I just don’t get parties. Sometimes I dread them and figure I can’t wait to leave, and they turn out just fine. If I know people and am comfortable, I’ve been told I can be quite charming. But if I don’t feel comfortable (and I seldom feel comfortable), I clam up altogether and sit in an uncomfortable armchair in the corner waiting for my wife to want to leave. Quite often, I have no idea who these people are or why they’re grinning so ostentatiously at each other.
To back up: For college, I attended Auburn University in Alabama. My father was teaching there, and it was dirt cheap—less than $1000 a year in 1971, or about $6,200 in today’s dollars. It was a no-brainer because my mother had already announced that I wouldn’t work hard enough to justify the expense of going to UNC or Duke. This after she’d earlier said that I could go anywhere as my siblings’ educations had been so expensive.
I took Modern Soviet History my last quarter of college, in 1974. It was taught by a Ukrainian—let’s call him Ilya. He wore very nice suits, often blue to set off his light blue eyes, and he had the feline Slavic face and thin blond hair. He’d sit in front of the room holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and puff until the ashes drifted down onto his suit.
Pretty much every day for the first month or two, he’d come in, sit down, light up, and say, “Vell, today I suppose we must talk about the Syndicalist Movement in Kiev in 1885.” And I’d think, no we don’t. I’m not sure we ever got to Modern Soviet History.
I didn’t read the textbook; it was my last quarter of senior year. I took the final and, before the grades were posted, I went in to plead my case: I needed an A to graduate summa. But he said, “Vell, but I cannot tell that you know the difference between the February and the Octo-bear raavolushhhuns.” February and October? Huh? I bluffed my way to the A, but I can’t believe I didn’t know that. By now I’ve read enough to teach the class that he should have taught. I don’t recall anything about the Syndicalist Movement in Kiev in 1885.
By the time I had returned to Auburn with my MFA to teach as an instructor in English, Ilya had acquired a research assistant. She was a gorgeous black girl named, wait for it, Love Scales. You couldn’t make that up. She had at least five inches and fifty pounds on Ilya, and she was stunning.
I fell in with a group that gathered regularly at someone’s house—whose? The truth is lost to time and alcohol. It was typical of a southern campus house, two bedrooms, a bath, scratched dull wood floors, aging kitchen. Guests usually included Perry, the balding son of the writer in residence; Charlie Rose, an English professor and enigma; Mary, a former fellow undergrad in English; and Ilya and Love Scales; and any number of undergraduates and graduate students who showed up or didn’t on any possible night. But no other faculty: they knew better. Lying back in an easy chair, Love stretched out her long legs and languidly ignored everyone, including Ilya.
This was a group with which I should have felt comfortable. As a student, I’d received only A’s from Charlie and Ilya; Mary and I had been close friends; and Perry and I always tolerated each other, being aspiring fiction writers and thus putative rivals. I knew who they and anyone else who came in the door quite well; their quirks, obsessions, lovers, academic records, and state of their bank accounts (uniformly dismal).
Yet to this day I have no idea what these parties were for or about. Perry and Mary would sit next to each other, backs against a sofa, and whisper. Everyone else would sip and squint and smirk. There were long, awkward silences with which everyone but me felt comfortable.
What did they know that I didn’t? Some nights, I’d feel out of place and confused, and wonder, why do I even show up here? Except for Ilya, they were all southerners, and I was a Yankee, which never helped in the south.
Charlie would stand at the fireplace with a drink and mutter, and, standing on the other side of the fireplace, Ilya would cackle, “Oh, Cholly Cholly, you so funny!" Wait: if I couldn’t tell what Charlie was saying, how could Ilya the Ukrainian?
And what was Love thinking? Why did she show up? I spoke with Mary recently to confirm that I hadn’t been dreaming and that I had actually shown up at these soirees, and she told me that one night Ilya brought Love and his Russian wife. What? And Mary reports that another night there was a car chase. What else that Mary’s either forgotten or prefers not to mention? Maybe each night after I left, they all engaged in unspeakable rituals? Or maybe they just laughed at me? A Yankee always thinks that’s happening in the south.
After I left teaching for law school, Ilya got nailed for nailing Love Scales, and they threw him out. As he was a bad enough teacher to give me an A despite my not knowing that there had been two revolutions, they were probably thrilled to be able to cashier him. I Googled him once, and he seemed to have landed on his feet in Toronto. He and several other people with the same last name (could he have had children?) are listed as directors of some sort of “institute.” I’m envisioning a dusty, neglected office like the one that the Estonian emigres maintained in London in John LeCarre’s Smiley’s People. They monitored the Sovs very carefully indeed, and I’m sure Ilya does too.
Mary told me that Love Scales has died. She was, it turns out, the first African-American woman on Auburn’s homecoming court. Charlie, sadly, has also died. More on Charlie later; I kind of loved him. We’re all getting on here.
Fortunately, I’m pretty old now, and I don’t get invited to parties, except by the olds I know, and that’s no consolation. Maybe it’s time to give it all up. I have a feeling that I won't be missing anything.
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