How to Talk to Girls at Parties (eBook Original) Read Free

trouble? Do we have to go?”
    Stella shook her head. He leaned down and kissed her, gently, on the lips. “You’re just happy to have me here, aren’t you darlin’?”
    “You know I am,” she told him.
    He looked from her back to me, and he smiled his white smile: roguish, lovable, a little bit Artful Dodger, a little bit wide-boy Prince Charming. “Don’t worry. They’re all tourists here anyway. It’s a foreign exchange thing, innit? Like when we all went to Germany.”
    “It is?”
    “Enn. You got to talk to them. And that means you got to listen to them, too. You understand?”
    “I did . I already talked to a couple of them.”
    “You getting anywhere?”
    “I was till you called me over.”
    “Sorry about that. Look, I just wanted to fill you in. Right?”
    And he patted my arm and he walked away with Stella. Then, together, the two of them went up the stairs.
    Understand me, all the girls at that party, in the twilight, were lovely; they all had perfect faces but, more important than that, they had whatever strangeness of proportion, of oddness or humanity it is that makes a beauty something more than a shop window dummy. Stella was the most lovely of any of them, but she, of course, was Vic’s, and they were going upstairs together, and that was just how things would always be.
    There were several people now sitting on the sofa, talking to the gap-toothed girl. Someone told a joke, and they all laughed. I would have had to push my way in there to sit next to her again, and it didn’t look like she was expecting me back, or cared that I had gone, so I wandered out into the hall. I glanced in at the dancers, and found myself wondering where the music was coming from. I couldn’t see a record player or speakers.
    From the hall I walked back to the kitchen.
    Kitchens are good at parties. You never need an excuse to be there, and, on the good side, at this party I couldn’t see any signs of someone’s mum. I inspected the various bottles and cans on the kitchen table, then I poured a half an inch of Pernod into the bottom of my plastic cup, which I filled to the top with Coke. I dropped in a couple of ice cubes and took a sip, relishing the sweet-shop tang of the drink.
    “What’s that you’re drinking?” A girl’s voice.
    “It’s Pernod,” I told her. “It tastes like aniseed balls, only it’s alcoholic.” I didn’t say that I only tried it because I’d heard someone in the crowd ask for a Pernod on a live Velvet Underground LP.
    “Can I have one?” I poured another Pernod, topped it off with Coke, passed it to her. Her hair was a coppery auburn, and it tumbled around her head in ringlets. It’s not a hair style you see much now, but you saw it a lot back then.
    “What’s your name?” I asked.
    “Triolet,” she said.
    “Pretty name,” I told her, although I wasn’t sure that it was. She was pretty, though.
    “It’s a verse form,” she said, proudly. “Like me.”
    “You’re a poem?”
    She smiled, and looked down and away, perhaps bashfully. Her profile was almost flat—a perfect Grecian nose that came down from her forehead in a straight line. We did Antigone in the school theater the previous year. I was the messenger who brings Creon the news of Antigone’s death. We wore half-masks that made us look like that. I thought of that play, looking at her face, in the kitchen, and I thought of Barry Smith’s drawings of women in the Conan comics: five years later I would have thought of the Pre-Raphaelites, of Jane Morris and Lizzie Siddall. But I was only fifteen then.
    “You’re a poem?” I repeated.
    She chewed her lower lip. “If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose world was swallowed by the sea.”
    “Isn’t it hard to be three things at the same time?”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Enn.”
    “So you are Enn,” she said. “And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?”
    “But