What I Wore to Host

Someone is talking about a film they saw in Atwater Village, and I am nodding.

This is what I do: I nod. I refill the glass nearest to me — Margaux's, who always lets it get too low — and I say something about the director that I actually know, because I actually know it, because I am a good host and I prepared for this evening the way I prepare for everything. The playlist is on its second rotation. The candles I lit at seven are burning lower now, the wax softening in the heat of eight people in a small room, and the conversation moves the way it always moves at this table, finding its own current, and I am watching it from somewhere very slightly behind my eyes.

The vibrator has been on since before anyone arrived.

Low. The lowest setting. A hum that is almost not a hum, a pressure that is almost not a pressure — except that it is, and has been, for forty minutes, and my body has been doing the math on that without asking my permission. I set the table. I sliced the bread. I answered the door four times with a smile that was entirely real and entirely beside the point, because underneath the wrap dress, underneath the thin jersey that lies directly against my inner thigh, something was already happening that had nothing to do with hosting.

I reach for my own glass and the movement shifts the fabric. A small thing. The hem grazes the inside of my knee and then settles, and I feel it the way you feel a word you weren't expecting — a half-second of pure attention before thought catches up.

I exhale. Not visibly. I have practiced not visibly.

Daniel is explaining something across the table, his hands doing the thing they do, and I watch his face and I understand what he is saying and I respond at the right moment with the right word and none of this is performance — I am here, I am present, I am the woman who chose this wine and this music and this particular configuration of people — and I am also somewhere else entirely, in a conversation my body is having with itself that no one at this table can hear.

The candles have made the room warmer than I planned. My knees are together under the table. The jersey is light enough that I can feel my own heat through it, a warmth that has been building since before the first guest knocked, patient and specific and entirely mine.

I refill my own glass now. I settle back in my chair. Under the table, in the warm dark that only I know about, my thighs press together once — deliberate, quiet, a private punctuation — and the conversation keeps moving around me like weather, and I let it, and I wait to see what I will allow myself next.