The next day, I watched the play again. It was a matinee, so the cast scraped out of Ricky’s house at eleven o’clock with the pouty camaraderie of a communal hangover. Too tired and confused the night before, Danny and I had had sex that morning—emerging last into the kitchen, secretly superior. I ordered another to-go lobster on the way to the theater and it came with its claws flopping over the sides of a fast food container, which I liked. I sat in the back again but felt a strange sinking when the lights dimmed. Danny looked handsome in his costume: styled, slightly, and forced to wear jeans that fit him.
I don’t think I’d ever had a truly violent impulse before that afternoon, sitting in a velvet chair in a dark theater as old people laughed. I had a boyfriend in high school who got into a fight at a party in someone’s basement and I remember driving him home in silence, fully incapable of understanding why he felt compelled to punch Joey Carlton in the face for the shit he said about Mike and AJ. But I understood now. Danny and Olivia were just so charming! The part where they first kissed, his hand on the small of her back and her fingers running through his hair. The part where they giggled and eye-smiled and confessed things and fought and made up and cried and kissed again. I wanted to take Olivia’s face and hit it as hard as I could. Shove her to the ground and kick her in the side. Smash her against the wall, pull at her hair, punch her again right between the eyes. I imagined doing these things as the audience laughed. Imagined getting up on stage and beating her up. Just literally beating her up. Fuck you, I would say. Fuck you and your stupid clothing and your stupid attitude and the way you talk to everyone like they fucking love you. Stay the fuck away from Danny and if you ever fucking talk to him again I will kill you, I would say. I will literally kill you.
During intermission I went outside to sit in the car because I didn’t feel like talking to the lobby and its circles. Part of me probably knew it was coming because as soon as I shut the door, I started crying. I let my head hang forward and press against the steering wheel but after a few sobs I sat up and stopped. I texted five or six friends from the city. Small things like “hey how’s work?” or “ugh I want to kill this girl in Dan’s play.” I do that sometimes when I’m feeling lonely; it’s a strange and compulsive habit, but it usually works. I waited for a minute before anyone responded. Flipped down the mirror and rubbed my knuckle under my eyes, exhaling. My sister and my friend Tara texted me back and I responded to both immediately. I spent the second half of the play reminding myself of particular ways in which I was better than Olivia: I was thinner, I had nicer eyes, I went to a better school.
I didn’t know what my problem was. Danny had been a (struggling) actor since the day we met and I’d seen him kiss girls onstage before. I guess the summer had been hard; the cell service in northern Cape Cod wasn’t great and I’d wonder about him all day as I sat in my office. The envy was twofold: jealousy of the girl he was spending time with and jealousy of how he was spending his time. Playing around all day doing stretches and dumb acting games, getting wasted at night at the Beachcomber, the local bar he raved about whenever we talked on the phone. “It’s so fun,” he’d say. “There’s this group of local alcoholics who are too freaking funny. But they have these bands that come and everyone just sort of goes with it, you know? None of that too-cool bullshit.” “Yeah,” I’d say, in bed with my salad. “It sounds amazing, you’ll have to take me when I come up in August.” “For sure,” he’d reply. “I can’t wait.”
We got dinner together between shows and had sex again on these inland dunes. Danny parked the car on the side of Route 6 next to a beach pine marked with an orange plastic flag.
“This way,” he said, leading me up a path through scratchy trunks growing sideways out of sand. “I’m telling you, this place is unreal.”
It was. We emerged from the cropped forest into an expanse of craters, dune grass waving from the tops of their peaked edges. The sun hadn’t quite set but the crickets were pulsing—chirping from the green patches with astonishing volume. It was windy, and strips of hair blew out of my ponytail and across my face. Danny stretched his arms up and leaned forward into the wind.
“Isn’t it amazing?”
“Yeah,” I said, pulling on a sweatshirt.
“We come here a lot at night.” He jumped forward and down in massive leaps, sand sliding in chutes behind him. I leapt after, shrieking, and landed in a heap at the bottom, rolling next to him.
We had the idea at the same moment and kept our clothes on the whole time. When we were done, I lay down beside him and looked up at the thin clouds. I thought about how funny we must look from above—lying in the center of a bowl-shaped hole in the world. I imagined what it would be like if every crater had a couple at its center, looking up.
“Do you ever come here with Olivia?” I asked. Cupping sand in my hands and letting it sift into a pile.
“Sure,” he said. “We all come here.” I knew my jealousy was unattractive, that Danny would think I was insecure, but I couldn’t stop.
“Yeah, but do you come here with just her?”
He rolled over to face me.
“Olivia and I are friends,” he said. “We do shit together.”
“Like kiss every night.”
“Onstage. In a play.” I didn’t say anything. He sat up. “You’re not serious, are you?”
I reverted, pulling my head inside my sweatshirt in mock retreat.
“I hate her!” My voice came out muffled. I popped back out. “I hate her, I hate her.” I smiled, and it worked: the intensity of the moment vanished as fast as I’d created it.
We lay there in silence for a while, but it was ruined. I knew the way Danny thought and I knew this only made him like me less and like her more. For the second time that day I wanted to hit something but I still couldn’t help myself. I rolled over and kissed at his neck.
“Remember that T-shirt she was wearing yesterday?”
“Who? Olivia?”
“Yeah.” I paused. “Did you give it to her? I thought you had that shirt.” He sat up again, serious this time. Cupped my hands in my lap.
“Listen,” he said, his eyebrows raised. “I love you, okay?”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to convince you.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.” The crickets droned and I stood up to shake sand off my back. “I just—love you.”
He looked at me and tucked my loose hair behind my ears.
“I love you too,” he said. But I never got my answer.
The Yahtzee happened that night. After the play. I went for a third time despite Danny’s genuine suggestion that I sit this one out. In the hour beforehand, I walked to the Penny Patch, the old candy store in the village by Wellfleet Harbor. I ate a small piece of chocolate fudge, a small piece of penuche fudge, and three saltwater taffies and decided I was being ridiculous about the whole thing. Danny and I had gone out to dinner. We’d had sex in the bottom of a romantic dune crater. We’d been dating since we were twenty-four. I’d gone to Minnesota with his parents; he’d come to my grandfather’s funeral. Olivia was strange and loud and a tomboy and they loved her because she was one of them, drinking beers and wearing dumb hats. Tomorrow I would pack Danny inside my car and we’d zoom off on the freeway and back inside the walls of New York.
The fact that I had to watch it a third time was almost comical. The approach this time ended up as a complex and detailed imagining of exactly what Danny and Olivia did together offstage. Wishing each other luck before their first entrance. Squeezing hands behind thick black curtains on the side of the theater. Rapidly changing costumes at intermission and catching glimpses of each other’s underwear.
When the show was over, I acted extremely cool. Involving myself in the standing ovation and congratulating Olivia when she came out the side of the theater. I even winked at Danny, which he thought was funny, or pretended to. The cast and crew were hopped up on nostalgia—and the whole thing felt a lot like the last night of camp. We grouped up in cars and headed to the Beachcomber, where the local alcoholics and bad bands were as prominent as promised. I actually got a bit drunk off gin and tonics and Danny must have been listening at the dunes because he paid a lot of attention to me. The morning hovered over all our actions with a kind of euphoria. I decided I hated Cape Cod as much as I hated its summer heroine, and the hours until I could cross back over its metallic bridge ticked down with each exceedingly dizzy hour.
The six of us ended up at Ricky’s just like the night before. Danny, the bearded Noah, the delicate Eric, Olivia, and me. We had to do the whole ordeal with the square penis again, running up the stairs and kneeling before Ricky lumbered up to kick us down. Everything felt very exciting and very immature at the same time and I genuinely fluctuated between resenting my hidden worship of their rural hipsterdom and declaring (internally) that their fun was a little too intentional. Eric forced us into the kitchen, where we were supposed to engage in “slap shots”—a game he insisted was hilarious but involved taking a shot and promptly getting slapped. Ricky didn’t understand and the rest of us were too tired for that kind of thing so we ended up sort of loitering and looking in cabinets.
“Game,” said Noah, opening and shutting the refrigerator for no reason. “Game!”
“Yes!” Olivia agreed. And it was settled. Danny and Noah went to set something up and Ricky pulled Eric out to clear the table and assemble some kind of smoking situation. I went to place my wineglass in the sink but stopped when I realized Olivia was still standing there and we were alone together for the first time. I looked at her.
“Do you want another drink?” she asked, casual.
“No thank you,” I said. Still standing in place. It was silent, awkward.
“Did you like that wine?” she said finally, twisting a ring.
“It was fine.”