The After Party Read Online Free

The After Party
Book: The After Party Read Online Free
Author: Anton DiSclafani
Pages:
Go to
columns—the
Houston Press
’s “The Town Crier,” the
Chronicle
’s “Gadabout”—usually with a man and a photo. But those men weren’t serious, and they weren’t strangers.
    â€œStop watching Joan,” Ray whispered in my ear, and I turned my attention back to him. Joan, if I’m being honest, was a minor tension in our marriage, mainly unspoken.
    â€œI’ll only look at you for the rest of the night,” I said.
    â€œNow you’re talking,” Ray said, and twirled me out again onto the floor in response.
    Ray had promised the night we were engaged that he would never leave me. And he had asked I promise the same thing, which I thought was absurd. Men left women; women never left men, not unless they were stupid, and I wasn’t stupid.
    Now he spun me out and grinned a little crookedly, as he did when he’d had a drink, his big hand warm and firm as he caught me again. He continued to watch my face. Ray often surprised mewith the things he noticed. He was attentive in a way I’d had to get used to. He could walk into a room and read me in a second. Half a second.
    â€œCee,” he said now, “have I lost you?”
    â€œI’m here,” I said, and leaned in closer to Ray so I could watch my friend without Ray’s noticing. She wasn’t right tonight; I’d known it since this afternoon. I could see the man better now. He was tall and meaty. And he was certainly a stranger. He wasn’t handsome. But handsome didn’t matter to Joan. “I’m like Jesus,” she said one time, when I asked her how she could date men so clearly unsuitable for her. “I love them all.”
    A pair of dancers swung into our path, blocking Joan and her stranger. Ray kissed my cheek and I closed my eyes and I was lost in the music, in the press of bodies, in Ray, for a moment or two.
    When I opened my eyes I was dizzy, but I had a perfect view of the tall man leaving through the door next to the stage, which led through the bowels of the club and hotel, straight to a stairwell; the stairs rose to the Shamrock’s rooms.
    I scanned the club for Joan, and spotted her near the bar, smoking a cigarette, laughing. I was relieved to be wrong.
    Then Joan extinguished her cigarette in an ashtray, dropped her lighter into her satin clutch, and followed the stranger through the door. I wasn’t wrong.
    Life should have shown me by now that I was powerless against Joan. She was a grown woman, a grown woman who was used to getting her way. Nobody had ever told her no: Not her parents, certainly. Not a teacher. Certainly not a man. Joan Fortier did as she liked. I was only herfriend.

Chapter Two
    I was fifteen when my mother died. It was December, nearly Christmas. A week after the funeral, Joan and I were still in my mother’s house, skipping school, sleeping until noon each morning, falling asleep as the sun rose. Joan had already told me I would come to live with the Fortiers at Evergreen. I wanted to, fervently, but I didn’t quite believe her. Joan loved me, and I loved Joan, but Mary and Furlow were not my parents.
    Furlow had come to Texas from Louisiana to make his fortune when he was a young man, and decided to stay. Texas could do that to a person: you came for a visit, then looked up one day and found you’d never left. He’d built Evergreen for Mary’s wedding gift. It was a graceful plantation-style mansion with enormous columnsflanking the porch, replete with rocking chairs and black-shuttered windows. He’d named it after his beloved magnolias, which lined the driveway.
    Furlow and Mary wanted me to live with them because I took care of Joan. I had access to places they did not. But I didn’t know that then. Then, it was second nature to follow Joan around at parties, to make sure she met curfew, to cut styles I thought would suit her from
Harper’s Bazaar
and give them to Mary to order.
    I was
Go to

Readers choose