Going Dutch

by James Gregor

  “My roommates might be home.”

  What did she mean by that? He wanted to laugh out loud.

  “I have some pork buns left over from the weekend. They’re even better after a day or two in the fridge.”

  They took the elevator up four floors and walked down a dingy corridor. Anne opened the door to her apartment. It was a jagged collection of rooms the color of old margarine, like other graduate housing Richard had come across in the neighborhood.

  Richard followed Anne down the narrow hall.

  “I hate that we have a television,” she said.

  “There’s a television at my place too.”

  A grainy sweetness floated in the air.

  “That’s the smell of vegan chocolate cake in case you’re wondering.”

  In the kitchen two women, probably in their midtwenties, dressed identically in gray hoodies, navy-blue aprons over jeans, and red Swedish wedges, stood amid spoons and a torn bag of flour. They were engaged in vehement conversation.

  “I’m going to sleep out on the field,” one said, a bag of sprinkles in her hand.

  “I’m going to drape a banner from the roof,” the other replied, leaning into the open fridge.

  They were almost identically tall and robust, and wore bandanas in their hair, one red and one yellow, over pale, waxy faces.

  “Oh look, it’s Liz Taylor,” the one with the sprinkles said. She licked a thick glob of icing from her finger.

  Anne snorted and raised her sunglasses onto her head. Richard turned his face toward a beaten stack of books on the windowsill, The Fourth Wave and Veganomicon among them.

  “This is Richard,” Anne said. “Meet Erin and Alicia.”

  “There’s going to be a series of protests on campus,” Erin said to him. “Are you going?”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “You should really stay informed,” said Alicia. “It’s important.”

  “I am informed.”

  “About what?”

  “About a lot of things.”

  “Oh, you mean like, who’s the most important bald man in the Western canon?”

  “Right!” said Erin, leaping on this. “Or like, how many teenage boys did Plato deflower? The important stuff.”

  “To some people,” said Anne, “Plato’s erotic life is of the utmost importance.”

  She got some pork buns out of the fridge. As they spun in the microwave, she led Richard into her room, offering him a seat at her desk, a broad mahogany thing dauntingly out of place in the mangy apartment. He noticed a shelf of old porcelain makeup dishes and glass figurines. On the walls there were black-and-white photographs of a parched landscape.

  “I drove across the Peloponnesus last year,” she said. “I went with a really wonderful older woman friend. The men were frighteningly aggressive.”

  “Really?”

  “They would just bark at us in Greek. Obscene things, I’m sure.”

  “I thought you spoke Greek.”

  “Ancient Greek. Not the dialect currently in use at gas stations on the outskirts of Thessaloniki.”

  Richard shifted his attention to the bookcase.

  “So what’s up with your roommates?” he asked.

  “Oh them,” she said, leaning against it. He turned away slightly, as though intrigued by her Loeb Classical editions. “Don’t worry about them. Wannabe lesbians.”

  “I don’t care,” said Richard. “I don’t even know them.”

  On the other side of the room, there was an abstract painting on the wall. He walked over to get a better look. It was a swirl of black ink on a white background. “My sister is an artist. I come from a family of depressive, intellectual women.”

  “Does she exhibit a lot?”

  “Yes, in the mental institution where she lives.”

  The microwave binged. “It sounds like they’re ready,” he said, with an anxious speed.

  As he stepped into the kitchen, Erin and Alicia launched into an abrupt and self-consciously spirited discussion as though a moment before, they had been in a posture of attentive surveillance.

  “What this all comes down to is, the school needs a stronger environmental policy,” Alicia declared, pulling a Pyrex tray of black material out of the oven.

  “Are you aware of the fact?” said Erin, offering Richard a piece of cake. “That there are no composting toilets on campus?”

  He shook his head.

  “How about you, Anne?” said Erin. “Are you going to the protest?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not interested in feeble gestures.”

  “We’ll see how feeble it is when I throw an egg in the president’s eye,” said Erin, and the two young women erupted into laughter.

  Anne rolled her eyes as she took the pork buns out of the microwave. She put two each on a plate, but instead of taking a place at the kitchen table, where Erin and Alicia were sitting, she walked back into the bedroom. Richard followed, feeling the eyes of Erin and Alicia on his back. He sat near the door. Was it was more awkward to leave the door open, or to have it closed?

  Sitting at her desk, Anne looked at him and mouthed sorry. She shook her head, gesturing in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said quietly.

  “Aren’t these even better reheated?”

  “They’re very good,” he said.

  He ate the pork buns slowly—they were extremely hot. As soon as he was done he said he had to be going.

  “You do?” she said, clearly disappointed.

  “Unfortunately.”

  “Okay.”

  As Richard followed her to the front door, he said bye to Erin and Alicia, who were now on the couch. They waved with unreadable expressions on their faces.

  “We didn’t get a chance to discuss our paper,” Anne said in the elevator.

  “That’s okay,” he said, too relieved to be out of the apartment to much care, at that point, about the paper.

  They stood on the front steps of the building.

  “Next time,” she mused. “They have a habit of hijacking the conversation.”

  “You’re pretty verbal yourself.”

  “There are two of them.”

  “How did you meet each other?”

  “We were put together by the housing office. That was a few years ago and now— dot-dot-dot—we’re friends. I stay because they’re here. I’d move out otherwise. Sometimes we’re hard on each other, but it’s just kind of our style. We really love each other.”

  “The whole Elizabeth Taylor thing?”

  “That’s one thing they do—make annoying comparisons.”

  “Well—it’s good to be friends with your roommates, I guess.”

  Anne nodded.

  “Are you friends with your roommates?”

  “I just have one,” Richard said. “We don’t really talk.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I’d move out if I could.”

  There was a heavy silence. She cupped his bare elbow, her small hand soft and warm. “Lunch Tuesday? We’ll get back on track with the paper?”

  “Okay.”

  She strained on her toes to reach his cheek. He bent down and she kissed him.

  “I had fun today,” she said blushingly, her words like pale legs exposed to the sun after a long winter.

  “Me too,” Richard said, smiling, surprised by his own fervor.

  “Bye.”

  She went back inside.

  THREE

  “He was tall, skinny, chest a bit concave. Total white supremacist body.”

  Richard nodded. It was later that night, and he was at the loft of an independently wealthy hairdresser and amateur playwright named Toller. He’d been to parties there before, accompanying Patrick and Patrick’s newish boyfriend, a Latvian gallery assistant named Valdes, who had moved to New York to go to art school, and metamorphosed from a socially peripheral fi
gure into a caustic, haughty, and nocturnally adventurous bon vivant. Valdes was famous in art school for his Adderall-fueled finger-painting marathons. Tall, blond, and broad-shouldered like Patrick, Valdes wore turtlenecks, gold jewelry, and jean jackets on which he’d affixed numerous opalescent brooches. He traveled in a pack with two glossily handsome, stout undergraduate brunettes named Barrett and Amir, who occasionally worked as go-go boys at bars in the East Village.

  “No, but they often do,” Barrett continued, in his soft Maryland accent, pouring another glass of champagne.

  “Often do what?”

  “Have orange hair.”

  Amir, who seemed impatient to speak—he and Barrett were always in competition for the floor—began describing the way he came out to his mother.

  “I said I wasn’t sure, and she was like, well if you’re not sure don’t tell anybody! And I said, didn’t you notice when I got a subscription to British House and Garden? This was a while back, I’m proud to say. People still had subscriptions to magazines then.”

  “My mother was far more satisfyingly melodramatic,” said Barrett. “She said I feel like I just discovered you have terminal cancer.”

  They all laughed.

  “So then I got my head shaved, and whenever I knew she was around, like in earshot, I’d make gagging sounds.”

  Toller’s friends were mostly younger than Richard. They could be really annoying, but they were also energetic and witty, and some of them had amusing stories to tell about famous people in the city, in whose lives they played subaltern roles involving email management and food preparation and disturbingly intimate access to the sordid personal affairs of their bosses.

  Richard left their conversation when a muscly, ponytailed boy caught his attention near a table covered with vivid-looking sashimi. Richard slurringly asked the boy’s name and then showered him with compliments about his clothes and lips. The boy had a vaguely Quebecois accent.

  “It’s from the thrift store,” the boy said when Richard pointed to the mesh tank top he was wearing. His name was probably Benoit, though it was hard to tell with how loud the apartment had become. “Beacon’s Closet.”

  “Pardon?” Richard said, using the pretext of incomprehension to lean closer and inhale the arousing scent, evergreen mixed with sweat, which lifted from Benoit’s armpits. Even in mesh form, polyester didn’t breathe.

  “Never mind,” Benoit said, indicating with his thumb and index finger that they should go into Toller’s room. Patrick was already there, sitting on the edge of Toller’s bed, watching Valdes raffishly snort a line of cocaine.

  Benoit attempted to engage Patrick in conversation, but instead of responding directly Patrick said, “Have a line.”

  Slightly dumbstruck, Benoit sat down beside Valdes and proceeded to loudly inhale, at which point Valdes stood up and walked over to where Patrick was now standing. Richard took the open place beside Benoit, all along watching Valdes approach Patrick. If he couldn’t have Patrick’s attention, Richard supposed having this athletic specimen beside him was not a bad consolation prize.

  “Patrick is so funny,” Benoit said, sniffling as Richard partook in the line. “I’ve never met anyone like him.”

  “Sure,” Richard said, rubbing his nose and abruptly deciding to abandon this unresponsive Francophone, as Valdes started manhandling Patrick in the corner. Richard turned away from this irksome display and walked out into the main loft area to join Barrett and Amir, who were sitting on a sofa on either side of the flushed and sweaty Toller. His peroxided hair flattened against his forehead, Toller fixed Richard with an accusatory stare.

  “You didn’t bring anyone?”

  Richard shook his head.

  “Doesn’t anyone ask you out? You have an understated masculinity.”

  Richard tried not to smile too widely. He had often been mistaken for a girl when he was younger, notably into puberty, and his perceived position along the gender spectrum at any given moment was never far from his mind.

  “I invited someone tonight, but he’s not coming.”

  Twenty-four hours after their date Richard had sent Blake an ill-advised flurry of texts, not a single one of which Blake had responded to.

  “You met online?” Toller said.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s your answer.”

  “Don’t be a Luddite,” Barrett said. “It makes you sound old. Everybody meets online. My sister met her husband online.”

  “Maybe for gay guys, it’s fine. But girls? No chick should have to do it. No chick should be reduced to the hunt and peck,” Toller declared with an ersatz air of authority.

  As far as his own luck dating online went, he said—he was the romantic-slash-bourgeois type, it was important to keep in mind—his encounters had mostly been dull.

  “I’ve been on four dates in the last week,” he said. “The first guy was beautiful, but he kept going on about the appendectomy he got in Paris. The second and third were too political—one on the left and the other on the right—and the last guy told me outright that, though he thought I was interesting, my complexion was”—he used his index fingers for quotes here —“too milky, too feminine.”

  They were all listening intently.

  “But of course, I’m not surprised when a date doesn’t amount to anything,” Toller continued. “Profiles don’t give you an accurate idea of a person. If you meet someone out in the world, their personality comes out in drips and drabs—if they’re not totally basic, that is—and it’s all just more palatable.”

  “Every date can be dull,” Barrett said, his lustrous brown curls spilled messily but perfectly on his head. “Especially the ones that start out in real life.”

  They all nodded.

  Richard thought it possible that the gadgets involved in contemporary dating made it easier for someone like him, a misty introvert who didn’t do well exposed and put on the spot at bars, to approach other guys. Since it was just a message on a screen, there was minimal gumption required and the sting of rejection was reduced. On the other hand, the thrill and magic of meeting someone in person—but was it thrilling and magical?—was gone.

  “You haven’t convinced me,” Toller said.

  “That’s on you,” Barrett said.

  Richard tried to imagine Toller in the ubiquitous profile poses—shirtless in the kitchen, pretending to nap in freshly washed sheets, squatting in some fastidious urban weight room—but found these poses difficult to reconcile with the odd, preposterous hairdresser and heir, patron of emaciated young men, who roosted in front of him.

  Barrett and Amir, on the other hand, entered effortlessly into these molds. They both had beautiful faces smoothed to a poreless glisten and got frequent mani-pedis. They worked out with obvious expertise. Richard pictured them scampering down the beaches of Fire Island in tiny swimsuits, posting shots of themselves to Instagram, going inside to drink and cook up some delicious meal, before a night of orgiastic sex with an appropriate third.

  “I hate the idea of being displayed on-screen, trying to prove your worth,” Toller said. “People passing by leaving comments.” He paused for effect. “Like dogs marking their territory.”

  “But there’s a lot of possibility if you keep going, statistically,” Amir said.

  “Statistically I never meet anyone and I never fall in love,” Toller said. “Barrett says it’s because I don’t bother. I choose to believe him.”

  Barrett nodded.

  “All I want,” Amir said. “Is to be tall and naturally fit and never age, and have a big dick.”

  Patrick was suddenly dancing with Benoit, who raised his hands into the air, undid his ponytail, and fluffed his hair out.

  “Don’t worry,” Barrett said, turning to Valdes, who was staring at them. “Patrick loves you the best. Apparently you’re the only person who really listens or something.”

  I’m the one who really listens, Richard thought peevishly. He was hit by the vexing image of himself as Patr
ick’s scribe—monkish, self-denying, and oratorically competent—recording Patrick’s escapades from the fringes of the party and then, over yogurt and mimosas the next morning, recounting them to him all over again. Their conversations consisted mostly of Patrick speaking and Richard listening. Patrick was oppressively happy. He’d told his Evangelical grandmother, with whom he was close, that he was gay, then had a string of brief but meaningful affairs to celebrate. He was spending his latest academic stipend with a thrilling rashness, on shirts and cashmere ties; he told Richard that he could hang clothes from his cheekbones. It had amused him to no end one night when, squeezing out of a crowded, narrow bar, a punkish-looking girl in black leather ankle boots said to him in a robot voice, “Tall blonds must pass.” Patrick was socially brilliant, and Richard had always felt that he didn’t measure up, except as a kind of secretary.

  As if sensing these thoughts, Patrick abandoned Benoit, who was dancing fiercely with his eyes squeezed shut and fists in the air, and came and stood beside Richard, who was now sitting on the sofa.

  “Where’s your date?” Patrick asked.

  “He didn’t text back.”

  Patrick’s eyes seemed to slide out of focus. Afraid of being mundane, Richard went for the dramatic gesture.

  “If they ever find my body and say ‘he loved life,’ you have to tell them it isn’t true, because it isn’t.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic. There’s always hope.”

  Patrick sat down on the arm of the sofa. Staring down from a reassuring height, he began to recount the story of a couple he knew whose route to a successful marriage, begun on a dating site, had been marked by the flaky, noncommittal slalom of online and real-life interaction, a tortuous route whose destination turned out to be a solid and loving partnership, and residence on the top two floors of a brownstone.

  They both joined the website around the same time. The initial gesture was his.

  “Hi,” he wrote in a message. Patrick lowered his voice in an oafish manner to imitate this hapless straight man. Among his phalanx of talents, Patrick was a vivid mimic, and Richard, who was now smiling, always felt affectionately indulged when Patrick performed for his benefit.