Why I Love Being the Stranger at the Party

There are a number of ways to end up at a party you weren’t invited to.

There are a number of ways to end up at a party you weren’t invited to, ranging from being the tagalong to getting absorbed into something to straight-up crashing. I sometimes enjoy being in a room where everyone is a mystery and I could be anyone—between the periphery and the possible, something other than revelry is visible. Parties are the vaccine to isolation, fortifying our sociability but occasionally causing some funky residual sensations. If get-togethers are about having fun among loved ones, they are also about consciously not being alone.

The term party can describe a broad spectrum of events. There’s the small affair for a relaxed bunch of close friends, or an exclusive collection of purposeful players; the occasion and the occasion spinoff (e.g., the wildness of bachelor/ette night, at odds with the formality of the wedding reception); the dinner party (an evening of elegance—but also, tellingly, a popular setting for murder mysteries); the office holiday shindig (utter drudgery, or the origin of marriage-ruining scandal); the birthday bash; the house throw-down. Then there’s the verb form, used most often in the context of a violent-sounding event: the “rager” or “banger.” To me, it is this kind of occasion where the need to beat loneliness and find escapism is most palpable.

I recently ended up at one such night on a rooftop. I hadn’t been invited; my friend brought me to be her wing-woman. After adding my bottle of rosé to the table and pouring a not insignificant amount in my red cup, I turned to look at all the people I didn’t know. They were milling around under looming, inflated arches that domed over the rooftop like a flaccid cross, lit up in changing neon colors. For almost every new arrival—women in tight black and gold, guys in muscle tees—there was a fanfare of euphoric shouts, twirling hugs.

I watched the light shrink back to a pinpoint, the Manhattan skyline darkening against a backdrop of periwinkle and sherbet. By eleven p.m., the place was so packed it was as if the neon amoeba overhead had eaten us—we were one indistinct mass. My friend had disappeared with a guy who had come to talk to us, but really to her. Our mission complete, I was now a free agent, bored and a little drunk in the field, so I indulged my anthropological interest in the psyche of a male subspecies: “the bro.”

Many bros approached me that night with a question I once thought lazy: “What do you do?” which is a different version of “Why are you here?”

If I’m mildly dishonest with the people I meet at parties, I’m honest with myself about when it’s all in good fun, and when it’s a method of survival as an outsider. In survival mode, the deception isn’t singular or blatant, but cloak-like, a performance of poise to match the outfit I’ll wear in a room of confidence-suffocating egos. This particular night was about fun; posing as a food packaging developer, I was confusing to the bros. They seemed frustrated by the extra effort it took to contextualize me, and I realized that bros, too, have a biological clock. It measures the hours at a party, not the years of a uterus, and if they don’t commit to something early enough, the night and its potential hook-ups will pass them by.

Alcohol and the almost visible throb of music blurred the dark and neon on the rooftop. Couples that ground together were clumsy, but many of the partiers were on a drug cocktail that left them dancing by themselves. The place pulsated with mania, fantasy, desperation, a rave thrown by millennial Gatsby. At carousals like these, with the senses totally overwhelmed, you become either your most uninhibited self or a weird avatar whose shocking actions will later be relayed to you by the one person who remembers enough to fill in everyone else’s unformed memories. Lost mental reels become legends—the lies are built retroactively; the performance everyone gave becomes a truth.

*

In a city that considers “fake it till you make it” words to live by, sometimes simply showing up to the party is the lie. The game is less that of infiltrator and more impostor; it’s not that you’re not supposed to be there, but you (and, you fear, all those you talk to) are wondering why you are.

This was my life in too many fashion weeks past; because of my job at a glossy magazine, I was often told last-minute to go in place of someone actually important. Fashion parties happen around shows that are about the art of appearance, but artistry often gets left on the catwalk while scrutiny continues to stomp around the room. Over a few seasons, I made some tall Estonian friends, but it’s hard to make conversation with people who don’t take off their sunglasses, even indoors at ten p.m. It took me three Septembers to realize that those people were hiding behind their shades. If I was the impostor, at least I was hiding in plain sight.

At the age of twenty-four, I attended a very fancy work party; I wasn’t invited to be there, I was obligated. It was in an old bar in midtown with a lot of brass edges, large gilded mirrors, velour booth seats, oil paintings of jungle animals. Famous actors mixed with Pulitzer winners and editors. I had arrived late and stressed—en route I’d realized my bra straps were visible, so I had to stop and buy one that worked with my dress. Moving through the room, I heard men having conversations: My biography on David Foster Wallace took me six years. Oh, did you interview my first wife, M—? They dated before we married.

I maneuvered my way to a booth to chat with a young writer I kind of knew who had his dry cleaning with him because he’d picked it up on the way there. We hid in our booth together. Behind us, trapped among a cluster of mostly old white men, was Toni Morrison, who looked like she was having as good a time as you might expect.

*

That was a few years ago. Now, my friends, peers, and I are in the sophomore phase of adulthood and I feel less like a fraud on such evenings. But my favorite affairs involve just a handful of close friends and feel familial. Those gatherings are wonderful for us in the same way, as the Tolstoyan thinking goes, that yours are wonderful for you. I’ve been lucky to experience something magnetic traveling through a small collection of humans in a room.

A small group of known peers, however, doesn’t ensure an intimate get-together, even though that’s what the invitation always says. In fact, with so little to distract, if the chemistry at the dining table is off, the result is a level of awkwardness that David Lynch would tip into horror. The notion behind dinner soirées is one person thinking, “You all should meet!” so of course sometimes that person is wrong.

I was flying solo at one such evening and felt a little self-conscious about it—but at least this was a party I was invited to. I knew only the host and I don’t move in her echelon of society, which makes me a guest she brings to the table presumably “for variety.” But with my coat removed and the cocktail of the evening placed in my hand in one swift motion by a caterer, my fear lessened. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave a wraparound view of Manhattan from the table. Sitting among the candles and wildflower table settings, I realized I was inside one of the Swarovski towers that glittered outside.

Our host was practiced at this kind of evening, but even with the wine pouring, the evening’s mixture of personalities didn’t effervesce. Some hosts wilt as their failure mushrooms over the table; others become irritable, eyes darting around for the guest to blame, trying to isolate the patient zero of dullness. That’s what happened in this instance. I glanced up to see if anyone had noticed I’d picked all of the cranberries out my slice of soft cheese, and saw the host, from her place at the head of the table, staring at a woman two seats over. The woman was listening intently to a man expounding on the philanthropic value of community opera. She broke and ate her cheese and crackers with nimble fingers. “I’m sorry, dear,” the host said with a smile, leaning towards the woman, “remind me of your name. I don’t think J— introduced you.”

The woman looked at her, confused. “I’m not with J—.” Heads turned to the opera activist for confirmation that this person was a stranger to him. He put his hands up as if to say not guilty. I am someone who relishes a good squirm, but I have experienced no sensation like watching and listening to the slow discovery that this woman didn’t know anyone at the table, had not been invited, was meant to be at a dinner party in the apartment above this one, and had sat here for three courses actively participating in stilted conversation.

She said she had to be going. I don’t know if everything she said through the courses was a lie, what kind of kick she got out of being at that dinner, but she must have realized that she had the wrong gathering and remained with us anyway. I do know that she raised the bar for me when it comes to my own uninvited attendance at parties.

Whether joyful, stuffy, alienating, or unforgettable, all gatherings have one constant: They are fascinating renderings of how we try to socially navigate our world. Watching people whose words and reactions I can’t predict in a setting where, at once, we are all both unguarded and performing, I see how we show affection, attempt to walk the invisible hierarchies, place and move our physicality among other bodies. In other words, an invitation—or the lack of it—is the least of reasons to go to a party.