The Chamber of Commerce mixer was in a hotel ballroom that had given up on being a ballroom. The carpet had a pattern designed to hide stains and succeed. The chicken had a gravy that tasted like a decision made in 1987. A banner over the registration table said NETWORKING NIGHT in a font that wanted to be a handshake. The woman at the table did not look at my card. She looked at the line behind me. She handed me a name tag and a sticker for a drink that would not be worth the sticker. I wrote a name that was close enough to a name and I pressed the tag onto the fifteen-dollar jacket, slightly crooked, which I decided was charming.
The sticker was a circle with a number. I put it in the same pocket as the card I had not yet given anyone. I did not use it. I still have the feeling of the adhesive on my thumb, which is a stupid thing to keep and which I have kept anyway. The ballroom had a chandelier that was trying. The air had that hotel smell that is flowers and bleach and a decision about what a room should pretend to be. A man near the ice sculpture was telling a story about a closing. The ice was a swan that had already begun to be a puddle. I stood in the line and practiced being a person who belonged in a line.
The line at the registration table moved the way a line moves when no one in it wants to be first. A man in front of me had a card already in his hand and a smile already on his face. The smile was a tool. I recognized the tool because I had practiced one in a Honda. I did not use mine yet. I used the name tag. I used the slightly crooked press. I used the walk into a room that had given up.
I stood near a table of crackers that had been arranged as if arrangement were hospitality. I ate one. It tasted like a box. A woman with a name tag that said LINDA told me about a daughter in college and a store that sold frames. I asked about the frames. She lit up less than Gary would, enough. I did not take her money. I was not there for Linda. I was there to see if my mouth would hold a title in a room that had other mouths. It held. That is not a triumph. That is a rehearsal that found an audience.
The ice swan had a crack down the neck. I watched a server put a tray under the crack as if a tray could save a shape. The man near the swan finished his closing story. No one asked him a question. He looked at me. I asked him what he had closed. He told me. I nodded. I did not take his card. I have a habit, already, in this book, of not taking cards I could have taken. The habit is not virtue. The habit is appetite management. I was saving the appetite for a man near the gravy.