115 PM Richie #2
“And easy!”
“It’s the easiest thing in the world. The weird part is that I thought everything was fine, but people stopped inviting me to things,” Richie said. “They started treating me like a liability. I’m talking about my closest friends.”
“You didn’t think that everything was fine.”
“No. I guess I knew that it wasn’t.”
“The liability thing—that happens. I got kicked out of, like, three Fire Island houses. I started a fire in one of them. Got high on tequila and ketamine and put a match to a drag queen’s wig. Poof.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I fell off a bike at a wedding in Cancún and had to get twenty-three stitches in my left thigh and I don’t remember any of it.”
“That’s nothing. Once I blacked out at a bar in Bushwick and woke up in West Orange, New Jersey.”
“I overheard someone say that the only thing I had going for me was my hair so I started taking preemptive Propecia.”
“When my last boyfriend broke up with me he said he ‘needed space,’ so he moved to Australia.”
“I got drunk and lost a bet, and when I was sober enough to know where I was I realized I was on a plane and over Iceland.”
“I convinced myself it was totally normal to walk into a bar between work meetings and take two shots of Patrón.”
“I made a kid cry on the subway.”
Rami frowned. “I don’t think I ever did that.”
“I thought this wasn’t a competition.”
It hadn’t been intentional. Richie was honestly just sitting there, watching an empty Styrofoam cup roll back and forth across the floor.
This was at eight o’clock in the morning, and he was on his way to a sales appointment in the Financial District.
A hangover clung at his temples, but he had made himself a screwdriver before he left his apartment that was keeping the worst of it away.
As the train rocked, vodka and orange juice sluiced in his stomach.
The child was sitting directly across from him, though it took four stops for Richie to even notice she was there.
Thick purple-rimmed glasses obscured her eyes and there was a Band-Aid on her knee.
Next to her, a woman who Richie assumed was the girl’s mother tapped on her phone impatiently.
His eyes drifted from the woman to an advertisement for a meal delivery service directly above her head, then finally back to the girl, whose mouth was drawn and disapproving. He wanted to punch her in the face.
“What?!” he said, in a tone that, had he not been hungover (an impossibility, because he was either always very drunk or very hungover), he never would have used with a child, particularly on a crowded subway.
People turned to glance at him. Tears flowed down the girl’s face, and her expression turned from schoolmarm-ish to terrified as she reached a hand over to tug at her mother’s sleeve.
The woman set her phone in her lap, then leaned over so the girl could whisper in her ear.
Richie scratched his cheek, sniffed, and started picking his nose—at least, he figured, he had gotten the brat to leave him alone.
A moment later, the woman turned to Richie with knowing eyes, her expression settling into a mix of disgust and pity as she took in the sight of him.
Holding the girl’s hand, she stood up. Then, in a voice that was chastising but also, weirdly, sort of kind, she whispered, “You’re a monster,” before leading them both to the opposite end of the car.
A terrible explosion thundered in Richie’s chest and the two sides of his head squeezed together. He got off at the next stop.
“I was somewhere in Lower Manhattan,” he told Rami. “I bought two bottles of Smirnoff, told the guy who sold them to me that they were for an office party, then passed out on a bench in South Street Seaport. My friend Adam had to pick me up from a precinct downtown.”
Richie took another sip from his coffee.
He remembered the blurry surprise of waking up on a concrete precinct bench and seeing Adam next to him, the sensation of thinking he was in a dream, and the horror of realizing that he wasn’t.
He remembered how Adam had taken his hand and squeezed it with a force that was a little past comfortable.
He’d kept his grip tight when he said, “I know it’s a dumb thing to say, and you probably won’t believe me, but one day you’re going to be happy, Richie, and I promise you I’ll be there when it happens.
” Richie knew he didn’t deserve to hear something like that, especially after how he had treated Adam, but he held on to it anyway, laying his head against Adam’s shoulder, too dehydrated to cry.
Scratching at the space between his eyes, he waited in the restaurant for Rami to say something, though for a while he didn’t. There were a few bites of French toast left on his plate, and he dragged them through a puddle of syrup.
At last he said: “Well, you know what they say, one day at a time.”
Tires crunched along the gravel drive. Richie looked up from his Vanity Fair to see an enormous black SUV jerking to a stop.
Mia stepped out from the passenger-side door, jumping down to the ground.
The man driving the car was Mia’s boyfriend, Lev—Richie had met him once briefly, and by chance, at a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue.
He had long, ropy arms, gray stubble, and two small sweat stains on his linen shirt.
When he got out of the car, he twirled its keys once around his finger, then caught them before sliding them into the pocket of his pants.
Aviator sunglasses were balanced on top of his head; from the car’s trunk he removed a large khaki duffel bag, slapping at a bug on his neck.
“Jesus Christ,” Mia said. “Look at all these degenerates.”
Sasha dropped a yellow bocce ball to the ground and walked over to her, Ethan grasping at the air.
In the pool, Marco sank into the water until his chin was resting on the surface.
Laughter echoed against the house; a plane crossed overhead.
Setting his magazine down on the grass, Richie again thought back to his breakfast with Rami—of how, as they were waiting for the bill to be delivered to the table, Richie kept searching his face.
There was never any cynicism, or skepticism, or disappointment at how fucked everything had turned out.
Instead there was that same earnest smile, along with a speck of French toast clinging to the side of Rami’s mouth.
Standing now to greet Mia, he remembered how he’d leaned back in his chair, and for the first time wondered if maybe he could do this—if he could trade in something that had seemed so easy for this other thing that seemed so hard.
Because what other choice was there? Behind him was the bloody trail of his youth, while in front of him was…
he didn’t know. The potential for something else, maybe.
A lightness that he hadn’t thought was possible.
All that separated them was a thin sliver of faith, held together by bad coffee, new friends, and silly aphorisms about days being taken one at a time.
A fragile belief that the agony of consciousness was worth the miracle of being alive.