CHAIR
hen I was small my parents would host a lot of parties. I don’t know if they had more friends then or were just, as people say, “at a more social place in their lives,” but at least once a month there would be a bunch of adults in our apartment, drinking crappy wine and trying to play our untunable piano. There is something powerful for a child about your parents having people over. It’s not anything that happens at the parties but the evidence they give you that people feel safe where you live. That must go back to the savanna. Sometimes things happened at the parties that I was probably too young to see, but nothing scarring, just grown-up scenes. The air was bluish with different kinds of smoke. I have a memory of my father giving me a sip of wine on a sofa shortly after I turned four. Or one of the guests might say something inappropriate—for me cryptically so—and then at a look from my mother turn red and apologize. They had accidentally given me a glimpse of the darker and more serious world that otherwise lay unthinkable miles ahead. Guests would start to show up at around eight, meaning that I was allowed up for only the first hour or so. In reality I would lie awake much longer than that, listening to the chatter through the walls. My mother used to sit beside me for a few seconds. She was a high school chemistry teacher, always bone thin. She would pat my head, and ask if I was okay. Like that, “You okay, kid?” Her own carefully shaped and hair-sprayed hair … I knew better than to try to make her read to me like on other nights. She’d say, “You know I want to, honey, but I can’t be rude to our guests,” and then she would leave, closing the door very softly, and I would lie there listening—for hours, it seemed to me, but given how kids’ brains are with time it may have been minutes. Things went differently one night. I don’t know why this happened—that is, I can’t grope my way back into a conscious motive—but as nine approached with the first little wooze of drowsiness, I got up and left the party without needing to be told. Instead of going to my bedroom, I walked to my father’s office, which when parties started everybody suddenly called the “coatroom.” There was a chair in there, where all of the guests threw their coats. It was a big round chair like a bowl or a bird’s nest, called a papasan chair. People used to have them. I don’t really see them anymore. The room was dark. The only light came from an orange streetlamp outside the window. I pulled the door behind me until it was almost shut but not quite and approached the chair. There weren’t a ton of coats, maybe seven. It wasn’t nine yet, and a lot of the guests tended to arrive later, tenish. The few that were visible (strange how well I remember) were a khaki overcoat, a fuzzy orange one with large buttons, and a fur, which had an unfamiliar cool, animal slickness to it. Without thinking, possibly worried that someone would walk in behind me, I dove into them, burrowing my way down to the bottom of the bowl. I curled into a ball and lay there on my side. At first I had no breathing hole, and my breath was making the air warm. It smelled like my breath, which didn’t smell bad and was even enjoyable in the way of secret gross pleasures, but eventually I had to reach through and open a little airway. The cooler air from the room hit my face. The radiator in the corner made hammer-sounds that were always mysteriously cavernous. The pipes did not seem large enough to have produced them. The only sounds I’ve heard since that reminded me of those were inside of an MRI machine. Under the coats it grew warm and slightly moist. It had started raining. The most recently added coats were wet. I felt sleep coming, the first stage, when your thoughts start to fray. I opened my eyes and mouth as wide as they would go and resisted. The door creaked, and someone walked in—a man, by the weight and hard flat sound of his steps on the wood. He threw a coat onto Then the first voice, even more loudly this time: “Ron, I think your kid’s in here!” My father from out in the hallway said, I clawed my way up out of the coats and chair as if from the grave and walked straight to my bedroom, not looking at any of them, and fell instantly back asleep. My parents never said anything about it, not the next morning or ever. They may not even have remembered that part of the night.
