The Party

The Party

We stood in small groups talking about all the interesting things we were doing or wanted to do or told ourselves we would do. The House was full, college kids mostly, and a few of us old duffers milling around. The music seemed to get louder as the night went on, or as I got drunker. Most of us men engaged in pissing contests. I couldn’t quite keep up but I tried. Any intellectual or pseudointellectual jargon drew me into the discussion. I can be smart too. Look at me I’m smart too. I can say interesting things. I wondered how much of it was for the women. The music got louder and louder, we all tried to talk over it, but it was hard. Kids spilled out into the back yard where the keg was. Everybody talking and talking and laughing and talking and some dancing. We pumped and pumped at the keg. A warm creeping delirium began to wash over me, the kind that starts in the middle of your guts and slowly spreads, the kind that makes you forget who you are.

I was watching Kate. I stared at her because I could never place her in context. She seemed tight lipped and hid a seething rage or pain or both, and seemed always terribly out of place, unable to relate, a spring wound to the breaking point, ready to explode. We barley spoke, but I felt a secret affinity to her, like the mother ship dropped us both off in the middle of this alien world and we both knew they were not coming back to get us. But still we were miles apart. I was convinced she hated me. Or maybe not and we just couldn’t really make the connection that friendship requires. We didn’t speak the same language.

The men mostly kept talking. It seemed like the women entirely drifted away from our ego and beer fueled n symposium. Our navel gazing grew louder and louder, more aggressive, more determined to make some theoretical point. The more we talked and stepped on each other’s toes, the more I wanted to destroy something. I wanted to smash something, or to fly away, or vibrate to the point of breaking into a thousand tinny pieces. One guy in particular got more convinced and began to dominate the conversation. In the end it usually boiled down to one or two contenders, and everyone else became spectators, or moved on. Someone began yelling. Good, I liked the yelling.

Meanwhile, Kate slid in and out of tight groups of people arguing about world affairs and then gave it up and began dancing. More and more the women began to drop out of these little contests and dance. Some wildly. Someone turned up Birdy Nam Nam and more slowly began to crowd the living rooms turned dance floor. Some of the men turned to look, but most just kept arguing. Matilda began to dance wildly, arms spread, spinning. All began to sweat. The men stood around the perimeter. I wanted so badly to dance but I was too afraid. I watched them like a raptor, whishing to be one of them, or close to them. What must it be like to be so beautiful and graceful? What must it be like to dance with total abandon, in love with yourself, like no one else exists, like the world was made for your body and the animal purity of it's motion and sweat and the flex and release of it's muscles, to dance as we did around camp fires, as we did when we could still hunt along planes where the air was full of sage and the harsh call of geese, and great herds of bison,to dance as we did before theory became our weapons of choice. I thought how badly it wanted to resolve my mind into my body entirely, but someone quoted Freud and so I returned to the conversation that was still raging in the corner.