"Your brother is a good dancer."

A got my notebook back. Left it on Geo’s roof. Perfect balmy weather, like today, after dusk with few stars but a spectacular view of the Williamsburg bridge. I was warned that the sound system could bring the cops. I imagined dj’ing the whole lower-east side. “Alphabet city say ho-o.” “Williamsburg bridge put your hands in the air.” It wasn’t as lame live.
Good party, but I left my notebook and a good pen. Geo told A “someone left his life up here.” Lots of title-only reminders of ideas for short stories in there, diagrams of content-management databases, sketches and setlists, but A got it back for me.
At one point we were the few people dancing, A, me, and K, an opera singer from Germany, recently divorced and living on a couch, looking for a place to stay and talking about wanting to be pregnant (if that’s flirting, A finds it heavy-handed and off-putting, but he is magnetic and has to deal with what a lot of cute girls have to deal with, an imbalance of attention that’s too easy to win).
We are dancing and as I relax and do whatever I do without thinking, kind of restrained early evening dancing, cocktail party chatter on the furniture around the edges and by the buffet table and barbecue. K says to A: “Your brother is a good dancer.” I hear this and turn, say “Now I can’t do it,” and pout, hang my arms at my side, parody of childhood embarassment masking adult reenactment. I don’t get fully back into the swing again all night.