“Yes, I should work today.”
Quentin stood up and cast around for his own underwear. As he slid them on, the day, with its acid-mouthed hangover and hollow comedown, felt like an unbearable debt to pay. He moved behind Alex and rested his cheek against the back of his shoulder, feeling the rough denim of his jacket against his skin.
“You could stay,” he said into Alex’s back. “If you want. Stay.”
Alex turned to face him with a puzzled, searching look. He said nothing.
“I’ll walk you out,” Quentin said. “Let me get dressed.”
He retreated upstairs to his bedroom and stood uncertainly in front of the clothes that still remained in his wardrobe. He pulled on a pair of basketball shorts and an old T-shirt of Johnny’s, then went back downstairs. Alex had his shoes on and was standing in front of the dining table, looking intently at a pile of euros.
“Do you need these?” Alex said, turning to Quentin. “I can exchange for dollars.”
“Seriously? I think you’re selling yourself a bit short.” Quentin tried to force a laugh. “That will only be about sixty.”
“It’s not for anything,” Alex said. “Is just a gift. You don’t need it. See—” he stooped to pick up a note that had fallen to the floor under the table. “You leave it lying around like nothing.”
“Fine, take it,” Quentin said, feeling ashamed for them both. “You’re right, it is nothing. Let’s go.”
He followed Alex down the hall, watching the soft blank square of his neck above his jacket move. They reached the door, and Quentin picked up the wallet and keys he’d dropped the night before. He tried to smile. His face felt like a new, more fragile thing.
They walked together as far as the corner and said goodbye without touching. Quentin headed in the opposite direction and sat on a stoop to light a cigarette. He could feel people staring at him as they bounced by on their morning jogs or shepherded their children to the playground down the block. He didn’t care. He would go home soon and get Lulu, take her for a walk. Maybe buy some flowers at the farmer’s market. He looked down at his phone. Cleo was calling. The day, after all, was just beginning.
CHAPTER FOUR
Early August
Frank was having a long day. Not only had his new client, the second largest rum manufacturer in South America, asked for yet another edit of a fifteen-second TV spot that should have been wrapped and delivered weeks ago, but this particular spot was from a shoot they’d relocated to Buenos Aires, which meant that Frank had not been able to attend, despite having promised the client he’d oversee all shoots personally, because it had coincided with the week he married Cleo, and the footage that he now found himself looking at from the shoot that he had not actually been present at but must now pretend he had overseen was, to Frank’s eye, tainted, no, blighted, by the presence of an extra so colossally miscast that Frank had to question whether he was surrounded by incompetents, or if someone on his staff was indeed out to fuck him. He was also hungover. Painfully, royally hungover.
“There,” Frank said, jabbing a finger at the large screen silhouetting him and the editor, a pasty guy he thought might be called Joe. “Right. There. Am I the only one who sees this large, shirtless white guy in the frame? Tell me, seriously, can you not see him?”
“Oh yeah,” said the editor, cracking his knuckles with such obvious satisfaction that Frank had to restrain himself from reaching over and snapping his fingers like breadsticks. “What’s he doing there?”
“What he’s doing there,” Frank said with slow deliberateness, “is messing up the shot. What he’s doing there is interrupting a carefully choreographed milieu of young, genetically blessed Argentines—who are each, incidentally, being paid union rates—with his, his … I don’t even know what you call this. Porcine! His porcine appearance.”
“Maybe he’s meant to be adding some, you know, like, reality to the scene?”
Frank gave the editor a murderous look. They’d shot in Argentina for the better production value, though any sign of authentic South American culture had been scourged from the product itself (the company was trying to disassociate itself from the Latin market). The spot featured a suburban yet improbably good-looking white guy sitting alone in a bar. He orders a drink—a glinting, jewel-like glass of rum—tosses it back, and is suddenly transported to a tropical beach. A crowd of attractive revelers (tanned, but in a familiar European-looking way) gather around him. As one taut, bikini-clad girl passes him another drink, an airplane garishly emblazoned with the brand logo pulls a banner declaring “There’s a party somewhere. Find it” across the empty blue sky.
The irony that Frank should have to work on this particular ad while feeling as he did, like his brain was a cotton ball soaked in rubbing alcohol slowly drying in the sun, was not lost on him. He’d gone to meet Anders after work the night before with the innocent enough intention of watching highlights from that day’s Premier League game. Anders was already there when he arrived, recounting last night’s sexual exploits to the bartender.
“I’m telling you,” he said, signaling for the bartender to bring Frank the same dark lager he was drinking, “if the genders had been reversed, it would have been sexual assault.”
“So you’re saying you didn’t get hard?” Frank mounted a barstool and looked at Anders over his glasses.
“Well.” Anders ran his hands through his sandy hair and offered his gap-toothed smile. “I did not want to offend her. But she was certainly the aggressor. Much too aggressive for me, in fact.”
“You’re lucky Cleo’s not here,” Frank said, taking a thirsty gulp from the pint glass that had appeared before him. “That comment would definitely incur a feminist outcry.”
“Perhaps,” said Anders vaguely, turning back to the glow of the screen. “Ah, did you see that pass? Beautiful!”
“I’m only drinking beer tonight, by the way,” said Frank, taking another deep sip. “Sólo beer.”
Anders raised a white-blond eyebrow. “Did Cleo decide that for you?”
Frank had noticed that Anders was unusually tight-lipped on the subject of Cleo. He wondered if Anders was jealous of her. He and Anders had a decades-long friendship that was both deepened and threatened by an intense rivalry. When Anders split from his ex-girlfriend Christine, it was Frank whose couch he slept on for weeks while he looked for a new place. Neither of them had been in a serious relationship for years—they were each the other’s emergency contacts, for Christ’s sake—so it must have been disconcerting for Anders to watch Frank go from being single to married in only a few months.