by TL Gehr
I roll onto my side. I know the solution, I know what will help. I fight the urge for about five seconds before I get up and go rummage in my toiletry bag. There, one blessed blister of sleeping pills.
Gene was concerned when I said I intended to keep taking them. Sleeping pills are highly addictive yadda yadda. I told her plainly I’d go insane if I didn’t get some help with sleep. That was one of many things the heroin solved. When I shot up, every worry melted away. I felt warm and safe and I slept like a baby. I’d never slept so well, I couldn’t believe it.
At first, at least.
The effect didn’t last long. It never does. Soon I was taking it just to feel like I wasn’t dying. Sleeping pills are a compromise. That’s what I said to Gene. If she took away my sleeping pills, I was definitely going to start on the opiates again.
So she compromised and gave me a script for enough to get me through a week.
“I don’t want you using these every day, Brian. I don’t feel good about giving them to you, but if I do, you need to promise to be honest with me. If you start feeling dependent, or if they make you crave the hard stuff, or if you find you can’t get them to stretch through the month, promise you’ll call me. Come and see me and we can investigate other solutions.”
That was over a week ago, and I’ve managed to avoid taking any since. I’ve done all the other shit she suggested from warm milk to lavender soap and reading boring poetry. Some nights, if I go to bed early enough, I can even catch a few hours before dawn. But not tonight. Tonight I need help.
I stare at the little pink pill in my palm. Is it going to make me relapse? No. No, I refuse to let it. I can do this. I took these pills long ago, before my life went to shit. I can be normal again.
“I’ve missed you,” I tell the little pill before swallowing it down gratefully.
Because I haven’t taken in so long, it hits me full force. When I climb back into bed, I’m already surrounded by a mental fluffy cloud. I see that New York jerk with his square jaw and his white steed, blond hair backlit by warm sunlight, before oblivion claims me.
5
Philip
It must be near midnight when it finally happens. I see Chase.
It shouldn’t surprise me and I definitely shouldn’t stiffen the way I do, because then Jones notices and gasps, and Tabatha says, “Is that—?” and Gunther smiles his slow smile and says, “Finally this night’s about to get interesting.”
It shouldn’t surprise me, because he’s always shown up at my mother’s galas. He likes being seen in the right places. It shouldn’t surprise me because he wasn’t big on protecting my feelings when we were together, so there’s no reason he would be now.
“What is he wearing?” Triston leans forward with his elbows on his knees.
Jones tugs him back by his collar and growls the word, “Discretion?”
As usual, we’ve snagged a table furthest away from the center of the room so we can people watch and gossip without being watched and gossiped about. In this particular venue, it means we’re on a mezzanine, so there’s a good chance Chase won’t see me. Still, I have to stop myself from pulling at my cuffs and fixing my bowtie. Cameras flash as Chase poses for the paparazzi. His perfect teeth glint. He’s wearing a suit of deep green velvet and a striped scarf.
“It’s a bold choice,” I say. What I hope they’re hearing is that I’m fine—totally fine—with talking about my ex.
“I’d say,” says Tabatha. She wrinkles her nose. “Very 2012 Ralph Lauren.”
“I can dig it.” Triston is leaning forward again. “Harry Potter couture.”
He’s the one who looks like Harry Potter. He’s wearing his round frames tonight and his curly black hair has lost the battle with whatever product he put in earlier. His bowtie is hanging loose around his neck, and his dress shirt is open, revealing a triangle of light brown skin. From the outside, he seems like the very last person who should be commenting on fashion. But I know his outfit cost several thousand dollars. He wouldn’t leave the house in anything under a grand.
“It’s probably some up and coming new designer who’s showing at Fashion Week,” I say. What I’m really saying is that I’m still totally fine with this conversation and with Chase being here. Jones definitely doesn’t hear that. She puts a hand on mine that indicates what she heard was, It’s probably something designed by whoever he’s currently sleeping with.
It’s not like I was completely blind to what he was when we were together. I knew he was probably screwing around. I just thought that I was the one he’d chosen to come home to; I was the one who mattered.
I pour myself more wine. My shoulder twinges from my fall earlier. I wish I could leave, but as the royal prince in this pageant, I have to stay until the last guests have gone.
Tabitha takes out her compact and checks her makeup. She’s in a red satin number. Her brown hair is in a fastidious updo that shows off her diamond earrings. “Let’s change the subject. He’s clearly trying to get everyone’s attention. We shouldn’t give him the satisfaction.”
Tabitha’s the daughter of the British ambassador. She spends half the year in London and half in New York. She can speak seven languages and curse in sixteen. When Chase left me, she was the one who leaked unflattering photos of him to the press. I decided right then that I’d love her forever. Three weeks later, People was still trying to deconstruct his makeup routine. “From drab to fab! Makeup secrets top models don’t want you to know. Here’s what supermodel Chase Shaw’s hiding.”
“Oh, I know!” Jones slaps the table, making our glasses wobble. “Why don’t you tell them what happened in the park?”
“Oh yes,” Triston turns his attention from Chase’s outfit back to me. “You did that horse thing. How did that go?”
I shoot Jones a look. “I thought we were moving off the subject of my humiliation?”
“That bad?” Gunther’s interest is piqued. He says schadenfreude is a German word and therefore it’s his born right to enjoy it. “Tell us more.”
I sigh. “Some kid ran out in front of the horse.”
“No, you’re starting at the wrong place.” Jones smiles broadly and her cheeks dimple. “First you have to picture Prince Charming.”
I roll my eyes.
“He was sitting there with his back straight and this aloof look—”
“I wasn’t aloof!”
“—chin tilted up, eyes scanning the peasants on the lawns.”
“Oh, please.”
“Then, this kid rushes across the path after his frisbee and Samson rears and Philip goes flying. Like ankles over head. You should have seen his face.”
“This is why no one else agreed to go riding with you, by the way.”
“And—go on, tell them what happened next.”
“No one wants to hear this.”
Triston leans on the table with his face cupped in his hands. “I want to hear this.”
“I, too, wish to hear this,” Gunther says.
“Fine. Then she leaves me, lying on my back. I tell the kid off for running across the road and some guy goes off at me about how elite New Yorkers are and calls me an asshole. You happy, Jones?”
My bitterness isn’t really directed at her, but at myself. My guts churn when I think of how I must have come across to that guy and I really don’t need to be reminded of it.
She sighs and shakes her head. “You’re telling it all wrong. So this short shit—5'5? 5'6?—this short, skinny, guy comes out of nowhere and gets right up in Philip’s face and starts—”
“Who’s getting up in Philip’s face?”
Ice rushes down my spine. Chase is standing over our table with his perfect grin. I was so focused on Jones that I didn’t see him approach.
No one says anything.
“Sounds like a good story.” Chase invites himself to sit on Jones’s other side.
Tabitha forces a smile. “Well, if it isn’t Lord Voldemort.”
“Shhh, don’
t say his name,” Triston hisses, playing along.
Gunther laughs sharply, throwing his head back in clear delight.
“What do you want?” Jones asks Chase.
Before he can answer, Triston points at him and says, “Yes! Tabitha you’re absolutely right. What was that actor’s name?”
Chase raises his perfectly sculpted eyebrows.
“Who? Voldemort?” Tabitha asks.
“Yeah, Tom Riddle. He does look like that guy, doesn’t he?”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Chase says. What he’s actually saying is God, you’re a bunch of nerds.
Tabitha tilts her head. “He does quite. Same soulless eyes.”
Chase’s perfect eyebrows disappear into his hairline and for some reason, I think of that stranger’s dark, expressive brows and how they communicated everything he was thinking just as surely as his words did. Chase’s eyebrows don’t communicate much because botox.
“You wanted something?” Jones repeats.
Chase’s smile slides back into place. “Yes. I wanted to extend a personal invitation to you all. I’m hosting a little do next Friday, a Fashion Week after party. Nothing too extravagant, but the paps will be there, Vanity Fair, a few others.”
“So what you’re saying,” Jones swirls her wine, “is that you need us to be there so you look good. This isn’t rent-a-crowd, Shaw. You’re going to have to buy friends elsewhere.”
He puts his hand to his chest in mock affront. “You wound me, Barbara.”
Now it’s my eyebrows that shoot into my hairline. Jones hates being called that. Which, of course, Chase knows.
“He doesn’t want us there,” Tabitha says, appraising him. “An invitation a week before is hardly an invitation. Only social pariahs have a Friday free a week before. He’s not here to invite us, Jones, he’s here to inform us that we were snubbed.”
She’s right. Invitations for that sort of social event go out months in advance. This gala? It was planned in June.
Chase and Tabitha stare each other down. He doesn’t correct her.
“Well, I guess we’re going to a party,” I say, because no one else will say it and because I’m tipsy and tired and I would say absolutely anything to make Chase feel uncomfortable. “I expect you’ll send the official invitation in the mail? Or will you leave it with the doorman?”
He looks at me and my insides whither, but I keep my jaw set. He will not see any vulnerability in me ever again. I could be dying inside and he wouldn’t know it.
He rises slowly from his seat. “How kind of you to rearrange your bustling social calendars.” Then, directed at me, “Feel free to bring your plus ones.”
I keep very still so he can’t tell that his words hit home. I haven’t been with anyone since he left me, and he somehow knows that and is delighted to rub it in my face.
“Motherfucker!” Jones thumps her fist down on the table as soon as he’s out of earshot.
Tabatha exhales and drops her head forward. “Forget Voldemort, he’s a bloody dementor.”
“You guys really want to go to his party?” Triston asks.
“Well, we have to now, don’t we?” Tabatha says. “He threw down the proverbial gauntlet and Philip accepted.”
My jaw is still tight. “Sorry. I just—he always knows exactly how to get to me.”
“And how to manipulate you!” Tabatha looks up again. “I wasn’t putting on airs. I really do have other commitments.”
I know they all must. “It’s all right guys, you don’t have to go.”
“Of course we do!” Tabatha looks around at the others for support.
“Damn straight,” says Jones.
“Oh, I would not miss this for the world,” Gunther says. “Do you think he will host it at his own home? We can be like those people on that dinner show and go dig through his personals while he flirts with the editor of Vogue.”
“I doubt it.” Chase was always a very private person, even after we’d been together for over a year. “He’ll hire a venue downtown.”
“Then we can spike the punch,” Gunther suggests.
“It’s Chase, the punch will probably already be spiked,” Jones says.
“Then we water it down.” Gunther waves in the air. “We’ll think of something. Make him trip down the stairs in front of the press, break his neck. Or his nose. No, his neck. He’d simply have surgery on his nose.”
“It’s Chase,” Jones says, “he’s probably already had surgery on his nose.”
“He has,” I confirm.
“And you, Triston?” Tabitha asks.
I only realize then that he hasn’t agreed to the party yet. He’s staring at the center of our table, chewing on his lip. “We can go, but the plus one thing poses a problem.”
“It’s not a problem,” I say quickly. I know what he means. It would be one thing for them to go to Chase’s party single and ready to mingle, but if I showed up alone then the paparazzi would have a field day speculating about what I was doing there.
“Oh?”
They’re all looking at me now. “That’s not—I don’t mean—”
“So that’s where you’ve been hiding?” Tabatha steeples her fingers. “We were wondering why we never saw you anymore.”
Gunther smiles. “Einer heimlichen liebesbeziehung. This explains a lot.”
I blush, which does not help matters. “I only meant that I don’t care if Chase thinks I’m single. The press can speculate all they want. I’m sure they have more interesting things to report on.”
“‘Thinks’ being the operative word.” Triston gives me an exaggerated wink.
“No!”
“Cat’s out the bag now, so you may as well tell us everything.”
“No. There’s no cat, no bag.”
Jones, who’s been silent this whole time, says quietly, “You could have told us. I know you don’t want another relationship in the spotlight, but we would have kept it quiet.”
She sounds hurt which is not fair because I do not have a secret lover. But now I’m trapped, because if I continue to insist I’m not spending two evenings a week and every Saturday with a new beau, then they’ll want to know where I am spending that time, and I’m not ready to share that yet.
“Can we change the subject?” I make one last attempt to deflect them because otherwise I have to lie to them.
Jones squeezes my hand again. “Sure thing, Sweets.”
“Temporary reprieve,” Triston agrees. “But when you’re ready, you’re going to tell us everything.”
6
Brian
I become aware of a breeze around my nether regions.
I was flying up over New York, Manhattan stretched out below me, oblong and glittering. Through pink clouds, I could see the rest of the state, lush and barely kissed by the first light of dawn. Home. I was flying home.
Then my balls started aching with cold. I tried to reach for a blanket, and with that twitch of my hand, the dream melted away.
The view of New York did not. I’m not quite as high up and some of the glittering lights are those of the building opposite, tinged pink with the sunrise.
I stumble, my legs turning to Jell-O as my conscious mind realizes I am standing on the edge of the roof and I am butt naked. I slowly back away from the edge as I try piece together how I got there.
I don’t sleepwalk, but sometimes when I take sleeping pills I behave like a drunkard and do weird shit I have no memory of later. This is a new level of weird though. I must have woken up just before dawn with the pill still in my system, believing I had wings or some bizarre hallucination and come up here to fly home. Shit.
The door to the roof opens. I spin around. There’s nowhere to hide. The roof is completely flat aside from the little concrete block with the door.
An old woman comes out. She pauses as she sees me. I try to cover my bits.
Neither of us speaks for the longest time, then she says, “You must be Brian.”
She comes forward and sticks out her hand for me to shake. “Alex told me I was getting a new neighbor. I’m Cynthia Howard.”
“Um.” I stare at the proffered hand. “I’m, pleased to meet you Ms. Howard but, uh…”
“Oh come on, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. And it’s just Cynthia.”
I shake her hand. My skin prickles with goosebumps.
“I don’t mean to talk out of turn,” Cynthia says, “but it’s September, dear. Aren’t you cold?”
“Freezing.”
“Perhaps you should bring a little space heater up here in future. I’d offer you mine, but it needs power. You can get those portable ones now. I saw them at Walmart.”
What does she mean in future? Oh god, she thinks I’m here intentionally? She must figure I’m some nut trying out perineum sunning or waving my dong at the neighbors.
“Thank you, Ms… Cynthia, but I don’t actually mean to be naked on a rooftop again any time soon.”
She frowns. “You weren’t looking to jump were you?”
“What? No. I… sleepwalking.” It’s the easiest way to explain.
Her eyes stretch so wide that the skin around them goes nearly smooth. “You poor man! Come inside. I’ll make you some hot tea.”
“Thank you but… I can’t. I have an, um, important meeting.” And I need at least three hours to gather my shattered dignity before I face that.
She seems skeptical but she doesn’t press. As soon as I’ve closed the roof door behind me, I run back down to my apartment, praying no one else decides to take an early morning stroll.
I arrive at the bagel store at 09:10 and my nerves are shot. I gave myself extra time to get here because I knew I’d get lost, and I did. I got off the right train at the right station (miraculously), but I got out at the wrong exit and ended up walking three blocks in the wrong direction. At least Brooklyn’s streets are named instead of numbered, so my brain doesn’t mess them up too bad. I was able to orient myself without chewing through too much battery and I’m only a few minutes late.
