The Ingenue
The biggest fight in my relationship with Danny regards his absurd claim that he invented the popular middle school phenomenon of saying “cha-cha-cha” after each phrase of the Happy Birthday song—an idea his ingenious sixth-grade brain allegedly spawned in a New Jersey Chuck E. Cheese and watched spread across 1993 America with an unprecedented rapidity.
“I started that! Are you kidding me!?” His face was serious now, indignant. “Literally, I started that, ask anyone from Montclair!”
“Danny, you did not start that, that’s ridiculous.” I was serious now, too. “I’m done talking about this.”
“No, no, no. Listen. I don’t know why this is so impossible to you. Someone had to start it; someone had to be the first kid to say it. I’m telling you, that was me. Eliot Grossman’s birthday party. Ask anyone.”
“This is really typical.”
“What!?” He put his wineglass down on the table.
“Nothing. Just . . . you would think you invented something like that. It’s just something you would think.” I was searching the cabinets for this bag of Goldfish.
“I can’t believe you don’t believe me about this. It’s really pissing me off.”
“I can tell.”
“Arrgh! This is really pissing me off!” His eyes were frustrated and angry in a way I hadn’t seen before, and for some reason it satisfied me. I sat on the couch and opened my laptop.
In years to come he would whisper it at parties as the cake paraded by or mouth it across a restaurant table at a sibling’s birthday dinner. Cha-cha-cha, he would provoke. Cha-cha-cha, cha-cha-cha.
There was silence for a while and I knew he was brooding.
“Sometimes I hate you,” he said. He let the words hang for a moment and then came over and sat next to me, tousling my head into the pillow and kissing me lightly on each eye.
I only tell this story because it reflects why the Yahtzee was so essential.
*
There were six of us. Danny, the bearded Noah, the delicate Eric, the old artistic director, and Olivia, whom I hated. Cape Cod was abandoned but we were up in the artistic director’s Provincetown shack for a post-cast-party party. Danny was doing summer stock again and I’d driven up for the final performances. I actually ate a lobster by myself before I got to the theater—picking wet meat out of knuckles as I watched the summer’s final families appear from a dune drop-off and bang Boogie Boards against the sides of their cars.
The show was terrible for two reasons: one, that the show was terrible, and two, that it involved a lot of kissing. They giggled together, Danny smiling with his eyes inches from Olivia’s—pulling at her belt loop and touching her earlobe, which I’d taught him. I wasn’t usually so particular about the girls he kissed onstage but there was something about her I didn’t like. It started the moment I saw them enter together onstage—holding hands—something disgusting growing in the back of my stomach. She was masculine almost, like an attractive cross dresser, and her genuine tomboyishness unsettled me.
At the party, she wore an actual T-shirt, not fitted or branded, and a flat-brimmed hat with the name of a New Orleans bait shop in neon orange. She drank a beer from the bottle and teased the boys, who didn’t realize they stopped talking whenever she started to tell a story. I’d clicked through her pictures a few times that summer and imagined, on nights when Danny didn’t text back, rehearsals that ended in beers and joints on beaches.
“Show her the one with the square penis!” Olivia laughed, and we all lunged up a banisterless staircase. “Ricky’s partner is a painter,” she explained. “And he has this painting of a square penis.”
“It’s not that funny.” Ricky, the artistic director, was as drunk as the rest of us.
“It is, Rick,” said Noah. “It’s ingenious.”
“Fuck off.”
“It actually is!” The house was old and decorated with an enviable authenticity. We wove through rusted signs and relics from the Army-Navy store until we arrived at the painting, where everyone promptly knelt. I stood awkwardly, not sure whether or not I was involved.
“Get out of here.” Ricky whacked Eric on the back of the head. “You’re not worthy.”
“We know,” said Danny. “Trust me, we know.”
“You’re making yourself look stupid in front of your girlfriend, you know that?” It was a line from the play and everyone died. Olivia literally rolled onto her side and I felt an odd nostalgia for my high school friends and the days when everyone shared the same world of people. Noah pulled her up and I noticed the print on her T-shirt for the first time. There was a dinosaur that appeared to be riding a bike below a REX’S FIX UPS AND MIX UPS. It looked familiar: I remembered someone somewhere making a joke about that dinosaur, laughing in some bar about its tiny hands leaning down toward the bike’s handles. Eventually, Noah and Eric went downstairs to pack a bowl and I slipped a hand into Danny’s pocket, holding him back as the rest tumbled down.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.” He smiled. “I love you.”
“I love you too. Come here.” I pulled him into a corner of the upstairs space and we leaned against a bookcase, pressing our foreheads together. I hadn’t seen him since July and being together in groups never felt like being together.
“I miss you,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I love you.” We kissed but I could tell he wanted to go downstairs.
“You were good tonight, you know that? That part with the father, your physicality was really spot-on.”
“Thanks.” We looked at each other. It was a genuine compliment moment and we were on the same team. “I mean, the play is shit, but thank you.”
“It’s not.”
“It is.” We looked at each other again and grinned at the same time. Danny rarely admitted this type of thing and I was overcome with affection. I wanted to crawl into something and lie with our faces touching for as long as it took to feel like I didn’t miss him anymore. I wanted to do this, to tell him this, to say I wanted to get out of the house and into the car and onto the freeway where we could zoom away from all the attractive people I didn’t know, but Danny was looking at me, almost studying me, and took my shoulders in his hands as if surprised.
“Argh, man,” he said. “I missed you. I really did miss you.” His eyes were sad and he kissed me on the nose. It was as if he’d just realized it. Just actualized the refrain of our phone calls.
“Good,” I said. Worried, rather than hurt, that I might have to pull him back in. That he was sad to be heading home to our TV shows and late-night snacks and unmade cave of a bed.
We were so compatible, really. Really just so compatible in a number of ways. We had the same favorite band, the same exact one, and I used to act too, in college. We bonded over this at the party where we first met—some mutual friend of a friend and I had walked into an unlocked bathroom to reveal him rinsing with the apartment owner’s Listerine. We’d found this remarkably hilarious and I liked the way he made fun of me while holding eye contact. When we walked back to his place, I told him I had quit theater because it was never my primary focus to begin with and, besides, I was never that good. He said I was probably being modest (Danny always flirted with flattery) and for the first and only time in my life, I made out a good deal on the subway.
“You know the Books are playing in Prospect Park next weekend,” I said, my hands still in his pockets. “We should go.”
“Yeah, for sure.”
“Go to that Vietnamese place before.”
“Yeah, totally.” We could hear the wind rattling the deck umbrella in its metal holder and I thought for a minute about the vast stretch of beach we couldn’t see in the dark—about how the tide could be dead low or dead high and we wouldn’t even know. But the thought of Brooklyn had popped the image of Rex’s Fix Ups back into my head and I almost said something but decided not to. The shop was on Dean Street. The shirt belonged to Danny.
I heard shouting from the kitchen and it sounded like Olivia was laughing at Eric for spilling some kind of drink.
“I’ll kill you!” she shouted. “Hom-o, hom-o!” Chairs seemed to be sliding and we heard something drop. “Hom-o, I’ll eat you!” Danny tried not to smile but his face broke and he stifled a laugh.
“I’m sorry,” he said, still grinning. “I’m sorry, it’s just . . . I’m sorry.” He couldn’t keep a straight face.
“It’s fine,” I said, smiling back at him. “It’s fine. Let’s go.”
I kissed him on the cheek and we turned to leave, the umbrella still rattling from outside the glass.
It wasn’t until we were walking back down the stairs toward the maze of antiques and squealing actors that I truly realized I despised Olivia and her flat-brimmed hat with an unbearable and irrational intensity.