“Listen harder,” Ernesto said. Most of the time, the thick eyeliner made his eyes appear lively, unfocused. But now, he seemed to see into the grungiest corners of Patricia’s psyche.
Ernesto went back to his chaise, and Patricia was left trying to figure this out. It was one of those annoying tests: both a dirty trick and a healing exercise. She was pretty sure she’d been listening just fine. She was ready to throw foodstuffs again.
“Fine,” Patricia said after she decided she wasn’t going to crack this tonight. “I will listen harder. And I will try to be less self-absorbed, and more humble. I will let people in, if anybody even wants to be my friend after tonight.”
“I spent thirty bitter years trying to find a way to leave this place,” Ernesto said so quietly, she had to lean perilously close. He gestured at the room full of books, with his eyes. “Until at last, I accepted that this imprisonment was a price that I had chosen to pay. Now, I enjoy my situation as much as I can. But you have not yet begun to experience the pain of being a witch. The mistakes. All the regrets. The only thing that will make such power bearable is to remember how small you are.”
He went back to William Blake, and Patricia couldn’t tell if this meant their conversation was over.
“So does this mean I’m not going to Portland?”
“Listen harder,” was all Ernesto said from behind the book. “We do not want to send you away. Do not make us.”
“Okay.” Patricia still felt raw and desperate inside. She realized she ought to leave before Ernesto offered to make her a cocktail next door, because she did not want to get falling-upwards drunk right now.
As soon as she got out of Danger, she saw her phone was full of texts and voicemails. She called Kevin, who was worried, and she was like, “I’m fine, except I need a drink.”
Half an hour later, she leaned on Kevin’s crushed-velvet frock coat and pounded a Corona in the swampy back room of the art bar on 16th, with fresh graffiti on the wall and a DJ spinning classic hip-hop. Kevin was drinking Pimm’s with a fat cucumber slice and not asking her what that scene at dinner had been about. He looked amazing in the bar’s golden light, sideburns setting off the smooth planes of his face.
“I’m fine,” Patricia kept saying. “I’m sorry you had to see that. I’m fine. I sorted it out.”
But as her tongue greeted the lime wedge bobbing up to the lip of the bottle and tasted the pulp mixed with beer, she remembered how Kevin wouldn’t even look her in the eye when everybody else was accusing her of being a toxic loner.
“We should talk about what this is, right? You and me. What we’re doing,” she started to say, trying to make herself heard over the DJ without shouting. “I feel like we tried too hard not to label our relationship, and that became a label in itself.”
“I have something I have to tell you,” Kevin said, his eyes bigger and sadder than usual.
“I am ready to open up about my feelings. I feel…” Patricia searched for the right words. “I feel good, about us. I care about you, a lot, and I am open to—”
“I met someone else,” Kevin blurted. “Her name is Mara. She’s also a webcomics artist of some renown. She lives in the East Bay. We met only in the past fortnight, but this already shows signs of becoming serious. I was not even looking, but my Caddy pinged me with twenty-nine points of convergence between Mara and myself.” He gazed into his Pimm’s. “You and I never said we were exclusive, or even that we were dating.”
“Umm.” Patricia chewed her thumb, a habit she’d quit years ago. “I’m happy, happy. For you. I’m happy for you.”
“Patricia.” Kevin took both her hands. “You are utterly mad, but delightful. I feel so overjoyed to have gotten to know you. But I have been a fool too many times already. And I tried, I really did, to talk to you about our relationship, on five separate occasions. In the park when we were roller-skating, and also at that pizza bar…”
As Kevin listed these moments, she could see them with perfect clarity: all the missed cues and deflections, all the abortive moments of intimacy. All this time, she had been thinking of him as the one with commitment issues. Somewhere along the line, she had become an asshole.
“Thank you for being honest with me,” Patricia said. She sat and finished her drink, until it was just lime rind and bitter pulp.
Patricia wound up in Dolores Park at midnight. The heat still felt as intense as direct sunlight, and her mouth was dry. She couldn’t go home and face Deedee and Racheline. For some reason, Patricia found herself calling her sister, Roberta, whom she hadn’t talked to in months (although she’d had a couple conversations about Roberta with her parents).
“Hey, Bert.”
“Hi, Trish. How is everything going?”