I spent the rest of the morning in bed, eating steel-cut oats with maple syrup out of my mini slow cooker and watching DVDs on my computer. I checked my e-mail every two minutes. Each time I saw that Britt Wendt hadn’t written back yet, there was disappointment, but also great relief. In the infinite realm of possibilities, I felt I still had a chance. That was the last dreg of youth, I suppose, that hopefulness. I watched Face/Off and Con Air and a few episodes of Fawlty Towers. I took a shower and put a sheet down on my floor and did sit-ups and push-ups in front of my space heater. Then I watched the first ten minutes of Marathon Man and the first five minutes of Hoffa, clicking back to my e-mail all the while. My neighbors through the gypsum had gone out. Everyone was out, it seemed. The flophouse was strangely quiet.
At such times, it was my habit to buy things online. But I had resolved to try to cut down on my spending. All I had to show for my earnings as a graphic designer were my computer and a rack of expensive clothes, each item safely sealed in a clear plastic garment bag. Despite my refined taste, I blended easily into the rank and file; my clothes were just high-end versions of the crap everyone else was wearing. My workday uniform usually consisted of black jeans from MDR; a plain, handpicked-pima-cotton T-shirt from Het Last; a washed-linen button-down and a heather-gray hoodie, both from Deplore; and white leather high-top limited-edition Chucks, or my perforated wingtip leather miner boots from Amberline, if there was snow on the ground. At home, I wore satin pajamas—burgundy and blue striped top and bottom from Machaut—and a heavy Peruvian parka I’d won on eBay. I had recently splurged on rabbit fur–lined deerskin gloves at Modo and a custom-ordered cashmere hat from an atelier in Tokyo that I’d read about in Mireille. I’d had to measure the circumference of my head for it. I rationalized these expenditures easily: luxury accessories were better investments than, say, the seventy-five-dollar goat-milk soap from the Swiss Alps, which had taken a month to get through customs and lasted me exactly twelve showers. For the previous six months, I’d been working part time without benefits at Indent, a lifestyle magazine for rich intellectuals. It did not pay well. My bank account was empty. My credit-card debt by this time was in the five figures. I’d even cut up my cards in an effort to curb my spending. Until Christmas money from my father arrived, I would have a hundred dollars cash in my wallet, plus a fifteen-dollar gift card to Burger King that Mark had given me for Hanukkah as a joke. He had gone off to Vermont with his wife to be with her family. Everyone else was home with their parents, or on glamping trips in Joshua Tree or sunning themselves in Maui or Cabo or Puerto Rico with their girlfriends. My father was skiing in Tahoe with his new wife. He hadn’t invited me along. Without the funds to buy anything, I could only drift through online stores and put things into virtual shopping carts. It was all so futile. It was all just trash. What I really wanted was to run the tip of my tongue across Britt Wendt’s pale, trembling throat, then suck each of her ears until she begged me to fuck her. “Tell me you love me, or I’m pulling out,” I’d demand. “Oh God,” she’d say as I entered her. “I love you, I love you,” she’d pant at every thrust.
In the afternoon, Lacey Freeman texted to invite me to Christmas dinner at her apartment. This kind of last-minute invitation was typical of Lacey. “Herding all the strays over for my annual Xmas feast, so stop by if you’re lonely 6–11 p.m.” Every time I saw Lacey, she’d gained five more pounds. She was turning into the kind of obese girl who does her hair like a forties pinup and wears bright red lipstick, a blue polka-dot dress with a white doily collar, colorful tattoos across her huge, smushed cleavage, as if these considerations would distract us from how fat and miserable she had become. In a few years she’d get her eggs frozen, I predicted correctly, and the rockabilly thing would disintegrate into Eileen Fisher tunics and lazy, kundalini yoga. Any man interested in Lacey would have had to be seriously self-loathing. I knew this because I’d made out with her when we first met at Mark’s birthday party five years earlier. I got drunk and went back to her place, came to with my face buried in her back fat, about to consummate my desperation. I left quickly and rudely. I never told Mark about it. The next time I saw Lacey she acted unfazed, like we were chums who had merely shared a funny moment. “That Scotch!” But having held my dick in her hand, she seemed to feel she’d earned the right to belittle me as much as possible. “Are you getting by okay?” she liked to ask me. She was a sad person, sheltered and confused and ineffectual, et cetera. She’d recently become obsessed with canning and baking and making her own bitters. The last thing I wanted for Christmas was her homemade eggnog and gin-pickled okra. “Merry Xmas! I’ll try to make it!” I texted back. But I had no intention of giving her the satisfaction. Mark texted me a photo of his father-in-law’s model replica of a World War II battlefield. I did not reply.
For the rest of the afternoon I watched more DVDs, checked my e-mail, and pined for Britt Wendt. I fantasized about our life together. We’d get a one-bedroom in Flushing, fill it with her furniture, cook roasts, and drink expensive wine bought with the money we saved by living in Queens. Our repartee would be rich with subtlety and sarcasm, as smart and funny as midcareer Woody Allen. Our fucking, like Werner Herzog, serious and perplexing. I could imagine Britt Wendt lying beside me in bed, her frothy blond hair flattened into a fuzzy halo. We’d be like dope fiends for each other, reaching out our swollen hands for one more hit, her body pale and freckled, nipples pink as sunsets. “The worse your morning breath, the more I love kissing you,” I’d say, slipping my tongue into her hot, bitter, velvety mouth.
I think by then I’d been single longer than is healthy for a young man. I’d had just one serious girlfriend since graduating from college. Postbreakup, there was a consequent jag of failed sexual reprisals (including the one with Lacey), a two-year dry spell, then a single and only semi-interesting encounter with a completely hairless Taiwanese girl I met at Bloomingdale’s. Next came a few standard Brooklyn bar hookups with insecure twenty-five-year-olds, then three more years of nothingness, not a drop, not a cloud on the horizon. By my Jesus year I was practically a virgin again. My father told me to focus on my career. “Women are attracted to money,” he had said over the phone before leaving for Tahoe.
“I’ll die alone,” I told my father. “I don’t care.” This was all before I’d met Britt Wendt, of course.
“There are plenty of girls who would be interested in you,” my father said. “You’re a long-term investment, they’ll think. Women are good about the future. They can see further down the line. I’ll mail you a check when I get back from Tahoe.”