He sucked a huge gulp of whiskey and propped both elbows on the bar. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking like that: all or nothing, proposed to or dumped. He knew it was ridiculous and self-defeating. He wasn’t about to be anything, other than be met by his kind and affectionate boyfriend of four months – the longest he’d dated anyone consecutively, ever – who’d asked to meet him here right after work. Dex had no delusions. He only had coping mechanisms, and right now his coping mechanism wanted him to believe Patrick could potentially be proposing to him, when in his heart and his guts Dex knew – knew – he was getting dumped.
He checked his phone. No response from Tuesday (big surprise). No other texts. No emails. No calls (who called anyone anymore, but still). The bar was called The Bank, and it was in the heart of the financial district, which meant it was full of douchebags and assholes. Dex could, when the mood struck, be either or both. It was a land of finance bros: white guys with MBAs and short hair and, now that they were in their thirties, wedding rings and bellies that pulled their button-downs tight with a little pooch of fat over their waistbands. In the corner by the window there was a cluster of young ones, fresh out of school, still studying for their CPA exams, still able to drink like this every night and come in to work the next day, half alive. The boys were prettier than the girls. They were downing pints of something golden, maybe the first keg of Octoberfest.
His phone chimed. Tuesday.
I don’t see you on the list
He texted back, WHAT
Also you didn’t deny my previous text
which means on some level you must ALSO believe I am about to get dumped
She didn’t respond.
He’d known Tuesday for years. They’d met at work. She might be a do-gooder nonprofit stalker now, but Tuesday Mooney had started out, like him, as a temp in the marketing department at Cabot Assets, the oldest, most robust asset manager in Boston. At least that’s how it was described in the marketing materials, which Dex, like the innocent twentysomething he’d once been, took on faith for the first year of his employment. After one year – during which he became a full-time employee, with benefits, praise Jesus – he would have described it as the sloppiest, most disturbingly slapdash and hungover asset manager in Boston, though he had zero basis for comparison. He only knew that every Thursday night his coworkers went out to bars, and every Friday morning most of them came in late, looking like they wanted to die and occasionally wearing each other’s clothing.
But never Tuesday. She was the same on Friday morning as she was every other morning: acerbic and goth, never wearing anyone’s clothing but her own.
Like the last Cheerios in a bowl of milk, he would have naturally gravitated toward her, but the universe shoved them together. In an endless sea of tall cubes they were seated across from one another, at a dead end.
“Morning, Tuesday,” Dex would say, slinging his elbows over their partition. “Are we feeling robust today?”
“I’m really feeling the depth and breadth of this portfolio management team,” she’d deadpan, gesturing toward her computer monitor with her palms up. “The robustness is reflected in the ROI.”
“Oh, the ROI? I thought that was the EBITDA. Or was it the PYT?”
“Perhaps the PYT.” She’d squint. “Or the IOU, the NYC, the ABC BBD” – which Dex took as a cue to break into “Motownphilly.”
They’d both taken the job because they needed one, desperately, through a temp agency. Tuesday had something like a history BA, maybe an English minor. Dex had a degree in musical theater. He’d openly defied his parents to acquire it. In hindsight, it might have been his subconscious means of coming out to them without actually having to come out to them. His father flat-out laughed when Dex told him he’d be pursuing a theater degree. He’d thought it was a joke. His father was incapable of imagining any extension of his self – as a son surely was – spending time and money to be taught how to pretend, as though that would lead to any kind of career, which was surely the whole point of going to college. Dex, flush with his own inability to imagine a future for himself that didn’t include a literal spotlight, told him it was his life, his dream, his decision to make – not his father’s. To which his father said, “Fine. Go ahead and waste your own money,” and spat accusingly at Dex’s mother, I told you not to encourage him.
So Dex took himself to school, and took out his own loans, and studied and partied and graduated and promptly freaked the fuck out. He did not comprehend the weight of debt until it was pressing down on him. His theater school friends were either getting support from their parents or working weird jobs at all hours. Dex tried for a year to believe all you needed to be successful was fanatical self-belief, and failed. So he retreated to the safety of his minor in accounting. He had always liked numbers; music, after all, was math.
The job at Cabot was entry level and he figured it out; he was smart and worked hard and it was pretty shocking, to Dex, that that wasn’t the case for quite a few of the people he worked with. The whole place felt like high school all over again, and he was still the odd arty kid no one knew what to do with, only this time he was getting paid, which helped for a while.
And he had Tuesday. Who was just as out of place as he was.
So when Tuesday couldn’t stand it anymore, and jumped ship for a nonprofit, Dex jumped too. To Richmont, a smaller firm, a hedge fund with more assets under management than God, more go-getters, and better alcohol at parties. Dex hated his job at Cabot, sure, hated how buttoned down and conservative it was, how it smushed him into a cube with a computer and a tape dispenser he never used, how it had absolutely nothing to do with anything that he had once imagined for his future, or valued about himself. In finance, there was no professional advantage, for instance, to being an expressive belter. There were no head-pats for one’s encyclopedic knowledge of popular song lyrics, no kudos for one’s flawless application of stage makeup.
And Richmont likely wouldn’t be that different. But he was terrified of giving up the safety of his salary, which was now, he suspected, easily more than twice Tuesday’s. Because he had known her for so long, and in such a limited capacity – they were Drinks Friends, Karaoke Friends, Trivia Friends; he had never even seen the inside of her apartment – it wasn’t weird. But it could have been. Dex didn’t forget that.
He texted, see you can’t say it
you can’t even say ‘you won’t get dumped’ bc you know I’m going to get dumped and it will just be this horrible vortex of pain
Dex calm down, Tuesday replied.
Your level of concern is insufficient, he texted.
“Hello hello hello!” And Patrick was there, swinging the strap of his satchel over his head and taking his jacket off in the same fluid movement. Patrick did everything fluidly, gracefully, as though he never had to think about where and when and how to move his body; his feet were so firmly on the floor they may as well have been glued. He’d been trained as a dancer. Now he was a manager at a Starbucks. That was how they met, at the Starbucks in the lobby of the office building Dex sometimes cut through on his walk to work.
Patrick moved to peck him on the ridge of his cheekbone. “Wait, I forget,” he said. “Can we do this here? Oh fuck it,” and kissed him, because of course he was always going to. Patrick was younger than Dex, less fearful and careful of himself in the open. Dex was only slightly older, but they had grown up in different worlds.
“Hey you,” said Dex, pulling the chair beside him out from under the bar. “Welcome. Have a seat. How was work?”
Patrick rolled his neck on his shoulders. Dex watched. He had never seen such perfectly circular neck rolls. “Fine. You know, same old same old. Ground some beans, pulled some espresso, steamed some milk, almost fired Gary.”
“No.” Dex twisted in his seat, pushed his elbow on the bar, and propped his head on his hand. “Spill.”
Patrick ordered a whiskey and tonic from the bartender. He sat and shook out his shoulders like he
was trying to rid himself of something unclean. Patrick had told Dex about Gary. Gary was older, in his mid-forties. Gary had lost his job a few years ago, not long after the crash – he’d done something in finance, which made the decision to work at a financial district Starbucks particularly masochistic – and was taking classes, trying to switch careers (thank God his wife still had her job, thank God the kids were years from college). Patrick liked Gary. He showed up on time and worked steadily and well, even if he wasn’t quite as fast as the twenty-year-olds who could squat sixteen times an hour to grab a gallon of milk from the low fridge.
“He stole,” said Patrick. His drink arrived and he downed it in a single gulp. “I caught him pocketing twenty dollars from the till today. I saw him. He looked around first, to make sure no one was watching, and he just didn’t see me. He popped open the till and took out a twenty, looked around again, slipped it into the front of his apron, and closed the register. I could not believe it. You know, when you see something happening in real life that you’ve only seen in movies? You think, for one second: Where am I? Is this real? Is this my real life?”
He motioned to the bartender for another drink.
“You didn’t fire him?” asked Dex.
“How could I?” said Patrick. “He’s stealing because he needs money. I confronted him, told him I saw what he did. He got all flushed and couldn’t look me in the eye and I honestly thought he was going to throw up all over the register, me, everything. I told him if he ever stole again, I would fire him. Today, this, was a mistake.” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Mistakes have consequences, but they don’t have to break us. The next time it happens, I told him, I wouldn’t consider it a mistake.”
Dex thought, I would have fired that guy on the spot.
And then, I do not deserve the love of this entirely decent, generous grown-up.
Patrick slipped his glasses back on and leaned to the side, his arm over the back of the chair.
“You would’ve fired him on the spot,” he said, and grinned.
“What can I say,” said Dex. “I’m a mercenary.”
“You’re not a mercenary. I’m too soft.” Patrick tugged his ear. “I’m a sweet fluffy bunny in a land of wolves. I need to get meaner if I want to get anywhere.”
“Don’t ever,” Dex said. “It would break my heart if you got meaner.”
“Isn’t that what growing up is? Shedding the fat and the fluff until you’re this sleek, perfect beast, entirely the you you were meant to be?” Patrick was gesturing up and down in the space between them, and Dex realized, with a little jolt, that his boyfriend meant him. Patrick thought he, Poindexter Howard – who had dreamed, once, of painting his face, wearing someone else’s clothes, and belting show tunes on Broadway but instead became something called an Investment Marketing Manager, impeccably groomed in cool Gatsby shirts and Rolexes and shiny Gucci shoes, who belted nothing but his pants – was a sleek, perfect beast, entirely the him he was meant to be. Patrick actually thought Dex was himself. He was so young and so charming and so very wrong that Dex finally realized why he’d been so nervous when he first sat down.
“Patrick,” he said, “this isn’t working.”
Tuesday flicked her fingertip up and down, up and down, over the iPad, scrolling through the guest list. Which didn’t include Dex. Richmont, his firm, had bought six tickets for their employees, but he wasn’t one of them. Her stomach rumbled again. She was starving. They were allowed to grab hors d’oeuvres and drinks after the program ended, but that wouldn’t be for hours. At least she was sitting. At least she didn’t have to staff the cocktail party upstairs, wandering among the guests, answering questions, directing them to the VIP rooms or the bathrooms. All she had to do at registration was be pleasant to white guys in suits. It was a talent she’d honed daily all the years she worked in finance.
Dex once asked if her general standoffishness, her “aversion to team sports,” as he called it, came from having grown up in Salem, stewing in the cultural detritus of mass hysteria and (literal) witch-hunting. Salem’s natural vibe was part of it. What happened with Abby Hobbes was part of it too, though Dex didn’t know Abby Hobbes existed. Technically it was possible Dex knew the name Abigail Hobbes. He would have been a teenager in western Massachusetts when the coverage of Abby’s disappearance was at its height, bleeding beyond Salem, though her story never spread as far as it might have – if they’d found her body, if the missing girl had been upgraded to a dead girl. But Dex wouldn’t have had any reason to connect Abigail Hobbes directly to Tuesday. For Dex to know, at the time of her disappearance, that Abby had been her best friend, Tuesday would have had to tell him herself.
“You don’t trust people in groups,” Dex had said to her once, while they were out at McFly’s, one of his regular haunts for karaoke. Well, Dex was there for karaoke. Tuesday was there to drink, and pointedly not to participate. “Or people, really,” he continued. “But especially in groups.”
Tuesday had never thought of it in those terms, but yes, she didn’t trust people. People, in groups, alone – people disappointed you. That was what they did. They abandoned you. They didn’t believe you. They looked through you like you were made of smoke. You had your family, your work colleagues; you needed other humans around so you didn’t go completely feral, but the only person you could trust completely with yourself was yourself. That was, like … Basic Humanity 101.
“I mean … do you?” she said. “Does anyone? I thought that was the first rule: trust no one.”
“Should you be taking life advice from a poster in the basement of the FBI? On a television show?” Dex asked.
“That poster said I want to believe.”
Dex rolled his eyes. “I trust people more than you. But only a little.”
Tuesday hadn’t expected to stay in touch with Dex once they both quit Cabot. But Dex wouldn’t go away. He invited her to lunch. He invited her to the movies. They went to karaoke, even though Tuesday had a strict no-singing policy. They wiped the floor at pub trivia, the only two-person team that regularly took first place. She liked him; she had always appreciated his sense of humor and his intelligence. But he was needy. God, he could be outrageously needy. He texted. He chatted to her at work. In person, he required her approval of mundane choices he might have to make, her assurance that she had heard and understood him. Even the constant invitations, she suspected, had less to do with him wanting her company than not wanting to go into the world alone. Sometimes it felt like it didn’t matter who she was, so long as she was, an audience – any audience – granting him her attention.
She felt her phone buzzing in her bag, vibrating against her leg. Again. And again.
I did it, he texted.
IT’S DONE
WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME he was so nice and sweet and young and flexible
She paused, her thumb over the screen. She’d liked Patrick. But this had been coming for a while. Tuesday could tell, from stories Dex told her, from watching the two of them together, that they had fundamentally different versions of reality, and fundamentally different ideas of each other. They were both playing parts.
He was too young, she texted back.
Pls don’t remind me, Dex texted, that I’m a decaying hag
You’re not a decaying hag, she replied.
Tuesday hated texting. Hated it, for its lack of nuance and tone. She always felt she was saying the wrong thing, or saying it the wrong way. But Dex was a natural, loquacious texter, and even by his standards, he’d been texting like mad lately. It meant he was anxious. And lonely. And now that he and Patrick were no longer together …
She felt a cold little stab, the looming threat of being needed.
Hey, he texted. Has anyone from Richmont not showed
She dutifully examined the list. Three of Richmont’s six tickets hadn’t been checked in.
Anders, Grouse, and Bannerman aren’t here yet, she texted.
&nbs
p; UGH Grouse, said Dex.
I hate that guy
Why did GROUSE get an invite
He’s never going to show
I’m taking his place
Won’t your coworkers know you’re not him? said Tuesday.
He texted back, I’ll wear a clever disguise
Then: wait my whole life is a clever disguise
A flock of new suits appeared, swerved, headed toward the table. She tossed her phone back into her bag for good.
She’d worked event registrations often enough to intuit the kind of interaction she would have with an attendee the moment she made eye contact. Most people were nice. They smiled when you smiled, offered their names when asked. They were polite and looking forward to free Chardonnay and shrimp cocktail, comfortable with the implicit agreement one makes by RSVPing to a fundraiser: that at some point during the evening, you will be asked for money, and you will say yes.
Then there were people like this one. He came alone. He waited calmly, patiently, at the end of the line forming in front of the girl next to Tuesday, adjusting the cuffs on his suit, smoothing a dark tie between two fingers. The girl next to her was a Kelly – Kelly W.; there were at least three Kellys in the office. She was shy and not, like the other Kellys, blonde; her hair was dull brown, her nose small, her eyes large. Tuesday liked her. When she spoke, it was usually to make a joke so dry it made you cough. But she looked like a mouse, and Tuesday suspected that was why this particular guest was waiting in her line.
Tuesday had spotted him as soon as he crossed the lobby, moving with the confidence of someone who owns every cell of his body, every atom of the air around it, and every right in the world to be exactly who and where he is.
He was the kind of person who expects to be recognized, and likes to make a big deal when he isn’t.
Tuesday was in the middle of checking in a gaggle of attorneys when he reached the table in front of Kelly W.
“Welcome to the auction,” she said. “May I have your name?”
He had a face made for striking on coins: hair brushed back, broad, dark-eyed, and long-nosed. It was familiar to Tuesday. Because she read society and business columns. Because she was fond of a high forehead. And because she’d researched him.
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 2