Let's Get Back to the Party Read online

  Let’s Get Back to the Party

  a novel by

  Zak Salih

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2021

  For Scott

  Contents

  One

  Ecce Homo

  Two

  A Boyhood

  Three

  Skin Dreams

  Four

  The Little Deaths

  Five

  Tiberius at the Villa

  Six

  A Manhood

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  “I’m getting sick of crowds,” Bill said one night at a particularly noisy gathering. “Let’s take a walk.” After ten minutes on the moonlit road, none of the lights from the school were visible to interfere with the vast, heavy, velvety blackness of the sky, nor did sounds of laughter and music penetrate the almost terrifying hush. We stood still, enveloped by the awesome multiplicity of the stars. “Let’s get back to the party,” said Bill. “The universe gives me the creeps.”

  — ELAINE DE KOONING

  “de Kooning Memories”

  Vogue (December 1983)

  One

  Ecce Homo

  Sebastian

  He arrived at the wedding dressed for a funeral. Sharp black suit, shiny black shirt, skinny black tie, polished black boots. Black hair cresting over black sunglasses in a Hokusai wave. I turned away from the grooms and watched him tiptoe to an empty back pew on the opposite side of the aisle. Oscar Burnham. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, but underneath that violent head of hair—bowl-cut when we’d first met as children, shorn in rebellion when we’d last met as undergraduates—was the same slim boy, slipping inside the ceremony like a snake. Would he remember me? Probably not.

  After the service, I stepped out of the church into the haze of another high Washington summer. I searched the crowd for Oscar but couldn’t find him. As if he’d just floated in and out of the wedding, briefly, like an errant leaf. Or a ghost.

  At the foot of the church steps, under a full tree draped in white ribbon, someone laughed. I heard a photographer attack the wedding party, back inside. Loving it, the photographer said. Give me more.

  Cocktail hour. I lingered outside with a beer. Guests milled around the back lawn and garden of the Georgetown estate. Bar tables swaddled in white cloth and crowned with swollen floral arrangements dotted the clipped grass; beyond that, in a brilliant patch of sunlight, the grooms posed for more photographs. Smiling. Hugging. Kissing. Whispering. Chucking their chins. Nuzzling their noses. I’d been watching them for the past several minutes, forcing my face into a look of fondness so the other guests wouldn’t realize I knew absolutely no one here. Dani, my date for the evening, had abandoned me for the restroom and a fresh glass of wine. There was nothing for me to do but stand there and sip, smiling at the people who passed by, at the couple out on the lawn. Trying, unsuccessfully, not to dwell on my own recent uncoupling.

  There! Oscar’s long black shape, slicing through the space between wedding guests. It paused at the opposite end of the massive stone porch, leaned against a wrought-iron balustrade, watched the grooms. No, he was no phantom. He was here, occupying physical space. To look at him, you’d think Oscar was in danger of being blown off the porch by the slightest breeze, he was so slender. He reminded me of something by Egon Schiele. Tall, lanky, otherworldly. With his eyes hidden behind those sunglasses, Oscar’s gaze was mysterious, unreadable. He was all body, no expression.

  Across the lawn, the photographer signed a countdown from five. The wedding party, now regrouped, held hands and leapt in the air. The photographer, checking her camera, said, That’s great. Let’s try it again. A groomsman said, Christ, I need a drink.

  Fragile grandparents, beer-bellied college buddies, nieces and nephews dolled up in flower dresses and loafers. Someone passed by me and whispered to his companion how great it was to finally be part of a gay wedding. The woman (I assume his wife) said, It’s about time those two wild dogs settled down.

  Dani returned, holding her glass against her green summer dress, as energetic and ebullient as she was every Monday through Friday at Douglas Mortimer Secondary School. I had no idea how she pulled off such joie de vivre. It had been three years since the staff meeting where she’d seen me, the new guy, and patted the empty chair next to her. Since then, she’d become a friend and colleague, a sounding board for my administrative gripes—and my personal ones. She was the first person I called when, only a month ago, Jake left me for a job in San Francisco. Dani, ever the optimist, had a simple solution for my despondency: Throw myself back out there. Go on the hunt. But I was no hunter. I relied on the forwardness of others, their generosity of time, their curiosity. First moves, final moves; I was terrible at both. Where I flourished: the middle, where everything was comfortable. Where I felt I’d finally checked that box off my existential to-do list—Find A Boyfriend—and could get back to more serious matters. I thought I’d had it checked off, but now the check mark had been erased, recklessly, and without the distraction of work, summer was proving difficult. Last weekend, I’d found myself, like an idiot, staring at our four-poster bed, built for two but home now to one, and sobbing without shame in big, sucking intakes of breath. Thinking what a fool I was to have believed a life out here was something Jake actually wanted, that I was more than just a caretaker supporting him through the traumas of failed relationships from which he still couldn’t completely extricate himself. Thinking of all the times he told me how safe he felt with me, of all the times he didn’t say how happy he felt with me. Calmed by three glasses of wine, I’d called Dani. After listening patiently, she’d extended an invitation to be her plus-one at a friend’s wedding the following weekend. A bit late, I’d said. She’d told me her original date had to leave town. Aunt’s funeral, she’d said. I was just going to go alone, but I think this’ll be good for you. At the very least, it’s free drinks. On the drive into Georgetown, I’d received a text from Dani. FYI: Lee’s husband invited single friends. Come prepared to meet people. At a stoplight on M Street, I’d written back: You’re joking.

  I turned to tell Dani I knew the guy standing over there on the opposite porch, then saw she had someone with her. Sebastian, she said, I want you to meet John. He’s one of Lee’s friends. John, this is my friend Sebastian Mote. The art history teacher. I shook John’s hand politely and smiled. I love art, John said. He was soft: in speech, in body, in manner. Like me. He wore rolled-up shirtsleeves (past his elbows—Jake’s definition of gauche) and a loosely knotted cotton tie. Like me. Dani took several steps back, watching us as if awaiting the result of a strange experiment. I forced myself to be considerate. I was, after all, a guest at a wedding. Not just any wedding. A Gay Wedding, one painstakingly designed to strike traditional notes despite its untraditional participants. The escorting of the grooms down the aisle by their mothers. The biblical readings that sidestepped any mention of Iron Age gender roles. The vows, the exchange of rings, the precarious lighting of a unity candle. The kiss, long and slow and deep and just a touch inappropriate. Everyone at the wedding, from Patrick’s dying grandmother to Lee’s three-year-old niece, on a collective high from last month’s Supreme Court decision. According to Dani’s pre-ceremony brief on the front steps of the church, the wedding had been planned almost a year ago with the verdict already in mind. (I avoided asking what would have happened had the morning of June 26, 2015, led instead to an embarrassing kink in the arc of social justice.) Then there was me: heartbroken and struggling to see this day as a capstone to all the years I’d spent in college volunteering with the campus queer student organization, the months I spent canvassing for gay marriage outside suburban Metro stations and grocer
y stores. (Have a moment for gay rights? Not today? Thanks for your time.) All this—the back lawn of the estate, the strings of paper lanterns, the massive marble planters boiling over with vegetation straight out of a Fragonard—was what I’d done my infinitesimally small part to bring about. It was what I’d wanted for all of us. For myself.

  I looked over John’s shoulder at Oscar, peering Narcissus-like into his phone, oblivious to my glances, as stone-stiff as I remembered from those three childhood years we spent as neighbors on Cinnamon Road, when he practically lived at my house because his own was a den of strict rules and passive-aggressive silences. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been surrounded by a pack of college friends, moving through a party with preternatural ease, half-drunk on peach schnapps. So free of the constraints of his past life that, when I’d gone up to him, expecting him to pull me into an embrace, he stared at me, unable to recall my face, having abandoned it with the rest of his childhood, until I reminded him and he said, Ah, drawing the sound out from behind his red plastic cup. How nice, I’d thought, to be so free of the past.

  You enjoy teaching? I turned away from the grooms, from Oscar, to see John smiling around red cheeks. I do, I said. My father’s a professor. It runs in the family. There, I thought. The ice had cracked. Now there was an awkward pause. We both sipped our drinks until I realized what was expected of me and I asked John what he did for a living. I work on the Hill, he said, relieved. He gave me the name of a Vermont politician who wasn’t Bernie Sanders. I asked if he enjoyed it. Mm, he said. Very much so. I waited for him to take a sip of his drink, then threw my eyes across the balcony again. Oscar was gone. John asked which of the grooms I knew. Neither, I said, nodding to Dani taking pictures of the wedding decorations with her phone. I’m her plus-one. Oh, John said. I see. So you live in the city? Not anymore, I said, and left it at that. I stared at Dani in resentment, feeling duped. It was too soon. It was much too soon. I extended a hand to John, said it was a pleasure meeting him. Dani shot me a stern look. I excused myself to go inside.

  Down in the garden, two best maids wedged themselves under the grooms’ arms and strained upward to kiss their extended cheeks. The photographer cooed and said, That’s going to look so cute.

  I wandered through the ground floor of the colonial-style manor, with its Byzantine tapestries and glass cases of Pre-Colombian sculpture, its high ceilings and broad spaces that diminished the size of a wedding crowd that, earlier in the small church, had seemed like a teeming mass, as if the whole world had been there to watch Lee and Patrick become man and man. Everywhere were pictures of the grooms in frames and collages. Lee and Patrick holding hands in front of Caracalla’s massive stone baths. Lee and Patrick kissing in kayaks in the Florida Keys. Lee and Patrick running hands along the ragged walls of an ancient Thai temple. Lee and Patrick at corporate holiday dinners, at family picnics, at bed-and-breakfasts. Lee and Patrick as infants, as toddlers, as teenagers, as college students, as working adults. In front of a staircase blocked off with velvet rope, a string quartet played the familiar air from Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3. I stood and listened to the music, thinking of the first time I’d heard the piece, as a child in the living room of a friend’s house. I kept my eyes open for a glimpse of a slender, slippery shape among the guests. The quartet finished the piece and began a slow, strange arrangement of Dusty Springfield’s “I Only Want to Be with You” that soothed my resentment toward Dani and, invariably, drew my mind like a donkey on a well-worth path back to Jake.

  That spring, I’d asked him to move with me out of D.C. and into a rambler on the outskirts of northern Virginia. The rambler’s owner: my father, Dr. Malcolm Mote, Professor of American History, invited for a two-year teaching stint at his alma mater in western North Carolina. Facing rising rent and on the outs with a roommate (and former lover), Jake agreed to the impulsive move. Let’s give it a shot, he said. (Had I only paid proper attention to what he said next: What’s the worst that could happen?) So this is it, I thought. It’s happening! This is where life starts! A month later, however, that life began to soften and buckle. While I unpacked and arranged and organized, Jake sat in chairs and played with his phone, a great white shark forced into mindless circumnavigations in a cramped aquarium. For a few weeks, I deluded myself into thinking the wild animal I’d captured would adapt, that he’d realize how much easier it was out here away from the urban scene. That he’d realize he didn’t need all the parties he went to (without me), all the complex social circles through which he rotated (without me). And then the bed arrived, a mammoth four-poster piece we’d found on a weekend drive through the valley towns along Interstate 81. We had a horrible time getting it into the house, spent hours unscrewing, carrying, reassembling, both of us sweating despite the crisp March air. That evening, I came into the bedroom anticipating sex. Instead, I found Jake flung across the flannel sheets like a troubled Fuseli dreamer. We never did break in that bed properly. Instead, we argued more frequently over more trivial matters: refrigerated tomatoes, the origins of a pubic hair stuck to the side of the tub. Petty things that didn’t seem to carry any weight when I complained about them to Dani. Still, I convinced myself, Jake and I had a history. We had three years of dinner dates, of three-day weekends in Pittsburgh and Boston, of countless nights when I consoled him, as if he were one of my students, over the unnecessary social drama he couldn’t seem to pull himself away from. I thought that was enough. I really did. So I was dumbfounded when Jake came to me one evening in May and said he was going nowhere doing temp work and had accepted a marketing manager position with a San Francisco start-up. That’s all the way out in California, I said like a moron. The next thing I did, admittedly, was the last thing I wanted to do. Jake turned from my tears but kept a limp hand on my shoulder, which made it worse. I excused myself to the bathroom, where I punched a hole in the drywall above the toilet. I wasn’t sure if Jake heard me. I didn’t care. I felt something twist in my shoulder, but I didn’t care about that either. The job was just pretext. The truth, I knew, had less to do with his career and more to do with our experiment in domesticity, with his decision to slum it out in the suburbs. He wasn’t leaving me because of a job. He was leaving because he’d panicked. After more wine, Jake elaborated on his decision. I thought this was what I wanted, he said. I asked if he really didn’t want it, or if he just thought he didn’t deserve it. Incensed by the backyard psychoanalysis, Jake said, Maybe I’m just not happy with you. Later, in bed, lying board-stiff next to one another, I stared up at the popcorn ceiling in a rage while Jake snored as if it were just another night. The next day, he left to stay with friends back in the city. Three days later, he came back with a rental van, packed up his barely unpacked boxes, and was gone.

  In the hall, the wedding party lined up to enter the dining room. Lee’s father, plump and drunk and ready to be painted by Frans Hals, beckoned the guests inside with scoops of his arm. Dani came in from outside. There you are, she said to me. We’re Table Six. John was with her. Me too, he said. We walked into the dining room and took our seats, mine next to Dani’s, John’s next to mine. Two tables over, against the eastern side of the dining room, Oscar sat among several other men in slim khakis and pastel bowties. He was looking down at his phone and smiling.

  Behold, the grooms! Here they came, striding hand in hand into the reception hall, on display for the family members, the friends, the co-workers, the ex-lovers. They stopped in the center of the dining room, padded over with a layer of faux wood flooring in anticipation of the evening’s dancing, and waved to everyone. The emcee (Patrick’s cousin, Dani said) stepped back from the grooms as if in deference to the sheer physical force of their union. The photographer returned, flapping around the men to capture them from every possible perspective. Patrick and Lee raised their arms in triumph. The wedding guests raised bottles of beer, glasses of wine. A hard-fought battle, finally won. Here, now, were the victorious soldiers, returned from the field of war and prepared to live happ
ily ever after, their armor not blood-crusted chainmail but matching gray suits with white carnations affixed to their left lapels. At one point in their revolutions, Lee smiled and waved at me. It took me a moment to realize he was actually waving at Dani, who shouted her congratulations. Patrick beamed a smile and pointed a finger in Oscar’s direction. I watched Oscar give a limp wave and lean back in his chair with a toothless smile, arms folded against his chest, elbows stuck out like tiny wings. Lee and Patrick began to slow dance while the string quartet, now installed in a corner, played a rendition of “At Last.” This is so much cuteness I can’t handle it, someone at Table Six said. I knew Lee would take Patrick’s last name, Dani said to John. A waiter asked if I wanted red or white. John turned to look at me as the waiter came by to pour his wine and gave me another bashful smile. I returned the smile, reluctantly, then tilted my eyes to get another glimpse of Oscar on his phone. The strings began their final, sweet descent, and the couple ended their dance with another long kiss. There was a resurgence of applause, of sparse drunken cheers from Table Eight (Lee’s teammates from the gay rowing club, Dani said). The grooms continued to hold hands as they walked to the wedding party banquette, a Last Supper tableau with paper lanterns and an arbor of waxy white flowers.

  Muted conversation. Clinking glassware. Then the minister, towheaded and red-cheeked, took the microphone from Patrick’s cousin. I’m sure you’ve heard quite enough from me already, he said. But before we sit down to eat with these two fine men, I’d like to start with a brief invocation. Don’t panic. The Bible’s staying back at the church where it belongs. The room laughed. Instead, I want to open up this wonderful evening with words I’m sure most of us here, if not all, are already familiar with. The minister unfolded a piece of paper, cleared his throat, and started to read: No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than they once were. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment in themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The minister put away the paper. The room was silent. Let us bow our heads in prayer and thanks, he said.