The dinner party

I invited M. over for dinner with the idea of keeping her away from S. She didn't like S., she said, but when they were together, she felt the social pressure to flirt with him when he flirted with her agonizing, and they kept going further and further, and I didn't know when it would stop, so I took it upon myself to do M. a favor by trying to keep them apart, which is the main reason why I'd gone to all this trouble to set up dinner with M.

She thanked me for giving her something to do without S. and then called me twenty minutes later or so to tell me that she had invited S. to dinner.

The two of them arrived at 6:30 with a bottle of Diet Pepsi. S. never goes anywhere without Diet Pepsi.

I invited them to sit down in the living room--I was just about to throw the pasta in the pot. S. pretended to offer M. a chair, then overturned it, knocking over an end table in the process. Then he sat on the couch and turned on the TV, complaining that I didn't get digital cable because Pearl Harbor was on Starz. M. sat down next to him and started wrestling him for the remote.

I went back into the kitchen and M. followed me in shortly thereafter, asking if there was anything she could help me with. I told her she could make the salad--I had already laid out all the ingredients (the lettuce, the chickpeas, the olives, the anchovies, the spinach, the croutons, the cheese, the hard-boiled eggs, the special vinaigrette dressing I'd prepared) and all she had to do was put it all in the bowl and mix it up a bit with the tongs. Instead she went to the fridge and pulled a head of lettuce out of my vegetable crisper and started tearing at it over the bowl in a frenzy, like her small child was trapped inside and she had to rescue him or her. Most of the lettuce missed the bowl.

S. walked in and started complaining about the silverware, which I had already stacked on the counter. He said the forks weren't heavy enough, and he picked up his (as if to demonstrate) and threw it to the floor as hard as he could. It bounced off the tile, ricocheted off the fridge and landed tongs-up on my foot. He asked what I was complaining about, since it hadn't hurt me, although I hadn't opened my mouth.

I'd picked out a nice bottle of wine for the occasion. S. spotted it and grabbed it off the counter and said he knew how to open it without a corkscrew. He held it by the bottom and slammed the neck into the wall as hard as he could. The top broke off, spraying glass and wine across the kitchen. The glass landed on the floor, on the counter, in the salad, in the pot of boiling water. It glittered where it fell, because the cork had hit my kitchen's little chandelier, knocking out two of its five candle-shaped bulbs. S. grabbed two wine glasses and moved them under the bottle quickly--wine was sloshing over the jagged edges of the broken bottle. He tried to pour, but most of the wine ended up on his hands. He gave the second glass to M. and kept the first for himself, then put the bottle back on the counter. I wouldn't have had any anyway--I could see tiny pieces of glass floating in the thin red liquid even as S. and M. put the glasses to their lips.

S. put his glass down and rushed into my bedroom. M. asked me what I honestly thought of S. and cursed me for inviting him. She said he told her he'd been "nailing" some "broad" "on the side," but that she wasn't sure if she should believe him. I heard crashing sounds coming from my bedroom and left M. there in the kitchen.

In the bedroom, S. was methodically knocking all of my possessions onto the floor. With a flick of his wrist, the lamp went crashing off the nightstand. With a great sweep of his arm, my papers and books and notebooks and pens all flew off the desk. S. hadn't even noticed I was in the room--he just kept mechanically knocking things over, as if searching the room for a wire. He almost knocked me over, rushing from one side of the room to the other to pull a poster off the closet door.

M. ran into the room and saw S. knocking things over and jumped on his back, arms around his neck, screaming at him to stop. He backed up fast and slammed her into the far wall, shaking the room and knocking more things over, then he spun around and slammed her into the bookcase, scattering books everywhere. All the while M. was shrieking and S. was kind of growling.

It was at this point that I decided to leave. I noticed the pot was boiling over in the kitchen and walked outside.

I live in a small, unexceptional brownstone on Beacon St., near Fenway. I sat on the front steps, without my jacket. I could see my breath. I looked up at my windows--shadows were jumping wildly through the light. In the floor below, my downstairs neighbor was beating on the ceiling with a broom.

If only R. had come! Or C. or J. or G.--I had invited them all, but none could come, or would come. If one of them had come, they could have helped me with S. and M., and the two of us would have matched the two of them, and I wouldn't be sitting here by myself on the front steps of my brownstone while my apartment was being trashed.

There was a crash, then a second crash, and I saw that S. had pushed my desk from my bedroom to the living room and then through my front windows that went all the way to the floor (this was the first crash) and it (the desk) had landed on the sidewalk (second crash) and I think split in two. S. looked out the hole in the glass and looked down at the desk, a little satisfied, but less satisfied than he maybe thought he would be, and he knew that that was just the first thing and there was a lot he needed to do before he wouldn't be anxious anymore.

Later that night, I picked up everything from the floor in my bedroom, one little thing at a time.