do they teach you?”
Their bowls were empty and they looked up at Nate with sad, gaping eyes.
As the others drifted off, he untied their leashes and shooed the two of them up onto the terrace and into the house. Adjacent to the kitchen was a kind of cat apartment with carpeted walls, wicker bassinets, and in one corner a forest of dangling string. Way too large for this feline retreat, Wilkie and Sam knocked about like vandals in a child’s room, their bulky heads clearing windowsills of teak brushes and padded collars, Sam ripping strands of twine from the mobile with an impatient yank of his jaw.
“Chill out there,” Nate said, looking through the cabinets of tinned salmon and prescription drugs for something more substantial. Finding nothing, he opened as many tiny cans as he could into the miniature bowls before the dogs shouldered him aside to get at their supper. He fetched them water and sat for a moment on the chair in the corner, watching their glistening tongues lick the steel clean.
And then their heads were up again, eyes still brimming with hope.
“That’s it, guys. Sorry.”
They sniffed at the cat baskets, rummaging in search of their inhabitants.
“Stay here, okay? Just stay.”
He pulled the door ajar and crossed back through the kitchen, heading out into the front hall, wondering where Ms. Graves might be. Here and there on decorative chairs and benches guests had taken refuge from the heat and the crowd, an older couple dozing upright on a chaise longue, a Japanese businessman in a tight black suit tapping away at his BlackBerry, while a few feet behind him a gaunt woman in a sweat-stained silk dress ruminated on a painting over the fireplace.
Heading up the stairs, Nate paused on the first landing, from which three hallways ran off into different wings of the house, each painted a different color, one beige, one pale blue, one dark red. The others had likely retreated to the third floor, back up to Jason’s room, which could only mean more bong hits and combat, a prospect he didn’t relish just now given how forcefully his retinas continued to pulse to the beat of his heart.
Stilled there on the landing for a moment, he found himself slowly drawn to the pattern on the wallpaper of the blue hallway. Little indigo diamonds were set on an azure background and surrounded by tiny gold stars each in turn ringed in a halo of silver, the design stretching on uninterrupted by picture frames or light fixtures, as if decoration of this particular wing had gone unfinished.
Coming closer, he could see another pattern beneath, stamped in outline onto the paper itself: hexagons contained within octagons contained in circles, which were themselves woven of figure eights, each figure only an inch wide, the stamp repeated a thousand times over. Moving from background to foreground and back, his eyes roved up and down, left and right, searching in vain for a place to rest, for something to comprehend or analyze, but he could find nothing, no larger, central figure or meaning, forcing him eventually to give up and simply let the pattern enter him unconceptualized, the whole ungrasped, which strangely enough, after a few moments, produced an oddly pleasurable sensation, a kind of relief from the responsibility to understand, at which point he moved in a step closer losing all lateral perspective, as when he’d lost himself in the endless zigzag of the houndstooth check of his father’s overcoat as he was carried half asleep from the backseat of the car up to his bedroom as a boy, pressed against that endless repetition. The sudden memory of which he now condemned as sentimental. Thus covering self-pity in self-punishment, both of them equally false, both of them walls thrown up to block the view of something hopelessly vaster.
He kept on down the hall, coming to the open door of a bedroom done up in nautical style with powder-blue curtains and a navy bedspread and a replica of an old ocean liner set in a glass box on a table between the windows. At the bedside table, he picked up the cordless phone and dialed.
It rang three times, as it always did, before his mother answered, her voice rising gently on the last syllable of “Hello?”
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m over at Jason’s. I told you, right? His mother’s having this party.”
“Is she? Oh, good. Have they given you supper?”
“Yeah. They’ve got these tents set up and everything. Are you