Free Angels All Over Town by Luanne Rice

us could live in the same city, if not under the same roof.
    Saturday night I went to Susan and Louis’s party in their loft apartment snuggled beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. They shared one floor of an old warehouse with two other couples. All except two were actors, and they were painters. The loft, divided into three separate living areas with a communal kitchen and bathrooms, had windows on only one narrow wall, so most of it was very dark. Susan and Louis combatted this by painting their rooms white, but one of the other couples said that the cavelike aspect had drawn them to the loft in the first place, and had painted their walls black. The noise of rushing bridge traffic was constantly overhead, rattling the old building’s foundations. But the rent was cheap, and that was why Susan and Louis stayed there.
    I wore snug black jeans, battered black boots, and a big blue corduroy shirt. I put more kohl around my eyes than I usually do, and I wore huge, dangling silver earrings. Whenever I go to parties at Susan’s I feel super-aware of my clothes. I make at least three times as much money as anyone else there, so I don’t like to look affluent; also, it is the most artistic crowd I know, and their clothing is as much a means of self-expression as paper, canvas, or the stage. That night I stood in the stairwell, listening to Talking Heads music blare from inside, patting my hips and wondering whether I looked too casual, not funky enough, or too contrived.
    Louis Pease, Susan’s husband, opened the door. He hugged me tight, and I kissed his lips through his soft brown beard. Louis, a composer of avant-garde string music as well as an actor, looks more like a husky cowboy. He wears jeans that flare, flannel shirts, and string ties. He could stand to lose some weight.
    “Hey, Una,” he said. “You’ve arrived.”
    I looked into the room behind him and saw masses of dancers. “Oh, Susan said this was a small party.”
    “You’ve seen our big ones—it’s relative.”
    It was true; I had never been to their place with fewer than seventy-five other people, many of whom Susan and Louis didn’t even know. Word got around about their parties; to people who loved parties, theirs had the right chemistry or something. Susan, Louis, and the loftmates left bowls of fresh popcorn, pretzels, cherries in season, M&M’s, Fritos with hot dip, and chicken wings around the room. You brought your own liquor. You couldn’t even get a ginger ale from the hosts.
    I recognized several Juilliard classmates right away. Susan, lithe in a turquoise turtleneck over black tights that made her legs look as if they went on forever, ducked between dancing guests to greet me. She stood with her back to Louis and squirmed with the music against his body.
    “Glad you’re here,” she said, leaning just far enough away from Louis to kiss me.
    “Una is saying you lured her here on false pretenses,” Louis said.
    “This started out to be a very tiny party—dinner for thirteen people. I was going to make paella. But then I started figuring—hors d’oeuvres, the shellfish,
saffron
, which costs a veritable fortune per pinch, wine, dessert…I would have spent as much and worked six times as hard as I did for this party.”
    “It’s okay,” I said. I knew that in an hour I would be having a good time, but entering a room filled with people terrified me. Sometimes I wondered whether that fact lay behind my choice to act before cameras instead of a live audience; the reactions of crowds were immediate and brutal. Standing within one, you could see what everyone thought of you by the expressions on their faces. I always acted confident as hell, as if
I
knew I was wonderful and therefore couldn’t give a shit for what anyone thought of me, but secretly I constantly scanned faces for clues: did they think I was too flashy, too conceited, too reserved, too quiet, too eager? I honestly didn’t know. So I acted as if I didn’t care. Only Susan