Page 4 of Exit Party

“Hi. Yes.” She wanted to ask why he’d left his own party, but he spoke first.

“There’s something wrong with the party.” Kareem was looking up at the windows of the apartment with deep apprehension, or so it seemed to Ari.

“What do you mean?”

“I’d tell you more,” he said, “but you’d think I’m insane.”

“I doubt that.”

“No, it’s actually crazy.” Kareem sighed. “You don’t want to know.”

“If I didn’t want to know I wouldn’t have asked,” Ari said, but she kept her voice as light as possible and laughed a little to make it seem harmless, because after all she was a guest at his party. One of the things she hated most in the world was being told what she did or didn’t want.

“What’s that tattoo?” Kareem asked. He was looking at her wrist, where a few ink letters were showing. “Do you mind me asking? I like tattoos.”

Ari pushed up her sleeve to show him. The words TRUE DILIGENCE were tattooed in uneven letters on the back of her left wrist.

“I’ve had it for a decade or so,” she said.

“You got it done in prison?” Kareem asked. Then, “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. Gloria let it slip, but I don’t think she meant to tell me.”

“It’s okay.”

“You were in for a while, right?”

“Eighteen years,” Ari said. “I’ve been out for two months.”

“Jesus,” Kareem said. “Can I ask . . . ?”

“I took out a contract on my cousin,” Ari said. “It was a mistake and I’m not that person anymore.”

“Okay,” Kareem said. “Just when I thought this evening couldn’t get any stranger.”

“Why, what was strange before?”

“I can’t . . . There’s something really wrong with this party,” he said.

In that moment he looked so troubled and bereft. The party had meant so much to him, Ari could see that, he’d gone to such effort to create something beautiful after such a long and awful time, and now something had gone wrong with it. She was shocked by the compassion she felt for him. She’d closed herself off from feeling too sympathetic to other people, because it made prison easier, and the sensation now was unexpected. She wished she could say the right thing, tell him it was going to be okay or something similar, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about it, he was moving past her, and she ascended the stairs behind him in awkward silence. The party had quieted in their absence, shifted into intimate conversations in the living room and kitchen. Quite a few people had left. James was still here, talking with a pretty woman on the couch. He winked at Ari, then saw Kareem, and rose with an unmistakable look of relief.

“Kareem,” Ari heard James say, “Kareem, my friend, did someone spike our drinks?” And he laughed in a nervous way, like he was trying to turn something horrible into a joke. But Kareem was preoccupied, looking around, seemingly checking the apartment for something, or looking for someone. They disappeared into the hallway together. What would it be like to have a friend like that? Or any friend at all. Could she be friends with Kareem? A few people were dancing in the living room, and Ari joined them to assuage her loneliness. Some time later she found herself sitting in an armchair, an open beer bottle in her hand, a little dazed.

It was around two a.m. now, the party winding down. For how long had she been sitting here? She was exhausted. It wasn’t the sex, she realized, or the dancing, or the late hour. It was that social interaction was deeply taxing, like playing a sport for which she hadn’t trained. Gloria had disappeared. Ari went searching and found her in the dining nook, looking at a painting that hung above the table. Here was Kareem again, finally, coming in from the terrace.

“Excuse me,” he murmured as he moved past them. He seemed to hesitate when he saw Gloria looking at the painting, but then walked behind her and disappeared into the kitchen.

“Kareem told me I could take this,” Gloria said to Ari. “He’s redecorating.” It was an oil painting, a rectangle about the size of two sheets of office paper, mostly blue. Ari studied it. She didn’t think of herself as a connoisseur of art or actually anything, but she found the painting beautiful: dark oil-paint waves, a cold ocean far from the tropics, with a little pair of feet disappearing into the upper-right corner. As she watched, Gloria carefully lifted it down from the wall.

“You sure he said you could take it off the wall?”

“Yep,” Gloria said, in a bored voice. She turned the painting over, and Ari saw the neat lettering in pencil on the back of the frame: Swan Dive / L. Alkaitis 1960. “I always liked it,” she said. “You want to head home?”

“Sure,” Ari said. “Let me just thank Kareem.”

But when she looked into the kitchen, he wasn’t there. Ari stood in the doorway, confused. How could Kareem have slipped by again without her seeing him? There was no other door. A window by the stove was open, just a crack. She crossed the tiny room and examined it. The window had a guard on it and would open no further. She turned back, and the painting—Swan Dive—was lying in the middle of the kitchen floor.

No one else was in the room with her. Ari was perfectly still, staring at the painting, except that now it was gone, blinked out of existence. The kitchen floor was a blank expanse of linoleum with a bottle cap and a few broken chips strewn here and there, debris from the party. She closed her eyes, opened them, and the floor was still blank. Her drink had been spiked, she decided, or she was so overstimulated by the ex-prison world that she was hallucinating, or she had a brain tumour or was having a stroke.

“Are you coming?” Gloria was in the doorway, absorbed in her phone, mapping the walk back to Echo Park. The painting was under her arm, where it had always been.