The Literary Girlfriend: The Party Scene

It’s never good to see your girlfriend dancing with another guy.  The girlfriend and the guy dancing might say it’s harmless, but it really shouldn’t happen.  However, I knew that’s what I was going to see.  I knew it.  I had just pissed off Danielle, and she was vindictive.  She even told me she was vindictive when we first met, and I had witnessed it (toward other people) a couple times.  I had just embarrassed her, and I was sure calling me an asshole in front of Kirk and a few other guys wasn’t going to be the end of it. Nothing good was going to come from this.  But I had to see anyway.

Danielle was on the other side of the high-ceilinged, open living room, dancing with Jerome to the song “Scary Monsters,” and my first impulse was to rush across the room and belt him.  Yeah, Jerome was the host and had always been nice to me, but he also knew that Danielle was my girlfriend, and guys don’t hit on girlfriends, at least not when the boyfriend is in the house.  That was a lack of respect.

I was tempted to punch him out, but even in my sluggish condition, I remembered that I punched like a girl, and he was a few inches taller and he was broader and he could probably kick my ass even when I was having a good day, and even if he couldn’t, he could hire a lawyer to sue the hell out of me if I accidentally hurt him.  I’d rather lose a fight than get sued.

I shook my head and held back.  I watched Danielle dance wildly in her Jane Austen Victorian style dress.  Between us were a bunch of women in slutty costumes (nurses, vampires, French maids, etc.) and a bunch of guys in half-assed costumes trying to dance with them . The room was dark with some strobe light action, so my view wasn’t the best, but I could see enough.  I had never seen Danielle dance before.  We’d been living together for a couple weeks, and she danced for a living (a different kind of dancing), and yet I’d never seen her like this.  I could have watched her all night, except I was pissed off she was with another guy.

Then I noticed that the look on Danielle’s face was vacant.  Even from where I stood, I could see that she didn’t make any eye contact with Jerome.  It looked like he was trying to impress her, but she didn’t seem to notice.  She just liked to dance and do her own thing.  She wasn’t dancing with Jerome.  She was dancing next to Jerome.  And suddenly, I wasn’t pissed off anymore, except at myself.

Danielle was having fun, and I was thinking that maybe it was good that I wasn’t out there with her.  I would have been self-conscious.  I would have been aware of people staring at me (even if they weren’t), and that would have carried over to her.  She would have tried to compensate for my stiff dancing, and that would have made things worse.

But then I remembered I was dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster!  If anybody had an excuse to be a stiff dancer, it was Frankenstein’s monster.  Ugh!  I had wasted an opportunity to be a stiff dancer without anybody thinking twice about it.  It would have been fun.  Halloween was the one time it was okay to be a stiff dancer, but I’d wasted the moment by being an asshole.  It was too late now.  I stood in the doorway and looked at the floor.

A few minutes later, I was wobbling to the restroom when I bumped into a guy with an eye patch for a costume.  To me, nothing was more lame than a guy wearing an eye patch as a Halloween costume.

“Why the long face, Frankenstein?” the lame pirate said.  “Hahahaha!”

“It’s not Frankenstein,” I said, deciding between arguing with a lame pirate and using the restroom.  “It’s Frankenstein’s monster.  Frankenstein was the scientist who created the…”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard it in the other room,” the pirate said, waving me off.  He had been watching football with me earlier, and that annoyed me even more.

“Then get it right, you one-eyed mother… fu…” I grumbled behind his back.

After I used the facilities, I returned to the TV room and was relieved (not in a bathroom kind of way) that the pirate wasn’t there.  I wanted to watch football and get myself calmed down and then smooth things over with Danielle before we left.  She was just having harmless fun, and I was just going to make things worse by going in there like I was a stalker.

Just when I was relaxing (and maybe falling asleep), the pirate was in my face, waving a plastic toy bag of a kid’s monster mask in front of me.

“See?  See?” the pirate said.

I shook my head and focused on the picture in the middle of the bag, a cartoon of the Frankenstein monster’s face and in giant gruesome letters “FRANKENSTEIN MASK.”

“It’s not Frankenstein’s monster,” the pirate said.  “It’s Frankenstein.”

“The bag is wrong,” I said.

“The bag was made by professionals,” the pirate said.  “The bag is never wrong.”

“The bag is wrong,” I said.

The pirate laughed bitterly and tossed the bag at me before walking away.  “Whatever.”

The bag in my face and his “whatever” pissed me off and I rocketed (or stumbled) out my chair.  I felt dizzy from getting up too quickly, but I still said, “It’s Frankenstein’s monster!”

“You talking shit to me?” the pirate said.

“It’s Frankenstein’s monster!” I said again.

“I’m tired of you talking shit about Frankenstein and your sack head.”

“It’s Frankenstein’s monster!”

“No one gives a shit!”

“Then say it the right way!” I yelled.   My legs were wobbling, and I was seeing yellow dots, and the pirate either had two eye patches or there were two pirates.  That wasn’t a good sign.

Suddenly Danielle was in front of me, pushing me back.  “What are you arguing…?” but she couldn’t finish the question.

Kirk was in the room again too, looking at me strangely.  People were peeking in from various doorways to see what was going on. Danielle’s mouth was open, but she didn’t say anything, and I realized that I was making a scene and it was embarrassing her.  All this time I’d been worried about her behavior, and I was the one acting like an asshole, and even worse, I was being a loud asshole, and I couldn’t seem to stop.

“You need to calm down,” Danielle said, and took my hand.

I was about to say something about Frankenstein’s monster, but the pirate did it for me.

“How did Frankenstein get a hot girlfriend?”

Danielle rolled her eyes and turned on the pirate.  “It’s Frankenstein’s monster!”

“Damn,” the pirate said.  “Even the librarian’s talking shit to me.”

“I’m Jane Austen, douchebag.”  And she held up her copies of Pride and Prejudice and Emma.

“Oh yeah?” the pirate said, looking her over.  “Your glasses are an anachronism.”

“Your eye patch was made in China,” Danielle said.

“Your… you…”  The pirate threw his arms up in frustration.   “Dammit!”  The pirate gave up and staggered out of the room.

I was about to laugh, but Danielle turned back to me, and I knew I’d better keep my mouth shut.

“What’s wrong, Jimmy?” Kirk asked, getting really close.

“He’s been an asshole all night,” Danielle said.

“Are you drunk?” Kirk asked.  “You been drinkin’?”

“No,” I said.  “I’m just… sleepy… and pissed off.  I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“Shit!” Danielle said suddenly.  Then she looked at the ceiling and blew out some air.  “Shit!  Shit!”  Then she looked at Kirk.  “I have to talk to you.”

They moved to a corner and spoke quietly and I couldn’t hear them over the music from the other room, and I wanted to hear what they were saying because I knew they were talking about me, but I was also aware that a lot of people were watching us now, and my inhibitions kicked in.  Don’t cause a scene, I thought.  Don’t make it worse.  But I was also ticked off that Danielle was talking to Kirk instead of me.  So I stood there stupidly and kept quiet.

“What?” Kirk said.  Their voices were getting louder.  Whatever Danielle said had made him irate.

“I thought he’d be funny,” she said.

“He turns into an asshole,” Kirk said.  I was pretty sure he was talking about me.

“I didn’t know.”

“You can’t do that to people,” Kirk said.  Whatever Danielle had done, it must have been bad, considering that Kirk rarely gave morality lectures (he usually needed them for his own poor behavior).

“I didn’t mean to… I didn’t…”

“You want to tell him?” Kirk asked Danielle.  “Or do you want me to?”

Danielle hesitated, and then looked around at all the people in the room.  She grabbed my hand and said, “We’re going home.”

“But I was just starting to have fun!” I exclaimed.  I wasn’t having fun, but for some reason it felt good being belligerent.

“We’re leaving.”

“I wanna know what you two were talking about!”

Danielle sighed.  “Fine,” she said, and her cheese-eating grin started to take shape.  She put her arms around my neck, pulled me down, and just when I thought she was going to kiss me, she brushed her mouth against my cheek and then whispered, “When we get home, I’m going to…”

And she finished her sentence with a description of one of the most vulgar sexual acts I’d ever heard of.

“Okay,” I said.  I no longer felt like being belligerent.

She took my hand, and we left without saying goodbye to anybody.  We didn’t even thank the host.

“Next year,” Danielle said as we got into her car (she was driving), “go as Darth Vader.”

I’m not sure how I responded.  I fell asleep (or passed out) on the way home.

*****

DISCLAIMER!  I apologize for this being rushed.  I felt like I had to get this Halloween party scene done before Halloween (even though I’m pretty sure that doesn’t matter to anybody else).

*****

To be continued in… The Literary Girlfriend: Silent Treatment .

And to read “The Literary Girlfriend” from the beginning, start here.