Cocktail Hour
some short fiction
He tells the story as if he is the main character, starting from the beginning and everything. And when he does get to the good part, he makes the salient point his own befuddlement, which is a bad substitute for the true and delightful mystery of it all.
“And that’s how I got into YIMBYism,” he concludes with the finality of a man who knows his way around a funding round.
They are at a party—they includes, naturally, his girlfriend, the curt smile by his side with a purple streak in her hair that might have been interesting five years ago—that is walled on all sides by the most gorgeous concrete you’ve ever seen. I swear, it could very nearly breathe. An unbelievable Pothos climbs behind two Eames chairs to the second-floor landing, resting on the balcony as if exhausted from a race.
The woman he is talking to—she will replace the one by his side in about 8 months—wants to return to the good part, with the kidnapping and the arrest and everything, but it’s clear that in his telling of the story the point is his own political journey. For a moment, she wavers, as if she can peer into the future and is making her choice one way or the other.
“You must be a very good son,” is what she says. A gamble. For he might be like one of these other men—founders, was how they referred to themselves, so close to a better word, ‘flounders,’ but I digress—who treated compliments like being gifted a temperamental flower they weren’t allowed to touch. He might think she lacks strategic vision, reaching for the interpersonal when she could just as well praise his insights into zoning codes.
As it turns out, she has alighted on a tender area, for he has spent years feeling like a runaway after abandoning the Rust Belt town of his childhood for glamorous San Francisco. He has even wondered, at times, if he was the reason, if only obliquely, that his father did (or didn’t do) what he did (or did not do). He smiles warmly. “I try,” is all he says. Minor acts of intuition like these will be part of the reason she steals him. A more major act would have warned her against trying in the first place.
There is a cupid tinge of red on his cheeks: her opening. “And when you got to jail, he denied everything?”
He twists his cocktail straw into a little pink intestine. He’s uncomfortable on this particular point. “To this day he denies it.”
“But it’s him on video?” She presses. You must have seen it?
“It’s him, it’s his car, his license plate, but,” he pauses.
“But?” She says.
“He says it’s not him.”
The girlfriend makes a noise. What has always been most baffling to her about the whole ordeal was the fact that the family entertained the father’s denial. As if no amount of evidence would be enough against his word. She, an immigrant, was alone in this country, and didn’t have the luxury of flights of fancy. She relied on a more absolute ontology: is or is not. If the other woman steals her man, that’s not to say that she will put up a particular fight. So be it, she will think.
He’s steered the conversation back to housing, somehow. The girlfriend doesn’t know why he doesn’t channel this energy into, well, prison abolition or something (no one present believes in prison abolition). He talks about how he learned, at 29, the real meaning of empathy.
Both women suppress eye rolls. The new woman, being new, is able to brush it aside. The current woman, the former new woman, being too used to this sort of thing, wonders if he thinks of her as a vector of empathy.
Not that they necessarily disagree with him. Everyone at the party thinks that what divides them is the precise amount of money they make, the line being drawn somewhere in the vicinity of politics. The more accurate division is between the people whose fathers were arrested for kidnapping two real estate agents, and the people whose fathers were not arrested for kidnapping two real estate agents. What actually divides them is: whose power of belief outstrips their power of observation?
These are the breadcrumbs he provides the women current and future: that his father was a decent, hard-working man (condescension toward the laboring classes), that he had no criminal record (attempting to undergird belief with logic when never the twain shall meet), that there was no reason for him to zip-tie the two women (of course they were women) and load them into the back of his Suburban (an appeal to the existence of an ordered universe, wherein the three of them (as well as this entire party) have merely placed one foot in front of the other, responding to market forces, drifting toward progress, progress meaning this house, the pothos daring across the smooth concrete. An appeal to a certain definition of history, which is defined by continuity and smug symbolic geometries, where people go where they are supposed to go and become who they are supposed to be, except in those rare instances when Paradox herself reaches down to turn 1 into 2 and thus gives them something amusing to banter over at a cocktail hour).
The new woman tongues her ice cube. She doesn’t mind the working-class desperation that drapes over the story with a certain vintage glamour. She senses that the man, even if he stood up for his father in his moment of crisis, has abdicated his family claim by fleeing to the coast, any coast. She grants the man his miracle like a skewered olive. His father is innocent. His father is guilty. He’s already secured 10 million for the new venture. He has a sane and logical vision for the city; what of a metaphysical family life?
The girlfriend, who has not met the father, permits the miracle because the alternative would be to hold a flame to it and thus glaze it a deeper shade of violet. She wanders over to finger the plant itching up the wall, at which point she registers the other men in the room tracking her movements. It’s a polyamorous autumn and anybody in this room is fair game. After all, she has her own olives to impale.
The other two women—the real estate agents, who were tied and gagged and found in a field 15 miles outside the Toledo city limits—did not return to their professions. One became a Reiki healer; the other also became a Reiki healer. They compete for clients, selling their respective traumas in glossy pamphlets: he struck me on my _____; he called me a _____________; in court, he denied ______. The father, the one who maintained his innocence, did a session with one of the women. He would have done sessions with both, but only one was willing to come to the prison. The healer removes, in a very expensive session, a malignant force that benighted the father since his childhood. She does the session through the glass of the penitentiary visiting room. She calls this force Is-That-All-There-Is? In another session, equally expensive, she removes a second malignant force benighting the father since childhood. She calls this force Is-That-All-I-Am?
At the end of the party, the man gets the number of the future girlfriend along with an invitation to ‘connect.’ Would someone who isn’t the main character be treated to such a delightful little thrill? It is at that moment that he begins to plan his exit from the current girlfriend, although this is not how he would describe it to himself. It is not that dissimilar, though, to one night a few years prior, and his father, and some zip ties in an Amazon shopping cart. Or before that, when the man first stepped foot in San Francisco and thought to himself “at last, I shed the past and greet my future.” As to which is continuity and which is discontinuity depends largely on such things as theosophy, advanced combinatorics, color theory, close readings of Hegel, and so on and so on etc.