I have described the peculiar quality of the interior’s appearance and indeed one could perpetually feel that strangeness, even when the house was packed to capacity and the music turned up to a level at which you could feel it in your chest and barely make out the mouthed scream of the person at your side. Long departed was Willy Mann’s Uncle’s Woman, but the aura of her—of her peculiar architectural imagination—remained a powerful—at times, overpowering—presence: the indelible remnant of her eccentric yet august taste.

I was then going through a phase of my youth in which I generally disliked meeting new people but enjoyed the feeling of encountering familiar faces without ever having to make their acquaintance, allowing them to disappear from memory until the next occasion their appearance produced some flicker of recognition.

Inevitably, it seemed, I would encounter “that guy” or “that girl” from the last party at Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House, but they remained only that. And it reassured me to come across them, early or late in the evening’s revelry, standing as they always did, saying the same things, dressed not much different from the last time, signature drink in hand. I was always happy to see them and they me.

“Hey girl,” or “What’s up, man,” I would say, and they would offer something in kind as we floated past each other like soul ships in the night bound for separate, far off ports. Then it would be over between us; nothing more ever was said. Seldom did we cross paths more than once per party, unless pure coincidence conspired to have us briefly glimpse one another emerging from a bathroom or straightening from an open cooler, shaking ice and water from a free hand. Such secondary chance meetings might elicit a smile or a wave but nothing more. Words were out of the question. Indeed, even so much as uttering each other’s names—if in fact we knew them—would ruin the precious magic we enjoyed in being “that guy” or “that girl” to one another and destroy the comfort each afforded the other by way of that curious near-anonymity on a more or less weekly basis.

On the particular Friday night we had kidnapped Baby Jesus prior to our arrival at Willy Mann’s Uncle’s House (on the later side of things, as it happened), I found myself, having performed my customary survey of the kitchen, standing with two couples the girls of which I knew vaguely—neither too well, nor too little—and the boys not at all, which was just as I preferred. I had slept with the girls within a few weeks of each other the previous summer, but each of the trysts had been more or less understood as frivolous even at the times of their unfoldings, which allowed us all to remain on more or less comfortable speaking terms, albeit a little guarded if a current love interest or two happened to be on hand.

The looks, names, even the personalities, of these two girls I took to be more or less interchangeable, and when I smiled at each of them I enjoyed no luck at all in recalling which I had slept with first.