The Young Writer Goes to a Launch Party

The Young Writer showed up too early, not yet familiar enough with the etiquette of cocktail parties to understand that these things have no formal beginning and end, and that the times listed on invitations are merely suggestions, merely a confirmation that, yes, this thing is indeed taking place. He stepped inside from the spitting blizzard, scarf hard and crusted with frost where it covered his mouth, and stomped free the small drifts of snow that where perched atop the toes of his wingtips.

The Young Writer arrived alone.

The art gallery was called – facetiously, the Young Writer assumed – An Inspired Space, and the front lobby was appropriately and pretentiously adorned (or unadorned), with large plastic art pieces in searing primary colors: a deformed red hand, six-fingered, reaching out from the carpet (upon it was hung a woman’s tweed coat), and beside it a wide blue box-like-thing engraved with the shapes of human buttocks; evidently a bench, or a futuristic sofa-chair.

The lobby was empty.

No, not entirely empty. There was a table near the door, and a woman in a black dress stood behind it arranging a stack of magazines. From somewhere above, in the upper gallery, there came a lonely chiming sound; the image that came first to the Young Writer’s mind was of a cross-legged Chinese mystic solemnly tapping a single key of a xylophone with a long baton shaped from a human bone (the human bone, perhaps, like the red hand and blue buttock-seat, was a decorative pretension, but the Chinese mystic, that was a pure Freudian reaction from deep within the Young Writer’s sub-conscious – this ability, perhaps, why he was a Young Writer in the first place).

The Young Writer unwrapped his face, blinked away the crystals of ice that had bloomed on his eyelashes, and addressed the woman at the table. “I’m here for the…event,” he said.

The woman looked up. “Yes, the event,” she said, and waited for the Young Writer to elaborate. She stared back at him, and did not blink, as if the reflex of her eyelids depended on his answer.

“Do you need my pass?”

The Young Writer handed her the invitation he’d received in the mail, which, for weeks, he’d kept carefully folded in the pages of a book (Tolstoy, for it was heaviest and least read), and then, on the taxi ride over, in the front pocket of his freshly-ironed shirt.

“Oh, no,” the woman laughed. “Just go ahead.”

She took the Young Writer’s coat, folded it over her arm and flattened it against her thighs, and with a sweeping flourish, as if in the climactic midst of an exotic and half-forgotten Eastern-European dance, threw it over the thumb (or what appeared to be the thumb) of the reaching red hand, next to the tweed coat.

By the time she turned back to face him, ushering him up the stairs with a little twitch of her wrist and little twitch of her mouth, the Young Writer was sure that she still hadn’t blinked.

-----

The Young Writer was a young writer because his father had been a writer. Not a writer of much repute – just a few poems here and there, and, once, a play performed by a university theatre group and soon after forgotten – but a writer nonetheless, who carried with him the habits and accoutrements of all writers: the bookshelves cluttered with cigar-smelling volumes, the sudden nocturnal creative bursts, the drifting feather-light lifestyle of a man without roots, who lived his passion in some brightly-lit part of his brain, and not wholly in the real world.

The Young Writer was just like that. He had studied his father, and sought to absorb those parts of him that made him unique (his legacy, the Young Writer supposed), and to correct the faulty parts that had prevented him from finding success. His first correction was to start early, and, to that end, he found himself published, at the age of twenty-one, in one of the most prestigious literary magazines in the country (nowhere more prestigious, it must be noted, than within its own collective mind). The Young Writer’s friends were impressed (though perhaps not as much as he’d hoped), and celebrated this incredible feat of strength by taking him out for dinner to a reasonably-priced Mexican restaurant where he got drunk on imported beer and flirted poorly with the waitress.

Time passed. The excitement of those first few thrilling days leaked away as The World, in the wake of this massive news (the tremulous baby steps of a future literary icon!), remained depressingly unchanged. For months, the Young Writer waited eagerly for the magazine to appear (not yet familiar enough with the process of publication – even less so than he was with the etiquette of cocktail parties – to understand that, still driven by medieval technology, publishing moves also at medieval speeds). Time passed, and by the time the Young Writer received his invitation to the launch party, he had broken up, reunited, and broken up again with the girl who had inspired the story; he had moved from the large apartment he shared with her to a single room overlooking the playground of an elementary school; he had lost the paunch of fat around his waist that he had acquired in university, replaced it with a hard, curving flatness, like the surface of a broad iron pipe.

He was, it seemed, a different young man entirely.

The upper balcony was a plain white space pleasantly like a blank page. A series of small matted photographs were hung in random patterns, high and low, close together and far apart, a Morse-code message framed in glass. At a table near the back, a young woman in a bowtie stacked wine glasses. This was the sound that the Young Writer had earlier heard; the Chinese mystic’s chiming – in reality, a lonely toast to nothing. For the next ten minutes, as the Young Writer stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, waiting for something to happen, the sound of the clinking glasses was the only sound that could be heard.

To pass the time, the Young Writer examined the photographs: skeletal remains of collapsed buildings; shredded tires on the shoulders of highways. This photographer – famous, apparently, for his deconstruction of the socio-industrial-complex (whatever that was), and a vanguard, academics claimed, of modern protest-art (whatever that was) – had taken the picture that appeared on the front cover of the magazine: a collapsed cement wall beneath a wrought-iron frame, and, behind it, the sun setting solemnly upon the dagger-tips of faraway firs. It meant something profound, the Young Writer knew, but, for the life of him, couldn’t decipher what that profundity was.

Temporarily mesmerized by the photograph’s secret message, searching for it in the blurry details, the gallery around the Young Writer began to fill up. This was good, because the Young Writer could now camouflage himself amongst the mingling bodies, and perhaps stand close enough to a huddled group to be thought a part of their conversation (or – perchance to dream! – be invited into it). But this sudden influx also caused him some measure of distress, because as more bodies streamed through the door, sloughing off steam, stomping snow off their feet, the room filled up with more and more people he didn’t know, and who – most worryingly to the Young Writer – didn’t know him. It’s one thing to be the wallflower in a group of twenty…but in a group of one hundred? An entirely different achievement in social retardation!

----

At one point the Young Writer was approached by a girl. Finally. Almost an hour standing alone, desperately searching for some way to carry himself that did not imply his complete aloneness here in the middle of the gossiping throng (one hand in the pocket of his jacket, the other pinched gently around the stem of a wineglass, leaning back slightly with his chin raised, simulating some great internal philosophical debate about these photographs, these looming plastic art-pieces, these short pepper-haired men who caroused around him and feigned boredom with such skill, but who – you could tell after a while – lived for this sort of thing, and struggled desperately to gather up the passing minutes as they floated away, never wanting the party to end).

The girl was blond, and dressed like most of the older women in a short jacket unbuttoned just below the breast, the collar of which bloomed outwards like an orchid petal. The faintest impression of cleavage emerged from the low-slung hem of the blouse below her jacket, and it yanked at the Young Writer’s eyes as if they were leashed. He fought valiantly to look at her face.

She introduced herself as the student intern who worked for the magazine, and the Young Writer, as modestly as he was able, introduced himself as the author from page 35.

“I enjoyed your story,” she said to him. Dryly, he thought, but isn’t this the way that the literati compliment each other, with a sort of unrestrained (and mutually understood) resentment? The girl said: “I read it, and I wondered, have you read much Trollope?”

“No,” the Young Writer said. In fact, he had never read Trollope, but was thrilled that she had picked the bearded Victorian as a possible influence; so thrilled that words spilled out of his mouth, and he was unable to stop them: “When I was writing the story I was reading Ford Madox Ford, if you can believe it. I found some books of his at a flea market and went on a tear, read them in a few weeks. So I suppose that I may have absorbed a little of it and regurgitated it onto the page…”

The half of the Young Writer’s mind that was prone to wandering off (the half that defined him, in point of fact, as a Young Writer) carried him several hours into the future, where, at some high-ceilinged apartment belonging possibly to some magnate of the publishing industry – one of these greatly-respected folks; a familiar name that, like the gravesite of a beloved ancestor, is regularly maintained by a dedicated few; cultural flotsam subtly anchored – and at this apartment the Young Writer and the blond girl would sip cocktails from elaborate glasses and further discuss some topic of merit. The Young Writer would say something witty, and she would laugh. She would compliment his candour. “The people you meet at these parties,” she would say, “they’re usually so…self-serious.”

Intense eye contact, after that.

Meanwhile, back at the launch party, the Young Writer continued to ramble on. He noticed that she was looking over his shoulder, gazing off into the bustling heart of the party. He reigned himself in, and ended his tirade with an anticlimactic “…well, you know.”

The girl turned to him, finally, and said. “Well, yes. But that’s not what I asked. I was just wondering if you’d read Trollope.”

With that she smiled sweetly – too sweetly, the way one reacts to an unfunny joke told by a delinquent child – and whisked past him into the milling crowd. As they brushed shoulders, he let go of his eyes and they dipped down into the soft divot of white flesh framed by her open collar. And he didn’t care if she saw him look.

-----

Soon there were speeches.

The photographer waxed eloquent for a while about his photography and what it meant. Few paid close attention; a hundred whispered conversations simultaneously took place. The pepper-haired men, behind cupped hands, spoke to pepper-haired men-in-training. The jacketed older women spoke to their younger protégés aloud, oblivious to the far reach of their voices. The Young Writer watched and listened, and suddenly all those stories he was reading – stories about wild-haired, middle-aged professors and artisans, men strangely irresistible to academic nymphets; all that Updike and Roth and Bellow – made a strange sort of sense: he could see the girls through the crowd, enraptured, holding their wine glasses up near their shoulders, nodding slowly as if each word the photographer spoke unlocked some vital personal secret, as if he were explaining their lives and not the degradation of humanity’s relationship with nature, which apparently was represented in his photos of train-tracks and tipped-over oil-barrels. The blond girl was among them. She was out of breath, and was touching, with the tip of her index finger, the bare skin below her neck.

It was shortly after the applause had subsided (they were mighty, considering the lack of focus that preceded them), that the Young Writer saw her.

She was a wild-woman. Or so it seemed from across the room. Every bone in each of her five fingers carried a corresponding ring, heavy gold costume jewellery; every joint covered in shiny stuff, like she was wearing the armoured gauntlet of a knight. Her wrists, too, were concealed by a sequence of fat bracelets that reached almost to her elbows and clanked together like the treads of a tank. Her hair, in wild curls, was either styled too much or styled not at all; either she had spent hours in front of a mirror with a hot iron in her hair, or she had woken up from a deep sleep and tied it into a knot (the Young Writer, for all his supposed powers of observation, couldn’t tell).

This woman, he knew – somehow he just knew – was the famous editor of this famous magazine. She stood among the cocktail-party archetypes and seemed, with the spastic flailing of her hands, limp at the wrist and slapping back and forth as her forearms stabbed and parried, to be speaking with everyone at once. Everyone, or, perhaps, no one. It would be foolish, the Young Writer thought, to come all this way and fail (among all those other failures) to introduce himself. He marched over to where she was and shouldered his way into her audience.

“Hello,” the Young Writer said. “My name is (Young Writer).”

A brief pause. A flicker of something behind her eyes, and then they were suddenly bright again. This woman, he saw, was an expert at recognizing people she didn’t know. “Hello, hello, yes, wonderful, yes!”

Shaking her hand was like reattaching the loose chain of a bicycle.

“You published my story,” the Young Writer said.

“Oh, yes, wonderful!” she crooned. “It was wonderful.”

The Young Writer, wilting (unexpectedly) beneath the attention – specifically, the blank-eyed stares of the pepper-haired men, who, like the woman who had first greeted him, seemed not to blink – cleared his throat and panicked for a clever phrase.

The editor beat him to it. “Let me ask you,” she said, putting a hand on his arm and looking directly into his eyes. “Did you get your cheque?”

“Yes,” the Young Writer said.

“Wonderful!”

Once again facing her eager spectators, the editor was instantly immersed into whatever epic anecdote the Young Writer had interrupted. A thin nacre of boredom (self-applied) covered the faces of her audience, but the Young Writer could see, beneath it, that they would murder one another to hear the next word. It was time to leave.

Fleeing towards the door (towards the red hand of Beelzebub which was still bursting forth from the depths of Hades, still pinching the collar of his tweed jacket) the Young Writer could see – in the far corner near the chiming, bow-tied Chinese Mystic – the activist photographer and the blond girl standing together. Evidently, he was saying something witty, and she was laughing.

The Young Writer knew, finally, the meaning of the photograph on the front cover. Outside, on the snowy sidewalk, he laughed aloud at the irony of it (perhaps it wasn’t literally irony, but who cared for such strict and stupid literary definitions?) The crumbled wall, the frame beneath it, the faraway horizon of sharp trees: it was the inevitable collapse of his expectations, and, beyond it, the growth of his predator’s teeth.