Cult Classic(15)

Can we go anywhere else I was just there

She sent back a frowning emoji. Forlorn. Round. Yellow. The woman was never in town. She was stuck comforting a mother-in-law who despised Eliza for idiosyncrasies like not being Jewish.

Jordan’s friend is the sous chef!!

Being forced to return to the same restaurant two nights in a row was a first world problem if there ever was one. Too often New Yorkers treated experiences as vaccinations. They went to the Whitney every two years, Coney Island every five, the ballet every twenty. I did not want to be one of those people. Besides, nobody said I was required to order the General Tso soufflé, to post videos of its salty plateau folding in on itself.



* * *



Boots had never even heard of Eliza, which was part of a developing problem. It used to be that the introduction of new people was a thread that led to tales of summer adventures or first jobs—anecdotes of import, the kind that emerge in green card interviews and lend subsidiary definition to any relationship. But after a while, a Rubicon had been crossed. We were on symbolic ground. Recently, one of his friends mentioned a desire to go fishing in the Grand Canyon. I said it was as beautiful as advertised, but there were surprisingly few fish there. Boots shot me a distrustful look, as if I’d intentionally duped him into believing I was someone who’d never been to the Grand Canyon. He was older than me by several years. Even Johnny Two-Chicks over here, with his few relationships, should appreciate the difficulty of intravenousing a lifetime of formative experiences into someone else’s bloodstream. Vadis and Clive had come the closest to fluency in my life, but only because I’d spent nine hours a day with them for as many years.

Perhaps if, like Boots, I’d been gifted with a dormitory full of bright, uncomplicated people, I wouldn’t have needed to look farther afield. But as it was, the temperamental discrepancy between our friends was the size of the aforementioned canyon. We would be at some civilized picnic in Prospect Park with these tucked-in citizens who traded in good-natured ribbing and I’d receive a series of texts from Vadis about how the DJ she’d stopped fucking had broken into her apartment and defecated on her (open) laptop. Eventually, my guilt over not adoring his friends burned off like a fog. No more farro salad, please. No more mass emails that began with “gang.” No more quantifiable drug use and convenient politics. No more yapping about the past as replacement therapy for the present.

I treaded carefully while contextualizing Eliza’s existence. I drew her connection to people Boots had met while minimizing her personal significance, swallowing the niggling resentment I felt over doing this. I was not ashamed of Boots—if anything, I took pride in my proximity to such a likable human being—but I could not talk about him in front of him, which should’ve been the kind of Girls Night Out logic he was accustomed to from his friends.

“It’s not that I don’t want you to meet her,” I explained, “it’s just that I never see her. Next time she comes, we’ll have her over.”

Our kitchen table was covered by a broken burner and cardboard boxes. Boots was in the midst of repairing the burner and the boxes were for his pieces, some of which had actually been selling these days. Four in the last month after zero in the last six. This was a healthy turn of events for us both.

“It’s fine,” he said, remaining upbeat. “I’ll just be here, watching all the shows without you.”

“So low.”

“When do you think you’re coming back?”

He looked like he might cry but this was a function of the cat.

“Just curious,” he added, “it’s not like I’m waiting by the phone.”

He picked up his phone and tossed it onto a chair across the room.



* * *



The hostess decided against my familiarity as she removed a menu from her stand. Who goes to the same restaurant two nights in a row? No one, I telegraphed, let’s stick with that. In a different place, in a different neighborhood, repeat patronage would be perceived as a positive. But this place was too trendy. She probably ate this food for free after hours and was sick of it. She escorted me to Eliza, who was already in a booth in the corner, shielded from the din of the room. Spindly orchids hung from the ceiling, reaching down with their crooked joints.

“Do you think those are real?” Eliza asked.

Her manicure was the same shade as the petals.

“I know they’re real.”

“Fancytown,” she said, whistling.

Within minutes, Eliza was describing a distant universe. In this universe, her husband was putting pressure on her to have a second kid. I already knew this because of her tweets. New mothers were required to post all debates pertaining to the plights of motherhood as well as all articles about the conditions in places like Bhutan, stories that unsubtly boomeranged to the fact that they too had done something frightening and painful. Granted, they had done it on clean sheets and with lots of drugs, but they had entered into a universal sisterhood. Though I somehow doubted the mothers they pitied devoted any time searching for ways to hitch their virtue to the Elizas of the world.

Eliza’s offline universe was filled with local library drama, choking hazards, high fevers, faulty pelvic floors, gasoline-splattered shoes, and property disputes. The closest I’d ever come to a property dispute was the time we caught our neighbor kicking our wayward welcome mat away from her door.