Games to Play After Dark Read online

  SARAH GARDNER BORDEN

  Games to Play After Dark

  Sarah Gardner Borden holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of journals, including Open City, Willow Springs, the Chicago Reader, Other Voices, Literary Mama, and the New Haven Review. She lives in Brooklyn.

  A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL, MAY 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Gardner Borden

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Borden, Sarah Gardner.

  Games to play after dark : a novel / Sarah Gardner Borden.

  p. cm.

  “A Vintage original.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-74319-0

  1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Marital conflict—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.O6858G36 2011

  813′.6—dc22

  2010053422

  www.vintagebooks.com

  Cover photograph © Marcel Christ / Gallery Stock.

  Design by Jason Ramirez

  v3.1_r1

  For Anya Gardner and Stella Rose

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Reader’s Guide

  Acknowledgments

  1

  ATE AND COLIN met at a party thrown by Kate and her West Twelfth Street apartment mate, Darcy, a party Colin turned up at only by happenstance, knowing neither Kate nor Darcy and tagging along with a friend of a friend. They were recently out of college and young enough so that it didn’t matter whether one was invited to a party or not. Strangers would wander into strange apartments and get themselves drinks and make out with other strangers on ripped sofas in the dusty corners of candlelit rooms.

  Darcy had majored in art history but now worked as a paralegal at a high-powered law firm in Midtown by day and chased investment bankers by night. While Darcy put in long hours for lawyers, Kate did financial projections for Liz Claiborne. She and Darcy swapped clothes and went out every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. They ate pasta with tomatoes and basil at restaurants with the doors open to the sidewalk in the summer. They went to bars where Drew Barrymore hung out with her guitarist boyfriend or where a friend’s band was playing. They poked around flea markets, bought scarves of Indian silk, drank coffee from blue-and-white paper cups, averted their eyes from a man defecating on Houston Street. They fiddled with the apartment on the weekends and once in a while had someone come to clean, a sweet, thin Polish woman with recurring bruises on her face and a deep, abiding love for Elvis Presley. They did their laundry in the basement and sent the dressier things out for dry cleaning. Mondays, they opened a bottle of cheap white wine and watched Melrose Place.

  On the day of the party they tidied up and then spent the afternoon at Balducci’s, where they bought, among various snacks and ingredients, a tremendous ham. They put the groceries away and got dressed. Darcy pulled back her hair and poured herself and Kate a glass of wine and tied on an apron. Recklessly, she was attempting several complicated recipes from the Union Square Cafe cookbook. She prepared Roman-Style Marinated Olives and Bruschetta Bianca and set them out in the living room. Kate put on a secondhand pink velvet minidress and knee-high black boots. She applied makeup and buzzed in the first batch of guests. Darcy drank more wine and made Parsnip Pancakes and began to garnish each one with a tiny dollop of sour cream. Kate received cluster after cluster of guests, some she knew and some she didn’t. The party had been conceived of as a dinner party but it seemed to be morphing into something resembling a fraternity party. Kate retreated to the open kitchen and watched Colin, whose name she had not yet learned, hold the door for two slurring, shrieking girls on their way out. This manly young man holding the door, with his blue-checked button-down shirt and nice manners, looked as though he did not belong at this suddenly dreadful party. His glasses gave him a stern, righteous look. His hair, blond, was already thinning. In spite of the latter, she found him handsome.

  Darcy still had Creamy Polenta with Mascarpone; Red Oakleaf and Bibb Salad with Gruyère, Garlic Croutons, and Dijon Vinaigrette; Mashed Turnips with Frizzled Leeks; and Stuffed Chicken Breasts with Herbed Goat Cheese to go. The buzzer persisted. People leaked from the living room into the bedrooms. Friends meandered tipsily into the kitchen to say hi. Darcy was dropping things and beginning to break a sweat.

  “You could serve the sour cream on the side,” Kate suggested. “You could put it in a cute little bowl or something.”

  “But you know how that is; when a bunch of people are dipping the dip gets all ick.” Darcy’s face had begun to fall apart a bit and her stockings had run. She charged around the kitchen in her high heels with her pinned-up vermilion hair coming down.

  “You could put a spoon in the dip and then they could use the spoon to put the sour cream on their pancake and then the ick would be avoided.”

  “But they won’t know what the spoon is for!” Darcy cried.

  “You could put up a little sign. Directions. You could make an announcement.”

  The buzzer rang. “Will you get that? Will you get that?” Darcy asked. When she felt anxious, which was often, she said things twice.

  Kate buzzed the guests in but did not bother to greet them. She went back to the kitchen and Darcy—both disheveled, both staggering toward catastrophe, both running roughshod over their original intentions.

  Darcy finished putting sour cream on the pancakes—the final dollops panicked and sloppy—and began skinning turnips with a vegetable peeler. Kate watched, tending to the buzzer and drinking her wine. Every so often a turnip would slip and shoot out of Darcy’s palm and land in the prehistoric muck of the sink.

  “Is Luke here? Have you seen Luke?” Luke, a trader at Goldman Sachs whom Darcy regularly put out for, was clearly blowing off the party. But every time the buzzer rang Darcy’s spine would snap into place and her face would fly open—then everything would go loose and shut down again.

  “Is it Luke? Is it?” Darcy swept aside the turnips and opened a jar of peppercorns and blitzed half the jar in the coffee grinder.

  Kate looked out into the hallway. Raucous guests were carrying the ham into the bathroom, setting it on Darcy’s digital scale. “Don’t worry about Luke. Plenty of cute guys here.”

  “I haven’t even started the chicken.” Darcy dumped the ground peppercorns into a coffee mug. Reachin
g for the salt she overturned the open spice jar, and dozens of tiny peppercorns leaped onto the linoleum floor, where they jumped joyfully for a full minute.

  “What can I do? This?” Kate stepped up to the sink and took the turnips. She stood at the sink, as Darcy had, but when it occurred to her that they lacked a disposal and therefore a definitive reason to peel vegetables at the sink, she moved aside and began to peel the turnips right onto the counter. She searched for a clean bowl in which to put the peeled turnips but there wasn’t one. She attempted to wash one but the water in the sink rose forebodingly. She poked at the drain for a minute or two with a wooden cooking spoon. Darcy wiped her eyes with a checkered dishcloth and opened a sheaf of goat cheese and began to smash it, in its wrapper, with damp chopped herbs.

  The buzzer again. Kate shook out her wet hands.

  “Is it Luke? Is it?”

  “Sorry, honey.” Kate poured herself more wine.

  Darcy sagged against the fridge. “He doesn’t love me.”

  “No. He doesn’t love you,” Kate answered, carelessly. She stood with a turnip in each hand, considering the sink. Registering her own utterance, she whipped around, as if realizing, too late, that she’d knocked something fragile off a small, interfering table.

  “I’m going to pass out, I think,” Darcy said. She put her head down on the counter.

  “Wait. Not yet.” Kate brushed Darcy’s sweaty bangs out of her face and went to her own bedroom and got a Valium, one swiped from a stash she’d discovered two Christmases ago in her mother’s medicine cabinet. She fed the pill to Darcy.

  Darcy slid against the cabinets to the floor like she’d been shot. Colin rounded boisterously in, swinging two handfuls of empties. He registered Darcy, Kate, the sink. He put down the bottles and reached in and unclogged the drain, as if he weren’t afraid of taking on something chaotic and feminine.

  “YOU LIVE HERE?” he asked Kate.

  “I do.”

  Darcy, bearing the pancakes, had gone out to join the party. Kate and Colin were straightening up the kitchen, washing dishes and wrapping the now obsolete goat cheese and herbs and raw chicken breasts. She put things away in the lower cabinets, he in the higher ones. He was tall, though not unapproachably so, both his height and build reassuringly average.

  “You don’t look like you live here.”

  “No?”

  “You’re pretty. And … you smell good.” He closed the fridge and stood with his back to it, legs apart, hands in pockets. His eyes were blue behind the glasses.

  “It’s kind of a dump,” she admitted. “But … not usually this bad.”

  “What happened?”

  “This was supposed to be a dinner party. You know. Civilized.”

  “Oh, well.”

  “I guess we’re not ready for that.”

  “Guess not.”

  Later they put Darcy, flattened by Valium and wine, into bed in her ravaged stockings. They collected bottles and tossed stray food. They piled glasses in the sink. They wiped off the ham and wrapped it and put it away. Then they went to Kate’s room. She showed him her high school yearbook, her CD collection, and the IKEA cabinet she’d assembled herself. He kissed her and pushed her up against the wall and then down on the bed, where they struggled for a while. Her dress came off. Her boots and stockings came off. Her hair came down. He produced a magnificent erection. They ground against each other. Colin, on top, supported himself in the gentlemanly manner with his arms. Contraception was mentioned. Kate rummaged tipsily around Darcy’s medicine cabinet and her own. Withdrawal was suggested by him and rejected by her, it being a delicate time of the month. To compensate, she took him in her fist, then her mouth.

  · · ·

  IT WAS IMMEDIATELY CLEAR to her that if she gave him the opportunity to love her he would—and while she felt, dimly, that her motivations were devious somehow next to his, her character suspect beside his seemingly honest and upstanding and simple one, that she looked on their entanglement as an experiment, an adventure, while he looked on the same as a righteous endeavor, she wasn’t sure she could resist. He wanted her, and her narcissism flowered expansively under the hot orange light of his craving. She told him of her mother’s anxiety, the other men she’d been with, her father’s temper, the time she’d strayed from her family in a Moroccan bazaar, the time she’d had a pea stuck up her nose for an entire summer. Colin told her how it had flooded on the day of his communion, how he’d been held at gunpoint by a hitchhiker, how his father’s skin had turned yellow before he died last April. Later she learned that he wore his socks inside out because he didn’t like the feel of the seams, that he ate his hamburger first and his fries after.

  She felt diagnosed somehow, at the start of a long healing process—she felt split open and figured out; everything about him was like a warm curious hand inside her, making sense of the rubble and confusion, turning things over and putting them back where they belonged.

  THEY DATED ALL WINTER and spring and summer. They held hands and watched a white Bronco tear down Southern California freeways. They spent whole weekends in bed, screwing and sleeping and recounting their dreams upon waking. They freely swapped love, trading it back and forth like second graders with stickers. They opened constantly to each other, ready always to receive each other and any accompanying inconveniences. They spent Labor Day at her mother’s house, eating at midnight in Greek diners and driving hours for fresh strawberries and a disappointing flea market. Back in her room, after a movie and dinner at Thomas Quinn’s Bar and Grill, Kate’s mother asleep already, Colin asked Kate if she’d marry him. They lay on her girlhood bed, playing cards—she dressed in a denim skirt and a soft brown Indian blouse. When he asked her Kate laughed because she couldn’t believe he was serious, but then she said yes.

  This was unprecedented—amazing. She felt as though she’d suddenly landed a starring role in her own life. She found herself desperately thirsty, the kind of thirst she used to get with her hangovers when she was a teenager, and she and Colin walked over to the gas station and bought three different kinds of fruit punch, and back at the house she drank some of each, from a tall glass filled with ice. She couldn’t get enough of it—her teeth hummed and she was almost sick.

  “I didn’t even realize I wanted to get married,” she said. “But I do! I want to see you every day. I want a pink bathroom and a mirror at the end of the bed. And an Oriental rug in the living room. And a really nice fridge. I want to make birthday cake. And babies. I want to have a happy family. That’s it. That’s my dream. I didn’t even know until right now.”

  Parties were thrown for them; they were baptized with cards and presents and attention. They were celebrities—everyone believed in them, supported them verbally and fiscally, took an almost civil interest, as if Kate and Colin were candidates in a political campaign. In October, Darcy and Kate visited Bergdorf and Saks and Vera Wang. Kate waited for Darcy on the steps of the New York Public Library, drinking sweet and light coffee from a paper cup. She wore a striped, pointed woolen hat, a brown tweed jacket patched at the elbows, corduroys of a darker brown, and a giant diamond ring on the correct finger. The ring marked her—she could not get used to it; she could not accustom herself to the responsibility of something so valuable and she kept touching it and twisting it, making sure it was still there. She looked up and down Fifth Avenue. Her nose ran a little; she sniffed and wiped it, making a fist. The diamond, turned around, pressed into her palm. An elderly woman in a fur coat and hat passed Kate on her right, emanating even in the cool clarifying air a strong odor of expensive perfume. Her face was a powdered, crumpled, exquisite little thing. Soon, Kate thought, she would be legally tied to someone who would accompany her into old age. She imagined that in her forties she would wear her hair shorter and somehow be tan; that when she reached her sixties she would grow the hair again and wear it up, the way her grandmother had. Colin would thicken around the shoulders and wear monogrammed velvet slippers given by her for
their thirtieth anniversary. They would live in New York and subscribe to the ballet, during which Colin would sleep.

  She had intended to shop for the dress alone—especially she did not want her sweet but alarmingly passive mother in tow—but early this morning, a Saturday, before getting on the F train uptown on a wedding errand, she had prodded Darcy awake and requested her company—partially simply to validate the experience—seeing herself, though with awe, as an impostor in the white dress, an understudy called upon to play the crucial role on opening night, hoping the audience and her producer—Colin—wouldn’t find her out.

  Two smooth hands covered her eyes. Kate grabbed one wrist and pulled at it.

  “I am so psyched to be doing this with you,” Darcy said. “Where to first?”

  Sober and showered, with her bright straight hair and pale skin and strong Slavic features, she looked as though she’d been chipped from the cold air.

  “Bergdorf. Can you stand it?” Kate asked, locking her jaw.

  They caught a cab going up Fifth Avenue. A man jumped out of their way as they pulled from the curb. Darcy cranked down the window and shouted, “Nitwit!” Kate finished the last of her coffee and crumpled the sides of the cup together, spilling a few sweet remaining drops.

  “My mother is on my case because you’re getting married,” Darcy said. “She scoffs at the whole idea of women needing to get married but then it’s still totally important to her.”

  “My mom is that way too. Ostensibly liberated but actually a doormat.”

  “I’ll stop complaining. This is your day.”

  “Oh, please. I don’t want it.” Kate paid for the cab and they got out in front of Bergdorf Goodman. The interior was dense with perfume and flowers and Kate sneezed as they waited for the elevator. Darcy examined the store directory and when they boarded she pressed the correct button.

  “Bri-dal,” she sang in a falsetto voice.

  They stepped out of the elevator and found their way to the inner sanctum of wedding finery. Gowns billowed sideways from racks, animated by crinolines and proximity to one another. A plump, delicate little woman drifted from the pouf, her hands clasped inquiringly: “May I help you?”