Lucky Night

Chapter Five

Five

He knew what she meant right away. Playing dumb— huh, this, whuh? —was a stalling tactic. Because while he’s happy to bullshit all night about books and blow jobs, delving into their this ? Their thing ? No thanks. Why should they? They’re so good at not talking about it, at reveling in it without wrestling with its murky implications. Its this ness.

They’ve managed to avoid most conversations about it for six years. So why is she bringing it up now, and why in God’s name is she asking whether it’s changed him?

Has it changed me, he says, as if he’s mulling it over, really considering it. Has it changed me, hmm, let me feign contemplation…

Where the hell is the all clear? He should call down.

We’ve been doing this for a while now, she adds. Six years.

That long? he says, stalling, stalling. They’ve always been on the same page about what this is. A fun—more than fun, a joyful—escape, a release valve from the limited and the humdrum. Since they realized how compatible they were in certain key respects, since they assured themselves that nobody was going to get hurt, that they would be careful, careful, so careful —since that time, how great has this been? If, you know, essentially unimportant.

Just over six, she says. It was New Year’s Eve, six years ago…

When I abased myself before you in the Parks’ kitchen, he says.

Essentially unimportant? That’s not fair. He’d needed this, or something like it. Though in the privacy of his own mind, in the story he tells himself about his life—easy, pal, she’s the storyteller, not you—he has tended to minimize its importance. Her importance. Because not everything has to be momentous, okay? Not everything has to be Something. Still—to call it unimportant because it’s physical, because it’s sex—that’s not right, either. That diminishes sex, when it should be celebrated . Glorified. Especially sex with her. It’s delirious, their connection. Alchemical. The things she does to him. The things she lets him do to her! She laughs—laughs while they’re fucking! They’re free with each other, they play. He asks her for things, says outrageous, filthy things to her, with no filter, no fear that she’ll misunderstand or get offended. It’s such a relief, so liberating, compared to…well, to the rest of life. They don’t have to worry about consequences, judgments, even what the other thinks of them, outside of rooms like this.

That’s what they have, and it’s always been enough. For both of them. Though it’s true that one time, early on, swept away, overglowed, he had suggested they meet more often, once a week instead of once a month. She’d shot that down quick. And rightly so. Better to keep their this limited. Reduce the chance of complications.

And so they’ve had six supremely uncomplicated years—he knew it was six, of course he knew—free of heartfelt protestations and fraught exchanges. She can tell her little lies. They can both fuck other people. He hasn’t, but he could. Has she? Look at her, glued to her phone. Is she texting the baby Spaniard? Sending him erotic emojis, thanking him for the scores of simultaneous orgasms they enjoyed this week, his—

Your phone is a real source of fascination tonight, he says.

Sorry, I’m…she sighs. Bites her lip.

What isit?

I’m looking at news about the fire, she says.

There’s news?

Not much. I found one tweet, and now there are a few more, but all they say is that the fire department is investigating. I can’t even tell if there’s actually a fire, or if they’re just responding to the alarms. It seems like there’s something, though. They just issued a new radio code, a 10-76, which is a notification of an incident in a high-rise, which—

Jenny, he says. It’s fine. They’re doing their job.

I know. It just makes me feel better to check.

There’s way too much information on the internet. Radio codes? Where are you even finding this shit?

From social media accounts that follow the FDNY. She’s scrolling again. I came across them last year, when I was doing research. At the end of my trilogy, a fire destroys the house at the center of the story. I wanted it to be authentic, and—

Wilderkill burns down? he says.

Yes, it…she looks up. How do you know its name?

Hmm? Oh. Well. He reaches for his champagne. Takes a long sip. Jill read your books. She loves them.

She does? Jenny looks so pleased. I had no idea.

Yeah, she never shuts up about them. I must have heard it from her. Listen, stop stressing about the alarm. And don’t look at the internet. It’s a cesspool.

Right. You’re right. She sets the phone down. Adjusts the pillows behind her. Picks up her champagne and takes a sip.

So, she says. Us. You. Change.

She’s really not letting thisgo.

You said early on that you’d never, you know. Done anything like this before.

Had an affair, he says. Cheated on my wife.

Because if they must talk about it, they should stop mincing around and use the correct terminology.

Adultery. Voluntary sexual activity between a married person and someone other than that person’s spouse.

From the Latin, adulterare, to pollute or defile.

Synonyms: infidelity, two-timing, fornication, inconstancy, entanglement, liaison. Faithlessness. Criminal conversation.

I guess I’m just curious whether it’s made any sort of a difference in your life, she says.

I’m happier, for sure. He takes her hand and kisses it. We’ve talked about this—how I was in a dark place. Suffering my predictable midlife crisis.

Your malaise, she says.

Exactly. Which is gone now, thanks mostly to you. But has this changed me fundamentally? I would say no. He turns her hand over and kisses her palm. If only, right? If only knowing you could wash away all my flaws and failings.

He bites her thumb. Hears the sharp intake of her breath. He takes hold of her wrist, pulling her toward him.

Hey. Why don’t we…

But she’s drawing away.

I’ll be right back.

And she’s gone again. He picks up his glass. Empty. He goes to the fridge to collect the second bottle of champagne. She’s still nervous. Should he have offered to go downstairs and check out the situation? God no. He tears the foil off the cork, untwists its wire cage. He could have called, though. He just doesn’t want to break the spell of the night. There’s something intimate about being confined in here with her. Insulated from the outside world. Even placing a phone call would be reaching out to that world. Acknowledging that it matters. He aims the bottle at the bland collage above the sofa—a dent could only improve the thing—and eases the cork free with his thumbs. Still, she shouldn’t have to turn to the internet for information. He’ll call down when she comes back.

Why is she so fixated on change—has he changed, can’t people change? She hasn’t. For all that’s happened, her massive success, her glamorous new career, she’s exactly the same as she was when they met. At a toddler birthday party, of all places, in one of those soul-murdering kiddie torture gyms. They chatted among the balance beams and brightly colored mats. Other people were there, he doesn’t remember who. She’d just moved to town, another Brooklyn refugee. She had a messy ponytail. And a poppyseed stuck in her teeth. He would have said something, but he didn’t want to embarrass her. She was so wonderfully unselfconscious, with her big guffaws. Her sexy weariness. He found himself thinking about her the rest of that day. She’d snagged in his mind.

He began to see her occasionally around town. At social events, when he was running errands, dropping Jill at the town pool. He would notice her and instantly feel awkward. Because, to be clear, he was not that guy. The married perv, the creepo dad, ogling and lurking—that was the last guy he wanted to be! It was disgusting. Of course he wouldn’t do anything, would never approach her or signal his interest. But it felt wrong to even think about her. So he remained polite, but aloof. At the park, the bookstore. The occasional neighborhood party.

Settling the new bottle into the ice bucket, he notices her heap of rings, and his cock gives a valedictory twitch. Engagement ring, wedding band. He loves to watch her remove them. The way she thrusts her elbows out, twists and tugs, lips pursed, a crease between her brows. The effort makes her breasts shimmy gloriously. Until off the rings come, and she leans over to place them on the nightstand. Where my hand is set. She is naked then, shorn of any reminder of her other attachments, her full life of relationships and associations that could cause him a pang of…

What? Nothing. He doesn’t feel pangs. That’s part of what’s so fantastic about her, and this. It’s blissfully pang free.

He prefers her completely naked, that’s all.

Mrs. Gryzb! he yells. Your presence is required in the bedchamber!

This time she really did have to pee. Sweet relief! She flushes just as he hollers from the other room. Some variation of get your butt in here, no doubt.

But she’s taking a minute. Doing a little check-in. A self-check, like you’re supposed to do after hiking. Except instead of deer ticks, she’s checking for latent terror.

She doesn’t find much. Disquiet, sure. Why haven’t they made another announcement? It seems like a bad sign. But this worry is fighting for brain space with a fresh source of agita: her cringing embarrassment at the turn their conversation just took, entirely at her instigation.

Has this changed you? Where did that come from? From what he said earlier, obviously, she was belatedly pushing back, waddling after him on webbed feet, but why did she make it about them? What kind of response was she expecting?

He hadn’t even known it had been six years!

So, yeah. With that recent horror uppermost, her fears about the fire aren’t getting much oxygen.

Ha ha. Aren’t you clever?

Pull it together.

The toilet seat is warm. It wasn’t warm the last time she was in here. Is it one of those fancy…why yes. Look at that control panel. He must have switched it on. He’d have been all over the option for ass-toasting, ready as he is to deploy every available amenity. Including her.

She moves to the sink. Has this changed you? He handled the question well. Answered without lobbing it back at her, or demanding to know why she was asking. He’s so patient tonight. Since that first moment of tenderness— where are you, Jenny, where’d you go? —he’s been so gentle. Who knew?

She plucks a hand towel from the stack under the sink. Everybody, maybe. Maybe everybody knows him. Patient, kind—that could be who he really is. And lustful, caustic Nick, handsy and horny, mocking and profane—that could be the version he shows only to her. Shady, street corner Nick. Because with her he doesn’t have to be good.

You know what, though? No. She’s seen him out in the world. They keep a careful distance, of course, but she can observe. Enough to know that his personality, his essential Nickness, is the same out there as it is in here. In their little sex pod. Their fuck bubble.

Six Years in a Fuck Bubble: The Parrish and Holloway Story.

She wanders back to the toilet, wipes a few drops off the seat. Has this changed me fundamentally? I would say no. All righty, then. That’s fine!

No it isn’t. If she’s being completely honest, it isn’t. She would like to think she has some importance to him, aside from being a semiregular receptacle for his copious ejaculate.

A Semiregular Receptacle forHis

Enough with the book titles. Honestly.

But yes. If she’d had some effect on him, however small, she wouldn’t mind the imbalance. Because he has affected her, profoundly.

The man who can’t even be bothered to read her books.

She examines the toilet’s many buttons and blinking lights. What can it do other than warm your butt? Suggest some firming exercises? Slim it down with a little lipo? She presses a button and jumps when a little arm whizzes out from under the seat, spraying water.

Why does it sting that he’s never read her books? She should be glad. Immensely relieved, in fact. Because if he had cracked one open, Mr. Super-Genius, Analytical Man, surely he would have noticed certain, let’s say, essential similarities, between himself and her hero. He couldn’t have failed to observe that Julian Blackwell is the eighteenth-century teenage ghost version of him, Nick Holloway. Romanticized, superficially altered, but undeniably him: his intelligence and intensity, his caustic wit, his quick gestures. The sound of his voice. The way he kisses.

It’s all Nick. Nobody knows, but he would know, instantly.

She tried to disguise him at the time. She really did. But she was writing in a fever. Not in control of herself or what was pouring onto the page.

How could she be? She was so desperately, uncontrollably in love.

She moves to the door, but hesitates. She needs another minute. Maybe they’ll make an announcement soon, and she can saunter back into the room free and easy, instead of skittering around, constantly checking her phone. Fritzy Jenny is getting tiresome.

It happened maybe six months into their little arrangement. Everything was going great, it was low-key, casual. Exactly what it should have been. Until they had plans to meet one night, she was getting on the train, and he texted her. A work emergency had come up, and he was sorry, but he couldn’t makeit.

She read it and fell to pieces.

This is it it’s over he’s tired of you he’s making an excuse, it’s over it’s over it’s

Harpies, clawing at her.

When she recovered, she couldn’t deny what it meant.

She was in love.

It was a catastrophe!

All that summer and into the fall she was full of it—full to the ears. The sensation was intoxicating. Her behavior was ridiculous. She spent hours concocting gemlike texts and emails, and waiting in agony until he responded. He would travel for work, and she found herself googling the weather for whatever city he was in. Every sugary pop song was rich with meaning. She soared. She crashed and burned. She couldn’t come without wanting to shout it at him. She managed to restrain herself. Barely.

He is in my bones, she thought once, driving to see him, hands gripping the steering wheel. He is in my bones!

Ridiculous. Teenagerly. But true.

And all the while, the beloved? The object of her passionate devotion?

He didn’t have a clue.

All that scorching mental rigor, and he never saw it. True, she did everything she could to hide how she felt, because when she wasn’t exalted she was mortified. The first new man she sleeps with in ten years, and she immediately goes gaga? Real original. Way to go, hon.

Regardless, he didn’t know, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him. But it was torture to keep it bottled up. So she started writing again. Her abandoned dream, her young self’s obsession. She’d spent her childhood filling notebooks with stories, fairy tales, poems and plays. She was going to be A Writer. Then she got to college and was refused a spot in an undergraduate fiction workshop. Such a minor thing. But she was so soft and eager—God, she was young! Too uncertain to withstand rejection, all too willing to accept any criticism as the unassailable truth about herself. She surveyed her sad scribblings, her lofty hopes, and was filled with shame. Hating herself for thinking that she might be good, that someday she might…

No. The world saidno.

And she listened.

But now, saturated with dangerous feelings, desperate for an outlet, she fell back into writing as if she’d never been away, picking up an idea she’d sketched out years ago. It was a teen romance, the perfect receptacle for her volcanic emotion, allowing her to reveal and conceal her own heart. Because it’s not quite true that Julian is all Nick—he’s her, too. She is both of her characters, two very different people falling in impossible, forbidden love.

Her love lasted eight months. Then she ended it. She decided, she changed. It sounds like a lie, like she’s deluding herself, she must love him still. But she doesn’t. Confident about so little, she is certain of this.

And he never knew . About her great love. How she turned it into books that changed her life. Then, how she triumphed over it. No, to him she was and still is pretty, pliant Mrs. Gryzb, the married woman he gets a kick out of secretly screwing.

She makes a face at herself in the mirror. He knows that name bugs her. The teasing about her books, too. Tell me about ghost jizz, har har. He loves to make her feel dumb about her big dumb bestsellers. Yes, she laughed at the time. But did he not notice how she was fidgeting around the room, how she couldn’t stop checking her phone? Even when she confessed what she was doing, he dismissed it. It’s fine. They’re doing their job. Yes, okay, probably, but did it not occur to him that she might need a little more reassurance than that?

He can be so obtuse sometimes.

Why haven’t they gotten the all clear? What is going on down there?

No. What is going on up here? Here is where the problem is. She means so little to him that he can’t be bothered to console her, he means so much to her that she has to hide her need for consolation. It’s not love, of course, that’s well and truly over. But it’s something, some power he has over her still.

Power. Of course. His power, which she gave him, which she has, historically, given to any man who’s shown the least bit of interest in or approval of her. Why did she listen to him— pity my poor testicles —when she could have left? Why did she trust him? Why do women trust men? When has that ever worked out?

No. Don’t generalize. This isn’t about Women and Men. It’s about him and her. And six years of so little importance that he hasn’t even bothered to keep track of them.

Oh, she’s tired.

She’s exhausted suddenly.

And she’s pissed off.

She slides the bathroom door open and steps out.

There she is! He’s refilling his glass. I opened the second bottle. Let’s—

Are you seriously not worried?

Worried?

Yes, Nick. Worried. About the total, she flings a hand at the smoke detector, lack of information about the fire?

There’s no fire. Jenny, cometo—

Why haven’t we heard anything? It’s been over an hour.

They said it would take time. Honey. Are you still scared?

Of course I’m still scared, she says. Honey.

The emphasis there, that dark and loaded honey, that’s not good. She’s planted at the foot of the bed, scowling at him. Did something happen while she was in the bathroom?

He sets the bottle on the nightstand and goes to her.

You seemed fine, he says. You said you were okay. I wish you’d told me you were still nervous.

Yeah, well, honesty isn’t really our thing, is it, Nick?

Okay, so something definitely happened in the bathroom. Did she get an upsetting text from Tom? He knows he hasn’t done anything. He’s been nothing but patient.

He moves toward the phone. How about I call down?

She follows him. The alarms, the announcement, she says. The fact that we’re trapped. None of that bothers you?

I wouldn’t say we’re trapped.

Don’t quibble.

Jenny, I don’t think you’re being very—

Does anything bother you? she says. Ever?

Why is he being attacked?

He hasn’t done anything!

Plenty of things bother me, he says carefully.

Has anything ever not gone your way? Have you ever been disappointed?

He wants to laugh, but that would only make things worse. Still. Have you ever been disappointed? She has no idea.

Jenny, I understand you’re anxious, and I’m sorry I didn’t—

Answer the question, Nick.

Have I been disappointed? he says. Of course I have.

Yeah? Tell me aboutit.

Look, I don’t know what happened in the bathroom, but I haven’t done any—

Oh, no. You’re great! Her voice rises. You’ve been super. But it’s easy, isn’t it? I mean, it must be easy to be you. On top of the world. Better than me, smarter thanme—

Jenny, what the hell are you—

Don’t interrupt! She jabs a finger at his chest. You’re always interrupting me! Because you’re the boss, right? You know best, you’re in charge, you get to talk,to—

The smoke detector chirps.

They lookup.

It emits another short, piercing chirp. Then buzzing static. Then:

May I have your attention. May I have your attention, please.

It’s the voice they know, with its Bronx-accented mildness. Its calm authority.

This is your fire safety director speaking.

There’s a long pause.

Why? Don’t pause, fire safety director! Keep talking!

She can’t breathe. She can’t bear it. She’s going to faint,or—

The previous alarm has been investigated by fire department personnel and has been resolved. I repeat, the situation has been resolved.

Resolved.

That’s…

We are in the process of restoring functionality to the guest elevators, which we anticipate will take approximately thirty minutes.

It’s okay.

They’re okay!

Oh thank God. Thank God.

She keeps her eyes fixed on the smoke detector. She doesn’t look at Nick.

He must be so annoyed with her.

We appreciate your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you.

The smoke detector chirps again.

Then silence.