Cult Classic(16)

“Are you guys thinking of getting pregnant?”

“I don’t know. We’ll have to flip for it.”

“Be serious, you’re thirty-eight.”

“I know. I can count.”

“Don’t take it out on me,” she said, squeezing the words through her hyperaligned teeth.

“Take what out on who?”

Maybe I’d never connected with Eliza. Maybe we simply reminded each other of being young and any bond we felt was rooted in our respective narcissism and that’s why our odd-couple bit was collapsing like a soufflé.

Halfway through the meal, her sous chef friend appeared with an order of chèvre fritters. He had to get back into the kitchen, he explained, but first he wanted to hug Eliza. He was younger than I expected, for a friend of her husband’s. He wore a puka shell necklace and had ringlet hair and enormous vacant eyes, the kind that looked as if they were staring into the middle distance. Modern Psychology once printed that staring into the middle distance meant you were having a minor stroke, our copy editor having taken it upon himself to drop the words “urban legend has it that.” That was a bad week.

“How’s your food tasting?” he asked, hiding an anxious grin.

This question has always made me feel as if I’m being poisoned but Eliza had nothing but reassuring smiles for him. He seemed desperate for her approval.

“Brody’s like Jordan’s little brother,” she explained, after he disappeared. “He had a really hard time just existing before he went to culinary school.”

“Drugs?”

“No, that’s Brody. The hammock kid.”

She waited for me to be blown back in my seat.

“You know this story,” she insisted. “It’s a cautionary tale.”

“Against what?” I asked, amused. “Nap marks?”

Convinced of my ignorance, Eliza recounted the story. When Brody was a kid, his mother married a wealthy man. They flew up to the guy’s lake house on his plane, and Brody was left to bond with his toddler while their respective parents had sex and boiled lobsters. One morning, the toddler shook Brody awake because he wanted to go play on the hammock.

“Oh … no.”

Eliza continued: So Brody walked the toddler outside and they played a game where Brody spun the kid around like a cocoon and let go. The kid insisted on going faster and spinning more. Eventually, Brody wound the netting too tight. The boy couldn’t hang on. He hit his head on the corner of a rock and “that was that.”

“It’s the worst story of all time,” Eliza said. “You probably knew it somewhere in the back of your head.”

“No pun intended.”

“You’re evil.”

“Tragedy makes me nervous.”

“It’s become one of those things like how people remove the doors from old refrigerators before putting them out on the sidewalk. Except now there are safety warnings on hammocks. Because of Brody. That Brody.”

“Do you get sent to jail when something like that happens?”

“Lola, he was a child. He got sent to therapy. God, you’re so punishing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Eliza shrugged, as if she’d picked the word out of a hat and was now fishing around for another one.

“Judgmental? Not all the time. Unforgiving, maybe. Always searching for fault.”

“It feels like I’m always searching for a lack of fault.”

“Yeah, that’s judgment.”

“Well, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like something I should get credit for.”

Our waiter passed by and asked if we were “still picking.” We shook our heads. Suddenly everyone in the restaurant seemed lucky to me. They’d seemed lucky before, to be laughing and gesticulating over thirty-dollar entrees, but now they seemed lucky to have never committed involuntary manslaughter. The defenselessness of our species was all out of proportion with the amount of ways we manufactured harm.

“I have to pee,” Eliza announced, shimmying out of the booth.

I checked my phone while she was gone. I wanted to see if the story was famous enough to be procured using only the words Brody and hammock. But before I could, I saw two text boxes. One was from Boots (a photo of Rocket sprawled out on her back, accompanied by his commentary: “slut”). The second was an automated box, offering me nearby Wi-Fi networks. Most were gibberish or strings of numbers, but one jumped out: “Willis Klee’s Phone.”

It was possible, I supposed, that there were multiple Willis Klees in the world, in the country, even in the city. But how many, I wondered, had left a stick of incense on the windowsill of a bed-and-breakfast in Carmel, California, during the summer of 2011 and nearly burned it down? How many had then accompanied me to an abortion clinic a month later, shaking his knee in the waiting room, a cup of ice chips in his hand?

Not that many.

My eyes darted around the room. I saw nothing. Then, atop the staircase that led to the restrooms, arose Willis. He looked like a mirage. Not in the way Amos had looked like a mirage, like he could disappear, but in the way Willis Klee had never looked real. There was no getting around it: Willis was the most physically attractive man I’d ever been with, a real boon in the “keep the baby” column. But I was too young to have a baby (at the “where would I put a baby?” age) and Willis was too cartoonish to be a dad, at least in my estimation. If asked about fatherhood, he would talk about how exciting it would be to teach his son to throw a football and ride a bike. I resented how reality-free this fantasy was. If I were to express excitement about having a little girl because then I could have someone to dress up, I would be deemed unfit to breed.