The rain was steady that day, or was it snow. Or no, neither, none of the above. It hit 70 in late November that year, and the sun slanted down with malice of an odd angle. The neighborhood mostly evacuated in the morning, leaving long gaps between cars on streets that were usually crammed, and the nuisance bar on the corner sulked behind its shutters. The occasional passerby blinked like someone awakening after a bender at 2 in the afternoon to find the familiar world a haunted place, acid on the eyes.
Giving thanks? Sure. We loved it like anyone.
The goal was to make life easy for once, no big production. But you couldn’t just do nothing on a holiday; that would be depressing; that would begin only some years in the future. For this occasion we would convene for a simple dinner with two of our closest friends. Going through the motions, we would create something memorably unmemorable. Another couple, they were like us in many respects on the face of it, also fairly unlike. Most pressingly we were just all similarly tired.
They had a good excuse at least: they were planning their union of souls in just a few months. M and I, on the other hand, we were just beat. There were no doubt particular vitiating circumstances, the ordinary crises of nonextraordinary life, though the specifics now elude memory. Life was exhausting us, let’s say. We were exhausting each other. Sleep fled despite cushioned eye masks, swimmer earplugs, white-noise machines, heavy curtains. Anxiety mounted. We were fraying each other’s loose ends. We massed disagreements, then set them aside for future use like so many clean balls of sock overstuffing a dresser drawer, the sticky, heavy, wooden kind you can barely close once opened.
Once the day had drifted into the necessary hour, we ventured down and out, blinking and sweating under clothes as stunned as us by the sunlight, carrying from every limb and neck a whole larder’s worth of foods to load into the car. M had inherited it from her mom and dad—a sensible hatchback, Japanese, four-wheel drive, with a calming forest-green interior, and well maintained despite the piling-up years. A car good for families, pets too, and one of her parents’ only unalloyed legacies.
M opened a rear door and leaned over to clear space in the backseat.
Hey, I called.
She turned to face me, hair jet black. Behind her a roll of paper towels was kicking around in there for some reason, a tennis racket, a pair of fetching sandals, a dog toy, a ream of printer paper, a jumbo bottle of naproxen. I waited long enough for her to see the leveled phone, realize what I was doing, and glare. Lovingly? I laughed. It was then I snapped the photo.
Beautiful, I said.
We rolled down the windows, opened the sliding panel in the roof, put on some music, and pretended separately behind our sunglasses that it was June, May, our first trip to the country, the early trip to the beach when she played me a song by my favorite singer that I’d never ever heard before.
◆
Hey guys! Diane’s voice tinkled at the door like something breaking jovially. Greetings are the easy parts.
We exchanged hugs in the common hall on the top floor of their building, balmy under a scummy skylight, and removed our shoes to enter. There was a home for them, a neat three-tiered rack of metal rails and wood. The object had a weird magnetism. Its planes were perfect but counterintuitive, the mellow wood supple to the ungloved hand. Blond: why do we humanize furniture so? The occultisms of capital and design committed to furniture. The rack seemed to glide sitting still in the vacant space.
The footwear it contained, by contrast, was like flesh, bent out of shape and emitting unseen fumes and heat. One high top sneaker had fallen on its side, releasing an effluence that almost visibly spilled out like something drizzling from a storm drain. On this very day three years later—or two, or five?—I would go alone to a house on a pale California hillside, again sweating under clothes that were sickmaking in their warmth, and place my shoes on that same rack. It had glided to a perch just inside the door to my friends’ new home, resting on the brilliant tiling in their long entry, white and stained-glass blue, as light seared in through windows on all sides. Diane’s voice tinkled in both places, and time collapsed into a Mobius shape.
Where’s Mildred? Diane asked.
Oh, we didn’t bring her, M said.
But she’s so cute!
She would have driven us all crazy.
Mil-dred? Mil-dred? Schuster called from inside in a singsongy grandmotherly voice. One more time he said the name, high-pitched, evenly, and at length: Millll-dreddd. It made me regret abandoning the animal. She was a docile, sweet pet who deserved better.
Do you even like dogs? I said.
Not really, he said. Mildred though . . . She’s got charisma.
I love dogs, Diane said.
Really? You seem like more of a cat person, M said.
And so the dinner was off to a roaring start.
Our jackets impaled themselves on pegs near the door, limp outlines of our shapes. The apartment was warm, furnished with friends and mentors’ art on the wall, the living room receding into bedroom and bath behind a paned, occluding glass wall. A heart-shaped glass coffee table weighed down a pit marking bounds with a love seat and two chairs. Bookshelves along one wall, a lamp from Morocco, a bright yellow wedge-shaped fiberglass stool that perhaps was an art object, perhaps a seat, uncertain of its own status.
Schuster finally stopped whatever he was doing at the sink to hug us also, belatedly, ceremonially. He reached for a dishtowel to dry his wet hands only after he had wiped them on our backs, smiling. Then he offered us each a pour of strange vermouth served in a rarely seen piece of crystal, tinted a thin russet in color.
These are beautiful, M said dutifully. Schuster and Diane were my friends, really. I wondered how much she wanted to be there at all. Of course these transactions occur all the time in relationships, first in one direction, then in the other. They define and constitute the relationships, in fact.
The four of us set about mobilizing provisions and divvying tasks. Parcels, bags, and foiled trays lay strewn around by our clumsy entry like debris. I kicked two bottles of wine in a shopping bag at our feet, which clanked. A tin rested perilously on the radiator where I had set it, with a bag of unwashed greens placed atop it. The pie plopped on the counter, grocery bags pendant from the finials of two table chairs: and yet the disorder was quickly absorbed, subsumed into the overall plan. Our hosts were ahead of schedule. They had already taken care of so much. Really it would be easier for us to just relax, they insisted, set it all aside, drift, enjoy the exotic elixir we’d been served.
This sequence was predictable. Diane and Schuster were always picking up tabs, taking so much care. I was not irresponsible, thought of myself as magnanimous and as generous as feasible, but maybe that was all in my head. And in any case I lacked the ability to make it appear so easy, so firm and yet so gentle: so paternalistic. So humiliating. They needed to assert control over things, they did it automatically. It dovetailed with my juvenile nature, the selfish part of me. Though they were my peers, I clung to them a bit like second parents, and my life did become a good deal less stable after they moved away.
Since you’ve already thought of everything, apparently, I asked resentfully, what else? Is there nothing you can delegate?
How about a vase for the beautiful flowers you brought? That cabinet there. No, the other—Shu, can you show him?
And how about some music? Schuster added, going not to the cabinet but the recycling bin, from which he extracted a thick-necked, freshly washed bottle that he handed to me: aesthetic coups all around.
M, can you flip the record?
I’m on it, she said. After a Cagean moment of rustling and aspiration, something polyrhythmic with horns and accordion came spilling, crackling out of the speakers. Whatever it was, I’d never heard it before. The taste existed in some channel of the household’s personality that I had never, it seemed, jumped the groove into.
How’s the wedding DJ search going? M asked.
Terrible, Schuster said. Do you know Bridget’s boyfriend?
Which Bridget?
Bridget from Gavin’s.
No, not at all.
He DJs. Like, it’s what he does, or part of it. We have a meeting with him next week.
I think he’s going to be too avant-garde, Diane called from a chair she was standing on, extracting a serving dish from a high cabinet.
Of all the things you’d think picking a DJ for the reception would be, like, fun. But no.
He leaned against the counter and jostled a pile of peeled potatoes, one of which rolled off onto the floor with a clunk and moseyed toward me. I picked it up, plucked off some grit, and moved to rinse it.
Don’t let me just stand around here, I said.
Schuster peered around with the kindled awareness that a good host delegates small tasks to make guests feel included. How about . . . How about there, some things that need chopped for the salad. You could use that cutting board. Oh or you could put out snacks.
I’ll do the snacks, M said.
You love snacks, I said, and she smiled. It was a private joke.
I settled into a spot at Shuster’s shoulder. We stared out the windows over the washbasin into planar sunlight, now fading like a star core and at a certain slant. The kitchen looked out onto a tidy courtyard half a block long. A small playground glowed at our end, a fountain lurked distantly in advancing shadow at the other. Along the rowhouse colonnades, lightbulbs pinpricked certain panes, alongside the thorough figures moving inside them. The end-day’s light seemed to be moving across a gap of time. Which literally and imperceptibly it of course was.
Average sunset for November? Shuster said. Four four zero pm.
The moment would come relatively soon, not many months future and less than one November, when Diane and Schuster’s proposed departure began to offer proof of itself as an actuality. For me, it became irrefutable only on the final day before they left, when I saw with my own eyes the packing almost complete. It was painful. The force of all endings gathers in each single one, and I felt some unknown but impending event swell inside me like bad joints in approaching rain. I had volunteered to leave my office early and stop over at their apartment, they had accepted the pretense that I was going to help in some capacity—placing objects in boxes, taping up cartons, running to the store for some depleted or forgotten supply. Or just beverages; moving always requires lots of beverages, all that dust and the bolus of the past clogging the throat.
But that line was a sham, obviously; they knew I was useless as a person; I just wanted to see the place and them in it one more time: it was closing night of my favorite cabaret. Like true friends they left the lie, delusion, pretext unquestioned. When I arrived, the work had of course all been finished and Schuster was out buying beer, usurping the one errand I might successfully have run. The floors were naked so that you could for the first time feel their vertigo slant. Stray lamps commiserated with stray plants. And the walls—seams of bad old handiwork lurked on the edges of perception beneath coats of paint they and previous tenants had applied. A certain reality had peeled itself back, traceless like a decal, to reveal there was nothing behind it but a void. A thing that can be wiped away so easily, did it ever really exist? The true answer, idiot, is yes. But the truth behind the truth says no, false.
The sun falling over the landscape of piled boxes transformed into a long yellow glow. Average sunset, June: eight one one pm. I found myself alone with Diane. It was a thing that happened regularly but not often. We never knew what to say to each other really. I expected her to share my welling nostalgia and sadness but to my surprise what I found in her expression was a slightly weary satisfaction, as if she had been playing some long and grueling game and, if she had not won, she had finished respectably in the end, reaching something like a personal best.
Recall, too, it is terminally easier to be the one leaving than to be the one left behind, in the old place, living the weedlot, shoebox life.
◆
No way, I said, idly grating some cheese. Are you sure it’s her?
Oh yeah. The sunglasses are iconic. And then we did some Page Six research.
Tell them about the town car, Diane called. She was out of sight changing shirts, having gotten a spray of balsamic on the one she’d been wearing.
And then I started noticing when I was getting up early to go to the studio, when I was finishing my last show. Every morning she has a town car waiting to take her to the office.
No way! That’s so ’90s. Or is it ’80s? M said. It was hard to remember the heyday of print.
She had a fundraiser for the president, Diane said. That was pretty amazing.
Did the Secret Service come and visit you?
No, which is crazy, right? Great shot from right here. I was kind of disappointed.
Did you watch the whole thing with binoculars?
I tried not to, Schuster said, shrugging. It seemed bad manners.
Lies, lies, Diane said. He was glued to the window all afternoon.
It was sexy that our friends lived in spitting distance of the editor of a famous fashion magazine, even if they were currently only part of the rentier class themselves. Proximity to our secular popes and petit royals could be dizzying. But that was why we had come here, the big city: fantasies of upward mobility for all, actualizations for some. For my part, I loathed fashion. This opinion was rashly considered, highly gendered, and willfully stupid in at least a couple of ways. I could rant about the toxicity of valorizing surface, image, and excruciating attendance to meaningless detail, about the inevitable lamination of appearance to self-esteem and a person’s worth. But mainly I was terrified by its simple addiction to transience, the glittering glee it broadcast in the obliteration of one meaningless thing by the next meaningless thing to come along.
I stopped grating and weighed the rocklike slab in my hand for a moment. It had aged underground for some years, leaching out the mineral qualities of the earth surrounding it. Then I stared at Shuster from the side and behind. Tall and bulky, he leaned over a glossy pile of black-green fresh herbs with a Japanese knife in his hand, his shirt tail hanging long and untucked. Despite his bonhomie, my nominal best friend was actually a quiet and oblique person, I had come to realize over time, who could never quite give me everything I wanted from him. I pulled out my phone and snapped a pic. No angle would seem more apropos.
Across the room, M and Diane chatted at the table over the spread that was forming, popping small food elements into their mouths. They were perfectly amiable together but had never gotten to know each other deeply and so they had immediately fallen back on what was prescribed: they were talking about the wedding. But M was, I think, genuinely curious. How might one might bend one’s life arc with a forever commitment? She and I both viewed it as a fascinating question but a relatively impotent one. We could imagine doing it ourselves but we set that imagining on a certain course so it could exist in our minds only as the talus left by a landslide of desire. Or perhaps this was just me. Marriage was a safer subject than procreation in any case.
Seeking always to liberate us from gender stereotypes, I wandered over to interrupt their conversation.
So, I said, eating a handful of almonds, Who’s doing the dress? Terrie?
Oh no, Diane said, laughing nervously.
I still wear those heels of hers I have, M said helpfully. It happened that Terrie, Diane’s sister, was a fashion designer herself. She visited New York occasionally with her husband, who was a combination of artist, art handler, art dealer, and drug dealer. He had wild eyes and wore open collars and grew a mane of yellow surfer hair; typically he looked as if he were trying to break out of an invisible cage. He had had more charisma at early life stages but had also lost it relatively early—I didn’t know him then but you could detect it in his needless self-assertions, the desperation with which he would buy a round of drinks. I always liked Terrie and thought her to have been poorly saddled. She and he had one child named Zephyr and another animated inside her.
What about menswear? She doing tuxes now?
Nein, Schuster said, opening a Côtes de Something.
Well, the logic of capitalism is expansion, I said. So that stance is, like, political.
But isn’t specialization also the logic of capitalism? M said.
A silence fell. Most of our friends were low-level entrepreneurs in fields affiliated with design, fashion, or art; within that number were many actual artists, like Shuster, like M. Their failures were, even more so than the others, wildly cruel, though those collapses of career or business always certified who had family money in cases where it had been in doubt. Fortunately these two would both be lucky.
I excused myself for a moment.
In the bathroom above the toilet hung a framed print of a painting of Piazza San Marco in Venice. On the eight or ten other trips there over the years, I had never noticed it. The glass was dusty, my-own-house dusty, but it appeared to be one of the famous Canalettos, facing the crazy church from the far end of the square. Tiny figures dotted the pavimento. It seemed impossible to imagine in a pre-photographic era how he ever decided how to arrange them, how many bell towers to edit out of reality, where to put the dogs. Canaletto’s real last name was “Canal,” which always struck me as comic.
I pulled the veduta off the wall, wiped the dust off it with a nugget of toilet tissue. That was unsatisfactory, and so I dug under the sink for paper towels and glass cleaner, wiped it thoroughly, and dried the surface until it was uniformly gleaming and streakless. The details were more visible now. A man in searing red robes glowed from the shadows to the left: a cardinal? He was connected to an immortal tradition that marked him as distinct. Laundry flapped out of a few windows in the arcades, which was a shock, and an urchin gesticulated annoyingly toward no one, or perhaps was playing.
Closing the toilet lid, I sat, placed the image on my lap, removed my wallet, and took out my bank card, some currency, a bag of ketamine. I very hastily arranged myself a very thin line. The amount would make me stupider and more jovial, like a strong antihistimine. I wasn’t bored.
I flushed the toilet, dusted the print again, put it on the wall, did some business with the sink, and returned to the party, such as it was.
I never noticed that picture of San Marco, I said. A tremor in my shoulder notified me that this was a little tempting fate, but it was too late, I had already said it.
Oh that, Diane said, blushingly.
It’s a little house joke, Schuster said.
Like M and my joke about snacks, I thought, which perhaps not even she had gotten.
You don’t know that story? Diane said.
It sounds . . . familiar, we said.
Well, it isn’t much of one really—
Except it is, actually, the story of how we met.
I just meant it wasn’t like, dramatic, or anything.
Diane is just embarrassed because she was dating someone when we got together.
That’s a salient detail, I said.
True. My dirty secret.
I was installing in Venice, at the Palazzo Grassi. Working as an installer, I should say.
And Carol had sent me there because we had a couple of artists in the Arsenale. And then we met—
Where? How?
Getting takeout coffee, he said. Per portare via! I had seen her before that though.
Dreamy, I said.
And I’d seen him around too.
They progressed like this in a miraculously unplanned choreography that suggested to me what their first dance at the wedding reception would be like, gliding and elegant. When I actually witnessed that dance this memory of course failed to ignite in my head. Or perhaps it did. I didn’t enjoy the wedding very much, religious mythology layered on societal lies. It all seemed so fatuous. At the moment of the first dance I was deep in a wash-rinse-spin cycle of drunk and hung over. Thus I have no memory of it at all.
It was love at first sight, anyway, smooth sailing from the first attempt: that was the overall theme of the Venezia story, and consistent with the rest of their way in the world. The betrayal seemed the slightest of sins with the distance provided by only a little time, relatively, and thus its confession floated banal and toothless. The apartment had begun to fill with paplable steam as the fowl in the oven roasted.
I remember calling Terrie and saying, Oh my god, what a mess this is, what am I going to do.
And she said . . .
“Just do what you want to do, baby girl.”
And that’s why I will always love your sister.
Aw.
The bind between M and I had a story that was no less unique and more powerful and precious, but it involved drugs and alcohol and some rash decisions, trips to emergency rooms, trips to pharmacies, suicide attempts and broken condoms. It had been slow rolling and sloppy. To trot it now out as comedy devalued nothing about our relationship, and probably our friends had heard it a dozen times. But in this saccharine dyadic context it suddenly felt taboo. And M would feel embarrassed. I remembered how much I hated double dates with other straight couples. Our love was the most potent and real thing in the room, and yet less a thing to be declaimed. Why? This intractable, inexplicable blockage made me angry. Our love would outlive theirs, despite whatever they would tuxedo it up in. Our love would be the one without end.
Stand over there, I said to them.
What?
Just stand, I repeated with a shooing gesture. Really quick.
When they realized what I was asking, they posed awkwardly-expertly, as we all do, for our collective future anterior. Each draped an arm around the other’s waist, each free hand cupped a wine glass at a careful distance from their bodies to avoid sloshing booze on themselves. Frozen inside the image’s frame, the composition reminded me of a pair of people walking tightropes together, the outstretched arms a heavy thin rod with a gorgeous oxblood bulb pendant at each end.
◆
Now that we had gotten through the preliminaries, time began to fold along the familiar form of the holiday; we ran its fingers along the slots and pegs as we assembled the day together. We finished nibbling from shared boards that were swept away. Phones rang inopportunely, hands were lent; we talked about our families, why we were or weren’t talking to them. More LPs were flipped, platters appeared, bottles popped and disgorged into decanters with the curves of yachts, cavity temperatures approved. Shufflings between kitchen and table, the good dishes, the heirloom silver. Schuster hacked at the bird without much idea what he was doing, learning by doing, seeding the awareness for carvings in perpetuity.
Then came to pass that we were all seated before the arrayed food, a moment that, in a world after God and prayer, still never felt right without a pause. I resisted the urge to span the empty time, elongate it, with a photo.
To your impending nuptials, I said, and love everlasting. The glasses sang.
And then we ate. The food was inept. Nevertheless there were declarations of deliciousness, second helpings, declarations of overeating, more communications to and from family and friends, the slow busing of plates, the Can I helps, the No please sits. Any alternative to the day’s preordained pattern lost definition in the fog of alcohol and food. The lamplight was grainy and gray in quality, with the world outside having definitively grayed.
We sat around looking at each other, wondering what to do. All were surprised we had reached this impasse so soon. I thought of M’s occasional suggestions that she and I play board games to make the domestic hours pass and how those efforts always failed. Directed leisure was replaced then by a familiar air, that of waiting for something terrible to happen. For example when my mother began her physical and mental decay, every call from my parents’ old number gave me a tremor. As did creeping around the house late hours on visits, looking at her slumping with her eyes closed in front of the television on the old sofa in a fresh nightgown that someone had gratefully insisted she buy, as opposed to the old one which, threadbare, had become obscene. Would she open her eyes if I spoke her name? If I heard from across the house the sound of something falling, would I find her dazed in a pile on the floor? If I hear someone exclaim from the kitchen, would I rush into a scene where the floor was spattered with blood or applesauce?
In that case it was clear what was going to go wrong. Usually however we know only nonspecifically, only that things are proceeding, perceptibly or otherwise, in dire, fatal, unannunicated directions. The seeds of all endings are in all beginnings, the shoots and sprouts extending skyward through our actions like fireworks smoldering in their ascent. Dread is built in, if you’re the species to fill with fear at loss, and death.
What do you think Mildred is doing right now? I asked M.
Peeing under the couch, she answered.
We laughed. The dog’s kidney problem would be diagnosed in about a year. She died in her sleep, mercifully if not peacefully, without having to be put down.
In this bloat we stared at each other. We stared. Diane was quite plainly beautiful, Austenian, an oval face, delicate and discouraged freckles, few creases. Schuster’s face had just started to lose a little of its definition; the process had begun almost undetectably with a slight decrease in the shading on the underside of his jaw by an increment of micro lumieres. There were also those furrows that run down from the nose to the mouth, whatever they are called, like marks made by the impression of an invisible claw. Here too progress was gentle but unmistakable. On my face they had already taken hold. When I looked at myself, reflected as in the image of San Marco, I looked very very tired, like I needed to sleep for a thousand years.
And M, oh, let’s not. I prefer to leave her unscored by my pen, pristine. I leave her too much out of this and other things for fear of getting her wrong.
Anybody know any campfire stories? Shuster said.
Oh, I said suddenly. I’ve got an idea. Do you have a CD case you don’t need? Or a DVD?
Yes, Schuster said, with a wariness that pretended to be ironic but was not.
OK great. I just need also like tape, or super glue—
Maybe tape, M said, laughingly. Apparently I appeared to be drunk.
OK but scotch tape, do you have it? It has to be clear. And then a blade, which I will handle carefully, very carefully. A boxcutter would work. Oh and a sheet of paper.
Notebook paper?
Rules, no rules. It doesn’t matter.
With a trip to the home office, the materials were produced and I went to work. I felt luminous; the world fell back briefly. An espresso grinder whirred in the background, dishes clinked. A votive is, contrary to what you might think, not a memorial but an offering to the gods.
This is going to be beautiful, I declared—and immediately snapped the plastic face of the CD case into two jagged halves while trying to clip off its edges.
Sorry, sorry, I said. Do you have another one of these?
You’re lucky I make videos.
Don’t worry, I’ve done this before. It’ll just take a second. Flip the record, fill your drinks.
With heightened delicacy, the project moved along. I traced a triangular shape on the paper, excised it, and snipped off the tip. This wedge I then used as a template to cut four like pieces from the clear plastic cover of the plastic—gently, gently. Using the tape, I assembled them into a small object like a pyramid or funnel.
You have an 8 ball to dump in there?
You know I’m too broke for 8 balls.
Do you know what he’s doing? Diane asked M.
I’ve never seen it before.
Is it some kind of top? A dreidel?
OK, we’re almost ready. Can someone cut the lights?
M sighed. She knew how I loved to drag things out in a combination of self parody and the actual if clumsy execution of the mechanisms of suspense. Here, I was admittedly taking my time, to extend the moment and because I knew I was about to slay them all.
One second, I said, fiddling with my phone, one more second. The scent of coffee was pervading things like it can pervade the night’s last dream. It evoked both the pain of entering the world and eternal mornings. A tear gathered in one eye. One more second, I begged.
I made them all stand back just slightly. To initiate the final sequence, I flicked through some screens and settings on my phone, turned the display on high, and placed it on its back in the center of the table. After a final adjustment to the size of the image on the screen, I precisely balanced the plastic pyramid fat side up on the face of my phone. And there appeared floating in jewelbox three dimensions Diane and Schuster, smiling in their kitchen, arm in arm, gray with the cool light of a low North American sun in November.
Whoa.
Cool.
That’s amazing.
It’s almost more nostalgic than a photo, Diane said.
It’s because you can see right through, I said. Like ghosts.
Soon came dessert, which was sweet.
◆
Much later M and I saw each other one night. It was the first time in a long time. At first she was upset and cried and we wrapped our arms around each other in a way that felt utterly alien; I couldn’t remember what it had been like for us to embrace at all. There was comfort in it but new comfort and by the end of the long clutch, during which she whispered sadnesses into my ear like we were enacting some myth, she was abruptly calmed, like a discharged battery. Then I was upset. Snot dried into a shiny film on the shoulder of my coat, which I had not managed to remove before we had fallen into each other’s arms, and the wetness from my eyes was soaking into her shirt. I took solace finally in her height, and in finding again what a rare ratio of shoulders to waist she had, how well formed she was overall. There’s no shame in coveting someone’s physical form if you covet the rest of them as well. And besides, it will only be around so long.