Going Dutch

by James Gregor

  Anger and disappointment were spreading across Blake’s face.

  “We’ve been talking about it for months,” Anne said, her eyes starting to water. “It’s not a rash decision. Stop saying that.”

  The waiter brought the bill. He was briefly ignored, until Anne handed over her credit card. Blake stood up.

  “Please sit down,” Richard said.

  Blake’s head seemed to move out from his body in the manner of an ostrich or a giraffe, a sudden, righteous extension.

  “I don’t think so.”

  His angry dignity struggled against a coarse loss.

  “Wait,” Richard said.

  He looked around the restaurant, as though a solution, a sensible course of action, could be discovered there—in among the graceful eaters, the two men with their tie clips over minestrone, now chatting with espresso cups in hand, the famous young male singer, ostensibly straight, who kept glancing their way, the blond ponytailed woman in her preposterous jodhpurs—if only he looked hard enough.

  Blake went toward the bathroom, almost knocking the table over in the process. Richard got to his feet. He caught up to Blake at the bathroom door, grabbing him by the arm, but Blake shook off his hand.

  “What the fuck is this? What is she talking about?” Blake’s face was mottled with anger.

  “I told you. Nothing. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

  “But who is she?”

  “I’ve mentioned her to you. I’m sure I have. I told you. She’s a colleague, she’s in my program.”

  “No, you haven’t. I would have remembered an overweight redhead who clearly has some deranged suburban hetero fantasy about you.”

  “Why are you being unreasonable?”

  “Stop saying that. You think it’s unreasonable that what she’s saying—what you’ve said to her, apparently—upsets me? What’s wrong with you? Who the fuck is she?”

  Richard cast around in his mind for a response, but found nothing.

  “I don’t know. She’s someone I know.”

  “What kind of an answer is that?”

  Richard felt utterly vacant, as if even the simplest words were beyond his capacity. “She’s lonely and desperate.”

  “Obviously, but there’s more going on than that.”

  Richard was sweating again.

  “What am I supposed to do if she has feelings for me?”

  “She has more than feelings for you. She thinks you’re going to move in with her.”

  “She’s delusional.”

  “She made that up?”

  “I might have said that I’d move in with her, at one of her low points.”

  “Why would you say something like that?” Blake’s voice was flat but throbbing.

  “I didn’t know what else to do. She was suffering.”

  “She said you’ve been talking about it for months.”

  “It was once, maybe twice.”

  “Have you been leading her on?” Blake folded his arms. “Tell me the truth.”

  Richard was briefly unable to speak. He saw Blake in the courtroom, in a dark blue suit, handsome and effectual, volleying questions at a witness.

  “I don’t know what goes on in her mind.”

  “You must play some part.”

  “What?”

  “You’re supposed to move in with me,” Blake said, his voice aggrieved, but also angry and darting, like a wasp caught in a small space. “If you didn’t want to, you should have been honest.”

  “I want to move in with you,” Richard said, grabbing his crossed forearms.

  Blake didn’t say anything. He seemed to be calculating, to be near one or several conclusions.

  “I was scared,” Richard said, beginning to sense irreparable damage being done.

  “Scared of what?”

  “Of things that would happen. Of things going badly.”

  He tried to put his arms around Blake, but Blake brushed him off again and shook his head. He reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and removed some cash.

  “Give this to Anne. I don’t want her paying for me.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going home.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I need to think.”

  “Come on. Let’s talk.”

  “Not now.”

  Richard grabbed his arm again, but instead of flinching, Blake deftly and gently took the hand and removed it, leaving it hanging in the air.

  What was happening? Richard thought. He had always wanted a young man to say to him: Move in with me, let’s live together. I want to see you when I go to sleep, and I want to see you when I wake up.

  “You need to figure this out,” Blake said, gesturing toward the table.

  He slid past. Richard watched him move with nimble resignation through the restaurant. As composed as any other diner, he opened the front door and disappeared out onto the street.

  For a moment Richard stood still, not wanting to set time moving again. If he shifted even an inch, the sinister ripple of disturbed molecules would irreversibly alter the world.

  A man appeared in a blue corduroy suit. Richard stepped aside to allow him entry into the washroom. When he returned to the table, he had the sense that Anne would be gone too, that the restaurant would be empty, or newly filled with strangers, one life built on the erasure of the old, Aperol spritz and buttered bread in different hands, as if they’d never even sat there together.

  But she was still there, wiping her eyes with a napkin.

  EIGHTEEN

  Richard went home with her. The entire brief cab ride they were silent. When they arrived, he moved to follow her into the building, but she stopped in front of the doors.

  “Can I come up?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know what just happened,” he said.

  “Richard, come on.”

  She had a look of almost enjoyable mockery on her face.

  “Can I try and explain?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Can we talk later then? Tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  She wasn’t crying now; he wondered if she would cry the moment she stepped inside; or if she wouldn’t cry at all. It was horrible to hope for the former. Or perhaps it wasn’t.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I’m going inside now.”

  What if Erin and Alicia appeared? he thought suddenly, with a sensation of solid threat. If they found out what happened, they would probably assault him. Maybe he would deserve it.

  “What are you going to do for the rest of the day?” he said frantically. “Are you going to take a bath?”

  “Yes, I’ll probably take a bath.”

  Her voice was utterly flat.

  “That’s good. That’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll do that too.”

  “Just go,” she said.

  So he did.

  On the subway, he had to grip the filthy silver pole tightly to stop from toppling over. There was the sensation of living in a performance with all the other passengers that would abruptly fail and collapse into anarchy if even one tiny movement was not properly executed, one innocuous breath forgotten, or if an oblivious gesture faltered.

  Leslie and Courtney were on the couch when he arrived home. His loathing for the apartment and their presence had not diminished, yet it felt like a fortress in the newly intense assault of impressions that the street had unleashed on him. An obtuse blur of comfort and affection was settled on their faces. They appeared oblivious to the ominous sensorium they, and everyone else, were living in.

  Leslie motioned to a bottle of wine on the table.

  “Cab sauv?”

  Richard looked at them as if they were insane and shook his head.

  “It’s a little early, don’t you think?” he said, bitterly enjoying turning the tables on them and ex
pressing disapproval of their behavior.

  “Hey, Richard,” Leslie said. “Do you remember my friend Joe?”

  “Joe?” he said, impatiently holding back a fusillade of acid remarks. “I think so.”

  In fact he did have a fuzzy memory of an anthropologist friend of Leslie’s, or someone like that. “Why?”

  “His lease is up around September or October. I think he’ll be looking for a roommate. He and Jessica are getting divorced. She’s moving to California.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Spanish Harlem.”

  Richard, his back turned, rolled his eyes at the suggestion of this far-distant neighborhood as the next logical housing destination for him.

  “Great. Thanks, Leslie. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “It’s good to get out in front of stuff like this. The summer is passing us by.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want a drink?” Courtney said.

  Richard strode haughtily across the room.

  “I don’t want a drink.” His fist clenched involuntarily. “I’m going to take a shower and then have a nap.”

  It was a signal to them that they would have the apartment to themselves again. It was a signal for them to leave him alone.

  “We just want you to make sure you end up in a good place next.”

  “Your concern is noted.”

  “No sweat. We hate to do it, but you know—” she said.

  He looked at Courtney and was struck by the realization that she did, after all, have the belly of a pregnant woman. When had that happened?

  “Of course.”

  He went into his room, closed the door, and sat cross-legged on the bed. With its unadorned walls, the fake gleam of the parquet floor, and the window with its muffled alley light, Richard’s bedroom was the proverbial Craigslist horror show. It was a room that he had always hated in a building that he had always hated. He’d always wanted to be out of here. And now, one way or another, he would be. But whenever he’d pictured himself gone, he’d pictured himself with Blake, or Anne. And somehow he’d also pictured himself with this gloomy room to go back to.

  * * *

  THREE DAYS LATER HE went to Sheep’s Meadow to celebrate the acceptance of Patrick’s thesis revisions. As a pretext for a gathering this seemed a bit of a stretch, but Richard had barely left the apartment since the brunch disaster, and he wasn’t about to reject an invitation from people who, it seemed, actually wanted to see him.

  The young men were stretched out on blankets, resembling wayward Athenian philosophy students in a neoclassical tableau. The blue sky was festooned with the ghost fleet of cirrus clouds. Thin towers rising south of the park looked like the denatured fingers of an elderly hand of great wealth. It was one of those impromptu delirious gatherings in the open air that young, vaguely creative people hope to have with other young, vaguely creative people when they come to New York.

  Except it seemed that everyone was leaving New York.

  Barrett and Amir were graduating in the spring and choosing, for their internships, between San Francisco, London, and Ho Chi Minh City. Toller was thinking of selling his loft and relocating to Santa Fe. And Patrick was leaving soon enough to take up the postdoc in California.

  Richard shuddered at this talk. Wasn’t New York supposed to be the ultimate destination?

  Toller unzipped a leather duffel bag and removed bread and cheese and a bottle of champagne. Richard’s contribution was a baguette. To purchase this conduit of bread had seemed a major endeavor. Every action undertaken these last few days had felt slow, uncanny, and weighted, like the viscous delay of a game of tennis played at one-quarter speed.

  He’d been obsessively checking his phone—he hated that thing—for any signs of contact from Anne or Blake, but of course there had been none.

  “Is there any brie with this baguette?” Patrick asked. “Butter?”

  “No, sorry,” Richard said.

  “Who’s surprised?” Patrick laughed.

  Richard was too distracted to be piqued by this comment. On top of all his present chaos, he felt a silencing depression at the thought of Patrick’s impending move. He tried to focus on its purportedly short-term character. How long would he last out there in San Francisco anyway?

  Toller asked Richard how things were going with Blake. Richard said things were going well.

  “Two toasts then—to Richard’s happiness and Patrick’s departure.”

  Patrick frowned.

  “Patrick’s success.”

  They all leaned away as Toller tried to uncork the bottle.

  “You’re scaring me,” Amir said.

  “It’s fine.”

  “Let me do it. You have no wrist strength.”

  “What are you implying?”

  Amir took the bottle and pointed it toward a group of distant children. The cork flew through the air.

  “Why didn’t we go to a bar?” Toller said as he spilled the champagne into plastic flutes. “Someone else would have poured for us. A hot waiter, for example.”

  “It’s beautiful here.”

  “But the new skyscrapers are so ugly.”

  “Skyscrapers are usually banal. That’s what my architecture friends say, anyway.”

  “I hate having sticky hands,” Toller said.

  Barrett was lying on his back at the edge of the blanket. He sat up as he was handed a glass of champagne.

  “Will this interact with my headache medication?”

  “I’m so relieved it’s over,” Patrick said of his thesis defense. “And now”—he paused theatrically—“the rest of my life.”

  Part of Richard was genuinely happy for Patrick, but the majority of him, as usual, was impatiently drawn back to his own problems. He wondered what Blake was doing. Was he driving along a highway with the images of trees and dispersed rural shapes reeling like badly Xeroxed images across the windshield? Was he at the beach in a tiny swimsuit? Had he booked a room in a house on Fire Island? Doubtful, you had to do that far in advance. Did he have his face in someone’s crotch? Was he back on the apps, offering himself up on the steaming bazaar of New York’s sexual marketplace, face angled for a hint of wholesome depravity, chest hair exposed, height and weight listed, desires and attitudes crisply evoked among the gaudy confetti of so many willing and available men?

  He had to remind himself that it had only been three days.

  Richard took out his phone and scrolled—back, back, back—through his text conversations with Blake. He had often thought that all it would require for him to develop into a great cook, or a really great handyman, or any of those other skills so vital for the proper running of the world, and for which he had demonstrated such an abominable lack of ability, was the necessity of a loved one—a defenseless or at the very least vulnerable young man who depended on him for his food or his shelter. This would have spurred him to become a competent, domestically minded person. His own welfare was clearly not enough.

  If Blake welcomed him back, he thought, an annihilating wave of disinfectant would sweep the new bathroom, the kitchen attain a level of sterilization to satisfy even the most compulsive of germophobes. He’d decontaminate the fridge with something brutally effective but environmentally sound, sanitize the cupboards, wash the sheets, and dry them with Bounce to make them soft and smell like flowers. It was so pleasant to sleep on soft, fragrant sheets. Gleaming floors and elaborate cooked meals, things that Patrick had cooked in the past, but beyond even those recipes, noble standard-bearers but nothing too original, would proliferate. He saw himself familiarized with Larousse, mastering absurd French dishes that called for weeks-long marinating and other extravagant techniques, reproducing the maniacal courses served in noted restaurants around the world that were photographed in magazines.

  He would pay the rent ten times over—both of their shares; given time, he would find the money. He would discover a way to take utter and complete care of Blake, to liberat
e Blake from his legal responsibilities and allow him to pursue his acting, to give them both a glittering life of curated abundance, of careless outlays, of trips to Montauk, Palm Springs, and Mexico City, of expensive Latvian blankets, Turkish towels, and Japanese toothpaste.

  He took a gulp of champagne and, struck by an idea, surreptitiously began downloading or redownloading every single app he could think of. Searching for Blake, he scrolled through the horny undifferentiated mass of the city. The closest guy, who reappeared across several of the apps, was a wiry dancer who asserted his modesty but did splits upside down in a leotard, the camera focused on his clenched buttocks.

  The dancer sent Richard a message:

  You look like you’re from another time. Send nudes. Let’s go from there.

  Richard continued to scroll. The faces and torsos and crotches proliferated. Where would it all lead? It was madness, he thought. All this flesh was madness.

  “What are you doing over there?” Patrick asked.

  Richard looked up.

  “Nothing.”

  He put the phone back in his pocket.

  “Mind joining the conversation?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anyway,” Toller said, responding to Patrick’s earlier remark. “You’ll be fine. It’s our lives that are the problem.”

  “Our lives are fine,” Amir said, indicating himself and Barrett.

  “Mine and Richard’s then,” Toller said, and proceeded to describe his recent thwarted ambitions across a variety of media. He had just completed a one-act play called One-Act Play for a Suicide, but no one was interested in it.

  “It’s so hard to break in,” Toller said, taking a drink. “I mean, even with all the people my father knows. Maybe it’s a style thing?”

  “Do you feel like your work lacks grit somehow?” Amir toyed with him.

  Richard gripped the phone in his pocket, wishing for one of Blake’s cheerful strings of emoticons, or one of the impromptu, interrupting texts that seemed Anne’s own special and, he felt at that moment, charming habit to send.

  “But grit isn’t fashionable anymore. No one is interested in the poor. We’ve known for a long time that they, like, won’t inherit the earth after all. I mean, seriously, do we want the poor to inherit the earth? Hello, Stalin!”