I hope you can forgive me.

—

FOR THE LAST fifteen minutes, I’ve been hovering at this party clutching my drink—a Manhattan—trying to act as if I were interested in the beads of condensation crawling down its beveled-glass surface. Earlier, I’d attempted to infiltrate the nearest knot of people but found myself largely unable to secure any purchase in the smooth waterfall of words. Every syllable I uttered ended up the same: an aborted reach, followed by a slide back down the conversational slope.

Twenty minutes before, I’d been rolling along the streets of Buckhead as they became wider and posher and leafier, navigating past Hummers and Land Rovers and various other luxury vehicles until the huge home hosting tonight’s event floated into view like a glowing mother ship at the top of a hill. Ten thousand watts of incandescent bulbs burned brightly against the night sky, illuminating a pair of cream-jacketed valets trying to wave me down. I ignored them. No one drives my truck except me.

My truck! My truck is really an economy hatchback from which I’ve removed half of the back seat. This vehicle, which I’ve named Herman, has been with me for twelve years over multiple continents, so he doesn’t exactly boast the latest technology. He also looks like ass, having sputtered through monsoons and deserts and, in the worst of times, literal wars. I’ve replaced and rotated his tires, changed his brake pads and calipers, swapped out his filters, substituted his belts and hoses and batteries, and flushed his radiator and transmission. There are more than two hundred thousand miles on this sucker, and there’s no way I’m getting rid of him until the tragic day when he finally and irredeemably croaks. As always, driving him makes me happy.

In the house, though, I’ve lost a bit of my composure. I can’t control my fidgeting; of its own accord, my body yearns toward the door. My foot taps, a relentless, skittish beat. My face too is a failure: I can feel it settling into the kind of gritted-teeth smile produced by young kids who are being forced to pose.

Part of this reaction is physical. Even though the room, a grand, high-ceilinged sweep of space, has been cleared of furniture, the air circulates poorly. Flames roar in a ten-foot-high fireplace anchoring one end of the room, its mantel heaped with drying pine boughs and berry-encrusted twigs. The beribboned garland is clearly meant to invoke a festive yuletide spirit, but in me it produces a burning desire to figure out where the fire extinguishers are stored. Whoever decorated the mantel didn’t hold back elsewhere either; even without furniture, the room appears to have been fluffed by a herd of manic elves. There’s red and green shit everywhere: glass stars, hunks of mistletoe, human-sized nutcrackers standing sentinel in the corners, all of it somewhat shimmery from the radiance of the fire.