“Thank you, Sam. I must have left it here.”
Sam wasn’t certain if he was looking directly at Anna’s eyes. He was never certain with her. He could only guess, wonder, speculate until he told himself he was being silly, being egocentric, being sick.
“Anna,” he repeated, reaching out slowly, hesitantly, before placing a hand on her shoulder—exhaling into relaxation as he felt the smooth linen fabric beneath his fingers. “You sure you’re okay?”
Anna nodded, knowing he could somehow sense the motion of her head. Then picked up the book, dislodging his hand.
“I’m fine, Sam. Really.”
She listened to the sound of the tea percolating and thought about their mutual senses; it smells like cinnamon berries, it tastes like honey smoke, it feels warmer today. “Did I ever tell you I could do Black Swan’s thirty-two fouettés en tournant?”
“No.” Sam went back over to his desk and resumed his clicking. “You’ve never told me that, Anna. That’s impressive.”
Then Anna read to Sam. Read to him as he turned her words into a language of spots. A language that she now knew he could read in the steam and in the tea and in the books and in his body. In the painting and the shelves and the music and the air.
Anna brought her mug to the sink before excusing herself to the bathroom. She didn’t let him hear her turn the wrong way—but she knew when she clicked shut the front door that he’d know she’d never be back. Knew because her sagging breasts and varicose veins were covered in cotton. Knew because he could hear her tears spot his book like Braille.
The Ingenue
The biggest fight in my relationship with Danny regards his absurd claim that he invented the popular middle school phenomenon of saying “cha-cha-cha” after each phrase of the Happy Birthday song—an idea his ingenious sixth-grade brain allegedly spawned in a New Jersey Chuck E. Cheese and watched spread across 1993 America with an unprecedented rapidity.
“I started that! Are you kidding me!?” His face was serious now, indignant. “Literally, I started that, ask anyone from Montclair!”
“Danny, you did not start that, that’s ridiculous.” I was serious now, too. “I’m done talking about this.”
“No, no, no. Listen. I don’t know why this is so impossible to you. Someone had to start it; someone had to be the first kid to say it. I’m telling you, that was me. Eliot Grossman’s birthday party. Ask anyone.”
“This is really typical.”
“What!?” He put his wineglass down on the table.
“Nothing. Just . . . you would think you invented something like that. It’s just something you would think.” I was searching the cabinets for this bag of Goldfish.
“I can’t believe you don’t believe me about this. It’s really pissing me off.”
“I can tell.”
“Arrgh! This is really pissing me off!” His eyes were frustrated and angry in a way I hadn’t seen before, and for some reason it satisfied me. I sat on the couch and opened my laptop.
In years to come he would whisper it at parties as the cake paraded by or mouth it across a restaurant table at a sibling’s birthday dinner. Cha-cha-cha, he would provoke. Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.
There was silence for a while and I knew he was brooding.
“Sometimes I hate you,” he said. He let the words hang for a moment and then came over and sat next to me, tousling my head into the pillow and kissing me lightly on each eye.
I only tell this story because it reflects why the Yahtzee was so essential.
* * *
There were six of us. Danny, the bearded Noah, the delicate Eric, the old artistic director, and Olivia, whom I hated. Cape Cod was abandoned but we were up in the artistic director’s Provincetown shack for a post-cast-party party. Danny was doing summer stock again and I’d driven up for the final performances. I actually ate a lobster by myself before I got to the theater—picking wet meat out of knuckles as I watched the summer’s final families appear from a dune drop-off and bang Boogie Boards against the sides of their cars.
The show was terrible for two reasons: one, that the show was terrible, and two, that it involved a lot of kissing. They giggled together, Danny smiling with his eyes inches from Olivia’s—pulling at her belt loop and touching her earlobe, which I’d taught him. I wasn’t usually so particular about the girls he kissed onstage but there was something about her I didn’t like. It started the moment I saw them enter together onstage—holding hands—something disgusting growing in the back of my stomach. She was masculine almost, like an attractive cross dresser, and her genuine tomboyishness unsettled me.
At the party, she wore an actual T-shirt, not fitted or branded, and a flat-brimmed hat with the name of a New Orleans bait shop in neon orange. She drank a beer from the bottle and teased the boys, who didn’t realize they stopped talking whenever she started to tell a story. I’d clicked through her pictures a few times that summer and imagined, on nights when Danny didn’t text back, rehearsals that ended in beers and joints on beaches.
“Show her the one with the square penis!” Olivia laughed, and we all lunged up a banisterless staircase. “Ricky’s partner is a painter,” she explained. “And he has this painting of a square penis.”
“It’s not that funny.” Ricky, the artistic director, was as drunk as the rest of us.
“It is, Rick,” said Noah. “It’s ingenious.”
“Fuck off.”
“It actually is!” The house was old and decorated with an enviable authenticity. We wove through rusted signs and relics from the Army-Navy store until we arrived at the painting, where everyone promptly knelt. I stood awkwardly, not sure whether or not I was involved.
“Get out of here.” Ricky whacked Eric on the back of the head. “You’re not worthy.”
“We know,” said Danny. “Trust me, we know.”
“You’re making yourself look stupid in front of your girlfriend, you know that?” It was a line from the play and everyone died. Olivia literally rolled onto her side and I felt an odd nostalgia for my high school friends and the days when everyone shared the same world of people. Noah pulled her up and I noticed the print on her T-shirt for the first time. There was a dinosaur that appeared to be riding a bike below a REX’S FIX UPS AND MIX UPS. It looked familiar: I remembered someone somewhere making a joke about that dinosaur, laughing in some bar about its tiny hands leaning down toward the bike’s handles. Eventually, Noah and Eric went downstairs to pack a bowl and I slipped a hand into Danny’s pocket, holding him back as the rest tumbled down.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” He smiled. “I love you.”
“I love you too. Come here.” I pulled him into a corner of the upstairs space and we leaned against a bookcase, pressing our foreheads together. I hadn’t seen him since July and being together in groups never felt like being together.
“I miss you,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I love you.” We kissed but I could tell he wanted to go downstairs.
“You were good tonight, you know that? That part with the father, your physicality was really spot-on.”
“Thanks.” We looked at each other. It was a genuine compliment moment and we were on the same team. “I mean, the play is shit, but thank you.”
“It’s not.”
“It is.” We looked at each other again and grinned at the same time. Danny rarely admitted this type of thing and I was overcome with affection. I wanted to crawl into something and lie with our faces touching for as long as it took to feel like I didn’t miss him anymore. I wanted to do this, to tell him this, to say I wanted to get out of the house and into the car and onto the freeway where we could zoom away from all the attractive people I didn’t know, but Danny was looking at me, almost studying me, and took my shoulders in his hands as if surprised.
“Argh, man,”
he said. “I missed you. I really did miss you.” His eyes were sad and he kissed me on the nose. It was as if he’d just realized it. Just actualized the refrain of our phone calls.
“Good,” I said. Worried, rather than hurt, that I might have to pull him back in. That he was sad to be heading home to our TV shows and late-night snacks and unmade cave of a bed.
We were so compatible, really. Really just so compatible in a number of ways. We had the same favorite band, the same exact one, and I used to act too, in college. We bonded over this at the party where we first met—some mutual friend of a friend and I had walked into an unlocked bathroom to reveal him rinsing with the apartment owner’s Listerine. We’d found this remarkably hilarious and I liked the way he made fun of me while holding eye contact. When we walked back to his place, I told him I had quit theater because it was never my primary focus to begin with and, besides, I was never that good. He said I was probably being modest (Danny always flirted with flattery) and for the first and only time in my life, I made out a good deal on the subway.
“You know the Books are playing in Prospect Park next weekend,” I said, my hands still in his pockets. “We should go.”
“Yeah, for sure.”
“Go to that Vietnamese place before.”
“Yeah, totally.” We could hear the wind rattling the deck umbrella in its metal holder and I thought for a minute about the vast stretch of beach we couldn’t see in the dark—about how the tide could be dead low or dead high and we wouldn’t even know. But the thought of Brooklyn had popped the image of Rex’s Fix Ups back into my head and I almost said something but decided not to. The shop was on Dean Street. The shirt belonged to Danny.
I heard shouting from the kitchen and it sounded like Olivia was laughing at Eric for spilling some kind of drink.
“I’ll kill you!” she shouted. “Hom-o, hom-o!” Chairs seemed to be sliding and we heard something drop. “Hom-o, I’ll eat you!” Danny tried not to smile but his face broke and he stifled a laugh.
“I’m sorry,” he said, still grinning. “I’m sorry, it’s just . . . I’m sorry.” He couldn’t keep a straight face.
“It’s fine,” I said, smiling back at him. “It’s fine. Let’s go.”
I kissed him on the cheek and we turned to leave, the umbrella still rattling from outside the glass.
It wasn’t until we were walking back down the stairs toward the maze of antiques and squealing actors that I truly realized I despised Olivia and her flat-brimmed hat with an unbearable and irrational intensity.
The next day, I watched the play again. It was a matinee, so the cast scraped out of Ricky’s house at eleven o’clock with the pouty camaraderie of a communal hangover. Too tired and confused the night before, Danny and I had had sex that morning—emerging last into the kitchen, secretly superior. I ordered another to-go lobster on the way to the theater and it came with its claws flopping over the sides of a fast food container, which I liked. I sat in the back again but felt a strange sinking when the lights dimmed. Danny looked handsome in his costume: styled, slightly, and forced to wear jeans that fit him.
I don’t think I’d ever had a truly violent impulse before that afternoon, sitting in a velvet chair in a dark theater as old people laughed. I had a boyfriend in high school who got into a fight at a party in someone’s basement and I remember driving him home in silence, fully incapable of understanding why he felt compelled to punch Joey Carlton in the face for the shit he said about Mike and AJ. But I understood now. Danny and Olivia were just so charming! The part where they first kissed, his hand on the small of her back and her fingers running through his hair. The part where they giggled and eye-smiled and confessed things and fought and made up and cried and kissed again. I wanted to take Olivia’s face and hit it as hard as I could. Shove her to the ground and kick her in the side. Smash her against the wall, pull at her hair, punch her again right between the eyes. I imagined doing these things as the audience laughed. Imagined getting up on stage and beating her up. Just literally beating her up. Fuck you, I would say. Fuck you and your stupid clothing and your stupid attitude and the way you talk to everyone like they fucking love you. Stay the fuck away from Danny and if you ever fucking talk to him again I will kill you, I would say. I will literally kill you.
During intermission I went outside to sit in the car because I didn’t feel like talking to the lobby and its circles. Part of me probably knew it was coming because as soon as I shut the door, I started crying. I let my head hang forward and press against the steering wheel but after a few sobs I sat up and stopped. I texted five or six friends from the city. Small things like “hey how’s work?” or “ugh I want to kill this girl in Dan’s play.” I do that sometimes when I’m feeling lonely; it’s a strange and compulsive habit, but it usually works. I waited for a minute before anyone responded. Flipped down the mirror and rubbed my knuckle under my eyes, exhaling. My sister and my friend Tara texted me back and I responded to both immediately. I spent the second half of the play reminding myself of particular ways in which I was better than Olivia: I was thinner, I had nicer eyes, I went to a better school.
I didn’t know what my problem was. Danny had been a (struggling) actor since the day we met and I’d seen him kiss girls onstage before. I guess the summer had been hard; the cell service in northern Cape Cod wasn’t great and I’d wonder about him all day as I sat in my office. The envy was twofold: jealousy of the girl he was spending time with and jealousy of how he was spending his time. Playing around all day doing stretches and dumb acting games, getting wasted at night at the Beachcomber, the local bar he raved about whenever we talked on the phone. “It’s so fun,” he’d say. “There’s this group of local alcoholics who are too freaking funny. But they have these bands that come and everyone just sort of goes with it, you know? None of that too-cool bullshit.” “Yeah,” I’d say, in bed with my salad. “It sounds amazing, you’ll have to take me when I come up in August.” “For sure,” he’d reply. “I can’t wait.”
We got dinner together between shows and had sex again on these inland dunes. Danny parked the car on the side of Route 6 next to a beach pine marked with an orange plastic flag.
“This way,” he said, leading me up a path through scratchy trunks growing sideways out of sand. “I’m telling you, this place is unreal.”
It was. We emerged from the cropped forest into an expanse of craters, dune grass waving from the tops of their peaked edges. The sun hadn’t quite set but the crickets were pulsing—chirping from the green patches with astonishing volume. It was windy, and strips of hair blew out of my ponytail and across my face. Danny stretched his arms up and leaned forward into the wind.
“Isn’t it amazing?”
“Yeah,” I said, pulling on a sweatshirt.
“We come here a lot at night.” He jumped forward and down in massive leaps, sand sliding in chutes behind him. I leapt after, shrieking, and landed in a heap at the bottom, rolling next to him.
We had the idea at the same moment and kept our clothes on the whole time. When we were done, I lay down beside him and looked up at the thin clouds. I thought about how funny we must look from above—lying in the center of a bowl-shaped hole in the world. I imagined what it would be like if every crater had a couple at its center, looking up.
“Do you ever come here with Olivia?” I asked. Cupping sand in my hands and letting it sift into a pile.
“Sure,” he said. “We all come here.” I knew my jealousy was unattractive, that Danny would think I was insecure, but I couldn’t stop.
“Yeah, but do you come here with just her?”
He rolled over to face me.
“Olivia and I are friends,” he said. “We do shit together.”
“Like kiss every night.”
“Onstage. In a play.” I didn’t say anything. He sat up. “You’re not serious, are you?”
I reverted, pul
ling my head inside my sweatshirt in mock retreat.
“I hate her!” My voice came out muffled. I popped back out. “I hate her, I hate her.” I smiled, and it worked: the intensity of the moment vanished as fast as I’d created it.
We lay there in silence for a while, but it was ruined. I knew the way Danny thought and I knew this only made him like me less and like her more. For the second time that day I wanted to hit something but I still couldn’t help myself. I rolled over and kissed at his neck.
“Remember that T-shirt she was wearing yesterday?”
“Who? Olivia?”
“Yeah.” I paused. “Did you give it to her? I thought you had that shirt.” He sat up again, serious this time. Cupped my hands in my lap.
“Listen,” he said, his eyebrows raised. “I love you, okay?”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to convince you.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” The crickets droned and I stood up to shake sand off my back. “I just—love you.”
He looked at me and tucked my loose hair behind my ears.
“I love you too,” he said. But I never got my answer.
The Yahtzee happened that night. After the play. I went for a third time despite Danny’s genuine suggestion that I sit this one out. In the hour beforehand, I walked to the Penny Patch, the old candy store in the village by Wellfleet Harbor. I ate a small piece of chocolate fudge, a small piece of penuche fudge, and three saltwater taffies and decided I was being ridiculous about the whole thing. Danny and I had gone out to dinner. We’d had sex in the bottom of a romantic dune crater. We’d been dating since we were twenty-four. I’d gone to Minnesota with his parents; he’d come to my grandfather’s funeral. Olivia was strange and loud and a tomboy and they loved her because she was one of them, drinking beers and wearing dumb hats. Tomorrow I would pack Danny inside my car and we’d zoom off on the freeway and back inside the walls of New York.
The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories Page 7