Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [55]
The college kids emerged from the family room downstairs to announce that the karaoke machine was ready for action. Pulsing rock music beckoned, drowning out the Christmas carols on the iPod upstairs. Most of the revelers who were still standing trooped unsteadily down the steps, ready to continue drinking and watch each other strutting and mugging and stumbling over complicated lyrics sung alarmingly off-key.
With very little prodding, Carrie gave her patented rendition of Cher’s “Believe” in her perfect, sexy, adenoidal alto, complete with reverb on the chorus, “After love, after love, after love, after love.” It was a tough act to follow.
Carrie’s college friend Lulu took up the challenge with an overheated version of Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy.” Meg thought she saw something smug and proprietary in Henri’s dark admiring look as he watched the young woman shimmy up and down the structural pole that pierced the makeshift dance floor like a ship’s mast.
Meg followed, jumping in with a Gwen Stefani number that allowed her to wiggle her well-toned ass while soothing her overheated thighs by clamping them around the pole. “I know I’ve been a real bad girl,” she cooed as suggestively as Gwen ever did. She gave a nod of sympathy to Paula, who was disheveled after her clinch with her husband, but who nevertheless looked pleased with herself.
Henri had eyes only for his wife as he vamped to a Kanye West number, almost making Meg believe he had reformed. Then he disappeared, no doubt upstairs kissing someone else’s wife and congratulating himself on his renewed conquest of his own poor spouse. Paula, the pathetic victim of his many indiscretions, was now passed out in a chair in the corner.
An hour later, Meg was moving from pleasantly buzzed into the more dangerous territory of completely torched. Her patented system, she had to admit, was failing. She was on a sofa in the family room trapped between the ugly neighbors. She listened halfheartedly to the ugly wife whine about her dissolute teenagers; on her other side, the ugly husband surreptitiously trailed his pinky along Meg’s thigh. Did he really think that was sexy? she thought irritably. Did the ugly wife really think that dressing for a New Year’s Eve party meant a pilled Fair Isle sweater? Meg raised her glass only to find it empty.
Bess was wrapping her supple leg around the pole, growling like an improbable Justin Timberlake that she was going to bring sexy back. “I’m bringing sexy back. Just like a heart attack.”
Meg was pretty sure those weren’t the actual lyrics. She got up abruptly, interrupting the ugly wife in mid-whine and the ugly husband in mid-whatever. Ignoring their surprised expressions, she headed up the stairs.
Walking fairly steadily, Meg made a fairly complete circuit of the house, from the karaoke-singing sirens downstairs to the trash-strewn buffet table where men like Michelle’s dissolute husband had turned into pigs. Congealed meatballs dribbled from his mouth as he leered at her lasciviously. Another porcine guest saluted her with a chicken wing dripping sauce in one hand, a scum of dip across his sweatered chest.
Hearing a groan as she passed a powder room, dark as a cave, she nudged open the door to discover the ugly neighbor, one hand clamped to his eye, mumbling that someone had hit him and knocked out a contact lens or maybe knocked it in and scratched a cornea. He beckoned her in to help him. But Meg shook her head and kept moving.
She watched as various mini-dramas played out. On the sunporch, the beautiful daughter Carrie, evidently almost sober, talked intently to someone on her cell phone. Upstairs, the mousy daughter Celia sat weeping hopelessly outside a closed bedroom door, crooning her boyfriend’s name.
In the living room, she saw Michelle’s husband again—was he everywhere?—drunk as a monkey, suddenly smile wolfishly and lean in to lick the face of the