Chapter 19
Chris is hard to pin down in the days that follow.
There’s no allure in the chase, just a bloated sort of annoyance. Here I am, trying to get to know him more, trying to help
him heal from losing his brother, and he just keeps saying that he’s out of town. Sure, it’s summer, but there’s no way he’s
gone all the time or he’d be asking me to dogsit. Unless he’s found someone new for Arnie. The thought depresses me in the
shape of a punch.
Guilt-trapping him is the only way forward. I’m not proud of exploiting his kindness, but there’s really no alternative.
“Hey, Chris,” I say to the voicemail because once again he hasn’t picked up the phone. “I’m having kind of a hard time. There’s
a problem I’d like your opinion on. Let me know if you’re free for dinner or a drink this week. I can come over your way.”
He replies via text rather than a phone call, not like him. But at least he agrees to meet up, though he suggests brunch rather
than dinner, way less intimate.
I get there early, all keyed up though there’s nothing in my system but my own blood. He chose Bubby’s, a legendary breakfast
spot in the city, or so I’ve heard. I’ve never been here, but a line twists out the door and down the block, nearly reaching
the West Side Highway.
Inside, exposed brick wraps the family-style joint, and the tables are packed together with the sort of efficiency you’d expect out of Manhattan.
The clientele is a mix of soccer parents taking their kids out to a postgame feast, young couples mopping up hangovers with corn bread and iced coffees, and gaggles of postcollege girls animatedly sharing every negligible, essential detail of their lives as they snitch each other’s hash browns without having to ask.
Nostalgia for the Redstockings rises, the olden days and golden days when Jenni was still around, and Lilly too, and we could fill a restaurant booth.
Chris arrives and manages to slide into the chair across from me without jamming up against the person behind him. “You’re
early,” he says, and I pick up on the insinuation that he expected me to be late.
“Am I?” I ask, pretending not to be aware of the time. Pretending not to have changed at all since I first met him.
“So what’s going on?” he asks. “Everything okay?”
“Not really.” I’m enjoying the idea that everyone else in the restaurant likely assumes we’re a couple. “First, there’s the
fact that Hal is in love.”
“In love or in jail?” Chris asks. “You make it sound like the latter.”
“They’re one and the same. Both are cages.”
Chris pulls his mouth in an oh-so-it’s-going-to-be-this-kind-of-day way. It makes me want to hurry on to the next subject,
the reason we’re here.
“And also, I have this other friend who seems to be pulling away from me,” I say, fiddling with the cloth napkin that I refuse
to fold on my lap. “I found out something about his life. Something bad he went through. And instead of letting me in, it
just feels like he’s shutting me out.” I pause so the effect of using the third person can sink in, help him feel less attacked.
“What advice would you give me? To connect with this person?”
Chris is staring down at the laminated menu, transfixed on the same spot. Reading it over and over, or more likely staring right through it. “I’d tell you to respect his space,” he says, words sheared like hedges pruned into compliance. “Not everyone processes things by sharing them.”
I ask how someone might process them then. Chris says that actions probably do the talking, that the person probably lives
his life differently based on what he’s been through.
I want to reach across the table and put my hand over his, be the lid of a frying pan, keeping the heat in. But it would just
make him feel like he should further clarify that we’re not a couple. No need for that. “I just want you to have people you
can talk to,” I say.
“I do have people.” The statement goes down my throat like an ice cube, catching partway, not melting fast enough.
Olivia’s airbrushed face appears in my thoughts. I try to rise above the envy, remind myself it’s good if Chris is opening
up to her. It shouldn’t matter who his outlets are so long as he has them. But I’m not a big enough person to imbibe logic
through the arteries to my heart. It stays upstairs, stuck in the head, fucked in the head.
“Good,” I say, picking up my own menu, wielding it like a shield. “Glad to hear that.”
Later, after the blowup that follows, I skirt off the subway at Knickerbocker, dashing over to Lone Wolf.
“Where are those french fries from?” Tara asks as I walk in. I’m holding a basket of fries. My shoulders are rolled back to
their full height, the surest sign that I feel small and saggy inside.
“Stole them from brunch,” I say. “And left Chris with the check.” There’s a cackle in my voice, a pride, but it’s the artificial
kind, susceptible to the poke of a pin, a fingernail, even the dull side of a butter knife.
“Well, don’t carry the fries around like a flower bouquet,” Tara says. “Bon appétit.” My appetite is still gone, but I pass them over to Tara, hoping this proves I’m not a bad friend after all. Not rude and nosy like Chris said.
“So what happened?” Tara asks, filling in the gaps from the multi-paragraph, punctuation-less text I fired off to Tara and
Hal on the subway ride back. “He stiff-armed you when you asked about Luke?”
“He accused me of stalking his family,” I say. “Just because I knew a few things about his brother, like that he was an accountant
and lived in New York. And that Luke’s ex-fiancée was named Tiffany and they got engaged at Gurney’s Beach Club in Montauk
and lived in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone on Clark Street. Basic stuff like that, and he called me ‘obsessive’ and ‘unhinged.’
Can you believe him?”
Tara hesitates a little too long. It’s too much to handle, the fact that she might side with him or even contemplate it. I
plop my face into my arms, the whole puddle of me leaking onto the countertop, fitting in among the mess of cigarette butts
and beers.
“He’s the unhinged one,” Tara says vigorously, as if to make up for her vacillation. “He doesn’t know how to deal with someone
who has as big of a heart as you do, that’s all.” She whips up a Redstocking cocktail, going heavy on the pomegranate maybe
because she sees I need the color. “It’s a guy thing, and even as far as men go, Chris sounds like he’s on the emotionally
stunted end of the spectrum.”
“The most stunted,” I agree and tell her how Chris freaked out when I very gently, very kindly asked if he thought there was
any chance that perhaps he was trying to honor his brother by living out Luke’s dream life and losing sight of his own along
the way.
“I mean, I can see how that would be a bit upsetting to him,” Tara says, doling out another round of draft ale to the guys
at the bar, the regulars who come at lunch and stay through closing. “If he’s never thought of it like that before.”
“But how couldn’t he have?” I say, certain that no dots have ever been easier to connect. “He’s working the same job as Luke, living in the same city, dating a literal dead ringer for Luke’s ex. It’s so blatant and yet he’s gaslighting me for pointing out the obvious.”
Hal joins us at the bar. She’s solo, which I appreciate. “Just saw the texts,” she says, plunking down beside me, gearing
up for combat. “And for the record, I never liked Chris. Too wishy-washy, too dense to figure out he should be dating you.”
“Dating is completely off the table,” I say. “Not that it was ever on the table, but it’s fully in the dumpster now.” I repeat
the brunch story for her with more theatrics this time.
“He needs to go to therapy,” Hal says at the end, like this settles it. “Maybe you should go too.”
I glare at her. “Yeah, couples therapy sounds like the ideal solution for two platonic friends at an impasse.”
“Not couples therapy,” Hal says. “Though I’d pay money to sit in on that. Just go on your own, vent about each other, and
evict the negative energy from your aura. Wait until Mercury is out of retrograde, though. That’s probably why this happened
in the first place.”
“EJ doesn’t believe in astrology,” Tara says.
“Maybe I do,” I say, just to be difficult, just to take my anger out on the only people in the world who are actually there
for me right now, trying to help. “But why would I pay for therapy when I can just vent to you two?”
“Therapy is free in Norway,” Hal says, as if this is relevant to the conversation. As if anyone brought up Astrid’s home country.
“Chris will come around,” Tara says. “Just give him time.”
“Time for what?” I ask. “I’m not just going to sit here and take his punches. The ball is in his court to apologize. Until
then, he’s done to me, dead to me.”
I throw back the rest of my drink, wash it down with a pickleback, and then finish off the fries I didn’t pay for, the oil
coating my fingers, sinking into my dirty nail beds.
Under the wan lighting of the single-stall bathroom, I scrub my hands clean, though I have the sensation I’m absorbing the muck via osmosis.
It’s all grunge and grime back here, no toilet paper to be used, though plenty strewn across the floor like several mummies were unraveled, their stench lingering.
The concrete walls are plastered with magazine cutouts, page corners peeling.
Graffiti is streaked, little hearts and initials and skulls, each with its own story that will never be told, never even seen except by Lone Wolf patrons who have to piss, or people like me just trying to get slippery grease off their hands so they don’t drop something important. Except maybe they already did.