Going Dutch

by James Gregor

  “I remember. The diner. I was such a high roller then.”

  “I thought it was very . . . chivalrous. It impressed me that you were willing to take that risk on me.”

  “I took a risk and in return you lied to me and told me you were an administrative assistant.” Richard was smiling.

  “I told you why I did that,” Blake said, not taking Richard up on this line of teasing.

  Richard rubbed his chin on Blake’s shoulder. The line moved forward and then a pompous crew-cut waiter sat them at a minuscule table near the door, where the noise level was deafening.

  The restaurant was a tin-ceilinged space of competing rustic and industrial tendencies. They ordered mimosas and Richard adjusted his position on the tiny, uncomfortable chair.

  “Fucking brunch,” Blake said, shaking his head at the menu. “Brunch is the reason no one can afford to buy an apartment in this city.”

  They drank, chatted, ordered a second round of mimosas, and soon their meals arrived. Once Blake had settled the bill at the chaotic server’s station, they walked outside. The afternoon was elegantly warm. Richard was dozy from the food and slightly drunk.

  “Do you want to go into the city and window shop?” Blake said. “I have to go to Bloomingdale’s.”

  Normally Richard would have resisted a trip into the city on the weekend, but he didn’t want to part from Blake.

  “Sure.”

  They soon found themselves on the L train, which shuddered and lurched, as if sickened by its burden. A baby wailed at the other end of the car.

  “What do you honestly think of children?” Blake said, staring at the baby. Richard was awakened from his state of aimless passivity. He let a moment go by without answering.

  “They’re fine.”

  “Do you want children?” Blake clarified.

  “Maybe. I haven’t thought too much about it, honestly.”

  “And what would your conclusion be if you did think about it?”

  “I could probably be pushed toward wanting kids,” Richard said, the words drifting out.

  “You think?” Blake said, one eyebrow raised, but smiling.

  “I think it’s possible.”

  Children had never been a part of the elaborate future fantasy Richard had spun in his mind, which was perhaps unsurprising considering his supposed inability to take care of himself or others. But now, he imagined a circular kitchen table with a small flower in a cloudy vase standing at the center. Outside, the light was fading. A child screamed and spilled apple juice; another began whipping skeins of spaghetti attached to its fork, leaving a spray of pinpricks on the wall behind its head, like the aftermath of a violent acupuncture treatment. After bathing and putting the children to bed, he and Blake would climb into bed themselves, consult each other about the dangers, responsibilities, and possibilities of their life together, and then turn off the light, anxious and exhausted but with the security of an exclusive personal alliance to fall back on.

  Not being a parent himself, Richard suspected that he might be leaving out certain fundamental elements. Children were an important experience: some said the most important. As with most important experiences, the division of labor was crucial. Blake would have to do the cooking, for example.

  “Bracing enthusiasm,” Blake said, but he was still smiling.

  Richard shrugged as the train paused and then set off again.

  “It’s better than a no,” he offered.

  “That’s true,” Blake said. “Just give me some time. It’s my job to convince people of my point of view.”

  Despite his undeniable qualms about giving himself over to the care of a child, Richard felt lifted on a wave of togetherness, on the potential for cooperation to redraw his life, on the hovering apparition of a long union with Blake.

  They got off the subway at Fifty-Ninth Street and made their way to Bloomingdale’s. Primed by the mimosa, Richard felt mellowly transported in time by the sleek onyx walls, the powdery blues and fuchsias, and the checkered floor. Like many of his peers, he loved the peppy gaucherie of the 1980s. They weaved in and out of brassy, indistinguishable boutiques. Retail sentries in business slacks and kohl makeup looked on with bored expressions. Richard recalled the beautiful transvestite Octavia St. Laurent from Paris Is Burning, strolling through in her summer whites, trying on perfume.

  When Blake was finished, they left Bloomingdale’s and walked toward Madison Avenue. It was bright and hot. Grit swirled off the pavement.

  “Let’s go to Barney’s,” Blake said. “It will be cool in there.”

  On Madison, men in linen pants and leather moccasins strolled the sidewalks beside women in silk blouses, distressed jean shorts, and gold-rimmed aviators. As they approached the entrance to Barney’s, Richard glanced across the street. His brain registered something familiar. He did a double take, thinking he saw Anne.

  As they walked over to a rack of sunglasses, he felt the room shift frequencies.

  He stood still for a moment. Then he said, “I’m going to find the bathrooms,” hoping Blake would not want to follow.

  “Text me,” Blake said, trying on a pair of glasses, “I’ll tell you where I am.” Richard stepped into the elevator and went up two floors. He walked around to the escalator and took it back down to the ground floor. He peered around a corner, scanning for Blake in the vicinity of where they’d separated. Two tall, handsome men with punctilious beards—they appeared to work in the men’s shoe section, based on the way they were standing—glanced up at him; he smiled and they nodded in return, acknowledging him but retaining their modish distance. Blake was nowhere to be seen. Locating the nearest exit, Richard hurried out onto the street and walked quickly back in the direction of Madison.

  He crossed to the east side and went north. Then he crossed back and walked down the west side, but he didn’t see Anne anywhere. He stood and scanned the intersection. What was he doing? What would he say to her? Words were not the purpose. It was instinct: an arcane, remote but imperative guide, a preverbal assertion of need. To be close to that perception again, the hand that reached out and took hold of the world, cradled it and laid it out before him, the longing for that connection across the table in the library, the hushed rapport with the mind he’d grown used to observing and cherishing.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket.

  I FOUND THE BEST PAIR OF SUNGLASSES, Blake wrote. COME LOOK!

  Richard sent back a smiley face wearing sunglasses.

  BE RIGHT THERE!

  After one last scan of the street, he headed back toward the entrance.

  Maybe it was no one.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Blake took a week off from work. Instead of leaving the city they decided to have a “staycation.” Richard was disappointed, and also relieved. He had no money for any kind of trip. In any case, he was looking forward to spending time with Blake after the recent near-obliteration of their relationship.

  They trekked up to the Met to look at the French Impressionist paintings. They went to the Guggenheim and the Whitney and to galleries in Chelsea and on the Upper East Side. They drove up to Hudson and Beacon and spent the days perusing bookstores and antique shops. They went to the beach.

  As August waned, days relaxed their borders and spilled into each other, filled with meals and pictures. Things spread out, hot and exhausted and satisfied. The slackening in time was echoed by slackening boundaries—open doors and windows and minimal clothing on the citizens of the city, drafts that had been kept in dark, still places, the cool snout of air-conditioning that poked over the sidewalk from the open doors of boutiques. Richard felt hot and sweaty and attractive, sheltered from responsibility and the self-scrutiny of solitude.

  But when Blake went back to work, Richard again became listless and reluctant to face the Clio submission alone. It was almost due: at the beginning of September, when classes started again. In the afternoons he went to the library and tried to work on it, to summon that happy, anxious energy of
composition, of thoughts and ideas locking together, which had once occurred with regularity in his mind.

  His strategy was to extract ideas from Anne’s last paper, organize them into bullet points, and compel them to form something novel—a fresh perspective, arranged on the screen with a velvety rationality. But nothing would come; the proposal, which he had managed to complete, had been just a tease of competence. Thomas of Erfurt and Martin of Dacia remained elusive. After days of fruitless effort, the dexterity of her thought, the subtlety of her readings, and the elegance of her style crushed him. A manacled wreckage of disjointed and digressive statements, at stark odds with the reasoned, dignified analysis that had preceded it, was all that he could produce. It was strange to think that he had once been able to do this, or even wanted to.

  Still, he told himself it was better that Anne was not there.

  He had grown dependent on her. It was crucial that he emerge from her shadow, find his way back to where he’d been before his mind had grown recalcitrant and indifferent. But when he left and went out into the neighborhood, past the restaurants where they had eaten together and the patios where they had shared pitchers of sangria, he felt regret.

  He wondered where she was, what she was doing, if she thought about him.

  * * *

  AS THE DEADLINE APPROACHED, each time Richard left the library his sense of solitude and incompetence rose to a pitch. If he was honest with himself, all he wanted to do was to go back to his own apartment and lie down on his bed and not worry about anybody else, even if Leslie and Courtney happened to be perseverating in the kitchen about Lamaze class or the baby yoga they’d signed up for, reminding him gently that a new roommate was in the offing and asking him where he planned to move. They seemed to spend their days accomplishing nothing, yet in the meantime they were poised to achieve the fact of building a family and a life together.

  At the end of the day, when Blake got home from the law firm, Richard suspected that his own comparatively rested face must be a galling sight after nine-plus hours of work on the island of Manhattan. It occurred to him that he was, in fact, more at ease when Blake was not there, when Blake was still at the office tangled in precedents and torts, with the expectation that his warm person would soon return, bringing competence and a smile.

  The approach of evening made Richard apprehensive. They had established what on the outside appeared to be a cozy domestic equilibrium, but an imbalance in competence was on vivid display, and Richard’s insecurities flared.

  The worst instance came one day when, at Blake’s request, Richard went to the Pathmark to buy fish. Blake arrived home, took a deep breath, and said:

  “It’s gone bad. Can’t you tell?”

  “It’s bad?”

  “You can’t tell when a fish is bad?”

  “I guess not. I can’t smell anything at Pathmark.”

  It was raining and windy out. Blake had gotten soaked on the walk from the subway. They opened the windows to air out the smell, and he was annoyed at being cold. He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders.

  “I wish we had a bathtub,” he said. “There’s a bathtub at my old studio.”

  They ordered an expensive, artisanal pizza in place of the fish and ate it in silence.

  But Blake’s patience, or his indulgence of Richard’s ineptitude, was a kind of solid, and despite these small idiocies on Richard’s part, he typically made an effort to dampen Richard’s ensuing anxiety.

  “I’ll teach you my tricks,” he said. “Soon you’ll be making me bouillabaisse.”

  “Maybe.”

  They drank, and in the analgesic flow of the wine Richard’s worries subsided, and he fell into bed with a brackish combination of alcohol and dehydration in his body, picturing his future competence, though his sleep was often shattered by dreams of deficiency and abandonment.

  It was a feeling he’d never had with Anne, who saw him clearly for what he was, and who had seen him for who he was, he suspected, ever since she’d appraised him across the room at the departmental wine and cheese, the first time they’d really spoken. At the idea of him standing in an apron, holding a spatula, she would laugh dryly but sympathetically; she would not be too surprised to find that he’d purchased a rotten fish.

  Richard had reached the vaunted destination—he was living with a man in one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in Brooklyn—but what he could not stop picturing was some faraway station of disclosure and repentance. He longed to unburden himself about everything he’d done in the past few months, but he feared that the results, as with Patrick, would be disastrous. They hadn’t spoken since the terrible night of the party, and now Patrick was living thousands of miles away. Of course, part of the reason they had yet to speak was that nothing had changed. Richard had not apologized for what he had done. Now and then he had the urge to reach out, but the idea of prostrating himself before Patrick filled him with resentment and sometimes anger.

  He was not absolved.

  * * *

  ONE WEDNESDAY, A FEW days into September, Richard was sitting at the kitchen table when Blake arrived home.

  “Was it a good day?”

  “It was long,” Blake said, putting his bag down on a chair.

  “Poveretto.”

  “Happy it’s over,” Blake said, slumping onto the sofa and resting his sock feet on the coffee table. “Glad to be home. What about you? What were you writing?”

  “I was looking over my submission for the Clio.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Hoping it’s good,” Richard said, knowing full well it was not, knowing full well that “submission” was a generous term for the hash of notes he had accumulated.

  “I’m sure it’s good. Give yourself some credit.”

  “What about you?”

  “We always talk about me.”

  “No we don’t.”

  “Let’s talk about you.”

  “I hate talking about myself.”

  “No one really hates talking about themselves.”

  “Stop being argumentative,” Richard said, smiling, but finding himself vaguely irritated. “You’re at home now. You’re not at work anymore.”

  “I’m not being argumentative,” Blake said. “Even though—yes, I know—I’m disagreeing with you. We’re just trying to talk.”

  It was the rocks Blake was placing one by one on his chest—that was the problem. It was the fact that these questions—having to account for his day, being asked to describe, and therefore relive, the hours of lonely frustration at the library—could feel like a show trial.

  Blake walked over and wrapped his arms around Richard from behind. Richard tried to relax his body, to become receptive to Blake’s touch.

  “We don’t have to talk about your day.”

  Blake squeezed tighter, and Richard suddenly felt so guilty about being irritated that he couldn’t bring any words to his lips. He exhaled, and the feeling passed.

  “I’m starting not to care about the case though.” He wandered to the fridge. “I’m going to make us something to eat.”

  “I should have made something.”

  “We both know that’s beyond you.”

  Richard frowned.

  “But you can still be useful. Find me some ingredients.”

  Blake rattled off a list. Richard gathered the ingredients and put them in a disordered pile beside the stovetop. Even with the list, and Blake’s supervision, he was unsure about what to do. After all, he was constitutionally unable to prepare his own food unless it came in a package and contained over half of his daily salt requirement. The sooner everyone realized this, the better.

  Blake stepped in and began the next stage.

  “While you’re doing that,” Richard said, brightening at his own idea, “I’ll get Häagen-Dazs at the bodega. Or Ben and Jerry’s. Or both. They have both.”

  “You sure you don’t want to stay and watch? Learn something?”

  Richard shook his head.r />
  “Okay, fine,” Blake sighed.

  When Richard returned, the apartment was full of smells and Blake had set a place for him at the table.

  “I have a proposal,” Blake said as he put the food on the table. It was spaghetti Bolognese, Richard saw.

  “Cooking lessons?”

  “Well, that too. Actually, that’s a good idea, but no. I have friends in town from Portland next week. I want to invite them over. Is that okay?”

  “Sure,” Richard said, even then feeling a tinge of annoyance at whatever expectations would flow from agreeing to this meeting. “Why wouldn’t it be? I’d love to meet them.”

  “With their kid.”

  Richard nodded. “Yup, that’s totally fine by me.”

  “Great,” Blake said, and they sat down to a dinner prepared in its totality by Blake.

  Agreeing to meet Blake’s friends—and their child—was a far cry from actually meeting them, of course. Between now and then, there was a yawning gap to cross. When they came, Richard would have to convince them that he actually belonged there with Blake in that apartment, in that neighborhood, in that arrangement with all its promise, all its twenty-first-century suggestion of triumph and justice and possibility, of everything he was tasked with living up to. Nevertheless, Richard was relieved to see that Blake was happy, convinced of his enthusiasm, and unaware of the hesitation and ambivalence, even dread, that this approaching event had inspired in him.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Richard went down the steps of the library after yet another attempt to get the Clio paper into shape. It was a bright, limpid day. Students in their druidic formations went past, carrying heavy backpacks, tense young personalities full of summer punditry. Soon the relative remoteness and sluggishness of these dog days would cede to a phalanx of new personalities, tender freshmen, green but cunning, charged with the excitement and danger of potential academic and sexual exploits. But Richard knew the campus would still feel desolate to him, now that Patrick was not walking its halls and pathways.