Chapter 1 #2
"Because I can see it on your face, dude.
" He set down his drink. "Cal. I'm going to ask you a question and I want you to answer it like you're not on the clock.
When's the last time you did something for fun?
And I don't mean fun the way you mean it, which is a thing you scheduled three months ago and then attended out of obligation. I mean actually, genuinely, off-the-leash fun? When’s the last time you fucked someone? "
I opened my mouth. I closed it.
"That's what I thought," he said.
"You’re being sort of a dick, Hollis."
"I’m concerned about you." He leaned forward, elbows on the table. "Listen. I'm going to say something and you're going to let me say it without interrupting."
"Glad I get a choice in the matter."
"Cal. You're forty-one years old. You make an obscene amount of money.
You haven't been taking care of yourself.
You haven't taken a real vacation since the year my daughter was born and she's about to start the third grade.
The last time we had drinks you told me — and I'm quoting — that you'd realized you hadn't laughed out loud in a month and you found it 'professionally inconvenient' that our hangouts were starting to affect your meetings. Do you remember saying that?"
I did remember saying that.
"You're not okay," he said. "And I'm not going to lecture you, because I love you and because I know lecturing you is the fastest way to make sure you never call me again. But I am going to do one thing."
He reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a small card.
It was matte black, about the size of a business card, with nothing printed on it except a stylized symbol I couldn't immediately parse.
It was something that looked like the cross-section of a wave, or maybe a horn, in a dull silver foil.
He set it down on the table between us and slid it across with two fingers.
"What is this," I said.
"It's a membership card."
"To what."
"To a place," he said carefully, "that I have used, intermittently, for almost a decade to keep myself sane. And which, frankly, I have been meaning to put in your hand for about that long."
I picked up the card. It was heavier than it looked. The silver foil caught the light and seemed to shift slightly when I turned it, the way some inks do when they're worth more than other inks.
"There's no name on it."
"There wouldn't be."
"Hollis."
"Cal."
"What is this?"
He took a slow sip of his drink, set it down, folded his hands on the table, and looked at me with the steady, unembarrassed seriousness of a man who had decided in advance that this conversation was going to happen no matter what I did with my face.
"It's a bathhouse," he said.
I waited.
"In the warehouse district. East side, off Atlantic Avenue.
You won't find it on a map by name and there's no sign on the building, but the address is on the back of the card.
" He tapped the edge of it. "It's a metal door in a brick wall with one bulb above it and a little neon OPEN sign and that's it.
You'd drive past it every day for a year and not know it was there. Which is, again, the point."
"Okay? So what’s it for?"
"Just hear me out."
The tone in his voice told me everything I needed to know. "I'm not going to a brothel, Hollis."
"You haven't heard me out."
"I don't need to hear you out. I'm a forty-one-year-old senior partner at a white-shoe law firm. I am not going to a — " I lowered my voice, even though no one was within twenty feet of us. " — to a whorehouse, Hollis."
"Why not?"
The question stopped me, because I genuinely could not, in the moment, come up with a reason that wasn't because I am not that kind of person that does that sort of thing, which was the exact answer I'd been giving myself about everything for years, and which had not been working out for me.
He saw my face and pressed his advantage.
"I'm not telling you to do anything you don't want to do.
I'm not handing you a prescription. I'm handing you a card.
You take the card. You put it in your wallet.
You forget about it for a week. And then, the next time you find yourself at ten o'clock on a Friday night microwaving leftover pad thai and watching a documentary about cargo ships because you can't think of anything else to do, and don’t argue with me I know how you are,” he added, cutting me off.
“I want you to remember that there is, in your wallet, a little black card. And you decide what to do about it."
I looked down at the card. The silver foil caught the light again. The bar's soft jazz murmured somewhere in the background. Two tables over, a couple was laughing about something I couldn't hear.
"You said it's a bathhouse," I said slowly.
"Yes."
"Is it just a bathhouse?"
He smiled. "Cal. Look at me."
I looked at him.
"It is not," he said, "just a bathhouse."
"I knew it."
"It is a place where, for one weekend, you can stop being Calvin Reeve.
Stop being a senior partner. Stop being on call.
Stop being the man who answers emails in the bathroom.
Stop being the man who has not been touched by another human being since your last breakup.
You go there. You take a long bath. You get some good fucking dick from someone who simply wants to, and they'll be there too, I promise you, in considerable quantity. You could get a room there, sleep in a bed that’s not in your shoebox of an apartment.
Hell, you could just fuck for two days straight if you need to.
And on Sunday afternoon, you come back out, and you decide what kind of life you want to be living. "
He paused.
"That's the prescription. Take the card.
Don't take the card. Use it next month. Use it tonight.
I don't care. But it's on loan, by the way, it’s mine and I want it back.
So if you don't use it within thirty days I'm going to come over to your apartment and personally retrieve it and possibly slap you. "
I held the card between my fingers and turned it slowly. The light moved across it.
“Does your wife know you go to this place?”
The question clearly caught him off guard. “She knows I’m bisexual and has given me an opportunity to explore that side of myself. However, she doesn’t know how often I explore it.”
“Huh.” I paused, turning the card over again. "Is there a catch to all this?"
"There's one thing."
"Of course there is."
"It's— " Hollis stopped, picked up his Manhattan, took a thoughtful sip, set it back down. "Look. You know how the world is?"
"I'm aware of how the world is."
"And you know there are creatures around. Out in the open now. Going to the same coffee shops as the rest of us."
"Hollis. I work with two of them. Devon's boyfriend is a centaur."
"Right. Right. So, what I want you to understand is that the bathhouse is a place where that's more present than other places. Some of the company there is human. Some isn't. And they don’t hide themselves at all. That's part of how the bathhouse operates. And one of the perks if I’m being honest."
I sat with that for a second.
"You're saying there are monsters there," I said.
"I'm saying," he said, "that there are people there. Some of them are extremely interesting people with extremly interesting parts. Some of whom have horns. And hooves. And very wonderfully shaped cocks. And that for a like you that hasn’t gotten laid in probably two years, being fucked silly by something different than you expect might be exactly the kind of thing that gets you back on your feet. Metaphorically."
"Metaphorically."
"And also literally, possibly, depending on what kind of weekend you have."
I laughed again. Twice in one night. That was probably a record for the year. Then I looked at the card. I looked at Hollis. And I looked back at the card.
I put it in my wallet.
"There he is," Hollis said quietly. "There's my friend."
We had another drink. We talked, for the first time in months, about something other than work.
Apparently his daughter was obsessed with horses now, his wife had found a new pottery hobby, and there was a documentary about coral reefs he'd seen that he thought I would like.
I sat across from him and felt, very faintly, like the back half of my brain was starting to come back online. Just a flicker. Just enough to notice.
When we hugged on the sidewalk outside the bar, he held on a second longer than necessary, and whispered into my ear, "Thirty days, Cal. I mean it."
"Thirty days."
"And use the card before you talk yourself out of it. You always talk yourself out of it."
"I know."
"Go do something nice for yourself, buddy.”
He clapped me on the back and walked off toward the train.
I stood on the sidewalk for a long time, watching the headlights go by.
I made it almost six days.
That sounds like a long time. It was not a long time.
It was the time it took for one bad partners' meeting on a Tuesday and one passive-aggressive email from a client on a Wednesday and one lonely Thursday night spent eating cold leftover pho over the kitchen sink to grind down whatever was left of my resolve.
By Friday afternoon I was sitting at my desk staring at a model I should have been reviewing, and instead of reviewing it I was thinking, in a quiet steady way I couldn't seem to interrupt, about the black card in my wallet.
I got up. I closed my laptop. I told Mira I was leaving early.
She raised both eyebrows. "Early?"
"Early."
"It's three-fifteen on a Friday and you are leaving the office."
"Yes."
"Are you dying?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Mira."
"All right, all right. Have a good weekend, Mr. Reeve."
She watched me walk to the elevator, and I had the distinct sense that she was making a note of the date in some private internal calendar.