Black Light

“You want us to push?” she shouted, as the Triumph crept almost to a halt.

“NO!” bellowed Constantine. He’d changed into a blue blazer and white shirt, boat shoes, no socks, with a red-white-and-blue Hermes ascot tucked under his chin. He looked (and drove) like a demented Cary Grant.

“Dad! It’s not going to—”

“NO PUSHING.”

“But—” I closed my eyes while they argued. My hair was still damp; I knotted my fingers about it, breathing in the henna’s sweet scent of grass drying in the sun, and hoped I didn’t look too ridiculous. The bizarre things I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, now seemed very far away. It was difficult to believe in antlered men or ghosts with Constantine Fox singing Judy Henske songs off-key in the front of a red convertible. I’d had a hit off a joint with Ali back in her room, and felt a pleasant anticipatory buzz about the party. My parents would be there, which wasn’t so great. Neither was the prospect of watching everyone in town suck up to Axel Kern. But I shivered at the thought of seeing Jamie Casson again, his languid mouth and bruised eyes and insolent voice…

“Hey, Lit—” Ali nudged me, hard.

“Ow! What?”

“Get out. We’re pushing.”

I groaned, clambering out as Ali squirmed by me. Constantine got out as well, and the three of us pushed until the car gave a low rumble.

“Get in!” yelled Constantine. Ali leaped in beside him, laughing hysterically, and I flung myself onto her lap, the door hanging open as we barreled up the hill.

“Very important to make a good entrance!” shouted Constantine.

“Yeah, like the circus,” Ali hollered back.

We puttered up the last few hundred yards, the road weaving among the great old-growth forest: hemlock, poplar, beech, white oak, all slashed with crimson and yellow and glowing in the headlights. Up here the cold wind ripped across the mountaintop and the trees creaked like a ship under full sail. Other than that there was no other sound. No music, no party voices. No other cars making their way up the mountain; nothing to suggest that anything lay behind those sentinel trees but wilderness.

But then the Triumph bounced over a rut. The chassis scraped against stone. Ali shrieked; Constantine swore. I sat up too fast, blinking and feeling slightly vertiginous, as though I’d just stepped onshore after days at sea.

“Hey! Dad, watch out!”

“Hold your horses, for chrissakes let me park…”

A few feet ahead of us a sawhorse had been set up as a roadblock. In front of it a spare figure in white shirt and black vest and trousers was directing traffic. Constantine snorted in annoyance and pulled the Triumph into a long row of cars parked at the side of the road. “I guess we walk from here.”

Ali hopped out before he could cut the engine. I followed, turned to see Constantine perched on the edge of the driver’s seat. The rolled-up blueprints lay across his knees. His hands curled around them protectively as he stared up the road to where guests milled around, laughing as they made their way toward the main entrance to Bolerium. Constantine’s bronze cheeks glistened faintly in the twilight, and even from where I stood I could see his dark eyes, at once tired and expectant.

“Thanks, Mr. Fox,” I said.

“Hmm? Oh, Lit—sure, sure.” He smiled and got out of the car, pausing to pat my shoulder. “You girls behave, now.”

I watched him walk unsteadily toward the others, who greeted him with more laughter and raucous cheers. In the darkness I could just make out Ali’s white face as she rushed to hug Duncan Forrester. I was heading toward her when a voice rang out.

“You left the door open. Hey! You left your door—”

Someone grabbed my arm—the formally dressed guy who’d been directing traffic. I stared at him blankly, then said, “Jamie.”

He nodded wearily. “Your car—”

“It’s not my car.”

“Whoever—that drunk left his front door open.” He turned to motion at a Mercedes barreling toward us. “Fucking assholes,” he muttered, then shouted, “Over here! Sir—over here, please—”

I walked to the Triumph, closed the door, and returned to Jamie. “You’re working here?”

He gritted his teeth in a fake smile and beckoned another car. “You got it. Part of the deal my old man made with Asshole Kern. What a goddam cheapskate, like he couldn’t hire someone to do this? Yes, ma’am, right there! Thank you, sir! Hey, Lit—look out, will you? You’re gonna get killed”— He grabbed my arm, pulling me to the side of the road. —“and then I’d lose this nice job.”

I frowned, trying desperately to think of something to say. But Jamie just went on, “God, this bites. It’s only till nine, though.” He lit a cigarette and eyed the line of cars with revulsion. “But I don’t know who the hell’s gonna get all these drunks home.”

For a few minutes no new cars appeared. Jamie smoked silently and stared down the road, and I stared at Jamie. Finally he glanced at me sideways, eyes narrowing.

“Hey, you got a joint? No? What about Ali? She around?”

I gestured at the enormous stone gates flanking the estate’s entrance. “Yeah. I came with her. She was just here, I don’t know where she—”

“Shit—” Jamie tossed his cigarette and strode away from me as more cars hove into sight. “Back to work. Hey—hey! You can’t go in there—”

He shouted at a Karmann Ghia, then spun on his heel to wave at me. “See ya, huh?”

“Sure. Later.”

The knot of waiting guests had disappeared, and except for the occasional roar of a car mounting the hill, the night was quiet. I hugged myself against the chill and headed toward the gate. Seeing Jamie had given me a sharp burst of elation, but now that was fading into anxiety. Where the hell had Ali gone? I thought of Jamie sitting on the jukebox, fixing me with his prescient gaze; I thought of the antlered man moving with slow and dreadful purpose through the trees.

Blessed is she among women who is given these rites to know…

The wind came rushing up the mountainside, cold and smelling of woodsmoke. For one last moment I stopped to look at Jamie in the distance, his sullen swaying dance as he beckoned a car closer and then sidestepped out of its way, dust staining his trouser cuffs and his bow tie coming loose to flop around his neck. Then I hurried on.

I kept to the left of the dirt road, past parked cars, smoldering cigarette butts, an empty bottle of imported beer. Ahead of me Bolerium’s gates arched like a smaller study of the mountain itself, black and threatening. It made me feel faint and muzzy-headed, already drunk. I looked up guiltily when I heard voices.

“…don’t know what he’s thinking, it’ll be frost by the time they open…”

In the shadow of the gates people stood talking. Friends of my parents, men and women in late middle age, faces sun-creased, their voices brittle with drink. The women wore designer minidresses or ankle-length Halstons in harsh colors—bronze and silver, gunmetal blue—beneath furs still smelling of storage. The men were dressed like Ali’s father, in navy blue or tweed; a few wore tuxedos. I tried to will myself invisible to them, but it was no good.

“Charlotte Moylan! I didn’t recognize you—” The casting agent Amanda Joy, a plump woman resplendent in velvet cossack pants and gold brocade, raised her wineglass to me and grinned archly. “So this is what it takes to get you into a dress.”

“Hi, Mrs. Joy.” I gave her a limp wave as the others turned. “Hi, hi, hi…”

“Where’s your mother, Charlotte?”

“Unk going to make an appearance tonight?”

“Your dad here?”

I shook my head. A lock of hair fell across my face, vivid as a pheasant’s wing, and I felt myself blushing. “Uh, not yet.” I forced myself to nod pleasantly as I passed. Behind me their voices faded into laughter and affectionate mockery, the familiar rhythms of people who measured their acquaintance by the titles of shows