look of a liberty. It was enough for me.
I closed on them quickly; the crowd was thinner now. Jules hadn’t let his hand linger on Joyce’s button for long. He was just lifting it as I reached them. It was already a little higher than her neckline when I grabbed it—grabbed his wrist, I mean. He tried to pull free of my grip and jerked his hand back hard. I heard his glass crack as it hit Joyce’s mouth.
“Get away from me!” she cried, reeling back and slurring her words. She covered her mouth, but from a slack corner peeking through the space between her index finger and thumb I saw a gleaming white shard and feared that the glass wasn’t the only thing that had cracked.
There was quiet, then confusion on as many sides as there were guests left to form, and the stirrings of an indignation that I withstood long enough to see that gleaming shard on Joyce’s lip melt to water. “You bastard, you sonofabitch,” Jules kept saying, but not so much to me as in some kind of tough-guy parody for the bystanders. He had a coward’s gift for advertising his affront. Shifting his weight from one leg to another, cocking his head this way and that—his kinky hair bouncing like the coils of a spring—balling up his fingers and opening them again before he’d closed them far enough to make a fist. I was hoping that he’d take a swing at me, but it didn’t take long to see that he wouldn’t. The crowd that had gathered knew it too and dispersed, and when Joyce went away, I was about the only one left to hear him muttering. There was nothing for me to do in the end but march off dismally to fetch the hat and gloves that had brought me back to the party in the first place.
On my way to the makeshift coatroom, I bumped into Cecilia again.
“I’m afraid I owe you an apology. That was a terrible way to end a dance.”
“It’s okay. We all get jealous sometimes.” I found the hint of an accent I’d been looking for in her pronunciation of “jealous.” She made jealousy sound especially poisonous.
“It’s good of you to forgive me. But, you know, it wasn’t a question of jealousy.”
“Of course not. No one admits to being jealous. It’s always more complicated. It’s more complicated, yes?”
“Well . . . yes, that’s right.”
“It was good to meet you.”
“I hope you’ll give me the pleasure of another dance sometime.” It was a quaint phrase, but it fit. She was like that.
“That would be nice.”
Charlie Younger had remained at his post, and lay fast asleep beneath a pile of coats on the bed with a cigarette tucked behind his ear. My things had gotten mixed up again in the heap, and while I was fishing them out, an older man waylaid me. He had shaggy eyebrows and a muffler that he had trouble keeping clear of his chin. “I’ll tell you something,” he said while I searched for my astrakhan. “Know what they say about power? It’s a very tricky thing, tricky, tricky, trickee.”
“What is?”
“Power.”
I don’t know what it was—just then my mind was churning: in the pile of coats I’d come across Joyce’s mink—but the word power sounded strange and unintelligible, like one of those nonsense words you’d hear in an exchange between a cowboy and his Indian guide in a Western.
“Power?”
“Maybe you don’t think so. I can see that you just waltzed around to the other side of the desk.”
“If you say so.”
“That’s all it takes as far as you’re concerned, isn’t it? You just walk to the other side of the desk.” I found my coat, and realized as I put it on that I was swaying on my feet. “You think that’s all there is to it. Well, it’s not like that, not for some of us. Some of us, we start on our way around, and what happens.” He was looking me in the eye, trying to get me to look back into his. Behind him, on a silent television, a man in a yellow mackintosh riding a tricycle in fast motion hit a curb and fell over.
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“I thought you might like to know.”
“Okay, what happens?”
“What happens? The desk vanishes. We’re on our way around it and it’s gone. Paff, into the ether. Just like that, paff.”
“No kidding,” I said, and pushed my way past him through the door. He might have knocked me over if he’d pushed back. I was suddenly that bleary. I crossed the landing to the head of the stairs and was about to start down when I ran into Bud going the other way. “I’m calling it a night,” I said.
“I won’t ask what kind of night you’re calling it.”
“Yeah, well, every party needs at least one good row. They’re what people remember.”
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
“I’m really all in.”
“It won’t take a minute,” he said.
I was about to refuse when Joyce and Jules rounded a corner below and I remembered that she hadn’t collected her coat. I hoped they’d have gone by the time I looked at whatever Bud had to show me.
He led me quickly down the hall—too quickly, to tell the truth; his spryness at this time of night made me feel old and sodden—through the master bedroom to his dressing room. “Have a seat,” he said and went over to a bureau facing a window. He took an envelope from the top drawer. Then he looked up and, pointing at the window, said, “See that?” The twigs and branches outside the window were outlined against the scrim. “When the moon’s bright, I see this pattern against the shade and say to myself, it’s supposed to be plain.”
“What is?”
“This, these lines,” he said. “Their meaning is supposed to be clear. But it’s not. It looks like some kind of Eastern calligraphy on a parchment.”
I lit a cigarette, and gave another to him.
“I guess so. But why should it mean anything?”
“Because it’s the writing on the wall. And what’s the expression? It’s as plain as the writing on the wall.”
“I don’t think—”
“And haven’t you ever said, when some inevitable-seeming tragedy occurs, say a man’s business goes belly-up—”
Or his wife, I thought.
“—that the poor sap couldn’t see the writing on the wall? Well, maybe this is mine, or ours, in some crazy alphabet! What if our future is spelled out right here?”
“Ours?”
“It might foretell success or romance.”
“Sure,” I said. “Or both.”
“Let’s not get carried away.” His laughter broke out again, but I didn’t join in and he couldn’t go on alone for long.
“Here,” he said, handing me the envelope. “Mickey’s already got a copy. He said I shouldn’t be surprised if you were slow to warm up to the idea.”
“The idea?”
“The one we discussed a little while ago, when Mickey was here. It’s my proposal you’re holding. The confidentiality agreement’s in there too.”
The mention of his venture doubled my fatigue. I put down the envelope. “I thought I’d told you that I’m not in the business of backing new enterprises anymore.”
“Maybe you’re not seeking them out the way you once did, but when something like this comes along and bites you on the ass, I think it might be another story.” I was having trouble sitting up in my chair, but Bud’s eyes only got wider as he pressed his cause. “I’d think this is one that merits a good