U UP?

by Catie Disabato

  “When Miguel killed himself,” I said, choosing the phrase killed himself deliberately, “We all went through hell. Ezra is allowed to seem whatever way that he wants, when it comes to Miguel. We all deserve that latitude, I think.”

  Paris shrugged again. I sucked my Penicillin and crunched on crushed ice.

  “Do you need another?” the hot bartender asked, suddenly right near us, gesturing at my empty fishbowl, and then Paris’s, but secondarily, less interested in refilling Paris’s drink than she was in refilling mine.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Paris said.

  We looked at our separate phones while the bartender busied herself with big ice cubes and cocktail shakers and eyedroppers of bitters. I opened my Messages app and saw Miggy appear at the top, then disappear, then reappear when I reloaded the app; my Cascarilla was wearing off.

  “Look,” Paris said, after the bartender had placed our fresh drinks in front of us, “I didn’t mean to say that to make you feel shitty.”

  “I don’t feel shitty,” I clapped back immediately.

  “Whatever. Okay. I just was telling you that he got heated, he got upset, he wanted to leave, get out of that dark place.”

  Was she talking about something emotional, or the physical darkness of the Drawing Room? I didn’t ask. She kept talking:

  They had left the Drawing Room, stepped out into the light, blinking, it was only 9:32 a.m. and they both felt out of time, the way you do at an airport. Paris suggested they go hang out at the house on the hill she was selling; she’d just done an open house, so the pool was full and cold. On the way, they stopped at Ezra’s apartment, where he’d filled a tote bag with Bud Rams cans and grabbed his swimsuit. They drank the beer poolside, under the beating sun. While I’d been sleeping through a cocaine hangover, Paris was floating on her back, wearing her bra and underwear as a bikini. They made out, finally, sitting on the tiled pool steps, staying partially submerged to stay cool. Ezra took off Paris’s bra, her nipples had been tight, she could’ve rubbed them against his chest for the pinpricks of stimulation that would’ve given her, but she didn’t. They were too tired to fuck. They floated again, Paris still topless, sometimes reaching for each other’s bodies.

  Around noon, Ezra had gotten a text from someone; something happened on his phone that took his attention away from Paris and their little oasis. He’d said he had to go, and he promised to text when he got there, and kissed her once on his way out, thanking her for being such a good friend, for being there for him when he’d needed her most.

  “He promised he’d text,” Paris said again. “And when an hour had passed, he hadn’t texted me back, so I texted him. I still haven’t heard from him. I’m worried, and until he posted that Instagram I honestly thought he could’ve died.”

  A part of me knew that feeling, a certainty around doom. Another part of me wanted to mock her for jumping so quickly into the idea of life-ending disaster. I knew Ezra couldn’t die, because Miggy already had. I couldn’t survive a second loss.

  “He deactivated Twitter and Instagram. I kept waiting for him to just, be there, but he wasn’t, he still isn’t. You haven’t heard from him, right?”

  “Not directly,” I said. “But I heard he’s texted other people. Just not us.” Carelessly, I threw us in together, and then suddenly I did feel like we were together, ignored together.

  “Who has he been texting?” Paris sounded scandalized, as if the very thought of Ezra having other friends shocked her. What had she thought? That every time he opened his text message app, her number was at the top of his list, and he always texted her back first, and always texted her whenever he thought about texting?

  “Who did Ezra go see?” I asked.

  “What? When?”

  “You said, at the house, he got a text and left, did he say where he was going?”

  “I’m not sure, I mean, he said who he got the text from,” Paris said.

  “Who?”

  “Your girlfriend,” Paris said, “Bea.”

  “What the fuck!?” It slipped out, loudly enough to startle the bartender, and make Paris choke a little. I coughed.

  “My ex,” I said.

  “What?” Paris asked.

  “Bea isn’t my girlfriend, she’s my ex.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Paris said. The bartender was maybe pretending to listen, looking at her phone but not really moving her fingers.

  “What is there to be sorry about?” I snapped.

  “That’s what you say when someone has a breakup.”

  “Maybe I broke up with her and I’m happy,” I said.

  “Well then I’m sorry for assuming you weren’t,” she said, but not nicely.

  I excused myself to the restroom with as much dignity as I could muster, which in fact was none at all, but I decided to be okay with shitty energy replacing decorum in this instance. There was nothing worse than being shamed/ashamed in front someone who was not anonymous enough to be a stranger but not close enough to be a friend. In order to regain my composure, I needed to separate myself from her physically until I could pretend the conversation had gone down in a different way, one that left me with more of my dignity intact.

  The bathroom had tile floors and good mirrors and was extra-dark. I sat on the toilet, but couldn’t make my body need to pee. Usually, when I had as little as a single glass of water in me, I could sit on a toilet and eke out at least a trickle; today I sat dry. I used to know what I was looking for.

  I thought I was looking for Ezra, his body, and the groundwork we’d laid over years of friendships, a mutual unspoken rule that even if it hurt each other we’d tell each other everything about our lives, we wouldn’t spare the details. Ezra and Miguel had once gone to Mexico on a boy’s trip with a bunch of our friends, a trip that had taken gender segregation so seriously that even I wasn’t invited, and when they got home they spent an hour discussing the trip minute by minute, so that I would have a history, a memory, of those moments in his life they spent without me. That used to be the way it was.

  When had that been taken from me? And was it my ex-girlfriend that had plotted to take it from me? And even if Bea had felt the need to explode my only remaining close friendship, why had Ezra fallen for the bullshit? What possibly could she have said?

  When I got back to the bar, Paris was signing her check. When she looked at me she looked me right in the eyes, in an intense police-interrogator kind of way, and I realized she was looking to see if I had been crying; I was so glad I hadn’t been crying, that I hadn’t even been able to produce enough liquid out of my body to pee. I was like a cactus, conserving all of my water inside my body, surviving a desert because I could ration all the hydration I needed. I wanted to text this to Miggy, and I could imagine his response, you’re a cactus because you’re fucking prickly, except he was mad at me and I couldn’t text him anything.

  “Ezra didn’t mention you and Bea had broken up,” Paris said, maybe an apology. I resolved to be calm and collected.

  “Can you close me out?” I shouted in the direction of the bartender. I didn’t even care about how she looked anymore. I responded to Paris: “It was only a few weeks ago.”

  “It’s weird Ezra didn’t mention it to me,” she said.

  I allowed my resolve to be calm and collected go out of my body like birds scattering from a tree.

  “You guys were together for what? Almost a year?” she was saying, while I was untethering my angry impulses.

  “What’s weird is your interest in my personal life,” I said, looking right at her.

  “Huh?”

  “What’s weird is you trying to pry little details out of me. What’s weird is you expecting Ezra to tell you anything at all! About him or me!”

  I saw my check waiting for me in its little leather folder thing. I hadn’t noticed the bartender dr
op it off.

  “What’s weird,” I continued, snatching my check and signing it furiously, “is you continuing to keep up with Ezra after you broke up! What’s weird is you telling me all about how you still want to fuck Ezra! What’s not weird at all is Ezra not divulging the personal and emotionally difficult details of my life to you, practically a stranger!”

  As I was storming away from Paris, thundering down the staircase, I realized I was storming out of a bar, something I’d never done before, and I lost track of myself for a disorienting series of seconds. In order to keep myself emotionally coherent, I tried to summon a memory of watching a friend storm out of a bar, but that doesn’t happen often in real life; instead of storming out people linger hoping for a happy resolution to a difficult moment, lingering long enough to be hurt more. So, as I descended the final steps, I tried to think of a scene in a movie or television show where a character I liked had stormed out of a bar, but I couldn’t think of a single individual scene or person; instead, the idea of storming out of a bar came upon me like I was reading an entry on TVTropes.org, an idea of what storming out meant, an amalgamation of so many moments that no single one was distinguishable, like when you mix all the colors together and they become a murky brown.

  I burst through the doors, squinted, the sunlight suddenly everywhere. I was uncomfortably illuminated. I pulled out my phone and ducked into the shaded doorway of Clifton’s so I could see the screen clearly, unconcerned at the idea that Paris might walk through the doors soon, having already paid her bill and been stormed out on. I had messages, like a flood, all at once.

  Miggy

  if you wanted to “spend this weekend together” you could’ve fucking tried not killing yourself. you and i both know, death is something that happens to the people left alive, not the people who’ve died.

  Today 3:15 PM

  i wish so badly you weren’t dead

  I know, honey, but I am.

  I was enough absorbed in my phone that I would’ve missed Paris had she left while I was texting. It didn’t matter if she saw me lingering.

  Miggy

  i talked to Ezra’s exgf paris. they made out on friday morning and then according to paris, he left her to go talk to bea

  Shiiiit

  But listen girl, any contact with Bea is a bad idea for you right now

  I wouldn’t recommend following this trail any further

  i plan to disregard your advice

  One thing that had drawn me to Bea immediately was how available she made herself; to me, in particular. We had long dates that started with a good boozy brunch and ended up curled up in the huge seats at the ArcLight Hollywood, wrapping her hand around my wrist to claim me. She made herself available on a bright Thursday afternoon when she skipped a weekend away with her crew to hang out with me, stroll with me around Echo Park Lake, and make out at the wine bar El Prado and eat cheese pupusas from the cart outside the bar Little Joy, that Thursday when I knew I loved her. She made herself available to me more and more often, sometimes five nights in a row at my apartment, practically living with me.

  To the rest of the world, she made herself available online. Almost all of my friends lived online, but she gave herself over to the internet the most; she’d started at thirteen by dipping her toe into AIM chat rooms, and finding the temperature of the water perfect, she’d dived in, and stayed in that pool the rest of her life, always wet. She’d been active and well-followed on Myspace; her LiveJournal, which has been allowed to remain online for posterity, was an obsessive chronicle of her high school years; in college she shifted to Tumblr, discovered reaction GIFs and memes and other forms of internet-specific humor, and discovered that she was also uncannily good at creating the right GIF for every occasion and developing memes that struck a chord. She was on Twitter and Snapchat before anybody and she’d made an Instagram account so early that her name on the app was just “Bea.” Bea was a consumer tech reporter, of course, working her way up through BizBash and TechCrunch; while we were dating, she had gotten a big new job as the technology editor at GQ. All this to say, to find Bea, I didn’t need to tediously text her and wait some agonizingly long minutes for a text back, all I had to do was check online.

  Though I’d unfollowed her on everything, there was of course nothing stopping me from searching her, she was unlocked, unblocked, available. I searched her name on Instagram and there she was again; if I scrolled down I’d see happy versions of myself doing fun things with my girlfriend who loved me, but that version of myself was hidden by a ton of new pictures. The most recent one was from less than an hour before, Bea with four of her friends, all of them in outfits, all of them posing, on a wooden porch; even if she hadn’t geo-tagged it, I’d recognize the scene, Verdugo Bar in Highland Park. One Saturday a month, Verdugo hosted a lesbian nineties dance party called The Grind, and when Bea went, she stayed all day with her crew of cool scary lesbians, sipping pints of craft beer, dancing until she was wet with sweat, available. All I had to do to get to her was show my ID at the door.

  Saturday, 3:59 p.m.

  Verdugo sprawled, a huge dark interior with black leather booths and craft beers on tap, and an equally large wooden deck, which would be blasted with afternoon sunlight at this hour. The air inside vibrated slightly from the bass; the DJ was playing a remix of “No Scrubs,” which is a song that didn’t need a remix. As always during The Grind, the booths inside Verdugo were packed full of girls who wanted to be present but were too timid to dance, and a few regulars sat at the bar watching the Dodgers play the Giants, whooping every time a boy in blue got a hit, no matter if it was a home run or base hit or a foul ball or a fly out. The manager Julian was lingering behind the bar, which was lucky for me, because he loved me and perked up whenever I came in and immediately poured us shots of tequila.

  “Hey Eve,” he said, all excited, getting the shot glasses out without even asking me, I’d never declined a gift from Julian.

  “Hey Jules,” I said, “how’s Matilda?” His daughter recently had surgery for a cleft palate.

  “All she does is cry,” he said, “but she won’t remember anything when she grows up, which is good.”

  “Therapist Lauren thinks early traumas affect the person forever.”

  “Therapist Lauren was referring to the kind of emotional trauma you rightly received for being such a nerd in high school.” Julian balanced a slice of lime on top of the full shot glass and slid it across the bar to me. I waited for him to put the bottle of Espolòn Tequila away, then we picked up our lime slices and clinked shot glasses and tapped them on the bar and took the shot and bit the lime.

  “Matilda,” Julian said, “will know that sometimes the people who love us the most have to be the ones that make us suffer.”

  I left Julian with his glasses to wash and limes to slice and his bartenders to order around. I walked past the dykes lining up for the women’s room and trans guys lining up for the men’s (Verdugo doesn’t have gender neutral bathrooms) and took my first tentative steps onto the sunlit porch. The dance floor was packed and everyone was moving as much as they could, everyone was sweating. I probably knew or had fucked or had partied with half the crowd; I surveyed everyone: baby dykes who had just graduated from Cal State, recent transplants from Brooklyn (they decorated our dyke nights the way smog made our sunsets such beautiful oranges and pinks), women in their early thirties who had just started dating women and leaned so hard into their lesbianism they acted more like TV characters than people. All these unfamiliar faces, all their unfamiliar limbs mixed in with the people I recognized, an overwhelming mash of queer people rubbing their bodies against each other, this is where I used to live; I had years and years of plowing through this world before I settled into my domestic thing with Bea, the smells of their spicy sweat were as familiar as the smell of Bea’s pussy. All the lives I’ve lived were being performed here un
der the blistering LA sun. I elbowed through the crush.

  I stumbled, my arms prickling with my own sweat, up two small stairs into the DJ booth. Naomi greeted me with a one-armed hug and a lipsticky cheek kiss; I immediately wiped the waxy red lipstick off my skin. She was wearing a look I knew she had aped from Cara Delevingne: high-necked t-shirt and no makeup except red lipstick; she was twenty-three, still looking at icons to guide her. Naomi held up a single finger—hold on one second—and fiddled with something on her computer. She was playing LL Cool J, I’m going back to Cali, Cali, Cali, I’m going back to Cali, and she started mixing in Biggie, Going back to Cali, strictly for the weather, women, and the weed.

  I surveyed the crowd from my modest perch, two crooked steps separating me from the group, and if I waded back in I’d be absorbed, I’d be one of them.

  I saw a flicker in my peripherals, a figure distinctly unlike the dancers, unlike us. A fully bodied ghost sat on top of the ten-foot wooden fence, happily watching the women dance below. It was the ghost who’d been following me, the one in the Silver Lake hills and in the meditation space, but now her body was so crisp and present. I remembered the freaky way her mouth had bled when we last met, and for a dramatic moment I thought of running away from her, but then she did a little grooving dance with her shoulders which made her look cute and fangless. She seemed to like “Going Back to Cali,” But that don’t mean a nigga can’t rest in the West / see some nice breast in the West / smoke some nice sess in the West. Maybe it was a coincidence that she was here; a thought I was only able to hold onto for a few seconds, until she looked right at me. She cocked her head like she was checking me out, she beckoned to me with one crooked finger like a lover; did she expect me to climb the fence?