Read Online City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg - Free Book Online Page B

Next to Your Fire? If Keith were here, he would have made it a game to guess, but once inside, mingling, would have easily hidden how frivolous he found the whole thing. The thought of facing Daddy and the Goulds without him made her want to retreat to Brooklyn Heights, settle up with the sitter. Half the boxes in the new place remained to be unpacked. But it was too late. Miguel was probably already back at his desk, and here she was, at the threshold, alone. She hung her coat in the front closet, ignoring the coat-check that had been set up in the hallway to her left. Special treatment still made her feel guilty. From several rooms away wafted the drunken noodling of the piano. She took a diver’s deep breath and headed toward it.
    It always caught her off guard, the swell of sound as she rounded the corner to the great reception hall, the scores of people. The bolts of green fabric that draped the walls made her think of a ballgame her father had taken her to years ago, before they’d torn down the Polo Grounds and she’d converted to the Yankees—of the dim, pigeon-infested concourses, punctuated by squares of bright green beyond which lay summer and humanity and life. Except that, in the glow of a half-dozen more of the indoor torches, this green was hellish, combustible. Chatter collected in the vaults of the ceiling. Below, each guest wore a half-mask, as in the commedia dell’arte. Her stomach tightened again; no one had told her to bring a mask. Besides which, she hardly saw the point; did people really not recognize each other because this small swath of features—the cheekbones, the bridge of the nose—was covered? No, the true purpose of the masks was to give the hostess a way to confirm that she’d managed to impose her will on the assembled guests. Vis-à-vis Felicia, there were only two viable positions one could take: escape completely, as William ultimately had, or submit.
    Just then, a horripilating Scaramouche appeared at her elbow. The prosthetic nose was long and carbuncled, and seemed to waggle suggestively. “Jesus,” she said, placing a hand over her chest. “You scared me.”
    The voice from beneath the mask was labored, adenoidal. He wasn’t much older than her son, she saw, and she couldn’t understand what he was saying.
    “What?”
    “I said, may I offer you one?”
    She looked down into the proffered basket, where cheap black plastic Lone Ranger masks were piled. To be polite, she took one and secured its rubber band around the back of her head. Before she could thank the kid, he evaporated.
    There was no shortage of servants, though. They seemed to outnumber the guests. Canapés circulated at shoulder height. Behind a wet bar along each wall, a pair of Punchinellos with martini shakers struggled to keep up with demand, like a single, four-armed organism. Regan waited in line. She was in fact more comfortable now that she had a mask of her own. Despite the recognizably willowy figure inside her cocktail dress, none of the guests seemed to know who she was. No one singled her out as a latecomer, or as the firm’s new head of PR, or as the presumptive heiress and youngest member of the board, and not a single person asked about Keith or the kids. She could get through an hour like this, easy, and then she could go home. Take off her shoes, humble herself with some Gallo, put on Carly Simon soft enough not to wake Will and Cate, and peek in on their faces, each lit by a stripe of hallway light, before returning to the living room to throw a party of her own, the kind where you could cry if you wanted to; her analyst would be proud.
    At the front of the line, she took a glass of champagne and turned around. A gap in the crowd offered her the first glimpse of her father’s wife, backlit by a stone fireplace big enough to walk around in. Against the flames, Felicia’s body was a smudge, save for her mask, whose red sequins shimmered intelligently. Peacock feathers soared from each