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"Call me Millionaire," he said.
I must have looked puzzled, because he repeated himself, chuckling a little. "Millionaire," he said again. His pinkie ring, a miniature disco ball in pink-tinted rhinestone, flashed as he lifted the glass to his lips. It takes all kinds, I thought, and, aloud, said "Sure. Millionaire."
Sure. Millionaire. The guy was sprawled on a blanket in the shade, and I could see his pale ankle where his olive suit had ridden up one calf. He had a matching purple tie and handkerchief in some kind of shiny silk, and square purple sunglasses concealed his eyes. His head was newly-shaven, I would guess that same morning, because there wasn't even stubble, just that speckled paleness that reveals skin, new to sunlight.
"Strawberry?" he said, offering me the bowl of strawberries soaked in expensive wine.
Stephen had bounded into my room at ten-thirty. "Want to drive to New Hampshire?" he asked. He didn't offer a reason or a destination, just stood there, freshly-showered, wet hair dripping in a scattered circle onto my floor. For some reason I agreed, and by quarter of eleven we were on the road, windows open, elbows and hands catching the rush of hot air outside. After twenty minutes of talking about the expanse of summer stretching before us, I asked, "so where are we going?"
"A friend of mine from college is having a party. This woman named Jenny. And her friend Jenny, they're both hosting it. They told me to bring people. It should be fun," he said.
"Two Jennies?" I asked.
"Yeah. And one of them collects rock stars, so there might be a musician there."
Collects rock stars, I thought. This should be interesting. "I've never met any of your college friends," I said.
"Hey, look at that road," he said, pointing to a rutted dirt path. The turn was marked by a small green sign proclaiming the 9 mile distance to Bear Swamp, Vermont. "Wanna try it?" By the time I finished convincing him not to explore the booming metropolis of Bear Swamp, I had forgotten the unanswered question that had been hanging in the air of the car. The mountains around us reflected heat like some kind of soft metal, green aluminum beer cans, maybe. Leaves were moving overhead in the hot air, speckling the road with shadow.
About an hour later he said "Oh yeah. The Jennies might be kind of...dressed up. They like cocktail parties."
"Stephen, I'm in jeans and a t-shirt!" Jesus, I thought, and my birkenstocks. This is going to go over real well. I'm going to look like a freak.
"Don't worry, they'll probably dress you up," he said. "Just wait. One of them will offer to dress you when we get there."
No one offered to dress me. I tried glaring at him from across the room, but it didn't work; we were both enlisted to carry blankets and wine and cheese outside, and by the time I had caught his eye we were having a picnic of wine and cheese and cointreau-soaked berries. "I'm sorry," I said politely to the man next to me, "I didn't catch your name."
He said, "Call me Millionaire."
Millionaire, as it turned out, was the keyboard player for a highly successful lounge band that, of course, I had never heard of. We had carried a stereo outside with us, but we weren't listening to his band; we were listening to a tape of old swing tunes.
"Don't you love jazz?" This was one of the Jennies, the one with the longer hair. Both were wearing soft, silky dresses, with thick straps on their tanned shoulders. Maybe it was because they had the same name, but I kept catching myself thinking of them as versions of the same person, one entity in two bodies.
"Yeah," I said lamely. Way to stop a conversation, I thought.
"Come on, Millionaire, dance with me!" The short-haired Jenny stood and tried to pull Millionaire to his feet. He laughed and shook his head.
"No, I don't dance. Women flock to me when I dance," he told us, and I laughed. The two Jennies danced instead, hips moving, some kind of fifties swing dance that went perfectly with the music. I felt strangely jealous, and wished again that I had tied my hair back before we left the house, or put on lipstick, or something.
Laughing and a little tousled, the Jennies sat down. Short-haired Jenny flopped onto the blanket in front of Stephen and demanded a backrub. His fingers looked spindly and pale on her shoulders. Her skin paled to pink where his thumbs had pressed, then grew brown again.
I ate another strawberry. Crickets buzzed in the trees.
The father of the long-haired Jenny was a teacher at a prestigious New England boarding school, one of those schools where all of the buildings are covered in ivy and you imagine all of the students are probably athletic and multilingual. That's where we were: the campus of this boarding school. The father was gone for the summer, and he had lent his little faculty apartment to the Jennies. None of the rooms were square, and the ceilings were at strange angles. There were squares of stained glass in the windows, and wax on the carpet from when one of the Jennies had lit candles in the wrought-iron chandelier and forgotten that they would drip.
We sat on pillows on the carpet, except for one of the Jennies and the Millionaire who had claimed the only chairs in the room. The wine bottles and cheeseboard were in the windowseat, spotted with purple from the colored glass.
"So when do we get to try the absinthe?" Jenny asked.
"Absinthe?" I asked.
Stephen laughed. "Jenny, you've really done it this time. We have absinthe?" He threw himself backwards onto the carpet and sprawled there, grinning at the ceiling. "Where did you find absinthe?"
"I'm part of a secret absinthe-brewing society," the Millionaire said. For at least the second time that day I wondered if he were real, or if someone were going to step out of the woodwork and pull the man's skin off and reveal an actor, streaked with spirit gum and laughing at having fooled me all day long. The Millionaire exchanged his purple sunglasses for a pair of Lennon glasses with yellow-tinted lenses and sat back in his chair, crossing his legs. "We are divided into groups," he explained seriously,"so that no one person has the capability to make absinthe all by himself. That keeps us all together. We have to be able to trust each other, and this way if someone freaks out and tells the cops, they can't bust everyone."
Watching this guy was like watching fucking Masterpiece Theatre. Apparently one group grows the wormwood, and another group makes the alcohol, and a third group handles the fermentation of the wormwood in the alcohol; and there are other people who handle the sugaring process, and people who bottle the stuff, and people who distribute it secretly to everyone involved. "It's always in green glass bottles," the Millionaire told us. He took off his yellow glasses and put them in a pocket. I was starting to think he had a glass fetish.
"Do we drink it straight?" Stephen wanted to know.
"No. You mix it with ice water, like Ouzo. And you wait until it turns cloudy." The Millionaire produced an unlabeled bottle and was about to open it when one of the Jennies stopped him.
"I have an idea," she said. "Let's drink it in the chapel."
The boarding school, like most New England prep schools, had once been affiliated with the Episcopal church, and daily chapel attendance was still mandatory, regardless of a student's religion. The chapel building stood off by itself, near the lake and the boathouse where the long skinny crew boats hung, waiting to be taken down again in the fall. We were all standing outside, shading our eyes from the sun.
"I wonder if he believed us," one of the Jennies said.
The long-haired Jenny had called campus security and identified herself as the daughter of the history teacher. "One of my father's colleagues is visiting," she told the officer, "a potential music teacher for the upper school. He wants to see the chapel." When she hung up the phone she was grinning. "Pack up the absinthe and some glasses," she said. "Hurry."
The officer unlocked the door and left us alone, although I thought he looked at Stephen kind of strangely. Stephen, being the more respectable-looking of the two men, was supposed to be the potential music teacher, which almost made me laugh. I couldn't imagine him as a role model for teenagers -- especially not today. He seemed so comfortable in this bizarre role, as though his entire life had been like this.
The chapel was cool and very dark: the only light inside was the long column of sun that hit the floor when the door creaked open, and the dappled blue and gold light from the tall stained-glass windows on the sunside wall. One of the Jennies turned on the altar lights. The Millionaire strode up the aisle and deposited the backpack of absinthe and plastic glasses on the steps.
"Voila," he said, pulling out the bottle. He set it down on the altar table, where it cast small green drops of light on the white tablecloth. The cloth was embroidered with a simple black cross.
Someone handed me a plastic cup filled with a slightly milky liquid. It didn't taste like much of anything. A little bit like tea that has been steeping for too long, that kind of bitter, and then someone's poured sugar into it to hide the taste of teabag. It wasn't very cold. I drank a few small sips, then drained the cup.
"And my Aunt Ethel just nodded and smiled the whole time, and then when they were gone she mocked them for the rest of the day. You have to admire an old lady that's that manipulative, you know?"
I was a little unnerved by how coolly she was speaking.
"I mean, she just made fun of them! Their clothes especially. And their accents. And she said the woman was wearing the most awful clunky blue shoes."
"She never let on that she despised them?" The other Jenny now, asking just the right question, like it was scripted.
"Of course not. No one in my family is that transparent." Laughter.
When we went over to Frank's apartment, I was wearing one of Jenny's shirts, because mine was soaked in champagne. Stephen apologized the whole way there for having knocked my glass over, but I told him it was my fault, too, for lying on the carpet next to a champagne flute. "I mean, you didn't do it by yourself. It was all of our faults." My tongue felt thick. I decided just to listen again instead of talking until my tongue got smaller again.
Frank, Jenny said, was a swinger. He was sixty-five and his apartment was filled with photographs of famous people shaking his hand, and statues of horses. Some of the statues had people on them, in English equestrian garb, little black hats and tan jodhpurs. One wall held several pen-and-ink drawings, advertisements from the forties. When I looked again they were all slightly pornographic; leggy women smiling coyly over a pale expanse of thigh, nipples peeking out through feather boas and furs. I blushed and sat with my back to the drawings.
"Those were the days," he said. "Let me tell you, being president of a school like this is almost as good as being a diplomat. You get to meet the most interesting people. Did I ever tell you young ladies about the dancing girls in Paris?" The Jennies both giggled. I ate a handful of peanuts from the bowl in front of me.
"Did you dance with them?" Stephen asked. Frank raised his eyebrows significantly and said nothing.
The Millionaire was standing at the bar. When I glanced at him he was running his fingers over Frank's crystal decanter. "Say," Frank said, turning away from the sofa where the Jennies had their arms around each other. "Would you like a drink?"
It was starting to get dark when Jenny suddenly remembered that we were supposed to have a late lunch around three. "Oops," she said. Everyone laughed.
"Hey, make it dinner," Frank said, and clapped his big hand on her back. "Whaddaya say, beautiful?"
We all walked back to the faculty apartment and climbed the spiral staircase. Jenny lit several tall white candles that she said were Mexican altar candles. We all collapsed onto pillows on the carpet. I was starting to feel stable again, although I hadn't spoken in a few hours, uncertain of how my words might come out.
Stephen opened another bottle of Veuve Cliquot. Dinner was beautiful and delicate: a salad made of small, bitter greens, and a cold yellow pepper soup with herbs floating on the top. It was dessert that really got me, though: personal absinthe soufflˇs, the grand finale. Little orange balls of puffiness and cream in black ceramic bowls that fit into the palm of my hand.
"There's a secret ingredient," the Millionaire told Frank. "Jenny's secret recipe. That's why it tastes so good."
"But if you told me, you'd have to kill me, right?" Frank asked. We all laughed.
"This is the only way to live," Jenny said, rubbing her toes back and forth across the carpet. "Embellish. Embellish everything you can."
I folded Stephen into the passenger seat of his car and closed his door gently. One of the Jennies stood by the driver's side door. "Are you sure you won't stay the night?" she asked.
"No, thanks," I said. "I've got to get home, I have work tomorrow morning."
She promised to invite me to all of their parties for the rest of our lives. She kissed me on both cheeks. I wondered if the other Jenny could feel it when I touched this one's skin. The night air was cool, finally, and smelled like water. The sky was clouded and gray.
I drove us out of the campus gate and onto the highway.
"So what do you think." Stephen's words were strangely clear. "Of the rest of my life before I met you?"
The road curved like tendrils of something, grape vines or maybe hair. Fog was starting to wisp around our tires. I took a deep breath.
"I mean," he said, "you're the only person from here who's met any of them. You know?"
It amazed me how quickly the road went from being main street of the school's sleepy little town to being the middle of nowhere. Already our headlights were the only light I could see, great triangular beacons cutting a hole in the darkness. I knew what was bothering Stephen, and I wondered if he realized that his silence about the years before we met had given him away. I almost asked, so are you upset because you used to be melodramatic and probably suicidal, or are you upset because you think nobody here understands who you were? I thought about saying, hey, look, I know where you're coming from: we all wore black for a while, it's an artist thing, it's a growing process. I almost laughed.
In the darkness he seemed to have become transparent, and I could see what was inside his skin: I almost said, I knew someone who killed herself in college, too. Or: we all had a first lover: we've all been left. But for some reason I didn't say any of those things.
I also didn't say: your people make me uncomfortable. Or, worse: who the fuck are these people? I knew that was what he was waiting to hear, and his body was pressed into the seat because he half-expected me to say these things. Maybe I should have wondered how I knew all of these things about him all of a sudden. I did not.
"I know," I said. "Yeah. I know."
You can find more of Rachel Barenblat's work on her website, The Velveteen Rabbi.
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