“A feature on Eater where I’m portrayed as a petulant child, ruining his father’s legacy by adding orange zest to a blintz recipe.” He exhales and his whole torso seems to crumple.
“Okay, but she’ll be dating a man who can make blintzes. And you can still cook,” Ari points out, because for some reason, other people’s problems always seem obviously fixable. She hasn’t had a reason to absorb someone else’s pain since Cass left. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s an odd sort of relief from wallowing in her own misery.
Josh stares into the dregs of his wine, his shoulders rising and falling with heavy breaths. “I have no interest in stepping foot in another kitchen, not that anyone wants to hire me.” His voice is softer than she’s ever heard it. Resigned. Like the furious, know-it-all energy that used to surround him burned away and left a shell of a person. “Every morning I wake up and remember I have no plans and nothing to look forward to.”
“Well, that’s not true.” Ari swallows, searching her brain for a way to cut the grim direction of the conversation, even though she had the exact same realization when she lay awake at four a.m. on the inflatable mattress. “You just spent eighty-six dollars at CreamPot.”
“I did not need to buy a hands-free lube dispenser,” he points out.
“It’s convenient and hygienic.” She laughs, the last sip of whiskey still burning a streak down her throat. “You’ll thank me the next time you bring a girl back to your place and you’re not fumbling around in your nightstand.”
He finishes his wine. “Don’t be nice to me. It makes me uncomfortable. And I don’t deserve it.”
The Jim Beam makes her want to reach over and squeeze his arm or something. But that much human contact would probably shatter him at this point.
“I think I prefer this version of you. You’re morose as shit, but for once, you’re not acting like an entitled prick.”
The look on Josh’s face is hard to parse, like he’s both offended and pleased. When their eyes meet, it’s as if he sees behind the tight smile she’s been plastering on her face.
Ari slides down from her stool, grabbing her shopping bag—filled with high-end vibrators that she cannot afford—from the hook beneath the counter.
“And men rebound quickly,” she says. “You’ll be knee-deep in some soulmate-level romance in a month or two and you’ll forget we ever had this conversation.”
Ari glances out the window, watching pedestrians move down Greene Street, meeting friends outside restaurants or hurrying home to their loved ones.
There’s no one waiting for her anywhere.
She nods at the street. “Do you…want to take a walk?”
* * *
“AT LEAST YOU don’t have to get divorced,” Ari says.
Josh watches her wrap a crocheted rainbow scarf around her neck as they walk north, auto-piloting vaguely toward Washington Square Park.
“Sophie thought weddings were tacky.” He pauses. “She used the word ‘gauche.’ I always pictured a city hall ceremony. Something simple.”
A trio of tourists brush past him, their Zara shopping bags trailing behind them.
“We got married while I was working on a cruise ship. I wore a striped two-piece.” Ari takes out her phone and scrolls through approximately ten thousand pictures—many of them distractingly…flesh-toned—before selecting a photo and holding it up for him.
He tries to focus on Ari’s bright smile in the photograph and not the bikini. Her nose is a little scrunched up, like she’s about to burst into a laugh next to Cass. There’s nothing artificial or posed about it.
“You keep this picture on your phone?”
“I know, I know.” She tosses her phone back into her tote bag, shaking her head. “Radhya tells me to delete all that stuff but sometimes I find it comforting? The tangible artifacts of happiness. Every time I get a text, it’s like…my heart leaps because I think it might be some huge apology.” Ari buries her chin a little farther into the rainbow scarf. “I can’t believe I just told you that humiliating tidbit.”
I’d give anything for Sophie to text me, he thinks, unclenching his cold, stiff hands.
“You still have the apartment, though?”
“Yes, but I’m living the involuntary minimalist lifestyle,” she continues. “Eating on the floor. Re-inflating my mattress every night.”
“She took the furniture?”
“Well, I guess almost all of it was hers.” A little wrinkle appears above the bridge of her nose. “When I moved to New York, I had one set of utensils and my water bottle. After a couple days, I bought myself a single bowl at Pearl River Mart. It was white, with a blue border around the rim and a dragon at the bottom. I thought it was beautiful. It felt like a New York ‘thing.’?”
He nods. “It’s a classic pattern.”
“I never kept more stuff than I could haul around in a duffel bag but everything in the bag was mine. If nothing else, no matter what shitty apartment I had to live in, I always knew I had the equipment to make myself cereal.” Her voice grows a little more agitated. “Cass used the bowl all the time and I thought that was kind of cute. She already had tons of kitchen stuff, but this was my symbolic contribution to the apartment. After the movers left, I went into the kitchen and threw open all the cabinet doors, looking for it.”
“And it wasn’t there?”
“I assumed she’d make sure they left that one thing.” Her voice rises in pitch. He’s afraid she’s on the edge of tears again until she recomposes her face into something nonchalant. “At least she didn’t take my bong.” Ari laughs, but there’s a razor-sharp edge to it, giving Josh the sense that the bowl represents the outer bound of some bigger hurt, pulsing under the surface.
They take one of the looping walkways around the park, leaves crunching beneath their boots, following the paths without either one of them leading the way. The orange-pink light of sunset filters through the Washington Square Arch onto the surface of the fountain water, creating an ideal backdrop for a handful of couples taking selfies.
Ari stares at a man and a woman, his arms slung around her shoulders, her right hand outstretched to hold her phone.
“How do you think those two will break up?” she asks.
“Break up?” Josh tilts his head at the couple. “They seem happy enough.” They’re each wearing L.L.Bean fleece pullovers in muted earth tones.
Ari gives him an “oh, please” look. “It’s easy to be happy at that stage. But in a couple months he’ll start to suspect that she’s cheating on him with her work husband. He’ll notice her smiling at some after-hours text and check her phone when she’s in the shower. He’ll tell himself he’s doing it to prove himself wrong. That she’s totally innocent. And instead, he’ll discover that his intuition was spot-on. She’s been boning her co-worker for months.”
“Is this a new hobby of yours?” Josh asks, searching for whatever invisible signs of future infidelity she’s picking up on.
“More of a lifelong aptitude.” Ari starts walking again, hugging her coat closed. “Weird how I didn’t foresee the demise of my own relationship. I guess we always think we’re the exception.”
Something about her dejected expression triggers his empathy, revealing a sliver of common ground between them. Josh clears his throat. “When we first met, I was—”
“A total shithead?” Ari keeps her eyes straight ahead as they pass beneath a stretch of scaffolding.
He exhales, recalibrating. Apologies have never been his strong suit. “A bit arrogant.”
“But you’re a softboi now?” She gives him a gentle little jab in the ribs. It gives him a jolt in a way he’s certain she didn’t intend. There’s a pause—an opening—but they let it pass.
“I honestly don’t know if that’s a positive or a negative.” He makes a mental note to check the meaning of softboi on Urban Dictionary later.
“You also said you were completely certain that the best sexual experience of my life wouldn’t be with a stranger.”
Interesting that she memorized the exact wording of his pronouncement. Of course, this exchange burrowed deep in his hippocampus, too.