1200 PM Richie
He squinted until his reflection blurred and then disappeared, his nose and mouth and forehead smoothing out to a thin band of light.
He kept the world like that for as long as he could hold it—soft and imperceptible, nothing too bright or complicated.
But then the bartender said, “Can I get you something?” and Richie opened his eyes.
He saw his red face in the mirror, and all the bottles lined up in front of him.
He wiped beneath his nose with the back of his wrist. He ran his hands through his hair.
“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”
The bartender nodded, then picked up a small white rag and began wiping down the bar. Next to a plastic container filled with limes was a stack of cardboard coasters, and she took a moment to straighten them.
Richie said, “Actually, how about a beer.”
“Any particular beer?”
“Oh, whatever. I’m not picky with these things.”
The bartender set the rag down in front of her.
She looked young, in her mid-to-late twenties.
The air was thick with a mix of bleach and beer and melted cheese from the pizza place next door.
White light filled the windows, and outside people crowded the sidewalks, pulling dogs on leashes, carrying takeout salads in large paper bags.
Richie was the only person in the bar. He had been here more times than he could count, though now when he tried, he couldn’t remember a single one of them.
The bartender puffed air into her cheeks. She put her hands on her hips.
“Let’s see,” she said. “On tap we’ve got an IPA, a lager, a stout—”
“Surprise me.”
“You don’t have any preference?”
“Literally zero.”
The bartender shrugged. She took a pint glass from beneath the bar, held it under a tap, and pulled a handle shaped like a goose’s head. Richie heard a farting sound. A second later, foam dribbled into the glass.
“Goddamn it,” the bartender said. “Fucking Josh.”
“Who’s Josh?”
“He’s a piece of shit.” She ran a hand over the top of her hair, pressing down a few strands. “Give me two minutes. I need to change out the kegs.”
Richie wondered if he should consider this a sign from God. But then he remembered that he didn’t believe in God, had never, actually, believed in God, and he said: “How about a bourbon instead.”
“You want a bourbon instead?”
“I mean, it seems like a bourbon will be easier for everyone.”
“It’s really not a problem. Someone’s going to want an IPA eventually. At some point I’ll have to change out these kegs.”
“But why do something now that you could do later?”
“That right there is why I’m still in grad school.” She replaced the pint glass and pulled a bottle of Maker’s Mark from behind the bar. “You want a single or a double?”
“Can you do a triple?”
The bartender exchanged the glass she was holding for a bigger one. She opened a drawer, and Richie heard the sound of ice cubes rattling against each other. His hands were shaking, and to stop them he set them on top of each other on the bar.
The bartender said, “I don’t see why not.”
He’d seen Adam not too long ago, back in the beginning of December.
It was a Saturday morning, and Richie had gone to the nine o’clock meeting on Grove Street.
Recently he had finished his second stint at a clinic in California, where he’d attended group therapy sessions and taken up gardening and spoken to an army of detox counselors, to whom he had to explain that his slip out of sobriety was prompted by 1) a nebulous, irrepressible disappointment in himself and the people he loved; and 2) a tray of Halloween-themed Jell-O shots.
The counselors nodded at him, as did the other attendees at the nine o’clock meeting on Grove Street.
They looked at him with understanding expressions that said “Oh, these things happen,” which made Richie feel both a little bit better and a little bit worse.
When he saw Adam, Richie was searching his coat pockets for a pair of gloves on the corner of Grove and Bleecker.
His knuckles were purple and it was nineteen degrees.
“Richie,” Adam said. “Wow, hi.”
He was wearing a black wool cap and his cheeks were bright red.
A gym bag hung off one shoulder, and on the other one was a reusable canvas shopping tote.
Richie said hello. In the last year or so they had spoken only briefly—once when Richie texted Adam to apologize for saying he would be a terrible father, and another when Adam left him a message, wishing him happy birthday.
Seeing him now, Richie felt a twinge of embarrassment, like he was looking at another mess he had failed to properly clean up.
Adam asked which way Richie was walking, and Richie pointed north, toward Chelsea.
Adam said, “Me too,” and for five minutes they walked in total silence.
But eventually, at Fourteenth Street, they started talking. As they were passing a CVS, Adam brought up the New Year’s Eve party where they’d first gotten together, that derelict apartment on Orchard Street where Richie and Marco had lived a few years after college.
“What made you even think of that?” Richie asked. He hadn’t found his gloves, and now the tips of his fingers were numb.
“I walked by it the other day. I was shocked the building hadn’t been condemned.”
“It wasn’t that bad—”
“It was pretty bad, Richie.”
“—and, technically speaking, that wasn’t the first time we got together.”
Adam stopped. “If you’re referring to that time during sophomore year when I was still in the closet—”
“I am.”
“What did I say my name was?”
“Sean Straub. You said you were from North Carolina. I think you even faked a southern accent.”
Adam covered his face with his hands. He said, “Let’s talk about something else.”
So they did. They talked about how, when she came back from studying abroad in Madrid, Courtney Paulson faked a lisp, and how Sasha convinced Adam and Mia that their apartment on East Fifty-Seventh Street was haunted.
They talked about the weddings they went to together, and the ones they’d suffered through alone, and how many of those people were still married, and which ones should have gotten a divorce.
At Eighteenth Street they got too cold—they found a coffee shop where they could sit.
They talked about the jobs they’d had, and the jobs they wished they’d had; they talked about whether it was still too late to do something else.
Adam said he had a carton of ice cream in his reusable shopping tote.
When Richie asked if he wanted to get home before it melted, Adam responded by asking him if he had read anything good lately.
They talked about the books they’d loved and hated, and whether The Bear was a good show, and if Biden was too old to run again for president.
They remembered voting for Obama, and then spent nearly twenty minutes debating whether what they had been was hopeful or instead dumb and na?ve.
Adam looked out the window. He said, “You know, I actually love New York in the winter,” and Richie—even though he still hated the cold—agreed.
He said, “Look, I know I texted you this already, but I’m sorry for saying you were going to be a bad father.”
Adam turned back from the window.
“That’s okay.”
“It’s not, really.”
“Well, I might be, you know. We’ll find out in three weeks.”
“I think what’s more likely is that you’ll be an irritatingly good one.”
Adam smiled. He looked down into his coffee cup, which had been empty for a long time.
“I’m actually glad I ran into you,” he said.
“We’ve been making space in the second bedroom in our apartment for the crib and changing table and everything else—honestly, you wouldn’t believe what’s required these days to keep a baby alive—and last night I was cleaning out the closet and I found this old Nike box full of some of your stuff.
I guess I thought it was my stuff when I moved out of our apartment, and I’ve been holding on to it. ”
“You thief.”
“It’s a few books, a Wicked Playbill, shit like that. I can drop it off with your doorman this week if you still want it. I feel weird throwing it away.”
Richie told him sure, that was fine, even though he knew he would probably throw the box away too.
For another ten minutes they talked, and then Adam said that now that the ice cream had fully melted, it was probably time for him to go.
They threw away their cups, and walked through the coffee shop’s fogged doors and back out into the cold.
On the sidewalk they stood looking at each other, saying good-bye, and then good-bye again, and then Adam took a step forward at the same time as Richie did and their mouths met.
Neither of them moved. They stayed there with their eyes open, unsure of what else there was to do, until a few seconds later Adam stepped away and started laughing.
“Let’s get together after the holidays,” he said. And then, “It was really great to see you again.”
Richie walked home. Two days later, his doorman handed him a beat-up orange shoebox that he put into his closet and immediately forgot about. Eight weeks later, Adam died.
The bartender placed a glass in front of him—a tumbler filled with bourbon, poured over three cubes of ice. The fumes rose up to his nose; tears formed at the edges of his eyes. He ran his hands over his face.