The Romantics

by Galt Niederhoffer

  “You’re drunk,” said Pete.

  “Well, yeah,” said Weesie. “We’ve been drinking since five o’clock. What time is it now?”

  Pete shrugged. “Hell if I know.”

  “Of course, you don’t wear a watch.”

  Pete smiled. It was a point of pride that he didn’t wear a watch. In college, it had seemed a more quaint rebellion. Now, it seemed subversive, a true rejection of societal rules.

  “Jake wears a watch,” Weesie declared.

  “I think he wears two,” said Pete.

  “I bought him a really nice one for Christmas,” Weesie said, then she deflated. “It’s such a boring gift.”

  “The worst,” Pete agreed. “Tripler gave me one for my last birthday.” He assumed a robotic monotone. “The gift you give when you want your spouse to show up on time.”

  “Ha,” said Weesie. She let loose with a sharp jab to Pete’s thigh.

  “I’m just kidding,” Pete added. “It’s beautiful. She had it engraved with our anniversary.”

  “Aw, that’s so sweet,” Weesie said. “I should have done that.”

  “Not sweet. Practical,” Pete said. “I had forgotten it one too many times.”

  Weesie attempted to administer another jab to the leg, but this time, Pete anticipated the motion and grabbed her foot by the ankle.

  It occurred to Pete that holding Weesie’s ankle was inappropriately intimate, but he dismissed the notion quickly and held it firmly in his grasp.

  Weesie made a halfhearted attempt to disengage from Pete’s grasp but, relishing the charge it sent through her body, quickly gave up. She batted one arm across the floor, searching for the wine bottle.

  Weesie did not start drinking seriously until after she graduated from college. At school, she had earned the adorable, if slightly embarrassing, reputation of being the member of the group most likely to end the night sober. It was not for lack of trying. She tried to party voraciously. But instinctively, she didn’t enjoy it. To watch common sense, balance, even walls evaporate as a night progressed struck her as decidedly un-fun. Luckily, fate conspired with Weesie’s preferences. As a freshman, she was pretty enough to walk into any dorm room without a drink in her hand.

  That her mother’s diet of vodka gimlets and peppermint candies formed the basis for her aversion to alcohol did not occur to Weesie until she married Jake. At this point, it became clear that Jake shared her mother’s proclivity and, more importantly, that Weesie needed to acquire it in order for the marriage to survive. Even so, she had not developed an especially high tolerance. She was still as charmingly vulnerable to alcohol—red wine especially—as she had been during those first few months of her marriage, when she had ended most nights sitting on her bathroom floor, counting the tiles on the wall, wondering how she’d ended up with someone so much like her mother.

  “Here; I’ll go first. Annie Wallace,” Weesie said. She elevated her diction as though she were presenting a diploma. “Lovable but neurotic. Totally obsessed with her looks. Not sure about her fiancé. Not as smart as she thinks.”

  “Ouch,” said Pete.

  “Sorry,” said Weesie. “I told you I was drunk.” Without getting up, she fumbled for the wine bottle resting on the floor. She lifted it to her mouth sideways, like a canteen.

  “It’s empty,” said Pete.

  “No,” Weesie whined. “What are we going to do now?”

  “Oscar Clark,” Pete announced, and it functioned, for the moment, as a distraction.

  “The smartest one among us,” Weesie said. “And the most annoying.”

  Pete nodded his agreement.

  “So far in the closet,” Weesie added, “it’s a wonder the boy can breathe.”

  “You think so?” asked Pete. “Know,” Weesie said.

  “Interesting,” Pete said.

  “What the hell is ‘wireless content’ anyway? If he says that again, I’m going to smack him.”

  “It’s huge, you idiot,” Pete said.

  “Whatever,” Weesie went on. “Can someone please tell him the dot-com bubble burst?”

  “He works for Google, dumb-ass.”

  “Oh God,” Weesie said. “Really?” She sat upright and turned to Pete. “You would tell me if I were insufferable, wouldn’t you?” She fell back onto the sofa before Pete could respond. “Someone should tell Oscar.”

  Pete poked the arch of Weesie’s foot, and she recoiled, giggling. He had never realized how hilarious she was until now. Tripler often contended that Weesie was the funniest girl in the group, but Pete had rejected the sentiment as a kind of consolation prize; it was better to be Lila, the prettiest, or Laura, the smartest. In all his time knowing Weesie, he had never seen evidence of this vaunted sense of humor. But now he realized the observation was justified, understated even.

  “Your turn,” Weesie demanded.

  Pete said nothing. He had never before spent this much time alone with Weesie, and he was surprised, not only by her rowdiness but also by the smell of her skin. It was a guilty realization, of course, but one that he quickly dismissed. How to feel this way with his wife, he decided, was the lesson he could take away from this night.

  “Laura. Brilliant, tortured, hates Lila, completely obsessed with Tom,” he said.

  Weesie smiled and saluted. “Well stated.”

  “Lila. Perfect, beautiful, gorgeous, tortures her friends for sport.” He paused, debating his next disclosure. “Not very good in bed.”

  “No!” Weesie squealed.

  “Afraid so,” said Pete.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Freshman year.” He paused. “And then one other time that nobody knows about.”

  “What! When?” Weesie demanded. “We were still in college,” Pete said.

  “But you were dating Tripler when you were still in college!”

  Pete nodded. “Scandalous, I know.” He moved on before Weesie could launch a more extensive interrogation. “Tom. Hearthrob. Genius. Charmer. Missing, as we know. Not in love with Lila. And yes, I think that’s why.”

  “Aha!” said Weesie. “I knew it.” She sat upright and turned to face Pete. “So where do you think he is?”

  “Somewhere, freaking out.”

  Weesie stared at Pete for a moment, nodding and smiling. “I knew it,” she said. “I totally knew it. That makes me feel better.”

  So much better that she quickly lost interest in Tom and moved on to the remaining victims.

  “We skipped ourselves and our spouses,” Weesie said.

  “Seems fair enough,” Pete said.

  “Come on. It’ll be fun,” she said. “I’ll do Tripler, and you do Jake. So we both have something on each other.”

  Pete grinned and shook his head, pretending to refuse. Without thinking, he slid his hand from Weesie’s ankle to her calf.

  “Tripler,” Weesie began carefully. “Hilarious. Driven. Terrified.”

  Pete swallowed a treacherous feeling.

  “I just worry sometimes that she’s going to snap.”

  “I think she already did,” said Pete.

  Weesie nodded solemnly.

  Pete frowned as he digested the enormity of the betrayal.

  “Your turn,” Weesie said. She reached again for the bottle, but tipped it to the ground.

  “Jake,” he began. “Talented. Sensitive. One of Yale’s finest. But if the poor guy doesn’t write something soon, I’m afraid he’s going to go postal.”

  Weesie covered her mouth with her hand, as though the gesture could obscure her agreement.

  “They’d actually be really good together,” Pete said.

  “Oh my God, you’re totally right,” Weesie shouted.

  “Maybe we should set them up,” Pete said.

  “I think Tripler’s already on it,” said Weesie.

  “Good point,” said Pete. “But I bet we’re having more fun.”

  It occurred to Weesie that the conversation had reached the threshold of propriety.
But she waited too long to respond—or decided against it—and by the time she did, she was too drunk to tell the difference.

  ELEVEN

  Tripler stood suddenly from the sofa and beelined for the bar. The ideal ratio of vodka to vermouth eluded her at the moment, so she erred on the side of too much vodka. It was a policy she followed as a rule: masking self-doubt with self-assurance. Drinks in hand, she returned to the coffee table and set them down with a ceremonious clink. She produced a small white plastic bag and scanned the coffee table for an adequate surface. She rejected the coaster, a book on Colonial architecture, and the glass pane of the table before settling on a framed photograph of Lila.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Jake said. Cocaine was never a part of the group’s repertoire in college. It was a staple of the classes that matriculated a few years later but considered by this group to be as passé as bell-bottom jeans.

  “Come on,” Tripler said. “This is your last chance to do blow off of Lila’s thighs.”

  Jake closed his eyes, the only response to this kind of provocation. When he opened them, Tripler was hunched over the table, playing the role of the beautiful mess. The performance was perfectly calibrated—repellent yet irresistible. Before she had inhaled the first line, Jake was sitting by her side.

  Despite her efforts to present herself as a confident, together person, Tripler felt, at the age of twenty-nine, as lost as she had at nineteen. No matter what she was wearing, she felt like a mannequin, shoddily pulled together, desperate to be reinvented in the coming season. It didn’t matter that she had finally kicked a ten-year eating disorder. Unfortunately, her particular disorder was the one that didn’t amount to weight loss. Instead, it had caused her weight to fluctuate over the same fifteen pounds and consumed much of the day with the search for a secluded bathroom. Choosing acting as a vocation certainly played into the disease. But oddly, the crushing rejections of auditions were not problematic in themselves. In some way, the dismissive directors and apathetic producers offered a kind of consolation, echoing a voice as familiar and nostalgic as milk and cookies.

  An only child, Tripler had been subject to all of her mother’s attention and none of her approval. That her mother frowned on her vocation was predictable, but that she disparaged every other choice Tripler made—her weight, her wardrobe, the color of her hair—was almost too much to bear. Mrs. Pane was not even satisfied with Yale, having hoped for Harvard. The constancy of her disapproval permeated Tripler’s every thought, causing her behavior to oscillate, much like her weight, between obedience and rebellion. It was as though her mother had infected her with a germ at conception, haunting Tripler with the suspicion that she was defective. Nothing she had done in her twenty-nine years had done much to convince her otherwise.

  Her girlfriends heaved a collective sigh when, just over a year ago, Tripler asked, by way of mass e-mail, if anyone knew of a good shrink. All four had replied within the hour. And it seemed to be a divine intervention. In the last year, Tripler had kicked bulimia, lost twenty pounds, and gotten her first part in an indie movie, a three-day stint that confirmed her belief that movie sets were her natural habitat. Unfortunately, this progress was offset by a handful of new bad habits. The state of her marriage—and her affair with cocaine—had been unsettling of late. She had looked forward to Tom and Lila’s wedding with childlike anticipation—as though it were her own wedding—hopeful that time with her best friends from college would give way to the feelings she had in college—the giddy excitement, the hopeful anxiety, the oblivious confidence. She had not felt any of those things for so many years.

  “Hey,” said Tripler. She swatted at Jake as he leaned in for a second sniff. But she was too slow to respond. Jake had already inhaled the pile.

  The basement seemed like the right part of the house to tackle first. It was accessed from the kitchen, so the path was likely deserted. Even so, the chill of clay tiles on their feet took them by surprise.

  “Shit,” Tripler snapped, looking down at the floor. “Of course, she did terra-cotta.”

  Jake was actually relieved by the cold. The feeling of tile against his bare feet reaffirmed his connection with the ground.

  “Are you sure this shit isn’t laced,” he demanded. “I’ve done cocaine, and this is not how it felt.”

  “Don’t be retarded,” Tripler said.

  She took the lead and opened the door to the basement, marching fearlessly ahead while Jake followed behind.

  The planks of the stairs were wider and darker than the floorboards in the rest of the house, revealing the shifts of the house’s foundation far more honestly than the polished floors of the public areas. This realization gave Tripler an odd sense of satisfaction. It was pure thrift, the sneakiest of economics, that would compel a homeowner to skim-coat the dining room walls but shortchange the hidden spaces.

  A muffled but indisputable thud stopped them in their path.

  “What the fuck was that?” Jake whispered.

  Tripler froze, cocked her head to the ceiling, then continued down the stairs. “It’s a spooky old haunted house,” she quipped. “What do you expect?”

  A single bare lightbulb hung from the ceiling, surrounded by spiderwebs. Tripler fumbled for a moment, then tugged at the string, spreading light throughout the room. She moved past an old refrigerator into a smaller adjoining room. The furnace and fuse box rattled with every step she took.

  Jake trailed slightly behind, ears pricked for suspicious sounds. He was already quite overwhelmed by the high. Everything in the room seemed to spin as though he were the axis of a carousel. He clenched and unclenched his hands, suddenly convinced they were going numb. Gulping his drink helped the cause, sending tingles of sensation to his extremities. Against his will, he forced himself to scout the adjoining room. Inside, he found a bare, makeshift office that was bathed in an inch of dust. A plaid sleeper sofa languished on a worn Persian rug. Two metal music stands stood across from the sofa, their height and distance causing them to look like eager guests. Calming slightly, he crossed the room to examine the music stands. They held consecutive pages with a five-line staff, a musical work whose title was scrawled at the top of the page: The Last Great Love.

  A flickering light interrupted Jake’s investigation. He followed the signal back to the main room to find Tripler standing under the bulb, tugging its string impatiently.

  “He’s not here,” she announced.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Jake said.

  “He’s obviously with Lila,” Tripler said. She tugged violently at the string, casting them back into darkness.

  Cocaine, though not a hallucinatory drug, had a strange effect on the search. Even Tripler found the task of tiptoeing through the unlit house a trial. As she walked, objects appeared in sharp relief, as though it were noon on a winter day, not sometime after midnight. Her balance was dulled to the same extent that her perception was sharpened. And the combination of these two things made it very hard to walk.

  She had intended her supply to last through the weekend but quickly gave in to the drug’s logic, concluding that one excessive night was better than several moderate ones. As they crossed through the kitchen, she treated herself to a quick replenishment. There was something irresistible about doing lines off Augusta’s countertops.

  “How’s your job going anyway,” she demanded. She poured and divided a sizable pile into two unequal portions, then handily inhaled the larger pile and offered Jake the smaller one with a gracious nod.

  “I got fired last week,” said Jake. “But I haven’t told Weesie yet, so please don’t say anything.” Jake attempted to mimic Tripler’s technique, but he lost concentration in mid-snort and sacrificed the rest to a cough.

  “You haven’t told Weesie yet?”

  “Nope. And I’m not planning to for a while.”

  “Where does she think you are all day?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care.”

  “Oh God, Jake. That’s awfu
l,” said Tripler. She ran her finger over the counter. “I’m sure she would understand.”

  “You think? But would you understand?” Jake paused. “If I was totally pulling your leg?”

  “Fuck off,” she snapped. “Excuse me for giving a shit about my friends.”

  “I’m just joking,” Jake said.

  “Hilarious,” said Tripler. “Next time, I won’t even ask.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Jake. “Don’t be mad. How about you? How have you been?”

  “Lately?” asked Tripler “I don’t know,” said Jake. “How have you been since college?”

  Tripler opened her mouth to reply with typical bravado. But the drug revised her response, and the truth came out instead. “Not so great,” she confessed.

  “How are you and Pete?” Jake tried.

  “Great,” she lied. “Really good.”

  “That’s good,” said Jake. “Us too.”

  Tripler looked down and stared at the counter, as though she were trying to count the grains in the stone. She remained like this for a moment, stifling a wave of sadness. But before she could name the emotion she was fighting against, she burst into tears. “We’re terrible,” she admitted. “Really bad.” A cascade of sniffles obscured her speech.

  “Oh Trip,” said Jake. He leaned across the counter and placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “Everyone seems so happy,” she sniffled. “No,” said Jake. “No one’s happy.”

  “Really?” she asked. She stopped sniffling for a moment, as though comforted by this thought. “Really,” Jake said.

  “Well, you people should try acting. You’re better at it than me.”

  Jake tilted his head thoughtfully in mock consideration. “Hmm, maybe I should,” he said. “The writing thing hasn’t panned out.”

  Tripler offered a grateful smile. “At least you know you have talent. I haven’t done anything worthwhile since I was eighteen years old.”