The Party Is Here

By Georgina Beaty

A memorable, edgy debut exploring the climate crisis and young women on the verge of transformation

Edgy and darkly humourous, these stories introduce us to women grappling with climate, fertility, and their relationships with each other, all as they teeter on the verge of transformation. A figure skater in a warming world quits, only to find herself embroiled in the politics of ice; a graduate student becomes progressively unhinged as she reports on the unravelling of her Patagonia research project; an artist finds an unconventional use for her own frozen eggs; a park ranger at Joshua Tree National Park goes to extreme lengths to save his beloved tortoises.

In this daring debut, Georgina Beaty offers a bold, nuanced look at our turbulent times, fearlessly probing the ambitions and confusions of her generation. Wholly unexpected yet wildly entertaining, The Party Is Here slants the world to speak to the uncanny truth of modern life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Freehand Books
• Release date: Sep 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781988298948

Georgina Beaty

Georgina Beaty is a writer and actor. Her fiction has appeared in The Walrus, New England Review, The New Quarterly, PRISM, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. Originally from Canmore, Alberta, she is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Book preview

NATHASHERPES

NAT WAS HEADED BACK from the library when she heard someone yell, get a bike light, asshole! She turned around, ready to defend, and there was Shannon, wind-whipped cheeks, biking up beside her. At the red light, Shannon said, I’m going to this art opening at another bar, come.

Where?

Another bar.

What? No. I can’t. I have an essay due.

It’s Friday night.

The light turned green and they biked on, Shannon in front. Low-riding cars pumping Drake slid past them and lit up their shins.

Here!

Nat looked up at the sign: Another Bar. Her bare hands stung on the cold metal breaks. She pushed aside balloons attached to a sandwich board announcing Max Friend’s Exhibition. He sounds like a children’s entertainer, she said as she locked up her bike.

Shannon grabbed Nat’s hand and pulled her in. Nat had told herself she wouldn’t drink until exams were over but she hadn’t been out in two months. Having the thought seemed like enough — she could hold both truths — not drink, and pop into Another Bar for just one.

---

THE VIRUS CURLS at the base of the spine, like a snake under the fridge. Many people have a snake under their fridge, they just don’t know it. Lucky. Once you do know, it’s impossible to un-know.

---

BEER WAS THE ONLY WORD on the chalk-board above the bar. Nat was relieved not to have choices. The bartender (bowl haircut, nails painted toxic green) asked to see Nat’s ID and she already had it in hand. They looked her over and said, you’re shitting me. It was just because Nat was small, five foot two, with an upturned nose and a bra-size that hadn’t changed since grade six — a genetic fluke that enabled her past decade of work as an actor, eternally playing the precocious teenager. It was part of the reason she’d gone back to university, in search of a job where the way she physically presented wasn’t her sole currency, where she could be her actual age, thirty-three. The bartender poured a beer, as if doing Nat a favour.

Nat looked around at Max Friend’s art exhibition, which seemed to consist of pillows. Pillows on plinths, pillows attached to the wall. Touch me, said signs beside or beneath the pillows, and people were doing so. The bar was about the size of a small flower shop — maybe it used to be one. Nat arced around the art, as if it might force participation on her, and made her way over to Shannon and a few other friends. The frames on their glasses looked like the ones their moms wore in the ’80s. The zippers on their jumpsuits glinted in the light. The golden seams reminded Nat of the chrysalides of monarch butterflies from when she was a kid — little green packets of transformation attached to fork tines by a strand. One summer she’d been impatient and had opened a chrysalis too early. An ooze of half-digested biology slopped out, not a half-formed anything.

No way! one of the women in the group was saying to another, no way!

Nat had missed what the no way was about. She shouldn’t have come to the bar, should have just kept her transformation quiet, stayed away until she had finished school and could say, I am a new thing, with some degree of conviction.

A gust of cold air sliced through the bar and their knot tightened in. One of the women — Nat had acted in a show with her — asked what Nat was up to and because Nat didn’t want to get into ‘urban resiliency in the case of extreme weather events’ right at that moment, she held up her beer and said, drinking.

They laughed and moved on — updates on lovers, political upheaval, the difference between authentic and manufactured desire. Nat felt the gravitational pull towards these friends who were doing what she used to think was the only thing that mattered. Really, she did still act, still went for the parts, still wanted to belong to this informal group of the permanently auditioning — all so busy, so beautiful, so tired.

One of the women was talking about Tblisi, where she’d recently shot a film. She showed a picture she’d taken of walnuts strung together on a black thread and dipped into a pomegranate casing, a food meant to sustain soldiers who had to walk long distances, that was now sold as a novelty in long, red, bulbous loops in markets in Georgia.

I know it looks like anal beads but it’s sooo delicious. She talked about the one scene she had with George Clooney, who, in spite of his extraordinary fame, was the sweetest guy, totally genuine, the real deal.

Nat went to get another beer.

---

TO PREVENT AN OUTBREAK, the medical literature advises: avoid fatigue, stress, menstruation, heightened emotions, wind, cold, heat, and late afternoon sunshine. Suddenly, the world is revealed. The night-seeking vampires, the werewolf who transforms when feelings overwhelm, the ghosts without temporality — all just another way to say, herpes.

---

NAT WAS STANDING by the snack table, scraping orange Cheezie powder from her finger with her teeth, when she saw Evan, her last long-term boyfriend. He was next to a woman, in front of the pillows mounted on the wall, so it looked like they were sleeping standing up. Nat felt a dull, low sense of replace-ability. The woman’s hair was slightly longer than Nat’s, she was a bit taller, probably kinder, but otherwise, the similarity between them was uncanny.

Nat didn’t want to be seen, so she turned towards the art and reached out to touch a nearby pillow. It was cold and hard, not soft. She retracted as though she’d bitten into something sweet only to taste salt. A guy standing nearby saw her pull back and laughed. He was tall, Diane Arbus tall — like the one where the giant goes to visit his parents at Christmas and has to bend to fit in the room. Nat knocked on the pillow and there was a hollow, deep tone. It’s a cheap trick, she said to the man.

I’ve heard that before, said the artist she would soon know as Max Friend.

---

A SNAKE IS ALSO KNOWN as a herp, from the Greek for creeping. It’s an etymological clusterfuck. Snakes do not creep. Snakes wind in a never-ending s across the floor, like a river trapped in a membrane. The effect of a herp strike (where its tongue flicks, lesions erupt), that vesicular disruption could be called creeping, but really, the nomenclature is all wrong.

---

YOU HAVE TO COME OVER, said Shannon. It’s an emergency.

She was waiting out front of her apartment building when Nat arrived.

Are you okay?

Shannon held out a boule of sourdough, scored beautifully.

Bread? Is the emergency?

Jeff has made at least one loaf, every day, since we moved in together. Should I be worried?

About yourself or him?

In Shannon’s apartment, there were bowls covered with tea towels on every surface. The smell, sweet and yeasty, made Nat want to curl up and go to sleep.

I want to end it all because he’s taken up baking? It makes no sense. Psychologize me!

Nat smiled. Ecology, not psychology.

Then give me that!

Nat peeked in at the different stages of leavening. I don’t know if sustainability plans have anything useful to say about the, like, touching domesticity of your soon-to-be-husband.

Shannon raised the coffee pot, a question, and Nat nodded, glancing at the Post-its, Jeff’s notes to himself (Rising, halved sugar, potato flour, 6 p.m.).

Shannon poured them both a coffee then slumped to the floor in the corner between two cabinets. He starts kneading these fleshy blobs while talking about our plans for the future and I get so enraged. I just want smash something. Like, go buy teacups, so that I can smash them. She was wearing a thick golden necklace that twisted around and snaked up and away from her neck, casually rejecting gravity.

Does he expect you to do anything in return for all the bread-making?

What? Like cook dinner or give him a blowjob or something? No. I mean, I do. Or, no, I never cook dinner, but, see, that’s what I mean! He’s great. What’s wrong with me?

They smoked a joint on the small balcony. It was warm enough to stand shivering outside. The loaf of bread came with them — crystals of salt, flecks of rosemary. Shannon dangled it from one end — it was the size of a baby. Nat felt the urge to rescue it, so she did, then placed it on the railing.

Nat did get around to asking about the pillow artist — Max — and Shannon said, oh yeah, he’s poly.

Nat took that to mean that a) he had inoculated himself against intimacy and b) his dance card was full, which was just as well. She hadn’t had sex in the past six months, since ending things with Evan, and accident was starting to give way to intent. Why not just keep it up, finish the degree, and then either think about it — sex, love — or not. The wind picked up and a window-cleaning platform on the apartment building opposite swayed on its ropes.

The bread fell from the fourth-floor balcony. They both looked over. It had landed on its base, the golden-brown boule looking up, still hopeful. Fuck, said Shannon. I love him so much.

---

THE SNAKE BEGINS to shed. It leaves a dried-out semi-translucent replica of itself behind — a sign. Before it strikes, there’s contraction in, a tingling — you can feel it if attuned. Something like desire.

---

EVEN WHEN NAT AND MAX did begin some manner of dating, as of course they did, she held onto the belief that it meant nothing, even as he finger-fucked her on the table. He was, his words, fluid-bonded with his other partner, ________, who he didn’t call his primary, because he didn’t believe in hierarchy, but she was the one with whom he spent five days of the week, who had met his child and so on.

Max liked to talk about systems and how monogamy served capitalism. There was something more biologically natural about having multiple intimacies, emotional and physical. Nat found it hard enough to make two days a week for one person, let alone have romantic relationships with several people, but she was curious about Max, attracted to him. While he defined it as ethical non-monogamy, Nat told Shannon that they had a pinhole relationship. They each had little openings into each other’s lives that accumulated into constellations. A WhatsApp message he recorded of his five-year-old daughter singing over and over in an atonal way, dear dear what is the matter dear, dear dear what is the matter dear. A picture of a new sculpture he was working on, trying to get wood to look like water. He sent a video of fragments of ice slushing up at the shore of the beach like a million broken windshields. _________ must have been there, but out of frame.

Nat did tell Max that discrete space felt preferable, she wouldn’t have liked to be _________ in that moment, so his curation of their pinhole relationship changed slightly.

Max was curious about Nat’s feelings. How did it make her feel when they met up after he had been away for the weekend at a wedding with _________? Or when he came straight to meet her after a night at _________’s place? At a certain point it started to feel like he was asking Nat how she felt about his aunt’s crochet hobby or the fact that he played in a rec hockey league on Wednesday nights — he was asking about something that didn’t seem to be in relation to her. She wasn’t responding in the way he expected, or even the way she thought she might have responded, which was what? Jealousy? No. She didn’t feel that.

You carry so well, he said, after telling her about adding a new lover into his mix. And she liked being someone who could carry. She liked his idiosyncratic turns of phrase, liked their time on deck, found the way he always had a theory to justify the way he wanted to behave amusing. She liked that he was wrong-sized for the world, his crow’s feet from smiling, the line-sketched tattoos, and that he gave her space, which gave her room to want him.

She did sometimes have the feeling (when he’d say that unfortunately they couldn’t meet up Saturday, or that he was busy on her birthday) of pressing into a bruise, a bruise that she didn’t know existed, from a fall she didn’t remember. But pressing it came with an attendant burst of adrenaline. She was interested in what would happen next and was glad there wasn’t a fixed narrative about how the relationship would develop.

It seemed to make him feel better to say, Your work is your other partner.

No. She did think this was important to clarify. My work is just my work.

---

IF THE SNAKE COMES OUT from under the fridge, you can’t make it go back. There’s nothing to do but wait, observe the complex shades of your own unease, note the trail it leaves as it slithers around everything you thought of as yours, as though you are in its home and not the other way around. It will go back eventually, on its own terms, in its own time.

---

MAX AND NAT MADE a roast chicken dinner together and his phone kept buzzing so he took the call from _______ in the other room. It turned out that _______ had just gotten into a minor fender-bender and was, understandably, rattled. Go, Nat said.

It’s my night with you. How will you feel?

Go. It’s fine.

When they next had a date night, they went to an interview with someone who’d written a book called How Minds Change. They sat in the auditorium on plastic chairs, the room filling up, waiting for the event to start and she did say to him, you never need anything from me. And I can’t ask you for anything either.

He could call Nat anytime, he could show up for a spontaneous lunch, but she couldn’t do the same.

Then buck, he said. Ask. He squeezed her leg. I’m here. Try me.

I am trying.

He shook his head and smiled. You’re such a tough guy.

NAT WAS READING about community-designed adaptations to desertification. On her study breaks she updated Max, unleashing long monologues into WhatsApp that he could listen to on his own time — then a day later the pings of his side of the conversation piled up. She would wait to listen to his messages, meting them out as an intermittent reward. This long, snaking, out-of-time WhatsApp dialogue about ideas — she couldn’t describe what it all amounted to, but it was sustaining.

Nat was trying to figure out how to make a community’s climate resilience plan actionable. She suspected a community would not act in accordance with its theoretical values (preservation, inclusion, etc.) unless they first felt safe themselves. One couldn’t divorce urban ecology from feeling. People needed to make adaptive decisions from a place of calm, but how could they do that when the actual disaster was only increasing?

She and Max went for long walks in real time. She talked about how Toronto could build another layer of city, a whole level up, for pedestrian life and easier access to nature — though more and more it seemed like the second level might be a necessity rather than a utopic solution. The ground level was prone to flooding.

Max sent Nat ambient music to help her study but all of it sounded like there was some sort of emergency, a fire alarm in the background. She liked not liking things from him. Then he sent a playlist of songs she loved, and she hated that she loved it, and played it on repeat. Press-in-bruise.

Lying in bed together, he acknowledged, there are limits, of course there are limits. But, he said, you have limits too.

From the bed she could see the little pile of empties from their date that night, ready to go out to recycling, evidence gone. _______’s jacket was hanging with his clothes — black with Mondrian accents, considered, mature. Nat thought she’d probably like _______.

In the morning, Nat helped pull off his sheets for laundry. There were blood stains from other women’s menstruation on the mattress.

You don’t have to do that, he said.

I don’t mind. And she didn’t. So much laundry involved in ethical non-monogamy.

Then, somehow they’d been seeing each other six months.

---

HERO GIRL — Sixteen. Hard punk-exterior but genuine, AUTHENTIC at heart. DO NOT submit your client if they have food restrictions. Required to eat Sausage McMuffin.

Nat was still going for auditions, even though she’d said to herself that she wasn’t going to take the time away from school. If she were authentic enough to book a national commercial, she could cover six months of tuition in one day. Biking to casting, she thought a bug had landed in her eye. That was the first hint.

In the overcrowded bathroom with a sign that said, Actors, this is not your personal dressing room! she leaned close to the mirror while the others put in fake nose rings (hard-punk exterior), let their loose powder fall in the sink, and she saw a snot-like gob of white floating on the green iris of her eye. She used a tissue to get it out, pretending to wipe at her eyeliner, then pulled on a black toque to cover up the wrinkles on her forehead — sixteen.

In the waiting room, she saw Sam, a former roommate she’d slept with years earlier, who was going out for the role of Dad. They were the same age. They did the hey-how-are-you-what-a coincidence-thing, and he said, God, we’ll probably get called in together. Yikes. When their names were called at the same time, he nodded at Nat. Here we go.

They stood on the tape on the carpet and slated. Natalie Renaud. Sam Walker.

There were three men and one woman seated behind a table, the camera was in one corner and beside it was a white flip chart with the scene written out. The spot was called: Unconditional.

DAD asleep in bed, the phone rings.

CUT TO: Dad’s car pulls up in front of a raging house party. HERO GIRL gets in car.

CLOSE on McDonald’s 24 HOUR SIGN.

Car goes through the drive-thru.

CUT TO: DAD and HERO GIRL sit in the car eating McMuffins as the sun rises.

V.O.: McDonald’s. We’re there for you. Unconditionally.

When the Casting Director called action, Nat pretended to be leaving a party, mime-opened a car door, and sat on a plastic chair next to Sam. He put a hand on her shoulder and improvised a line. You okay, kid?

Unbidden, she remembered his cock in her ass and that, as he came, he’d said, I’m going to fill you with milk, which she’d never heard before or since. Whatever passed across her face must have looked authentic enough, because she booked it, baby.

While all the other actors went to the bathroom to