It’s like walking into a showroom of human endeavor. My wife Cara and I are often invited to parties given by Dr. Tony Schermbrucker and his third wife, Marta. Cara had worked with Tony’s first wife Jennifer when they shared an office at Children’s Services. I manage Cardiff Corner Books and the Schermbruckers are some of our best customers. He’s a cardiologist who reads thrillers and WWI history. Memoirs make him feel uneasy. Marta buys a lot of cookbooks, memoirs, and Moleskine notebooks. Cara will no longer go to the parties. She thinks we get invited because we can carry on a lively conversation. True, but I want the Schermbruckers to keep buying books. Maybe it’s just all about pretending. 

So, I show up, say how Cara can’t make it because she’s on duty at the Crisis Center. The phones never stop ringing. Tony and Marta’s house is spacious, a burglar’s dream. The wine is thirty years old and the scallops were so, so hard to come by. Tony introduces me as Russell, the bookman, and I feel naked without a book in my hand. I know I’m going to mention John Cheever at least ten times during the evening, and I’m going to ask someone if they can name a living American poet.

This is an unfamiliar professional crowd, all sharing some mystical connection. That shadow of money is here for sure but something sharper and secret, too. I float around drenched in small talk. Wonderment, complaints, declarations, and flawed insights abound. The sound of glass on glass. A woman in a revealing red dress finds rhetorical contradictions in the early paintings of Dorothy Lutz now on exhibit at the West Plaza Gallery. Tony and Marta own one of those early paintings—Dream With Wings. I lean in close to the woman and say, I was a reckless gaucho in my early days, and I speak the secret language of gauchos. She’s never met a gaucho. 

There’s a man named Roger expressing worry about an antiquated system that is costing him money and boy is he getting pushback when he complains to corporate. He works for a company that makes snack foods and laundry detergent. Big demand these days for comfort food and clean clothes. I say, True, so true but I’m not a fan of food that colors my fingers. I don’t say that someday I’m going to write a book of my own about the art of pretending.

There is laughter rising near the piano. A man in head-to-foot corduroy reports that his cohorts mock him for his deification of the semicolon. I blurt out, I saw a naked man running along the interstate near Butte, Montana, in the rain, just before dawn. I keep going, Punctuation is not taught in our schools but The Elements of Style still sells well. He gives me that I’ve-never-heard-of-that-book look. 

I see Dane, a poet I know, holding the hand of Tony and Cara’s lawyer daughter, a stuffy young woman who reads romance novels like they’re vitamins. I look away because I didn’t like his last book, Haiku Bandits. Now, he’s wearing shiny shoes and blousy pants. The poet in him is hiding. I move near the fireplace. There’s a discussion of divorcement strategies in climate change negotiations. I’ve been invited to this party to stir conversation but talk about a brick wall. So, I do tell my story about divorcement, about how my mother died and how for weeks after a small bird with dusty yellow wings appeared at our bedroom window. It was my mother saying good-bye again or hello or don’t worry or please, please. Three people shake their heads and say they’ve had similar experiences. Then, God is introduced and I move on.

A pregnant woman in silver slippers, her hands stroking her fat braids, has discovered glaring errors in the certain binary suppositions. She is an assistant professor in the mathematics department at a local university. I say, Prison life isn’t as bad as people say it is. There is silence, then a show of teeth. I hit a nerve.

Tony and Marta bustle by, spreading goodwill. In a month they will be in Italy. Lake Como and they want to run into George Clooney again. I wonder if the guests want to talk heart-talk. They all have them. Tony wants to talk about the Brusilov Offensive. I mention Wilfred Owen’s “Arms and the Boy” and catch a wink from Tony.

There is shouting, husky voices. A man and woman, both in paisley bow ties, are condemning a mining bias in recent elections in Alaska. Statute 343 and 501 have been overlooked in favor of big money. I want to assuage their anger so I say, Sex in a sleeping bag in the wilderness is the best kind. Bears find this very amusing.

I do a 360. 

Five people are wearing watches that speak to them. I hear “yield curve inversions” and I shake my head and say, I’m in favor of unlimited breadsticks.

A recently tenured professor uses “dichotomy” ten times in one minute. He wanders into the bookstore now and then, hanging out in the philosophy section. We think he steals. He’s famous because he won an Ironman Triathlon last year. Cara wonders if he’s the mumbler who calls the Crisis Line once a week. I say in a gentle tone, Dichotomy is a flower that grows in the ditches along the narrow, rutted road to my family’s cabin at Lost Lake. 

I’ve had five conversations about books so far. Yes, we sell the new turmeric cookbook. No, I don’t know what a signed copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five might be worth. No, we don’t carry self-published YA novels by local authors. Yes, the essay is a popular form. Yes, I have a good idea why a writer would want to write a six-hundred-page novel. And no, we don’t worry about all of the filth appearing on bestseller lists.

A flannel-covered angler is a fan of guided fly fishing trips in search of the brookie, the aurora, the square-tail, the humble brown, the marble. I jump in and mention that one of my favorite novels is A River Runs Through It. The angler says something about meeting Brad Pitt in Montana. As he turns away, I remark, It’s fun to fish with a stick of dynamite. You catch a lot and you don’t need a guide. This ends our literary discussion.

The Schermbrucker’s bathrooms number at least five. The one I end up in has a shower with twelve heads and a fancy video display above the sink, probably a camera hidden overhead. It’s a bidet heaven.

When I return, Tony is showing off a new acquisition. It’s a guitar. I didn’t know he played. He doesn’t by the way he’s handling his 1955 Fender Stratocaster. Tony describes his quest to acquire it, noting that Bob Dylan might have owned and played it at one time. Tony brushes his hand over the strings. They’re way out of tune. I know I’m supposed to say something about the guitar, so I say like a rock historian, Dylan got booed when he switched to electric. I’m looking for traction so I add, Everyone should have a guitar story to tell. Buddy Holly’s guitar was found in a field after his plane crashed. His glasses, too. I can’t wait to get home and play my Epiphone Hummingbird that I paid $280 for at an estate sale.

Tony and Marta have two party rules: 1) do not address Tony as Dr. Schermbrucker, 2) no discussion of heart attacks, heart murmurs, heart ablations, stents, valves, or medical coverage. I can’t help looking at his expert hands and imagining him touching a heart like he’s squeezing an orange. Or a small pet.

The tall man with I AM GODOT printed on his t-shirt has a cut on his cheek, his hands clenched in his pockets, says he’s a frequent participant in some hazy clinical knowledge stream that he didn’t anticipate. I say jokingly, Are you talking about my bookstore or the public library? Talk about knowledge streams. And knowledge will always cut your cheek.

Now hear this: fintech inroads are going to kill the best plans of the couple whispering by the aquarium. They are dressed in complementary shades of blue. As long as we’re talking about killing, I say, my college girlfriend loved cocaine more than she loved me. I warned her not to drive her BMW with her eyes closed. She was from North Carolina and is buried in my memory. 

The woman with a cast on her foot has a Mensa-qualified daughter who is writing her dissertation on post-secularism and the emergence of rap music. She’s won a major scholarship and is dating a film editor from LA whose mother is a famous actress in Spain. I say in a tired tone, I need to be going so I can start rereading Bleak House with new energy. I drift slowly to the front door but the Schermbruckers catch me and give me a two-on-one hug. The night air is heavy but I am light on my feet.

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Gordon W. Mennenga lives in Iowa City, Iowa. His monologues have been featured on NPR and produced by the Riverside Theatre Company. He’s worked as a field laborer, a milkman, a wedding singer and a college professor. His work has been published in The North American Review, Epoch, The Chicago Tribune (Nelson Algren Award), and Jabberwock Review. An essay appeared in Issue 84 of  the Bellingham Review. His craft talk, “Writing Under the Influence,” is available at The Writing University. Contact Gordon at: gordonwmennenga.com