You have been moving around these kinds of parties for so long, since you were young enough to be picked up at one, taken home and plied with liquor until you moved like you would eventually move without the help of liquor when you were too old to be picked up, that is, now. Now you move, you think, on the outside, loose bones, confident in your body’s padding, good at falling, recognizable as a human. You are thirty-eight years old. Your mother had babies when she was your age. You don’t feel bad about this because momentarily you are a New York woman with a cocktail glass in her hand, you are clear and liquid and go straight down. You are still awesomely uncomfortable at these parties. The whole room is a pair of jeans twelve years too tight.
Playing the crowd very well is a man with the kind of loose dark hair that he can put his hand in. He does that. Puts his hand in it. Every couple of seconds, when he is talking to a girl who reminds you very much of yourself, or would if you would admit that you had ever curved your neck forward in that way, rounded your shoulders to emphasize the smoothness of your skin, stretched your arms back to display the clean, sexual pit of your shoulder. The young man is telling the girl, for sure, about some music she does not know about not because she has not heard it, but because she does not know how to listen the way he does. She believes this. She believes in the celebrity of having talent at listening. She will hang around parties like this until she is no longer young in hope of meeting other men who know how to listen better than she does. Eventually she will stop listening to music at all.
But perk up—he’s coming toward you. Or he is getting another drink. Did you just turn your body to make way for him—yes you did. Now you need to put your whiskey-ginger aside and hold the ice-tongs as though they were a long cigarette. In the young man’s face there is nothing nostalgic, although he wears his jacket and narrow jeans as though he had been born a long time ago, as though it would hurt his soul to buy a pair of glasses with rims.
“Who are you,” you say, being careful not to point with the ice-tongs.
“Shawn Goldberg. Music writer,” he says.
“Oh yeah? What do you write about?”
“Jazz,” he says, tasting the fizz of the word aggressively.
“Who do you write for?” you ask. He slouches coolly for a second, then straightens, takes a sip of his drink (impossible to say what, possibly something with gin).
“Anybody. Me. Nobody. You know.” He’s never sold a piece. You close your eyes and your head throbs a little at the prospect of getting into a conversation where you feel superior to a young snobby kid on someone else’s behalf. On whose? You’re supposed to be an academic, on the periphery of this skinny, snarky circle of people who hawk for a living. “Who do you write for?” he asks you.
“Geena Harding,” you slip in awkwardly, extending a hand that Shawn Goldberg pretends not to know what to do with. He hasn’t asked your name, and probably wouldn’t have. “I teach jazz history and analysis. I’m on sabbatical.”
“So you write for you, too.”
A flash of your father, on his way to sleep one morning, record album sleeves awkward in his big callused hands. “I wouldn’t say that.”
He drinks a little more. Then puts his glass down. “What would you say, Geena?” It’s not a cue. He’s not that sincere. He’s not enough of a creep.
The party never ends, but you go to his place without comment at the time it should have ended. You sit quietly together in a cab that you can afford and he can’t. You’re better than him at doing the things you’ve never seen on an album cover or read about in a magazine, like tipping the driver, looking at the blackened sky without thinking of song lyrics, taking your shirt off without coquettishness. Shawn Goldberg, music writer, makes love the way he says the word “jazz,” secretly savoring and perhaps recording somewhere the immutability of each tongue or finger against flesh, for posterity, possibly for resale.
