Going Dutch

by James Gregor

“Blake told us you don’t cook,” Sara, Blake’s mother, said in neutral tones.

  “Unfortunately, not really,” Richard said.

  “Takeout has gotten so much healthier though,” she said, considering. “Do I sound like I come from the country?”

  An elegant, retired professor of social work, she had a throaty laugh.

  “Not at all.”

  “Blake was telling us about his Fresh Direct bill,” Blake’s father said. He was named Rick—a fleshy, jovial man in a blazer, also a lawyer. “I cook tempura these days. Cook, not eat. Sometimes I’ll work hours on it, but then all that time standing over the pan—the oil kills my appetite.”

  “Blake is a wonderful cook. We sent him to cooking school in France,” Sara said.

  “He didn’t tell me about that,” Richard said, giving Blake a chastising smile.

  “The way they treated the ducks was barbaric,” Blake said, not looking up. “Where is the waiter?”

  Blake had skipped lunch because of a meeting. His mood was tetchy.

  “I love foie gras,” Rick said.

  “He used to make us pastries,” Sara said.

  “I’ve heard pastries are a challenge,” Richard said, attempting to add something to this topic on which he was vastly uninformed. “But I can’t say I have any firsthand experience.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Sara said. “We’d have a Ricard before dinner. Then we got out of the habit. But I love the idea of the aperitif.”

  They scanned the menus.

  “You look hungry. Most of the young men look hungry in New York,” she said. “Order something hearty.”

  “Mom—are you commenting on Richard’s body?”

  “Thank you,” Richard said, feeling tension deflate within him. He’d assumed Blake’s parents would be paying. Nevertheless, it was reassuring to have confirmation. “I will. This is lovely.”

  “Is there a one-child policy in this restaurant when it comes to waiters?” Blake said, looking over his shoulder again.

  “Blake introduced us to sushi,” Rick said, leaning close to the menu, open flat on the table. “I never ate this growing up. He has more discerning taste than we do.”

  “And more expensive.”

  “There’s too much choice,” Richard said.

  “You always have this problem,” Blake said.

  Richard nodded. “It’s true, I do.”

  Blake was unaware of this pressure to be open-minded and adventurous he exerted on Richard when they went out to eat. Richard didn’t want to come off as squeamish, timid, or button-down, so usually he caved to Blake’s badgering culinary permissiveness.

  “Ask Blake,” Rick said. “He’s the expert.”

  “Well, I’ve eaten a lot of sushi in my life, in a lot of different countries,” Blake said, with the pragmatic clout, the matter-of-factness, of a weather forecast.

  The waiter came with the bottle of sake and they placed their orders.

  “What did you do in the city today?” Richard asked.

  “We went to the Museum of Arts and Design. Then lunch in the park.”

  “Tomorrow, shopping downtown. I’m looking for a new raincoat.”

  Richard’s phone buzzed. He twitched.

  “Settle down, partner,” Blake said, noticing this. “Everything okay?”

  “Definitely.”

  “You better not have seen a mouse.”

  “No, no,” Richard said.

  He slid the phone out of his pocket and glanced down.

  WHERE ARE YOU? Anne wrote.

  Why was she writing to him? She was supposed to be having Mexican with Erin and Alicia on the Lower East Side.

  Vaguely annoyed, Richard put the phone away without responding. The tempura appetizer arrived.

  “That’s good,” Blake said after taking a bite.

  The phone buzzed for a second time.

  MY PLANS FELL THROUGH.

  Richard again slid the phone into his pocket, where it buzzed a few more times. He thought of excusing himself and calling Anne from the bathroom, but he was enjoying himself. Now that it had been established, the flow of the dinner felt effortless and self-sustaining, but it was necessarily precarious, requiring constant tweaks and adjustments. Furthermore: what would he say to her?

  He was not about to be rude to Blake’s parents.

  While holding Richard in her affable gaze, Sara began explaining that both Rick and Blake suffered from a kind of hunger-induced melancholy.

  “It runs in the family,” she said.

  A lack of food provoked not just irritation but profound existential dread. When a gnawing futility settled on them—a not infrequent occurrence—it was usually due to a lack of protein. Eggs and bacon would smother that voice for a while, steak convince them it was worth walking out of the house; a cheeseburger lay a sturdy plank over the abyss.

  “Sensitive men. Something to remember when he’s in a bad mood,” she said, winking.

  She spoke with palpable affection and concern. Richard smiled and glanced at Blake.

  There was another round of buzzing. He glanced into his lap again. Anne wrote that Erin wanted Korean, but Alicia stuck to her guns about Mexican, and what started off as a minor disagreement then exploded into an argument about selfishness and privilege that left both of them crying. They were currently making up over tea, still at the apartment. Anne was desperate to get out.

  ARE YOU OKAY? she wrote. I’M STARTING TO WORRY.

  Richard felt the impoliteness of his divided attention waft from him like the smell of garlic.

  A few seconds later:

  PLEASE RESPOND.

  He inhaled sharply. A zip of claustrophobic resentment went through his chest.

  “Is everything all right?” Sara asked.

  “Everything is fine, thank you.”

  “Everything will be fine if there’s enough salmon in my maki roll,” Blake said, clapping his hands together and rubbing.

  Rick smiled.

  “I’m the same way,” Richard said, turning the phone off. “Hunger turns me into a monster.”

  Blake nodded knowingly.

  The food soon arrived, and the restaurant grew louder. An atmosphere of urban inclusion and glitter prevailed. To Richard’s delight and relief, he had a natural rapport with Sara and Rick. They were charismatically informal—evoking studies undertaken and abandoned, old habits, youthful sloth, misdirection, and marijuana use—and the questions they asked were considered but not intrusive. They wanted to know about his childhood and where he grew up, his parents and his family life, but their inquiries were gentle and open-ended, allowing him to determine the level of specificity in each response. Sara was especially pleased to hear that Richard’s mother was a French teacher. Sara was a Francophile herself. She had been taking French lessons for years.

  They had a skeptical attitude toward the city that Richard found refreshing and not unfounded. He agreed with many of their points but did not deny his abiding affection for the place. They asked him about his studies, and he described them in a broad sweep, briefly mentioning his paper on the Modistae, and then wondering if making a reference to such an obscure group had made him look ridiculous or pretentious.

  “Tough job market in academia,” Rick said, the only—modestly—inimical words he had uttered all evening, despite Richard’s earlier worry.

  “Dad,” Blake said, shaking his head and rolling his eyes in one combined gesture.

  “It’s not easy,” Richard said, clearing his throat. “It’s a challenge. But I’m at a good school.”

  “You must work with some interesting people,” Sara said.

  “I do, yes.”

  The evening was concluded with a drink in the bar of Rick and Sara’s hotel. When Richard left to go, they hugged him, and he felt that he had won them over.

  Blake walked him to the subway.

  “Your parents are wonderful.”

  “I’m lucky.”

  “A lucky boy.”

  R
ichard slid his hand into Blake’s back pocket. Blake lightly knocked against him.

  “I feel bad about my mood earlier—God, I revert with them sometimes. Plus I was starving.”

  “That’s okay.”

  They walked quietly for a moment.

  “So . . . you met them.”

  “I wonder what that means,” Richard said coyly, smiling.

  “What does that mean?”

  They both wore quizzical, amused faces. The streets were calmly alive with pedestrians.

  “Well,” Blake said, his expression turning sly. “For me, it means that I’m only dating you.”

  Richard turned to him and smiled.

  “It means the same for me.”

  Was this statement true? For a moment he thought of Anne. He decided it was.

  “I have the contract right here,” Blake said, pretending to pull a document from the breast pocket of his jacket. “I’ll need you to sign.”

  Richard snickered.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Um . . .”

  They kissed, squeezed each other for a moment, and Blake told Richard to text when he got home. Richard descended into the subway.

  There were no free seats on the train, but that was okay. He was in a daze of contentment. He swayed with the motion of the car and stared at an advertisement for blemish reduction, and then at one of two muscular black men with no shirts on, exhorting him to get tested for venereal diseases. The train lurched from side to side, accelerated, and then came to an abrupt halt. An unintelligible voice made a rambling announcement. He was so happy contemplating the evening with Blake and his parents, the fact that Blake was a man who wanted a monogamous relationship, who had a good job, who treated him decently, and whose parents had just taken him out for dinner, that he forgot, for several stops, that he had left his phone off.

  When he turned it on, there was a long chain of messages from Anne, leading up to:

  WHERE ARE YOU? ARE YOU OKAY? I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. I’M LOSING MY MIND.

  He went outside and hailed a cab. He texted her from the cab.

  I LOST MY PHONE. JUST GOT IT BACK. I’M COMING OVER.

  When he arrived at her building, the doorman called up to the apartment but there was no answer. Richard had him try again a minute later, but still nothing. He went outside and texted her.

  I’M DOWNSTAIRS.

  He went back inside and was about to show the doorman her texts when the phone on the desk rang.

  “I’ll send him right up,” the doorman said, motioning for Richard to go ahead.

  When he knocked on the door, a small croaking voice from inside told him to enter. Anne was on the sofa, wrapped in blankets. It was cold in the apartment, as if she’d been running the air-conditioning all day on high. An empty bottle of red wine stood on the table. There was a towel beside her.

  “I threw up,” she said, pointing at the bottle.

  “Do you want water? Aspirin?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Tea?”

  “I can’t drink anything. I’ll be sick again.”

  He sat down on the sofa, crossed one leg over the other, and looked at her. Her eyes were red and inflamed.

  “I’ll make tea.”

  He stood up again and went to the kitchen.

  “Where are Erin and Alicia?” he said with his back to her. “Why are you all by yourself?”

  He plugged in the electric kettle, trying to calm his growing annoyance. The night had gone so well up to this point.

  “They went for Indian.”

  “They left without you?”

  He shook his head, struggling not to harden against this drunken, histrionic display.

  “I told them to. I didn’t want to go.”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you stay here tonight?”

  She was mumbling. He opened the cupboard and examined the boxes of tea.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “Why don’t you want to live here?”

  “I kind of do live here,” he said, picking out a chamomile. “I’m here all the time.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Anne, let’s not talk about this now. You’re drunk.”

  “I have been working hard,” she said. “I’ve been working hard for both of us.”

  He came back to the sofa.

  “I know you have.”

  “I need to sleep.”

  She put a hand to her forehead.

  “Good idea. Let’s go to bed.”

  He helped her up and they went into the bedroom. While she stood motionless, eyes closed and arms raised as though she were a small child in a doctor’s office, he removed her clothes.

  She crawled into bed and Richard got in after her without undressing. The combination of his clothes with their city odors and street particulates, and the clean, detergent-smelling sheets of the bed, produced a sense of nesting and mixture. He put his arm up above her, resting it gently against the top of her head.

  The water started to boil.

  “Shit.”

  “It will turn itself off,” Anne murmured, rubbing her cold bare toes against his sock feet.

  “Why did you get so upset tonight?” he asked.

  “You didn’t answer me.”

  “I don’t always see my messages right away,” he said.

  And, he wanted to add: I was having a lovely meal. I was having a great time. He swallowed at this thought.

  She shifted.

  “I didn’t know where you were. People die in this city all the time. Someone might have pushed you onto the subway tracks.”

  “That never happens.”

  “Yes, it does happen.”

  “Okay, it does,” he said. “But it didn’t tonight.”

  “It probably happened to someone.”

  She nuzzled herself against him, and he wrapped his arm around her, feeling the doughiness of the two of them pressed together in the sheets. The warmth of the bed was soon homey and enfeebling. When it became uncomfortable, he shifted and awkwardly peeled off his clothes. Anne snuggled into the crook under his arm and began to snore, an acidic puff issuing from her mouth.

  Spending time with her had initially seemed a minor pantomime to perform in exchange for her assistance. Now, along with conspiracy and entrapment, they had a flesh solidarity. Their bodies were familiar to each other, their tissues accustomed to the warm traction and transitions from smoothness to friction. They were sentimental and tender to each other’s limbs and bones, a freckle on Anne’s clavicle, a bowtie of veins on Richard’s arm. Tonight, this open gash in her armor, this abrupt collapse into vulnerable disorganization, pierced him.

  It wasn’t possible for Richard to imagine destroying someone. If she found out about Blake, what would Anne do to herself? The outcome veiled itself in metaphor: he imagined her back on the sofa again, wrapped in a blanket, surrounded by a debris field of soggy Kleenex and empty wine bottles.

  But it was so ridiculous. Who hadn’t spent a night alone with a phone entombed in silence, or an uninteresting movie, or a clutch of indignant articles, or a listless blur of pornography? You went to sleep and the next morning it was another day. She was like Patrick: preposterously strong, crashing through the world and shoving people aside and controlling things.

  This disinterred similarity made Richard blink with affection as he stared at the ceiling. Her calmed, steady breathing filled the room. The annoyance that had ripened into worry subsided again into the same sweet, complaisant burden that he’d felt earlier that evening as Blake’s face lit up in a blaze of expectation and welcome, when he’d spotted Richard crossing the street toward him.

  SEVENTEEN

  There was a one-bedroom on the edge of Clinton Hill Blake wanted Richard to see. On a Saturday afternoon toward the end of July, when Anne was visiting a cousin in Baltimore, they spent an hour perusing furniture and interior stores on Atlantic Avenue, and then walked up Lafayette Street and turned right o
nto Clermont, continuing until they found the address.

  Richard loved the neighborhood—the people were so good-looking, and there was something of the ideal progressive future in it. The leafy brownstone quadrants appeared placid and gorgeous against the clear blue sky. To boot, the restaurant where they’d eaten their first steak together was close by.

  His hand on a greasy banister, Richard followed Blake up a flaking staircase. The apartment was predictably small, and crowded with junky furniture and appliances. There was a brick fireplace, nonfunctioning yet charming. They walked around in a state of quiet appraisal. The unit had a built-in washer and dryer, and the kitchen was tiny but recently renovated.

  “Can you see yourself here?” Blake said.

  Richard stepped toward the window. A fringe of leaves shielded the living room from the neighbors across the street. He could see himself here—retreating from Manhattan at day’s end, looking forward to coming home and drinking gin and tonic with Blake on the stoop, having gentle and trifling conversation, and watching Netflix. Even the prospect of paying bills with Blake had, in that moment, an oddly promising feel.

  Of course, he spent a significant portion of his nights at Anne’s place these days—but that seemed, in this new apartment miles away, less an obstacle than an alternate reality.

  “Yes, I can. Can you?”

  “I think I can.”

  “I think I can too.”

  They laughed.

  Afterward they sat at a nearby coffee shop, crowded with young families. Blake outlined the down payment and the rent. Though not unexpected, the numbers were staggering.

  “We should keep looking, of course,” he said, his eyes on the papers. “Maybe we’ll find something better. But I love this neighborhood.”

  Richard nodded, turning slightly to face the open door. Confronted so directly with the financials, and the speed with which all this was happening, he was beginning to feel light-headed. He wondered if Blake might adjust their shares of the rent to reflect the stark differences in their income levels, but he doubted it. Was that unfair of Blake? Was that unfair of Richard to want Blake to? Perhaps Blake, now vaguely aware of Richard’s delicate financial situation, believed that subsidizing the rent might damage their relationship. He was—of course—sensible in that way. Or maybe he believed the specter of this gay domesticity would be enough to snap Richard into shape financially?