Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the short story of the week.
Best,
Sam
GIRL TALK
The way he’s come to feel about relationships is – certain ironclad compartments. It’s the phase of life when certain folk wisdom begins to have a particular resonance: the secret of a happy marriage is separate bank accounts, that’s a good one. And, within that principle, other routines – the shower in the morning, the vigorous jack-off, the cycle of imagining all of Marya’s girlfriends – all the more intense since one of the ironclad compartments is that he can never hook up with any one of them. Also, topics that can never be raised – he feels that he can check out women on the street, this actually being a point of some sort of solidarity with Marya, the way they’ll appraise women passing by them, but not to actually pursue any of them, also Marya’s sense of him as being basically a factotum, as pulling no great weight in the place where he works, also Marya’s essential disastrousness as an adult, her inability to connect to money or to responsibility or to any self-accountability other than the points that he, aggrievedly, raises every once in a great while.
These limitations of Marya, he hopes, are addressed in some way through her friendship with Katlina, which he encourages. Katlina is like a different species – that’s how he thinks about her. She’s much larger than Marya, much fuller-bodied, seeing them together always feels like some natural history exhibit of different varieties of woman, Marya fine-boned and delicate and inimitable, Katlina with features like they’re carved out of a mountainside, but also somehow more feminine, the way her body seems always to be falling out of her clothes, and also higher-status, this being taken for granted, even though Marya talks more, is smarter, is funnier, the great exclamation of laughter Katlina has when she belatedly catches on to something that Marya is saying, says that, yes, yes, she can relate.
Katlina is dating a musician who is poised to blow up – Ryan is a bit amused by this, points out that ever since the time Marya met Katlina her boyfriend has been poised to blow up – but this does, actually, seem to be the case, and it gives him great, pit-of-the-stomach misgivings to imagine the ways in each of them talk about, and compare, their boyfriends. And there is no question that this is what they, to be honest, probably spend the majority of their time doing. He has passed them in the apartment, when he was coming back to grab something, and Katlina was over for a glass of wine, and he clocked the way they tracked him with their eyes, like it wasn’t even worth it to pretend to be talking about something else, until he’d grabbed his MetroCard, or whatever it was, and was safely out of earshot.
Marya has, for the sake of gossip, passed along much of this. The cheating of Katlina’s boyfriend – out of control, says Marya, and there’s a kind of abyss in the middle of conversation in which Ryan tries to imagine exactly what this entails – and then, closer to home, there’s the period when he and Marya are fighting a great deal, a period of slamming doors, of knives hacked into cutting boards, not of raised fists, not of thrown dishes, but it’s surprising how close all of that feels, like the moment of an eclipse actually locking into place, when a door is slammed shut just missing the other person pursuing in hope of some sort of conciliation and the gesture appears not only natural but also necessary, inevitable, and Marya – as is well within her rights – runs a particularly contentious point past Katlina, “he wants me to love him just for the way he is,” and diligently reports back Katlina’s answer, which is to laugh really wildly. “They’re such children,” Katlina says, and Marya seems to fix Ryan intently, to stare at him with her most cunning look, when she repeats that verdict to him.
II
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when, as a lawyer might put it, it becomes irreconcilable between him and Marya, and he has a nagging suspicion, even during the litany of cheating and lying, the period of furious hand gestures, of bitter tears, then of dishes hurtled irrevocably, thrillingly, into walls and floors, that they’re not talking about the real thing – and the real thing is, well, if he knew he would say, but he is somehow convinced, although he does not say it, that it has something to do with Marya and Katlina tracking him with their eyes, wine glasses raised to chin level, Katlina spilling out of her outfit. In any case, Marya and Katlina have long since had a falling-out, for reasons that he can’t even come close to piecing together, and just mentioning her, he thinks, would create some new hard-to-predict chain of recriminations.
The way they leave it, he has about a half-day to clear out what he wants from the apartment, then it’s hers until the end of the lease, under the threadbare premise that she might be able to pick up the entire rent, although they both know perfectly what will happen, that she will be equal parts broken and infatuated, that she will accept the invitation to move in with her new fling, that she is at an age which feels like an ultimatum, that it takes a certain willpower to reject the path-of-least-resistance and that that sort of willpower is exactly the thing in the world that she is worst at. He makes a point, standing in the doorwell, of memorizing each of his gestures, like that matters for anything – the view of the apartment in the advanced stages of her distress, her clothes flung on furniture and on the floor; the light switched off for the last time; the key turned firmly in the lock.
The truth is that there’s a certain exhilaration in being on his own. He hears his footsteps tapping on the sidewalk and there’s a lightness in his step that he hasn’t felt in a long time, swipes his card at the turnstile – it turns out that he’s needed so little he doesn’t even bother with a cab – and just feels some sort of electric connection between gestures, the swipe of his wrist, the screen lighting up, the bar turning from his flicked wrist. He senses that this will be a good phase of his life and he turns out to be right. Maybe the main thing, to be honest, is not having to split everything he makes with a demanding, underemployed girlfriend or paying for an apartment in a cool neighborhood. Instead, he spends lavishly on Tinder dates and works up various excuses about why he’s bringing them back to such a dump of a room. But it’s not just that – money starts to be there. Once, in his days of being a kind of highly-educated bum, he was playing softball and the centerfielder on his team, explaining why he’d just left his job, said, “Well, you make money in your 30s,” and Ryan suspected that this wasn’t entirely accurate, that the centerfielder was looking into some abyss of being probably unemployable and trying to cushion it with whatever savings he had, but Ryan was at the time in the stage of life when anything remotely honest said by anyone older than him was taken in as a kind of talisman, a mantra, and he took that seriously – when he hit his 30s, he would make money, and that turned out to be the case. It’s not at all clear to him whether that proves his merit one way or the other – as far as he can tell, it’s just a matter of being dutiful around his immediate superiors, of keeping his head down, of learning with a certain reptilian intelligence what doesn’t matter at work, which is pretty much every single daily indignity, the constant humiliation, the sense of incessantly going backwards, the demoralization that afflicts everybody at his level, that they treat as like a fact of nature; and learning what does matter, the moment in a meeting when he learns forward with a bright idea, the moment when just about everybody has gone home for the day and he’s still at his desk and fields the oddball crisis that starts to ricochet around gchat and the office phones, the look his superiors have when the budget is getting tight and he suggests somebody on his team who isn’t quite pulling weight and the superior says, “Thank you for your candor,” like this really is some testament to Ryan’s character.
Let’s not go crazy. There’s a tendency – Ryan certainly fell victim to it in the moment of extinguishing apartment lights, of exuberantly swiping MetroCard – of crafting a before and after. Before: Ryan in his late 20s with Marya, money hemorrhaging, the honeymoon curdling, co-dependency, toxicity. After: Ryan in his early 30s, proudly independent, working his long day and then finding himself with the evening completely conducive to his whim, maybe the dive bar under his office, maybe fooling around on his apps, maybe just – a heady feeling to this always – going to his own home, his music, his shows, lying on his bed, ceiling spinning from whatever booze he’s drunk, hours until he’ll be able to sleep, trying somewhere in this to discern the outlines of himself, somewhere in the booze, the music, the ass-licking, the ass-kicking, the sports jacket that he crisply puts on in the morning and discards in the evening, the shape that he takes in the world, which is very different from what he would have pictured, for instance, when he was in college or in the exuberant phase when he met Marya and it felt like they were never not touching one another and there was nothing that wasn’t possible, but, look, it is a shape, and he knows enough by this point, has met enough distraught centerfielders, enough pixie dream girls, to know that that is not insignificant. Not romantic, not a clean before and after. A muddy period, his paystubs inching higher, his titles leveling up, the phone interviews he does – stealing time from his current job – the way he states his ‘rate’ and is startled that the person on the other end of the call finds it reasonable.
He and Marya, the bad blood cooled, are in touch most of the way through this. The feeling is of having sold off a stock prematurely, just before it starts to rise. And Marya plays a welcome role, as cheerleader, as friend-from-afar. Her own romantic choices have proven disastrous, a married man always on the verge of divorce, an older man, quasi-famous, who doesn’t even try to hide that Marya is slotted into a rotation. She is rueful about all of this, funny – another piece of evidence of how Marya, smart as she is, is somehow unsuited for the world – but, to Ryan’s deep, silent frustration, she never asks forgiveness, she never says that she ‘regrets’ what happened. It’s all interpreted as part of the journey, Marya at every step doing what she ‘had to do.’
And they are able to recapitulate just about everything. There’s a case to be made that being ex-lovers is the best part of the whole thing, there’s no longer the pressure of holding on to the relationship, they’re able to review each of the different compartments and it’s swinging open doors, throwing sunlight into a moldy room. “Which of my friends did you want?” she’ll ask him, and a deep breath, secrets so long preserved and now released, he’ll tell her, tell her about his morning trips to the shower and the harem of her friends that accompanied him, school friends, girlhood friends, “Katlina of course,” he says, and there’s a harrumphing on the other end of the line, the feeling that not everything is safe to say after all. “Of course,” Marya says.
It’s a very different moment – a cool phase – he has his own car, his own apartment, he likes to leave work and just kind of get lost as he drives home, he’s in L.A. now, likes for it to still be light out, likes the feeling of no plans, no plans whatsoever, while Marya, in New York, is getting sleepy, drifting off on her side of the line. And in that mood, free-wheeling, magnanimous, he says, “Marya, what really happened, do you think? Why didn’t it work?”
And she’s annoyed by this, she feels like she’s given her closing argument enough times, she says, “It just felt like, in the relationship, I was stronger than you and there was an imbalance there.”
She’s on the car speaker and then she’s not. Dexterously, the fillip of his hand like he’s changing a radio station, she’s turned off. She texts after a couple of missed calls, “What happened? Did I lose you?” and, at a red light, he manages to text, “I’m ignoring your call. Obviously.”
And so much for transparency, so much for sunlight on all the hidden compartments. This phase of life – the less work, more money phase – seems to feature a lot of drinks, a lot of cigarettes. His footloose evenings after work, the drives around different highways and side streets, have a way, always, of culminating in a handful of similar bars. Sometimes – every few weeks – he succeeds in picking somebody up, but, mostly, it’s just him, his beers, his smoke breaks, reading through his articles on his phone. There are people who are uncomfortable being in a bar by themselves; he’s determined not to be one of them. Strength, he’s become convinced, isn’t actually achievement – his work experience has shown him this very clearly – it’s composure, inner peace, something that’s very, very hard to do, Marya for instance has no idea how to do that, something, he feels, that’s in the ballpark of sitting by himself at a bar and scrolling placidly through his phone.
III
And on one of these evenings a form passing by says, “Ryan?” and it’s buried so deep in fantasy that he’ll be sitting in some different city, in some different phase of life, and will run into somebody like Katlina, that this is kind of his first thought, the thing he allows himself to hope for, when he hears his name.
She’s not alone – that would have been too much to ask. She’s holding a martini and very anxious to not have it slosh. There’s a man barreling in front of her, drinks held in a triangle. Katlina calls to him to explain what’s happened and he waves them both over with his head. The group has installed itself in a booth. Andrew, her man, nods his greeting, reaches across his drinks to shake hands. Room is made for Ryan next to Katlina. They’re waiting for one more. There’s a friend of Andrew’s there, same age, same demographic, they’re waiting on his date. The two of them, Andrew and his friend, are sorting out drinks like they’re shuffling a deck of cards.
They’ve just gotten there but everybody’s smashed. Who knows, thinks Ryan, maybe this is just how they carry themselves. He raises his voice to be heard. It’s the usual questions, beer sipped, eyebrows raised more or less significantly depending on the piece of information being relayed. She’s been here two years. She’s an actress, she says, shrugging her shoulders and spreading her arms helplessly, like what else could one expect, she had no say in the matter. And Ryan, when it’s his turn, beer cagily in front of chin, says, equally helplessly that he’s a producer – who isn’t, everybody’s a producer, if the other person isn’t an actor, the statement has no great value, but it is a warming sensation to say a word like that, to hear himself say it, and to have it be true – and Andrew, it turns out, is also a producer, record label, and so is his friend, and she elbows Andrew and from his distant end of the booth he salutes Ryan with a drink, acknowledgment for whatever it is they have in common.
He’s busy by now. The friend’s date has arrived, they both seem to be actively pursuing her, Andrew’s arm drifting from time to time back to Katlina’s wrist, around her shoulders, like he’s touching base. The sense of a setup, the sense of Andrew suddenly wheeling around and confronting him, but that’s not the case. They cover neighborhoods in L.A., they cover travel, they cover dating in very hazy outline, they cover work. At a signal from Andrew, it’s time for them to leave – they’re all going to a different bar, working their way up to a party. They stand there while Katlina gives him her number and he texts her back to say ‘Nice to connect!’ and Andrew reaches out, nice handshake, man-to-man, slurs, “Great knowing you.”
This starts a new phase for Ryan. He goes to work, he goes on dates, and every time he checks his pocket, every time a few hours pass and there’s a stillness from his phone, he thinks of Katlina, the possibility of her thinking of him. And she does respond, there is a kind of slow-motion flirtation, he sends her short, low-key notes, that it was nice to see her, that it’s great to have people in L.A., and, at the end of each one, some question, some leading detail, something unfolding, and her replies are at their own pace, much less driven, it’s safe to assume, by adrenaline, obsession. But she does answer each of his questions – what some of her favorite things to do are here, that she’s settled in but it’s hard to talk to people lol, and when he asks her what she’s up to the week just before Thanksgiving, she writes back, “No big plans! Grab a drink?”
They’re on the patio of a wine bar overlooking one of the canyons. There’s no conversation about Andrew, nothing about Marya really – “Are you in touch with her?” he asks. “No,” she says very decisively, like whatever rupture they had is too complicated even to describe. “You?” “We’re friends,” he says – and the rest of it is from the sort of periphery of their romantic lives, his adventures on the dating apps, the tawdry story of her musician boyfriend. “I mean, I was open,” she says, “I didn’t care, I liked hearing about these hot women, I liked the way he described them, and then it was just completely out of control,” she says, her exclamation of laughter, like everything that happens, everything connected with her, she finds utterly surprising, “doesn’t answer a call for a couple of hours, is just a little late coming back from something – and every single time!”
Ryan, wine glass at chin, pleasant smile, eyebrows raised in mild surprise, trying to imagine what that would have been like, the way a life would have been structured where that was commonplace – he’d forgotten all about the musician boyfriend and then he was watching television, at his grandparents’ just to make the sense of humiliation all the more acute, saw a guest on one of the talk shows that looked somehow familiar, and realized who it was; that he had blown up after all. And Katlina with the same gesture as when she told him she was out here being an actress – what can you do, the world in fixed patterns, and this being the thing that he’d first found compelling in Katlina, other than the obvious, how, poker-face on, he’d told Marya that she’d be a good friend to keep, some feeling of like homespun, folk wisdom, practical knowledge in her, a gnarled peasant in the body of a New York 10.
And walks her to her car. In L.A., the critical conversations always happen here, in parking garages, standing on line at valet. Everything else, he thinks, is just some elaborate ceremony, drinks, meals, views exchanged, bills paid, the only thing that matters is this wary moment, everybody looking forward to their own car, their own place, and whether they can find it in them to take in this stranger they’re grinning at. He stands there, the door already open on the driver’s side, his hands down by hers, grazing the very ends of her fingertips. “Sure!” she says. “I’ll send you a pin.”
Drinks – the section of sitting on her living room couch, her pouring out the very bottom of some old bottle of gin, record on the turntable, discussion on the apartment, agreement on every possible topic – everything so civilized, so decorous, seems like the last thing imaginable is what they’re clearly about to do. The way she runs her fingertips through her hair, the way she asks him, once again, about his current project, and, good sport, he tells her what he’s already told her, and then like it’s completely in context, one thought leading to another, his current gig, what he likes about it, what he’s looking forward to from the next one, record hitting the end of its side, needle returning to base, the moment of looking at it like should they advance the side. Ryan puts his hand out and she curls her fingertips around his.
He’s thought about her so much, pictured this so many times, all the different permutations of this, that it’s a relief somehow, strange as this is to say, jeans off, socks off, to find that she has a pussy, just like anybody else’s, finds it gratifyingly slick. A beautiful girl, a rock star’s girl, a debauchee’s girl, best he’s ever had, no question about that really, but very different from her trophied at the producers’ table, her with wine glass somehow, miraculously, in Mayra’s apartment, her spilling everywhere. Now it’s just her lying back on her tousled bed, flattened out, her closing her eyes, the relief, the thrill, as he starts to stoke her.
IV
He is regularly in touch with Marya and when they’re text-chatting he has this curious overwhelming impulse, like a compulsion, this feeling that, stupid as it is, he can’t stop himself. “I have to tell you,” he writes, and, when he finishes, the long pause, a boiling, and she writes, “Um ok. Thank you for telling me. I guess.”
But whatever. Past the point of feminine sarcasm, past the point of feminine judgment – Katlina takes hours to respond to his text telling her what a nice time he had. Doesn’t matter. They had nothing much in common anyway. He’d been honest about himself, true to himself, tried to be a good version of himself – they’d found that lacking, seen right through that. So something else. Something hard and cold. Let them have their girl talk. Let them try and critique that.