Excerpt from The Spectators by Jennifer duBois, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"God knows we don't come here for the ambience," says somebody, probably Paulie, on one or many evenings.

In the front room, all and sundry are picking up good vibrations; in the back room, the loneliness won't leave us alone. The women's room door swings open and reveals its royalty: the queens recently exiled from the Goldbug or the One-Two-Three. Everyone here comes from somewhere else: Milano's and Omega; Westchester and West Virginia; off-Broadway callbacks and the New York Stock Exchange. Our own group hails from rich Midwestern matriarchies and poor Howard Beach Catholics, St. Paul's preparatory academy and the St. Vincent's psych ward, the United States Navy and the Tisch School of the Arts. Brookie has recently returned from a stint in San Francisco which we will never, never stop hearing about. But wherever we have come from, tonight, we are here.

We dance, we drink, we lose each other. We sip from glasses streaked with grime and, it turns out later, hepatitis. We stare at boys with hiphuggers and teased hair; we stare at boys in stage make-up who do not necessarily work in the theater. A man we've known forever takes off his glasses, and we stare at him, too. Perhaps he catches us—perhaps we let him—and for a moment, the Dionysian evening stills to a single Apollonian face: even as the ephebes and catamites, concupiscent and riotous, dance all around us in the dark.

We stop at the wishing well—which is sometimes filled with ice, though usually with something less poignant: empty boxes, crates of beer. It doesn't matter: we did not come here to be prissy. We toast to the wish we all share—the one that is always the same, and that almost always comes true. And then we toss our coins, and sometimes they bounce back at us, and either way Brookie declares that tonight, he can feel it, is his lucky night.

Which, in a way, they all were.

Excerpted from The Spectators by Jennifer duBois. Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer duBois. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.