Going Dutch Read online

  The recipient of the message read it on her phone as soon as it arrived, but she did not want to give the impression that she was hovering desperately, waiting for a message, so she waited thirty-six hours to reply.

  She wrote, “Hi.”

  Patrick’s voice became high-pitched and vaguely midwestern to capture her.

  The hapless straight man read the message on his phone when the Q train entered the liminal zone of reception on the Manhattan Bridge. His instinct was to reply but when he considered the amount of time it had taken for her to reply, he decided to multiply the time it had taken her to respond by one and a half, and then reply. He would reply in fifty-four hours.

  At which point, he wrote: “How are you?”

  Over the next several days he checked the website compulsively on various devices, but no messages came. But then—it was a week later—he checked the website on his phone when he was in the bathroom at work and there was a message from her.

  “I’m good. And you?” she wrote.

  Basking in the message, he waited in the stall for an extra minute. When he returned to his desk, he worked on his reply. There wasn’t much to do at the office; he worked on it all afternoon, rewriting it a dozen times.

  The next night, while out with a friend who was visiting the city, he thought he saw her at the solar-powered taco stand in the neighborhood. But he pretended not to see her, as the etiquette of contact in the real world had not been discussed, and he had not yet responded to her message. He spent the night with his back to the entrance, an awkward maneuver, now and then stealing glances behind him. She also had her back to him, deliberately too, it seemed.

  A few days later, while out eating dumplings, her friend asked her how dating was going. She rolled her eyes and said all the men in the city were flakes. Her friend rolled her own eyes in sympathy and they both dug into their dumplings. Soup shot out.

  I’ve had enough, she said. I’m going to get rid of my profile.

  But after the meal she secretly, a bit unconsciously, decided that she would leave the profile where it was, because she still held out a faint hope that a nonflake would send her a message and maybe a new life would bloom from the seedling of a kind or flirtatious phrase.

  When the appropriate amount of time had passed, he decided to send his reply. It was four words long, just as her previous message had been.

  He wrote: “Not bad. Working hard.”

  When she read the message on her phone at the grocery store, she had to think for a minute to remember who it could be. The attempt to remember distracted her. When she realized who it was, she shook her head and walked out into the street, inadvertently stealing the head of lettuce she had cradled in one arm.

  They ate that head of lettuce the first time they had dinner together.

  “What’s the point of that story?” Richard asked, frustrated at the futile hopes Patrick had momentarily inspired in him.

  “I don’t know, maybe that love can spring from ordinary circumstances. Anyway, I feel like it’s your MO to go for guys who are emotionally unavailable.”

  “Thanks for saying so.”

  Richard felt the warm pang he always did when Patrick expressed a sympathetic anger about his emotional life. It was like that charge he got when a stranger or acquaintance unexpectedly praised him for some casual, tossed-off remark he’d made about a work of art or a person, and suddenly his sense of his own worth abruptly expanded. Who else could he rely on to go to bat for him in that cold, antagonistic landscape of handsome, determined young men?

  Patrick offering judgment and advice on Richard’s life—and cooking for him—had been the thrumming heart of their friendship for years now: Patrick the advisor, Richard the beneficiary of this advice, Patrick the intercessor, Richard the court stenographer. It was one late afternoon at the end of October, in their fourth year of college, when they’d gone for some of the metallurgically bitter coffee at the Architecture Café, that Richard abruptly realized he was in love with Patrick. Patrick said the summer had taught him that he was still negotiating his identity, and this made Richard feel better, because if someone so stylish, so strangely enchanting, with such deftly orchestrated gestures as Patrick was still negotiating his identity, perhaps Richard didn’t need to worry so much about it himself. On the other hand—Richard concluded later with declining optimism, after they had parted with as chaste a hug as ever—this could likewise mean he had a long road in front of him, a road whose length he’d stumble alone and vainly in search of his “identity,” while Patrick found happiness with others like himself: confident, direct, capable people who just were who they were. Whatever happened, Richard would find himself alone.

  “Are you going to be all right here?” Patrick asked. “I’m leaving with Valdes and Benoit.”

  “You’re leaving with both of them?”

  Patrick nodded, grinning. Richard’s feeling of reassurance vanished.

  “You might actually change your life with some conversation,” Patrick said, as Barrett and Amir went to refill their drinks. “You could do this too, you know. You might actually meet someone.”

  “Maybe if I get an eyebrow ring,” Richard said, and waved his hand in a grotesque imitation of Barrett’s flamboyant hand gestures.

  Patrick bent down to tie the shoelaces of his black high-tops, and handed Richard his champagne, which Richard promptly drank.

  “You have to stop judging people,” he said, his face near the floor. “Do you seriously hate them so much?”

  Patrick stood up again and leaned against the wall with an aura of brightness around his face. He smiled out at the dancing crowd.

  “If that’s the case, you might as well just go home.”

  “I’m falling asleep anyway,” Richard said, feigning a yawn.

  Patrick threw up his hands in frustration and walked off. When Richard entered the guest room to get his jean jacket, he found Toller lying facedown on the bed.

  “Is Patrick leaving with Benoit?” Toller asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Goddamn it! It’s that fucking ponytail. It works every time.”

  Outside it was humid and there was an uncanny hush to the block. Furry, sluglike things—what were they called?—littered the sidewalk. Richard wanted to feel diva-ishly exhilarated by his exit, but instead he merely felt sheepish, and also nervous to be alone in that still quite industrial part of Bushwick, with its shuttered repair shops, desolate lots enclosed by fencing, and the occasional livery cab that pulled up, honked interrogatively, and sped away.

  As he reached the end of the block, he could feel the onset of one of those schmaltzy waves of introspection that sometimes hit him when he’d had a lot to drink and was traveling alone on a nighttime sidewalk. The sour taste of champagne lingered in his mouth, and he acquiesced to the reflection that he was yet again leaving a party alone, heading to bed alone, from all possible vantage points alone—alone in the crowded city of great possibility. For a moment he indulged this cozy gloom, until it abruptly fermented into a headache, accompanied by regret that he’d argued with Patrick.

  At the bus stop he opened a dating app and loaded a gingham of torsos onto the screen of his phone. He was immediately drawn to Kind, Courteous, and Horny—according to the GPS the third-closest person to him at that moment, trumped only by Kenneth_bulge, a sweetly smiling brunette, and the backside of SimpletonNYC Kind, Courteous, and Horny had an orange beard, pierced nipples, and hieroglyphic tattoos along his flanks.

  Richard’s phone shook as a message arrived.

  Love to blow you man.

  He scanned for a backlit figure in a window, lunar screen glow revealing a jawline from which a cascade of orange beard merged with the luxuriant body hair Kind, Courteous, and Horny claimed with pride. But all the surrounding buildings were dark.

  Thanks bud.

  Anytime man!

  A bus arrived and Richard climbed on board. He found a seat at the back. As it heaved forward, he imagined Pa
trick in a taxi, lazing in the attention of his admirers who would soon be naked, the lights of the city swept behind them; and then himself, walking home through dark and empty streets, returning to the roommate who would keep him awake all night, the cackles of street-level libertines, the predictable but irresistible postmasturbation ennui.

  Richard had to admit that Patrick did try in his way to help, despite his increasing romantic distractions. His latest scheme was to prod Richard into therapy in order to demolish the blocks that prevented him from finding a decent boyfriend and working on his doctorate. Patrick was himself seeing a therapist—this service was free for students at the university—but was someone whose “issues” had never enfeebled his day-to-day confidence, or his ability to stay out all night and hook up with guys, occasionally date them, and then move on with little sign of damage. Puzzled at the obvious asymmetry and bias of therapy itself, Richard wondered what the point was. So you sat and talked to a stranger? He imagined confessing to a rotund man who represented a parody of a Viennese psychoanalyst. The man wore a monocle. Richard was convinced his desires and anxieties would seem routine and unsurprising once he articulated them out loud, like a bird launching out of a tree, having a heart attack in midflight, and then falling to the ground with a heavy thud.

  Patrick was probably right—not about therapy, Richard considered himself too intelligent for that, but about a boyfriend. If he found a decent man, an emotionally available man, they could move in together to alleviate some of their mutual financial woes; people did it all the time. They built a life in common, took on the challenge of the city as one entity.

  Most of the time it seemed like a dismal joke to search for another kind of life in the transactional indifference of the streets, like looking for consciousness in the head of a mannequin. But then in certain optimistic moods Richard could feel woozy with choice and sympathy, almost telepathically generous and porous. Contrary to the sensation one had at rush hour in the subway, the city was essentially benevolent in its crowded human bounty, its opulence and plenitude. The streets gushed with young men on their vibrant way, zealous platelets in a bloodstream. The blind statistic of so many anonymous faces hid the potential for a jarring recognition, an extraordinary conferment of attention, the tidal blur resolving itself into one determined stare that picked you out of the crowd.

  FOUR

  Anne had followed up by text to cement their working lunch date, and on the following Tuesday Richard was sitting on a red banquette, watching three older male waiters as they drifted in a disintegrating choreography of semicircles across a room covered in yellow wallpaper. A saxophone played in the background and gilt mirrors, several reflecting Anne, hung on the walls.

  Richard hadn’t slept well, and he felt acutely the dry challenge of making conversation. They didn’t know each other well enough just to indulge whatever mood they might be in, and silence, it went without saying, was far from Anne’s default mode.

  “Do you think Antonella gets those pants in New York?” she asked, her third or fourth attempt at igniting a sustained dialogue between them.

  “Naples,” Richard said, feeling guilty that he wasn’t trying harder. “I noticed that kind of style when I was there—that sort of . . . top-of-chic, bottom-of-chic thing.”

  “I like it,” she said.

  “Really?” he replied doubtfully.

  “I think it’s unique.”

  “Unique?”

  Anne made a grimace of joking reprimand.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I think Antonella is beautiful,” Richard said. “But she needs to stop smoking. It’s aging her skin.”

  “The tanning also plays a part.”

  “She tans?”

  “She invited me once. Can you imagine? I’d incinerate.”

  “That’s practically assault, with your complexion.”

  They both laughed.

  “I’ve never thought about what Antonella does in her free time,” Richard said, his eyes wandering back toward the kitchen.

  “She has a boyfriend.”

  “Oh yeah, I think I met him once. Dima—he’s Ukrainian, right?”

  “Yup—more of a bro than you’d expect.”

  Richard had tried to gossip about Antonella before, but those attempts had mostly fallen flat. Initially reluctant to descend to the level of base, hedonistic, and gleeful speculation over the life of their advisor, Anne had held back, laughing when Richard dished but not adding substantially to the conversation. But as they’d spent more time together, she had begun to supply anecdotes—first skeptically, as if conceding to the well-placed point of an intellectual adversary, and then jumping in zestfully, finally even initiating the gossip herself. She could probably tell that Richard liked to talk about other people. He in turn wondered if it was a relief to dispense with her demure, professorial air. There must be a retaliatory pleasure in it, the upstart attacking the mentor, though he doubted that Anne would ever articulate it that way or admit to it.

  “You should come and see my new place,” Anne said, as if this naturally followed.

  “You moved?” he asked, startled by this sudden new tack in the conversation. She hadn’t mentioned her intention to move at all the last time he’d seen her. That was only ten days ago. Had it all been on a whim? Did she make a call and a swarm of movers descended to liberate her from the depressing graduate school apartment, an experiment in communal living that she had brought to a merciful end, a brief indulgence? He wondered suspiciously if she had relocated to Brooklyn, perhaps even to his neighborhood.

  “I had to get out. I felt like I was playacting for the benefit of Erin and Alicia so they wouldn’t criticize me.”

  “Okay.”

  “They kept calling me a free-speech fundamentalist. And I really didn’t want to do their dishes anymore. There was no dishwasher, of course.”

  Richard nodded, but he was confused by her new attitude toward Erin and Alicia. During his recent visit, she had seemed devotedly if grousingly attached to them, while they had clearly been skeptical of him. Perhaps she had cut them loose in order to move closer to him.

  “No dishwashers in those apartments,” he said, shaking his head, trying to remain focused. “What do those two study again?”

  “Erin is in epidemiology and Alicia works on cyber-bullying.”

  Richard coughed.

  “Here we are,” said a tall bald man in a white shirt who had arrived with their food. A goat cheese salad was lowered to the table. Richard leaned forward and sniffed, hungrily riveted.

  “Thank you,” Anne said to the waiter, who nodded and walked away.

  “There’s a gym and a pool in my new building,” she said.

  “Really?”

  Of course, now that there was no one else in the apartment, there would be no one to observe them there together. It would be the freedom, or the captivity, of privacy.

  Richard realized he had his knife and fork in hand.

  “And a sauna.”

  “A sauna?” he said, attempting a tone of analytical disengagement. “Very nice.”

  “Made from Japanese fir trees.”

  He put down the fork and passed a hand surreptitiously over his belly. He was still essentially thin, but he had not been to the gym in some time, conscious all the while that you were essentially invisible in New York without muscle tone.

  “We can have a lazy Saturday.”

  “What’s a lazy Saturday?”

  “Drinking coffee, reading the paper, doing laundry.”

  So she wanted him to come over and get in the sauna.

  “After five there’s usually no one in the pool.”

  “Much nicer that way,” Richard considered, ambivalently.

  “Isn’t it?”

  Eating these meals together had made him wonder if Anne, despite her encircling intelligence, was largely unaware of how other people perceived her. It was like one of those illnesses, suitable for description in long magazine articles, in which you
did not recognize the face of someone you’d known your whole life, or could only see the left half of things. She did not sense, perhaps, or she did not acknowledge sensing, indifference, instead launching forth unbidden to fill the void of disinterest. It was a dynamic that held in the seminar they were currently taking together. A collective stupor came over the room when she spoke, a tremendous daze in the eyes of their colleagues, despite her frequently brilliant commentary. One day a few weeks earlier she’d been sick with the flu, and in her absence, the mood in the seminar, taught by a visiting professor from the University of Palermo, changed instantly and noticeably. The professor only barked at one person, a timid brunette, and this was not because of any preposterous reading of the text, but because the brunette’s phone rang during the lecture. Several fellow students, previously silent back-row spectators oppressed by Anne’s eloquence, rose into the vacuum like dolphins surfacing in a grotto.

  It also seemed that Antonella, whose thesis Anne claimed to admire deeply—Antonella called it “Disemboweling Leopardi” with a discharge of scornful laughter—felt irked by Anne’s presence and treated her with hauteur and stinting respect. Richard would see them walking together through campus, up stairs of somber stone and through clumps of backpacked students, Antonella’s chin in the air and Anne stumbling to keep up. In the classroom Antonella rarely made eye contact, disavowing the scholarly connection that was evident beyond the walls, preferring instead to stare at a point slightly above Anne’s head when listening to a response or replying to a question. She would exhaust all possibilities before conceding to Anne’s raised hand, scanning the class and imploring a response from the other faces, despite knowing full well that Anne’s comment would be the most articulate, thoughtful, and profound.

  The other students enjoyed Antonella’s open distaste; an unspoken complicity existed between them against Anne’s luminous intelligence. Perhaps it had something to do with the scarcity of the jobs for which they would all be competing. Anne effortlessly navigated the scraggy complexities of the language while the rest of them stepped tentatively forth, despite the advanced nature of their degrees, growing more frustrated and entangled with each new concept. Her Italian was more fluent and elegant than the Italian of those in the class who had grown up in Italy, or with Italian parents. She made none of the modern concessions to speed or efficiency, but spoke instead in the coherent mahogany outbursts of a philologist.