She looked at Dana, pinched her sullen cheek too hard, and said, “Dude: who put gluten in your muffin?” And Dana actually struck Inez’s hand away as she said, “I’m fucking celiac, so don’t joke.”
Inez treated Dana’s gluten intolerance with the same amount of . . . well, tolerance she brought to the idea that anybody might pay to be taught how to make shit up, let alone by her father.
“Your dad’s cool,” Dana muttered.
“What does he teach you? What does he actually do?”
Her tone was derisive but she did truly want to know. It was impossible to imagine him standing in front of a class, holding forth, professorial.
“He’s a good teacher,” Dana said. “We all liked him. We’ll all miss him.” And then, bitterly: “But how’s your education going, Inez? You learning much from your Craigslist perverts?”
For a moment Inez wondered whether to tell her about Carlos, the way his eyes went black. The less she told Dana, the better, she decided. That was how not to be fucked with. Trust yourself, no one else.
“I don’t know why you do it,” Dana said. And then, almost to herself, in a kind of incredulous whisper: “It’s so stupid.”
The arrival of a text. It made Inez grin. A stranger would shake them up a bit.
“Where are you going?” Dana said.
“New friend, my friend.”
Downstairs, she flung the door open and raised her hand to Kate, who looked at it, bewildered.
“Dude, I’m high-fiving you! High-five me!”
If you put your gaze on the elbow of the person you were high-fiving, your palms met perfectly. Like how to open a beer bottle with your teeth, or where to get a fake ID, these were just things you came to know. Kate, she suspected, had different areas of expertise.
A dilapidated elevator shaft, concrete walls, inscrutable pieces of timber, three bikes in a drunk, half-tangled stack. She felt Kate taking it all in.
“I know, so janky, right?” Inez said. “This building is like basically falling apart.”
There was some pride in it—a boast, almost. She yanked the door of the elevator cage shut and said, “I totally didn’t think you’d come, by the way.”
“Here I am,” Kate said. She added, hastily, “Thanks for inviting me.”
When they stepped out onto the roof Inez heard a soft, marveling sound come from Kate as the view hit her. Brooklyn was wide open beneath them, Manhattan a visible fairy tale. And tonight the city was going for it, putting on a show like this was its last, the sky outdoing itself in flamingo pinks, all the tiny squares of steel and glass lit into glittering tiles, as if the whole skyline were sequined and shimmying. Evenings like this made Inez want to open her mouth wide and eat the world. She looked at Kate’s expression, so daffily rapt.
“You know it’s all the pollution and shit that makes the sunsets do that, right?” She turned her back on it all, propping her elbows against the concrete behind her.
Kate shrugged. “I love it.”
“That the sunset is nothing but, like, actual shit in the sky?”
“If the air were clean the sunsets would be boring,” Kate said. She sounded, Inez thought, like both a parent and a kid. “Less spectacular.”
Inez considered this. “You’re weird. Come meet people.”
Fingers tight around Kate’s wrist, Inez walked her through the house, a tour of the space and its residents, different music drifting out from different rooms, different faces looking up from beds and hammocks and couches, hands raised in brief waves. The biohazard of a kitchen at one end, crusted cereal bowls in teetering stacks, bristling with spoons. A drum kit, projector, bean bags. Dana was hunched in the middle of a collapsed couch now, frowning at a laptop. She unhooked her earbuds one by one, a gesture meek and precise, and got to her feet. When Dana said hey, she met Kate’s eyes and shook her hand with a certain deliberation, a grimness to her courteousness, as though they already shared a knowledge of something. Inez couldn’t take this, the absurd solemnity of it, a pair of global heads of state meeting at the fucking UN, so she seized Dana in a headlock, pulled a grotesque sad-face at Kate, and said, “Dana’s no fun today. I think it’s that time of the month.”
Dana wriggled free, rubbed her neck, shook her head, and sat back down.
“Let’s go get drunk,” Inez said, snatching Kate by the wrist again.
Outside, there were thin blankets and fat cushions, and Inez threw herself down on them, stomach first, ankles in the air, as she always liked to do, and poured mezcal into red plastic cups. It tasted smoky and burnt, the way the sky looked, and she watched Kate take greedy little tugs of it, like she was sucking up the dark violet shreds of clouds.
Others joined them, and Inez poured Dana an extra two inches. The bottle emptied and then Gabe was tipping out ashy gray crystals from a baggie onto a tray, delicate and precise, fashioning small bundles of them out of rolling papers. “This is the top-drawer shit,” he said, several times, a favorite phrase of his, regardless of the quality. Inez knew there was a whole fifth dimension of difference between a bit of shitty speed plus powdered aspirin, and the real deal, speedless, that granted you a religious experience.
“Here!” Gabe said, making an offering to Kate.
She looked like she’d just been handed a gun and told she had to shoot the president. Inez couldn’t help it, she laughed. She flung herself to Kate’s side, scooting closer, slamming her body up against hers. “Take it, take it!”
And Kate did. Difficult things to swallow, these paper bombs.
“You’ve got to take a massive gulp now,” Inez urged her, passing her the bottle. “Like, huge.”
After she’d done this, Kate smiled, suddenly, with her hands empty and her eyes wide. All gone. This pleased Inez. She threw her throat back and let out a howl to the moon, wherever it was.
“You’re going to be so unembarrassed! And I’m going to be your tour guide! Here begins the unembarrassment of Kate!”
By the time she noticed Kate was gone, the sky had turned navy blue and the fairy lights strung everywhere looked soft and blurry—melted, almost. The crowd of friends had multiplied into friends of friends and everyone seemed loose and oblivious, people muddled up in people.
“Shit,” she said to Gabe, stubbing out the cigarette. “Have you seen her?”
“Huh?”
Of course he hadn’t. He had a stupid vague grin slopping around on his face and his eyes weren’t keeping up with his body’s movements.
Inside, Inez gave the bathroom door a gentle kick. There she was, sitting on the toilet with her feet tucked under her and her phone in her hands. Kate’s eyes looked a little red. It would hit at any moment, Inez thought.
“Sorry. I had to . . . My boyfriend is sort of . . .” and Kate held up the phone to indicate some kind of crisis.
Inez said nothing for a moment. Then: “You’re coming out with us tonight.”
15
Dennis never failed him. Always got to his feet with difficulty as he heard Bill enter the apartment, and ambled over, head slung low, body stiff, tail wagging faintly to greet his owner’s return. Always doggily, indomitably himself. He pushed his muzzle into Bill’s hand and gratefully licked the sweat.
“Hey, man,” Bill said, closing the door behind him, slinging his keys. “Hot, right?”
Dennis twitched his ears and rearranged his chops in a way that seemed to Bill to be affirmative, and then resumed panting with soulful eyes. Bill swore, sometimes, that this look expressed regret at not being able to parse human words.
The AC units whirred.
It always struck him as a great gender unfairness that women, in temperatures like this, could wear next to nothing and look desirable, but that men in shorts were, unfailingly, considered buffoons. Even a man in a T-shirt was halfway to being a buffoon.
Or at least, a man of his age was. With a semifrozen beer in hand and a cold, soaked dishcloth over his head, Bill yielded to the sofa and allowed it—the day, the heat, everything—to vanquish him.
When he parked the beer and pulled off his damp shirt, balling it beside him, Dennis followed the object with intent, his nose twitching.
“No, dude, you don’t want to smell that.”
Dennis, chastened, dipped his head, doleful-eyed.
Bill switched on his default hate-watch of a news channel. A blond-helmeted Stepfordian in a pink suit was addressing him from behind a desk, manicured hands clasped firmly.
“Record temperatures,” she was saying. And now the man beside her—because she was just a woman, wasn’t she, and these TV people must think viewers needed “masculine authority”—confirmed it: “One of the hottest summers on record.”
Dennis sat at his feet, alive and attentive, his sides heaving. They stared at each other with mutual regard, an old benevolence.
“And now,” the female voice was saying, “is this little boy corrupting your children?”
The screen split into two: on the left, her face, immobile save for the infinitesimally raised eyebrows, indicating that this, fellow Americans, was not your average story; on the right, a freeze-frame from a video.
“A boy from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has become a YouTube supercelebrity.”
As she spoke, the footage of a hyperanimated tween began. He was wearing saucy little pink shorts and a tie-dyed crop top, mugging for the camera in his bedroom, rolling his eyes with draggy glamour, pouting, and then pushing his butt inches away from the camera and oscillating that butt with remarkable speed, all while casting a look of precocious sexual intent over his left shoulder. Bill turned to his dog.
“Is this child corrupting you, Dennis?”
Dennis’s tail drifted back and forth with uncertainty.
“Going by the YouTube name of Tiniest B,” the anchor said, stressing it in a way that made clear she was as leery of this vulgarity and foolishness as you were, “the boy has attracted more than seventy million views online for videos that contain sexually inappropriate language and dances.”
Bill smiled at the screen. “Sexually inappropriate dances, bud. Watch out for them.”
Dennis wagged his tail with a little more enthusiasm.
“Exactly! Butt shaking! You’ll end up on the news, pal. Twerking sensation.”
The anchor talked on, sternly.
“His real identity remains unknown, but parents across America are demanding answers.”
Bill switched it off. “Demanding answers,” he said into the silent apartment. Dennis wagged his tail hopefully.
“Walk?” Bill said.
They walked south and then east, toward Tompkins Square, and Bill found himself passing the building where, some months back, he’d had an unremarkable night with a woman who’d gone to high school with him, or so she said. Did they talk to each other, all these freshly divorced women in their forties whom he’d known decades back, old acquaintances who, out of the blue, sent him Facebook messages with winking emoji in them? He wondered if they’d formed a sort of sorority. Then he looked up and a sign seized him. It was—there was no other word for it—fizzing. Neon letters descending, B-A-R, but the B sputtering in and out of existence, humming as it flashed and died in the morning, leaving an ar where a bar had been.
Neon, meaning something new. Newness for the permanently new New York, a newness that was now blinking out. Soon these signs would spark the same nostalgia as subway carriages berserk with graffiti, or prostitutes with platinum perms. Were there social media accounts for this, digital mausoleums for images of a dead city, so that its ghosts could live on in virtual permanence?
Dennis shuffled his hind legs to a halt and a squat, then cast Bill an abject glance. He duly looked away, waiting with the little green baggie in hand, as his dog did his business on the sidewalk.
Few people inspired in Bill a desire to make offerings. He took a certain splenetic pleasure in showing up to dinner parties empty-handed. But Casey, the oldest person he knew and also the person he’d known the longest, the permanent kid, was a person he wanted to give things to. Cannoli. They’d please him, offer succor to his sweet tooth, cookies for breakfast. And so Bill walked to Little Italy. Down Avenue A and Ludlow, west along Grand, to a bakery that had been there forever, a Proust machine for a thousand old fuckers like him, mooning over the bites of their pubescence. He ordered seven and then carried them, in a bright white box, all the way back, route retraced.
The door from the street gave its haunted-house whine. Casey’s doors were never locked. Three flights up, Bill found him in the usual chair, by the window, mouth slack, fingers limp. A cold wash of dread moved through Bill’s chest.
“Casey?”
His eyes snapped open, that unnatural blue, full wattage. Snapped open so fast that Bill wondered if he’d been fucking with him.
“You’re late!” Casey said.
“I’m surprising you. I can’t be late.”
“No surprises. You should have been here half an hour ago!”
This was normal, really.
“What did you bring?” Casey said.
“Guess.”
“I hate surprises, loathe them, you know that, Willie.”
Untrue, Bill thought. Casey loved surprises. Disrup-tions. Any act of anarchy. He just didn’t like to be on the receiving end of any of them.
“What’s in the goddamn box, Willie?”
“Sweet things.”
“Goody.”
“Cannoli.”
“Let’s eat them.”
“You got any coffee?” Bill said, depositing the box and moving to the poky kitchen, opening cupboard doors hopelessly. “Proper stuff, not that vile powder.”
“Vile powder!” Casey parroted from the other room. Then, glumly: “I have rum.”
Bill opened and shut doors, finding cat food, more cat food, a garish bong, a jar of Jiffy. The fridge was clinical in its emptiness. He gave up. He told himself he hated sweet things, but Casey’s ardor was the kind that you had to just go with. He sat in the half-shipwrecked armchair beside him, coffeeless, getting cream and crumbs all over everything, listening to Casey make small grunts of satisfaction as he ate.
“When I walked in,” Bill said, “I thought you were dead.”
He noticed a smear of cannoli cream on the crotch of his jeans and began scrubbing at it with a fingernail.
“Ha!” Casey said. “Spooked you, did I?” And then, with his mouth full: “Well, will be soon.”
It took a moment for the words to reach Bill’s mind.
“The fuck?”
“Oh, don’t go all Florence Nightingale, Willie! All shocked and tragic! Been dying since the day I was born. We all are.”
“You’re sick?”
“Sick, depraved, twisted,” he said, the words made thick and stupid with cream. He wiped some from his mouth, unsuccessfully, and reached a hand, knuckles cubed by arthritis, toward the box again. His fingers trembled with impatience. “Pass me another.”
“Well, I can see you’re eating like a bird, so . . .”
Casey just grunted.
“Do you have health insurance?”
He knew the answer to this.
“Let me help, Casey. Medical bills. I’m going to help. You know I can afford it. Especially since my only child seems to show fuck-all interest in tertiary education.”
Casey kept gobbling.
“Write down your bank details. Or send me the bills.”
“Good for her,” Casey said.
“What?”
“College!” he said. “That’s one for the sheep. Lem-
mings.”
“Those are two different species. But
maybe. Cara definitely doesn’t think so.”
“Who?” he hooted.
“Her mother. My ex-wife. Remember her?”
Cara had been pissed that Casey had worn white. Two decades ago! A ceremony in her parents’ garden in Connecticut, her sweet bump under the lace. And Bill, laughing with disbelief at his new bride, telling her that his friend always wore white, that she couldn’t seriously be pissed about this, she had to be joking. Her eyes had become even harder at that, merciless. It would take years for him to learn not to show any amusement in the face of her anger.
“Latinas!” Casey yelped. “Hot-blooded. She was a hot-blooded one.”
“Yeah, I don’t think you can say that anymore, Casey. Kind of racist. Tepid-blooded now, anyway.”
“So you’ve found yourself a hotter-blooded hottie?”
Bill exhaled something like a laugh.
“Ooh, a girlfriend,” said Casey.
“Not a girlfriend, no. She’s much younger. English.”
“You found her on the double-you double-you double-you?”
“No. Real life.”
“Oh, what is that, Berto? Real life!”
“Face to face,” Bill offered vaguely. “IRL.”
“I are what?”
“Never mind.”
“Well, you should bring her to my real-life birthday party. Halloween. Weekend before. It’s going to be a blast. Bang-bang.”
As if summoned by the words, there was a knock at the door.
“Lock it!” Casey hissed at Bill.
The knocking became louder, terrorizing, a you-better-fucking-open-up door assault.
Casey’s eyes bugged wild, his fingers spread stiff in alarm. Bill leaped across the apartment, exhilarated. The second fusillade came a breath after he bolted the door.
“You’re in there!” the voice boomed. The speaker sounded late-middle-aged, white, heavyset, bruising—exactly as Bill had imagined. “I just heard you lock it!”
Casey seemed to have shrunk even smaller in his chair. “Shh,” he whispered. He flapped his hands. “Sit down.”
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