700 PM Mia
Mia placed her fingertips on Lev’s forearm, interrupting him. He turned to face her and smiled, his swollen eye pinching shut.
“Can you pass me the salt?” she asked.
“The what?”
“The salt.”
She pointed to a blue saltshaker, shaped like a dolphin balanced on its tail. Lev grabbed it by the fin and set it next to her plate.
“Anyway.” He looked around the table. “Where was I?”
“The toilet,” Nina said. “You’d just gotten onto Elton John’s private jet, and you clogged the toilet.”
“Right, right, right. Oh God. Maybe I shouldn’t tell this story.”
“No way.” Mitch Reynolds wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. He was sitting to the left of Sasha, and as he set his elbows on the table she moved her wineglass out of the way. “You have to now.”
“It’s so embarrassing.”
“Yeah, no shit. That’s why you have to.”
Chuckling to himself, Lev shook his head. Then he took a deep breath. “Okay, so…”
Dinner was in full swing. Half-emptied lobster shells littered the table.
There was also a loaf of sourdough bread from a local bakery with only its heels remaining, and wide wooden bowls smeared with traces of vinaigrette, and a flat white plate holding a single piece of charred zucchini, and another bowl, this one steel, filled with a salad made from tomatoes and grilled corn.
To Mia’s left, Sasha picked green cilantro leaves out from beneath a cube of feta cheese, adding them to a growing pile on the rim of her plate.
Lightning flashed outside. As she sprinkled salt onto her corn from the dolphin’s blowhole, Mia began counting to herself silently.
Five seconds later she heard the one-two crack of thunder.
The storm had started a few hours ago, as Mia was sitting with Lev in their bedroom upstairs.
With one hand she had a towel filled with ice pressed against his left eye, and with the other she was rubbing his shoulder.
Rain splattered against the leaves of the trees outside, sporadically at first, and then with an increasing and constant ferocity.
She heard voices yelling. A door slammed downstairs.
“He didn’t mean to do it,” Mia said. “They were playing a game.”
“I believe you, but unfortunately my eye doesn’t really care about intent.”
She removed the towel. The beginnings of a bruise were forming on much of the left side of Lev’s face, a circular red spot the size of a bocce ball. A bit of dried blood clung to the side of his nostril. His eye was nearly swollen shut.
“Emily says she doesn’t think your nose is broken, so that’s something.”
“Do you have a mirror?”
“Hold on.”
Mia put the towel in Lev’s hand, and then when he didn’t do anything with it, she guided it back up to his eye. She unplugged her phone from where it was charging, opened up its camera function, and held it so that Lev could inspect his face.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
“I really don’t think it’s that bad.”
“You really don’t think it’s that bad?”
“I guess what I mean is, it’ll get better.”
A gust of wind rattled the windows. Downstairs Theo yelled, “How does a house this close to the beach not have any towels.”
Lev took the phone from Mia, tilting it to various angles.
“I’m supposed to interview Sally Yates at the festival. I can’t go up there looking like this.”
“The festival is in, like, October, Lev. I think you’ll be fine by then.”
“So, what, you’re a doctor now?”
“No, but I’ve had a bruise before.”
He darkened the phone and dropped it to the floor.
“This isn’t a bruise. This is disaster.”
“Tell me what can I do.”
“Give me an Ativan.”
“I don’t have any Ativan.”
“There are three gay men and four graduate degrees in this house. Someone has Ativan.”
Mia set her hands on her thighs. She had yet to change out of her bathing suit, and her skin was greasy with sweat and sunscreen.
“I think Theo does,” she said, and stood up from the bed. “He won’t mind.”
Down the hall, she opened up doors until she found the right room, then went into the adjoining bathroom and began searching through Theo’s Dopp kit.
In it she found toothpaste, deodorant, floss, a pacifier, bottles of Propecia and Lexapro, and then, finally, the Ativan.
Mia removed the bottle’s cap. She was glad that Lev had come, but also a little bit not.
She hadn’t seen all of her friends in a while, and with Lev there she felt like she couldn’t entirely be herself around them.
There was a part of her that was always trying to figure out how he was seeing everything.
She would predict Lev’s opinions, and find herself becoming hypercritical and embarrassed; Sasha would say something about a Bravo show they both watched, and immediately Mia would glance at Lev and then think, Oh my God, Sasha, shut up.
What made it all worse was that whenever Mia noticed that she was thinking this way, she grew more angry with herself for being so judgmental in the first place.
She wished everyone could make things easier for her, and became annoyed when they didn’t, which, in turn, amplified the annoyance she was feeling toward herself.
Cupping her palm, she shook out one of the pills from the bottle, and then, after giving it some thought, shook out a second one.
She placed it on the center of her tongue, swallowed it without any water, and went back to the bedroom.
At the dinner table Lev continued his story.
He said, “So I’m sitting there, and water’s spilling out of the toilet and all over the floor, and Elton’s PA is knocking on the door saying that we need to take off or he’s going to be late for his taping of The Tonight Show, and I’m thinking to myself, okay, what would Shirley MacLaine do in this situation? ”
Sasha removed another cilantro leaf from her salad. “Why Shirley MacLaine?”
“Have you ever met Shirley MacLaine?”
“Uh, no. No, I have not.”
“Well, take my word for it: if you do, you will always be thinking to yourself, ‘What would Shirley MacLaine do in this situation.’ Okay, so—”
Rami interrupted, “I think my bigger question is, what did you do to that toilet?”
“Nothing! That’s what was so wild! I literally just took a piss, and not even a very big one. Honestly, it was my first time on a PJ, and I wanted to see what the bathroom looked like.”
“How was it?”
“Fabulous. Just absolutely fabulous. Had a little window and everything. But that’s all beside the point.
The point is that water’s spilling over my shoes, and Elton’s going to be late for Tonight, and all I’m trying to think about is how Shirley MacLaine would get out of this mess and still be able to do the interview that I was there to do. ”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, for starters I—”
A baby cried. Abruptly Lev stopped speaking. Emily picked up a small gray monitor from the table, squinting at its screen. Then she turned to Sasha and said: “Ava’s asleep. I think that’s you.”
Sasha’s mouth was full. Chewing, she leaned back in her chair; her monitor was on a credenza behind her, and she had to reach an arm back at an awkward angle to retrieve it.
As she struggled, Theo stood up. He was a little drunk, and as he pushed his chair out from behind him it fell over to the ground.
“I’ll go,” he said. Then he balled up his napkin and set it on the table, next to a torn-off chunk of sourdough bread.
Lev turned to look at Mia.
He arched an eyebrow as if to say: See?
About six and a half months ago, Mia had developed an aversion to eggs.
It happened suddenly. One morning she was hard-boiling two of them for breakfast, which she had done nearly every day for the past four years, and when she began peeling away the shells, her stomach flipped and she ran to the bathroom.
After flushing the toilet, she brushed her teeth and took a shower and over the course of the next hour began feeling better and thus forgot about it.
But then the next day, as she was salting a yolk, she experienced the same chain of events: the flipped stomach, the fleeing the kitchen, the sudden drop to her knees.
It took it happening a third time for her to buy a test and learn that she was pregnant.
She decided she would give herself a week or two before deciding what to do.
She went to work like normal, and to dinners with Lev, who never seemed to notice when she passed on cocktails and wine.
Occasionally when she was on the subway she would catch herself smiling without realizing it, remembering that she had a secret.
She told no one about it, not even Adam or Sasha.
She allowed her deliberations to stretch into a month, and then six weeks.
Because of her age, her doctor scheduled her for an ultrasound, where she heard the thump of another heartbeat inside of her, and turned to the technician to say: “Oh my God.” Still she told no one.
And this decision turned out to be prudent because in the middle of the third month—the tenth week, she would learn, of the pregnancy itself—Mia noticed a concerning amount of blood, and after making another appointment with her doctor, she learned that her secret had died.
“I’m very sorry,” her doctor said. “You should know that with advanced maternal pregnancies, this isn’t that rare. It also doesn’t mean that you can’t have a successful—”
“No, yeah, it’s fine.” The tissue paper on the examining table crinkled beneath Mia. “I was going to talk to you about getting an abortion anyway.”
It was a Friday. She had plans to meet Adam that evening, and then later have dinner with Lev in Greenwich Village.
Everywhere she looked she saw children—it was as if in the time that had elapsed during her doctor’s appointment the city had repopulated itself with infants in strollers and toddlers set on their fathers’ shoulders.
When she saw them she found herself smiling, not exactly happily, but rather in a heavy way that she couldn’t remember having smiled before.
In Chelsea she met Adam at a bar and didn’t bother taking off her coat.
He asked if she was all right, and she said, “Yes, just a little cold,” and then ordered two gin martinis, which she drank quickly and guiltlessly, before continuing on to the Italian restaurant on West Eleventh Street where Lev had made their reservation.
There was a bar up front and white-clothed tables in the back, and when they sat down at their table a waiter delivered a wooden basket filled with stiff breadsticks and a metal bowl of crudités.
She hadn’t intended to tell Lev anything—she was determined not to be sentimental about something she didn’t want—though over the course of the next ten minutes, she’d found herself recounting what had happened.
When she got to the part where she’d discovered she was pregnant, a terrified expression briefly passed over Lev’s face.
While he did his best to recover quickly, Mia nonetheless saw it and began to cry.
He reached across the table to take her hand, and held it as she used her napkin to dab at her eyes.
Their waiter returned to ask if they had made any decisions.
Lev looked at Mia, still holding her hand.
She didn’t say anything, so he ordered her chicken marsala, with a side of angel-hair pasta and steamed vegetables.
When the waiter was gone, Lev said: “I love you,” and then repeated himself, over and over.
The sound of his voice drifted to the back of Mia’s brain: she was drunk, and experiencing a new, confusing kind of heartbreak.
The grief stemmed not from the event itself, but from the loss of a possibility, a choice that was hers to make until suddenly it was not.
But she didn’t know how to explain all of that to Lev without coming off as silly or melodramatic—she wasn’t even sure how to explain it to herself—so instead she listened as he told her that he loved her.
When her food arrived, she took a bite of it, but found that she wasn’t much in the mood for eating; she was nauseated, though it was a different kind of nausea than she had experienced with the eggs.
She filled her fork, set it down, and drank from a glass of white wine.
At one point Lev must have noticed that Mia hadn’t eaten, because once again he reached across the table to take her hand.
Gently he ran his thumb across the thin pocket of skin that connected the base of her thumb to her forefinger, and after a few seconds she looked up to meet his eyes.
“Listen to me,” he said. “Serious people don’t have children.”
“And that, my friends,” Lev said, “is what Shirley MacLaine would do.”
There was a fireplace on the other side of the dining room, and it howled as wind filled the chimney. Adam touched his cheek, rubbing his fingers along the stubble of his beard.
“I didn’t realize that’s how airplane toilets work.”
“Neither did I, until I had my hand in one.”
“What did you say when you came out of it?”
“Nothing. About a half an hour later, someone else went in, and Elton blamed her. By that point we were already halfway through the interview and really hitting it off.”
“Did he make it to Tonight on time?”
“With hours to spare.”
Theo returned from upstairs. He sat down next to Sasha and leaned over to whisper something to her.
“What’s he like?” Rami asked.
“Elton, or Leno?”
“Sorry—Elton.”
“Oh, he’s great. Super friendly.” Lev refilled his wine. “You know, you wouldn’t think it, but he’s actually quite the scholar.”
Nina dragged a chunk of bread across her plate, picking up bits of corn and shreds of lobster. She said, “I can totally see that.”
“We talked about Verdi, Tolkien, the messaging around the AIDS crisis. We really hit it off.” For a moment Lev’s voice trailed off, as if he had lost himself in the memory.
Then he blinked and came back to earth. Mia felt his hand settle on her knee.
A second later he said, “Actually, all of this reminds me: I have a question for the gay people in the room.”
Adam said, “Okay,” at the same time that Richie said, “No, thanks.”
Scooting himself closer to the table, Lev tented his fingers.
“Does it feel like there are more of you now?”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean, it just seems like there are so many of you now. Elton agrees, by the way.”
Mia stood up. She said, “I think it’s time for cake.”