by Ian Mark
“Zach…” I turned. Amanda looked at me, tears in her bright blues eyes. I waited. She opened her mouth. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and tucked it behind her ear. She closed her mouth. I left.
My phone vibrated as I was unlocking my door. I stepped inside and tossed my keys on the table. I unbuttoned my peacoat with one hand and pulled out my phone with the other. It was a message from my mom. “Zoey’s number,” it read, followed by a string of digits. I paused. Was Amanda right? Maybe I wasn’t ready for this. If this girl was everything my mother said, maybe I wasn’t being fair to introduce myself at such a bad time in my life and drag her down with me. Then again, I’ve always been selfish. If calling her had a chance of making me happy, why should I pass it up? I’d never even met her. I dialed the first digit when my phone vibrated. It was Kevin. He wanted me to meet up with him for dinner. “Sure.” I texted back. I realized I hadn’t checked my email in a few days. I had nothing but spam. A nice woman named Sylvia had written to tell me how I could enlarge my penis and satisfy her for hours. I was flattered, but not particularly interested.
A few hours later I remembered I hadn’t called Zoey yet. I figured I’d do it after dinner. Kevin had texted me nothing but an address, so I googled it to find out where and what it was. Some Italian place up in Midtown. Seemed kind of far for us to meet for dinner. Expensive too. He must have some sort of ulterior motive, I figured. As long as he didn’t try to have a heart-to-heart, I’d be fine. And if he wanted to buy me an expensive dinner, who was I to stop him?
I got there at 7:15. Kevin had said 7, but he was always late. Except this time. The maitre’d laughed when I told her I was meeting the most uptight guy wearing the most conservative suit in the place.
“I know exactly who you’re talking about. This way.” I watched her ass as I walked behind her. It swayed left and right. She was a little older, maybe early forties, late thirties, but I didn’t mind.
“Here we are. Let me know if you need anything. I’m Talia.” I watched her walk away. Kevin was wearing a black suit with a white tie. With his pale skin and black crew-cut, the only splotch of color anywhere on him were his lips, which were pursed. He gestured impatiently for me to sit down.
“You’re finally here.” He grabbed my arm and made me sit next to him. For the first time I noticed there were four chairs at the table, and two of them were already pulled out.
“What is this?” I asked.
“The ladies are in the bathroom,” he continued, talking over me. Then he seemed to hear my question.
“You remember that girl I told you about?”
“The one you banged last weekend?” He shushed me. I looked around and admired all the nice clothes the other people there had on. I was woefully underdressed.
“I’ve had dinner with her a few times. I actually kind of like her so please don’t mess this up.” He calmed down. I didn’t.
“Then why am I here? Who’s the other girl?” I realized what this was. “Oh. Kevin. Tell me this isn’t a double date. Please.” I put my head in my arms on the table and looked up at him.
“What do you want me to say?” He scratched the top of his head. I wished his hair was longer so I could pull it.
“I want you to tell me that this isn’t a blind date, and I want that to be the truth.”
“Excuse me gentlemen.” It was the waitress. She was an old, old woman. I was surprised she could walk. Her breasts had long ago given up on fighting their losing battle with gravity. She seemed like a brisk wind could pick her up and carry her off to heaven. But her voice was strong. It startled me. I sat up and folded my hands in my lap. “Now that the last member of your party is here, I was wondering if you might like a drink?” She looked at me.
“Yes, um, I’d like a glass of chardonnay I guess.” She didn’t write anything down.
“Very well. Sir, would you like another?” She indicated Kevin’s beer with a nod.
“Yes, please, ma’am.” Kevin also seemed unnerved.
“I’ll have those for you in a few, and perhaps then every member of your party will actually be at the table?”
“Thank you, uh, what did you say your name was?” Kevin seemed oddly interested.
“Ursula, dear.” Her tone made it clear that she didn’t feel he was particularly dear to her or anyone. I laughed.
“Is that your real name?” She frowned at me. Her face could not wrinkle any deeper, so she had to lower her eyebrows to make it clear she was upset.
“No, it’s the stage name I use to keep away my fans.” Her tone was so dry and bored that I had trouble detecting she was kidding for a few seconds. After neither of us responded, she turned and shuffled away. I turned back to Kevin.
“Is this really a blind date? Why would you do that to me?”
“Uh, well…” He wasn’t looking at me. I followed his eyes to the two beautiful ladies exiting the restroom. They were laughing as they strode through the place. Every single head that was attached to a body that was attached to a penis turned as they did so. A few that weren’t turned too.
“Which one are you dating?” Not that it mattered, I’d have the blond or the redhead.
“The redhead,” he whispered. “Her name’s Violet.” Damn. I wanted the oxymoronic one.
“What’s mine named?”
“Wanda.” I turned back, content now that I had a name to put to the face. And damn was it a nice face. Her red lips curled as she laughed, and her round amber eyes twinkled. The rest wasn’t too bad either. Her legs went on for miles. She wore a red frilly dress that would have looked foolish on most other girls, including Amanda. I stood up as they got to our table. Kevin followed suit.
“Violet, this is Zach.” we shook hands. Her handshake was surprisingly firm. “Zach, this is Wanda.” She placed her hand in mine daintily. I kissed it. She giggled.
“Please, I prefer Cosmo.” Kevin snickered. They just stared at me. Not a great start. Ursula came back with my wine and Kevin’s beer. She took our orders. I felt the strange need to have her approve of my order. I went with a steak. The way she repeated it made me feel I had erred.
“She is so creepy,” Wanda said as she walked away.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s so weird to think she was our age once, going out on dates and partying and stuff. I wonder if you’ll be like that when you’re older.”
Wanda’s face warped. Kevin grimaced. “You think I’ll look like that? Well, you must not think much of me now.”
“No! I didn’t mean it that way at all. I meant… you’re so beautiful now, and I just thought... wouldn’t it be weird if in fifty years…” my voice trailed off. It was over. I had lost. That’s the thing with first impressions-- they’re all that matter, and they’re based on such tiny intervals of time that a momentary lapse in judgement can cost you an entire relationship. The rest of the dinner would be a waste of time. The weird thing is, we’re expected to act so perfectly normal when we meet someone. But no one is looking for “normal.” Everyone is looking for someone unique, someone who will tell us things that only we will know. So we have to act as normal as possible to have the chance to someday show how weird we are. Because everyone is weird.
Kevin was glaring at me. I had to act normal for his sake at this point, not mine. “So Kevin,” I began, “How are you liking the new corner office? Big enough for you?” Violet caught Wanda’s eye. Kevin gave me an appreciative nod. He launched into a well-rehearsed-but-not-well-enough-to-prevent-it-from-sounding-rehearsed speech about the pressures and responsibilities of his new job. “But the view,” he said. He took a dramatic pause. “It’s absolutely gorgeous.” Violet practically swooned. “Sometimes I don’t get any work done, It’s so nice to look out.” Both girls were loving it. I was long forgotten. The food came.
After a long meal, it was finally time to go. Kevin invited Wanda and I to join him and Violet for drinks at some place nearby. She made up some excuse, so I did too. I wasn’t in the mood for anymore double-da
ting, and I certainly wasn’t interested in third-wheeling. I patted Kevin on the back, nodded to Violet, and hesitated when I got to Wanda. She stuck out her tiny hand. Her nail polish was freshly painted maroon. It matched her dress.
“It was nice meeting you,” she said. I took her hand and shook it firmly. It’s funny, the lies we tell. I could already hear her complaining to Violet the next day: “He was so weird. All those corny jokes weren’t even funny. You’re lucky you met Kevin first.”
“It was my pleasure,” I said. I’ve always been a hypocrite. We all got to the door. I excused myself and went to the bathroom so that we wouldn’t have to leave at the same time. The bathroom was impossibly fancy. They had scented soaps and warm towels for after you had done your business. There was an employee whose job was to stand at the front of the bathroom and nod at people as they came in. He wore a red button-down jacket and black pants. He had on a tall circular cap. He looked like one of the guards at Buckingham Palace. I imagined he was one, but at a crucial time he had moved, ruining the day of three tourists from Kansas who had come to see the guards not move. So he had been fired, and he had traveled to America in search of similar work. Unfortunately, the market for people who stand very still wasn’t great, and this gig was the best he could do. I could see the sadness in his eyes as he greeted me with an almost imperceivable nod. His hair was cropped close and his face was pockmarked with acne scars.
“How’s it going?” I asked, just to see if he could talk.
“Fine, sir, and you?” He had a nasally voice that drained the hope out of me. I didn’t respond. I moved past him to the row of urinals. There was a man at the one closest to the stalls, and another standing with his feet spread wide at the urinal nearest to the door. The farthest stall was empty. Urinal etiquette demanded I take the stall over the middle urinal, to avoid the chance of social interaction in this wretched but beautiful place.
While I peed, I heard a loud crash. Someone had burst into the room. I heard a grunt and a man fall. I got on my knees (the floors were impeccable) and looked under the stall. A pair of heels walked slowly down the aisle, past the urinals. The depressed guard lay on the ground, not moving. The mystery woman kicked down the first door. She kept walking. She kicked down the second door. I was next. I was too scared to pull up my pants.
The door was kicked in. It swung open with a bang and bounced back. Wanda put out a hand and stopped it. She strutted into the stall and dragged me to my feet.
“I want you,” she whispered. I was too stunned to say anything. “I wanted you as soon as I saw you.” She pushed me onto the seat. I banged my ankle on the porcelain base. I brushed her hair out of her eyes and kissed her. She moaned. “I just had to have your--”
I shook my head, clearing my mind of the fantasy. I flushed the toilet with my shoe and zipped up. I washed my hands, sampling all the different scents. On the way out, I nodded at the guard, who I had taken to calling Chauncey. I apologized in my head for having him incapacitated to allow me to satiate my sexual desires. Horribly rude. I barely knew the man.
I was bored on the walk back. Walking always bored me. It was just me and my thoughts. No entertainment. I dug through my pockets and came up with a scrap of paper. It was Zoey’s number. For what seemed like the hundredth time, I took out my phone to call her. I had a text message. I ignored it. I dialed the number. It rang as I walked. And rang. Finally, a robot told me that the number I was calling was not available, and prompted me to leave a message. I didn’t know what to say. After a pause, I said who I was and why I was calling. I asked her to call me back at her earliest convenience, then chided myself for sounding like a middle-aged man calling a proctologist to inquire about his availability. I hung up the phone, already second-guessing my decision. I tried to think of a time when my mother setting me up with a girl had gone well. I realized she had never actually set me up with a girl before. My thoughts instead drifted to Brian’s funeral…
It was the grayest day of my life. The trees were gray, the snow was gray, Amanda was gray. Everything was gray. The sun didn’t come out once. I spent the whole day waiting for it to rain, for the weather to match the way I felt, but the rain wouldn’t come. I couldn’t cry. I was a mess. Amanda clutched my arm as we sat directly behind Brian’s parents. I couldn’t bear to face them. When his father spoke to me at the reception, his stern face wasn’t even angry, it was just disappointed.
“You were his best friend.” The admission seemed to cause him almost physical pain. I thanked him and looked for something to drink.
Earlier, I had sat there, and while looking around at all these people I didn’t know, it became clear how little I really knew about Brian’s life before NYU. We were college roommates turned best friends. The random pairing our freshman year had been willfully renewed the next year, and the next at the cheapest apartment close to campus we could find. We had upgraded, and Murph and Kevin joined us the next year, but I was never as close with them as I was with Brian.
For as much as I deferred to him, we were truly equals. He respected me. I respected him, and I loved him like a brother. Yet we so rarely spoke of the time before we met, of our childhoods. I had met only a handful of his high school friends, he had met even fewer of mine. These were the people that had come to his funeral. I could feel all of them blaming me-- the prolonged stares, the whispering that stopped as I approached and grew bolder as I left.
“They hate me,” I whispered to Amanda, who had been strange all afternoon. She wore a black dress and a black hat. She looked too young to be at such a sad occasion. I imagined her at my funeral, wearing a veil and weeping silently as they lowered my lifeless body into its final resting place.
“You’re being paranoid. A lot of these people probably don’t even know who you are.” This disheartened me. Their presumed hatred included a recognition of who I was: Brian Lewis’ best friend. But if they didn’t even know who I was, it cheapened our relationship: had Brian not talked about me to his old friends as I had him to mine?
The service ended. A few of us made our way out of the large funeral home, which had diminished the appearance of the size of the group there to say goodbye, out to the snow-covered cemetery for the burial. The snow crunched underneath my too-tight loafers as I reflected on the service. The rabbi had struggled to find the words to mourn Brian’s death. He had died young, but it was his fault he had done so. None of the usual stuff would fit. The eulogies had been equally painful. I had not been asked to give one, which I resented and took as a sign of my guilt in the eyes of the family. After all, no one had spent more time with him over the past six years than I had. Hadn’t I earned the right to say a few words about him?
Amanda clutched my arm as we walked. I wondered about her feelings. She had always enjoyed his company when he was around, but been highly critical of his drug use when he wasn’t. She felt he was a bad influence on me. I didn’t deny it, she was definitely right. If the NYU housing system hadn’t spit us out as a match six years ago, I almost certainly wouldn’t smoke, would drink less and burn less, and absolutely never would have tried cocaine. But I also would have missed out on some of the most amazing experiences and best stories of my life. I would be a different person. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, the mean part of my psyche thought. I pushed those thoughts into a box with all the sadness and anger and guilt I felt, and I pushed that box as far down as I could. I knew one day that box would spring open and I would have to deal with them.
The rabbi stopped us by holding up a hand. Brian’s father looked at me. I looked away. All of the work he had done to raise Brian to be a good man, to treat women right and to respect his elders, was for naught. Never mind that it hadn’t worked that well, that Brian was a womanizing drugged-out failing actor, I had ruined his life’s work of raising a son. He wrapped his arms around Brian’s mother, who had started to sob. She was so much bigger than the last time I had seen her, almost three years ago. Her black dress was too tight, and the jacket she w
ore over it seemed ready to burst. Her sniffling cries drowned out the rabbi, a young man with long curly brown hair and those ear-things that very Jewish people have. I didn’t know what they were called. I had systematically flushed out all my knowledge of Hebrew and Jewish culture as soon as the checks cleared from my Bar Mitzvah.
The wind blew, and I bristled in my suit. I had forgotten to wear an overcoat. Well, forgotten to own one, really. I had always borrowed Brian’s when I needed one, but that seemed wrong to do in this case. I doubted he would have protested, but still. My peacoat didn’t seem quite somber enough for the occasion. So I had figured I could be cold for a little while. But now I was regretting my poetic mind for suggesting any parallels between my discomfort and retribution for my actions. I put an arm around Amanda, not so much for her comfort as for the warmth of her body against mine. I felt movement in my pants, and was ashamed that I could feel and think in such a way while my best friend’s corpse was ten feet away waiting to be buried in the snow.
A phone rang. An awkward looking grey-haired man apologized profusely. The rabbi looked at him. His hair was wild and his suit ill-fitting. He took out his phone. Brian’s father looked at him. He seemed ready to answer the damn phone, when Brian’s mother’s sobs grew louder. He finally remembered where he was, and he silenced his phone. I wanted to break the thing into a thousand pieces and throw them in his face. Amanda stroked my arm. I glared at him. The rabbi continued speaking. A few muscular Mexican men stepped forward and began lowering Brian into the grave. This was it. I looked at the box that contained my best friend, and I still couldn’t cry. I felt as if my inability to produce tears was betraying my best friend. I turned away. Amanda wrapped her arms around me from behind.
