He told her she looked like bad news. She laughed and moved to give the glasses to him, but he stopped her—no, she couldn’t possibly take them off, he said, coaxing the Ray-Bans from her neck as a consolation prize, knowing the style suited him brilliantly. Hey, hey, hey, hey! the back room called. Ooooooooooooo-ooh-ooo-oo-ooehoo-owhoa. Vivien grabbed Wes’s hand excitedly, pulling him through the crowd toward the music with a practiced impulsiveness. Won’t you come see about me—I’ll be alone, danc-ing—you know it, ba-by.
—Tell me your troubles and doubts. Giving me everything—they sang to each other, peeking over the rims of their shades, the room plenty dark enough without them.
It wasn’t just that song. The entire set list that night was steeped in timeless adolescent longing. Cult movie soundtracks. Journey. All the something-“Girl” songs—“Jessie’s Girl,” “Rich Girl,” “Uptown Girl,” “American Girl,” “Yesterday Girl,” “My Girl.” Wes and Vivien both knew almost all of the words to almost all of the songs, and whatever song was playing seemed to have been written specifically for them. Any contradictory lyrical narrative underpinnings were rendered entirely irrelevant. What mattered was the chorus. Don’t stop believin’. ’Cause you know it don’t matter anyway. Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t—don’t you forget about me.
Like everyone else there, they danced in that vaguely eighties collegial way that involves a lot of jumping around and emphatic arm movements. The battle for “best dancer” in the back room at Harry’s was one of those baffling unofficial social contests to which everyone implicitly understands the rules despite their making no logical sense. For the “best dancer” at Harry’s was almost always actually the worst dancer; that is to say, whichever very bad dancer gave the fewest fucks about being a bad dancer and danced with reckless abandon anyway. The “winner” that night had already been crowned: an overweight fellow wearing a printed orange bow tie and light blue Columbia College shades. He had an astonishingly bad “Lawnmower,” a jump split bordering on grotesque, and deeply reminded Wes and Vivien of at least two different characters from Sill. But then, everyone there that evening seemed like someone else, some ghost of Harry’s past—including themselves. It didn’t matter that in all the nights they had each spent at Lord Henry’s, it was actually only the second or third time they’d ever been there on the same one. Their fond recollections folded together and tangled and combined, implying—no, insisting—that two similar pasts were actually a single shared one, augmenting each other’s importance to the other’s life in a way that seemed to fully, unequivocally justify the present. Alcohol and nostalgia make for a pretty toxic concoction; the surgeon general doesn’t warn you about that. Wes could feel the anachronic webbing cloud his mind—until he couldn’t. Until the web began to hide the webbing. Nothing makes sense except paradox, Lord Henry seemed to say. Exult in bad news. Don’t means only, quite emphatically, do. Vivien was Diana. She was the absolute worst.
The room regressed a couple of decades further as “Danke Schoen” started to play. Wes presented his hand and led Vivien in a loose, ballroomy swing, lip-synching theatrically. As the song’s intensity and tempo built though, they both strangely, strangely intuitively, slowed down. He took off Vivien’s sunglasses, and lifted the NYU ones away from her face. Her eyes were expectant; her face, dewy with exertion. It was the most radiant she’d ever looked to him, but the Mental Catalogue was not open for business, its equipment having been redirected to processing live-action video. When the brass entered in full force, he pulled her closer—dangerously close. She’d long abandoned her denim jacket, as he had his sweater, and the arcs and turns of her body that the dress hid from his eyes were immediately visible to the touch. She felt totally impossible: relaxed but tight, hard and soft. Danke schoen, oh darling, danke schoen. He realized he was already kissing her before he realized he was going to. Like it hadn’t even been a choice. Or rather, like he’d affirmatively made the opposite choice, but thinking so hard about not kissing her made him precisely more likely to do it. Wes pulled back quickly—wide-eyed, shocked by his own nerve—and almost started to apologize. But there was no need. She was already dancing again, lip-synching with charming pizazz, almost as if it hadn’t happened. Had that not just happened? No, it had, it definitely had. He could still taste it. Danke schoen—auf weidersehen—danke schoen.
They stayed for two more songs, “Twist and Shout” and “Summer of ’69,” dancing furiously, with such joy it almost hurt. But timing was always iffy leaving Harry’s. You wanted to walk out the door precisely at the party’s apex. Leave too early and sure, you’d miss out on a bit of the fun. But leave too late, and you risked breaking the spell entirely, of having to walk that depressing musicless halogen exit, surrounded by the other people who’d gotten as bombed as you, or were, very deep down, too sad and lonely to pull themselves away sooner, like you. It had been Vivien’s idea to go to Lord Henry’s, but it was Wes’s idea to leave. He was just sober enough to be deeply invested in propelling the magic outside. It was late. He should walk her back to her hotel.
The air outside was misty and wonderful. For the first couple of blocks they reveled in its cool humidity, singing aloud, still wobbly twirling. As their lungs adjusted and the pace slowed, Vivien started hugging her arms together. Wes draped his sweater over her shoulders and his arm managed to remain. She reached up, pulling his hand into hers, and they walked slowly like that, in more of a “mosey” than a “walk” really, saying absolutely nothing, holding on to the moment, savoring it, willing it to last. At the entrance to the Carlyle, she didn’t let go. She didn’t let go again at the elevator bank or inside the manned elevator. The gentleman smiled pleasantly at him, the way you smile at an attractive young husband who is clearly still very in love with his attractive young wife. For a brief second Wes felt strange and uncomfortable, like maybe he should retrieve his hand, but then they stepped off the elevator and the sensation dissipated.
She led him to her room, still not letting go of his hand but spinning to face him, as if guarding the door behind her. For a few seconds they just looked at each other, considering each other seriously, like one might examine a painting. But then, oh my god and then they were kissing like Wes only ever wanted to kiss, the way that made him certain he was being fully appreciated for the exceptional lover he knew himself to be. With urgency and passion and tension and thirst. With instinctive deliberation and transcendental physicality. At some point, Wes noticed, the door had opened and closed behind them and it was very dark and his shirt was unbuttoned and there was a maddening unfastening motion happening at the top of his jeans. He inhaled deeply and ran his hands up the insides of her arms, pinning them back to the door above her head, holding them there with one hand and exploring her body with the other. She made a wonderful little noise that fell somewhere between disgruntled compliment and satisfied complaint, and he pressed into her harder still, wrapping his free hand into the crease of her taut little thigh-butt border, inching up her dress, then releasing her arms and turning his entire attention to the effort. He lingered in the exercise, deliberately tormenting her, and himself. Her skin felt like hot ice—familiar yet unfamiliar, exquisite and unsatisfying, surprising and predictable. It responded to everything he did the way he wanted it to respond, and his own body responded to the response.
The second time she went for his jeans, he let her, only marginally hindering her progress, gnawing her neck and shoulders and chest, working the inside of her thigh, investigating the delicate lace first with his fingers, then lips and tongue. She pushed him onto the bed. He would have sought a dresser or table instead, but it was dark, he didn’t entirely trust his own coordination, and experience told him he would probably most enjoy whatever it was she most wanted to do—which turned out to be climbing on top of him and torturing him to the point he could no longer resist ripping off her underwear and fucking her.
Over time, sex with the same person always settles into an orange you peel you
rself and divide on the natural membrane. Still delicious, of course, but contained. It had been a long time since he’d tasted the smooth surface of interior fruit, cut with an extrasharp knife. It was oozing and juicy. Not just ignoring the membrane, but somehow spiting it.
PART TWO
CHAPTER XI.
The single greatest innovation in modern workplace sexual politics was the holy union of invention and practical application that is the fully corporate-sanctioned Enterprise Instant Messenger (E-IM). Here, the technical capability of internet-wide GUI-based messaging à la PowWow, ICQ, and—most nostalgically from a Millennial perspective, that ancient maker and breaker of reputations and hearts—the AOL Instant Messenger met a user base essentially trapped for eight-plus hours per day at a computer, supposed to be doing things that they didn’t especially want to do.
It is almost painfully easy to imagine the power of the original pitch, full of words like speed and productivity gains and The capital T F Future and email reduction and employee mobility. What was perhaps underestimated was the timeless, universal compulsion of human beings—even without, like, a tailor-made mechanism for it—to complain and scheme and procrastinate and flirt. The kicker here was not just that there was an almost infinitely elastic new way to waste time, but that idle pinging suddenly looked exactly like working. From behind the curtain of a laptop privacy screen, the modern professional servant might easily gossip about a colleague or undermine a political decision or try to get laid all while the boss was watching. It was a paper bag sort of open container arrangement, a calculated cease-fire from both sides. Statistical data on the subject is scarce, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the leading use case of E-IM, running diametrically counter to its intention to support swift, remote corporate communications, was in fact the conduction of pseudo-to-outright-non-business matters from within the same room. Nowhere was this use case more palpably irresistible than in those wretched, infamous black holes of corporate time, those infuriating cesspools of egotism and rhetoric, those bitter traps of white-collar adulthood: meetings.
Diana was sitting across from Dale in one now, wearing another short, shapeless dress, only marginally different from the one she’d worn yesterday, slouching slightly in a pose so relaxed it bordered on unprofessional, one knee draped over the other lazily. She was a greedy online conversationalist—fond of bypassing greetings and transitions, frequently jumping between threads of discourse in a manner that might have been hard to follow except for the fact that she neurotically numbered them. Their texting had felt fraught with meaning the day before, but this new element, of being physically with her in the same room, able to trace and analyze the micro-metamorphoses in her face from word to word—it was as if the Wi-Fi connection between them had grown a visible cable, directly linking their human operating systems. The little blue bubbles elicited almost programmatic physical manifestations: redirected half-smiles, goose pimples, neck rubbing. The public nature of their environment only enhanced its smiting intimacy.
Within seconds of his arrival online that morning, Diana had plunged straight into one of her neat little lists:
1. Clogged with yesterday’s excess, does the body drag the mind down with it?
2. What are we having for lunch?
3. You are going to love me.
Number one was addressable. Number two, a false anchor: one of those cognitive illusions so powerful that even piercing awareness of it fails to counter its effects. She’d thrown in a banality just to highlight the audacity of number three. Dale knew Diana was being deliberately, cruelly provocative here, revving him up to some anticlimax. That she’d scored free Phillies tickets, maybe, or extracted a toothsome chunk of gossip out of another member of the team. She’d already demonstrated herself an expert in plausible deniability. But she also hadn’t lied, quite explicitly. There was an underlying truth fixed in everything she said, and no small pleasure watching it refract into blistering shards of irony. It hardly mattered what they were literally talking about. The specter of number three was always there, the shadow conversation of their shadow conversation. Every topical thread pulled and wrapped around its slippery fulcrum of negative space. Oh, the unsaid known!—or, rather, the unsaid almost known. Few things are more alluring: that final sliver of uncertainty and danger and risk fanning your desire for more more more as you wade like Tantalus, knee-deep and dying of thirst for approval from someone you very much approve.
The E-IM medium deftly accommodated this kind of reverie, and played much to Dale’s strengths re: the return exhibition of cleverness. In live-action conversation, he was forever thinking of the perfect thing to say thirty seconds too late. When instant messaging, however, Dale had just the right touch. He googled a Horatian rejoinder, taking his time, knowing the interval served only to enhance his response. He wanted Diana to feel the absence of his attention—for her to feel it sharply, her pleasure comingling with pain. Only when he saw a trace of disappointment—only then did he hit send, monitoring her face intensely, mesmerized by her change of expression, like he was witnessing a work of art come to life. 1. It is the false claim of fools to try to conceal wounds that have not healed, he typed, watching Diana’s brain wrap around the farthest corners of his double entendre, oscillating over the ripple between self-deprecation and adversarial slight. 1. The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are sometimes right, she’d sent back in no time, almost as if she’d known the quotation he was going to choose. Like she’d actively wanted to be cast as the fool all along.
They made plans for lunch. But how to escalate things? Dale ached to push beyond the prosaic here with original material—a natural impulse of those inclined to woo—but all the poetic schemata traditionally designed for wooing were categorically inappropriate, and even if they hadn’t been, would have felt maudlin and embarrassing. No, there was only one form of love poem that couldn’t possibly be construed as one:
There once was a poor dog named Horace
Who caused quite a kerfuffle for us
Just give me some ale,
And I’ll tell you the tale,
Supported in full by the chorus
(That’s you, Diana, you’re the chorus)
There was something grossly immodest about the way she had looked at him then. Something unapologetic, even wickedly self-satisfied, as if accepting a challenge she’d already won. The little blue bubbles flew faster now, addictive, unsatisfying, ever accelerating his need for the next blue bubble:
There once was a fellow named Dale
Whose limericks were shockingly stale
So why was he failin’?
He needed a Whalen.
To make it a whale of a tale.
The meeting ended, and the Portmanteau team returned to the fifty-second floor to drop their laptops. Diana went to the bathroom, and Dale urged the rest of them to go ahead and grab something to eat—he’d wait for her. Everyone (but especially Eric Hashimoto) was still fairly hungover and hungry and welcomed the suggestion. When Diana returned to find Dale alone, she beamed viciously.
—You never responded to number three.
—What?
—Do you want to know why you’re going to love me or not?
For a moment Dale had the fervent wish to be again constrained by a meeting, as if his swashbuckling boldness were trapped in his laptop. The power of speaking out loud, of physical mobility—there was something awkward in it, a separate kind of pressure, harder to push back against. Freedom seemed to Dale to possess its own new set of constraints, and his disadvantaged mind threatened to drag his body down with it.
—Only lawyers ask questions they already know the answers to, said Dale.
—Oh, but I don’t know the answer. I only almost know it.
—Let’s hear your hypothesis, then.
They exited the elevator and walked through security, slowly approaching the Underworld’s staircase. At the top of it Diana turned toward him.
—Fine, she
said smugly, passing him. I’ve already finished ninety-two percent of the tech blueprint.
The bob of her little blond ponytail descending the steps felt distinctly imperious to him, and he rushed to catch up.
—That’s a rough estimate, I take it.
—Eric’s brief was right-on about one thing: they want to use the Russian company as a platform.
—Pegaswipe? Yeah, I wonder who supplied him with that information.
—You? Then why did you guys sell them a blueprint? If they’re just going to scale Pegaswipe, they already have a blueprint. Pegaswipe is the blueprint. Diana laughed. You strategy people just love the word blueprint, I think. It’s one of those pretty little words you use to ensure you’re never actually responsible for doing anything.
—Your job should be pretty easy, then. Sounds like you are the one who should love me.
Dale grinned like Mephistopheles, ready to collect her soul. He could feel the cadence of their easy conversation from yesterday returning, the cloudy haze of E-IM melting away. They reached Panwich, the Underworld’s gourmet deli, and he gestured for Diana to order first.
—Hi, yes, thanks, I’ll have the Napoleon, please, she said to the chef.
Dale read the menu. The Napoleon: Roasted turkey, Normandie Brie, caramelized onions, fig jam, 7-grain roll.
—Ooh, good choice. I’ll have the Napoleon, too, thank you.
Diana’s glare was white-hot.
—Can there really be two Napoleons?
They walked around the corner toward the pickup counter, prattling on about Napoleon and thinking about conquering each other until their sandwiches arrived. Diana paid while Dale scouted a relatively isolated corner of the food court. They sat down.
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