An opening was created in the wake, and the trapped man acted on it. The flow of bodies did not lead to the front door but to a secluded hallway. Low light in a book-lined room suggested a back way out, and in peeking around a shelf Michael was glad to find glass doors facing onto a veranda. In his escape, he stumbled over a piano in the shadows. The baby grand was out of tune, but not so out-of-tune for him to sit down and peck quietly at a few dusty keys. It was rare when he got access to a piano, though not as rare for him to abandon a party of pleasure to entertain himself elsewhere on the premises.

Honestly, the solitary man had no interest in forming a friendship with Jacques, or with anyone else for that matter; and given his history of not reciprocating social interest, the few friends he did have were lost mainly through attrition.

When inclined to socialize, he was better with small groups than in one-on-one situations. It was truer to say Michael desired company more than friendship, for he found it hard to distinguish between his genuine social need of others and his occasional need for an audience; and pitting these requirements against the exclusivity of his pursuits made him the most reluctant of loners. At the very least this ongoing conflict convinced him he had not chosen his life but it had chosen him.

In his intermittent guise as friend he had both enthralled and frustrated those who had shared a passing acquaintance with him. Humor was his way into most conversations, though he sometimes employed it inappropriately to the occasion. If he could be coaxed to seriousness, it was generally to soliloquize on a topic of interest to him. Yet when it was his turn to listen, he often did a poor job of hiding his boredom when he was not engaged, or entertaining an opposing view when he was. With age, he got better at accommodation and the social graces, but one would be mistaken to confuse his appearance of equanimity with tolerance. This notwithstanding, he was winningly personable, although being personal posed difficulties. He experienced varying degrees of anxiety when others were personal with him, from mild discomfort to resentment over being asked to make a show of feeling that did not come easily to him, be it empathy or discourteousness. Regardless, he prized good conversation from others, especially engrossing biographical accounts, or insights on any subject to which he was nescient. What he most detested were conversations that turned on affectation, boorishness, didacticism, or pedantry of any kind; these qualities were sure to be found in abundance at a college departmental party. That he preferred his own constructive company was clear enough, for he found other artists too idle to endure for long. More to the point, it was impossible for him to relax, even when by himself. Parties were by definition exercises in idleness, and idleness was neither a vice nor virtue he possessed.

He was only at the keyboard a few minutes when the form of a woman darkened the glass doors. She rapped on the panes wanting to be let in, so the bewildered pianist rose to comply. Swishing into the room with a scratch of tulle and satin, she unhooked a high heel and clapped it loudly against a ledge of masonry; a mud clot flew off to land inside the fireplace screen. “Are you a groom or a pallbearer in that monkey suit?” she asked.

Michael had forgotten about his silly tuxedo; the alcohol spoke for him. “Depends on your point of view.”

Light from the veranda muddied the young woman’s features in silhouette, but her smile was as discernible as the improbable pair of black-rimmed glasses she sported. She inquired further, “Do you know Heart and Soul?”

The duet was a party standard, but Michael played dumb.

The brunette slipped back into the shoe and dropped to the piano bench on a pillow of perfume. She then proceeded to bang out a formidable rendition of Chopsticks. “I took just enough piano lessons as a child to drive the mice and roaches from our house,” she informed him.

Drawn into her easy patter, he observed, “A more effective form of fumigation than dance lessons.”

She did not look up from the clanging keys. “I was too tall for dance.”

“I was too chesty for the cello,” he rejoined.

She bounded up in the next breath, keeping her straight face, and gestured to the door. “Would you care to keep me company while I look for someone?”

Nodding, the blindsided man fell in obediently behind her rustle of strapless formalwear; it was only in the half-light of the hallway he realized the costume was actually a trimmed-down wedding dress. She did not so much merge into the party as descended on it from a silvery cloud. The smoky light remained poor, but there was enough of it for the recruited escort to realize he had been trading one-liners with a woman of uncommon beauty. She glanced back at him with beguiling blue-green eyes before setting a course for someone in a tea-stained mummy outfit; and wanting to catch up, Michael purposefully lagged behind.

His first impression was one of a bride who just bolted from the altar, but seeing her glide serenely across the room, reducing everything around her to mere backdrop, made him think she had just stepped off a freshly finished Gil Elvgren canvas. Intoxicated on that thought, the painter could almost make out the glistening brushwork from a distance: how the flick of a round brush caught the curl of an eyelash, and the bold swivel of a flat brush mimicked the zigzag of her opalescent dress.

She was quickly frowning and coming back to where he stood. “You’re not keeping up.”

In the closer quarters, her pale skin resembled milk swirled in rose water. The enigma of it sent him (in his mind, at least) delving into his tackle box for tubes of paint: alizarin crimson, yellow ochre, ultramarine blue, zinc white. He drew in the stuffy air to chase away his late stupefaction. “Wasn’t that him?” he asked. “The person you were looking for?”

“Come,” she said, wrapping a silk-gloved arm around his rental sleeve. “Keep up.”

Michael was both self-conscious and lightheaded to be seen with so attractive a woman is so public a place. He could not help but tap her as a heroine in one of his screwball comedies: Colbert in It Happened One Night, Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, Dunne in The Awful Truth, or maybe Lombard in My Man Godfrey; indeed, he had already assigned himself the role of William Powell.

They brushed a table covered with toppled plastic cups. The bride picked up two empty ones and sniffed them. “These smell clean,” she declared on handing one to him.

His cup smelled of beer. “Did the scullery maid run off with the good crystal?”

Miss Elegance had stepped out of character to eye the staircase, leaving him, as had Jacques, to momentarily drift and drown. She tugged again on his thin frame. “We need something stronger than beer.”

The beauty waved off a volley of crass overtures with her wand-of-an-arm and started up the steps; the painter was inconveniently thinking about brushes on the ascent: synthetics and sables for her skin, and a coarser hog’s hair brush for the dark, strong line of her hair.

Someone fell against them coming down the stairs from the other side, almost pushing them into an embrace. The dithering man was not wearing a costume, and appeared lost. “I thought it was the black monolith from 2001,” he mumbled. “But it’s not.” He continued his clumsy way down, evidently expecting no reply.

Michael was once again bouncing around among the shadowy, half-naked characters that owned the second floor, although his easier companion was not shy about moseying up to a fellow slouching against a wall. He was wheezing through small nostril slits in his plastic Casper the Friendly Ghost mask and ogling a powder-wigged cutey popping out of her bodice.

“Is there anything stronger than beer?” she inquired.

The man pulled a sloshing bottle out of his red-splattered lab coat and thrust it to the ceiling. “What are you going to give me for it?!” His exertion only succeeded in throwing him off-balance. He tumbled comically to the floor to watch his Peppermint Schnapps roll away.

The enterprising woman picked up the bottle and poured a generous amount of beverage into their two cups from a bureau, whereupon the alcohol was returned to the passed-out man’s pocket. She dragged her companion along to a door that showed promise and, on peeking in, proclaimed enthusiastically, “It’s empty!”

When the door closed them off from the rest of the party, Michael braced himself against the darker, quieter room. They had traded one remote part of the house for the other, and he suspected whatever plan had been in the works was scrapped. Within seconds his eyes had adapted enough to the faintness to make out his company’s wincing on each slurp of her drink. He was thrown by the self-inflicted torture. She detected a critical cast to his look and threw up a screen: another withering smile.

“Are you a graduate student?” she asked.

“I guess you could call me an artist-in-residence.”

She glowed with approval. “I’m an MFA candidate, myself.”

“What’s your area?”

Nudging her glasses back up her nose, she regaled, “Photography. But that’s only to float me until my career in the service industry takes off.”

“A double-major is always wise.”

The impromptu couple continued to stand toe-to-toe in the shadows, rashly drinking their plunder without rhyme or reason. Michael was not sure why both were in such a hurry to become drunk, but wherever the girl was going, he wanted to come along. “Maybe we should eat something,” he suggested. “I saw some Vienna sausage-looking things on stale crackers downstairs.”

“I’m a vegetarian.” She hiccupped. “Most of the time.”

He spoke with authority. “If you’re going to be an artist, then you’re going to have to eat meat.”

“Wasn’t da Vinci a vegetarian?”

“And how many works of art did he make in his lifetime? Not many, as it turns out. Meat gives you stamina.”

Pleased by the turn of conversation, the woman blurted her thinking. “We look like we belong together on a wedding cake.”

Michael looked down at his too-small rental. “I look like I’m due in small claims court tomorrow to sue the bastard drycleaners who did this to my suit.”

The woozy bride snickered on her next gulp. She dropped to the edge of the bed, but missed it to land indignantly on her bottom in the floor. The misstep made her double over with laughter. “I don’t know where my ass begins and ends in this dress!” she cried.

Fumbling to lift herself with his feeble assistance, she was too debilitated by her fit of giggles to rise. She was at once resigned to sit it out, and with pained side-glances at her teetering groom still extending a hand. The sight of him in his midget’s tux sent her careening to the rug with more snorts, which only made her guffaw all the harder. Michael dropped to his knees to create a lower, more manageable center of gravity. The girl’s head was somehow under the bed skirt. He was quickly pulling at her ankles and trying to dissuade her from crawling further under the bed. Flat on her stomach, she shimmied like a Jell-O mold slathered with whipped cream, conveying in the broadest strokes the shapely body concealed beneath the billowy satin.

“I think we can get out this way!” she insisted.

Michael inadvertently pulled off one of her expensive-looking high heels. It flew over his head to land somewhere in the dark room. He was abruptly on his back, swimming. The beauty straddled him with a hard stare, although her feathery cleavage got him thinking about blending brushes.

“Where’s my shoe gone?”

Her breath was peppermint candy, and hardly the smelling salts he required. “I’m looking for it on the ceiling," he informed her, “because it’s the only part of the room that isn’t spinning.”

She started snickering again, threatening to collapse on top of him. Then, in a change of headwinds, she yelped, “The limo! I forgot the limo!”

“What?”

The young woman clambered to her feet and brought him up behind her. She wavered before careening into the side of the mattress a second time. “Shit!” Her hand rose to cover her mouth, as if to call back the expletive.

Michael was slow grasping the gravity of her reaction. He followed her bleary stare to the top of the bed where, unbeknownst to both of them, a darkly attired man was stretched out and sleeping on an equally dark bedspread. The painter recognized him at once as the sensory deprivation character from downstairs. He was still wearing muffs and a blindfold, and seemed impervious to the couple’s antics in the room.

For the briefest moment the graduate photographer appeared to be swerving toward another bout of giggles, but a bedpost steadied her enough for a sober proclamation. “I need to pee before we leave.”

The bride hobbled over on her one remaining heel to open the bedroom door. On stepping over an amorous couple stretched out in the hallway floor, she paused to size-up the woman’s shoes. A heel was hastily snatched from a foot and the wobbly groom was used for support as she wiggled down into it. The marauder then moved down to another door that was either a bathroom or a closet and charged in without knocking.

A young man, with painted-on five-o-clock shadow, was looking out a bathroom window. He was trouser-less and wearing a trench coat, and mused on cue. “I used to know a girl who lived in that house across the street.” Opening his coat, a large cylindrical balloon filled with helium rose up between his legs. Flesh-colored pantyhose held it in place, as well as two smaller round balloons doubling for testicles. “She used to live there,” he continued, pointing at the window with his freakishly large member, “in that attic apartment.”

The bride neither blushed nor recoiled when the fellow turned to face her full-front, but commented dryly on the reinforced nylon toe of the hosiery. “I see you’re not circumcised.” The bathroom door was unhurriedly closed on the bizarre scene, and the young woman once more dissolved into laughter.

There was no rejoinder Michael could add to the unscripted moment. He watched her swerve again to the floor, although their dynamic was different than it had been in the private bedroom. He felt keen embarrassment, but could not say if it was for her or him. Surely she was laughing more at his nonplus reaction than at the obscene joke. He was slower lending a hand to pull her up, and felt the weight of her body more intrusively in the hoist. Her skin had briefly dulled, and the lace and needlework of the dress passingly resembled something out of a grandmother’s sewing drawer. She was no less beautiful, but miles away from where he wanted her to be.

The accidental newlyweds proceeded to the stairs and surveyed the number of ragged partiers clogging the steps. The chances of getting down without a tumble seemed doubtful, so the willful girl spun around to another room with conviction.

“I know another way out!”

Again in a dark room, Michael recognized the sofa bed where the lovers had earlier put on their performance. The smell of linseed oil told him they were invading an art studio. The determined guide divined a path between a worktable covered with crusty paints and an easel. A Japanese screen offered one last obstacle, and on ducking behind it a door was at hand. It opened onto narrow, accordion-like stairs that stretched down into oblivion.

She yanked on his hand. “Keep up!”