The Engagement Party
by Catherine Shannon
We didn’t bring anything to the engagement party, but from the moment we walked in, it was clear that we should have. On the table in the foyer, next to a lit, three-wick, Feu de Bois Diptyque candle ($230 retail, I’ve checked) sat a pastel green gift box of macarons, a promising white paper bag stuffed with pearlescent tissue paper, and several bottles of wine with understated labels—the kind that indicate true quality and expense. I know next to nothing about wine, but it’s not something I would readily admit to this crowd. The note hanging from the white paper bag read, “To Anne and Christopher. Félicitations!” Gratuitous French aside, I found this odd. In the ten years I’d known him, I’d always called him Chris.
Greg removed his jacket and looked around for the coat closet. I was embarrassed all over again when I saw the shirt he had selected for the evening: an aggressive plaid, bright red and blue flannel, machine-washed, crumpled collar, too small. I had already stolen a glance at it when he picked me up in the Uber outside my apartment in the East Village, but seeing it now, fully revealed, it was worse than I suspected. I knew, before I even met the other guests, that they would take one look at that atrocious shirt and think they had Greg all figured out. And they would be right.
Greg is generally regarded as an extremely talented and well-compensated engineer, technically a “data scientist,” but I knew his talents wouldn’t get him very far with the downtown crowd that would be here tonight, and I’d been kind of dreading bringing him. When we first met, Greg’s lack of pretension was something I liked about him. In the three months or so that we’d been dating, I have to admit that I’ve always known him to be a dependable, smart, kind, and utterly normal guy. He’s never lectured me about some manosphere theory he saw on the internet, he’s not caught up in some farcical New York City creative scene, and he’s never been able to be rough with me in bed, even when I asked for it. But when I saw that shirt, I found myself really wishing he had. Basically, I knew our relationship was over, and I knew I needed to end it with him as quickly as possible—as quickly as possible meaning, realistically, at some point tonight.
Greg put his hands in his pockets and gave me a full-body shrug, wrists protruding from his waist, eyebrows raised, as if to say, “Now what, Julia?” He looked so childish, so beta, when he made that face. I raised my eyebrows back at him with blatant condescension. We had been running late, we rang the bell outside and were buzzed up, but no one waited around to greet us at the top of the stairs, so we basically let ourselves in, following the sounds of women’s voices. Everyone was out on the back deck. Now we were alone, Greg and I. Now we were fighting. Now I was being a bitch.
Greg wandered off into the empty living room, which faced North, overlooking Seward Park. The whole apartment was tastefully decorated, but not in the way that most millennials decorate their apartments these days—with cheap Matisse posters and the requisite copy of Shoe Dog. It looked like real people lived here, people who have refined interests, vices, complicated pasts, potential, possibilities. There was a vintage couch, a few pieces of handmade pottery, and the books were mercifully arranged by subject rather than color. There were easily hundreds of them, which ranged in topic from Richard Meier to Baudelaire. I glanced over a few: How to Live With Objects, The Confidence-Man, Japanese Interiors. They even had a Tizio lamp.
The lamp must have been Anne’s doing; the Chris I know would never have come up with that one on his own. In our senior year at Penn, his apartment in The Radian on Walnut Street had exactly two decorations: a framed Zinedine Zidane jersey and a single photo of him on the varsity squash team from freshman year. Chris has always been a bit of a dog, but he was also funny and ambitious; and, just like a dog, when he got a whiff of something he wanted, he hunted it down with total resolve, charming everyone along the way. I imagine this is what happened with Anne. Clearly, the whole apartment was a reflection of her. Anne was born in Paris, her father is stupidly wealthy—international shipping, I think that’s what she told me—and she’s done some low-level modeling over the years. Chris told me that she dated a guy in his mid-forties before she dated him. All that is to say: I find her generally intimidating and only slightly annoying. I’ll have to get over it, given they’re engaged now. It’s an uncomfortable truth about getting older and pushing thirty: your friends end up marrying people you don’t even like.
“How much do you think they pay for this place?” Greg had made his way back.
“Probably a lot.”
He pulled out his phone and I waited, listening to the women’s voices on the back deck, trying to prepare myself for what to expect when we joined them, but I could only hear indistinguishable bursts of conversation and laughter over the music. He revealed his phone screen to me. “Eight thousand a month. Holy shit.”
“Don’t look it up on StreetEasy. It’s rude.”
“No, it’s not. No one can hear us. They’re all out on the deck smoking.”
“I know that. I can smell it, too.” For some reason I felt the need to defend these people, Anne’s friends, who I’d never met. “Some people smoke, you know, it’s not that weird. In Europe—”
“I never said it’s weird. It is gross, though.”
“You’re acting like you’ve never had a cigarette before.”
“Actually Julia, I haven’t.”
I told him that was embarrassing. I caught myself being mean on purpose, which made me feel guilty. I straightened the box of macarons to absolve myself.
We made our way to the back deck, but I hesitated on the threshold, lost in the fog of a dreaded social event, and I immediately felt people’s eyes on us. Anne looked so radiant when I saw her that it almost felt like an act of violence. Anne can only be described as violently beautiful; she disturbs the peace. This whole arrangement of society, of people having jobs, families, values, and principles—all that goes out the window when a woman like Anne walks in the room. Her skin is perfect. And she has those bunny teeth, where the front two are slightly longer than the rest, and it looks so pretty, so youthful, and that’s what she was, standing there, the beautiful, young bride-to-be, dressed in a white silk shirt with white bunny teeth. She was animated, talking to people, tucked under Chris’s arm, looking up at him.
Chris and I did hook up once in college, in the fall of our sophomore year, when everyone is really going at it, and you’re all so horny you’ll have sex with your friends first and ask questions later, but I can admit now, ten years on, that I wanted more at the time. Obviously (of course) I wanted to be his girlfriend. Every college girl “casually hooking up” with a college guy wants to be the girlfriend. There’s no such thing as casual sex when you’re a nineteen-year-old girl. Chris pretended not to know this in the same way I pretended to know about soccer. One time, I even did his laundry. He paid me $20 in cash—it was sort of an inside joke between us—but secretly I wanted to prove to him that he needed me, that I was wife material, maybe even mom material, even though I was so young and I had no idea who I was, let alone the kind of woman I wanted to become. Maybe I could become something for him. Maybe he would give me purpose. In the end, the answer was no, I couldn’t, and no, he would not.
I knew being in Anne’s presence would devastate me, and not for any particular reason I could name, just that it’s devastating sometimes, as a 7 with a day job, to be in the presence of a New York City 10 with bouncy brunette blowout, a rich father, and a fiancé. At once I hated her and I wanted to be just like her, and I’d rather off myself than have to feel both those things at once, this mix of jealousy and disgust. I was disgusted at myself for being the earnest, somewhat plain, hard-working American girl that I am, and I felt a whole new level of disgust for seething over a woman I don’t even really respect that much. I know it’s not Anne’s fault. She hasn’t done anything to me other than exist and be French.
•
Our names were written in cursive, in ink, on cream-colored place cards with an embossed border. My heart sank when I realized I was placed almost as far away from Chris as possible. But when I saw that I was seated between Greg and Hunter Morgan, I knew I was in for a grim evening. Hunter is another Penn guy who works in finance and wears a gold and stainless steel Rolex Daytona. He’s a real punisher in conversations. Everything I've learned about him I have learned completely against my will.
“Settle a debate for us, Julia,” Hunter said, as he approached me in a wine-stained blue button-up, sleeves rolled so as to better display the watch. He touched the small of my back, and I recoiled under his touch, but he didn’t notice. “If you plan to stay with the same person forever, do you think you have to get married?”
I pondered this for a moment, but I was also distracted by how much Hunter resembles a velociraptor since he started going bald. I’ll admit I impressed myself with the accuracy of the comparison; it was true to a frightening degree. I decided not to say it aloud, but I filed it away for later use. Maybe I would bring it up as a socially-acceptable dig at him over dinner, if everything went well, and I sensed people were on my side.
“Marriage doesn’t mean much if you’re not religious,” I said, scooting in my chair. I had accepted my fate. Based on Hunter’s facial expression, this was a novel idea. I elaborated: “Other than the tax benefits, nothing is really changing when you get married. If you’re not religious, I mean.” He asked me the natural next question (what changes if you are, in fact, religious). I skirted this one and gave him some song and dance about how it’s probably quite different for each faith, but obviously has something to do with God, who, admittedly, is not someone, or something, I have thought much about. There’s no room for God in Manhattan.
“But marriage is a commitment,” the woman seated across from us said. She spoke in a voice that bordered on an affected British accent, but was American enough to have plausible deniability. I noticed her massive engagement ring, or maybe it noticed me, as it was large enough to be sentient. She was seated next to someone I recognized from Chris’s fraternity—I think they called him “Schuman”—so I assumed she was Schuman’s wife, or his fiancée.
“Yeah, but you can still make a commitment without getting married,” I said. “You don't need to get married to make a commitment to someone. You can just do it.” I knew what she was saying, but I didn’t feel like being friendly. Hunter was amused by this, and I sensed I’d given him the answer he’d use with women from now on.
“Kind of a bleak topic at an engagement party, don't you think?” Greg reached over me to shake Hunter’s hand—I didn’t realize I’d been boxing him out—and as he did this, I got a whiff of his armpit which forcefully repelled me. It’s sort of amazing how quickly this change in perception happens when a woman has resolved to leave; a smell that she used to tolerate, maybe even enjoy on some base level, is now a source of total revulsion, as if her body is operating on some ancient, primal, feminine instinct. In other words, this is the power of intuition all women possess by nature, the same intuition that guides the mystical, mercurial process to determine whether a man is The One (it turns out the clichéd refrain that drives single people mad—when you know, you know—is really the only thing that makes sense to say), and this primal instinct also tells her, with little ambiguity, that she should never have a child with this man, perhaps their genetics aren’t compatible, maybe they’re too similar (what if they’re cousins?), and ultimately, like so many things, it just comes down to chemistry: she knows he won’t protect her and she knows she won’t be able to respect him, and she knows, above all, that she should obey her nose, which is of course connected to her gut.
I should have introduced Greg around, but I was fuzzy on the names, so I let him go through the motions on his own, introducing himself to a few others near us, including the couple across from me, which turned out to be Andrew Schuman (as suspected) and his wife Jessica (the woman with the fake British accent). After a few final comments, the verdict was in, and our section of the table agreed: there is no such thing as right and wrong in adult relationships provided everyone gives their enthusiastic consent, everyone is entitled to their own personal choice, and it was best not to discuss this now. These cutting insights would have made any Human Resources department proud. Still, despite the stench and all that, I was grateful for Greg’s intervention. Sitting there at the table, silent, I felt a twinge of remaining affection for him, which I tried to ignore.
I scanned the length of the table, maneuvering my head from side to side to see around the burning candlesticks and dried flowers placed in the middle. There were nearly twenty of us all together, all aged between twenty-five and thirty-five, all seemingly high-functioning members of this competitive, status-driven New York City society. Two groups quickly emerged. One group included Greg, Hunter, Schuman, and a few others I recognized from Penn, like Phil Rosa, who I think is a lawyer in D.C. now. These people had hardcore corporate careers: investment banking, early-stage startups, venture capital, management consulting, private equity, big law, engineering—the kind of jobs with massive earning potential. In ten years or so, they’ll be drawing down millions, meeting with Morgan Stanley to discuss their investment portfolios, and buying real estate. The other group I could only assume had gallery shows, concerts, modeling gigs, campaigns, brand deals, agents, managers, auditions. I recognized one of the women from Instagram, a “wellness-influencer-slash-model,” but I kept this to myself. These people will be doing “projects,” flying business class to Los Angeles, and trying in vain to find a wool jute rug for their open-plan, indoor-outdoor California lifestyle that doesn’t shed too much and is, of course, large enough.
I’m somewhere—or nowhere—in-between. When I graduated from college seven years ago, I saw two paths ahead of me: corporate money or creative dreams, and I couldn’t bring myself to decide between the two, so I took a job as a business operations assistant at Pitchfork, which is where I’ve been ever since. I realized only recently that I tried to choose both, but in choosing both, I ended up with neither. The corporate people and the creative people don’t know this though, everyone tells me I have a cool job (the work is not creative; the pay is shit), and I usually just agree and leave it at that.
“What about open marriages?” Hunter asked the group, starting the whole thing up again. He noticed the wine stain on his shirt as he placed his napkin across his lap. It was just like in college, he could never read the room. We had moved on. I wanted to say that an open marriage seemed antithetical to the very idea of marriage, but I had said enough, I didn’t want to seem prude, and besides, I didn’t know anything about the personal lives of the other people around me, and I didn’t want to. I reached for the bread and butter instead.
•
In just two hours, what had started out as a sophisticated dinner party had devolved into a bacchanalian, debaucherous affair. Anne and Chris made the critical mistake of buying too much wine and not enough food. A Dream Awaits Catering had generously provided each of us with one husk of bread, four butternut squash ravioli, two or three bites of steak over a few limp strings of arugula, and a smallish macadamia nut cookie—so at this point, everyone was hammered except me. Sensing scarcity, I had decided to pull back on wine right after the ravioli, which, in hindsight, was wise. Greg did not, he was as drunk as I’d ever seen him, which would either make the breakup much harder, or much easier, I wasn’t sure.
Other than the actual breakup conversation, which is always difficult, the rest would be simple: we don’t live together, we work in different parts of the city, we aren’t from the same town. Money is no issue; I don’t owe him anything (we usually split the bill), and the only thing I had at his place was a toothbrush that I got for free after a visit to the dentist. I started my period four days ago, so there was no possibility I was pregnant. And besides, we don’t live in real communities anymore—New York City is not a community by any stretch of the imagination, though everyone loves to pretend the opposite—and as a result, there are no real consequences for breaking someone’s heart. Greg and I don’t have a single mutual friend, I never traveled to Delaware to meet his family, he hadn’t traveled to Seattle to meet mine, and I didn’t much care for his friends that I had met, in fact, I only met a few of them once, three weeks ago, at a concert where we couldn’t even have a conversation. The only person I would hurt would be Greg, and after tonight, I would never have to see him again.
Beyond tonight, I doubt Greg will leave a lasting impression on me. I could see myself three or four years from now, recounting my former lovers to my fiancé and forgetting him entirely. Oh, right, I would say, and there was this guy Greg in New York. He was so boring, I think we dated for like six weeks. That would be the whole story, and it wouldn’t matter that it isn’t true. Every woman knows you are entitled to round down the time you dated by at least fifty percent and insult the old guy in order to coddle the new guy’s ego. Maybe we would even share a laugh about tonight, and my fiancé would ask me to tell him the story about Greg’s shirt, and the story about Hunter, the velociraptor. I’d show him a photo of Hunter and he would say, crying with laughter, Oh my god, Julia. Wow. He really does.
All that is to say: essentially, arguably, Greg and I were no more than strangers.
I looked at Chris, who was shitfaced. Earlier tonight, before the ketamine came out, he had forced everyone to look at photos of Anne from her early modeling days while saying stuff like, “I’m the luckiest guy in the world! Look at her! I am so lucky!” Anne weakly protested by burying her head in her hands and saying, “Christopher!” His phone made its way around the table. When it got to me, I could only swipe through a few of the photos before handing it over to Hunter, who really took his time with things, occasionally zooming in. Anne couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty in the pictures—they were easily a decade old, from before they ever met—and they were really riding the line between excusable and tasteless. The first set was Victoria’s Secret-adjacent, and featured Anne wearing baby pink lingerie and pigtails while holding a tennis racket for some reason. Anne said they were for a Maxi Pad commercial that never ended up getting made, which was meant to clarify things. Then there was a second “swim” shoot where Anne’s ass was sort of dipped in sand like two smooth, cinnamon sugar donuts, she was shot crawling out of the water, leaning against a skinny palm tree holding a coconut, that kind of thing. These pictures were shot by someone called Franco Padini, who apparently took tremendous pride in his work, and had heavily watermarked the images. Without anyone saying anything, it was clear the group had the same gnawing feeling that this Franco Padini guy had probably taken advantage of Anne, a young French girl trying to make it as a model in New York, and it made everyone not just uncomfortable, but kind of sad. All of this went right over Chris’s head, but Anne might have sensed it, because she explained that these pictures helped her get a national “out-of-home” campaign with Warby Parker. When she said this, the group was collectively relieved and told her how awesome that is over and over again. I withheld all praise and wished my lack of support mattered to Anne.
Greg and Hunter were engaged in a thoroughly boring conversation about the future of computing—stuff like personalized language models and automatic fact-checking—and I’d been pretending to listen in for at least fifteen minutes. It was obvious Hunter was trying to extract information from Greg that might inform his investments, but Greg thought he was genuinely interested. “I’m going to go to the bathroom,” I said, to no one. I got up and left the table.
The bathroom in the hall was occupied, and I could have waited, but I decided to head toward the bedroom, assuming that they had an en suite. I didn’t even have to go to the bathroom, I just needed to get away for a moment. I walked into the bedroom and shut the door behind me. The sounds of the party faded away, and it was finally quiet.
The bedroom was just as nice as the rest of the apartment, which didn’t surprise me, but it looked a bit too much like a hotel room for my taste—clinical, white, clean, like they had run out of decorating ideas. To my left, near the door, was a large dresser, about waist-level, with a collection of Chanel lipsticks and blushes, and a dozen expensive perfumes placed on a vintage silver tray: Baccarat Rouge 540, Hermès Calèche, Guerlain Angélique Noire. Other than a single framed photo of Chris and Anne in Central Park, wrapped up in each other’s arms—I assumed from a recent engagement shoot—there were barely any personal effects, and notably no books on the bedside tables, just two wireless iPhone charging stations.
The king size bed was made to perfection with two Euro shams and four standard-size pillows, all neatly tucked into crisp white cotton covers with a tasteful, embroidered border. The whole thing was topped with a plump down duvet that looked like a fresh snow bank. I ran my hand over the duvet and it felt so fresh it was almost minty. Surely Anne didn’t iron her sheets. I mean, what woman gets out the ironing board these days? Do they have a housekeeper? I wondered what side of the bed Chris slept on. I assumed my side, the side closest to the door, and without really thinking I took off my shoes and got in under the covers.
I lay there and thought back to the last time I was in Chris’s bed. I buried my face in what I imagined was his pillow, thinking his smell would help me remember, but everything had just been washed, and the pillow smelled like cedar and sandalwood. The last time I was in Chris’s bed, it was a Saturday. I remembered waking up before him, watching him sleep, hearing him breathe, and I felt an overwhelming tenderness towards him, watching him lie there in his completely vulnerable state. I thought about what it must feel like to be his mother—or any boy’s mother, for that matter—to kiss that little face every morning, tie his shoes for him, tell him good job Christopher, and then one day send that little face off to college, except it’s not so little now, it has a beard now, and now there is no little face to greet her every morning; that boy is literally gone, he’s grown up, he’s being greeted by someone else, a random sorority whore, me of all people. I’ve replaced her, and maybe one day I’ll eat dinner at her table and offer to help her with the dishes, but really she knows I’m sleeping with her son, and good god that must be awful. Maybe when a beautiful, foreign girl like Anne comes home, it makes it all easier. I don’t know.
There are men like Chris, men like Hunter, men like Greg, there are all different types of men, and they all have mothers who love them (which is especially remarkable in Hunter’s case, though perhaps only an excess of motherly love could produce such an insufferable person). I couldn’t shake the thought that in breaking up with Greg, I would be rejecting someone’s son, and that made me so sad that it was almost unbearable. Somewhere out there, there’s a woman I’ve never met, a woman who loves Greg so much. She did a good job, she really did, but she didn’t do a good enough job for me. And who the hell am I? I’m just a random girl, a girl who has shared his bed for weeks, woken up to his face, made him laugh, held his hand, all just to say: no thanks.
Rejection is always cruel. Chris rejected me in a thousand little ways—unanswered texts, canceled plans, half-assed, one-armed hugs. Plenty of other men have, too. I’m not that different: I have a mother, I have a father, what about them? Did any of these men consider that I’m someone’s perfect little girl? Probably not. But this didn’t make me sad for myself in the same way I felt sad for Greg, and I’m not sure why. What makes me sad for myself is that, so far, my life has not turned out the way I’d hoped it would, and it’s not the rejections that made it this way, but my own passivity, my own inaction, my own lack of courage. So far, life has felt like a big game of hide and seek. When I was the one seeking, I didn’t try that hard, and I never found anyone. Now I’m hiding, and no one has found me.
I got up out of the bed and remade it perfectly, just as it was before. I panicked briefly when I realized that Chris and Anne might have a security camera in the room—it is a really nice apartment, after all—but I reasoned with myself that they probably wouldn’t put one in their bedroom, for obvious reasons. If they saw me go in there, I had an easy excuse: I was looking for the bathroom.
When I returned to the party, watching from afar, it was clear that I had not been missed and I had not missed much. Most people were high on ketamine and dancing like animals. Anne was attempting to do a sexy dance for Chris, but it was too French to be truly sexy, it was just sort of titillating. Hunter hadn’t left the table, he was watching Anne, who was unbuttoning her shirt and bouncing around in her lacy little bra. That’s when I noticed Greg was watching her, too.
Without much further thought, I decided to leave. I felt the distinct thrill of my own agency; there was nothing left for me here, and I could—I mean I was physically able—to leave if I wanted to.
On my way out, I grabbed the white paper bag with the nice tissue paper, smuggled it down the stairs with my heart pounding, and opened it in the cab on the way home. It contained a candle, in fact it was a smaller version of the exact same candle that had been burning in the foyer when we arrived. No great loss for them, then. I opened the box and smelled it. It smelled like a burning forest, and I pictured the end of the world, people running scared, animals burning to death in the woods, the immense heat of the fire whipping back and forth through the trees, flicking charred tree trunks like used matchsticks, one falling after another.
I told myself that it’s not the end. The end would mean that I’ve given up, and I’m not the kind of person who gives up on things, not even, I suppose, on myself.
