I hear the sounds of raised voices and laughter, and before I reach the door, it bursts open. “Sorry!” a woman says. The guy beside her is laughing, his arm around her waist, and they stumble out into the garden.
As usual, I’m late to the party and a bit too sober.
For the last five years, I’ve rented the little cottage behind this restored Craftsman where my landlord-now-friend Nick Atwood lives with a fluffy white cat named Gatsby. Nick and I basically share custody of Gatsby—Nick’s an entomologist at the university, and his house is so often filled with colleagues and friends that Gatsby frequently comes to my place for some peace and quiet.
Nick’s kitchen is warm and smells of his famous Brazilian risotto cakes. I put the wine on the counter. Gatsby comes over, tail in the air, and lets me scratch him behind the ears. “What’re you still doing here?” I ask him. “I expected you at my place hours ago.” He flicks his tail and stalks into the laundry room.
I head toward the living room and immediately bump into Nick, who’s on his way to the kitchen. He gives me a big hug, and a kiss somewhere around my ear. “I was about to give up on you.”
“Sorry. Traffic was brutal.”
“Right.”
Nick draws me into a circle of colleagues and their plus-ones; he slips a brimming wineglass into my hand, makes introductions, and leaves me with the group. I wish for a few familiar faces, like my friend Jill, a fellow bio lecturer who’s away visiting her boyfriend in San Francisco. It’s much more fun when she and I can be each other’s date for the evening amid all the couples.
“So you’re Deb,” says a professor from Nick’s department.
I turn to look at her—a dark-haired woman named Sydney, sharp-featured but soft-eyed, her slender body standing very straight. “Have we met before?” I ask.
“No,” Sydney says. “But I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Before I can ask what she’s talking about, she introduces me to her boyfriend, a construction manager who draws us into a discussion about LEED-certified building and local politics. I listen, trying not to think about how I’m neglecting the lesson plans for my biology course. Eventually I ease my way out of the conversation and wander across the room.
The house is neat and clean, with Nick’s love of invertebrates on full display; the walls in the living room are covered with photographs and illustrations of bees and butterflies. As much as I dislike parties, I do like the white noise of them, and I always enjoy being in Nick’s house. I love seeing the way he’s merged science with art, and I like the semisocial aspect of being around people, even if not fully engaged with them.
Soon I feel the draft of Nick’s front door opening and closing, the noise level in the room fading slowly as the party winds down. As I turn the corner into the empty hallway, the ambient sounds of people talking and laughing and saying good night are almost like a lullaby.
The first time Nick invited me over, soon after I’d moved into the cottage, I demurred—as I did the second and third times. Finally, to be polite, I went, feeling the whole time as though I were in a dollhouse, as if I were back home, where my mother’s eagle eye would catch every fingerprint I left, every speck of dirt my shoes deposited on the floor. Then one of his friends toppled a glass of wine onto the couch, staining its beige cushion with a large, deep-crimson moon—and Nick simply poured her a fresh glass and tossed a pillow over the stain. Trust me, Gatsby’s done a lot worse to that couch, he said.
That’s when I began to relax—once I noticed the claw marks on the coffee table, the shredded arm of the sofa, the tiny nose prints on the inside of the kitchen window. And over the years, as we’ve grown closer, Nick has become one of the few constants in my life, someone who’s always here when I come home after months away.
Now I wander back into the kitchen, where Nick’s talking to Sydney. Her boyfriend isn’t around, and they don’t see me, and I feel, as I often do in these situations, that I’m not really a part of what’s happening but observing it from a distant place; I’m on the periphery, like something in the background of a photograph that never catches the untrained eye.
When the boyfriend returns, we say our good nights. Nick walks them both to the front door, his hand brushing against my back as he passes by.
I open the dishwasher and begin to run water over the glasses in the sink. A few minutes later, Nick is back, depositing empty beer bottles into the recycle bin in the corner.
“Leave it for the maid!” he says, pouring himself another glass of wine.