Read Online American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld - Free Book Online Page A

enthusiastically—I scanned to see how mine were faring, though with all of them lined up on tables against the wall, I couldn’t tell my own apart from anyone else’s—and a cover band from Madison called the Little Brothers, four men in tuxedos, were standing onstage playing “Who Put the Bomp.”
    “Hey, Alice,” Robert said.
    I looked at him.
    He grinned lasciviously. “Larry’s really excited to dance with you.”
    Both Dena and Larry laughed, and I felt a lurching panic that Dena had, via Robert, made some promise to Larry about my physical availability for the evening. Dena and Robert had by then had sex six times—once for each month of dating, as she explained, although half the times were retroactive. She told me she didn’t want to do it too frequently because then it wouldn’t be as special. Also, she said that his knowing he might or might not get it made Robert dote on her more; the week before, he’d bought her a stuffed white poodle that came with its own miniature fake-gold bone.
    When Larry and I started dancing, he did not, to my relief, immediately try groping me. In fact, he was a good dancer, a better dancer than I was, and we stayed out there as one song ended and another began, and then another and another. The songs were all fast, and in the middle of “The Watusi,” he shouted into my ear, “Robert has some—” He mimed drinking from a flask. “We’re meeting in the parking lot.”
    “But there’re teachers everywhere.”
    “No one will see us in Robert’s car.”
    “I need to check on my cupcakes.”
    He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
    As he walked away, I saw that Dena and Robert, who had been dancing close to us, were already near the doors of the gym. I headed to the refreshment table, where Betty Bridges was helping scoop punch, and I was still several feet away when I felt a hand on my forearm. I turned, and Andrew Imhof was standing beside me. “Would you like to dance?”
    “Sure.” Then I recognized the first notes of Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town” and I said, “Oh, but it’s a slow song.”
    He smiled. “Does that matter?”
    “No, I guess not,” I said, but I wondered, was it bad manners to slow-dance with someone other than your date?
    As we walked together back to the dance floor, I felt an immediate and unexpected awareness of how we appeared—a sense that if people looked at us, they might form an impression. What that impression would be was harder to say.
    We found a space in the forest of couples and faced each other. After a second’s hesitation, I set my left hand on his right shoulder, he set his right hand on my lower back, and we clasped our free hands together, held high. I was wearing my gloves.
    “Who’s your date?” I asked.
    “Bess Coleman.” He gestured with his chin, and I saw that Bess was dancing beneath a basketball hoop with Fred Zurbrugg, one of Andrew’s close friends.
    “Are you and Bess . . . ?” Later, I thought that if I’d consciously been interested in Andrew that night, I wouldn’t have been so direct.
    He shook his head. “You’re here with Larry, huh?”
    “Dena set us up, but I’m beginning to wonder about her skills as a matchmaker.”
    Andrew laughed. “Yeah, you’re definitely way too good for Nagel.”
    We both were quiet, and then Andrew said, “Do you remember when your grandma thought I was a girl?”
    “I had no idea you knew!”
    “After she said to my mom, ‘Your daughter sure is pretty,’ it wasn’t very hard to figure out.”
    “She never said that,” I protested.
    “Close.”
    “It was only because—”
    “I know.” He covered both of his eyes—both sets of eyelashes—with his right hand and shook his head. “I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy. My brother says Max Factor should hire me to model mascara, and he doesn’t mean that as a compliment.”
    “I’m sure he’s just jealous,” I said.
    Onstage a member of the band was singing solo: “ ‘Goin’ down to