American Mermaid by Julia Langbein

Author:Julia Langbein [Langbein, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 31

I am at a party at the home of a filmmaker married to a chef. I never clock names, but I clocked “Finola and Guy” when Danielle said their names in the car on the way over.

“Finola?” I repeated.

“Yeah, it’s Irish. Not that she’s Irish.”

No, of course not.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but the exceptional beauty of this home has me reeling, frantically sad that none of it is mine. I am supposed to be meeting Stem Hollander here, the guy who liked my book and put it on the internet and greased the wheels of my good fortune. I was thinking how comfortable it would be walking into a party ready to slide into a warm, one-person pocket of admiration. But now I am miles from feeling admired, sitting on a sofa thinking that it used to seem obvious to me, as a person with relatively little income, that what you do is dictated by what you can afford. (“Hey, you can go to Mexico, ten days, four hundred bucks, all in!”)

But things in Guy and Finola’s house have been dictated by their surface qualities, by how much someone loves walnut, by someone’s exposure to the tilework of Moroccan riads, by a bodily experience of intimate spaces in the little cafés under the Bridge of Sighs. Rich to me means hard surfaces, large, shiny refrigerators, and the talons of little dogs tapping in marble foyers. But I’m learning rich can be soft, infuriatingly soft; rich can be small; rich can be perfect rags. These rich people aren’t defined by being rich, but obviously things are densely beautiful with their own expense—the dark, interesting polished wood of the floor and the wide boards framing the broad windows that give onto a middle ground of wilderness, before the beaming lights of the city.

The house is low and wide—fuck you, square houses of the poor and the towering towers of the vulgar!—with navy walls and a bright Mexican carpet and somehow a beautiful brown velvet sofa. It’s probably not called velvet, it’s probably something new and environmentally sustainable called “Shylex” or something new and environmentally sustainable and French called “Chailesse.” But it absorbs everything, it absorbs your question about how much it cost as you sit under an asymmetrical lamp made of ropes and next to a squeaky, self-involved rubber plant. The filmmaker, Finola, is in a low leather strap chair stroking a white wolf in the corner, her thin neck stretched as she stares up at a yammering man in black, short stovepipe pants. It looks like we are on a 1920s ocean liner and he’s the coal-stained stevedore who knows his place and she’s the captain’s wife. The wolf watches the husband toss corn-flour-dusted soft-shell crabs in a pan of hot oil. The smell of toasting, salty corn makes everyone a little hungry, and we pull extra-long sips of our cold drinks.

The back wall of the kitchen is a large wood-framed glass panel that Guy tilts open

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