She invited me to a dinner party with her friends from university: a guy called Toby who lived in a basement flat masquerading as a flat-pack furniture emporium with his much more attractive girlfriend, Sam; a couple of lesbian marine biologists called Allegra and Jess who weren’t a couple but had been at some storied prior time; a benignly boring guy called Dan and his loudly bisexual girlfriend, Poppy, who had backcombed her hair like a televangelist and seemed to leave lipstick marks on literally anything that came within a yard of her mouth. I remember that night the way one remembers pivotal things, although in truth nothing earth-shattering happened. I found I liked Toby and Sam far more than I had expected to; they told jokes that weren’t at one another’s expense, did a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? bit that mostly involved slopping wine about and insulting each other before bursting out laughing. Haven’t I got a bitch of a husband, Sam asked me, winking, vamping up her voice like Liz Taylor. I remember someone put on “Edge of Seventeen” and Toby danced around the kitchen with Jess, mouthing along to the words. Someone had brought Lillet and Jess made Vespers in an assortment of plastic tumblers. There was a vegetarian lasagna, pork chops, and a bowl of mushrooms cooked in port, none of which went together. At one point, Allegra leaned across the table toward me and asked if I didn’t think Leah looked exactly like Jean Seberg in Breathless. They’d studied on the same course at university and apparently this resemblance was something that all of their classmates had noted. I looked at Leah, currently ferrying cutlery over from the counter—Leah with her short hair and her swimmer’s body, the way she moved about the kitchen. I don’t know who Jean Seberg is, I thought of saying, instead nodding my head and saying, Yes she does actually, wow I’d never thought of that before. Someone upset a glass, which spilled its contents before shattering across the kitchen floor, and I was relieved it hadn’t been me. I like the idea of living in the city, Jess said, but I think it’s just because I hate the idea of being anywhere where I can’t immediately locate any other gay people. Sam opened a bottle of red wine from the co-op and someone asked if there was anything for dessert. If you say pavlova I’m going to fucking kill myself, Dan said—actually the only thing I remember him saying all night—I don’t know why people think pavlova is an acceptable thing to serve just because you’re having a dinner party. Across the table, Leah winked at me, and I thought in an unwonted flash that I utterly adored her. What’s wrong with pavlova? Toby asked, looking hurt. Someone put on an Ella Fitzgerald compilation. Have you not been with a woman before, Poppy said to me at one point, red-wine mouthed and leaning toward me with the affect of someone who might have designs on my tonsils. Have you? I asked and she burst out laughing. Oh honey, you know how people are like “I’m gay for Jennifer Aniston, I’m gay for Gillian Anderson,” well I’m straight for Dan.
At the end of the night, Allegra came toward me, bearing down in a gesture I couldn’t immediately read and which made me lean back in my chair a little farther than I’d intended. I haven’t come to embrace you, she said, you’re just sitting on my jacket. I turned red and fished the jacket out from under me, handed it over without managing to find something intelligent to say.
You’ll have to come back, Sam said, hugging me tight and whispering something that I think was intended to be conspiratorial but, since she was rather drunk, was unfortunately only incoherent. Walking to the bus stop together, I told Leah what Poppy had said and she snorted, leaning into my side with a force that knocked me off-balance and which I found I rather enjoyed. Oh yeah, she said, grabbing my hand and dragging me into a run as the bus rounded the corner, Poppy’s all right, she just likes people to know.
* * *
“I still don’t understand,” Carmen says, “why you need a landline.”
We’re waiting in line at Argos and I can’t be bothered to explain to her that I don’t need a landline at all, I just need an excuse to be out of the flat.
“It came with the place,” I tell her, “you know how it goes. You break it, you bought it.”
“Euripides Eumenides,” she replies, and then says it again when I pretend not to hear her. Carmen read Classical Civilization when we were at university and is at constant pains to remind everyone of this, despite the fact that when pressed she could tell you very little, these days, of what it was she actually studied. Like everyone, most of Carmen’s higher education seems to have leaked out of her around her mid-to-late twenties, replaced in the main by methods of treating black mold, by passwords and roast chicken recipes and the symptoms of cervical cancer and thrush.