--David Schickler, at a reading in New York City last week
"'Anyhow he gives large parties,' said Jordan, changing the subject with an urban distaste for the concrete. 'And I like large parties. They're so intimate. At small parties there isn't any privacy.'"
--The Great Gatsby
There weren't any auto wrecks or "gas blue" dresses or champagne glasses "bigger than finger bowls" at any of the parties I went to in New York City last week, like there are in the famous party three chapters into The Great Gatsby, though at a Saturday night party in Chelsea there was so much cocaine in the room one practically needed a snowplow to navigate. It was not a book party. It was the kind of birthday party where guys with jobs in finance and non-monogamous boyfriends dart back and forth between the coke table and the table where the cupcakes are, never taking one but occasionally drawing a finger through some frosting.
At Gatsby's party, Nick and Jordan come across "an important-looking door" and stumble into a grand library where they find a man who's been drunk for a week; the parallel, at the Chelsea party, was when someone opened a giant translucent sliding door to reveal two standing men, both of them drunk and suddenly compromised, one of them with his pants at his ankles.
New York was unseasonably warm last week, and if people tended to overdress for the parties they went to, at least that gave them an excuse to then undress in each other's company. Last Wednesday, a friend took me to a publication party for David Means' new story collection, The Secret Goldfish, where most of the men were wearing jackets. (Not in jackets: a certain famously bitchy book critic, who wore a blue T-shirt, and me.) "I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment," our narrator writes in The Great Gatsby, and that's a little how I felt, too, in that navy-blue semi-formal sea, until a novelist I deeply respect but whose novels I've never read assured me that, given the temperature, I was the most appropriately dressed person present. Everyone was chewing cold shrimp and dumping cold cocktails down their throats and sweating. Eventually someone decided to throw open the windows.
"Well-dressed people like to read, too," I overheard in the living room, where, strangely, all the books in the room had been turned around, spines toward the wall. Someone explained to me that the decision was made to turn all the books around because they were not impressive books. Which, in a way, impressed me. At least it granted the books some privacy.
