had thrown a few weeks ago, during Reading Period. It was Larry’s idea. What Mitchell hadn’t known, however, was that the party wasn’t a real party but Larry’s final project for the studio art course they were taking. Larry, it turned out, had “cast” certain guests as “actors,” giving them directions on how to behave at the party. Most of these directions involved insulting, coming on to, or freaking out the unsuspecting guests. For the first hour of the party, this resulted in everyone having a bad time. Friends came up to tell you that they’d always distrusted you, that you’d always had bad breath, et cetera. Around midnight, the downstairs neighbors, a married couple named Ted and Susan (who, Mitchell could see retrospectively, had been ridiculously costumed in terry-cloth bathrobes and fluffy slippers, Susan with curlers in her hair), burst angrily through the door, threatening to call the cops because of the loud music. Mitchell tried to calm them down. Dave Hayek, however, who was six-four, and in on the hoax, stomped across the kitchen and physically threatened the neighbors. In response, Ted pulled a (fake) gun from the pocket of his bathrobe, threatening to shoot Hayek, who cowered on the floor, pleading, while everyone else either froze in fear or rushed for the doors, spilling beer over everything. At that point, Larry had turned on all the lights, climbed onto a chair, and informed everyone, ha ha, that none of this was real. Ted and Susan took off their robes to reveal street clothes underneath. Ted showed everyone that the gun was a squirt gun. Mitchell couldn’t believe that Larry had failed to inform him, the party’s co-host, about the party’s secret agenda. He’d had no idea that Carlita Jones, a thirty-six-year-old graduate student, had been following the “script” when, earlier in the evening, she had locked Mitchell and herself in a bedroom, saying, “Come on, Mitchell. Let’s do the nasty. Right here on the floor.” He was greatly surprised that sex offered openly in this way (as it often was in his fantasies) proved in reality to be not only unwelcome but frightening. Yet despite all this and how enraged he was at Larry for using the party to fulfill his course requirements (though Mitchell should have been suspicious when the art professor herself had shown up), Mitchell knew even later that night, after everyone had left—even while he screamed at Larry, who was getting sick over the balcony, “Go on! Puke your guts out! You deserve it!”—that he would forgive Larry for turning their house and party into bad performance art. Larry was his best friend, they were going to India together, and Mitchell had no choice.
Now he let himself into his apartment and went straight to Larry’s door, flinging it open.
On a futon mattress, his face half-hidden in a bush of Garfunkel hair, Larry lay on his side, his thin frame forming a Z. He looked like a figure at Pompeii, someone who’d curled up in a corner as the lava and ash came through the window. Thumbtacked to the wall above his head were two photographs of Antonin Artaud. In the photo on the left, Artaud was young and unbelievably handsome. In the other, taken a brief decade later, the playwright looked like a withered maniac. It was the speed and totality of Artaud’s physical and mental disintegration that appealed to Larry.
“Get up,” Mitchell said to him.
When Larry didn’t respond, Mitchell picked up a Samuel French script from the floor and tossed it at his head.
Larry groaned and rolled onto his back. His eyes fluttered open, but he seemed in no rush to regain consciousness. “What time is it?”
“It’s late. We’ve got to get going.”
After a long moment, Larry sat up. He was on the small side, with a puckish or faun-like quality to his face, which, depending on the light or how much he’d been partying, could look either as high-cheekboned as Rudolf Nureyev or as hollow-cheeked as the figure in Munch’s The Scream. Right now, it was somewhere in between.
“You missed a good party last night,” he said.
Mitchell was stone-faced. “I’m over parties.”
“Now, now,