800 PM Marco
On his plate: the remnants of a half-eaten enchilada, a smear of salsa verde, a rice pilaf dotted with kernels of yellow corn.
The band began playing “Love on Top,” and Marco saw Mia returning to her seat.
After shaking out her napkin she placed it on her lap and began taking small bites of her dinner without looking at him.
The seats on either side of her were empty—while she was at the bar, Mitch Reynolds and his two friends had left the table and were now standing with a larger group of people smoking cigarettes on the steps that led up to the hotel’s pool.
Others had left too, their napkins crumpled on top of their plates, their empty wineglasses stained with faint rings of lipstick.
When he looked around the table now, Marco counted only five people: Emily and himself, Mia, Satya Patel, and one of Courtney Paulson’s cousins, a girl of about twenty-two who had spent the entirety of dinner typing on her phone, her thumbs working with a ferocious determination.
But as he took a final bite of his enchilada, she stood up too, angrily pushing her chair away from the table as she whispered, “What a dick bag” to no one in particular.
She walked to another table, people she evidently knew better, and plopped herself down in an empty seat.
“So, Marco,” Satya said, “tell me everything.”
He wiped his lips with his napkin.
“Pardon?”
“Just, like, what you’ve been up to. Where are you living, where are you working, who are you hanging out with. Blah, blah, blah. Catch me up.”
“Right.” He lowered the napkin. Across from him, a waiter reached past Mia’s shoulder to place an open bottle of red wine on the table. Mia leaned to her left. She smiled politely at the waiter, then began inspecting her rice pilaf. “I’m in DC now.”
Satya crossed her legs. “I think I knew that.”
“I do economic policy at the White House.”
She nodded. “You know what, I think I knew that too. I saw a picture you posted with Barack Obama.”
“It was at—”
“Some Christmas party.”
“The White House Christmas party.”
Satya finished what was left in her wineglass and refilled it from a bottle of white.
“Sorry,” she said. “These conversations are so dumb. It’s like, we all know what everyone else is doing, Mark Zuckerberg has made sure of that, but we still sit here and act like we don’t.”
He looked across at Mia. He was beginning to sweat again.
He said, “I guess we’ll need to find something else to talk about.”
Satya said nothing, and for a little while they were both quiet.
Then Emily commented on how the temperature had become much more pleasant since the sun had set, and they all agreed that it was true, that it had in fact become much more pleasant, which they talked about for roughly two minutes before they fell quiet again.
Every so often Mia glanced up from her meal.
Finally Marco asked, “Why didn’t your husband make it?”
Satya brushed her hair off her neck. “Andrew? His aunt died. He had to go to the funeral.”
“Oh God. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. She was old. Like eighty or something.”
Swirling her wineglass, Satya began talking about someone they’d both gone to college with, a girl named Lauren Boylan of whom Marco had only the vaguest memories.
“You know her,” Satya said, “I promise you do. She got hit by a taxi sophomore year and got addicted to painkillers.” Marco pretended to listen; Emily drifted further and further from the conversation, until eventually she stood up and moved two seats closer to Mia.
At first Mia looked at her with a bit of alarm, and then glanced at Marco, who was focused on Emily.
Emily twirled one of her earrings. While Satya struggled to remember whether Lauren had gotten herself hooked on OxyContin or Vicodin, Marco heard Emily say: “I don’t think we got a chance to talk last night. I’m Emily.”
Mia set down her fork. She drank from a glass of water and said, “Oh, right. I’m Mia.”
“It’s really nice to finally meet you.”
Mia took Emily’s outstretched hand. Satya said, “I think it was Vicodin—but, like, a lot of it.” For the first time since dinner started, Mia and Marco looked directly at each other.
“Marco mentioned you’re a journalist at the Daily News?” Emily said. “My dad loves the Daily News. I grew up in New Jersey, and I think reading it made him feel like he was still a New Yorker or something.”
Mia laughed coldly. “I’m actually starting a new job at the Times next month,” she said.
“Wow—that’s amazing. Congratulations.” Emily leaned forward. “What are you going to be covering?”
“Climate stuff. The world going up in flames and all that.” Mia took another sip of water. She appeared to be thinking for a moment. When she spoke again, the edge in her voice had softened. “You’re in DC, right? Do you do something in politics?”
Emily laughed. She reached down with one hand to adjust the strap on her shoe.
“Nothing that exciting. I’m just in med scho—”
“She’s a surgeon,” Marco heard himself say loudly.
They both turned to look at him. Satya stopped describing how Lauren Boylan scored her drugs, a slightly startled expression on her face.
On the dance floor “Love on Top” reached its climax, and bodies jostled around in a loose mass—shirtsleeves rolled to their elbows, shoes dangling from outstretched hands.
Waves climbed up the shoreline, leaving patches of slick black sand as they retreated into the sea.
Marco licked his lips. “I was only saying—you’re not just in med school. You’re a surgery resident.”
“Yes.” Emily gave him a strange look. “That’s true.”
“Any particular kind of surgery?” Mia asked.
Emily turned back to face her, leaving Marco to stare at the backs of her ears.
“Colorectal. I’m in my second year of a surgery fellowship at Georgetown Medical Center.”
“Good for you.”
“It’s all right. Only bad part is I work with so many assholes.”
Mia laughed, caught herself, stopped. A few seconds later, she laughed again.
“That’s a good one,” she said.
Emily swirled her wine. “I’ll be here all night.”
They continued their conversation. Emily asked Mia a question, and Mia responded with one of her own.
Emily talked about an operation she’d performed last week, where she removed a foot of a woman’s anterior colon; Mia described a story she’d written at the Daily News about warming temperatures making it easier for rats in New York City to breed.
“It’s a real problem,” she said. “They basically can just fuck all year round now.” A minute later Mitch Reynolds returned with his friends, smelling like cigarette smoke and speaking much louder than before; Emily moved her chair closer to Mia so they could hear each other, and among the competing sounds and Mitch’s bellowing Marco lost track of their conversation, was left to ascertain what they were discussing via slight hand gestures and the shifting of lips.
Increasingly he became concerned that they were trading secrets about him, comparing notes.
It was an unfounded worry: he wasn’t the sort of person who had many secrets, but at the same time he convinced himself they would discover one, would somehow unearth a piece of information that would cause both of them to see him in a darker, guiltier light.
He poured himself more wine.
“Lauren’s part of some multilevel marketing scheme now,” Satya said. “I was on her Facebook page the other day, and it’s bleak. Any big trips planned?”
Mia rested her chin against her palm. She smiled and laughed at something Emily said.
“Sorry?”
Satya rolled her eyes. “Like, for summer. Are you going anywhere.”
“We just got back from Colombia. Emily had never been.”
Mia looked at him. Marco hadn’t intended for her to hear, but she had, and now her lips were pressed together into a thin line. Marco turned away.
Satya removed her phone from her purse. She held it up to look at her face, tilting it to the left and right. “Cool, cool. We’re off to Croatia in July. When did we last see each other, by the way?”
“I think it was—”
“Alison’s birthday, like, three years ago. That’s when it was. I actually remember this super clearly. That night was a fucking disaster.”
Mitch Reynolds slammed his palm against the table and laughed; Emily began showing Mia pictures on her phone, swiping her finger across the screen.
Marco realized that Satya was right—the last time he had seen her, the last time he had seen so many of them, was three years ago, at Alison Liu’s birthday.
It was May; he had come up from Washington for his cousin’s graduation, which had coincided with Alison’s party at a bar in the West Village.
The weather had been terrible—an unrelenting spring downpour—and when he stepped out onto the street at the end of the night, he realized after walking half a block that he had forgotten his umbrella inside.
He’d doubled back, using his jacket to cover his head, and found the umbrella where he had left it, in a small pool of water beneath a banquette.
He was about to leave again when he saw Mia, sitting by herself at the end of the bar.
“Rachel Steinbaum and I got into this massive fight,” Satya said. “Like, the absolute biggest of our friendship, way bigger than when she made out with Andrew on my twenty-fifth.”
She—Mia—had been at the party the whole time, though they had done an admirable job of avoiding each other, deliberately moving to different corners of the bar, orbiting the room at the same velocity so as to avoid any unnecessary collisions.
But seeing her alone, he’d decided that he had been acting cowardly—that even though she had chosen New York over him, had in other words broken his heart, it was childish to not at least say hello.
Looping his umbrella around his wrist he went over to her.
“Hi,” he said, and she looked up and smiled.