“Okay, well, let’s get a look at him before you work on your origin story,” Cobie said, and rolled her eyes.
But even Cobie found herself watching him, she told Jess after, and not only because meeting him was her sole purpose for visiting Gillam. She took in the bar, the crowd, the music, Jess’s other friends from home, but somehow, for some reason, when she wasn’t paying attention, she was always searching for Malcolm.
“Exactly,” Jess said. “What’s that about?”
“He has a lot of presence. And the two of you together?” Cobie asked. “You’re like the prom king and queen.”
“Him, maybe,” Jess said. “Not me.”
“Not you alone, no. But with him?” Cobie paused. “You’re different here.”
Jess met Cobie on the first day of college orientation. They’d both complained about their hometowns—Cobie’s all the way in Texas—how the rules of life were prescribed from birth, though the families they’d been born into couldn’t have been more different. Jess asked, tentatively, if it had been hard coming out to her parents, and Cobie laughed and told her she was never “in”—her parents knew she was gay before she did. No, it was something else about home that was strangling her, the notion that what’s important to one person must be important to everyone. All of Jess’s classmates saw themselves as the ones who’d broken free, but oddly, the more the others griped about their hometowns, the more Jess saw that hers wasn’t so bad. The Ryans hadn’t had money, but that wasn’t Gillam’s fault, and in general, she remembered kindnesses. Teachers telling her she was bright, encouraging her along.
She’d gotten a decent merit scholarship but had still needed a sizable loan. She ended up deferring repayment to go to law school full-time. She paid for law school with a new loan, and the loan officer seemed pleased to tell her that when the time came she could bundle her loans together, as if it made any difference to her whether she repaid with one check or split the amount into two. At twenty-two, money was still only theoretical to her, and the higher that loan amount climbed, the more abstract it seemed.
* * *
“God,” Jess said the first time she saw Malcolm, standing behind the bar, “who’s that?” It was her friend Jenny’s birthday. They’d been co-captains of the track team their senior year of high school, and they still ran together sometimes when Jess was home. Jenny had just broken off an engagement, and Jess had just broken up with a classmate she’d been seeing half-heartedly. He always finished her sentences and he was always wrong. So they were due for a night out. They’d rounded up a few other friends from high school Jess hadn’t seen in a while.
“Oh,” Jenny said, with sympathy in her tone. “You’ve never met Malcolm?”
“Hello, Jenny’s lawyer friend,” Malcolm said to her later, when it was her turn to buy a round. “Your friends were bragging about you before you got here.”
“I’m not a lawyer yet,” she said. “Working on it.”
“Well look at you,” he said.
“I’m Jess,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “I’m Malcolm.”
“I know,” she said, and laughed. “You’re a big hit around here.”
When Jess returned to the table hugging eight bottles of beer and wearing a dopey smile, Jenny said, “Don’t even think about it. He’s been with everyone.”
“Think about what?” Jess asked. But every time she got a chance, she looked over at him.
She found an excuse to go home again two weeks later. And then again two weeks after that. Later, when they were together but no one knew, Jess would shout her order over the din and he’d lean very close, as if to hear her better. It wasn’t true that he’d been with everyone. He had rules about never getting together with girls who hung around the bar too much, girls he’d have to see too often when it ended. He wasn’t interested in girls who wore their designs on him too bluntly, the girls who got too drunk and sagged against him at the end of the night. He liked the girls who kept it together, he said, who could hold a normal conversation at midnight. Like Jess.
Once everyone knew, the same friends who’d stood alongside her in sympathy the first night started side-eyeing her, sizing her up. Was she in fact too tall? Could her breasts stand to be a bit bigger? Was she actually all that pretty or was she just skinny with good hair? Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.
* * *
Occasionally, to give her a break from all the back-and-forth, he came to her apartment in the city, but Jess knew he hated giving up a weekend night at the bar, hated circling in search of a parking spot. If she and Cobie had friends over, he asked Jess’s classmates for stories of what she was like in law school, if she was very serious or if she ever fell asleep in the back row. He said it was unfair that she could picture his day but he couldn’t quite picture hers. When they went out he always had plenty of cash and kept it neatly folded in a clip. He made the guys searching the opens maws of their wallets look like little boys.
In her third year, Jess was selected to represent her school on a tour of Southeast Asia as part of an international law initiative. She was twenty-five years old. She wore one of Cobie’s silk blouses to a meeting in Myanmar and ate the best meal of her life in Singapore. She went swimming off the coast of Cambodia and saw the towering Golden Buddha in Thailand. By then she knew she was in love with Malcolm, and sent him a postcard almost every day, mostly about food. She woke up ravenous every morning and asked her classmates if it was the same for them, if they thought it was the time difference, perhaps their bodies didn’t know when their meals were supposed to be and so wanted to eat all the time.
She was sick on the plane home, which was embarrassing. She hoped her classmates didn’t hear her retching into the tiny toilet. When she stepped out of the bathroom, a very kind flight attendant handed her a gel ice pack, told her to hold it to her face and neck, it would make her feel better. When she finally got to New York, dragged her suitcase up four flights of stairs to her apartment, she sat up late with Cobie just to talk about all the things they wanted from their lives, all the places they wanted to go. And then she slept for twenty hours, waking only to pee. When she woke up for real she was so hungry that she felt nauseated. Malcolm was on his way to see her.
Cobie said she’d clear out as soon as he arrived, but before she left she wanted to add one extra point to that conversation they’d had last night. She said, and asked Jess to please not be mad at her for saying so, that with Malcolm, Jess’s boundaries would always be Gillam’s. She thought Jess would have ended things with him by then, but instead it seemed to be getting more serious. Cobie said it was something she’d been thinking about and she’d be a bad friend if she didn’t make sure Jess knew that.
“You’ve just been to all these places,” Cobie said. “Is Malcolm interested in going anywhere besides Gillam and the Jersey Shore?”
“That’s not fair,” Jess said. “You need money to travel. Each year of that high school you went to cost more than most people pay for college. So there are things you just do not understand, Cobie. You think regular people can up and fly to Vietnam? I wouldn’t have gone to Asia if someone hadn’t picked my name out of a hat or whatever. If all my expenses hadn’t been paid.”
“There you go,” Cobie said. “They didn’t pick your name out of a hat and you know it.”
“He’s not dumb,” Jess said. “Far from it.”
“I didn’t say he is.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with the Jersey Shore. It’s beautiful. A lot of people don’t realize.”
“I said okay.”
“Or Gillam, for that matter.”
“I know that.”
“Anyway,” Jess said. “He’s ambitious. His plan is to own his own bar one day.” She laid a hand on her stomach and tucked a pillow behind her head.
“Great,” Cobie said. “Awesome.”
* * *