by Ben Philippe
“Financial analysts don’t romanticize,” she clarifies. “They establish and satisfy sound market demands.”
“Sounds hot.”
“He romances me,” she continues defensively, adding weight to the word. “It’s less pressure.”
“Now, see, how can I stop writing about you when you keep saying stuff like that?” I say, leaning back to stare at the glass dome above us.
If it shattered right now, I would shield you, I think and then say out loud just to see what happens. Mia is a story that requires an ending, and this airport drop-off isn’t it.
“Be still, my beating whatever,” she scoffs. Yet she moves in closer, removing the buffer between us by lifting herself onto the seat right next to me, keeping her toes tucked under my thigh.
“So, why did you come out here?”
I know the pretext—that she had wanted to give me the news of her impending nuptials in person. And the subtext, too—that she missed me and wanted to see how I was adjusting to Texas after a few dramatic emails about the heat and the people. But what I needed right now was the missing piece; the logic I knew was behind it all. I’m still finding my footing, both living in Austin and attending the University of Texas, hoping that every new acquaintance will turn into a deep and meaningful connection that never quite comes. I accumulate acquaintances and classmates, but my people are nowhere to be found. Two semesters in, it’s looking more and more like this is just a zip code. I’m lonely here and for better or worse, Mia is one of my people.
“I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else.”
I’m no great conversationalist, but it’s still her turn to talk so I wait, tapping my fingers against the back of her foot, careful not to slip into a massage. This silence is entirely hers.
“I think I needed to make sure. That I wasn’t making a mistake.” Mia finally sighs, and just like that, the whole weekend feels like a poorly graded assignment.
“Ouch.”
“C’mon, you know what I mean.”
I smile, if only to reassure her, but I don’t look down just yet. “I do. The ouch stands.”
At some point, and without my noticing, our fingers intertwined on the back of the empty chair, and I realize I’ve been probing the intrusive object around her finger for a moment now. Thirty-nine minutes left, and we run out of topics again, leaving the conversation with nowhere to go but back to that illogical pearly-white wedding invitation left behind on my kitchen counter that I already know will make a phenomenal beer coaster.
“I really do want you there,” Mia says, to which I snort without letting go of her hand, still focused on twirling the ring.
“I’m serious. It’ll be too weird otherwise. Me getting married and you not being there.” It feels both genuine and the possible setup to a cruel joke.
“Is it going to be an open bar?”
“Of course.”
“Then I definitely shouldn’t come.”
“Oh, c’mon, I expect to be at your wedding, too, one day.” There’s the punch line.
“Sure. Maybe I’ll hit it off with one of his sisters at the reception and we’ll all move into a giant three-walled house together facing an audience.”
“One sister. And she hates me.”
“Well, to be fair, you did just fly across the country and repeatedly cheat on her brother.”
It’s patently unfunny and that’s the funny part and just like that, we’re both laughing again. So hard that the old man with visible sweat pits sitting on the bench across from ours whips his newspaper at the pair of us until we’re both upright, pursing our lips to suppress the snickering. Wherever that guy might be at this very moment, I know that some Tuscany enthusiast who picks his honeymoon from preassembled honeymoon packages doesn’t laugh like this with her. Doesn’t make her laugh like this.
Her phone vibrates against the flat surface of her magazine, and she quickly untangles our hands. “One sec.” The custom ringtone—something like the recording of an old woman shouting profanities from afar with two sets of giggles in the foreground—echoes an entire history that I know nothing about. She doesn’t answer but begins to text right away, with a look in her eyes I can’t quite place. Fondness and a hint of something else. Guilt.
“I guess I’m not cabbing it home after all,” she eventually says, and it feels like she’s already boarded the plane.
In one of my short stories, she’s a predatory therapist and says to an increasingly unstable patient who professes his love, “I make love; you love. That’s the difference between us, Mister Simons.” It’s the closing line of that story.
I follow her eyes to the faraway screen of arrivals and departures, past the TSA check, and waiting any longer might cost her the flight, so we start to move. I stuff my hands in my pockets and keep my chin pointed outward as she slips on her sandals and abandons the ponytail, combing her fingers through her hair in the glass reflection behind us, flooding the air with a chemical scent of processed lavender. Connecting flight and all, I can predict at least one lengthy armrest conversation and two business cards in her purse by the time she steps foot in LaGuardia.
“Are you going to tell him?” I ask, and for a split second, something tightens in her arms. “Anything?”
“Are you kidding?”
I might have been actually; it’s getting hard to keep track. Because come to think of it, I don’t want that, either. I wanted it to be ours, impervious to audience participation. A story, yes, but scribbled in the margins, in tiny print that only two people knew how to decode.
“Maybe I should sign you two up for couples’ therapy . . .”
“Bread maker, blender, spa package,” she says distractedly, screwing the loosened diamond back to the base of her finger. “Keep it simple, Philippe.”
We stand for a moment, a little nervous, a lot unsure, and once again I speak first because something has to be said in the very next second or else I know the lavender fumes will turn noxious.
“Listen,” I begin and quickly stop, frowning at the weird echo in my voice. It takes me another moment to realize that I was not the only one speaking the word at that exact moment. “If you give me a handshake right now, I swear to God I’m raising my hand when the priest asks if there are any objections.”
She blinks her assessment. “We don’t do that anymore; too many unforeseen incidents. Does that mean you’ll be there?”
I shrug, hoping for some ambiguity. Either option seems as likely. My staying home and inhaling ice cream, sitting pretzel-style on the floor by my fridge, or my jumping on a flight for the privilege to watch my college friend—because that’s what we were always described to be—get married. It’s pathetic and pitiful and a slew of harsher synonyms, but I might. I might commit a thousand times over not to go but, in the final-hour coin toss, will go, no matter how many do-overs I may need; I’ll overpay for my ticket, overspend on the dry-cleaning of my tux, maybe even buy a new one, and when she makes her way down the aisle, flawless, what he’ll be looking for will be that imperceptible look sent my way. A hint that it’s all still some middling chapter, a rest stop on respective journeys that leaves the endgame the same as it was two years ago. Sure: I’ll shake the man’s hand for that look.
“Be happy for me, Rubeintz.” She finds my full name powerful and takes pleasure in using it.
“No.”
She pecks me on the lips and pulls me into an airless hug. I imagine a tall, whipcord-lean financial analyst tripping and cracking his skull open against the edge of a conference table, halfway through a PowerPoint about market shares. My mind isn’t always a nice place.
“You know I love you, right?” she adds, and if nothing else I’m grateful for the rhetorical phrasing. I want to tighten my grip but know she’ll wiggle out of it first, so I settle for the upper hand of being the one to break the embrace, lingering to place a kiss into her head, stealing a whiff for the road. A loose-necked and freckled white couple stares at us through sungla
sses and disapprovingly tight jaws, dragging their luggage past us. She doesn’t notice, thank God.
“Yeah, yeah. Tell it to your fiancé.”
She chuckles. “Asshole.”
“Adulteress.”
In a corner of my mind a retired couple decides to recapture something by traveling to a very specific hotel and past thick purple drapes. They rent a fully equipped room and, after changing, spend a few minutes taking in the various buckles and ropes, reestablishing boundaries and trust. They settle on the word phosphorous. “You know I love you, right?” the wife whispers against her husband’s lips, who in return can only nod before receiving the first whip crack. My stories still remain mediocre for another two semesters of fiction workshops. I spend the Friday before her wedding trying to increase my credit limit to purchase a $586 flight back to New York plus Airbnb. I can’t swing it.
On the day of her wedding, I sit for an hour in the lobby of the Austin airport, retracing our last steps, searching for any hint of hesitation in our last conversation, and trying to find, if not a story, then some trace of the woman who so carelessly let me get away. There’s no grand thesis about race to be found here. Some stories live under your skin, in the red and pink of your organs. These stories are all as important to who you are, and as inextricable from your being, as the color of your skin.
Twenty-Four
Black Ghost Goes, “Boo!”
I’M TWENTY-FIVE and I return to New York, weeks, if not days after graduating from the Michener Center. There are no ID cards this time; no one has requested my presence. A lot of my time in Texas felt like a three-year hiatus from the forward momentum that had bubbled up around me in college, though momentum toward what exactly, I couldn’t tell you. The city’s indifference to newcomers is already well documented in the media. Really: you are lucky if you can count on two hands the number of people who care if you live here or not. Carrie Bradshaw lied to everyone in Sex and the City: it’s the capital of loneliness, the final triathlon of living with yourself. She was sitting at the back of all those restaurants talking to three figments of her imagination, the poor unhinged woman.
I’m one of the many, landing at JFK with less than $100 dollars cash and a shrinking credit margin. It’s no longer Gossip Girl; rather it’s every crappy CBS sitcom trying to repackage and recapture the magic of Friends or Seinfeld. Monica Geller’s purple palace is not on the menu of possible domiciles.
And still, with everything ahead a series of unknowns, I return to the dating apps before the luggage carousel even starts to move and begin building fleeting connections with passing strangers’ photo albums. There are tales here, I think. People to run into, montages to kick-start. Stories. I’m sure. New York City is a hub of inciting incidents waiting to happen at each corner. Although, whether they happen in person or virtually, these happenstances statistically do not tend to end well.
?
It starts with the lone question mark.
We’ve all gotten the lone question mark before; that nudge to keep the banter going because the road to intimacy and long-term commitment is paved with consistent check-ins and goodnight emojis.
This specific question mark came thirty-six hours after my last exchange with “OneMilkTwoSugars” (not really OneMilkTwoSugars), an F/25 newly minted lawyer getting the hang of odd work hours. Its subtext was clear: “Hey: it’s your turn.”
Our prior exchange had been pleasant enough. My work was going well; she was having Seamless for dinner again; unnecessary LOLs were had by all. After a few false starts in which we’d both had to postpone or cancel drinks, texting had become our platform of choice, and the check-ins had fallen into an almost-daily rhythm. It took effort but less so than starting all over with a brand-new match. We joked about still technically being strangers while only living seven subway stops away from each other, which in hindsight, should have been the first sign. New Yorkers are known to travel farther to pick up good Thai food that doesn’t deliver to their address. But I did not reply to the lone question mark, nor to the dozen or so messages that followed. Instead, I ghosted OneMilkTwoSugars.
A Paltrow-affiliated publicist might call me “the active precipitator of an unforeseen, one-sided uncoupling.” You might settle for “asshole.” Somewhere along the way, my interest in meeting with OneMilkTwoSugars had simply vanished. It was a half-shrug of a thought process; like forfeiting a game of Words With Friends in which you had the lead, having no interest in seeing the outcome through.
Ghosting—the act of cutting contact in the midst of an ongoing interaction with someone you are casually, or in some cases not so casually, seeing—is nothing new, and plenty has been written about it. Many view the practice as a callous dismissal of another person’s feelings: cowardly, rude, and disrespectful. On the other hand, it is also very literally just not doing a damn thing at all, something at which we twentysomethings excel.
Two days after the “?” came OneMilkTwoSugars’ follow-up: “Wow. Really?”
It was passive-aggressive, but an opened door nonetheless. I could salvage this with an apologetic lie. My boss died in a car accident . . . my apartment was flooding . . . I lost my phone on the subway on the way to the flood crisis center . . . Lying was a better option than silence, but still I did not reply. Reactions among my friends were . . . mixed.
“So, you’re ghosting this white girl?” asked a good female friend, while we were in line at the movies.
“I’m ghosting her. But her being white had nothing to do with it.” (It really didn’t.)
“That’s really disappointing coming from you, Ben.”
When I asked why, she explained that I was not the typical ghoster. Not a “fuckboy,” nor Felipe. No picture of my penis had ever been sent to an unsolicited party, which I’m told is the litmus test of fuckboy-ery. The argument that this person and I had never met held little weight in her eyes. In fact, it made things worse. I was supposed to be a good guy.
“That poor girl is going crazy, thinking there’s something wrong with her.”
In my nonaction, my friend saw the same dismissal she had herself experienced with some other good guy who had made a nice first impression, sometimes over the course of several dates, only to suddenly fall off the face of the earth. The streets are apparently filled with ghosts and wounded parties waiting for an explanation. She dealt with these ghostings by imagining each ghoster to be an asshole who was doing her a favor by showing their true colors early and bright.
Another friend of mine, Dave (not really Dave), shrugged it all off. “Ghosting’s not a thing,” Dave argued. “You’re letting someone know you don’t want to interact with them by not interacting with them! It’s not your problem if they feel entitled to more.”
To be fair, Not-Dave is a bartender and a renowned fuckboy in his own right. He mostly avoids apps, and his ghosting takes the form of incredibly light steps as he vanishes in the morning and adds one more entry to his list of bars across the city to avoid. His dick snapshots fly fast and furious. Heck, your last text notification might be a picture of Dave’s dick. I do not have the looks, eight-pack, or self-confidence to date like Dave, but didn’t Dave have a valid point? What exactly is owed here?
Dating apps and websites are the Wild West of interpersonal connections. It is not virtual speed-dating; it is virtual spam-folder cleaning with people you might want to meet instead of emails. Yes, you might upgrade someone to your regular inbox if you find their content appealing, but you are mostly browsing through bulk advertisement that either does not speak to you or is packaged in a way that feels too good to be true.
To be fair, you are likewise being callously sorted in return, which almost democratizes the process. We’re all just huddled at the back of the school during recess trading Pokémon cards of ourselves. Racial preferences aren’t problematic yet. Statistically, Black women and Asian men are at the bottom of the pile. The interactions in my inbox back up those numbers.
“I don’t like Bla
ck guys, sorry!”
“Goofy but cute!”
“That’s my entire brand. Hi!”
“Too bad ur definitely one of those niggas that only dates white women”
“No, I’m not”
(No reply ever comes to that one.)
The next time I found myself listlessly browsing OkCupid, I received a message from OneMilkTwoSugars, as my continued existence greatly displeased her:
“I see you on here so I know you’re alive. I don’t know what the deal is but this is beyond rude. Disgusting.”
That green dot marking me as being online confirmed that I had not fallen prey to a falling AC unit while walking one day; I was not in a huddle of crying family members, living through some tragic and sudden loss; I was not suddenly asexual, having turned my back on dating altogether. Nothing was preventing me from playing a lackadaisical round of Quickmatch at 11:52 p.m., and this was “disgusting.”
Someone out there hated me specifically because they hadn’t met me—which, unless you take a firm ideological stance against Canadians, should be the minimum requirement for hating someone. Worse still, indifference was all I could muster. There was no guilt on my end.
I read over our past two weeks or so of correspondence, and in pixel form, my enthusiasm to meet matched hers. We’d had good banter along with some fairly intimate exchanges. It had also never really stopped; I had simply opted out of keeping it going. The prospect of coordinating schedules and finally meeting had grown more wearisome, and our first date was weighed by all this pre-intimacy we’d established. The simple answer was that we had waited too long to meet, so why was the prospect of writing about it more appealing than just telling her that in 160 characters? Was I a functioning sociopath for not wanting to be bothered?
What if I had met OneMilkTwoSugars? What if we’d gone for drinks, dates, and had sex before this unflappable indifference of mine had set in? Would that be preferable? Ending things at that point would be an entirely different process, but would it not eventually lead to a series of excuses in the hopes of achieving this same result? (“My phone died,” “Didn’t get your text,” “I forgot to hit send,” “I fell asleep, lol.”)