plastic, spun three times, and collapsed. She let out a great dog sigh. We saw the strip of light under the bathroom door flick off. Mendelson, we thought, in unison. He pulled the door in toward himself, stepped out of the bathroom, caught the tip of his Merrells under the mattress side and fell, face first, onto Amanda.
The dog yelped a human sound and scrambled out from under him. She ran into the kitchen and slurped frantically from her water bowl. The bowl screeched against the floor tile.
Carlo and Tom stood up then didn’t move.
Barry shouted, “Hoo!”
Mishti looked at me with eyes that said, We were young and now we’re idiots. I was born old and have always been an idiot. Mishti stood.
You remained seated and raised both hands to your parted lips and held them there in exhausted, abiding nihilism.
Mendelson lay where he’d landed. Nobody helped him up, he was beyond help, to help would be further insult. He lay there and smelled the mattress’s buttons as Amanda had done. Then, slowly, he pressed his palms down and with his established upper-body strength did a kind of push-up into a child’s pose, then to kneeling, to squat, to standing. The plastic creaked a fart noise under each of his movements. His head, as they instruct you, was the last to come up.
“Excuse me,” Mendelson said neatly, his pranayama-trained low blood pressure boiling somewhere very deep under his skin. He took his seat at the table with the incredible lightness of a man who finds humiliation boring.
I said, “What’s the preferred disciplinary action against unsafe mattresses these days? Mr. Estlin, Mr. Mendelson, I appeal to you, couldn’t we have this mattress expelled?”
You said, “Nell.”
Barry said, “That’s hardly funny.”
It seemed clear that I had ruined everyone’s life. I didn’t know what to do or say that could explain the fact that I’d never even asked for anything.
“Sorry!” I shouted at my bamboo napkin ring.
Tom said, “Huh?”
“I mean, thank you!” I shouted at Carlo.
You said, “Stop shouting.”
Carlo smiled as if he’d won a thumb wrestle and crooned, “You’re welcome.”
I poured the wine. Carlo swirled his glass, tasted it, didn’t like it, and said it was good. Mishti drank hers in a gulp and then sat back in her chair so that the rest of the night might happen to her.
Mendelson recovered entirely and made a toast, thanking Barry for guiding him to the honorary position, thanking Joan for the potatoes. Barry clanked everyone’s glass with sloppy hollow noises. I raised a toast to your pollen-pistil grant. You looked embarrassed to exist. I said I couldn’t wait to assist your study. I said your grant would not only earn you tenure, it would save my life. Heat rose from radiators before the great bay window and made the glass panes look molten and swirling. The apartment itself swallowed my toast, and the power and congratulation you deserved that night crumbled submissively under the outdated thumb of Riverside Drive. Barry said, “Hear hear.” You thanked him, barely moving your lips.
Anyone who has something you want—a talent, a beauty, an apartment—is paying for it at a price you may find intolerable. Joan what I wish for you even more than I wish myself for you is that you find someone who has only what they need. You’ll find they haven’t paid for it, the world has given it to them in deference to the humility of their request. This is a person who can weather life and who can rejoice in it.
Your sweet potatoes tasted like apple butter.
WINE
After I cleared the table, the bed was still on the floor, we no longer noticed it, it had become something natural to the space. Amanda occasionally revisited it, as if taking herself on vacation. Carlo opened a Sancerre he’d brought for the hosts but hadn’t presumed to pair with the meal; he found new glasses in your sturdy cupboards and poured the bottle out between us. In an adolescence-flavored stupor we receded into assorted corners and drank there, raised the low music, checked in to an evening we knew would turn jolly and damaging. There is no upper age limit for electing damage. It’s not a youth folly but a heart folly.
Mendelson was twirling a what, a toothpick? An extra-long toothpick? Somewhat acrobatically from finger to finger and rubbing Amanda (they now knew each other well) with the side of his calf. Carlo and Mishti flanked him, nodding.
“December,” someone said, as if all night we’d been singing