“I do have people.” The statement goes down my throat like an ice cube, catching partway, not melting fast enough.
Olivia’s airbrushed face appears in my thoughts. I try to rise above the envy, remind myself it’s good if Chris is opening up to her. It shouldn’t matter who his outlets are so long as he has them. But I’m not a big enough person to imbibe logic through the arteries to my heart. It stays upstairs, stuck in the head, fucked in the head.
“Good,” I say, picking up my own menu, wielding it like a shield. “Glad to hear that.”
Later, after the blowup that follows, I skirt off the subway at Knickerbocker, dashing over to Lone Wolf.
“Where are those french fries from?” Tara asks as I walk in. I’m holding a basket of fries. My shoulders are rolled back to their full height, the surest sign that I feel small and saggy inside.
“Stole them from brunch,” I say. “And left Chris with the check.” There’s a cackle in my voice, a pride, but it’s the artificial kind, susceptible to the poke of a pin, a fingernail, even the dull side of a butter knife.
“Well, don’t carry the fries around like a flower bouquet,” Tara says. “Bon appétit.” My appetite is still gone, but I pass them overto Tara, hoping this proves I’m not a bad friend after all. Not rude and nosy like Chris said.
“So what happened?” Tara asks, filling in the gaps from the multi-paragraph, punctuation-less text I fired off to Tara and Hal on the subway ride back. “He stiff-armed you when you asked about Luke?”
“He accused me of stalking his family,” I say. “Just because I knew a few things about his brother, like that he was an accountant and lived in New York. And that Luke’s ex-fiancée was named Tiffany and they got engaged at Gurney’s Beach Club in Montauk and lived in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone on Clark Street. Basic stuff like that, and he called me ‘obsessive’ and ‘unhinged.’ Can you believe him?”
Tara hesitates a little too long. It’s too much to handle, the fact that she might side with him or even contemplate it. I plop my face into my arms, the whole puddle of me leaking onto the countertop, fitting in among the mess of cigarette butts and beers.
“He’s the unhinged one,” Tara says vigorously, as if to make up for her vacillation. “He doesn’t know how to deal with someone who has as big of a heart as you do, that’s all.” She whips up a Redstocking cocktail, going heavy on the pomegranate maybe because she sees I need the color. “It’s a guy thing, and even as far as men go, Chris sounds like he’s on the emotionally stunted end of the spectrum.”
“The most stunted,” I agree and tell her how Chris freaked out when I very gently, very kindly asked if he thought there was any chance that perhaps he was trying to honor his brother by living out Luke’s dream life and losing sight of his own along the way.
“I mean, I can see how that would be a bit upsetting to him,” Tara says, doling out another round of draft ale to the guys at the bar, the regulars who come at lunch and stay through closing. “If he’s never thought of it like that before.”
“But how couldn’t he have?” I say, certain that no dots have everbeen easier to connect. “He’s working the same job as Luke, living in the same city, dating a literal dead ringer for Luke’s ex. It’s so blatant and yet he’s gaslighting me for pointing out the obvious.”
Hal joins us at the bar. She’s solo, which I appreciate. “Just saw the texts,” she says, plunking down beside me, gearing up for combat. “And for the record, I never liked Chris. Too wishy-washy, too dense to figure out he should be dating you.”
“Dating is completely off the table,” I say. “Not that it was ever on the table, but it’s fully in the dumpster now.” I repeat the brunch story for her with more theatrics this time.
“He needs to go to therapy,” Hal says at the end, like this settles it. “Maybe you should go too.”
I glare at her. “Yeah, couples therapy sounds like the ideal solution for two platonic friends at an impasse.”
“Not couples therapy,” Hal says. “Though I’d pay money to sit in on that. Just go on your own, vent about each other, and evict the negative energy from your aura. Wait until Mercury is out of retrograde, though. That’s probably why this happened in the first place.”
“EJ doesn’t believe in astrology,” Tara says.
“Maybe I do,” I say, just to be difficult, just to take my anger out on the only people in the world who are actually there for me right now, trying to help. “But why would I pay for therapy when I can just vent to you two?”
“Therapy is free in Norway,” Hal says, as if this is relevant to the conversation. As if anyone brought up Astrid’s home country.
“Chris will come around,” Tara says. “Just give him time.”
“Time for what?” I ask. “I’m not just going to sit here and take his punches. The ball is in his court to apologize. Until then, he’s done to me, dead to me.”
I throw back the rest of my drink, wash it down with a pickleback, and then finish off the fries I didn’t pay for, the oil coating my fingers, sinking into my dirty nail beds.
Under the wan lighting of the single-stall bathroom, I scrub my hands clean, though I have the sensation I’m absorbing the muck via osmosis. It’s all grunge and grime back here, no toilet paper to be used, though plenty strewn across the floor like several mummies were unraveled, their stench lingering. The concrete walls are plastered with magazine cutouts, page corners peeling. Graffiti is streaked, little hearts and initials and skulls, each with its own story that will never be told, never even seen except by Lone Wolf patrons who have to piss, or people like me just trying to get slippery grease off their hands so they don’t drop something important. Except maybe they already did.
Chapter 20
Back at the Inn later that day, I turn off my phone and stash it in my pillowcase so I won’t have to see how Chris hasn’t reached out. I don’t want to think about him, expend one more iota of energy on someone who clearly doesn’t value my presence in his life, doesn’t see how I’m the best, most vibrant thing ever to happen to him.
In spite of, or perhaps because of, this intense focus to not focus on him, on us, I plummet into obsession, replaying the brunch in all its grisly details, berating myself for saying too much and not enough, berating Chris for how he should have acted, might have acted. The angst engorges, pushing up against my bodily walls in a torrent of rain and fire. I have to eject it, have to let it come coursing out of me in whatever form it pleases. I’m not the captain, only the vessel.
So I open up a blank Word doc and submit to the feelings, my fingers flying over the keyboard to keep up with the voices, the visions, the vices. A mini play pours out, my most prolific work in ages.
