“Given your previous experience with Josh, it didn’t seemas simple as calling you up and saying, ‘Hey, I want to tell you about this guy I know.’ ”
“But it was easier to sneak around behind my back?” Radhya takes another drag of the cigarette.
Ari opens her mouth to dispute this interpretation of events, but instead, what comes out is a trite analogy. “It’s like…I got pushed into the water. But it’s not a nice, heated pool. There’s no shallow end. I got shoved over the railing of theTitanic.”
“Say what happened. Cass pushed you. Stop using the passive voice.”
“I’ve been treading water and I’m so exhausted that I can’t bring myself to”—Ari inhales a back-alley-scented breath—“like, wave my hands and shout for help.”
“I’m right here, offering you help, and you’re waiting for Kestenberg to rescue you?”
“No,” Ari says, her voice full of conviction. “He’s in the water, too. We’re both clinging to the same shitty piece of debris.”
“According to that metaphor you’re drowning in open water with someone who shoved my head underwater and never looked back.” Radhya exhales a cloud of smoke. “Don’t be the Leo in this situation. Don’t let him hog that fucking door.”
“I’m not the Leo.” Ari’s never actually seenTitanicbut she knows the reference from the memes. “He’s mostly just…going through a self-loathing thing.” It feels like a slight relief to swivel the spotlight away from her and onto Josh and Radhya. “He doesn’t even cook anymore. I think he’d like to apologize to you.” Even as she says it, she can’t quite remember him actually stating that.
Radhya stubs out the cigarette. “I’m not interested in being the next stop on his journey of ‘listening and learning.’ ” Shegroans like someone twenty years older than she is as she stands up from the milk crate. “I should get back inside.” She pulls the kitchen door halfway open and hesitates. “Did you at least talk to my lawyer?”
There’s an odd swell of nerves in the pit of Ari’s stomach. “How bad is it to send your ex a topless selfie from the bathroom of a divorce lawyer’s office? Asking for a friend.”
Radhya turns around to look at her. “Tell your friend dubcon nudes are…not great.”
“I’m self-medicating.”
“Meet me at Johnny’s in an hour?” Ari nods, her giant exhalation creating a cloud in the cold air. “You’re buying the drinks, Twattie.”
—
“HOW HAVE YOU LIVED INthe city for eight years and never been to the Frick?” Josh asks in a tone that’s both exasperated and reverently hushed. “It’s basic cultural lit—”
“Literacy. I know, I’m a heathen.”
Late afternoon light streams through the glass windows of the Fragonard Room, illuminating gilded sculptures, porcelain vases, and a series of large paintings that the label describes as “exuberant depictions of romance.” Josh and Ari have been wandering through the museum for almost two hours. Well,wanderingis generous. It’s more accurate to say that Josh has been coaxing and sometimes literally dragging her between the wings.
“Let’s see,” Ari says, glancing at the panels depicting subjects who definitely lost their heads to the guillotine. “I’m not interested in robber barons, colonialism, or celebrating thousands of years of sexism.”
“Is there anything that’s not problematic for you?”
“Are you suggesting that I shouldn’t have unzipped my hoodie to reveal mykillmonger was rightT-shirt in front of the docent?”
Josh stops in front of a giant mirrored mantelpiece and meets her eye in the reflection. “This is one of my favorite places in the city,” he says. “It hasn’t changed in…I don’t know, a hundred years? I’m not going to apologize because a wealthy industrialist once bought a Persian rug.”
“ ‘Bought’?” She lets out a littlecough—“white male privilege”—cough cough,but Josh isn’t listening.
He’s stopped in front of an enormous painting of a torturously corseted lady swooning at a foppish man in a wig. A small crowd is gathered around a heavyset man in a Nike baseball cap. He gets down on one knee and holds out a small box to a young woman in jeans and a Florida State sweatshirt.
It’s not that Ari begrudges anyone else the whole fantasy of “that moment.” But the trappings of weddings conjure up memories of terse phone calls with lawyers and an empty, silent apartment rather than flower girls and passages from Corinthians.
Endings like that have a way of overshadowing beginnings.
The woman tearfully nods and embraces Nike Hat. Josh continues watching, as people in the small crowd clap and take pictures of the newly engaged strangers. He turns and gives Ari a cryptic look, and she forces a sort-of smile, because that seems like the appropriate response to witnessing an engagement. But ten seconds later, she feels an urgent need to escape the imposing confines of the gallery, the fawning well-wishers, the smell of tourists sweating into their winter coats. Josh follows her out of the entrance hall, close enough that she catches the subtle botanical scent of his cologne.
“No commentary?” he asks as they exit into the cold early evening air of Seventieth Street.
“Well, for eighteen dollars I’m sure I could have written him a more memorable proposal.” Ari buttons her coat, thinking. “They’ll get married, have two kids, and Florida State will drag herself out of bed one morning, stare at the motivational word art on her desk, and realize that maybe shedoesn’twant to be trapped in a domestic jail cell with Nike Hat for the next fifty years.”
“So, they’re yet another couple destined to meet an untimely demise,” he says, a shade of weariness in his voice.
