“—double fisting bottles of cheap wine. I’ll be peeking around the corner, hoping you don’t see me and ask me how I’ve been. Because I’d have to tell you that I’m still pouring daiquiris at bar mitzvahs and writing speeches for strangers who actually have lives worth celebrating. That I still get drunk and go home with strangers I never see again. That I haven’t fixedany aspect of my life. I don’t want to go through that with you. I don’t want…” Her face scrunches up suddenly. “I don’t want to see you with a fucking wife and kid someday.”
Her chest heaves a little bit and tears start to stream down her cheeks. Josh looks away, moving his jaw, tensing against the impulse to allow his own eyes to well up.
“I’m so tired of crying in front of you!” she shouts. “I don’t do this. I’m not like this.”
It feels like some third person has pressed pause on the scene and Josh sees the whole thing like it’s playing out with two actors and he’s just some voyeuristic creep, watching an irate asshole yell at a woman who seems to close in on herself a little bit more with each volley. He waits until her crying jag subsides and she sniffles.
“How do you know we wouldn’t be buying organic grapes together in four years?” Ari’s expression changes, but not in a way that helps him decipher any kind of meaning. “I will buy you whatever fucking grapes you want. The kombucha.” He pauses. “The stroller. All of it.”
She looks exhausted. “I don’t want to get lost in someone else. I need to do something with my own life.”
It feels like a half-hearted tug-of-war; the harder he pulls on the rope, the more it frays.
“What the hell do you thinkmylife is like?” He stands up again, needing the higher ground, pacing in a tight circle. “I’m a complete fucking failure. My dad worked himself to death for forty years keeping his business afloat for my sister and me. And I killed it in a matter of months. Every morning I wake up and remember that I failed him in every possible way and it’s too late to repair it. I have no job, no friends, and I make up a bunch of stupid bullshit to do until it’s time to go to sleep and do it allover again.” He stops pacing. “Do you realize the only thing I look forward to every fucking day is talking to you?”
“That’s exactly why this won’t work. You failedone timeand you act like this pathetic victim of circumstance. Nothing’s stopping you from trying again except your own ego. No one exiled you. And I don’twantto be the only person you can talk to. I don’t want you to take care of me. I’m an adult.”
“Since when?” He should probably back the fuck off but everything’s gone a step too far to walk it back. “Seems to me that you’d rather be nipple piercings and bong vapor.”
Ari stares at him, eyes wide with a combination of anger and shock—like he’d just stabbed her in the stomach with a bayonet. He feels a momentary flair of regret but he can’t back down.
“I’m not waiting for more time to pass. I’ve wasted enough of my fucking life. I’m not going backward. You’re not going to insult me and pretend like we can just be friends again.”
He looks into her eyes until he sees the tears well up again, and she yanks the rope back.
“I don’t owe you a relationship just because we had sex.”
Josh stumbles back a couple steps toward the door. He’s supposed to be looking at his fucking girlfriend. He’s supposed to be soaking in the new relationship energy, letting himself replay the “I love you” over and over in his head, finally allowing himself to believe it. He’s supposed to have his face buried in her pussy, with her thighs pressing against his ears, so he can just barely hear her moaning.
But instead he’s looking at yet another person who just wants him to fucking disappear.
Fine.FINE.
Fuck. All. Of. This.
She can have her wish.
He steps over the shirts strewn around the floor. Walking out to the kitchen, he picks his coat and his fucking overnight bag up off the floor, grabs his knife roll, and silently exits the apartment.
She can keep the pasta machine. Let it collect dust in storage.
He leaves their dinner in the oven to burn.
23
ARI’S OFFICIAL TITLE IS “JUNIORsolutions enabler” for the first two weeks of employment at WinProv LLC. Her duties include picking up her boss, Brad Hoenig (founder/CEO/head improveneur/agent of fun #1), from a variety of airports. Driving Brad around is the easiest gig she’s had in years, even if she suspects she’s doing it because he has a suspended license.
Brad’s real name is Brian but he A/B tested first names five years ago and found that “Brad” is snappier. He’s A/B tested every aspect of WinProv, including the color of the shirts his “enablers” wear for each workshop (cobalt blue—green shirts are “aggressively unfunny”). He wears a pair of wraparound sunglasses pushed up on his forehead an inch and a half above his eyes. Ari frequently finds herself staring into the reflective black abyss of the sunglass lenses as he quotes Louis C.K. bits.
He puts Ari up in a studio apartment in one of those beige corporate housing complexes with stiff, uncomfortable furniture and a tiny coffee maker. It looks like a place a newlyseparated dad would occupy for a few months while he sorts out his shit.
Ari hadn’t brought much with her. The day before she took the train down to D.C., she packed a few odds and ends inside liquor store boxes and took a Lyft over to Radhya’s.
“This is ridiculous,” Radhya had said as Ari pushed the boxes into her tiny foyer with her boot. “You don’t have to leave the state because of Kestenberg.” It was probably the fifth time Rad had expressed this sentiment.
“This isn’t about him,” Ari insisted. “It’s a good opportunity for me.”
“I’m shocked I haven’t gotten another series of unhinged texts from him.” Rad leaned over to examine the remainder of Ari’s stuff—an assortment of random-but-precious shit that couldn’t fit in her suitcase (an aloe plant she’d managed not to kill, the blue-and-white bowl that she’d seriously considered leaving in the cabinet as some stupid show of poetic justice before chickening out). Everything else had been sold, curbed, or donated. “Since when do you have a pasta machine?”
