“Nothing. So how was work anyway?”
He takes a swig of his Fat Tire. Back when she used to visit him in her heavier days, she was content to enjoy dinner in what he thought was an amicable silence, smoking a Camel Light while he slurped takeout in front of an old monster movie. Now that they eat boiled grains over candlelight, she demands dinner conversation. As he yammers on about various parts of his day, often trailing off, only to be prompted by a clipped What else? he feels like one of those old mechanical toy puppies being forced to do flips.
It’s after her third What else? that he ends up telling her about Dickie’s foray into gastro sex. “He even offered her to us. Hot Pocket and me. Isn’t that sick?”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Just thought you would find it funny,” he says, taking another swig of his Fat Tire.
He didn’t mean to mention that last bit about the offer, but now it’s out there. He can’t take it back. He watches her grow eerily quiet as she chews on this new bit of knowledge along with a mouthful of sprouts.
“I don’t know,” she says at last, lighting a cigarette and tipping ash into her plate. “Maybe you should take him up on it.”
“Beth.”
“It could be fun for you. Nostalgic.”
He sighs, picks a small yellow ball out of the wilted pile of California greens that comprise the side salad. He turns it around in his fingers, squinting at it like it’s a miniature globe, like it contains the whole world.
“What is this anyway, a kumquat?”
What he intended was simply to change the trajectory of the conversation. Instead, her face, or what’s left of it, becomes a throbbing red blotch. “No.”
“Huh,” he says, turning it around once more. “Looks like one.”
“Well it fucking isn’t, okay?”
“Jesus. Get a grip. It’s not a kumquat. Got it. Sorry I’m not a genius chef like some people.”
He thinks she’ll laugh, but instead tears fill her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He sighs, sips his Fat Tire, lets her cry for a while, his eyes on the thin white Doric pillar to the left of her. It’s the most pointless pillar in the whole world, he thinks, eyeing it. It holds nothing up. It stands there, cutting off the living room from the dining room, because it is the kind of crap that impresses the kind of schmucks who go in for an apartment with free biscotti and a fitness center. She’s strung some purple Christmas lights around it she never turns on, which only adds to its absurdity.
“I just hate how you see me is all,” she says, swatting the tears away like flies, but it’s no good—they keep coming, causing her chin arrow to quiver pitifully.
“What do you mean how do I see you?” He looks at her intently, soberly through a dense and rippling puddle of drunk; she immediately lowers her eyes and turns her head, obscuring her face with a curtain of long black hair, a defensive gesture left over from her heavier days.
“I don’t know,” she says, pretending to examine her nails. “As some fucking . . . you know . . . kumquat eater.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he says. “You’re being ridiculous.”
She rises from the table. He hears a lot of cupboard and fridge door slamming, the glugging sound of her pouring more wine into her measuring cup, then pouring it into a glass. She returns with a glass of what looks like another two ounces of white and, her evening ritual, a square of dark chocolate from a bar she keeps at the back of the cupboard like an alcoholic’s hidden stash of gin. Seeing her huddled over this small square is sadder to him than the vegetable turds or the larval grains or the carefully measured glasses of bone-dry white. It’s like watching a woeful squirrel hunched over a piece of trash he has mistaken for a winter nut.
“You’d like to, wouldn’t you?” she says quietly, after what feels like an interminable silence.
“Like to what?” he asks, knowing exactly, but he wants to hear her say it.
“Nothing,” she says.
“No, tell me, Elizabeth. What would I like?” He looks at her but she keeps her eyes on her ashed-up plate.
“To fuck that fat girl.”
Jesus. He did push her to say it but he still can’t believe she’s said it out loud. It feels like a slap. He leaves with a mild slam of the door, even though she calls his name twice to come back.