115 PM Richie
Adam had found the house on Airbnb. It was set on the crest of a small hill and had eight bedrooms, split between two separate wings.
There was also a formal dining room, an observatory encased in glass, and what had been the maid’s quarters, a small nook off the kitchen now used to store cleaning supplies and lit by a single hanging lightbulb.
The exterior of the house was painted light gray, the color of rainless clouds, and the windows were trimmed in white, though from where Richie sat now, on a lounge chair near the swimming pool, he could see the paint was faded and chipped.
There were certain things that didn’t quite work.
Three of the bedroom doors didn’t latch shut; there was a bottle above the fireplace that was missing its ship; an empty wooden bassinet sat in the observatory; both downstairs toilets required a jiggle to flush.
Every floorboard creaked. All the knives were dull.
It was the sort of rambling, half-forgotten home that, had it not been for Long Island’s summer light, its scent of salt and grass, he would have thought was haunted.
The trees shivered as a breeze rustled through them, cicadas humming in their branches.
In the shallow end of the pool, Marco and Emily waded with Ava.
She was wearing a sun shirt and a wide-brimmed hat, and each time Emily lowered her toward the surface, she squirmed, kicking her fat pink legs.
Richie watched them, trying to remember the last time they were together; instead all he could think of were all the reasons they had seen each other less and less.
Careers, marriages, Brooklyn, babies. Stints out west in restorative desert rehab clinics.
Being together again felt normal, but at the same time a little off, like he was looking at a version of his friendships that had gone through the wash.
He was trying to work out if the problem was that they no longer knew the person he was trying to be, or rather he them, when from the chair next to him Rami said:
“You want this?” He held out a copy of the Economist, its corners wet and curled. “There’s a good article in it about Mike Pompeo going to Pyongyang.”
Richie cleaned some sweat from the lens of his sunglasses.
“Please,” he said. “You couldn’t pay me to read that.”
On the far end of the lawn, Sasha and Theo played bocce with Mitch Reynolds and Nina Guzman, Ethan set on Sasha’s hip.
Nina had been a last-minute addition. Mitch was spending all of August in East Hampton—Richie had invited him during a rare moment of congeniality—but Nina had invited herself.
A few hours after they had all arrived this morning, Richie had posted a picture of the house to Instagram, and when he checked his phone again he saw that Nina had messaged him, saying she would come for dinner.
She was at her own house in Sagaponack for the long weekend, she wrote.
No one was with her, and she had nothing else to do.
“We might have another guest at dinner tonight,” he had said to Sasha earlier this morning as they were leaving for the beach. “Someone should tell Adam before he goes to the store.”
“Why? Who else is coming?”
“Well, you know that Mitch Reynolds will be here—”
“Unfortunately.”
“—and I told Nina Guzman she could come too.”
Sasha was stuffing beach towels into a canvas tote bag. There was a smear of white sunscreen on the curve of skin where her shoulder met her neck, and dark circles beneath her eyes.
“Wonderful.”
“She didn’t really give me another option. Also, I owe it to her.”
Sasha pushed the towels down farther, then threw a Frisbee on top of them.
“You know how she made all that money, don’t you?
She worked for some e-cigarette company right after business school.
I ran into her at JFK. I was flying to see this artist in Miami—my first trip after Ethan was born.
I was having a great time, just reading a book and waiting for my flight, not worrying about a screaming kid, and then all of a sudden there was Nina Guzman, standing in front of me.
That’s the kind of person she is, Richie—she’s the kind of person who will ruin a perfectly nice childless afternoon at the airport.
In any event, she told me all about it. She basically got teenagers addicted to vaping, ruined an entire generation’s worth of lungs, and then cashed out.
That’s how she could afford a Tesla and that house in Sagaponack she’s always posting pictures of.
So much for getting kindergartners in Queens to eat more celery, or whatever it was she did. ”
Sasha had pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail, and a few red splotches dotted her neck. Her lips were chapped. Faint creases lined her forehead.
“I’m sorry about Theo,” Richie said.
Sasha cut him a look. Leaning forward, she set both elbows on top of the bag and gave its contents a final push.
“This isn’t about Theo,” she’d said. “This is about Nina Guzman using blood money to fly first class to Rome.”
In the backyard, Rami took the Economist back.
There was an old Vanity Fair from earlier in the summer beneath Richie’s chair, and he opened it to an interview with Emilia Clarke that he had no intention of reading.
Rami adjusted the angle of his chair, and settled back into Mike Pompeo’s misadventures in Pyongyang.
They had met over a year ago now, at the seven thirty meeting on Perry Street, which—like Richie’s sobriety itself—was a little hard to believe.
It was the second meeting he had ever been to.
After it ended, he was drinking a cup of weak coffee on the street outside, wondering at both the impossibility and the inevitability of his life leading him to exactly that moment, when Rami came up to say hello.
At first Richie decided the best course of action was to be cold, if not outright dismissive.
Rami was all smiles, which struck him as inconsiderate: he was embarrassed that he had ended up at these meetings in the first place, and figured the least Rami could do was act embarrassed too.
But he kept at it, asking Richie where he lived (“Chelsea. The west part.”), and what he did for work (“Sales. Google.”), and then, finally, whether Richie wanted to grab breakfast at the café around the corner.
Richie finished what was left of his coffee, then used his tongue to clear the loose grounds from his teeth.
“Sounds fun,” he said, “but I’ve got somewhere to be.”
“No problem. We can go after tomorrow’s meeting.”
“I have somewhere to be tomorrow too.”
“Okay, then Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday. Come to think of it, I’m actually free all next week too. You pick!”
Richie looked at Rami’s dimples, the curls of brown hair brushing against his forehead. He lit a cigarette, turning his head to blow away the smoke.
“Fuck it. Let’s just get this over with,” he said.
They went to a restaurant on Grove Street, which was one block west from another restaurant where Richie had once showed up so blitzed on boulevardiers that he’d asked for the check before ordering his meal.
At the place on Grove Street he knew the owner, and as a hostess led him and Rami to a two-top he kept glancing over his shoulder, making sure she wasn’t watching him.
He didn’t want to explain why he was there—he didn’t want to explain anything at all.
The other tables were filled with mothers who had come from dropping their children off at school.
Expensively dressed women who scraped avocado from thick slices of toast, and who had conspicuously patterned bags hanging from the backs of their chairs.
Over the next five minutes, Rami talked about his marketing job at Netflix with an alacrity that made Richie’s eyes ache.
He was describing how easy a commute it was from his place on Tenth Street when a server finally arrived to take their order.
Quickly Richie said, “Just a black coffee, please.” Rami asked for French toast, a side of bacon, an extra-hot latte, and an orange juice.
Once the server had left, he smiled at Richie.
“So, first time at one of those things?” he asked.
Richie tapped a knuckle on the table. “Second.”
“I could actually tell.”
“What are you, the social chair or something?”
“No. Ha! No, I’ve just been going to that meeting for a while. And you got out of there pretty fast. New people always get out of there pretty fast.”
“Like I said, I had somewhere to be.”
“Where?”
Richie looked up from his coffee. He searched Rami’s face for signs of sarcasm or cruelty but instead saw an earnest smile.
He said, “I lied.”
Rami didn’t seem to mind, or pretended not to care.
He said, “There are a lot of meetings, you know. If this one isn’t right for you, I can help you find another one.
I remember the first time I walked in there I saw, like, four people I’d slept with and thought to myself, Okay, so this isn’t totally anonymous. ”
“Why don’t you try a different meeting?”
Rami shrugged. “I like the people. And seven thirty works for me. I’m a morning person, and at least when I first started going it kept me from adding vodka to my coffee.”
Richie scratched as his chin. He swiped his hand across the table, brushing away crumbs that weren’t there.
“Oh, I never did that.”
Richie sat up straighter. Rami gave him a different kind of smile.
He said, “It’s not a competition. And even if it were, I’d say we both ended up in about the same place.”
Two tables over, one of the mothers stood up, her bag swinging from the crook of her arm. Richie watched as she stepped out onto Grove Street. It had begun to drizzle, and through the open door he saw one umbrella open, and then another. Clicking his teeth, he turned back to Rami.
“The problem is that it’s just so fun,” Richie said.
“Oh, it’s so fun.”
“If they didn’t want people to be alcoholics, they shouldn’t make drinking so fun.”