home is where?”
“I come from Montevideo.”
“Uruguay?”
“You go Uruguay,” a man on his way past us and into the bathroom said.
“Your English is fluent.” I listened more closely for the trace of an accent.
“I went to an American school. My father’s an army officer. We know lots of Americans. Would you like to dance?” I wondered what she meant by it—she was already half dancing in place on her own, bobbing discretely to a private rhythm. Maybe I was supposed to curtsy every now and then in sympathy.
“You’re here on vacation?”
“For vacation, yes. And for the wedding of my half brother.”
“He’s getting married here?”
“At Valley Forge. He’s in an officer’s training program.” Her motions grew more restless—she hadn’t come to explain herself. “You’re a good dancer. I can tell.”
“And how can you tell?”
“Older men know how to dance.”
I knew what she meant, that she didn’t like the freestyle dancing that had come into fashion, but I winced all the same.
She smiled. “I didn’t mean to say that you’re old, I meant that you’re debonair, a gentleman.” After a minute change in the angle of incidence between her upper lip and lower, her smile became inviting. “I like a man who has a little gray around the temple.”
“Nice try.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, though it seemed that she did.
“Never mind,” I replied, and introduced myself. When I took my hand off the cover of a phone book I was leaning on, I found that it was clammy.
“I am Cecilia Marta Bernal.”
“Unfortunately, Cecilia Marta, there’s no music for us to dance to.” Stan had stopped playing. “You may not need music, but I do.”
As if on cue, someone put a record on, and the music led us to its source in the living room, where the crowd had thinned out enough to give us room to maneuver. It was a slow bossa nova number, not exactly my style, but Cecilia Marta helped me till I caught on, leading with her hips and following with her feet. A few other couples started dancing too, and all indications were that I was enjoying myself.
As we capered here and there, I started to see people I knew over her shoulder. Our up-and-coming county executive, John Nickelson, who’d had his right arm withered by polio and become a collegiate squash champ with his left. My orthopedist, who was chomping on an unlit cigar, and mouthed “How’s the knee?” to me across the room. A junior partner in my firm whose deference to me in person led me to suspect that he was a backstabber. A man who always seemed to be on my train no matter what time I took it. A slight, kinky-haired, tightly dressed stranger whom I disliked without knowing why, until a helmet-headed guest moved out of the way and revealed the person to whom he was gamely holding forth to be my wife.
It couldn’t be, I thought. Of course I’d mistake anyone who looked even the slightest bit like her. I hardly knew how she looked anymore—I had recalled her image too often not to distort it.
“Is something wrong?” Cecilia asked.
The woman not only had Joyce’s face, she had her things too: the bright silk blouse, the dark beads, the darker handbag, the cigarette perched at the base of the V of her fingers. It had to be Joyce.
“It is,” I said, and steered Cecilia aside.
As I made my way toward Joyce, I thought I saw her hand on the arm of the man beside her. She was leaning his way, her head cocked close to his, her mouth hardly moving as she spoke to him.
She had straightened up by the time I reached her.
“It’s nice to see you,” I said, which was understatement and overstatement in equal measure. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d venture so close to home.”
“And I wouldn’t have thought this was your scene.”
“It isn’t.” I glanced at her companion, and thought that I was reading too much into the situation, that she wouldn’t possibly take up with him. He was an irrelevance, whatever she might think of him. If his presence meant anything, the humiliation was hers, not mine.
“Or your time of night,” she continued. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“I’d say you’ve ceded your authority on that question.”
“And good riddance to it. I only meant that I wouldn’t have expected—”
“It doesn’t exactly sound like you were hoping to run into me.”
“Well, let’s be honest. It isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world.”
“And yet you went out of your way to turn up here.”
“I hardly went out of my way. I didn’t think there was any chance that you’d be here, especially at this hour. Besides, I’m not going to start letting what I do be decided by . . . I’m not going to start sneaking around.”
Her weedy friend had been making motions to excuse himself and was drifting away. “Hold on, Jules,” she said to him, her sneer becoming a smile before she turned back to me.
“Jules?”
“This has really gone far enough. I came to a party, not an inquisition.”
“Cut it out, Joyce, will you?” I said.
“Enjoy your evening, Neil,” she answered and moved on.
I’d have gone home to bed if I could, but leaving was beyond me as long as Joyce was there. For twenty years, her words and deeds had been as inevitable as the hours of the day. Then she’d gone, and when I wondered where she was and what she was doing, I had nothing to go on. Joyce, or, rather, the figure of her, went from being entirely familiar to utterly mysterious. Nothing could be confirmed or denied, and so the possibilities were endless. The rest of my life might have been spent guessing at the rest of hers.
And here she was. I could see her, might even have touched her if I’d chosen—though that would be quite another thing. I felt almost giddy at first. The Joyce I’d been imagining didn’t correspond to the flesh-and-blood Joyce I was looking at. This had nothing to do with her appearance, or with my memory of it. She looked the same as ever. The green of her eyes, the slenderness of her arms, the half-disdainful, half-amused curl at the corners of her mouth were as I remembered. She wasn’t taller or broader or more or less beautiful or imposing. She wasn’t the trouble. It was all in my mind, where her absence had spawned a surrogate that had taken on a life of its own. And this life had become more real to me than the original.
Why couldn’t I take my eyes off this Joyce, the one in the room with me? Maybe I was trying to lay the ghost, to bring the imaginary one back into line with her. Or maybe I was waiting for her to come to me in my dark corner with my replenished tumbler to tell me that her experiment was over and she was ready to come home.
I’m sure she felt my eyes on her. I’d never known her to carry on the way she was now. She was either drawing smoke in or puffing it out, speaking or poised to speak, laughing or poised to laugh. She pulled at Izzy’s mustache and mussed the county executive’s hair; he mussed hers back. She pretended to pick my orthopedist’s pocket, danced a few steps of the cha-cha with the Youngers’ little daughter, trotted out her imitation of Rita Hayworth singing “Put the Blame on Mame.” It was a tacky performance, and the fact that it was for my exclusive benefit made it worse. If I was implicated in this display, then it was within my rights to put a stop to it.
The time came to exercise those rights. I saw her new friend Jules touch one of the buttons on her blouse—the top button, it was. He