“Yeah, ha, look who I date.”
But Mark’s still screaming at the errant cyclist, who’s disappeared behind a bus. When he’s finished, he turns to Paul, red-faced, and huffs. “What’d you just say?”
“Nothing. Forget it.” Paul thinks. He takes a breath and says, “Maybe we should just go home.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m serious, Mark. You’re in a bad mood—”
“I’m not in a bad mood.”
“—we’re already late, and there are literally zero cabs in this city. And besides, what are we even planning on doing? We’re just going to end up getting drunk in a crowded bar, which is what we do every Saturday night at home, anyway.” He kicks a piece of gravel off the curb. “I’m exhausted, too. Maybe we should just go home.”
On the opposite side of the street, two women spill out from a pub door. One of them drops her purse; her friend laughs and stumbles backward.
“Five minutes ago you were practically begging me to go to your snob-of-a-sister’s house,” Mark says. “And now, when we’re on our way to meet Alcott and actually do something fun, you tell me that you’re tired and you want to go home?” He spots an open cab turning onto Wardour Street and he nearly throws himself in front of it. Craning his head around to face Paul, he calls out, “When did you become so boring?”
*
Is he boring, though? If that’s the case, it’s certainly not due to a lack of thinking, of considering, on Paul’s part. In fact, if anything it’s because he’s plagued with this tendency to mull things over that he frequently finds himself in a state of overwrought paralysis.
“Here you are.” Alcott hands him a vodka soda. “Bottoms up.” He winks. Next to Paul’s left shoulder, an old Spice Girls song warbles on a stand-alone speaker. This, from a country that produced the Sex Pistols and the Rolling Stones.
He must become different, Paul thinks. He can’t allow this dreadful ambivalence to dictate his nondecisions—his boringness—any longer. He needs to start making choices. Start acting. Throw more proverbial mannequins in the faces of sadistic psychotherapists, so to speak. He must show Mark that, despite what he might think, Paul is not dull. And he must do it defiantly. But how? What’s the first step toward unshackling himself from, well, himself? For starters, he’ll drink this vodka-soda as fast as he can. Then he’ll order another one, and he’ll drink that one even faster. A little lubrication, a little loosening up, might do him some good, he figures, particularly as he enters this new Era of Not-Thinking. Besides, Mark hates it when Paul drinks too much, which is, currently, a perfect excuse for drinking too much. And then what? He’ll dance. Yes. Rather than concern himself with how he moves his hips (awkwardly, like he’s squeezing between two chairs), or how much he’s embarrassing Mark (a lot), or the state of the bar’s music (terrible: the Spice Girls have stepped aside for S Club Seven), he’ll wend his way through the crowd of twinks to the dance floor, where he’ll bask in the comfort of knowing that regardless of the country gay bars everywhere are all more or less the same. The only thing he has to do first is get out of his own way.
He sips his drink and takes a breath. Exhaling, he imagines his old ambivalent self, fleeing his body.
“Let’s leave,” Mark says.
“Wait, what?”
“Alcott says this place is awful tonight, and I agree.” Mark finishes his beer and leaves the bottle on the bar. “He knows of some other place. We can walk there.”
“But I was just going to—”
“Come on, Paul. Finish your drink.”
Christ, Paul thinks once they’ve made their way outside, he’s being especially dickish tonight. With a silver lighter, engraved with something in Latin that Paul can’t read, Alcott lights a cigarette, and Paul must resist the very real urge to tackle him to the ground and snatch the thing from his long, British hands. What has gotten into Mark, though? Eloise had embarrassed him—that happened—and while Paul had assured him that his sister’s slight wasn’t intentional, privately he knew the truth: Eloise hadn’t taken to Mark. She thought he was a phony. This in itself doesn’t surprise Paul: Eloise is a subtle bitch—which, in his opinion, is the worst kind of bitch a person could be. What does surprise him, though, is how mixed his emotions are toward Eloise’s judgment of Mark. On the one hand, he’s fiercely loyal to his boyfriend, despite how douchily he’s currently acting, and wants, desperately, to eviscerate Eloise, to give her a piece of his mind. On the other hand, for the first time he finds himself suddenly curious about his sister’s opinion. How, exactly, is Mark a phony? In which categories of class and culture does she find him lacking? What specific breed of awfulness does she attribute to him? Because if he’s being totally honest, he suspects that whatever she thinks of Mark, whatever her judgment of him may be, he might, for the first time, actually sort of agree with her. He is kind of awful—and not just momentarily, but generally, perpetually. For the first few years of their relationship he did a commendable job of keeping his awfulness at bay, of convincing people that there was another side to him, and that his undesirable qualities only came out when he was tired, or annoyed, or hungry. Lately, though, it seems to Paul that Mark’s stopped giving a fuck, that enough of the Prestons and Crosbys and Alcotts of the world have responded positively to his douchiness that he’s no longer concerning himself with what it means to be a decent human being. These are obvious truths, he knows, but he feels suddenly that he’s confronting them for the first time, and he dreads the nagging existential doubts they’re bound to leave in their wake.
But oh, God: here he is, thinking himself into a standstill all over again.
He stands behind Alcott and gulps up a redemptive cloud of secondhand smoke to calm his mind.
“Right then,” Alcott says, flicking the cigarette into the gutter. “Here we are.”
He leads them into a dim bar with mirrored walls and a low, baroque chandelier. The room is sparsely populated—only a few men occupy the barstools scattered around the curved black bar—and its walls are painted with silver fleur-de-lis whose petals interlock to create dizzying and unpredictable patterns. Paul blinks and, quickly recalling his mission to dispel Mark’s notion of him as boring, he announces that he’ll be buying the first round of drinks.
“The cocktails here are delicious,” Alcott says. “Very inventive.”
“What’ll it be, then?” Paul does his best to sound carefree. Jocund.