by James Gregor
Richard pretended to be asleep.
“We know you’re awake,” said Erin.
It felt, it sounded, like a threat. He tried to imitate REM sleep, shifting his eyes around.
“Stop faking,” Alicia said.
“Yeah, quit it.”
They sounded drunk. Had they been drinking? He couldn’t smell alcohol.
“Oh hey,” he said. “Yeah, I’m awake.”
“Oh hey,” Alicia said, making fun of him.
“Of course you’re awake,” Erin said. “How could you sleep with this trombone beside you?”
They cackled in unison.
“I can’t believe this,” Alicia said. “This is too perfect!”
“All is revealed,” Erin mused.
“I’m so excited to tease her about it!”
“No, we shouldn’t tell her we know. We should just, like, quietly imitate her whenever she walks by.”
“Move over,” Alicia said, teasing.
“I’m as far as I can go,” Richard said.
He pushed against the side of the tent.
“I’m just kidding,” she said.
It was three in the morning when he looked at his phone again. He was hot and stiff. Beside him, like a Greek chorus furtively tranquilized by a doomed protagonist, all three of them were snoring. Moisture gathered on the canted nylon walls. He struggled out of the sleeping bag and then out into the dark, zipping up the tent quickly behind him, as though securing a predator.
Indifferent to their protest, whatever it was, the patrician campus was still. Anne would probably be upset when she woke up and found him gone. Erin and Alicia would snicker all day, doubting his commitments, making inferences about his politics. He turned on his heels and started walking.
If Anne was upset, that was something she would have to deal with; she had to admit that it was one thing to go out for lunch, another thing entirely to ask him to sleep all night in a tent, squashed in with her dubious friends. She was helping him, but this favor had all been a bit much. Perhaps a piece of his anger stemmed from the fact that she had abandoned him in the tent with Erin and Alicia, that he needed her in that situation just as he did with Antonella.
He was mouthing an argument, coddling a lump of guilt like a small infant it was imperative not to wake. He went down into the subway, and after a long wait, the train finally arrived. He found a seat and hardly moved during the entire floridly lit, heavy-gravity crawl home.
SIX
What a chore it must have been for Patrick to have a needy best friend when he was a new resident in an emotional and erotic paradise. Since falling in love with Valdes—if he was really in love—Patrick was in the habit of being grotesquely late. And even when he did show up, Richard was always on the lookout for signs of hesitation and impatience, like a detective perched with binoculars at the window of a rented room. He was convinced that Patrick came only grudgingly to hear his repetitive tales of romantic frustration, or just to marvel at the bitter telemetry Richard brought back from excursions into the dating pool, Patrick having climbed out of that pool himself.
It was Saturday morning, two days since the protest and the abortive night in the tent, and the weather had made another one of its benevolent early-summer leaps—T-shirts prevalent and eager crocuses visible in the grass. Richard yawned as he entered the warm cave of Sloppy, a coffee shop close to his apartment. Still not having fully recovered his lost sleep, his eyes were dry and he was craving the pastoral taste of their dark roast.
He wondered whether he should buy Patrick his coffee. But the coffee was liable to be cold by the time Patrick arrived. He was probably lolling in bed with Valdes at that very moment, whining about how he didn’t want to leave, the sheets in a warm tangle.
Patrick could get his own coffee.
“Hi, Richard!”
Courtney, one of the Sloppy baristas, waved from behind the bar.
“Good morning, Courtney. How are things today?”
“I’m okay, Richard,” she said, in her characteristically frantic, ambivalent tone.
The Sloppy baristas were infamous for their habit of roaring over and complaining about obliterated relationships, badgering you to attend an improv performance, or joining you, when all you wanted to do was to drink your coffee in peace and read the paper, the moment you sat down at one of the tables with a small square prosthesis of cardboard fastened to one leg.
“A cappuccino, please, Courtney. I’m considering a sandwich, but maybe for later.”
Or maybe not, he thought, as he looked at the chalkboard. Despite the air of naïveté that prevailed at Sloppy, their prices, already vexingly astute for the gentrifying neighborhood, had definitely gone up.
Richard tried to be detached about it. He’d woken up in a good mood, and he wanted to prolong it as long as possible. The beautiful day, teasing out flowers and grass, tactfully disrobing the inhabitants of the city, helped a great deal. Moreover, that morning the money from the foundation had come into his bank account, indicating happy receipt of Antonella’s letter. It was the sort of efficiency you didn’t expect in a nonprofit.
“I’m happy to see you, Richard,” Courtney said. “I’m putting you on my gratitude list for today.”
“I’m glad to be there,” Richard said.
Courtney was a fixture of the surrounding blocks. She had long chestnut hair, aeronautical arms and legs, and rode around waifishly on a vintage Peugeot bike. Today she wore an undershirt and disintegrating acid-wash jean shorts. Her engagement to Craig, a fellow barista at Sloppy, had recently ended when Craig moved to Seattle to get into tech, despite having learned to count with wooden beads. Since his departure, Courtney had been spontaneously but reliably bursting into tears as she prepared the vegan sandwiches that figured heavily on Sloppy’s menu. You could see nervous customers watching to make sure that none of the tears fell into the beds of avocado and tempeh for which they were impatiently waiting. If the crying jag persisted, she went outside and sat on a bench. Once or twice Richard had taken a place beside her and she’d wept on his shoulder. She claimed she was going to have Craig’s baby, but her belly never grew.
Sloppy often felt utopic: the diversity and stylishness of the clientele, the quality and ethics of the coffee, the brownstones across the street, and the occasional vintage Mercedes-Benz sedan that appeared at the curb and just sat there, gleaming, absorbed in its own sublime mechanical prowess. It was a feeling usually punctured by the disgusting clogged toilet and the fact that they were always out of key ingredients. A rat had once died under the floor and was not removed for several days. Then again low-key celebrities frequently came in and let their adopted children crawl around on the ground. They arrived in Volvos or hybrids and acknowledged you as a fellow regular.
Cappuccino in hand, Richard went to the back and found a table. Around him freelancers leaned into their computers with slumped intensity. He checked his phone. There was still no sign of Patrick.
Before Patrick had got together with Valdes, he was often the first to arrive at Sloppy for their afternoons or mornings of caffeinated bitching. Wherever they happened to be, Patrick and Richard found a coffee shop to colonize together. They had been friends since meeting in a study-abroad program in Rome when they were both twenty-one. Learning a Romance language had seemed practical then; less than a decade later, it was without question a demonically frivolous act. But in those promising early days they had memorized their vocabulary together and gone to discos in Testaccio, to anarchist bars in San Lorenzo, and to the slowly crumbling lavatories and baths once enjoyed by the murderous politicians whose busts filled the city. Above his bed in Piazza Bologna, Richard pinned a postcard of Albert Camus that read There’s no shame in preferring happiness, which Patrick laughed at. But then Patrick rescued him from penury after his grant money stubbornly failed to materialize. He searched out the address of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and rode with Richard on a series of buses to the diplomatic section of the city, a region of long, unf
orgiving boulevards without sidewalks. The ministry was a marble edifice protected by numerous bored security personnel. When a pleasant elderly woman in one of the vast offices professed her ignorance as to the money’s whereabouts, Patrick demanded it be transferred into Richard’s account immediately, which it was.
In the years that immediately followed their undergraduate degrees, they’d stayed in intimate but intermittent touch without actually seeing each other. Patrick, having put Europe sensibly behind him, settled in New York to continue his education while Richard returned to loaf around the continent on a grand tour, his own tenuous version of Goethe’s Italian Journey, teaching English and nannying or manning the night shift at a hostel. Long weeks of silence were broken by the arrival of text messages or emails in which Patrick bemoaned his “boring existence” in which he was “anxiously preoccupied with handing over my life to the next terrible generation”—Patrick went through periodic but intense bursts of wanting to procreate—and declared that he’d “had the urge to meet up with you lately in some random city, dressed to kill, and destroy people with our side eyes.” Like many of his friends in that period, Richard felt, Patrick’s life had begun to assume an increasingly solid romantic and professional structure, something his own just stubbornly refused to do.
After Europe, full of the alarming dread of comparison via social media —“compare and despair”—Richard had returned home in a fog of gloom to live with his parents and regroup in the town where he’d been raised, which was just a swelling on the lip of the ocean, a small northern place where the phrase “all the world’s a stage” did not quite apply. Full of envy at Patrick’s life in New York, Richard spent a despairing year living in his childhood bedroom, which in his absence had been turned into an office and storage space. On the shelf there was a selection of paperback novels and a VHS tape with Princess Diana’s Funeral written along the spine in black marker. He got a job at an independent bookstore on its last legs and when, naturally, it closed, his parents began reluctantly filtering money to him through an old bank account he’d had since childhood, but that stream of cash had then been diverted to support a new habit of taking cruises up the Pacific Coast to Alaska—intellectual cruises where famous writers and physicists gave lectures.
It had been Patrick who suggested that Richard try his hand at graduate school, with the claim that it was an easy bridge for the moderately intelligent, and a last refuge for the neurotic and antisocial now that bookstores and video stores were vanishing and libraries turning into glorified Internet cafés. It was exciting to think they’d be living in the same city again, not too far from where they’d gone to college. Patrick helped Richard find the apartment and move in, and before Valdes entered the picture, they developed a nice routine. Most nights around ten o’clock Patrick would bike over from his apartment on Willoughby Avenue. Richard would eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese Dinner or something equally glutinous while he waited, and when Patrick arrived in a jean jacket, his blond hair strikingly windblown, they’d close themselves into Richard’s room, put on Eurythmics, and Patrick would roll a joint. Then they’d escape the apartment and walk the arboreal streets of Clinton Hill or Prospect Heights, pleasantly high.
Richard’s first months in New York had been a time of stamina and optimism. Almost every night of the week he went out to destinations chosen by Barrett, Amir, or Toller, all of whom he’d met through Patrick. They in turn had dozens of energetic and fashionable friends who were frequent recipients of tickets and invitations to openings and sample sales. The nights felt stirring, romantic, and full of potential.
But it was a routine with an inevitable expiry date. People were pairing off, not least Patrick, who still came out at night with whomever he happened to be dating, but who would soon disappear forever into a comfortable domestic bivouac, Richard was certain. Some nights—just as these new couples did—Richard would have preferred to stay in with pizza and Netflix. There was also the matter of being able to get any work done in the hungover days that interspersed these sparkling nights.
Coupling off in New York proved more frustrating and desolating than he had predicted. His attempts to date boys, these blind lunges toward happiness, soon predictably unsuccessful attempts at raw human connection, and the emotional hypothermia that followed led him to endorse the slogan, which floated around on the Internet and on Hallmark cards and in drunken conversation at the end of the night, that friends really were the most important relationship in your life, a conviction maintained despite mountains of evidence to the contrary in the form of married couples and nonmarried couples, couples with children, the agitation for the right to marry and adopt children, the number of guys on the dating sites and apps who wanted a husband, the waves of superiority that washed off couples, and the envy Richard felt toward those who didn’t have to go home at night alone and log on to their dating profiles at some stark hour. And then on top of that there was the obvious insincerity in profile names like norushfortheone and the radiant candor in names like waitingforthemiracle. But despite all that, Richard decided to try to believe it was true, and not just a comforting deflection intended for those who, like himself, couldn’t seem to get themselves into a relationship.
He was tired of feeling inferior and cast off, so he would change the terms of the debate, or game, whatever it was. But it was difficult when you were the only one who seemed to want to believe it. He was destined to find himself on the other end of a café table, it appeared, perpetually waiting for Patrick instead of some doting boyfriend.
The bone crack of fractured china fragmented through Sloppy as Courtney dropped a plate onto the floor. Richard felt newly annoyed at Patrick’s lateness, but also a growing need for him to be there, to sit beside or across from Patrick in that room of not-quite-strangers.
Where was Anne? Probably by herself too. Was she thinking about him? Anne did not leave you on perturbed standby, he reflected. She made you feel like you were the focus, not an incidental feature of the environment. Patrick wasn’t about to drop Richard, but the ambient threat that it could happen, and that if it did happen, it would be Patrick who did the dropping and not Richard, Patrick who was pulled away by some other more exciting thing and not the other way around, lent him an attractive menacing quality that was impossible to achieve consciously, Richard knew.
Anne was earnest and reliable and even if, by some inconvenient evolutionary tick, earnestness and reliability weren’t as attractive as the threat of abandonment, or a muscular physique, there were certain qualities you had to force yourself to value. In the long run it was for your own good.
She was like eating your vegetables, or quitting smoking, or going to the gym.
Windswept as ever, Patrick finally appeared. He came and sat down with a cappuccino in hand, carrying an attractively beat-up leather messenger bag.
“You’re not that late this time,” Richard said.
“What do you mean?”
There was a pause as Patrick arranged himself. Richard chose not to clarify.
“I’m sorry,” Patrick said, turning to Richard. “How are you?”
“I’m all right.”
“I don’t think we ever really discussed that date you went on . . . a while back. Tell me what you did again?”
The date in question was now several weeks old, but Richard still felt immediately the warmth and comfort that came with being the sole focus of Patrick’s attention.
“His name was Blake. We went for a walk on the High Line and I bought him dinner.”
“Where?”
“At a diner.”
“Did you sleep with him?”
Richard shook his head.
“A kiss, even?”
Richard thought for a second.
“No, we just hugged,” he said.
“And he never responded to your texts?”
“No.”
Patrick nodded thoughtfully.
“There’s your answer,” Patrick said, as though readin
g a thermometer.
“What do you mean?”
“You took him to a diner.”
“I wondered if that was a bad idea. You can’t live on that kind of food,” he sighed. “I don’t think that men see me as a provider.”
“You’re not a provider.”
“Do you think it’s something innate, or can it be learned?”
“It’s totally innate.”
“I thought you’d say that.”
Richard was overcome by gloom. His various handicaps—using credit cards that came in the mail attached to suspiciously cheery letters, not bothering with his taxes, not knowing how to make a tuna melt—had in the past been an amusement to his friends, and to himself the sign of a fine, original mind, too preoccupied by abstract thought to find its way to the kitchen or the bank. Now, as houses and marriages and children were being contemplated, and sometimes actually acted upon, these charming dysfunctions were taking on a more ominous aspect. He wasn’t eccentric and intelligent anymore, but flaky and incompetent, not original and endearing, but blundering and doomed. Doomed, that is, to be alone.
Patrick sipped his cappuccino, scanning the other tables.
“Maybe I should change my ‘Wants Kids?’ answer to ‘yes’ instead of ‘undecided,’ ” Richard said.
“Good idea,” Patrick said. “If you don’t want a kid, you’re a curiosity, you’re obsolete.”
“But I have a right not to want children.”
“I know you do, but don’t say that. People who are ambivalent about children are supposed to have great careers to compensate.”
“I just want someone there when I wake up on Sunday. Sunday fucking Sunday.”
Or Saturday, he thought. That morning, he was quite certain—despite the preciously conjured biosphere of south Brooklyn in which it took place, with all its percolating coffee, gently stretched sailor shirts, tennis shoes, lives made up of a baffling potion of accomplishment and leisure—would have turned to an abyss of boredom and disappointment had Patrick not been able to meet him. All the accoutrements, the trappings, the dishes of citrus donuts and caramelized bacon, Schwinn bicycles, vintage Mercedes-Benz cars, the beautiful people in perfect jeans, would not have been sufficient to prevent it. Being there actually made it worse, Richard decided. It was the contrast between him and them, himself and the people on the street who seemed fulfilled. If he had been somewhere bland, unremarkable, ordinary—like his hometown—he might not have felt it so acutely. But here what amplified it on weekend mornings was the absence of potential in the place that was supposed to contain the greatest potential of all.