Going Dutch

by James Gregor

  In Montreal her body had been delirious and happy, feral like a small zebra hopping around a lake that has finally replenished at the end of a drought. The evidence that she had not been touched in a long time, her scrambling maneuvers and chaotic breathing, mixed themselves with a natural refinement, a composure and prowess, and the erect, tensile but soft antennae of her empathy, like headlights sweeping up and down his body, assessing its needs and tailoring her behavior to his own. She was lonely, desperately so; but so was he. And now there were scratches on his back.

  In this grumpy negligent aftermath, he attempted to distract himself by cleaning, reading, making ultimatums about not going on the Internet, and taking walks. Avoiding the humped specter of Leslie on the couch, he bought cigarettes and smoked out the window of his bedroom. Now that it was early June, the panels of spring sudsy and transparent, the streets were filling with pugnaciously underdressed young people looking for patios and beer gardens. They passed below the window in their shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, unaware of Richard’s eyes angled down on them, like a lonely old man as he waits for his popcorn to inflate in the microwave, the black elaborate tattoos spiraling out on arms and backs, absorbing the sunlight.

  This morbid rhythm was broken when Patrick invited Richard over for brunch. Brunch was always a rescue of sorts, Richard thought, whether it was from the confusion and regret of a hangover, the intolerable presence of a roommate, or just the general despair of Saturdays. Brunch at Patrick’s apartment—eggs Benedict or burritos or lox and bagel, or some leaning peppery construction accompanied by mimosas and croissants from down the block—was also one of their long-standing routines. Now that Valdes was in the picture, however, they hardly ever kept to it. Still, Richard didn’t begrudge Patrick his warm exclusionary weekends in bed with his boyfriend. He too would have abandoned his best friend to a cold-cut sandwich, bowl of cereal, any beggarly survival-mode food, for just that.

  Patrick was standing at the stovetop, whipping eggs, when Richard arrived.

  “I’ll be using a whole clove of garlic,” he said by way of a greeting.

  A cool organic odor drifted in through the window from the shaded garden below.

  “Oh, fun,” Richard said, sipping the last watery inch of the iced latte he’d picked up at Sloppy on the walk over. He’d bought one for Patrick too, which Patrick accepted with a hug. The New York Times was spread out on the table. Patrick always got a paper copy of the weekend edition. His loyalty to print was charming, if perhaps uncharacteristically quixotic.

  As he sat down, Richard glanced at the predictably depressing headlines, but his head wasn’t in the news today, if ever it was. Entering the apartment, he’d been struck by how strange it was to come here, into Patrick’s kitchen, and not to tell him about Anne, to rely on the arbitrary and precarious barrier of his own silence. Patrick was sensitive to withheld information; it was like having a polygraph machine as a best friend, which naturally made things hazardous. Richard knew that Patrick would think what had happened a moral abnegation on the scale of a Russian novel. Why was it that Patrick usually saw Richard as an aggressor, attributing to him the agency and power that Patrick himself possessed? Was it possible that Patrick saw it as flattery?

  Maybe if Richard could be more like what Patrick thought he was, he might gain a greater foothold in his life. There had to be some maneuver, some final gesture in a series, that other people knew about and employed to organize things, to make everything fall into place.

  Or maybe it was just a convenient way for Patrick to esteem his own behavior.

  “Do you want the rest of my latte?” Patrick asked, still whipping the eggs. “I’ve already had too much coffee.”

  “Sure.”

  Richard took it and hauled through the straw. There must be a psychoanalytical category for people like Patrick, for people like Anne, he thought, and the spaces they took up in your life. He felt a pang of neurotic excitement, a tense expectation whenever he thought of Patrick and his competence, and he wondered if Anne had any equivalently ambiguous experiences from her college years, any shadow figure on whom she projected so many possibly fictitious or pointless yet compelling romantic and sexual hopes. It didn’t seem possible. She was too direct and also too aloof. The image that prevailed of her life before Richard knew her was a solitary figure in a grand library, shoeless and curled up in a chair, with a plastic bag of carrots at her fingertips. A grand celestial light formed above her, a glowing gash, as if the sky and then the roof had opened so a saint could descend and tell her that she belonged there. Her destiny was to be the lonely seeker of truth, and she nobly accepted.

  Now Patrick and Anne both walked through Richard’s mind, like visitors at either end of a vast estate, their footsteps echoing in cavernous rooms. There had been the night in college Patrick had first offered to come and cook Richard dinner, and the exchange that had ensued upon Patrick’s arrival to the studio, which at the time Richard considered very chic, due to the staggered black-and-white postcards of movie stars, dead writers, and retro bodybuilders affixed to the walls.

  “Do you have a mixing bowl?” Patrick had asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you have butter?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have salt and pepper?”

  Thanks to a nearby market, and the fact that Patrick loved impressing people with his cooking skills, the meal was rescued. Patrick quelled Richard’s anxiety by dismissing his lack of basic ingredients with a nonchalant shake of the head and reframing it as an enviable and ecologically responsible lifestyle. But Richard knew that his incompetence had been exposed. Though for the rest of the evening Patrick behaved without noticeable deviation from his usual cultivated and placid distraction, stretching his sinewy body across the bed and flipping through Richard’s books, flexing his vascular hands, speaking with attractive precision, shortly after that evening they stopped hanging out.

  In the weeks that followed, with the penumbra of the meal lending his surroundings a chiaroscuro frailty, Richard studied the withering stream of communication, Patrick citing the workload in preparation for his qualifying exams and other onerous application requirements for various doctoral programs. Richard went over what had been said in text and email, clicking away, attempting to ascertain why Patrick had detached, with a sinking feeling noting the elongating delays between texts that were distilling quickly into negligent monosyllables, like grains of salt left at the bottom of a jar.

  Did Patrick perceive relative poverty or incompetence in the walls checkered with postcards, in the bed barely off the ground, in the old electric teakettle, rusting on the bottom, that left a brown ring on the table if you forgot it there for any length of time?

  You’re not a provider. It was Patrick’s instinct to flee from all ineptitude, if not from the incipient feelings that he must have sensed coming from Richard.

  They’d come back together at the end of the year, immediately before graduation. Richard was still bruised by what had happened—the damage throbbed, buried too deep to massage—but he couldn’t react any other way than to forgive Patrick and step back into friendship. Without even realizing it, he’d decided that he wanted Patrick in his life no matter what. Patrick said that he regretted they hadn’t seen more of each other, now that they would no longer be living in the same place. It was a sad time to reunite, as immediately after, Richard went back to Europe, to wind up in residence at a hostel, and Patrick migrated a few hundred miles south to the city.

  Today, they were living in the same place again, and Richard had discovered to his dismay that, along with this geographical reconstitution, he was back where he’d started with Patrick: jealous every time Patrick began dating someone new, relieved every time the relationship ended. Obviously, Richard was still in love with him.

  Perhaps things would be different with Anne in his life. It changed you when someone picked you out of the crowd, and whatever else Anne did, she saw him. Patrick would be sure to n
otice this transformation. She’d said in Montreal as they lay naked together that for months before they’d spoken she’d had him under observation, as he moped around with a messenger bag cutting into his shoulder, his open, bewildered face hit with sudden shards of thought as he made his way among the library stacks, the hydraulic sway of his supported chin as he hunched over an open book, sighing and distractedly freeing sandwiches from cocoons of Saran Wrap. When she walked through the department, she sometimes heard him translating with Professor Caputo—Richard’s reedy voice more masculine than she would have surmised from his face, his accent northern-sounding because he couldn’t roll his r’s. She observed Richard staring at men in his vicinity, smiling at them when they looked up or if he caught them in some private tick or small accident, like tripping or dropping something on the floor and not bothering to pick it up—the conspiratorial edge he could give his smile when needed. She’d seen him holding doors for elderly black women and attractive young freshmen of all genders, their gratitude prompting a nod or their indifference leaving him stranded in his own pointless hospitality. He smiled at unfortunate rejects, locked eyes with overweight people, and gave change to the homeless who wandered through campus or buzzed at its fringes. He was always eating things out of plastic bags. She saw him go regularly for a colossal dripping pepperoni slice at Koronet Pizza, walking toward it wearing expectation on his face or emerging with a haze of tomato sauce still clinging to his mouth.

  From a certain angle, the level of her attention was morbid, unsettling. But did he really want someone to be lukewarm about him? Maybe it was creepy and obsessive; maybe it was moving.

  It was a kind of devotion, and given that he hadn’t heard from her since they’d returned from Montreal, it might have diminished, disappeared. Did she no longer want him now that she’d had him? Women weren’t supposed to be like that; it was supposed to be different from the terrible hardness that arose when only men were involved.

  “I might have used too much salt,” Patrick said.

  He brought the omelet to the table and Richard inhaled forcefully, trying to overcome a feeling of internal disorder.

  “It smells delicious.”

  “You want ketchup?”

  “Please.”

  Patrick sat down and cut into the omelet. He said that he’d been writing on the topic of superfluous men, those enervated Russian aristocrats of the nineteenth century. He was attracted to the idea of spending your life in glamorous dissipation after having been defeated in your higher cause, a great excuse to give it up if you survived, but with the memory of your noble initiative still shining in your mind, testifying to your essential gravity. Patrick had once worked at a refugee resettlement center in San Francisco, but his political commitment had softened in the intervening years, to the relief of Richard, who did not enjoy having his moral turpitude constantly pointed out to him.

  When they were finished eating, they went out onto the balcony to smoke, staring down at a gnarled fig tree and the disheveled garden that enclosed it. Patrick said he’d heard a rumor that the landlord, a nineties club kid named Paul Michael, was planning to gut the building and sell it. In the process everyone would be kicked out.

  “Our parents lived in small, crummy apartments expecting to move into houses as they got older, while we live in small, crummy apartments with the expectation of continuing to live in small, crummy apartments.”

  Richard laughed. “It’s too bad. This place has so much charm.”

  “It’s a dump,” Patrick said, taking a drag of his cigarette. “But I’d be sad to leave. Lorna was a total fluke.”

  “Yeah, and looking for an apartment is hell. Unless you move to Baltimore. Are places in Baltimore still cheap?”

  “No idea.”

  Richard had recently seen a Tumblr page in which a new arrival from Albuquerque cataloged the ghoulish spaces she’d come across in her search for a room in New York. In one, the ceiling was only five feet high, and the rent was fourteen hundred a month. Another was a concrete-walled room in a basement that resembled an interrogation chamber and was summarized with the eerie phrases “For single male working,” “with door for privacy.” Their college friend Jeremy shared a studio with a muscular recent immigrant who sat in the lotus position while wearing lime-green bikini briefs, observing to various telephone interlocutors that he was a streetwise Praetoria boy who used his posh accent to intimidate rich Jews.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Patrick said. “I’m moving in with Valdes anyway.”

  They were the words that Richard had long dreaded. He saw immediately what would happen—not just the end of their Saturday brunches, but the definitive end of everything. Living with Valdes in a distant neighborhood—in Manhattan, no less—Patrick would disappear physically from his life, though they would probably still text, and from then on Richard would eat Saturday breakfast, all breakfasts, alone: emptying the dusty remains of a box of Cheerios into a bowl of milk, spreading butter on toast if he remembered to buy butter, drinking burnt coffee, eating an occasional Pop-Tart while Leslie snored on the sofa.

  Richard looked at Patrick. He had the urge to disclose all of the details of his time with Anne, to pour them over Patrick’s head like a bucket of ice water and make him shiver in his exclusion. He could be swept off his feet and disappear into a life of glamour and sex just as easily as Patrick could.

  But Patrick wasn’t about to be brought to his knees. It was the tactical tragedy of it all. Such a sudden disclosure would do nothing except reinforce a sense in Patrick of Richard’s endless unreliability, the impression that he moved through life chaotically, without logic or planning. You did what? Not to mention the fact that it would mean Richard was taken, that their lives now pointed toward other people and therefore away from each other.

  “Don’t you think it’s a bit early to move in together?” he said.

  “No, I think it makes sense at this point,” said Patrick.

  Richard slipped his phone out of his pocket and texted Anne a smiling emoticon. He couldn’t come up with a sentence fast enough. He suddenly felt he had to communicate with her, receive some signal. The cigarette went out and Patrick handed him the lighter. Richard clicked it violently.

  “Fuck.”

  “Relax,” Patrick said, taking the lighter and holding it to the cigarette. The flame rose before his taut, determined face.

  Richard inhaled and looked down at the phone in his hand. The irritatingly active device, with its constant fondling for your attention, was always disturbingly silent and still just when you needed it to light up. Where was she? So it seemed that Patrick was leaving him. Was she doing the same?

  Richard wanted to toss the phone into the garden, get into a car, and leave the city.

  “Why don’t we move in together?” he said.

  “That’s a terrible idea,” Patrick said placidly. “Our friendship would never survive.”

  “You don’t think?”

  Patrick shook his head, and Richard inhaled the cigarette too forcefully. He leaned against the railing, looking down at the ground below. For a moment, he felt like he might be sick.

  TEN

  The following evening Valdes was curating a performance on the Lower East Side. Inside the entrance to the building, there was a metal donation box on a plastic concession table, surrounded by glossy copies of various art publications. Richard recognized the volunteer manning the donation box. Communications Director at the Narcolepsy Network. He was one of those guys who stated his occupation outright on his online profile. Richard had sent him a message about a week ago, but no reply came back. As they passed the table, he avoided eye contact.

  Inside there was a sea of gaunt young men in athletic, feudal-looking clothing. A heavy synthesizer chord issued from an invisible musician, and then a girl with a sharp dome of blond hair emerged.

  “Are your phones working?” she said into a microphone. “Because Mercury is in retrograde, and it’s really fucking up my servic
e . . .”

  Two figures dressed in red leotards and enormous plastic sunglasses joined from the wings. They gyrated and kicked in uncoordinated fashion.

  Well, Richard thought, The Rite of Spring probably felt stupid back then too. After the performance they waited in the sweaty crowd while Valdes greeted well-wishers and answered questions. Patrick ran into someone he knew and Richard was left standing to one side, listening in on the conversation. He had the unsettling impression that all the young men in the room were poised to fall into an orgy from which he would be excluded.

  “I can’t tell if they liked it,” Valdes said, in his slight Baltic accent, as they walked to the subway, Richard thinking all the while that he could have saved two subway fares if he’d skipped this risible performance. He was always trying to economize by purchasing single tickets and not an unlimited pass, but he usually ended up spending more in the end. It was a lesson he might have learned.

  “Who cares what they think?” Patrick said, kissing Valdes on the neck.

  “Can you write the review?”

  “You’d regret that.”

  They went down into the subway and emerged on the other side of the river in Bushwick. The sky had begun to pinken, the air was mild and soft. Soon they arrived at a blackened, garage-like structure. Two bouncers chatted and ignored a line of young men, who mostly stood courageously alone with the glow of phone screens on their soft, bearded skin. Now and then the young men looked up, locked eyes with each other, and looked away again.

  Inside they encountered perspiring dancers who stared narcotically at the floor as spastic lights flashed over their faces. They found Amir and Toller standing around a small table. Nearby, Barrett danced opposite a muscular boy in a tank top, both of them twitching with earnest self-absorption. Richard was pleasantly stimulated by the chaos and incoherence of the scene.