Vin slides his well-worn wallet out of its well-worn home in his back pocket and places well-worn cash between the salt and pepper shakers.
Two men start yelling at one another down the street and St. Michel takes the distraction to slide Vin’s cash into my front pocket. I start to protest but he kisses the back of my hand and firmly shakes his head.
The two men are yelling at one another still, but walking backwards and the yells are fading and Vin turns back to the table, standing and tugging me to my feet. “Bedtime,” he says, and makes my stomach flip. St. Michel would probably roll his eyeballs right out of his head if he knew that Vin meantseparatebedtime.
We cheek-kiss and then he’s waving us down the street. I’m loose with wine and happy. Unless it’s with Raff, Vin and I almost never socialize together. Like ever. And tonight he charmed the pants off Esther and tried to buy St. Michel a bottle of wine.
“Hey.” I nudge him lightly with my elbow. “St. Michel was flirting with you.”
“Sure.”
“Well, what the hell?”
Vin laughs. “He helped me out with a project. We spent a few hours talking. Became friends. Sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“Seriously, what is this project you got framed?”
He’s obviously irritated that St. Michel even brought it up in the first place. “Baby, it’s really not important right now. I’ll show you later.”
Thatbabyruns me through. It’s been so, so long. And it immediately transports me back to clean-shaven Vin, eight years younger and rolling over in my bed the morning after we slept together the first time.
Was he going to be weird now that we’d slept together? I’d wondered.
I’d had sex take me all sorts of directions in the past. You never quite know how it’s going to land. He’d pursued me in such a straight line, no wavering or game-playing, that part of me wondered if it actuallyhadbeen a game. And now that he’d gotten what he’d wanted…
But Vin is Vin, not some other guy. And he rolled over and tucked me into him, sort of under him, kissing my neck, pushing my hair behind my ears. “Can I make you some coffee, baby?” he’d asked.
And that’s how I’d known he was sticking around. The way he saidbaby.
Like it had been my name all along. Like we’d always been together, and always would be.
You hear about a moment that changes someone’s life. Sometimes it’s a bad thing. A missed connection at an airport or thewrong fight at the wrong time and then you can’t put everything back together again.
I’ve had a few bad versions of that moment. I’ve only had one of those change-your-life moments and it was a good thing. I know it’s corny. But I started thinking about it, calling it in my head The Smile Moment.
My wife, well, she wasn’t my wife then. Then she was just my little brother’s best friend, of about two years. I’d heard about her a lot from him. And I guess I wasn’t actually expecting much. My little brother, he’s the sort of person who walks into a train station bathroom and leaves with a new best friend. He was always stumbling into these friendships. And they’d be, like, so intense and either he’d be so obsessed with them or they’d be so obsessed with him. And I’d hear about this person nonstop for a year, like Vin you have to meet them, they’re the funniest, smartest, yadda yadda. And then I’d finally meet them and they’d be like, you know, funny, yeah, but kind of mean? Or, smart, sure, but kind of mean. And now that I’m saying it, out loud…that really was the common denominator. He apparently is really into people who are like brilliant and attractive and mean.
So, yeah, that’s the primer. That’s the background. That’s what I was expecting. I’d been hearing about this Roz person for about two years. Vin, she’s so smart and funny and you’re gonna love her, no seriously, this time you’re really, actually gonna love her. And I thought, Sure. Right.
So, anyways, back to the story. We’re at this restaurant. And it’s this big celebration. Raff, my brother, he’d worked his ass off and gotten his master’s in engineering. First in the family to even graduate from a four-year college and then he just decided to put a cherry on top and continue on through grad school—Sorry. Sorry. Obviously I’m proud of him. He’s sort of a—never mind. This story isn’t actually about him. Okay! So, we’re in this restaurant in Brooklyn. Old Italian joint out in Sheepshead. Like,waiters in the penguin suits and a live piano player playing, like, “Fly Me to the Moon.” You can picture it.
And, first of all, I was already surprised because when he told me he was having this party, well…a Raff party is usually a blowout. Like, he’ll get a clown and then the clown ends up in a threesome in the back bathroom. That’s a true story, by the way. For another time.
So I was expecting a huge thing. Every person from his graduating class or something. Or all his professors. But it was small. It was me and my date, Raff and the girl he was dating, this new guy friend he was excited about, and then an empty seat for Roz, his best friend.
She was late. I was not impressed. And I was hungry. We were waiting for her to get there to order, so I was grumpy. And I’d been wanting to get this introduction out of the way. Here’s the thing. We have this pattern, Raff and I, where when things start to get too intense for him with one of his new friends, the friend gets too mean or too controlling or they want to date and he doesn’t…a bell dings inside his brain and he’s like, I know, it’s time for them to meet Vin. So. He brings me out to the bar and I meet the friend, the friend is an asshole, I tell Raff that I don’t like the way the friend is treating him, and he breaks up with them, or whatever, and he breathes a big sigh of relief. We’ve never actually acknowledged this as the pattern, but this was the pattern. For like twenty-five straight years. Since he was like five years old.
So, anyhow. I’m hungry, I’m annoyed, and I’m anxious to get this little meetup out of the way because I figure the same thing is going to happen.
I should mention, because it sounds weird that I’m telling it this way, I should mention that he does actually have good friends too. He’s got friends from when we were kids, the neighborhood, he’s got friends from college, he’s got friends from work. It’s not like I’m telling him every single one of his friends is an asshole andthen he doesn’t have friends. He’s got tons of friends. It’s just this one thing, this lightning-strike thing, this I’m-obsessed-with-you thing that’s never worked out.
Okay, okay. So, I guess this isn’t that much of a story because there’s only like one moment of plot. And basically the plot is that she walks into the restaurant.
I looked up, I’m not sure why, because it was a busy restaurant and waiters were running around and people were coming in and leaving. But she stepped in and instantly I looked up and just knew it was her. This Roz person.
She didn’t know anyone else who was going to be at the dinner. So she was looking around the restaurant, trying to spot Raff. And then she did. Her eyes landed on him, she recognized her friend, and then she just broke into this smile.
You hearsmileand you think you know what I’m talking about. But you don’t. Some people have a smile that just…it’s like a knife but in a good way? You see it and it’s like suffocating, but in a good way? It’s something that you can only see in real life, in a real moment, when someone is experiencing actual happiness and calmness and…goodness. And it’s rare. Some of the best actors have come close; you see it on a screen and you think they nailed it. Because they have beautiful smiles. But that’s not what I’m talking about. They can’t actually do it. Because then you see it in real life, this kind of smile, and you realize that an actual smile, a true one…it can only happen when there is truly zero artifice.
