Chum

by Jeff Somers

  Bick and Mary were all of a sudden doing shots at the bar. Fucking happily engaged people, I hated them. Well, I loved Mary, but I hated Bickerman. He was a fungus growing on all of us, although she seemed very fond of him. Wedding just a few months away, and she had us in those horrifying dresses.

  A quick series of grim psychic visions of the rest of my life, watching them drink themselves into a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf-daze in a sad succession of divey bars.

  With Denise hating the world, Flo somehow making do with Mikey, the Bicks halfway to passed out, and Miriam chatting up the bartender with her wide-eyed, tits-out enthusiasm, that left me with …

  “Here you go.”

  The Sub-Doofus bearing a foamy beer for me and a bourbon for himself.

  I sipped beer to help swallow down my growing ball of dismay at the evening’s prospects and smiled wanly at him. “Thanks, Henry.”

  He smiled back, a bit of foppish charm, I thought. “You’re speaking to me?” He glanced at Denise. “I thought I was on the blacklist tonight.”

  It wasn’t so much the motherfuckery, I reflected, it was the gleeful unconcern with which the motherfuckery was bandied about that irritated me, mostly. I decided to be cautiously snotty, with an option for increased snottiness depending on what level of insincere BS the Sub-Doofus handed me.

  “Well,” I said sweetly, “what did you do to her?”

  He laughed and shook his head, stealing a glance at Denise. “Ah, Kel, we don’t have time for that list.” He winked. “Drink and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die, eh?”

  There was a lot of genuine sadness there, I thought, so I lowered the attitude provisionally. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun of you.”

  He winked again. “Sure you did. But that’s all right. It’s the Female Problem.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I shifted my beer, ready to hurl it in his face. I’d done it before. Not to the Sub-Doofus specifically, but at other men.

  He didn’t seem concerned. “How long have Neesie and I been dating? Five months. She hasn’t decided where I fit in yet, so all she does with you and Flo and Mare is study me carefully, right? She’s rubbing me hard, searching for problems, for imperfections, for reasons to give up on me.”

  For motherfuckery, I thought.

  He shrugged. “It’s okay, it’s natural. Why commit until you’ve kicked the tires and put it through its paces, right? But the Female Problem is that during this trial period, all her friends only hear the bad stuff about me. She’s daring you to tell her that I’m not worth it, to point out the fatal flaw.”

  I blinked. It almost made sense.

  He coughed a little around his drink. “Then, if I survive, and she embraces me as her boyfriend, her friends are amazed: They can’t believe that she’s settling in with this guy about whom they’ve heard nothing good for months. That’s the Female Problem.”

  “That’s,” I struggled, “that’s interesting.”

  He winked again, a gesture I was beginning to find really annoying. “Of course, a certain percentage of men deserve it.”

  I couldn’t help it. I was amused and hid a smile in my foam.

  “Careful,” he admonished, “or I’ll rub off on you, Kel.”

  I spared a guilty glance at Denise.

  “She’s in a mood to suspect infidelity with anyone,” he went on with an air of injured innocence.

  I picked Miriam out from the crowd, entertaining two blotto men wearing ridiculous green sweaters. One of them seemed to have found something fascinating in the offered cleavage of her white blouse. I nodded in her direction. “Coming in with her spread over you like butter didn’t have anything to do with it, right?”

  He nodded. “Sure it did.”

  I squinted distrustfully at this display of honesty. “So why set her off like that?”

  The Sub-Doofus looked at me for a long moment, considering, I thought. “Kel,” he said seriously, “she’s my friend’s fiancée’s little sister. I am not going to treat her like a leper just because Denise hates her perky tits. And second, you can’t always control what other people do.”

  “What does that mean?” I was sniffing the air for motherfuckery.

  “It means, what was I supposed to do? Shove her to the floor and denounce her as a whore?”

  I considered that, and realized my beer was miraculously gone. This was the power that men had, I knew. They talk and talk and before we know it we’re blitzed and have our shirts open.

  I sent the Sub-Doofus to the bar for another drink and thought about what he’d said. Maybe the Sub-Doofus was right in a sense: We hadn’t given him much of a chance. But then, he was right: Denise hadn’t let us know it was okay to. You couldn’t start liking the boy toy until she did. It was unseemly, otherwise. He returned and slipped a better-poured beer into my hand, with a confident smile that told me he thought he was pretty fucking charming. Well, I could see why Neesie liked him—most of the time, anyway.

  “Where’s Luis?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The Spaniard? Not his sort of holiday, or so he says. I say to him, ‘What about drinking, drunk women in bars, and fake Irish accents? They’re not up your alley?’ He looks at me and says …” here the Sub-Doofus launched into a passable Luis imitation. We all had a Luis shtick. “He says, ‘The Irish are as dogs to my people.’”

  I caught myself giggling and hid behind my beer. The Sub-Doofus was smiling. “At any rate, he may yet show up when he realizes everyone he knows is out at some bar.” He blinked, innocently, I’d swear. “Christ, that’s kind of sad, actually, now that I think about it. I’m going to go give him a call, see if he wants to join us now that he’s had some time to reconsider his Aryan ways.”

  “Sure,” I said, a sinking feeling telling me I was going to have to force myself on someone before one of the strange men, their bellies looking like they had a fucking Blarney Stone stuffed down their shirts, took note of me.

  • • •

  I don’t ever need to go to the gym because hovering over the most disgusting toilets in the world, urinating without making skin-on-funk contact in the wonderful places my friends bring me to, keeps my leg muscles strong. In this paradise the women’s bathroom was right next to the men’s room, which was unfortunate. I stood with Flo and tried to keep still despite the ongoing biological processes inside me. That was okay. The place was hot and smoky, and I felt lightheaded, but not in a bad way. There were still three girls ahead of me. The men’s room line cha-cha’d past at lightning speed.

  “I don’t think they even drop their drawers,” I said to Flo. “I think they just wet themselves in private and come right back out.”

  “Trough,” Flo slurred.

  I looked at her. Flo was tall and dark-haired, and I’d always been jealous of how skinny she was. She was fussing with her hair, which was tied back in a complex series of clips. As the night wore on and she drank more, the clips miraculously loosened. “What?”

  “Haven’t you ever been into a men’s bathroom? It’s just one big trough. They stand around it and piss into it. That’s why there’s never a line. They just squeeze in between two other guys and let loose.”

  “Yuck.” I considered this piece of intelligence. “When were you in a boy’s room?”

  She rolled her eyes. “At a ball game once. I was dating Phil at the time, remember him? Phil Dublen? I really had to go, so he ushered me into the men’s room, stood guard outside a stall.”

  Dublen … Dublen … “Oh, him; I remember him. Always wore that sports jacket, looked like he slept in it. Wasn’t he rich?”

  She shook her head. “No, he just inherited some nice sum once, that’s all. He was pretty poor, actually. Nice kisser, though.”

  “Why’d you break up with him again?”

  She scowled. “He mooned about this other girl, this waitress he knew. Never shut up about her. So finally I was like, Hello! Here I am, in the flesh. She’s not!” Her face darkened. “Let’
s just say his response was not the right one.”

  The line moved up one person, as Miriam emerged from the bathroom, almost falling into us.

  “Hi, guys!” she said, hugging us and pulling herself out of a fall at the same time. “This is so much fun! We all ought to go out more often! You guys are so great!”

  She was drunk as a sailor. I smiled and helped steady her. “Mir, baby, go find your sister. Have a Coke or something.”

  She giggled. “Okay!”

  When I turned back to the Pee Situation, which was getting desperate, I noted two guys now waiting in line for the men’s room. They were doing the typical motherfucker move, which is glancing at Flo and I about chest-high and then talking to each other.

  “Hi,” I called over to them.

  The dark-haired one looked embarrassed. The less dark-haired one smiled his way-cool smile at me. “Hey.”

  “Are you going to say hello, or what?”

  He blinked. “Hello?”

  “You were staring at our tits. I figured you’d at least say hello.”

  He laughed and pushed his way into the bathroom. His dark-haired friend looked ready to burst into flame.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  I shrugged. Only one away from the bathroom, I was in a generous mood. “Buy me a drink, you’re forgiven.”

  • • •

  Back at the bar, Bick had managed to worm us some bar space and two precious chairs, claimed by Denise and Mary. Denise appeared to be unclenching a little. She sipped a fruity-looking drink and had allowed the Sub-Doofus to stand next to her. Progress, of a sort.

  “What’re you drinking, sweetheart?”

  This from Bick, the Chief Doofus, who knew that I hated it when he called me sweetheart. I smiled sweetly. “A red, sweetcheeks.”

  “I like her,” he said to Mare. “She’s sassy. And you, Florence?”

  “Same,” Flo said cheerily, joining us. “My God, that bathroom is just gross.”

  “We’ll sneak you into the men’s room next time,” Mike offered. “It’s gross too, though.”

  “But gross with an element of danger!” Henry added dramatically.

  Denise rolled her eyes at me, and I pretended I was laughing at her. Girls had to stick together and all that, no matter how deviously charming their boyfriends tended to be at the most inopportune moments.

  “Anyone seen Mir?” Mary asked, looking around. “She’s been gone a long time.”

  “Just saw her by the bathrooms, actually,” Flo offered. “Thought she was coming back this way.”

  Everyone had to scream to be heard. Bickerman disengaged from Mary and settled his jacket onto his shoulders squarely. “I’ll take a look around, make sure she’s okay.”

  Mary bussed him affectionately on the cheek, and he was off, the Brave Avenging Fiancé. The Sub-Doofus handed his glass to Denise gently and turned to address us. “And I have to go to the bathroom like nobody’s business, so Mike, I leave you with four damned attractive ladies. Hope you’re up to it, buddy.”

  Mike let him shoulder past and leaned in toward the rest of us. “I didn’t hear a word he said,” he bellowed.

  A moment of quiet enveloped us; no one knew exactly what to say to Mike, who was nice but uninspiring.

  Mary, a saint as always, engaged her fiancé’s best friend in a conversation, and I let my mind wander, relieved. Mike was nice enough, but his conversation tended to make me sleepy, and I felt for Mare, who was burdened with him at all times through Bick. I was beginning to wonder if marrying the Doofus was going to end up more trouble than it was worth. I was starting to feel a little hot and dizzy, anyway, and my underwear suddenly seemed too tight. I couldn’t have managed small talk with Mikey if my life had depended on it.

  “Is it just me,” I asked Flo, “or is Henry growing on you, too?”

  She shrugged. “He is sweet, mostly.”

  “Yeah,” I mused. “I think Neesie’s doing well, with this one.”

  Another shrug, her eyes dancing around the crowd of red-cheeked men pushing each other out of the way for beer. “The way she isn’t speaking to him, I’m not too surprised if they don’t make it much further.”

  I squinted my disapproval at her. “Nah, I think he’s doing well. Normally, I don’t think she’d let him stand near her if she was really mad.”

  I glanced over to where Denise was making a half-hearted but well-intentioned effort to join Mary and Mike’s conversation. She kept scanning the crowd, looking for the Sub-Doofus. It was wall-to-wall drunkards, all of them vaguely resembling her boyfriend in at least the basic details: height, weight, complexion, sarcasm, pudginess. It was kind of depressing, sometimes, to have the commonness of the available men thrust under your nose.

  We ordered another round and summoned more small talk to cover the growing obviousness that three of our party were missing. Denise gave up the pretense that she was engaged in conversation, knocking back her drink in a huge, ominous gulp.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered, taking her by the arm. “Let’s go find him, then.”

  “And the fiancé too, while you’re at it,” Mary slurred after us. “If the little Rotter’s been chatting up the chicks, kick him in the nuts for me!”

  Mary drunk was not a pleasant sight, and the one good thing to come from her perplexing infatuation with the soft white form of Bickerman was his assumption of the Mare-Wrangling duties out at bars. It was a demanding job, and the Doofus got some amount of credit simply for tackling it in good cheer.

  “I’m sorry,” Denise whispered in my ear, her cheek hot against mine, her breath sweet with Schnapps. “It’s just that—”

  “You don’t trust him,” I finished. “I know.”

  “I’m terrible. He’s been good. I should give him credit.”

  “Fuck him. If he’s been good, he doesn’t need credit.”

  Pushing your way through crowded bars, crowded dick-heavy bars, was an Olympic-level sport, really. It was strenuous work requiring dexterity. Darting for openings, keeping your eyes everywhere to defend against gropers, sliding past defensive blocks in the form of pie-eyed pickup lines—it was exhausting. By the time we found the bathrooms, I was out of breath. Two Harry Reems look-alikes in muttonchops and denim jackets parted before us, and I was breathless, because there they were.

  • • •

  By the pay phones, with the phone numbers from a thousand wasted evenings printed on the pasteboard walls in blue and black ink, and the cigarette machine, where the yellow plastic knobs had been rubbed shiny by a thousand desperate hands tugging them for nicotine fixes.

  First, his back, the gray jacket he was wearing, the back of his head distinguished by the ballooning of those ears, great flaps of pink spreading out proudly. His posture was relaxed, careless, one elbow on the cigarette machine, leaning in toward the wall.

  Then, in slow motion, he shifted his weight, and there she was, against the wall, hands locked behind her back, her face flushed, her eyes shining, her fucking eighteen-year-old nipples poking at her blouse as if they already had his fingerprints on them. One hand reached up and pulled at his lapel, pulling him back toward her playfully.

  He turned, and his expression was ghastly. Horror.

  “I’m going to throw up,” Denise said. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  She pulled me back the way we came. I turned one last time, and my eyes locked with the Sub-Doofus’s, and there it was: horror, amazement, terror, and something else. Before I could put a name to it, the crowd moved between us, and then it was just people, and Denise pulling me.

  • • •

  “Calm down, sweetie.”

  Denise kept walking briskly. “We’ve got to keep drinking,” she announced. “There’s got to be a bar around here somewhere.”

  I glanced at Flo, walking with her arms crossed across her chest, weaving just slightly, the International Pissed-Off Drunk Girl Signal. Flo looked away. She’d been having a good time.

&nb
sp; “Okay, sweetie,” I said to Denise. “Let’s have a drink, talk about this.”

  “No talk. Just drink.”

  “Calm down. We didn’t see anything. Calm down.”

  She snorted. “He was practically making out with the little cunt right there!”

  I caught up and matched her stride, which was fast and angry. “But he wasn’t, and we didn’t really see anything. All I’m saying is, let’s calm down and think about this.”

  “Fine. First a few drinks, okay? If you want, go back in there and talk to Little Lord Fuckpants about it.”

  I swallowed my sarcasm and let us walk five steps before jumping back in with the brat. I opened my mouth, and she stopped to whirl on me.

  “You were getting mighty chummy with him back there, but I thought my friends would be on my side.”

  My mouth fell open. “Chummy?”

  “You and Little Lord Fuckpants chatting up a storm. Having a grand old time, huh?” she spat. “Anyone else, okay, you expect that sort of shit. But not you, Kel. Not you.”

  A stabbing pain through my gut, knee-jerk guilt. Never ever, ever flirt with other girls’ boyfriends; it was an obvious rule; it was what allowed society to exist. But fuck that, all I’d been was polite to the poor guy, dragging along her sullen little ass and trying to make the best of it. I felt righteous indignation was probably my best course of action.

  “Fuck that, Denise. I was just being polite.”

  She stopped suddenly, whirled to face me and Flo, who was sullenly trailing us, dragging her purse like a fucking dead poodle, which is probably what she felt the evening was beginning to resemble.

  “I just want someone to be on my side, damn it,” Denise hissed fiercely. “That dumbfuck is so goddamn charming everyone’s always defending him.”

  Which wasn’t true. Flo and I had been running him down for no good reason ever since she unveiled him, as girlfriends were supposed to do. I let that pass, though, seeing in a quivering lip and shining eyes a flash of daylight in the mess the evening was becoming.