Riley At The Party

The Great War to end all wars cracked the world apart. The old dust shook off. New green stalks sprouted up from the cracks. The youth, who were sent by the war romantics to slaughter, came back from the fighting to peg romanticism as a ruse. We woke up. We sought to replace our yells of battle and pain with roars of victory at having survived. We sought to shed off old ways and celebrate life rather than cower from death. Literal new electricity pulsed and illuminated a new world of innovations, rebellions, freedoms and inner revolutions. We saw the ridiculousness of prohibition and so we saw the folly even deeper of laws and men. Confronted with mortality we questioned stale ideas of rigid morality. Embrace vapid minds for vapid times. Young, pretty, reckless, thirsty, we welcomed the alcohol burning the tips of our tongues. This ignited mindless sparkling conversation which birthed passions and actions as spontaneous and random outbursts of dancing and kissing and smashing indulged us. The world silly, we took our own silliness seriously.

Gatsby threw lavish parties.

The old gods dead we decided to make among the living new gods to worship. My friend group made Riley our idol of worship. She frequented Gatsby’s soon to be legendary lavish mansion parties and then so did we, like bees chasing nectar.

The girls at Gatsby’s parties squealed with airy splashes in their play, as light as Champaign bubbles, as frothy as quick poured ale, as pretty as pink clouds. They took to heart the manta that the best thing a girl can be in the world is a beautiful little fool.

The girls cut their hair in slick bobs, plunged their necklines to near navels, raised their hems to just below their but cheeks and danced in drunken madness which caused their glittery string fringes to fly upwards and out and off. They cut themselves off from the dark drudgery of farms and the myth that only through mundane hard labor can value and purpose be gained. They flocked and floated to New York City like moths to green light. They shone like sun spots shimmering over bobbing water. Unshackled my generation rose, no longer suppressed under the cultural delusion that boring piety was preferable to fun and excitement. What is life but to live after all?

Riley could pull off that ditzy character better than all the rest when she wanted. Her laugh sparkled in the sweetest chimes, the prettiest of notes in it, rising above what sounded like sea bird squawks in comparison. She sung like a siren luring men to rocks to meet their welcomed demise. She looked the best and prettiest of all the girls when dancing and when standing still near a door or lying on the couch or talking, so often with her hands, or when drinking or doing anything. As slink as a silk cat she commanded space like a lion. It was Riley’s intelligence however which made her truly exceptional. Her wit was a heavy mass which pulled us all into orbit around her.

The young men of my friend group, recent NYU grads, poured money into the stock market and watched with glee as our investments rocketed skywards like silver skyscrapers. Money, quick, easily gained. We were eager to embrace the new world or our creation, to escape into money and carelessness.

We followed Riley to Gatsby’s, our third weekend straight. A car had crashed into a fountain in front. Two men fought in the oil slicked water for our amusement. One blow drew a direct hit on the chin, knocking the other competitor out. Faint discordant jazz notes from the main hall serenaded the outside brawl and chattering hoots and hollers of the betting spectators.

We saw the brawl now let’s go to the ball, joked my friend Edgar. We gaily stepped towards the source of the jazz, each step the horn blasts a bit louder. Riley was already slinking in a rhythmic dance as she stepped, already a Champagne flute in her hand, already all eyes drifting towards her and locked onto her. The heads that watched her soon swayed and bopped to the same rhythm she displayed with her motions. “The crispness of fall is like life starting all over again,” she declared. “Especially on Indian Summer nights like tonight. Look, the moon is full,” she said. We kept our eyes on her as she looked up and smiled, basked in silver moonlight shimmering over her silver dress. We entered the wide doors

In time I found myself in a corner of a room by a large plant and a replica miniature statue of Aphrodite. Whatever room you entered you encountered friendly strangers gabbing wild rumors about Gatsby. No one saw him yet we envied him and loved him. None really knew him so no one really cared about him other than as a source of our revelry and joking gossip. Some said he was a sailor who found pirate treasure; others said he was a Rockefeller, some said he was a poor boy who remade himself into what he is now, a nobody from nowhere who reinvented himself. Some said he came from the moon or mars. Some said his mansion parties were a lure to snatch a girl he fancied away from another man. A person who claimed to have talked to him said Jay Gatsby was naively and wildly ambitious and hopeful of his future in ways that struck him as both aspirational and pitiful at once. In a corner I shouted drunkenly to my friend Henry to be heard over the ruckus.

“What happens when all this ends?” Henry asked.

“We continue the party into hell,” I joked.

He concentrated on not smiling to show his seriousness. “No, really, what happens?”

I shrugged. “You’ve experienced endings of parties before.”

“I have,” he said. “I’m always mostly relived and yet a bit sad.”

“Why?” I asked

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“When the party ends we twaddle away time until the next party,” I said.

“I know,” he said, although he tightened his lips in what I took to be dissatisfied fluster. “What are you waiting for?” he asked me although I perceived he was more so talking to himself. I did him the favor of echoing the question back to him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something. Some eventual resolution to all of this.”

“All of what?” I asked.

He made a wide gesture. “Whatever this is. Not just the Gatsby parties. What’s happening with Riley? Who will she choose?”

I laughed. I half joked: “You worship gods to adore them not to domesticate them. She’ll have none of us. It would diminish her if she did. We’re all a rotten lot really.”

His jowl tightened as did his grip around his Champagne flute. “No,” he said. “You may choose to be a peon. I will choose to mingle with the gods.”

I could not help but to guffaw mid drink in a way which caused some stinging alcohol to spill out of my nostrils. I covered my mouth to hide my laughter.

“You are either chased or you are chasing,” Henry said. “We are all either gloriously fatigued or in constant anxious anticipated worry.”

I laughed.

Henry scowled. “Where does it all lead?” He asked again.

I chucked. I put on my most jovial demeanor and slapped my hand on his shoulder. “Just enjoy where you are now if you can Henry. We are in our best times and in our best times it is best not to think.” In my drunkenness I thought my drunken words to be profound. I continued my drunken philosopher spiel with: “We had a time. Someday we’ll have a time reminiscing about the time we had. Then we’ll have a time reminiscing about that time and so on until there is no time left.”

I heard Riley’s voice. She said, with some loud dramatic distress: “If I fail to meet your dreams it is not my own fault but because of your own colossal delusions. You have made of me not who I really am but only a symbol of your own ever expanding wild dreams, which I can never satisfy for I am real. You’d do better worshiping and chasing after a thundercloud than trying to win and contain me.”

Henry and I locked eyes and then went to follow her voice. Like an apparition however her voice and body vanished. We watched girls jig on tables and slip on spilled wine and laugh as boys fell over themselves trying to help them up, as if all were covered in slippery mud in a mud pool. I had more drinks.

Some minuets or an hour later I stumbled over seemingly slanted hallway floors searching for Riley. I grimaced at the echoes of howling ambient laughter lingering in my ears along with jazz notes and frantic drumming. Somehow, either by following her voice or scent, I found her in a bedroom. Edgar stood over her chocking her with her dress half off. I realized Henry had been trailing me. He saw the same scene and whereas I froze, he dashed towards them, a glass lamp base in his hand. He smashed the lamp against Edgar’s head. Edgar fell, blood gushing from his head. Riley coughed and gained her voice. “You imbeciles,” she yelled. “I asked him too.”

Henry and I exchanged awkward glances. Riley, with sharp smart awareness despite her drunkenness, pulled white silk linen from the bed and used it to apply pressure against Edgars head wound. She kept her eyes down. I often had fantasized about seeing her topless. Now that I had, in the way that I had, I felt shame. I felt torn between wanting to linger, to see her, be near her and to flee to never see her again and be gone from her mind forever, while knowing she would never stray far from my thoughts.

“Murder your darlings,” Henry oddly whispered. I had heard that line at the party before. I murmured another line I had overheard.

“All the bright precious things fade so fast, and they don’t come back.”

“Fuck you both,” Riley said with icy coolness as she attended to a groaning Edgar. Truth is both Henry and I had been jealous of Edgar’s movie star looks, math intelligence and comedic wit.

Henry and I stumbled out of this scene we had so violently intruded upon. We felt as strangers to them, to ourselves, to the party, to the world. The party swirled around us in its continual kaleidoscope merriment oblivious to us. “Nature despite its beauty is naturally cruel and uncaring and so are Gatsby’s parties,” I said.

“Shut up, just shut up,” Henry mumbled. “Everything is a lie,” he then said some steps later. “I loved her and that was the beginning and end of everything for me.”

“I half loved her of course,” I said, “which is why I feel shame. We are fools. Silly, stupid fools.”

“Shut up Clive,” Henry mumbled with irritation. “You should have fought along with me rather than stand there like a fool. Now both of us are lost.”

“We are all lost,” I said.

The night wore on into what felt like a strange forever until it didn’t. Henry and I stood at the edge of Gatsby’s glorious blue lawn. The sun rose. The yellow of the emerging sun bled into the new blue of the sky as the darkness gave way to light, obscuring the bright twinkle of stars. The yellow mingling with the blue, along with some thin cloud illusions, cast a strip of eerie green light streaked across the atmosphere. We had danced and flirted so teasingly close to dreams we for a time had been diluted into believing it could be grasped, I thought. I marveled at the green, thinking upon its symbolism of eagerness until it faded.