He smiled at Frank.
“Frank doesn’t have to worry about that with me,” said Cleo, and made a noise that was not quite a laugh.
Frank pecked the top of her head. Santiago took the bottle from him and poured three champagne flutes.
“We should send Kamal a bottle of this stuff,” said Frank, swallowing most of his in one gulp.
“I didn’t know you’d been married before,” said Cleo to Santiago.
“For my visa,” said Santiago. “She was a dancer I knew. But we were in love too, you know, for a moment.”
“What happened?” Cleo asked.
Frank refilled his glass.
“Oh man, she died,” said Santiago. “Overdose. Yeah, it was a real bummer. Beautiful woman, beautiful soul.”
Cleo would have liked to ask another question, but Santiago got up to check on the food and Frank wanted to hear some music, and the conversation escaped like smoke.
By the time the wedding guests started to arrive, they had finished two bottles of champagne and sampled every dish. Cleo’s former roommate, Audrey, came first. Slim-hipped, full-lipped, and covered in tattoos of quotes from books she’d only partially read, she was what Frank called one of Cleo’s strays. Cleo went to kiss her, but Audrey stuck out her long pink tongue instead.
“That’s how Tibetan monks greet each other,” she said.
“I thought you were Korean?” said Frank.
Audrey rolled her eyes. Cleo covered Frank’s mouth with her hand.
“Do Tibetan monks drink champagne?” she asked and handed Audrey a glass.
Audrey protruded her tongue again and pressed a pill onto it.
“Only when mixed with Klonopin.” She swallowed it with a gulp, then went to find Santiago, whose restaurant she was a hostess at.
Next, Cleo’s closest friend Quentin arrived. The two had met during Cleo’s first weeks in New York and become inseparable, each as lonely and adrift as the other. Quentin had grown up between Warsaw and New York; his grandmother was a Polish heiress who believed gay people didn’t exist in her country, which meant that Quentin would never have to work a day in his life but must also stay in the closet for the remainder of it. As far as his family was concerned, Cleo had been his girlfriend for the past two years.
“I still haven’t forgiven you for not asking me to be your maid of honor,” he said, kissing Cleo. “But I did get you a wedding present. It’s very expensive.”
“Honey, I don’t think you’re meant to tell them that.”
This was Quentin’s sometime boyfriend, Johnny. Johnny had the complexion of a naked mole rat and the same furtive expression, as though constantly looking for a hole through which to disappear. He was an odd choice of partner for Quentin, whose nature was like one extended grand entrance.
“I always thought you’d be the first to marry her,” Frank said.
“So did I,” said Quentin sadly.
The rest of the guests arrived, and Cleo took her place at the head of the table. She handed around plates and introduced acquaintances and accepted congratulations as the room became loud and gay. Most were friends of Frank’s; advertisers and architects and designers, people who had found the intersection between creativity and economy, who made beautiful things but did not suffer for it. She smiled and filled glasses and tried to focus on the conversations happening around her.
“People don’t know it, but Polish is a very poetic language,” a bald academic, who did not speak Polish, was telling Quentin, who did. “You know when they translated The Flintstones, they put it all in rhyme?”
“Sorry I never called you back,” exclaimed one guest to another across the room. “I threw my phone out the window after a bad haircut!”
Cleo stood up and tried making her way past the guests to the bathroom.
“… And now all he wants to talk about is doing ayahuasca,” a woman wearing a turban was saying to Zoe. “He goes down to Peru for the ceremonies and acts like it’s some rare skill he’s learned. I’m like, honey, it’s a drug, not a degree.”
“My acting teacher did say it completely neutralized his ego,” said Zoe. “At least for a few weeks.”
Zoe was the only family member they had invited. At nineteen she was also the youngest person there. Frank and Zoe looked almost nothing alike, despite being half siblings, in part because of the age difference, in part because Zoe’s father was Black and Frank’s, like their mother, was white. Bespectacled, freckled, and curly-haired, Frank was charmingly handsome, but he was rarely the best-looking person in the room. Zoe, on the other hand, was breathtaking. Her face had the symmetry of a Brancu?i sculpture. Her hair was a tumble of curls streaked with copper and gold. She did not appear to have pores. Every time Cleo looked at her, she couldn’t help searching for a flaw.