330 PM Richie
The man had been talking for the last five minutes.
He was dressed as Woody from Toy Story—one of those costumes people bought at seasonal Halloween stores, and that had a picture of someone wearing it on the outside of the package.
A plastic cowboy hat and a red bandana. A leather holster hanging from a thick belt, in which the man had placed a bright-green water pistol.
As he talked he reached down and absently set his hand on the gun’s hilt.
“You need to make sure there’s no added phosphorus in the fertilizer, though,” he said to Richie. “That shit can really fuck with your lawn.”
They were standing in the backyard with five or six other people, arranged in a loose clump.
Everyone’s costumes looked expensive and like they’d taken a long time to put together, and seeing how much fun everyone was pretending to have wearing them made Richie feel itchy and nauseated.
Why had he agreed to waste a Saturday afternoon in a backyard in Montclair?
He wasn’t particularly close with Sasha anymore—he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d seen her.
The man took the water pistol from the holster and kept talking.
Richie made a mental list of all the things he would have rather been doing if he were back in the city.
He could have been going on a walk in Prospect Park, where all the leaves were changing colors and dogs were starting to wear funny little sweaters.
He could have been scrolling through Grindr, or saving recipes on the New York Times cooking app that he had no intention of making, or going to see Bros, or walking out of Bros thirty minutes after it started, or texting Nina pictures he had taken of the dogs in their funny little sweaters, or staring for an entire hour at a brick wall.
Closer to the house, two children bobbed for apples in a large plastic tub, their hands pinned behind their backs. The man returned the water pistol to his holster. He said: “You can’t cut the grass too short. That’s another thing. So, where do you live in the city?”
A man dressed as a Ghostbuster leaned back to laugh. Richie looked down at the bulge pressing against the crotch of his jumpsuit.
He said, “Sorry, what was that?”
“I asked where you live in the city.”
“Oh. I’m in Chelsea.”
“Cool, cool. We were on the Upper West Side before we came out here, so not too far.”
For the last ten minutes, when he wasn’t talking about lawn care, the man had been doing this, finding opportunities to remind Richie that not so long ago he’d lived in the city too. He’d mentioned his five favorite restaurants, two of which had closed in the last year.
Richie heard himself say, “Not too far at all. You glad you moved?”
“Oh yeah. This place is great. It’s mostly people from the city, so you still have that vibe, you know?”
“Totally.”
“And the taxes—well, I don’t have to tell you, you still pay them in Manhattan, ha-ha! I’m John, by the way.”
“Richie. Pleasure.”
John’s hand was wet from the beer he was holding. After he was done shaking it, Richie wiped his own against his pants.
“So what is it that you do, Richie?”
“I’m at Google. Sales.”
John nodded slowly, thinking. He brought his beer to his mouth, and before he sipped from it he said, “So you probably take the C train?”
“No. I walk.”
“Ah.” Now John drank. He smacked his lips. “I used to take the C train all the time when I lived on the Upper West Side. My stop was Seventy-Second Street. I don’t miss that.”
“Oh?”
“Well, you know how it is now. It’s gotten a little crazy.”
“How do you mean?”
John looked at Richie quizzically. He took another sip from his beer.
“It just feels like, after Covid, the city’s been kind of a mess.
Every time I get off at Penn Station there’s some homeless guy, like, shitting right in front of me on the sidewalk, people are getting pushed onto subway tracks left and right, crime in general is way up—it’s not the place it was when I was twenty-five. ”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“We talk about it all the time, Ashley and me. We were there during all those Black Lives Matter protests. The day that our little girl turned six months old, we saw someone throw a brick through the window of a Chanel store. Like, I’m sorry, I vote Democratic in every election, and I am the farthest thing you’ll ever meet from a racist, but destroying private property and looting stores?
Those are criminal acts, and those people should be arrested.
That’s just the law.” He shook his head.
“We really like it here, though. If you get a chance, you should get Theo to swing you by the club.”
“Would you excuse me for a second?”
“Sure thing, pal. And hey—if you have a chance, can you grab me another one of these?” John held up his beer bottle, then rotated it so Richie could see the label. It was a craft IPA.
Richie walked across the backyard toward the house.
On the way he saw Adam, laughing with too much effort as he talked to four straight men, and then Mia, standing with a group of women.
Since they’d arrived in Sasha’s Volvo she had drawn whiskers on either side of her face, and had darkened the tip of her nose.
She looked sad—like, legitimately very sad—and when she saw Richie she gave him this pathetic wave.
With as little energy he waved back, lifting both his eyebrows and pushing his tongue against his cheek, as if to say, Let’s remember whose idea it was to come in the first place.
Inside the house he found the bathroom, where a battery-operated witch cackled as it twirled from an overhead light.
Looking at himself in the mirror, he fixed his hair and washed his hands.
The liquid soap that was next to the sink was an expensive brand, though when he pumped a dollop of it onto his palms he discovered that Sasha had refilled the bottle with something generic and lemon-scented.
Richie sighed: they were all trying so hard.
He rinsed the soap from his fingers and was drying them on a gray hand towel when he heard his phone chime.
It was a new text from Nina, asking him what he was doing tonight.
He gave his fingers a final wipe and then typed a response.
I’m in NJ
An ellipsis appeared. A second later Nina responded: WHY??????
Richie wrote, that’s a very good question, tapped send, and returned his phone to his pocket.
The fact that he and Nina Guzman were close was still sort of funny to Richie.
If someone had told him fifteen years ago that there would come a time when they texted multiple times a day, he would have laughed and told them to fuck off.
But remarkably, that was how things had turned out.
After his thirty-fifth birthday in Amagansett, they’d started hanging out more and more, mostly at Nina’s invitation, and despite his best efforts not to, Richie had discovered that he legitimately enjoyed her company.
Why had he found her so annoying in college?
He couldn’t remember now—he only knew that everyone else had decided that it was totally acceptable to be cruel to Nina Guzman, so he went along and was cruel to her too.
Whenever he was reminded of that, he felt a profound shame, and wanted to apologize to Nina for years of bad behavior.
And on a few occasions he had done that.
Each time, Nina told him not to worry about it.
“Let’s let bygones be bygones, or whatever,” she said. “At least now we’re friends.”
The last time they’d hung out was a week and a half ago.
Nina had texted Richie and asked him to join her and Courtney Paulson for dinner at the Odeon at eight o’clock on Wednesday night.
He had no other plans, so he said yes, and thirty seconds later she emailed him a Google Calendar invitation that said “Dinner with Courtney Paulson at the Odeon at eight o’clock on Wednesday night.
” Courtney had left the city in the summer of 2021, after her divorce from Geoff was finalized.
In that time she had met a dentist named Kyle, married him at City Hall, and moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, where Kyle’s father had a practice he was planning to take over.
Richie didn’t know why she was in town, and he didn’t really care.
He could just tell that Nina didn’t want to have dinner with Courtney Paulson alone.
“God, I missed this place,” Courtney said after their food had arrived. She had ordered a Caesar salad and french fries and was halfway through her second martini. “Did you ever, like, come here for a glass of wine, end up drinking an entire bottle of chenin blanc, and call that lunch?”
Nina said, “No, never.”
Richie took a bite of his hamburger. With his other hand he wiped at the side of his mouth.
“Actually?” he said. “A couple of times.”
On the side of Courtney’s plate was a small ramekin of ketchup, into which she dipped three french fries. Outside it was raining gently. Richie watched through the restaurant’s windows as two women huddled beneath the same black umbrella.
“How’s New Canaan?” Nina said.
“Fine?” Courtney picked a few croutons from her salad and lined them up on the side of her plate. She ate a few more french fries. “It has all my brands.”
“Well, that’s good, at least.”
“Do you remember Suzanne McGinnis? She was the year below us in Theta?”
“Blond?”
“Yeah, but only until junior year. She lives down the block from us. Her husband works in Stamford and they’ve got four kids.”
“Holy shit. Four?”
“McGinnis.” Courtney ate some of her salad. “Irish Catholic.”
The rain grew heavier, blurring the light from streetlamps and filling the gutters. Richie squeezed lime into a glass of club soda.
“What’s Kyle like?” he said. “I never had a chance to meet him.”
“Oh, he’s okay.”
“I’m assuming he’s okay—you married him.”
Courtney set down her fork.