Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [191]
“No,” I said. “We have to do this. Anyway, all the movies have started.”
“What’s the big deal with this party, Benjamin?” she asked me. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her dark glasses, but I knew they were trained on me. She wore a dark blue blouse, and her hair had been pinned back with a rainbow-colored barrette. The fingers of her hands, now on the table, had a long, aristocratic delicacy, but she bit her nails; the tips of her fingers had a raggedy appearance.
“Oh, interesting people will be there,” I said. “Other actors. And literary types, you know, and dancers. They’ll make you laugh.”
“No,” she said. “They’ll make you laugh.” She took a sip of her beer. She lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Dancers can’t converse anyway. They’re all autoerotic. If we go to this, I’m only doing it because of you. I want you to know that.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Listen, could you do me a favor?”
“Anything,” she nodded.
“Well, it’s one of those parties where the guests …”
“What?”
“It’s like this. Those people are clever. You know, it’s one of those uptown crowds. So what I’m asking is … do you think you could be clever tonight, please? As a favor to me? I know you can be like that. You can be funny; I know you, Giulietta. I’ve seen you sparkle. So could you be amusing? That’s really all I ask.”
This was years ago. Men were still asking women—or telling them—how to behave in public. I flinch, now, thinking about that request, but it didn’t seem like much of anything to me back then. Giulietta leaned back and took her hand away from mine. Then she cleared her throat.
“You are so funny.” She wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be evaluating me. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, all right.” She dug her right index fingernail into the wood of the table, as if making a calculation. “I can be clever if you want me to be.”
After buzzing us up, Freddy Avery met us at the door of his apartment with an expression of jovial melancholy. “Hey hey hey,” he said, ushering us in. “Ah. And this is Giulietta,” he continued, staring at her dark glasses and her rainbow barrette. “Howdy do. You look like that character in the movie where the flowers started singing. Wasn’t that sort of freaky and great?” He didn’t wait for our answer. “It was a special effect. Flowers don’t actually know how to sing. So it was sentimental. Well,” he said, “now that you’re both here, you brave kids should get something to drink. Help yourselves. Welcome, like I said.” Even Freddy’s bad grammar was between quotation marks.
Giulietta drifted away from me, and I found myself near the refrigerator listening to a tall, strikingly attractive brunette. She didn’t introduce herself. With a vaguely French accent, she launched into a little speech. “I have something you must explain,” she said. “I can’t make good sense of who I am now. And so, what am I? First I am a candidate for one me, and then I am another. I am blown about. Just a little leaf—that is my self. What do you think I will be?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I ask, ‘Who am I, Renée?’ I cannot sleep, wondering. Is life like this, in America? Full of such puzzles? Do you believe it is like this?”
I nodded. I said, “That’s a very good accent you have there.” She began to forage around in her purse as if she hadn’t heard me. I hurried toward the living room and found myself in a corner next to another guest, the famous Pulitzer prize–winning poet Burroughs Hammond, who was sitting in the only available chair. Freddy had befriended him, I had heard, at a literary gathering and had taught him how to modulate his voice during readings. At the present moment, Burroughs Hammond was gripping a bottle of ginger ale and was smoking an unfiltered mentholated cigarette. No one seemed to be engaging him in conversation. Apparently, he had intimidated the other guests, all of whom had wandered away from his corner.
I knew