830 PM Richie #2
Suddenly it seemed to him that the room had gotten very quiet.
He was aware that people were staring at him, and he was trying to act as natural as he could, though he kept seeing Adam and Rami out of the corner of his eye.
He wasn’t trying to look—his gaze seemed to float back there involuntarily, and each time it did he got light-headed and became even more distracted.
He began imagining what had happened when Rami went into the kitchen to get ice for Lev’s eye.
He saw Rami and Adam talking, and Rami asking Adam if he needed any help, and Rami finding little ways to touch Adam as he walked toward the freezer for ice.
Standing in the living room, he saw Adam’s fingers brush Rami’s thigh. Mia smiled at Richie encouragingly. He felt like he was going to throw up.
“Oh, gosh.” He lifted a hand to his cheek. “Let’s see. Oh! Here we go: she’d know how to fix a toilet on a private jet.”
Nina shouted, “Shirley MacLaine!” and Richie smiled.
He said, “Yes, that’s right,” then waited for the round to end before excusing himself to the bathroom, which was down a hallway on the opposite side of the living room.
Standing before the sink, he turned on the faucet and splashed a few handfuls of water in his face.
His eyes were red, and after looking at himself in the mirror he blotted at his face with a white hand towel.
Outside the bathroom door, he heard a baby cry on one of the two monitors, and then Sasha ask if they could all take a break before the beginning of the second round.
Richie pressed the towel to his face again.
He pictured Adam coming up to him at some point later this evening, and asking him what he thought about Rami.
He would tell Adam that Rami was a good person, because that was the truth, and because he owed them both that much, and Adam would respond with such speed and certainty that Richie would realize that the question was a courtesy, and that it was, in fact, entirely irrelevant what he thought.
The inevitability of it all overwhelmed him—he felt like he was watching a wave, rising higher and higher until it crashed into a spray of white and blue on the beach.
The sides of his face became extremely hot, and for the second time this evening he worried that he was going to be sick.
After returning the towel to the rack, he left the bathroom to go outside for a cigarette.
To avoid the crowd in the living room, he took the long way around, circling through the study and the observatory and then out into the backyard.
Someone had turned the pool’s lights on, and now it glowed bright blue in a large, dark patch of grass.
Wind continued to course through the trees, though in the last twenty minutes the drizzle had become a thick mist. Standing beneath a small awning outside the kitchen, Richie pulled a cigarette from a pack of Camels, shielding a match with his hand to light it.
He curled his arms across his chest. Voices carried from inside, and he heard a door quietly open and close.
Tapping ash from his cigarette, he turned toward the observatory, where Emily was now sitting alone on a wicker chair.
Her back was to Richie; from what he could gather she hadn’t seen him.
She leaned over slightly at the waist to rest her elbows on her knees and then she pressed her hands to her face.
Richie watched her. He found himself thinking bitterly of how shortsighted he had been.
What had he expected to happen? Did he think that while he was off getting his shit together everyone else was going to stop and wait for him?
He saw now that might have been the case.
Unwittingly he had convinced himself that his life would fit into an easy narrative trajectory, and that he would be rewarded for doing something hard.
But that wasn’t what had happened at all.
It might have taken getting sober to realize what he wanted, except now that he had realized it, it was, of course, too late.
The wind sent ripples across the pool’s surface.
Richie took another drag of his cigarette.
He wanted to forget this feeling, to wash it away and leave it behind like all of his other mistakes.
But that wasn’t going to happen. Already he could sense it sinking into him, lodging itself in the soft space between his ribs.
Leaning against the wall, he watched as three gnats chased each other beneath an exterior lamp.
In the observatory, Emily stood from the wicker chair, smoothing down her shirt and then her hair before pressing a knuckle beneath both of her eyes.
Moonlight turned the mist silver, and high above the house a break in the clouds revealed a dark patch of star-pricked night.
Richie stared up at it for a few seconds longer.
Then he finished his cigarette and went back inside.