845 PM Richie
Richie ran his tongue along his teeth. Across the table Nina Guzman had Adam in a conversational death grip. He watched them until his eyes crossed and the two bodies became four.
“I’ve remembered it,” the old woman sitting next to him said, “his name is George.”
“He sounds like a great guy.”
Her hand was on top of Richie’s wrist, pinning him to the table, and her lips were half an inch from his ear.
Since they’d sat down for dinner she had been doing this, leaning over to whisper half-thoughts and other assorted incoherencies like a drunk Miss Havisham.
Most recently, she had gotten it in her head that Richie looked like an old lover of hers, some idiot who’d died in either the Korean War, or the Civil War, or the Trojan War. Evidently his name was George.
The woman’s grip tightened—she smelled like baby powder and cloves. Richie looked down and saw veins, jagged and purple beneath cellophane skin.
“He wasn’t. He was a snake.”
She emphasized snake, stressing the s as if she were a cobra herself. Richie felt a spray of saliva wetting the interior of his ear.
He blinked: Nina and Adam’s duplicates disappeared. He had been sitting down for approximately fifteen minutes, which for Richie Fournier was fourteen and a half minutes too long. In a single motion, he stood up and finished both their glasses of wine.
“Put a pin in that, babe,” he said. “We’ll talk about George in a minute.”
His destination was the bathroom. Miss Havisham and her serpentine lover had been a buzzkill: the edge of the coke was wearing off, which meant that in a few minutes the high he had been riding would come crashing to the ground.
The energy in his veins would calcify and turn instead to a nagging sadness, the sort that always left him panicking and staring at the back of his hand for no reason.
Who had time for that in a place as beautiful as Mexico?
Disparities between setting and sobriety had never sat well with him, and he figured it was best to ward them off before their teeth could sink in.
Of course, there was the promise that he had made to Adam this morning, and as Richie picked his way through the sand, he found himself thinking of it again.
They’d been lying in bed, discussing Richie’s unexpected dip in the swimming pool, and Adam was lying on top of him.
That had felt good—divine. He was atrociously hungover from the night before, and all he wanted was the heft of another body to work out the knottier bits of his misery.
“Maybe try to rein it in tonight,” Adam said, his lips pressed against Richie’s ear.
“Mm-hmm.”
“I’m serious. It’s not very fun for me when you get like that, you know.”
“I shall keep it reined in.”
“Do you promise?”
“No more late-night laps.”
Adam shifted on top of him. “Thanks.”
And he had meant it too—he intended to keep things neat and aboveboard this evening.
If anything, that was exactly the reason he was taking his third excursion to the bathroom.
Once again he had found himself slightly off-balance, and if he wanted to hold it all together, he figured the best course of action was to right all the cockeyed bits.
Also: Adam was out of his mind if he thought Richie was going to stay sober at a wedding.
He paused at the bar, making a quick pit stop to order himself a pair of Geoff and Tonics; he had always thought it uncivilized to do drugs without a drink.
There was a lime kissing each glass’s edge, and instead of squeezing them, he ate them, pulling the juice from the flesh with his teeth, then tossed the rinds to the ground.
He passed Marco’s table, where thick-necked Mitch Reynolds was laughing with a couple other brutes, and continued trudging through the sand.
Between a pair of tiki torches, he spotted Mia standing at a second bar, and he jogged a little to escape being seen.
At last, in the safety of the handicap stall, surrounded by a flickering orange light and the scent of the pool’s chlorine, he reached into his pocket for his bag and his hotel key.
All he needed was two bumps—actually, on second thought, he could tell Miss Havisham’s story was very long, and it didn’t seem like she had any intention of dying soon, so maybe he would be better off with four or five; besides, he’d managed to smuggle drugs into a foreign country, and not to honor that accomplishment by doing them struck him as graceless and uncouth.
The first two bumps went up his right nostril, and the next two went up his left. A moment later, there was a familiar lightness right between his eyes, and the taste of gasoline dripping down his throat. The sadness faded; his veins became liquid. He looked up into the lights and smiled.
He left the bathroom and began to circumvent the pool, taking the long way back to the geriatric tedium of table seven.
On the way, he passed a restaurant serving tacos and frozen palomas from a slushie machine.
Feeling festive and inspired and sick of Geoff and Tonics, he ordered one, and drank it in two brain-numbing slurps, right there at the bar.
Lights were brighter, sounds were clearer, thoughts came quicker.
Frozen palomas! These were the moments that made life worth living.
Onward, upward, forward: he signed the check for the drink, then continued working his way around the pool, its waters glowing a vivid, ersatz turquoise.
He stumbled over a step, mentally blamed it for being in his way, and kept on going, weaving haphazardly among the empty chaise lounges and palm trees.
At the foot of a path lined with rusty bicycles, he smelled cigarettes, and heard two voices cutting through the night.
One belonged to Satya Patel, and the other to Rachel Steinbaum.
Their backs were to him; each had a lit Parliament dangling from her hand.
Satya lifted her left foot, then reached down to worry a spot beneath the heel strap of her sandal. Richie stopped.
“That dress cost fifteen thousand dollars,” Satya said.
Rachel tilted her head. “You’re kidding me. That thing?”
“I know. It’s a catastrophe. She looks like a mail-order bride. But Courtney told Nina Guzman, and Nina Guzman told me.” She exhaled. “I wasn’t supposed to say anything.”
“What idiot wears a dress with sleeves in this weather?”
“Totally unreal. But, I mean, are you surprised? Remember the shit she wore in college?”
“The striped vest with the bows.”
“And that was the best of it.” The tip of Satya’s cigarette glowed red. “If your father owns half of the Audi dealerships on Long Island, and you wear a wedding dress that looks like that, you should be thrown into a gulag.”
Richie smiled. Satya lifted her foot and scratched at her heel again.
Rachel said, “I bet Nina’s flipping out. I mean, she’s so obviously still in love with Courtney.”
“Oh, totally.” She set her foot down. “Isn’t it crazy that she ended up being an actual lesbian? I mean, sure, I made out with half my pledge class, but I didn’t become an actual lesbian. Who becomes an actual lesbian? That’s just crazy to me.”
“You made out with half your pledge class?”
“Sophomore year. Everyone was doing it.”
Richie smiled again. He was turning to leave when he heard Rachel say:
“Oh my God, did you see how wasted Richie Fournier was last night?”
“I was standing next to him when he slipped into the pool. Also, he spilled an entire margarita on my shoes.”
“It’s just not cute anymore, you know? Like, we’re thirty years old. This is a wedding—not some frat basement. He’s such a joke.”
“One hundred percent.”
“How does Adam Parker stand being with him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s his hair.”
“It’s incredible hair.”
“He better hope he never loses it, because then all he’ll be left with is that personality.”
Satya crushed her cigarette beneath her sandal.
“Wait, on the subject of Adam Parker. Did you hear—”
But Richie didn’t stick around to listen to the rest of it. He went back to the bar for another frozen paloma, then returned to the fluorescent safety of the bathroom.
Ten minutes later he found himself back at table seven.
There was a plate of enchiladas in front of him that he didn’t remember being there before.
Three rolled-up tortillas with shreds of beef sticking out their ends, covered in green sauce and slick, plasticky cheese.
He didn’t want the enchiladas. He wanted someone to take the enchiladas away. The enchiladas were making him sick.
“The thing you need to know about George,” the old woman began, and now Richie turned to her.
He said, “Look, I don’t give a shit about George, all right?”
The old woman picked up her spoon and used it to scoop up a bite of refried beans. With her hand shaking, she brought it to her mouth.
Before she ate it she said: “George was a prick too.”
The emcee announced the band was going to slow things down.
His voice sounded like he was doing an impression of an emcee announcing the band was going to slow things down.
Courtney and Geoff moved to the middle of the dance floor.
The song was “Mirrors” by Justin Timberlake.
Everyone turned their chairs to get a better view.
A photographer’s flash sent a shockwave through Richie’s brain, dislodging something crucial.
He watched Courtney put her sleeved arms around Geoff’s shoulders.
He poured white wine into a glass until a few drops dribbled over its edge.
Taking a giant sip from it, he thought back to a time this past winter when he’d asked Adam what he saw in him.
It was a Sunday afternoon, he remembered.
The weekend had depleted his serotonin stores, and he was feeling raw and squishy, like he had lost a protective exoskeleton.
They had recently moved in together; Richie had started his job with Abbott a few months earlier.
Two large duffel bags were piled in the middle of the living room, the lumps within them appearing to Richie like parts of severed bodies.
Richie and Adam were sitting on the couch, Richie’s head in Adam’s lap.
Outside the window was a lifeless, monotonous gray.
Monday loomed unforgivingly large on the horizon.
Adam twirled Richie’s hair around his finger.
“What do you mean?” Adam asked.
“If you’re going to live here, I think it’s important that I know these things.”
“I see a lot in you.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Adam began listing things. Richie’s laugh, the way he could light up a room, how he always talked to waiters so Adam didn’t have to.
There were other ones too, he thought, but Richie either couldn’t recall them, or didn’t hear them, because soon thereafter he fell asleep, and when he woke up an hour later, the sky was dark and Adam was in the shower.
Now he clamped his eyes shut and felt a vein throbbing on his forehead: the cocaine was making every thought intolerably, blindingly clear.
He drank more of the wine, finishing it in two monstrous swallows, spilling it down the front of his shirt.
Why did he care so much? Why did he care about any of it?
Why did he care if Satya Patel thought he was a joke, or if his stepfather thought he was a failure, or if Adam thought he was a child?
He didn’t want to care—he wanted to be hardened, inured, though there was something inside of him, something violent and atomic and irrepressible, that prevented that.
It was love, he thought—either that, or a need to be adored.
He could never figure out which was which, and Jesus Christ, he needed another drink.
He poured himself more wine and drank it as fast as the first. Then, in a matter of seconds, he felt it: the alcohol hurtling him past the provisional lucidity provided by the cocaine, and into the kingdom of the shit-faced.
Quickly he drank more, letting the wine wash tastelessly over his tongue.
His muscles relaxed; he knocked a glass of water over, and let it stream to the sand.
Nina glanced at him. A disapproving expression flashed across her face and she looked away.
Richie wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
He felt an overwhelming desire to break something.
“Hey, Nina,” he said.
She turned back and looked across the table at him. “Yeah?”
“Didn’t you used to have a thing with Courtney Paulson?”
Nina took her napkin off her lap and set it in front of her. Richie’s vision blurred. When it refocused, he saw a row of messy red stains.
“I mean, we were friends, yeah.”
“No, what I’m saying is, didn’t you have a thing.”
Adam was staring at him now—Richie could see it out of the corner of his eye. Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors” was halfway over. He thought: What a fucking dumb song.
“I don’t really know what you’re talking about,” Nina said.
Adam mouthed: Stop.
“Because from what I remember, you and Courtney used to hook up in college, and when she left you for that basketball player you had this epic breakdown in Smoke’s. People talked about it for months.” His leg began bouncing. “People are still talking about it, actually.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“It must be really hard for you, knowing that you were, like, a phase for Courtney. I mean, she looks really in love right now.”
Nina’s eyes turned glassy.
Adam stood up, pushing his chair back. He said, “Nina, would you like to dance?” and then: “What the fuck is wrong with you, Richie?”
A bomb detonated in Richie’s heart.
The old woman shook her head.
“You know,” she said, “George would have done the same thing.”