The car swerves around a cone, and he thinks of the conversation he had with Mark last night, which was a reenactment of the same conversation they’ve been having for the past two months. They’d been in the kitchen. Mark was cutting leeks for a frittata, and Paul sat across the counter from him, his chin resting on his fist, his gaze locked on the spice rack on top of the fridge. On Mark’s iPod Nina Simone crooned, and in his head Paul repeated the word curry enough times for it to lose its meaning.
Between the two of them, Mark’s the more skilled and knowledgeable cook. It isn’t that Paul is a total mess in the kitchen, it’s just that with Mark around there doesn’t seem to be any point in trying. He’s always there to step in, to stop Paul from burning butter, to show him a better way of slicing onions. He navigates a stove with a sexiness that makes Paul feel content with, if not dully embarrassed by, his own incapability.
“What’s wrong?” Mark asked him. “You’ve got a face like a wet weekend.”
A pan with caramelized onions sat on the stove, and the kitchen grew claustrophobic with their smell.
“A what?”
“‘A face like a wet weekend.’ A bad mood. It’s a saying.”
“Huh.” He’d never heard Mark use the expression before. He let his eyes trail down from the spice rack to the fridge’s white face, strewn with magnets that they’d collected over the nearly four years they’ve been together: a black-and-white shot of the Empire State Building at night; a Winston Churchill saying, now clichéd, given to Paul by one of his mentors from grad school; a magnetized save-the-date for Preston and Crosby’s wedding. He imagined the other expressions coiled up in Mark that he’d never heard him use. Pithy turns of phrase that might be sprung on him in the next hour, day, month, year. How, once he’d heard one of them, he’d spend the rest of the day wondering where Mark had learned it, and how it had managed to not become a character in their story until now.
The hardest part of a relationship isn’t staying with the people we love—it’s actually getting to know them.
“No,” Paul replied. “I’m not in a bad mood. Or not really, I guess. Thoughtful, maybe. But not bad.”
“Anything you want to talk about?” Mark scooped the leeks into a mixing bowl.
Paul considered this; he thought about the looming headaches that would unravel if he were to speak. He spoke.
“I just … are you sort of waiting for my green light with all of this, or something?”
Mark tossed a fistful of chopped peppers into the bowl. “What do you mean?”
“Just with this … open relationship idea. Am I the roadblock to that?”
“I never said I wanted an open relationship.”
Outside a streetlamp flickered and succumbed to the night.
“Okay, fine. Monogamy with terms and conditions. Whatever you want to call it.” Paul leaned forward and plucked a pepper from the bowl. “Are you waiting for my … like, my go-ahead with it?”
“I guess?” Mark pinched salt into the bowl. “Yeah, I guess that’s probably true.”
Paul looked down and drew circles on the counter. He said, “I don’t even know what that would look like. If we did what you’re suggesting, I mean.”
Mark wiped his hands against his pants and reached behind him for the rosemary. “It would probably look very similar to how it looks now,” he said. “Except that we’d be more open to situations that we might have otherwise been closed to. Hey.” He reached across the table and tapped the top of Paul’s head. “Are you stressed out about this? Because you shouldn’t be. If it’s something that you don’t want, then—”
“This doesn’t stress you out?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the prospect of all this. Of us sleeping with other people. It doesn’t stress you out?”
“Not really.”
“How—”
“Because I know you’re not going to leave me.” Mark shrugged. “And I’m not planning on leaving you. We’ll set rules, and we’ll follow the rules, and the relationship will probably be better because of it.” He thrust a spoon into the bowl and began tossing the mixture in tight, quick loops.
The Nina Simone track ended in a fizzle of violin. A bit of pepper lodged itself between two of Paul’s molars.
“You sound so sure about all this,” he said.
Mark shrugged for the second time. “I am.”
And this is the part of Mark that astounds Paul, because if Paul is sure of nothing, if his life amounts to a sort of walkabout through a vistaless ambivalence, then Mark is sure of everything. The best way to cut an onion, the direction the economy is headed, the healthiest means to confront the boredom of monogamy. It doesn’t matter if any of those beliefs is ever proven wrong. His sureness can’t be rattled. He’d just acrobatically throw his stock into being sure about something else. And he’d do it all with a blithe confidence that at once scares Paul and makes him dreadfully envious.
*
The Nissan slows and speeds up again. Sweat pools above Paul’s lips. He grips his mannequin child tighter.
“Okay,” Goulding says. “Get reaaaaaaady…”
Birds chirp on a telephone wire high overhead, indifferent to the insanity unfolding at their feet. Erwing steers the car around the lot’s last corner, and its tires groan. Paul swallows. He tastes starchy memories of the dumplings he had for lunch.
“THROW IT!” Goulding shouts.
Paul hurls the child as hard as he can, and his right arm protests with a white-hot pain. There’s the clamor of plastic against steel against asphalt, the familiar burnt-rubber screech of four bald tires. He looks up expecting to find the mannequin reduced to a pile of out-of-whack limbs, but instead sees it sitting upright, calmly, like it’s just sat down to take a rest. His shoulders slump.
“Goddamn it, Paul!”
The birds flutter away, annoyed. The Nissan rolls to a stop.
“I—I thought it was harder?”
“You thought!?”
A slow rage boils near the bottom of Paul’s throat. He swallows it down.
“Sorry,” he says. “Next time will be harder.”
Goulding squeezes the bridge of his nose, and Paul counts as he takes seven deep breaths.
“All right.” He cleans away more sweat from his glasses. “Everything’s all right. We’ll just … try it again. And Paul, this time, please—”
Paul says, “I know. I got it.”
*
Mark cut off a thin slice of frittata and reached it across the counter. “Here, try this. Tell me what it needs.”
Paul bit down—it was delicious. Hearty and filling. It needed nothing. Mark’s cooking rarely did.
“Salt. Just a little more,” Paul said. “Don’t you think it’s just asking for trouble, though?”
“What’s asking for trouble?”
“I don’t know, this whole other people business. The whole thing feels like opening Pandora’s box. Who’s to say that one of us won’t fall in love with someone else?”
“But isn’t that always a risk?”
“Sure, but why compound it by actively recruiting that someone else, and then asking them to get naked?”
A car honked outside.
“Are you worried that I’m going to leave you?” Mark asked.