620 PM Adam #2
“So, if someone said something that was even a teeny bit sexual, you had to be the first one to say that’s what she said. This guy Rohit started it when we were on the beach one day. He’s so funny, like, easily top five funniest people I’ve ever met. We’re super close.”
“He sounds like a real blast.”
“That’s what she said.”
Nina giggled. She slapped the table. Adam ran his tongue across his gums. He said, “Sorry, was that sexual?”
“That’s what she said!”
Now Nina was really laughing. Red blotches formed at the base of her neck. An old woman across the table dropped her fork to the sand. For a second after that she sat still, befuddled. Then she ate her enchilada with a spoon.
“Isn’t it funny?” Nina said, once she had caught her breath.
“Very.”
Richie stood up from the table. Nina scooted her chair closer to Adam.
“Where does he keep going?” she asked.
“Just to take a walk.”
Nina started giggling again.
“Maybe he’s got Montezuma’s revenge.”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“Montezuma’s revenge is when you drink the water in Mexico and—”
“Let’s keep it clean, Nina.”
“THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!”
Adam looked at his plate. He was not hungry, but he also knew that was probably an effect of the drugs, and that if he didn’t eat something now, he would later regret it. He scooped up some rice.
“So, how’s everything on your end?” Nina asked.
The question caught him off guard. “Sorry, what was that?”
“I asked how everything was on your end.”
“Oh, fine.”
“Are you, like, working at a law firm now?”
“I am working at a law firm now.”
“Oh my God, is it like Ally McBeal? Do the boys and the girls use the same bathroom?”
“They do not.”
“Oh.” Nina licked salt from the rim of her margarita. She said, “Well, that’s boring.”
Glancing across the table, he saw Richie. He had just returned to his seat after his second trip to the bathroom, and he was talking to the older woman, tapping on the table with two fingers and nodding his head to the music. His untouched salad wilted in the heat.
They’d gotten back together last September, after breaking up for the second time.
They were both in Saratoga Springs for Satya Patel’s wedding and were staying five rooms away from each other on the same floor of the Hampton Inn.
After the reception, while Adam was trying to focus on not falling over as he brushed his teeth, Richie came and knocked on his door.
He had taken his coat off, along with his tie, and his shirt was unbuttoned at the collar.
“Yes?” Adam said. His toothbrush hung from the left side of his mouth, and Crest coated his lips.
Richie smiled loopily. He pushed the toothbrush from Adam’s mouth, stepped into the room, and closed the door.
If there was a part of Adam that thought this was a bad call—a part that remembered how much Richie had already frustrated him and hurt him—he was either too drunk or too flattered by the very idea of Richie standing in his hotel room to listen to it.
Instead he let Richie shove him onto the bed, and yank down his pants, and dig his fingers into his thighs.
A few hours later, as sunlight was beginning to warm spots on the room’s carpet, Richie slid from the bed and started getting dressed, his movements slowed by a pre-hangover blurriness.
Adam watched with one eye open from his pillow.
“Hey,” Richie said, fastening the last button on his shirt.
“Yeah?”
“So I guess I’ll see you at home?”
Adam nodded. Then he waited until Richie’s footsteps had faded before he called Mia.
She picked up on the fourth ring.
“It’s early,” she said. “Did you tell Satya I’m pissed I wasn’t invited?”
“I think Richie and I are back together again.”
There was a silence—not a very long one, but enough for Adam to notice.
Then Mia said, “You can lead a horse to water.”
“Who’s the horse here?”
“You are. I think.”
He understood what Mia meant. Whenever they were together, it seemed that half of Adam’s time was dedicated to cleaning up one or more of Richie’s messes.
He had become extraordinarily adept at begging pardon from bartenders, and policemen, and late-night-dollar-slice-pizza cashiers, and the entire staff of doormen and porters in their apartment building in Williamsburg, and the woman who owned the flower shop on the corner.
These moments were—obviously—frustrating.
They made Adam feel like he had done something wrong, which made him angrier at Richie, which in turn made him angrier at himself.
At the same time there was a side to Richie that Mia only rarely saw, a side that spontaneously cooked Adam homemade pizzas, and remembered the date that both his parents died, and sent Aunt Patty flowers on her birthday.
It was this side that could make Adam laugh as though he had never laughed before, and that reminded him why he’d fallen in love with Richie Fournier the first time he saw him as an undergraduate in Philadelphia.
When this side was around, Adam felt as though he was able to solve the problems that the other side posed—felt that, if he focused his attention hard enough, he would be able to devise the right argument and series of propositions to rein in the worst of Richie’s impulses.
He would be able to say, “See, this is the part of you that I think is real, not the part that falls in swimming pools.” And Richie would hear him, and would respond with, “Wow, I hadn’t actually thought of it like that before,” and then things would get better for good.
“What happened to helping kids eat organic in Queens?” he asked Nina. “Isn’t that what you were doing before?”
“I was helping plant community gardens, and it was in the Bronx.”
“You didn’t want to do that anymore?”
“Not really.”
“What changed?”
Nina set down her fork. Her face settled into thoughtful contemplation.
“I think that I always told myself that I was more of a Miranda,” she said. “But there was this part of me that also knew there was a secret Samantha hiding somewhere inside of me, and I really wanted to let her out.”
“I see. That makes sense.”
“Also, I decided it sucked being poor.”
She picked up her fork again. Then, in a voice that startled Adam with its sadness, she said, “You know, I actually really miss Ally McBeal.”