“Okay, then how about getting up at Therapy tonight? Seven minutes?”
This “Therapy” is not a garden-level office where a pleasant woman tilts her head while she asks you to “say more about that.” Ari is certain she will never, ever want to say more about that. In Gabe’s world, Therapy is the bar around the corner where he hosts a comedy show on Thursdays and flirts with aspiring Broadway performers Friday through Wednesday.
Performing has always been Ari’s escape from her problems—she usually feels more at home onstage with her friends than anywhere else. But she had a few disastrous improv shows the week after Cass left. It felt like her neurons failed to fire. She froze up. Two nights later, she’d bombed—like, bombed—a stand-up set. More evidence of her personal failure. The last thing she needs is a stage. She’d rather be anonymous or ignored right now. Why give an audience of strangers the opportunity to validate all the toxic thoughts brewing in her mind? Better to throw herself into catering and freelancing and jobs where people don’t punish her with stony silence because she’s just a little preoccupied with the way her wife left her with an empty apartment because she’s decided she’s “beholden only to herself.”
Ari exhales. She’d scoured off the top layer of white enamel on the sink.
She shoves a stack of fresh paper towels into the dispenser and slams it shut. “I’ve told you. I’m not capable of being funny right now. I’m busy writing customized eulogies for fifteen dollars each.”
He narrows his eyes. “All this moping over a woman who used to tell people she conjured you out of Manic Panic, nipple piercings, and secondhand bong vapor?”
“That’s basically a compliment.” Ari aggressively sprays glass cleaner over the mirror, blotting out her own reflection. “And I’m not moping.”
“There’s a cute new bartender at Therapy.” Gabe leans closer to the mirror and examines his chin, tapping beneath it as if to check for signs of sagging. “Amazing ass. Never wears a bra.” He pauses. “Glasses.”
Ari tries to muster some enthusiasm. She pictures leading a braless, near-sighted bartender into the alley behind the bar. Feeling a new pair of hands in her hair. The damp brick wall against her back. Dragging her mouth across a shoulder, a collarbone, a nipple covered by the thin fabric of a stretchy tank top. Clouds of breath in the cold two a.m. air. Being pushed to her knees. Quiet little whimpering noises barely audible above the muffled, thumping bass from inside. Just picturing that kind of encounter would normally send flickers of live-wire energy through her body.
But the swooping sensation in the pit of her stomach won’t materialize.
“I can’t tonight.” After what is sure to be a few mind-numbing hours of pouring cheap merlot at an opening at the Whitney, she has huge plans to go home and try not to look at her soon-to-be-ex-wife’s Instagram. It features pictures of Cass and Katya cuddling on a hammock in the Catskills, captioned “New beginnings,” followed by some quote from Brené Brown.
“You’re isolating yourself.” Gabe turns to face her. “You should get over her by getting under a bartender. Or two. At the same time.”
“I’m not getting under anyone.” She gives the mirror one last swipe with the rag, catching her disaffected facial expression in the reflection. “Plus, you know I like to be on top.”
Thurs, Oct 13, 6:26 p.m.
Abby: Financial advisor will be at the restaurant in 7 mins.
It’s on 55th.
I have a booth in the back.
Bring your laptop.
7:10 p.m.
Are you coming?
7:28 p.m.
We ordered you the salmon.
You like ponzu, right?
8:00 p.m.
You need to be part of this decision, Joshua.
We have to present a united front.
Emailing you a recap of the offers.
If we move forward, I’m inclined to wait until after the Historical Society event.
Optics.
Josh braces himself against the chilly October wind whipping down Great Jones Street. He’s started adding evening runs to his gym schedule. Spending a full quarter of his waking hours at the Crunch on Bowery is a perfectly acceptable way to pass the time. Better than meetings with the humorless bald man fielding offers for Brodsky’s—property developers who want to turn the space into “athleisure concept labs” or “bitcoin bodegas.”
Inside his building, the old elevator shudders to a halt, opening directly into his fifth-floor apartment.
The fluorescent lights take a full two seconds to buzz to life, revealing the chaos, courtesy of his mother. In what’s supposed to be his living room, there’s half of a booth that his dad never got around to reupholstering, an industrial mixer, assorted hotel pans and racks, his dad’s old records and paperbacks, and questionably functional home gym equipment. A physical testament to Danny Kestenberg’s stubborn refusal to let go of things. His home now functions as a twelve-hundred-square-foot junk drawer.
At some point, Josh will pry the hideous avocado tile off the bathroom floor, rip out the chipped kitchen cabinets, and finish demolishing every non-load-bearing wall. But he’s not going to bother with the renovations he and Sophie had planned. Someone else can come in with their Miele appliances and Herman Miller chairs and create the most generic version of a Manhattan “dream home,” complete with a wife and a French bulldog.
He’s been telling himself that for the last six months. The only progress he’s made is a smattering of half-hearted sledgehammer holes, created after an especially brutal bout of self-loathing. Instead of dropping an anchor, he’d swung it through drywall.
He does some light social media stalking: monitoring restaurant openings and closings on Eater, sifting through the social accounts of every chef he ever worked with. All the James Beard winners, the Top Chef contestants. This form of masochism is supposed to propel him into action, but it only brings the bitter feelings back up to the surface.
Peeling off his shirt, he walks back to the bathroom to start the multistep process of running the hot water in the ancient claw-foot tub. Everything in this apartment is half-broken. Josh misses the walk-in steam shower from his previous apartment. He misses Sophie in his walk-in steam shower. Or maybe he misses the idea of Sophie in his walk-in steam shower because they’d only had sex in there once. (She’d said it was awkward and possibly dangerous.)
Sometimes it boils over into a mix of hostility and anger: a longing for her to call while fantasizing about rejecting her offer of reconciliation. He wonders when he’ll have another sexual experience aided by more than his own hand and his porn stash.
So, when his phone abruptly buzzes to life in that very hand, it’s reasonable to conclude that he’d conjured a text from Sophie with the power of regret and self-pity. He gives himself a half-second to imagine her sheepish, apologetic message before glancing at the screen.
But it’s not Sophie’s name.
* * *
ARI CURLS UP on her air mattress—as much as one can curl up on a large plastic balloon—her fingers hovering over the keyboard, on the verge of the last line for another maid-of-honor speech on NeverTired.
Ari’s been describing the apartment as “empty,” but that’s not exactly true. It’s full of piles: piles of clothes, piles of books, piles of random shit she never bothered to put away that used to be on the nightstand. Which is also gone.
Several times, Ari has felt the automatic impulse to clean up the piles, in case Cass comes home late and stumbles over them in the dark.
But no one’s coming home anymore.
No one’s sending a wildly inaccurate ETA text with the kiss emoji.
No one’s getting up in the middle of the night to make kimchi grilled cheese sandwiches when Ari has the munchies.