I spent a lot of time at a party on Saturday night looking for someone named Anne. It was a “swap meet” party. It took place in a windowless studio. The crowd included a guy in devil horns drinking out of a flask and a woman in a white dress whose breasts looked like bread dough. I’d been invited casually and I thought the “swap meet” thing was a joke theme, so I brought a crappy plain-blue painting I did years ago, and a friend of mine brought an Operation game board minus several pieces. Turns out it was an actual swap meet, and people were there to swap vases and records and bass guitars and ski jackets and couches.
Even though there was a keg, the party was only barely fun, what with all the anxiety and the hard selling. Everyone brought their idea of junk, but the moment you expressed interest in it they acted like it was the most beautiful, important object they’d ever owned. Fakery and greediness abounded. And if all you had to trade was a piece of blue art, forget it. I arrived in need of nothing and was soon convinced that I desperately needed a pair of snowboarding goggles. When the goggles didn’t work out, I turned my sights on a stack of books wrapped in a belt. The books included Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster and The Best American Short Stories 1991. A sticker indicated that these books belonged to this as-yet-unidentified Anne, but I couldn’t locate Anne, no one seemed to know her, and the frantic party was starting to get to me, what with all the begging and the bartering and the anti-blue-art snobbery. The Best American Short Stories 1991 has a story in it by Charles D’Ambrosio called “The Point,” a story that happens to begin at a party and that I happen to really like, and so I sat down and started reading it. (D’Ambrosio, as it happens, has a new story in the New Yorker this week.)
Anne saw me with her books and pounced within seconds. “Hi. You like my books? They’re great books. I can’t believe I’m getting rid of them. What do you have to swap?” (I’m paraphrasing.) Like one of the characters in “The Point,” her eyes were “glassy and dark and expressionless.” I wanted these neglected books and she obviously didn’t. And in the course of the party, I convinced myself that I should have them. I thought I could square with Anne, book-lover to book-lover. She was not a lover of anything except acquisition. When I showed her what I’d brought, she said, “Oh. Shit. I’m wasting my time with you,” and darted away. I fucking hated her. But my attachment to her books was only growing. An hour later, defeated, I offered her two bucks for them. “No money at the swap meet!” she said. And then she laughed as if we were friends and said, “Well, okay.”
