The crowd
Hosts poured the wine and whiskey and gin and vodka with a generous hand, the glasses were bottomless. In the morning the children, five and six and towheaded, fascistic little blondes with ice-blue eyes, picked their way among the bodies of the fallen, the dissipated adults who dusted themselves off and doctored their headaches with Bloody Marys. The boy drained the cups, sometimes collapsed into his cereal bowl at breakfast, and the grown-ups with their hoary breath and bloodshot eyes would wink and laugh too loudly for anyone’s taste, the kind of laugh that enters your dreams, the sound that the man with the fingernails like claws makes as he rips at your pinafore, at your high-necked nightgown.
Everyone slept with everyone else. Desire was hidden and then revealed with the snap of a corset, with a leer and a grope. These men were artists, the women were their muses, a quickie against the walls in the host’s bedroom the price of admission. The children woke up once to see their mother and Uncle Robert (the poet, the madman who once thought he could stop traffic with his mind and his one upraised hand, standing in his underwear in the middle of Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day, eyes closed, the other hand resting on his heart) settling in on the floor. Their mother was throaty, her voice slow and low, like she had scraped her words against broken glass before releasing them.
“Mama?” the girl said and the room got quiet, the form on the floor stopped cold. In the hallway a woman was crying. Everyone waited. The adults returned to the dance when the children appeared to fall back asleep.
Image from Follow My Bliss, but I am not sure where she got it.
From the prompt "The crowd." Based loosely on what I've heard of Anne Roiphe's most recent memoir.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
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