Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner [9]
We were parked along with many other cars in a long circular driveway and Arturo and Teresa were discussing something, Teresa playing with Arturo’s hair, calling him Arturito. We sat in front of an aggressively modern house, low to the ground, expansive, white stone and acres of glass. I caught Teresa’s eyes in the rearview mirror and she asked how I was. Arturo opened his door and we all got out of the car; I asked where we were and Arturo said, my boyfriend’s. Teresa entered the house on my arm, whether out of irony because I was a drunken American idiot brought to the party as a joke, or because she felt a vague solicitude toward me after my strange performance in the car, I didn’t know, but I could hope. As we entered the party I reminded myself to breathe. There were a lot of handsome people in the sweeping white-carpeted living room with minimalist furniture and monumental paintings on the carefully lit walls. Various people greeted us and Teresa detached from me to kiss them and I was acutely aware of not being attractive enough for my surroundings; luckily I had a strategy for such situations, one I had developed over many visits to New York with the dim kids of the stars: I opened my eyes a little more widely than normal, opened them to a very specific point, raising my eyebrows and also allowing my mouth to curl up into the implication of a smile. I held this look steady once it had obtained, a look that communicated incredulity cut with familiarity, a boredom arrested only by a vaguely anthropological interest in my surroundings, a look that contained a dose of contempt I hoped could be read as political, as insinuating that, after a frivolous night, I would be returning to the front lines of some struggle that would render whatever I experienced in such company null. The goal of this look was to make my insufficiencies appear chosen, to give my unstylish hair and clothes the force of protest; I was a figure for the outside to this life, I had known it and rejected it and now was back as an ambassador from a reality more immediate and just.
Teresa took my arm again and led me to a bar in one corner of the giant room; when we’d fixed drinks, she walked me out onto a vast patio where there was another bar and a large teardrop-shaped pool, faintly illuminated, its floor blue tile, in which more handsome people, a few women topless, splashed around. As I tried to hold the look, Teresa led me beyond the pool into a rock garden of some sort where there was a smaller group of people organized around a central figure singing and playing the guitar, the performer on a stone bench, the others on the ground, Arturo already among them; we sat down.
There ensued a battle between the music and my face. I was at first put off and threatened by the handsome countenances of the other listeners, faces that displayed an absorption I refused to believe was felt, each face carefully positioned to imply a lively interior world, faces that invited others to admire their obliviousness to others. The men tended to look down, the women slightly up; the former as if in painful concentration, the latter beatific, half-smiling, but close to tears—everyone seemed to be having a profound experience of art. Several joints were being passed among these various private worlds and I was returning to my previous heights, losing coordination in my face, my eyes still wide but now a little too wide, the hint of smile lost and with it all suggestion of detachment.
As I struggled to recompose my aspect I began to hear the music, to hear it as addressing me and not just as an excuse for the other faces to assume their poses. He was an unmistakably