by Daniel Riley
“They broke up a while ago, I guess. She’s been single and struggling with it. That was part of why she’s moving back to Chicago. Nothing keeping her here. Some friends. But she’s from there. Figured it was the right time.”
“So, how?”
“Her going-away drinks. I wasn’t planning on it. I wasn’t scheming.”
“You have a few beers and just stay later than everyone else,” Whitney said.
“That’s definitely one thing I missed out on by being with you all this time,” Will said. “I missed staying out hours later than I wanted to, chasing the slimmest chance around town, burning through cash, and coming up empty-handed at four in the morning in a weird neighborhood.”
“But not this time,” Whitney said. “You knew this one was in the bag.”
“C’mon,” Will said. “I get along with lots of the women I work with.”
“And none more than this one. All those happy hours at Johnny-O’s.”
“Cheapest beers near the office. So what? We liked to go for beers after work.”
“All those long hours and late nights. You must’ve wondered about it.”
“What are you doing? What are you trying to pin on me?”
“I just mean there were a lot of drinks over three years. A lot of shared bitching about coworkers and clients. It’s not like it’s out of the realm of possibility. It happens to people. It has happened to people…”
Will fixed her with a disbelieving stare. “There was a woman, my age, at work for a stretch, with whom I occasionally drank beers, because she was actually down to drink beers. That’s it.”
“And that’s all it is to me, too. But there was something longstanding. There was something in the air, is all I mean.…You never fucked her before?”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“Might as well get it all out now. I’m just asking the questions while I have the opportunity.”
“You didn’t have to react this way,” Will said. “This was the thing I worried about most the whole time. You coiling back down into that snake pit and getting me for the same old fucking thing I’ve more than paid for. You could’ve held on for twenty more minutes, gotten to the end of all this, and decided to be okay with it, but instead—”
“You’re the one who broke the rules,” Whitney said. “I’m just trying to lend a little context to the encounter.”
“Well, now you know,” Will said. “You’re up. Go on, Number Two.”
“You head home with her from the party,” Whitney said, undeterred. “Where does she live?”
Will scraped his fork around the plate. He chewed slowly and the volume of the dining room crashed over them.
“East 80-something…” He swallowed and watched the light change in her face. “Look at that fucking grin. It’s exactly what you’d hoped, isn’t it?”
“It makes me feel better.”
“You’re such a fucking snob.”
“Close to the Met because she loves art so much?”
“Closer to York.”
“Even better.”
“So I head up there with her after the thing. We’re both pretty beat. I, unlike you, don’t have it in me to spend eight straight hours going at it.”
“But you get her clothes off. You get to see those glorious tits.”
“The apartment smells like kitty litter. There’s three or four half-drunk Juice Press bottles in the fridge.”
“More please.”
“White carpeting with scattered wine stains. A stand-up AC instead of an in-window unit. I don’t know. Mailings of summer offers from SoulCycle. A membership application to The Wing. A fridge with a dozen Save the Dates. One of those little word-magnet things spelling out a lyric from ‘Formation’—”
“I love you,” Whitney said, cutting him off. “I’m sorry I lost it for a second. I know you, I trust you, I didn’t even mean what I was saying. I know you didn’t do anything intentionally hurtful. I recognize that you’re one of the good ones. I’m sorry.”
“If there’s anything I’ve learned this month,” Will said, “it’s that this thing here is good, okay? You’re good to me, I’m good to you. That’s it.”
“I know,” she said swallowing hard, serious very suddenly. “I feel the same way. I love you, and I want to do this with you, and I’m sorry about a minute ago.”
“I love you, too. But do me a favor and think back and count. How many times with Adrien Green?”
She failed to quell the rush of blood to her face. She failed to suppress the grin that knew the precise answer. “It’s hard to count. What’s the number you’re looking for?”
“How many times did you stop and start again?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying. I can see how crystal-clearly you know the number.”
“Enough…”
“Four, five…” he said.
“Nine?”
“Nine?!”
“Twelve?”
“Whitney!”
“I don’t know. Six. I don’t know!”
“So a new record,” Will said.
“I guess it felt like a record.”
“It was purely sexual.”
“Something to shoot for, then,” she said, placing a hand in his lap.
“It was too big, it was gross.”
The waitress dropped off a single cube of pork belly.
“So, what,” Whitney said, drawing her hand back to her knife, “you snap her bra off with one free hand and dim the lights with the other?”
“The whole time I’m thinking of you,” Will said.
“Give me a fucking break.”
“You and the petite blonde who broke my nose—I can’t get either of you out of my mind.”
“I’ll bet Kelly gives effortful head.”
“I don’t know.”
“I bet she watches herself in the mirror above the bureau that’s caked in foundation dust. I bet she watches porn for tricks and practices on her hairbrush.”
“All based on a conversation at the beach three years ago?”
“I’ve met her other times. I met her at that holiday party. You glean things.”
“It was all fine.”
“You do it this way and that. You shove your face between her legs. She says, You have great hands.”
“All I wanted to do was go to sleep. I couldn’t stay up any later. I was thinking about work again.”
“You run your tongue along the heart she’s shaved into her bush.”
“It didn’t look like she’d been up to much down there for a while, if you really want to know. Unlike Number One, she did not appear to be expecting company. Based on the mess of mail, and the cat box, and whatever was going on with that situation…”
“So between the downstairs nothing and the downstairs everything of your pair, you really did catch the full spectrum we thought wouldn’t be possible with just two, huh?”
“The missing variety of seven years out of the game,” he said.
“You ask her to ride you so you can watch her bounce,” she said. “So you can stare at that line on her stomach.”
“I don’t even know what this line is you keep referring to.”
“You know the line. Which is why you try out all the positions, to get a good look at every inch of that body. You flip her around. You smack her butt. You pull her hair—not too hard, though, ’cause, remember, you’re one of the good guys.”
“She faked a couple big crescendos.”
“And we’ve already revealed the fact that you certainly didn’t get there.”
“While I was buttoning up my shirt, she asked me if I wanted her to try again. I told her that it was okay, it had been great anyway. Her face scrunched up and she told me she could just add it to the list of things she’d failed at recently. I started getting dressed a little faster. I didn’t love where this was going. She said she was leaving New York because it had spit her out and left her with no
thing to show for her years there. She was heading home and she knew she’d never leave Chicago again. A few hours earlier, she’d told everyone at the party that going home was the thing she was most looking forward to on earth. Now she’s crying and I can’t find one of my shoes, and so I hand her the tissue box on the floor near the headboard. She doesn’t take it. Just lies there, with the covers up to her waist and tears in her eyes, her tits slipping off the tabletop of her chest, just kinda pooled up there in her armpits. Man, they look like a pain in the ass to deal with. Just, the whole scene…I felt terrible.”
“But you leave anyway.”
“I leave and tell her I’m sure I’ll see her again before she gets out of town.”
“But you don’t.”
“I don’t.”
“Poor Kelly.”
“Your Number Two, then,” Will said. “Please.”
“You’re not just framing it all this way for my benefit?” Whitney said. “The bloody nose. The tears. The boredom through and through.”
“I guess you’ll never know.”
“But it’s useful for me to know before I head into this one. Just to help me calibrate my telling.” She sipped from a nearly full glass and considered the volume of liquid. “We’ll never finish the second bottle.”
“What are you talking about?” he said. “We have half that chalkboard left.”
They took a break and teased each other about their eating and their drinking. A breather before diving into Whitney’s second, and each of their thirds. The server brought the new dishes at an accelerated pace. Spiny urchin shells stuffed with whipped uni. Razor clams. A pair of ruby-red langoustines. A bowl of fried potatoes. They were getting fatter. Their teeth were turning pink. The overhead fan had stopped for some reason and they were starting to sweat through their clothes.
He’d never felt the sensation of her belonging to him more than he did just then. And that same feeling of possession was overwhelming her in the moment, as well. Whatever they’d devised for themselves, it had worked, it was working. He wanted to break the new record she’d set. She wanted to make sure he never had an up-close look at another woman’s pubic hair again.
“Go on, then,” Will said. “Number Two.”
“He was old.”
“Forty.”
“Fifty-five.”
“C’mon.”
“One of the things they wanted me to do while I was out there was make a last-ditch play to get this novelist to let us option his first book. It’s not my favorite thing, but John read it in college and it changed him or whatever, and he’d failed to get this guy to go with us before.”
“A novelist.”
“It’s a boring story,” she said. “But he’s lived in the Palisades for twenty-five years. Has two grown kids with a first wife. Published those first couple books, wasted some time with screenplays that were never made. But John saw a series in his debut. The guy’s nice, nice-looking, still has his hair.…But this house. I’d never seen anything like it. Exposed beams and ceilings and glass walls, and just lush like I didn’t know it could be in L.A.”
“A novelist,” Will said again, and Whitney rolled her eyes.
“The book’s not even good. I did it as a favor to John. I drank the guy’s coffee. I made an appeal. I knew he had no intention of working with us. I could’ve left, but I wanted to tour the house. These warm rooms where the light splashed in. Bookshelves on every wall. His kids were handsome and didn’t look like the sort who were doing blow in Hollywood clubs at fourteen—but what do I know? The ex-wife was an actress. I said she looked familiar even though she didn’t, and he said she was on some network shows in the nineties. He was tan, nineties-handsome himself. I don’t know, there wasn’t anything in particular about it, except I was running out of time out there, and I’ve always been curious what it’d be like to be with someone that age. He didn’t want to do the show, and I could care less, but I thought I’d make his day. It was simple as that. I didn’t want to leave yet. I really wanted to get another look around. I really wanted to see the upstairs.”
“So you fucked the house.”
She laughed. She looked uncomfortably full. “I guess that’s right.”
“You asked for an extended tour.”
“I just went upstairs and he followed me and I guess I sat on the edge of the bed and he sat on the edge of the bed and nobody said anything, and then it just happened. No booze. Conventional as can be. I imagine with guys like that, they either get divorced and bang hookers, or they just kinda pack their dicks away and try to be a halfway-decent little-league coach for a while. I got the distinct impression that he was the latter.”
“The un-Adrien-Green.”
“It was perfectly pleasant.”
“That’s kinda gross, though. That’s fucking old.”
Whitney shrugged. “It was warm upstairs. He knew enough about what he was doing. He’d lived over there most of his life, you know? He’d been married and he’d probably dated plenty of beautiful women. The sort who are just…around. He was probably more confused than anything. Halfway through, he needed to catch his breath and I sorta did the work on top.”
“But you got there anyway. Nice and primed from a record-breaking effort.”
“You couldn’t even call it the full thing that I’m used to, though.”
“Un-Adrien to the max.”
“It was like, I dunno, sliding down into a bath or something. Different than I’d had in a long time. Definitely not bad, definitely not better.”
“Whereas the other one’s what?”
Whitney thought about it. She wanted to get it exactly right. “Glass shattering?”
Will rubbed his face in an exaggerated fashion.
“I had my eyes closed and didn’t really look at him much and wondered after the fact if he’d maybe felt used. It really was, like, we couldn’t have been less connected. But it seemed to work for him. I guess I know what I’m doing, too.”
“Please tell me you used a condom. The way you’re saying it, this doesn’t sound like a condom situation.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and she felt Will’s eyes boring deeper. “I don’t think we did. But it’s fine. I got tested when I got back to New York. Everything’s fine.”
“You let a fucking stranger old guy, who lived in L.A. in the nineties, come inside you?”
Will put his forehead flat on the bar.
“It all worked out okay,” she said.
“You can be fucking careless sometimes,” he said without moving.
“And you made some decisions I don’t love.…But we made it through unscathed.”
Will sat up again. “What were you thinking? Seriously?”
“I wasn’t, I guess. It didn’t even occur to me. I didn’t have much time. I had to take what was in front of me. Just like you. I know you think I had it easier, but that’s just not the case. The rest of the trip was production all day, every day. I just wasn’t thinking too hard about it. Sorry.”
“An old guy with a nice house,” Will said.
“Just like a young guy, but old,” Whitney said.
“What did the novelist have to say for himself afterward?”
“He thanked me in this deeply gracious and depressing way. The whole thing was a little surreal. Maybe it didn’t happen.”
“Adrien Green wakes up your body and you can’t wait to put it to use again. You find the first living breathing thing with a garden and a custom modern home on the Westside.”
“I’m twenty-nine years old. Every day I get older, my body gets grosser. I’m on the clock. Besides, it wasn’t right away after Adrien. I was running out of days.”
“Okay…” he said, swallowing. “So what about Number Three, then?”
Her brows flexed, extremely anxious-seeming all of a sudden. “You first,” she said.
“Well…” he said, pausing and dropping his eyes to his plate again. “I have another confession to make. And you might not
like this one, either.”
“Oh, Will…” She looked like a different person than she had ten seconds ago.
“You might want to finish that wine.”
“Who?”
“Just finish it.”
“Who?!”
The bartender and the waitress turned toward them. They’d finally made them notice.
Will dragged some strange noodles around a dish of burgundy goo. He couldn’t tell if the contents came from land or sea.
“There, uh, there wasn’t a Number Three,” Will said. “Sorry. I…know what the deal was. But I was a little shook after all the crying. No Three for me, unfortunately.”
Whitney stared at him blankly and her breathing shifted.
“I know it’s not what we said,” he continued, “but I figured of all the options, you’d be better with fewer rather than—”
“I didn’t…” she said, cutting him off, and swallowing hard, seizing on something, some window of opportunity. “I didn’t find three guys, either.…Just two.”
They sat there on their stools in silence, letting the revelations linger. They looked all at once drained. Paralyzed, almost, by their symmetry. They reached beneath the bar and squeezed each other’s hands. They kneaded each other’s fingers and knuckles and palms, and it felt like something they could do for the rest of their lives.
“This is good,” Will said, smiling disbelievingly.
“This is exactly why this is meant to be,” Whitney said, snorting with an incredible relief.
They sat there in the thickness of what they’d done and what they hadn’t done. The way they’d operated in the world without one another, yet in unison nonetheless.
“Adrien counted as two, anyway,” Will said.
“And Kelly, then, too. A penalty for breaking the coworker rule.”
“Former coworker.”
“It all worked out,” Whitney said, eyes wet now, eyes red.
“And it did what you were hoping it would do?”
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I guess I just…needed this so that I never had to wonder again.”
“Now we know,” Will said.
“Now we know,” Whitney said, smiling sadly, uncertainly. “Thank you.”
They drank from their glasses, but couldn’t touch another bite.