Ex Party by Lee Conell
When the jasmine-scented letters arrived in the mail that August afternoon, most of us thought they were a joke: You are formally requested to attend a gathering of my ex‑lovers at my abode. Wine and summer snacks provided! No plus ones, please. Xo, Corbin. All of us receiving the invitations were women and, yes, all of us were the ex‑lovers of Corbin. We were also med students and administrative assistants and lab techs and artists and cashiers and waitresses and gallery assistants and college students and dancers and librarians and programmers and nannies and journalists. We had many differences. Yet we had suddenly been curated without consent, placed together by Corbin into a single mass. Our names weren’t even on our actual invitations. Hi, you, was all the cardstock’s salutation said.
Oh, hey, Corbin, you ass.
But let’s be fair. In some ways, it made sense that Corbin would internally clump us all together. The Ex-Lovers. A baby, when first born, can differentiate the faces not only of humans, but also of apes. A human baby can tell Ape #23 from Ape #12 no problem. As we get older, though, we can differentiate easily only between human faces. The apes all begin to seem the same to us, melding into one hirsute not-me. Over the months and years, Corbin probably stopped being able to differentiate us as real individuals, too. It was not all his fault. It was the fault of time, as well, and of the patriarchal etcetera, and in general we tried to be understanding of his limitations.
Still, because of who he was, there were certain ways Corbin wasn’t limited at all. While our first impulse, as we already said, was to dismiss the invites as a joke, we quickly reconsidered. We all knew Corbin enough to understand that a prank could evolve by the sheer force of his pretentiousness and intergenerational wealth into what he would call “a performance piece.” We might be his subjects. Which was kind of gross. All of us said to ourselves, “Nope, not going.” We thought, “Dignity!” We thought, “Pride!”
But when the night of the party arrived, a few of us thought, bellies grumbling, “Free wine and summer snacks?” We were eager to know about these snacks of summer. Also, we were eager to know about each other. Corbin had always been closed-lipped about former girlfriends. He liked to say, “I don’t see myself defined by past relationships.” Only now here he was, defining something about himself with this event. We were just not yet sure what he was defining. And if we didn’t attend, we’d never know.
All of us arrived at his house exactly forty-five minutes after the proposed party start time, meaning all of us had the same definition of fashionably late. We tramped en masse across the greenest parts of his lawn. We eyed the flowers bursting from the shrubs and tried in vain to remember what those flowers were called. We smiled at each other, refusing to size each other up as we said things like, “I wasn’t going to show here either, is what’s funny, but then I just got so curious.”
We rang the doorbell. Nobody emerged. We knocked. Nothing. At last we tried the door. It was unlocked. We marched inside. In the living room sat a table stacked with glitteringly dark bottles of wine and with cheese that stank in a way that made the roofs of our mouths smart. We saw crescent slices of green apples, mini caprese skewers, frozen watermelon slices on Popsicle sticks, white-bean hummus drizzled with lemon juice.
There were nearly two dozen of us, staring at these snacks.
But no Corbin. Just a note by the hummus that said, “Out to get more wine, B‑R‑B!”
On the discovery of the note, a long silence. The dashes in “B-R‑B” were enraging. They made us think about the way Corbin had narrowed his eyes at us the second we disagreed with one of his stupid theories about life/art/human relationships, or when we brought up (during one of his long-winded spiels about how hard he worked to get to where he was) that his grandparents just happened to own buildings in Manhattan and San Francisco that they’d sold for a gazillion dollars. In front of the snacks, we took deep centering breaths. Most of us had shown up to the ex party trying to remind ourselves that Corbin wasn’t all bad, that it was easy, after a breakup, to only remember the shitheadiest parts of someone, and that we took a more nuanced view. We made a point, before going to the party, to remember the thoughtful birthday gifts, the first editions of books we loved. And how mindfully Corbin would ask us about our days at work. And how, before sex, he would cook elaborate meals for us, full of unexpected ingredients – quail eggs and roasted fennel and once, upon finding out the many hours of childhood one of us devoted to playing the computer game Oregon Trail, an actual slab of venison. We had gathered to the front of our minds all sorts of good will, like a woolly blanket to keep us from getting too bitterly cold at this ex party.
But now this.
B-R‑B.
“There’s still plenty of wine,” we said to each other then, and we began to drink, trying to resist the urge to rage-text Corbin. Less shyly now, we looked around. Some of us wore cocktail dresses and some of us wore expensive ripped jeans and some of us wore cheap non-ripped jeans and some of us wore blazers despite the heat, as if silken lining might protect us from the possibility of shame. Also: One of us had dressed as a ghost, a light blue sheet over her head. “Because he ghosted me,” she said in a low voice through a hole in the sheet. “This invite’s the first thing I’ve heard from him in months.” She said she wanted to reappropriate this party – his probable performance piece – as her own performance piece. “I’m wearing the sheet we fucked on,” she told us. Her faith in an overwrought pun to reappropriate anything at all, ever, made the hearts of the rest of us sink a little, both because the attempt seemed misguided and because the “ghosted” pun seemed like one that Corbin himself would utter and delight in. He would often make bad puns and then say out loud “hashtag dad joke.” To convince us, what? That he was self-aware? That he was like our dads? That he’d be a good dad? It all, in retrospect, felt very calculated, the goofy ole dad move.
We drank more wine. We shoved our mouths full of summer snacks. We chomped down hard on Popsicle sticks.
We were starting to feel jealous! No, not of each other. We were jealous of Corbin. How easily he had gotten us all here. So many pieces of his past had shown up, arranged themselves artfully for him and for his art. Could we ever gather up our individual past lives in one room like this? We tried to picture our own series of Corbins, clustered together at a party we threw – a thicket of dudes awaiting our arrival. But like a yoked oxen refusing to ford a river on the Oregon Trail, our imaginations would not budge. We couldn’t envision such a party because we couldn’t deny the truth: Most of those men would not have shown.
More wine!
“Where is he?” one of us asked, digging her hands into the pockets of her un-ripped jeans, the red discount tag on her just-bought floral blouse hanging from the collar (should we say something?). “Corbin should be back by now.”
“This is like Waiting for Godot,” said a fancy-ripped-jeans woman and another woman, in a cocktail dress, said, “Nah, this is like The Bachelor but in reverse. A gathering of all the ladies he has no hope of finding love with ever again.”
“The Bachelor?” said Ripped Jeans. “You watch that trash?”
We swiftly broke into four camps:
Camp 1) Those who watched The Bachelor in earnest (the smallest group).
Camp 2) Those who never watched it because they believed to do so would be to betray decades of feminism.
Camp 3) Those who hate-watched ironically and proudly, with lots of wine.
Camp 4) Those who hate-watched ironically but were sheepish about their irony because Corbin himself, along with several other ex‑boyfriends, had said that irony was toxic and mostly dead, that to be ironic about anything, to make fun of anything (particularly our own lovers), would cut away at our own capacity for unfiltered joy and connection, corrupting our twenty-first-century relationships with the cynical mores of the late ’90s.
For a moment we party guests seemed forevermore divided, but then a woman in a red dress from The Bachelor Camp 1 reached out to the poor tortured souls in The Bachelor Camp 4 (the majority in the room). “He loved talking about our cynical mores, didn’t he?” said the woman from Camp 1. “If I ever mocked Corbin just a little bit, in some small dry-humor way, he’d go off on me and make the joke seem like my ethical failure.”
“He was controlling.”
“He’d act like he had this moral high ground, just as a means of covert emotional manipulation.”
“But he had no moral high ground!” One of us stood up from her spot in a red leather chair. “He made me split the cost of Plan B with him once. I went in alone to the CVS and he stood outside and gave me twenty dollars and I said it’s forty and he said ‘Well, we were both kind of involved, right?’ even though he knew I was making minimum wage, and then he offered to buy me a fucking croissant.”
“What about the time he groped me during my office holiday party and acted like it was a joke even though I said no, Corbin, stop. Do you think he stopped? He tried to make it seem cute, later, like he was just so passionate, too attracted to me to resist.”
More and more came out. We had told him we weren’t ready for sex, we were not totally ready, and he had said what if we just talk all night, and had poured us tequila shots while proceeding to discuss his emotionally withdrawn mother for so many painful hours that we finally said okay, okay, screw us. He had given us a pair of expensive sunglasses he said he didn’t want, and then asked us, two weeks later, if he could have the sunglasses back. One of us – the discount-tag-still‑on woman – said in a small voice that she had never told this to anyone before, but that once Corbin had asked her what she would do if he punched her in the face, and when she looked horrified he said, “I’m just asking as a thought experiment,” and later on when she asked him if he remembered his aggression-laced question, he said no, and added that he was of course not trying to gaslight her, he earnestly did not remember pondering what she would do if he punched her in the face, he said, and he doubted he would ever utter something so violent, anyway.
The wind blew hot through the open door.
No Corbin, still.
We felt very close to one another now. His decision to clump us together had backfired. There was a new power in our togetherness. And a kind of relief. We were not alone in this.
We decided we needed to confront him. When he arrived with the wine, we would remind him of what he’d done, we would tell him our side of the story. The forced groping, the shaming, the tequila, the violent threats disguised as thought experiments, all of it, and it would become our performance.
But who should go first? Who should meet him at the door? We needed the person with the story we deemed the most damaging. The office party groping was bad, but the violent thought experiment, we decided, was even worse. We turned to the woman in the floral blouse with the tag still on, and we said, “You need to confront him. Tonight.”
“No. I’m not ready.” She shrunk into the couch. “I never even told that story before just now.”
But the rest of us demanded it. Corbin still wasn’t here so we had to demand something of somebody. We turned on her and said you will tell your story first, you will tell your story first, you must be brave, we all support you, we all believe you. She said, “I know you believe me.” She stared hard at the artful rip in the jeans of the woman next to her. “I just don’t feel ready to confront him.”
“We’re your sisters in this,” we said, “and we’re here for you.”
And we lifted her by her arms so she was standing and we pushed her, very gently, to the front of the room, to the front door, the tag swinging between her shoulder blades like the pendulum on a grandfather clock, and when she tried to escape back into the crowd of us, whispering, “I’m not totally ready,” we held her hands tightly and we said, “You’re ready” and some of us said, “We believe in you” and some of us said, “We believe you.” She said, “I told you already, I know you believe me.”
And she began to cry. Many of us were crying. Splotchy streaks blossomed on the sheet covering the woman dressed as a ghost. “This is such a powerful moment,” we said, clinging at her hands, pushing her forward, intoxicated by our choral force, and there was Corbin’s car pulling up, there it was, here he was at last.
We would love nothing more than to describe what happened next in detail. We would love to give a play-by-play of a climactic confrontation, to claim an identical sense of catharsis blanketed all of our selves as we crowded around him. If we could only slow this moment down, narrate the triumph we do, in fact, deserve. But when we wrote about the ex party later – in emails to dear friends, in op-eds about male privilege to local newspapers, in thinly veiled autobiographical fiction, in fragmented text messages to our lovers (both ex and current) – we each decided we didn’t want to go too much into Corbin’s arrival for different reasons. One of us claimed the actual confrontation was too typical, the kind of thing you’d see on any syndicated talk show, and that it was our coming together that was the real story. Another of us claimed to skip past Corbin’s arrival because the rising tension followed by the release of confronting Corbin mirrored traditional narrative structures, which mirrored male orgasms, and she wanted to engage in alternative forms of storytelling, especially given the subject matter she was dealing with. Another said Corbin had spent his whole damn life with a metaphorical megaphone in his hand, his voice always in the world, often in her head, and she wanted to keep his voice out of a party that was about our speaking, not his.
There was truth to all these statements. But none of them were all the way true, all the way honest.
The difficulty was that after the ex party, after Corbin left the country and hid out in Iceland for a while, taking his photographs of shadows shifting across snow or whatever, few of us would even remember what it had been like to look him in the eye and share our piece. What we remembered most was this: Pushing the crying woman in the floral blouse forward, murmuring into her all of our belief. The weight of her leaning back into our arms as she tried to get away from the front door – this, too, we remembered. She had not wanted to go first and we had made her.
So what, now we were supposed to feel guilty? After all we’d already been through just navigating the world with fallopian tubes? Was the guilt just some sneaky regressive feeling, imposed by years of being told by men to feel bad anytime we felt the least bit strong? Or was the guilt more real and true, something to take seriously? Or was that ache in our stomachs not guilt at all, but some other feeling that was harder to classify, to name? Should we address it not as guilt, but simply say to it, offhandedly, “Hi, you”?
Important to note: What we had done that night was not comparable to the real shit Corbin had done. We were trying to help. We were trying to tip the power balance. We were trying to curate the arc of our demands, the order of our stories. It was better than doing nothing. It was better than pretending all was fine. It was better than being Corbin’s subjects.
Yet still some of us would be haunted, later, by the woman’s words. “No, no, I’m not totally ready.” In spite of everything, in spite of our strength and rightness and in spite of the beauty we’d discovered not in our individual faces but in our togetherness, we would still find ourselves forgetting Corbin for long stretches, stretches during which we could recall only how we had forced ourselves so closely around the crying woman. How we had burned then with a new passion, hot with the ferocity of our best intentions.
Lee Conell is the author of the short story collection Subcortical (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Her stories have appeared in Chicago Tribune, Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Collagist, and Glimmer Train.