Back After This

Chapter Thirteen The Party

Chapter Thirteen

The Party

We’d worked hard enough, gotten far enough ahead in the producing schedule, that with all my dates over, Toby let the entire team slow down for Thanksgiving week. It was a good thing, since I didn’t think I could bear to talk about myself any more right away. I had a small dinner with Molly and Pete; Julie went to see her parents; Abby and Charlie disappeared and didn’t even tell us what they were doing—a sensible self-preservation tactic for producers hoping to have actual time off. And while I should have spent that week not thinking about work, I spent it burrowing into the reactions we were getting—including to the first episode where I actually went out on dates (with Josh, Paolo, and Michael #1), which dropped the morning after Thanksgiving. I had promised Julie I would not do this, that I would relax, but she had known I was lying.

The show was fun. The show was misogynist. The show was entertaining. The show was revelatory. The guys Eliza picked were great, or boring, or too good for me, or not good enough. Eliza was sharp and funny, or she was completely fake. I was too negative, or I was the best, or I was a snob, or I was gullible, or my voice was annoying, or they had looked me up online and I was ugly, or they had looked me up online and I was cute, or they had a crush on me, or they wanted to set me up with their brother, their boss, or their best friend.

The men I dated had their own factions from the start. It was as if my dating life had become a sports stadium, with each guy hearing the roar of his own cheering section or the booing of his detractors. Michael #1 had hardcore fans immediately; we had not said anything about Costa Rica, but I had a feeling some of them might have been willing to follow him there. What’s not to like about sunshine, cocktails, and tax evasion?

By the time we all got back on the clock at the beginning of December, I wondered whether it was killing Eliza having so many people have so many opinions about her, but of course, she was much more used to it than I was, and she took it in stride. Instead, she was focused on the joint holiday– Twenty Dates party she was throwing at her house. “I’m so glad you called,” she said. “You’re coming to the party Saturday, right? I think practically everybody from your work is coming. You can meet all my friends. And Marcela. And you can hang out with Cody! My sister and her husband are coming, too.”

I’d never met any of her family. I was certainly curious. “I’ll be there.”

“Fabulous. You’ll love it, I’m having this tremendous caterer do it, the best in the city. Passed apps to die for. It will be worth it for the food alone. And there’s going to be a band, and dancing, it will be great.”

When I thought about a party at Eliza’s, all I could envision was endless selfies and servers walking around with trays of smoothies with little umbrellas in them, and I felt like I would be preposterously out of place. In this case, though, it qualified as a work event, and at least I would be surrounded by people I knew. “I’ll be there, don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

—

The party was on Saturday night, and that afternoon I went through my closet until I found a hunter green sweater, and I paired it with one of my many pairs of black pants. I tried once more to replicate the look Eliza had given me during the makeup lesson we did.

Julie had a Honda CRV, or more precisely her parents did, and she picked me up so we could drive out to Bethesda. Up and down Eliza’s street, cars were already parked on both sides, and when we got out, music thudded in the distance. As we got close to the house, we could see people, so many people, milling around inside, and along the path to the front door there were arrangements of poinsettias. “Very nice,” Julie said. “She can definitely entertain.”

Despite the meticulous, contemporary spareness of Eliza’s house, the party was emphatically maximalist. In order to allow for drinks that were not exclusively clear liquids, furniture and rugs had been moved and replaced with furnishings I’d never seen, ones in bright colors that I suspected were rentals. Lights had been added, and there was one bar set up in the kitchen and one in the basement where the home theater was. A four-man band in skinny ties played throwback hits on a small platform in the emptied great room. Indoor trees winked with fairy lights, and a catering table with covered chafing dishes took up most of the dining room. We wedged our way inside the front door, and someone took our coats and disappeared with them, and I looked around to see a collection of Palmetto people, people who seemed like they might belong to Eliza or her business, and people I couldn’t place at all.

“Should we get a drink?” Julie ventured, peering cautiously toward the kitchen.

“We might as well,” I said. We wound our way through the front hall, and when we passed the poster of the wedding photo, Julie silently pointed at it and raised her eyebrows, and I nodded. Just as we got near the bar, I heard my name.

“Cecily!” Eliza was in a bright pink print jumpsuit and a perfectly complementary pink blazer, and she had a bright red drink in her hand. “I’m so happy to see you! Hi, Julie, thank you for making sure she actually showed up!” Julie laughed at this, which I found moderately traitorous.

“Thank you for inviting me,” I said. “This is beautiful. I mean it. I don’t know how you do all this.”

“I let people help me,” she said pointedly. “Now have a drink. I’m having a Negroni. There’s boozy cider in a pot in the kitchen, which smells unbelievable, or the bartenders will make you whatever you want. I’m so happy to see you!” She hugged me from the side, around my shoulders, without spilling her drink. Just then, a woman with her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail came up and put her hand on Eliza’s elbow. Eliza leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Carla, hi! Carla, this is Cecily, she’s the host of the show. Cecily, Carla was my high school bestie. She lives in Annapolis and she came all the way here just for me.”

Carla crooked a corner of her mouth. “I mean, I came for the booze, but yes, love, I came for you, too.”

I don’t know why I expected Eliza not to have friends, or not to have regular friends, or not to have old friends. Somehow, I always envisioned her moving from place to place followed by a gaggle of admirers, perfect people who were perfectly aligned with all the advice she regularly gave them.

But as it turned out, when Julie and I fetched drinks and started to walk around, most of the people we talked to had relatively normal jobs. There were people Cody knew from work, people Eliza knew from the neighborhood, people they both knew from their long history together. Only a few of the guests looked impeccable in the particular way that Eliza always did—one of them was a woman named Jia who introduced herself to me as a juicing entrepreneur. But she had also been a devoted listener of Otter Tail, and unlike most people, who could only go on about the crime and who did it, she asked me about some of the thorniest ethical tangles of true crime. It made her uncomfortable, Jia said, listening to something she thought was so riveting that was about something so incredibly sad. Me too, Jia, I thought but did not say.

We listened to the band and had drinks, and I even danced a little. Eliza came down and bumped her hip against mine in rhythm on the dance floor, and she said in my ear, “I’m so glad you’re here.” She squeezed my shoulder.

It was hard not to look around this place—her home, her husband, her friends, her happiness—and feel like she had something figured out. I had thought maybe she had a shiny life but not a happy life, but it was clear that she had a happy life, too.

I was standing in a corner of the living room watching Julie dance with one of Eliza’s other college friends when I felt someone standing next to me. I turned to see Cody leaning on the wall exactly as I was. “Cody, hey,” I said. “It’s good to see you, thank you so much for all this.”

“Good to see you, too,” he said, holding a beer bottle in one hand. He clinked it against my whiskey glass. “And congratulations on the show. I heard the first one, I really like it.”

“Well, thank you, that’s very nice of you,” I said. For reasons I couldn’t quite explain, the fact that he hadn’t heard more than one episode felt like a sublime act of confidence in their relationship. After all, he’d probably had to decide, at some point, that he couldn’t possibly digest all of her content. I turned to him. “How is all this for you anyway? All this…this?” I waved my arm at my own friends, at my own bosses, at his wife and her pals laughing and popping meatless sliders in their mouths.

He shook his head. “I just hang on tight,” he said. “She runs the carnival rides.” This could have seemed resentful, but it didn’t—it seemed admiring. No, adoring. “She just flipping loves people, you know?”

“I can’t get over how much energy she has,” I said.

“It’s no joke,” he agreed. And then he turned back to me. “Is she driving you nuts? Little bit?”

I was so surprised by this question that what came out of my mouth was a long “uhhhhhhhh,” and the minute he heard it, he started to laugh. “I mean, no,” I said, “she’s been fine, it’s just a lot of big changes for me. I think she’s disappointed in me, probably, since I’m not doing everything she wants in quite the right way.”

He took a drink from his beer. “I’m going to tell you a secret: She’s never disappointed in anybody,” he said. “She just wants to help. It’s her whole thing. She can’t not do it.”

“It has to be a lot,” I said. “All the…carnival rides.”

“I knew who she was when we got together,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t know we’d end up on YouTube, but she was always going to be big. You know, big. ”

“Big like a celebrity?”

“Big like a bulldozer,” he said. “She never stops moving. The business has been really bumpy the last couple of years, and she’s just rolled on. I don’t know if she told you, but we just sold the apartment in New York, and that was really hard for her, but she got used to it. She’ll have ten new projects going by New Year’s, probably, and she won’t even slow down.”

“I’m sure she won’t.” Eliza hadn’t mentioned selling the apartment. She hadn’t mentioned anything other than new ideas, new collaborations, new products, new opportunities. I almostcouldn’t picture her accepting any development that wasn’t to her liking.

Just then, a blond woman in a black wrap dress came up and kissed Cody on the cheek unselfconsciously. “Hey, babe,” she said. “How are things over in this corner?”

“They’re good,” he said. “Emmy, this is the host of the show, Cecily. Cecily, this is Eliza’s sister, Emmy.”

Emmy fussed over me exactly as much as I’d expect from someone who was related to Eliza, but she had a calmer vibe, a more restful aura, and I knew she was a few years older. Cody excused himself, and the two of us stood there watching the party. “So,” Emmy finally said, “how’s the dating stuff working for you so far?”

“Well,” I said, “I have been on twenty dates, and there were a good number of solid picks. I would recommend her for anybody who needs first dates at high volume.”

Emmy nodded slowly. “That’s very fair.” It was funny how much Emmy immediately seemed to me like someone I would be friends with, and Eliza seemed like the little sister of someone I would be friends with.

“She keeps telling me it’s important to be intentional.”

Emmy rattled ice in her glass. I had a feeling she was a little bit tipsy. “Ah, I’ll bet. She comes by that honestly.”

“What do you mean?”

Emmy rolled her eyes. “She never tells anybody this story. She should tell it. When Eliza was nineteen, she got engaged to our next-door neighbor.”

“Really.”

She nodded. “They grew up together, our moms were best friends, our dads played golf, all that. They get to high school, she and Liam start dating. Literally, she’s a cheerleader and he’s the quarterback of the football team. You could have plonked them down on the heterosexuality float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. They go to college, and they get engaged, and because they’re not going to get married until they graduate, she spends—I am not exaggerating—three years on wedding planning. There are spreadsheets. There are albums. There are fabric samples. She shows me five kinds of confetti.”

“Jesus.”

“Exactly. So they’re almost done with school, they start looking for a wedding venue, and this is when she finds out that for the last two years, he has been screwing her roommate and best friend basically every time she wasn’t in the room.”

“Oh, shit. In the room?”

“On her bed.”

“Why her bed?”

“Can’t imagine, but that’s where they were when she caught them. She walked right in. Just a couple of bare asses rolling around under her Florence and The Machine poster.”

“Whoa.”

“Exactly. Complete meltdown. She makes it to graduation, comes home, she’s just moping around the house. Total mess. The quarterback gets engaged to the roommate.”

“No.”

“Yes. And El feels like she absolutely has to find somebody. Cannot wait, right? She’s never been single as a fully formed person, ever. And at that time, you know, dating apps are taking off, but she’s really suspicious, she has a couple of bad experiences, she decides that’s a no. So she determines she’s going to do it logically. Like the wedding planning. She starts making spreadsheets. She gets referrals. Everybody she knows. Everybody they know. I’m married myself by this point, by the way, and all my husband’s single friends get written down. Everybody she meets gets entered into this system.”

“This part certainly checks out.”

“Right? So she comes up with this list of potential people to go out with, and she starts asking for introductions, and going on dates, and crossing people off—you know those bulletin boards like on a conspiracy show? Where there are all the red strings, and it’s either very logical or very wacky and you can’t really say which? It was like that. And she followed this whole thing faithfully until she met somebody who told her about Cody, and she did research on him, she looked him up, they went out, and they fell in love. And they’re very happy, and he’s a great dude. So for her, that’s how you become happy.” She took a drink. “It’s safe to say we’re pretty different.”

“How did you meet your husband?” I asked.

“I tripped over his foot on my way to an IHOP bathroom.”

“Well,” I said, “everybody has their own journey.”

I stood with Emmy, and we watched Eliza on the dance floor, throwing her arms around one of her friends, effortlessly balancing her cocktail in her hand. Emmy stepped away to greet a friend. And then I did a double-take, because over by the door, a very familiar tall and narrow frame was handing over a coat. “Wait,” I said. “What the…”

Julie was suddenly next to me. “Hey, look, it’s your waiter!” she said. “We felt like it would be fun to invite him, since he’s such a big hit with the audience, so we tracked him down at Madeline’s. Should we go say hi?”

“Oh. Oh…Julie.” He looked so good. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and he was better than I remembered. This was not what I needed, even though it was a little bit what I wanted. “Look, just so you understand, in case it comes up, I kind of know him,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I—okay, remember when I told you about the dog, the guy I helped catch that escaped dog?”

“The huge one? That escaped dog?”

“That’s the only escaped dog.”

She nodded slowly. “And the guy who looked like a handsome man’s brother.”

“Yes. He also took my new pictures.”

“You went to your waiter to get your pictures taken?”

“No, I didn’t go to him. I mean, I did, but I didn’t know,” I said. “I didn’t know he was the same guy as the waiter when I went to get the pictures, and I didn’t know he was the same guy as the dog guy when I went to the restaurant. He keeps showing up. Or I guess if you’re him, I keep showing up.”

“This is complicated,” she said, almost admiringly. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I haven’t thought about anything but tape and scripts for the last month. Plus, I was afraid if I brought it up, it would seem like I was making a big deal out of it. And then he was the kicker on the preview episode, and everybody made a big deal out of it, and I just…didn’t.”

I wasn’t sure this was a very convincing explanation, but we were out of time to chat about it, because suddenly, there he was. “Cecily,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

Oh, why did he have to look delicious in completely different ways? Every damn time I saw him? He was wearing a navy blue flannel shirt, and there was a little blue thread hanging from a button near his collar, and it was all I could do not to reach out and touch it with my fingers. Instead, I tried not to gulp and just said, “Hi, it’s good to see you, too. This is Julie, you met at the restaurant. Julie, you remember Will.”

“Sure,” she said. “You gave me a great quote, and now the internet loves you.”

He grinned at her. “I don’t know how that works.”

She shrugged. “Me neither, really.”

“Oh my God, hi!” Eliza came bounding up beside me. “You’re Hot Waiter!”

“Eliza,” I said, “this is Will.” I put a little extra emphasis on it.

She leaned up and kissed his cheek. “I’m so glad you could come, thank you so much. By the way, I love Madeline’s, it’s one of my favorite restaurants, and I always tell people they have amazing service.” One of her friends overheard and walked up next to her, nodding enthusiastically.

“Thank you,” he said, looking at her with a mild head tilt. “I’m glad you enjoy it.”

“Did you think that was crazy when everybody on the internet thought you were so cute?” Eliza’s friend asked.

“A little bit, yeah,” he said.

I slipped into some kind of a fugue state as I watched people come by and make conversation with him exclusively about the restaurant and the internet. I thought maybe I should say something about his photography, say how talented I thought he was, but I wasn’t sure he wanted that, and Eliza would wonder why I didn’t tell her, and so forth. Maybe he wanted to keep all this as contained as possible. He didn’t look miserable, but he did look surprised to be the focus of so much attention.

I was just beginning to think the crowd around us was going to thin enough that we could talk when Toby came strolling up and slapped me on the back in that way he had, that way that always made me involuntarily think of the word “hiya.” “How are we doing?” he asked. I introduced him to Will. “Oh, of course. The waiter. Congratulations on your adoring fans,” he said.

“I think they’re Cecily’s fans,” Will said. “I was in the right place at the right time.”

Toby pulled Will into a conversation about natural wine that I was quite sure Will wasn’t interested in, and Eliza and I drifted away in the direction of a small low table with little bowls of nuts and M&M’s and trail mix. I popped two M&M’s in my mouth. “It’s funny,” I said, figuring it was better to just tell her, too, in case she found out, “but he and I actually know each other a little bit.”

“Right, you said at the restaurant you were neighbors.”

“We are, kind of, but we also kind of keep running into each other.” I explained about Buddy, and the rescue we effectuated. “And believe it or not, you remember when I got the new pictures taken? He was the photographer.”

“So he’s an artist,” she said with such perfectly crisp neutrality that I couldn’t tell whether the rest of the sentence inside her head was “with a big beating creative heart” or “who probably doesn’t even do sponcon.”

“Yes. He’s really talented, actually.”

I must have trailed off a little too warmly, or I looked at him a little too hungrily, because Eliza narrowed her eyes at me. “Do you like him? Are you guys…I mean, do you like him?”

“I’m just telling you we know each other. And I don’t know, maybe if none of these dates pan out—”

“Of course,” she said, rolling her eyes a bit.

“What?” There was a way in which I suspected a person like Eliza would feel safe being a terrible snob, and a way that she wouldn’t. She was not the kind of person to be caught on TikTok ranting about how someone working in retail took too long to ring her up. She was not someone who would post a red-faced complaint about being unable to get a coveted piece from a new lingerie line on the day it came out. Her whole thing was positive. She was nice. And even though her livelihood revolved around as many people as possible knowing who she was, it would have been devastating to her image ever to be heard to ask, “Don’t you know who I am?”

“I mean, I’m not surprised you like him,” she said. “Who doesn’t admire a guy who saves a dog?”

“It’s not that. He’s a good guy. We talked when he did the pictures, he asked me questions about what I do, it was just friendly.”

She reached over and grabbed my hand. “Honey, he’s not interested in what you do.”

I sat back. “Excuse me?”

“You met him, he likes you, and you haven’t slept with him. That means that’s the situation he’s working on right now. So whatever time he spent sitting there fondling your microphones or whatever, that doesn’t mean he’s really excited to hear about, I don’t know, subwoofers.”

“What exactly do you think my job is?”

“Listen, I get this. You’re starting to open yourself up. All this work we’re doing is making you feel more ready, and that’s amazing, I’m super proud of you. But like I told the entire internet, the whole point of this is to be intentional about it. ‘Whatever’ doesn’t work, remember? The definition of insanity is expecting to do the same thing over and over again, as they say.”

“They don’t say that,” I muttered. I pulled my hand back a bit.

“My point is that you are a beautiful and successful woman. I don’t want you to settle. Somebody saving a dog and the internet thinking he’s cute, those are not reasons to go out with somebody.”

“So the fact that I like him means I’m not supposed to go out with him.”

“No,” she said, “just, the fact that you like him doesn’t necessarily mean you should go out with him.” Now she laid her hand over my wrist. “Tell me the truth—do you think somebody who hasn’t had success can appreciate the kind of work that you’ve put in with your career? You told me you wanted somebody who was not going to resent your work. Do you think somebody who isn’t driven can understand why you’re so driven?”

I frowned. “How do you know he’s not driven?”

“To do what?” she asked. “Bring bread to the table?” The way I looked at her, she seemed to instantly realize this was too far. “I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be horrible. I want you to find somebody who’s passionate like you, that’s all.”

“He’s just been really…kind to me,” I said, knowing it sounded watery and unconvincing, and when I saw the pitying expression on her face, I regretted saying it, despite the fact that it was true.

“Kind? Cecily, everybody is supposed to be kind to you. It’s not enough. I want you to fall in love and stay in love. And that starts with not jumping on the first guy you meet who saves a dog in front of you.”

“I didn’t jump on him,” I said. “Nothing is happening. Believe me, any interest in an actual relationship would not be mutual anyway, okay?” It was true. While he’d inquired about asking me out, he’d also gone out of his way to tell me he wasn’t staying in town. He was short-term only. Even if I had been having serious intentions in that direction, which I was not prepared to say I was, he didn’t share them.

She sighed and took both my hands. “Do me a favor. Go out with Michael again. He is a dreamboat, and he really likes you, and he has an actual career, which I know you care about, whether you admit it or not. And if he’s not it, we’ll keep trying. You said you were going to give it a chance.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to go out with Michael.”

“Okay, then. We agree.”