The Decent Proposal (15 page)

Keith was busy playing host; most of his guests were still in the other room. There wasn't anyone handy she could use as a
buffer. Mike had been needling Richard to introduce her to the DP for months, and now that the DP was here she would have given anything to get away from her.

They stood side by side, two wallflowers.

“So
he's
wasted.” Mike nodded toward Richard, who by now was riding an invisible pogo stick, a tiny crowd heckling him from the sidelines, egging on his ass-hattery.

Elizabeth smiled her annoyingly beautiful smile.

“I think it's our fault. He was nervous about introducing us.”

“Well, can you blame him?” Mike had meant this to be funny, but it came out wrong: antagonistic, bitchy.

“I've never seen him like this actually,” said Elizabeth. “We don't really drink together.”

“
Really?
That surprises me.” It felt as though she were a suitor marking out her territory, proving to the interloper how much better she knew the belle of the ball. Mike hated what she was doing, but she was powerless to stop herself. “Well, you're in for a real treat. He's a messy drunk, I'm warning you now.”

“You just came back from vacation, right?”

Mike nodded. “A week with my parents. Sort of hellish, but what're you gonna do?”

“How's your father?” Elizabeth asked. “Is he doing okay?”

When Richard had told Elizabeth a month earlier about Mike's father, he had failed to mention it was a secret. At the time, Elizabeth was an isolated acquaintance, and when he invited her to the party he forgot to tell her not to say anything to Mike. Richard danced on, twenty feet away, “raising the roof” with ironical intensity.

“He's fine,” Mike snapped. How dare he tell this bitch about her father? The flimsy buttress of goodwill that had been barely supporting her self-restraint snapped in two, and her ability to put a good face on this night and the Decent Proposal in general
came crashing down around her. She opened her mouth to say something—anything—unpleasant or hurtful, but Richard chose this moment to bounce in their direction.

The song wasn't over, but he was feeling self-conscious. He had reached that stage of drunkenness wherein he was
very
drunk but acutely aware of it, and overcompensating by pretending to be sober. His dancing had gotten too wild; he needed to rein it in a little.

“Whatchoo guys talkinabout?” he said.

“What do you think?” said Mike. “You, of course. What else?” She didn't give a shit about sounding like a bitch now.
Fuck them both
, she thought.

Elizabeth felt sorry for her, though she knew the last thing Mike wanted was her pity.

Richard didn't feel sorry for Mike. He had expected
her
, not Elizabeth, to rise to the occasion tonight. He associated Mike's failure with his own, and his revelation from earlier returned to him. He fumbled for something to say.

“You know whass funnybout this song?”

“What?” asked Elizabeth.

Mike stared daggers at them both.

“Th'lyrics make you think she's like desperate, ya know? I wanna dance wi' somebody—like she juss wants t'dance with somebody, anybody.” He paused in the effort not to slur. “Like anybody who's willing. But then you get the full verse, and she says she wants t'dance wi' somebody who loves her.”

“Deep,” Mike deadpanned.

Richard stared at his best friend. He should've known she wouldn't get it. This was typical, in fact, of the reaction he got from Mike whenever he tried to say anything that wasn't either clever or flippant. She was so scared of falling into the cliché of having a “deep” conversation that she was often afraid of saying anything at all. Somehow his shorthand with her, which
was supposed to be a code for something deeper, had begun to supersede rather than abbreviate whatever used to lie beneath it. He realized he would never be able to have the sort of open, earnest exchange with Mike that he achieved every week with Elizabeth.

This
was why he hated bringing his friends together. He acted one way around Mike and another way around Elizabeth, and there was no way to be both people at once. He couldn't help alienating one of them. The awkwardness of the situation helped sober him up a little, and he was able to speak more clearly while answering:

“No, really. The lyrics're good! ‘I want to take a chance on a man whose love will burn hot enough to last.' Good stuff.”

“I can't believe you know the lyrics that well,” said Mike. She turned to Elizabeth: “Richard has terrible taste in music. I don't know if you've learned that yet in all your ‘sessions.'” She lifted her drink in one hand and used air quotes in the other.

There was a lull as the song ended, hence no need for Elizabeth to raise her voice when she said, “In grade school I convinced a group of girls to lip-synch to that song, and we each had a big cardboard cutout of a heart with flames around it that we waved back and forth whenever that line came around. It's my favorite part too.” She smiled above her straw.

Cunt
, thought Mike, even as somewhere, some part of her was urging her to
calm the fuck down
and stop playing the harpy.
You're better than this.

“I'm gonna go pee,” she announced, pivoting on her heel and heading for the bathroom.

Richard turned to Elizabeth.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “She's coming on strong, but once you get to know her she's really amazing. I promise.”

“I don't doubt that,” said Elizabeth. “She obviously cares a
lot about you.” It was as close as she would ever come to telling him what she knew with certainty now, that Mike was in love with Richard.

She took a longer-than-necessary sip of her ice water.

Richard looked all around him, his discomfort over Mike and Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Keith, him and Elizabeth, any and all of this intimate interpersonal crap melting away as the alcohol kicked into overdrive and the euphoria of the successful party took over again. Who cared about individual grievances? What were they compared to the spirit of camaraderie he gave himself over to now among all these lovely, wonderful people?
His
people? He was beaming so wide, it felt as if his face might crack in two.

Elizabeth eyed him over her glass, a fainter version of his expression playing about her face.

“Collective effervescence,” she said.

“Huh?”

“The energy you get from a group of people. That magic you feel around them. Like a sum greater than its parts.”

He stared at her.

“I can't take credit for it,” she said hastily. “It was Émile Durkheim who came up with it.”

“You'resso smart!” he exclaimed, without a trace of sarcasm. The alcohol was raging through him now; he no longer had the mental wherewithal to despair over her superiority. He was too drunk, too astonished by her intelligence and perspicacity. How did she do it? He just stood there, gazing at her with naked admiration.

A rare blush spread over Elizabeth's features, which she hid behind her glass.

Just then Leona Lewis's “Bleeding Love” came up. It was an unusual selection, as Popstarz favored poppier, boppier songs, but sometimes the DJ liked to throw in a slow ballad early in the
night and work his way up from there. They both froze a moment, inhaling, and then turned to each other, surprised.

“D'you love thisong as much as I do?” If he'd been sober he never would have asked the question, at least not so artlessly. It was embarrassing to like “Bleeding Love,” especially as a guy.

She nodded.

He took the glass away from her and replaced it with his hand, leading her onto the dance floor.

Something surged inside Elizabeth's chest, constricting her throat and blurring her vision—a feeling as painful as it was pleasurable. She dropped his hand and he turned, extending his arm for her to take again. She looked at him and waited a few seconds longer to identify the feeling. It was
happiness
, but not the muted kind she felt when she did a good job at work or had a new book she was excited to read. This was a giddy, untamed emotion she hadn't felt since childhood. Elizabeth knew instinctively that Richard was about to make a scene on the dance floor and that it was probably going to be a disaster, and that by dragging her out here he was implicating her in his drunken antics, his carelessness, his idiocy. But instead of dreading all this she actually
couldn't wait
, because even though she let loose to the radio inside her house more often than anyone would have guessed, and allowed herself on occasion to be drawn into the impromptu group dance parties that ended almost every (drunken) social gathering sponsored by her firm, it had been a long time since anyone had asked her—properly asked her—to dance.

She took his hand.

THERE WEREN'T MANY
on the dance floor, and as the lights dimmed and Leona's voice swelled in the first tortured, tenuous notes of this wantonly sentimental song, everyone looked to them instinctively. They struck the traditional pose, his right hand on
her left shoulder, his left supporting her right. The beat kicked in, and they turned together as the lyrics began,
Closed off from love, I didn't need the pain. . . .
Slowly at first, then faster as the music picked up speed. Elizabeth's skirt flared out, giving her a traditional dancer's silhouette.

In two months of sharing the intricacies of their personalities, they had never talked about music. Richard wished he was like Mike, or even his hipster neighbors, who knew as if by intuition about every cool indie band to grace the sweaty bars dotted across Silver Lake and Echo Park—the mustached men and tattooed women who climbed onto dark stages and wailed away for two hours at a time. But he didn't care. Elizabeth was no stranger to iTunes, yet her tastes hadn't changed much since she was nine years old and dancing onstage with a cardboard heart. The secret behind her love of roller skating was that it provided an excuse to blast this kind of music in her ears on a regular basis, and, for his part, Richard couldn't go too long without singing along to one of his cheesy mix CDs inside his car. They both loved pop music for the same reason so many do: because it made them feel good. And while this focus on the
effect
of the music rather than the music itself rendered their taste somewhat indiscriminate, it was a preference by no means careless. They both deeply loved the way certain pop songs could within seconds make everything okay—a picture frame tilted askew but righted easily enough—as if all the change the world required were to be found inside a key shift. After two months of chipping away at each other's personalities, of collecting meager specks and slivers, they had hit upon something solid, something they shared, and while it was a small find—commonplace even, in no way a point of pride for either of them—it felt significant because in the very moment of discovery they were able to pool it between them and watch it grow, a sum greater than its parts.

At the top of the second verse he led her in a box step around the perimeter of the floor:
But something happened for the very first time with you
. A few people hooted, catcalling from the sidelines. When they got to the chorus he let go of her, and they each did a revolution around their half of the dance floor before reuniting in the center. They switched to freestyle. Richard allowed the slow beat to undulate across his body, left to right, top to bottom, each sequence ending with a gentle version of the pelvic thrust Mike hated so much. He knew from years of practice that most guys messed up by trying too hard. All you needed was a little rhythmic motion from the body's core; the rest was attitude. Elizabeth swayed, shimmied, and spun; she'd never thought about how she looked while dancing, and it showed in the native elegance of her movements.

The heart of the chorus kicked in,
You cut me open and I keep bleeding, keep keep bleeding love. . . .
Mike watched from the sidelines, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. From beside her, Keith snaked an arm around her waist, inviting her wordlessly to lean against him. For a few prideful seconds she resisted, and then she rested her head on his shoulder, swearing never again to make fun of Richard's business partner and second-best friend, as together they watched the couple reunite in the center of the dance floor.

At the second verse's bridge,
You cut me open and it's draining off of me
, Richard spun her. Growing up, his mother had dragged him to the Boston opera regularly, and the only exception to the abject pain of these experiences was the laughter that sprang from the singers whenever it was called for in the course of a story. These baritone belly laughs and soprano titters ringing out across the stage always sounded so ridiculous to him—as obscene as farts—so it was a shock to hear one escape from him now. It turned out those stage laughs weren't so false after all, when the source of the laughter was
joy instead of amusement: so routine in opera, so rare in real life.

There was a long, standout note less than a minute from the end of the song. It happened on the word
I
, and Richard was waiting for it. On the words
Ooh, you cut me open and—
he stepped back from Elizabeth and rushed toward her, catching her up in a massive spin, rotating on a tighter and tighter axis as their bodies drew together, ever closer, spinning faster, then faster still: impossibly fast. He could feel her heart beating against his chest as they whirled in a cocoon of their making, shielded from the rest of the world by their motion. The crowd roared. They were going so fast!

Maybe a little
too
fast?

They began listing dangerously to one side, like a spin-top before it falls over. Richard overcompensated by wrenching their bodies in the opposite direction, which succeeded in keeping them on their feet, but at the expense of the glorious spin, which was brought to an ignominious end. Elizabeth opened her eyes. The song had at least half a minute to go, but Richard was obviously finished. He was crouching over, hands on his knees, panting from the exertion. He looked up into her face.