Chapter 20 #2
Finn and Chase arrived next because Finn was constitutionally incapable of being late to anything and Chase was constitutionally incapable of letting Finn go anywhere without him.
Chase was carrying two bottles of wine and wearing the easy, unhurried smile of a man whose primary function in his relationship was to offset Finn’s particular brand of responsible anxiety, a role he performed so naturally that it was easy to miss how deliberate it was.
He shook my hand, said, “Great apartment,” and settled onto the couch beside Potato.
Potato shifted two inches to accommodate Chase and resumed his standard operating posture.
“He’s magnificent,” Chase said, resting a hand on Potato’s back.
“So I’m told,” I said.
Then Rod arrived with Ruthie and a container of something he described as “a topping for the peach pizza that Benji is going to ruin if he doesn’t let me handle the honey.” Within thirty seconds, he had displaced Benji from the stove and taken command of the kitchen.
He also moved my cutting board to the wrong side of the sink.
I noticed.
I chose not to say anything, because Rod was finishing Benji’s pizzas with a quiet expertise that turned an ambitious experiment into something that actually worked. The wrongness of the cutting board was a small price.
Ruthie padded into the apartment with the dignity of a senior dog who had learned that new rooms eventually yielded comfortable surfaces.
She sniffed Hiro. Hiro sniffed her. They reached a mutual agreement to coexist without further interaction, which in dog language constituted a successful evening.
General Tso, from the refrigerator, tracked Ruthie’s arrival but remained atop his throne.
Then Dante arrived with Dostoyevsky, and the apartment’s fragile equilibrium underwent its final recalibration.
Dostoyevsky was a retired racing greyhound, the color of ash.
He was built like a comma with legs that seemed to belong to a considerably larger animal, and a face that conveyed the permanent low-grade melancholy of the Russian novelist he was named for.
He entered the apartment in the strange, gliding way that greyhounds moved, as if his legs were theoretical rather than structural.
He surveyed the room with enormous dark eyes that absorbed every detail and found it all mildly insufficient.
Hiro froze against my leg.
He’d met many dogs through the foster rotation, but he had not encountered a dog who was taller than the coffee table and moved like a specter with a metabolism.
I put my hand on Hiro’s back, ready to move him to the bedroom if his anxiety escalated.
Dostoyevsky, with a social intelligence that distinguished greyhounds from most other breeds, looked at Hiro, assessed the situation, and folded his impossible legs beneath him to lie down on the floor, making himself as small as his frame allowed.
His message, in dog body language, was unmistakable: “I am not a threat. I am furniture. You may proceed.”
Hiro approached.
Sniffed.
Considered.
Then he lay down beside Dostoyevsky and rested his head on the greyhound’s front leg. Something loosened in my chest, because Hiro choosing to trust a strange dog was Hiro choosing to trust the world, and every time he made that choice, it felt like a small, private miracle.
“Don’t film it,” I said to Mia, who already had her phone out.
“It’s interspecies intimacy, Peter.”
“Let them be,” Rod said from the kitchen, where he had plated the peach pizza and was now doing something to the honey drizzle that involved a blowtorch he’d brought from home. Apparently, Rod traveled with a blowtorch the way other people traveled with a phone charger.
I stood at the island and scanned my apartment.
Chase was on the couch with Potato.
Jacks stood at the bookshelf running his finger along the spines with the slow attention of a person who reads titles the way other people read faces.
Rod stood in the kitchen with a blowtorch and a beagle.
Mia was filming the dogs despite my objections.
Dante sat in the armchair with his book, apparently content to exist at the periphery of a social event, reading Tolstoy while his greyhound served as a pillow for a stranger’s pit bull.
Finn was organizing the drink station because the Irishman had never met a drink station that didn’t need the Dewey Decimal System.
General Tso sat atop the refrigerator, tail his only moving part, twitching at the tempo of displeasure.
There were seven people, two dogs, a bulldog (because he counts as his own category), a cat on a refrigerator, and a hairless cat in a carrier behind the couch.
My apartment, which had held exactly one person and a rotating cast of foster animals for two years, was full in a way no home of mine had been since Portland.
Benji appeared beside me. He’d shed the apron and was holding two plates of pizza, one of which he set in front of me without asking if I wanted it, because Benji had learned that I would always say I wasn’t hungry but would always eat if food appeared, and that the most efficient path between those two points was to skip the question entirely.
“You okay?” he asked quietly.
“There are seven people in my apartment.”
“And three dogs and two cats.”
“I haven’t had seven people in my apartment since . . . in years.”
He didn’t ask what I meant. He knew what I meant. He just stood beside me at the island and let the sentence exist.
The letting-be was exactly what I needed.
“Is it okay?” he asked.
I looked at my apartment full of people and dogs and cats and noise and warmth and six pizzas that a man had spent all day making because he wanted his friends to come over and enjoy themselves.
And I swallowed.
Hard.
And clicked my tongue.
“Ask me at midnight,” I said.
I ate the pizza.
It was better than it had any right to be.
Jacks’s movie selection was a Korean revenge thriller that Benji had apparently been evangelizing for six months.
“I didn’t pick it because of you,” Jacks told Benji. “I picked it because it was on three ‘best of’ lists.”
“You picked it because I’ve been telling you for six months—”
“Your recommendation was only a minor factor. Rotten Tomatoes carries more weight than you and your hair.”
“It was absolutely a factor, and I will carry this wound to my grave.”
I looked up from the chairs I was arranging. “Is this the one with the hallway fight scene?”
The room went quiet. Seven faces turned toward me.
“You’ve seen it?” Benji said.
I shrugged. “I’ve seen most of Park Chan-wook’s catalogue. He’s one of the best living directors.”
The silence that followed was the silence of a group of people collectively revising their understanding of a person they thought they’d figured out.
“Peter,” Mia said carefully. “Are you a film person?”
I shrugged again and continued my chair shifting. “I watch movies.”
“He’s a film person,” she reported to Benji.
“I’m not a film person. I watch movies that are well made. I have a preference for directors who understand pacing and silence. Park is good with silence.”
“He’s a film person,” Finn confirmed.
“David and I used to go to the art house theater in Portland every week,” I said. The sentence slipped past the editorial checkpoint that usually caught David’s name before it reached the air. “It was our thing . . . on Tuesday nights.”
The room held the name the way this group held things that mattered, gently and without fuss.
No one asked a follow-up question.
No one tilted their head.
Jacks gave a single small nod that meant, “I hear you. We can keep going.”
“Tuesday nights are sacred,” Chase said. “Finn and I do crosswords.”
“You do crosswords, and I do crosswords,” Finn corrected. “You’ve never finished one.”
“I provide moral support. I’m the crossword supporter.”
“You fall asleep by twelve across.”
“Twelve across is where the hard ones start. That’s a natural stopping point. It’s like the seventh inning stretch but with naps.”
The conversation carried David’s name forward without making it heavy. I settled into my chair with a fraction less tension than I’d had a minute earlier.
The movie was excellent, which was never in dispute.
What was in dispute was the proper way to consume snacks during a film, which turned out to be a subject on which every person in the room held strong and incompatible convictions.
Rod ate his pizza in complete silence, treating the food with the same reverence he gave the art being consumed alongside it.
Mia ate popcorn one kernel at a time, which she described as “mindful eating” and which Benji described as “psychopathic.” Finn didn’t eat during movies because he found chewing sounds distracting, a position so fundamentally joyless that Chase had developed a technique for eating Milk Duds by letting them dissolve on his tongue, which took approximately four minutes per Dud.
I had set out bowls for the popcorn arranged by type with small tongs for the communal candy, because shared food should be distributed through utensils rather than hands.
This was a basic hygienic principle that I’d assumed would be self-evident and that generated, instead, approximately fifteen minutes of commentary and unending verbal abuse.
“Tongs,” Mia whispered to Benji, loud enough for me to hear, because Mia’s whisper was calibrated for theatrical effect rather than actual discretion.
“He puts out tongs for everything,” Benji whispered back. “The first time I tried to grab the bread with my hand, he looked at me like I was about to commit a felony.”
“Hands carry bacteria,” I said. “Tongs exist for a reason.”
“Tongs exist for salad and errant baby deliveries,” Benji said. “Nobody tongs a Milk Dud.”
“You’re welcome to use your hands. The tongs are an option, not a mandate.”
“He said mandate,” Mia whispered. “About candy tongs.”
“I’m sitting right here. You know I can hear you, right?”