Category: kindness of strangers

We went to a party and everyone got drunk. This came treading the heels of some very sad news that had dissolved me and my partner into tears, sad family news, we sat on the couch and both cried together. That was 3.30pm, reflexively and pointlessly I looked at the clock. A long while later he said, what time was that party starting? Oh, but it was miles away, right out into the suburbs in a place I’d never heard of. The start time was listed as five, it was half past four. We’d be late, they’d be all sat down in one long intimidating row along the side of a formal, white-swagged dinner table, heads would look up with blank smiles, like those hollow clowns, in unison. We looked at each other and my bold companion stood up. He held out his long hand to drag me off the couch. “I’ll make the icing,” I said, “you do the grooms.”

I had spent time on the phone that morning trying to find a cake decorator that sold those little plastic brides and grooms you see on the top of wedding cakes. This was an engagement party for two men, I wanted to buy two sets of plastic brides and grooms and break them apart and re-pair them. Turns out, they’re called cake toppers. Turns out they’re out of fashion. “Oh, we used to have those,” decorators said. I hauled myself into the shower to clear my brain and when I came out the kitchen table had been turned into a workstation. He had pulled out a reef of fresh cardboard and some watercolours and begun to draw. I mixed a batch of thick lemon icing, bridal white, and prodded the sticky gingerbread I’d made days earlier, to see if it was still fresh. With a bread knife I cut a crumbling diamond, slicing away the rinds, and iced it plumply on a big flat wooden plate.

To have sorrowing behind you and ahead and to carry on your lap a cute, white, festive cake, having turned out of the shower fresh as a pair of cupcakes, to pull on fresh, glittering clothes and drive out into the dark streets… there are worse ways to launch an evening. The party was way out on the Northside, at the far end of a twenty-minute drive, down a looping long steep street that ended in bush. By the time we arrived there we were two hours late. Another carload of people pulled up, honking and gesticulating: thankfully, these were the only other people we knew at this party. “Are you leaving? or just arriving?” “Depends. What does the party look like when we get there?” We all spilled down the hill together in our finery.

To a shy person, walking into a party full of strangers feels like going into a cave filled with dancing bears. Sometimes I sit outside in my car for half an hour, thumping the steering wheel intermittently, urging myself, “Come on, come on!” Then the long drive back home and the sick dark feeling of having been bested again. It felt good to walk in on the crest of a wave of sunny people. We thrust our cake at the happy couple. We took photos, were hugged, stood smiling bashfully as the cake with its giant grooms in top hats – cake toppers in toppers! – was shown off. The house was gigantic and cavernous, raw beams thrust up into the roof, a living room like a stage which had at its end an actual bar, mirrored and framed in polished wood,  hung with gleaming glasses.

In the commotion no one noticed a man in his sixties slide down the outer edge of the huge polished staircase and eel round the back of the big couch to turn down the volume knob on the stereo. He did it with such a furtive air that I burst out laughing, and bailed him up as he snuck past: “I swear, no one even saw that you did that, I promise.” He laid a finger to his nose, willing to laugh about it. “Reckon they’ll notice?” “They’ll never know the difference,” I said. I stuck out my hand. “Are you Pete’s Dad?” He was too generous to say, “stepdad.” I discovered that later, in his sweet snuffling speech about this “young man” who had “come into my life” and how at first they hadn’t understood each other but now they were “thick as thieves.”

The betrothed couple held hands and nuzzled each other as they were toasted. Like the darker-haired groom, speeches were short and cute. There was a feeling of being welcomed under the roof of a family, who wanted us to share in their good fortune. A long table was laid out with splendid food. Girls picked at the salads with immaculate fingernails. My partner said, “Do you realise you are the only woman here not wearing make-up?” I looked at him, expressionless.

In the far corner a tall guy was looking at his phone every time I glanced up. After a few glasses of punch I went over and slid my hand between his device and his eyes. He looked up. “Every time I see you you are gazing at this. Don’tcha wanna join the party, and be here amongst us?”

He was gracious, startled, cuter than I’d noticed. “I know,” he said. He laughed and shrugged. “It’s just I don’t know anybody here.”

“Neither do I,” I said, “except… those people.” Pointing back at the group I had abruptly levered off from, who had their heads together and were all weeping with laughter. He asked me what did I do and I asked what did he. He said, “I’m an accountant, but I hate it.” I said, “What would you be doing if you were really loving it?” So we talked about languages and which ones he liked. He had stayed as a student in Montreal. I tried to say something in French, something like “Zat ees where St Leonard of Cohen lives, non?” His girlfriend squeezed him on her way past, not looking at me. I said, “Wow, your girlfriend’s gorgeous!” “Yes,” he said, looking as proud as though he’d built her.

When I went back to my friends it was time to go home, almost. The next morning I woke horribly tainted with the poison Aunt Ethyl leaves to bless her favourite children. My thoughts hurt. Over breakfast we sat a long time sighing and staring. All of a sudden I remembered, “Hey? What were you laughing about, last night when I was talking to that guy who couldn’t get off his phone.” Oh, he said, laughing some more: nothing. Tell me, I said, tell.

It is easy to goad a person suffering hangover: by prodding, by putting your face too close and blinking into them. “It’s just that when you were talking to him he kept showing you his crotch,” he said.

“What?”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “He wanted you to notice him. He was standing at an angle… like… this… and had his hand in his pocket, pointing to himself… like this… and I was pointing that out to them and that’s why we were laughing.”

The day passed in a fog, we gathered our green veges on the markets. At bedtime, he said, in his funny mix of excellent and slangy and over-formal German English, “There was no sexier woman on that party last night than you.” I purred, pretended to suspect him. “So ~ you were looking?” “Oh yes,” he said earnestly, “I looked and looked. But there was no one.”