SOME PARTS OF L.A. are exactly what they seem: neighborhoods within a larger city. Others are independent municipalities with their own government and police force. It’s impossible to tell one of these miniature kingdoms from a regular neighborhood; Santa Monica, Culver City, and Beverly Hills are technically cities separate from the City of Los Angeles, whereas Venice, Century City, and Silver Lake are neighborhoods inside of L.A. It makes no sense and those who know better don’t bother looking for sense in the first place. To love L.A. is to love a mess: a jumble of sand, concrete, sunsets, and strip malls; a snake’s nest of highways on top of which the full emotional spectrum, from rage to carelessness, may be witnessed inside every single hour of the day; suburban sprawl punctuated randomly by urban markers—museums, hotels, nightclubs—that in other cities would exist in one concentrated area; a metropolis associated persistently with the darkness of literary noir despite the starched-white sunlight that drenches it most every day, and the pink polluted sky that lasts into the dead of night; a city so expansive it encompasses a little bit of everything, but only a little bit. L.A. is all breadth and no depth—most of the buildings here don’t even rise higher than a story or two—and there are many who believe this shallowness to be its fatal flaw. But shallow waters run clear and are easier to tread, and if L.A. sometimes feels like a million desert islands, the water between these islands isn’t very deep at all—a folly more easily crossed than it would appear to be from a distance, which is why that old chestnut about L.A., like a palm tree or an aging starlet, actually looking better from a distance has little truth to it. The chestnut perseveres because, to those who merely visit, this city doesn’t look like anything up close, doesn’t look like a city at all. It’s up to those who live here to imbue it with whatever character they like—or don’t like—which is why Los Angeles has that singular, precious ability to accommodate each and every person who chooses to make a life here.
West Hollywood is another one of these miniature cities masquerading as a neighborhood, and just west of its City Hall on Santa Monica Boulevard lies its greatest treasure: a walkable strip of bars from San Vicente to Robertson. It’s possible to hop from bar to bar and make a debauched night of it without ever getting in a car. Many cities are full of areas like this, but in L.A. there are only a handful, and most are tourist traps. The WeHo strip, however, does not cater to tourists. It belongs to the gay men and women who live there and those who wish to party with them, and all the bars and clubs along it—Trunks, Revolver, Rage, Motherlode, Here (to name only a few)—are a reliably good time.
At the end of August, Richard’s business partner Keith was celebrating his thirtieth birthday at the Factory on the western end of the strip, during a Friday-night dance party called “Popstarz.” Mike was returning to L.A. the same day from a week-long vacation with her parents, and before she left she extracted a promise from Richard to bring “the DP” to Keith’s party. (Over time, the code word “DP” had shifted from referring to the proposal to Elizabeth herself.) After two months, Mike and Elizabeth still hadn’t met.
Richard had intended to invite Elizabeth the previous Saturday, at Factor’s, but the evening had gone so badly he’d abandoned his plan. He hoped Mike would forget about it too. It wasn’t that he was angry with Elizabeth; he was constitutionally incapable of holding a grudge, and had more than enough white man’s guilt to blame himself for his perceived insensitivity to her challenged upbringing. Still, he was by no means eager to see her again. Saturdays were more than enough.
It was with a sinking heart, then, that he read Mike’s Facebook message the Monday after Factor’s, five days before Keith’s party:
Ugh so bored up here going nuts. 1 week + 2 parents = HELL. Yesterday my mom asked me when I was getting married, Jesus H. . . . My dad is good thx for asking. Anyhoo you’d better make sure the DP comes Fri I’m counting on it you PROMISED. It’s all I have to look fwd to mwah.
Fuck, thought Richard. He was still in bed, and his leg shook so violently the mattress began to squeak. Mike affected an amused curiosity about “the DP” that allowed her to ask as many questions as she wanted, but Richard knew perfectly well she hated this weekly standing engagement that had nothing to do with her. She was a jealous friend, and had been ever since breaking up with him. It was almost as if her possessiveness was meant to make up for her pushing him away, and in a way it did, because he’d never had a problem with any of the men who’d come in and out of her life over the years—never felt as though he might be toppled from his privileged perch as “the best friend” by any of them. It was funny to him, yet unsurprising, that Mike should feel threatened now, and he knew that if he didn’t introduce them soon there would be hell to pay. He clicked over to his inbox. Elizabeth wasn’t even on IM, so the only way he could contact her besides texting was old-fashioned e-mail. (Calling her was unthinkable.) This message was a bit too substantial for text, so he gathered his courage and clicked the “new mail” button:
Hi Elizabeth,
Happy Monday!! Hope your doing well and work isn’t too crazy?? Looking fwd to Sat (movie night!!), but wanted to invite you to a party this Fri also. It’s Keith’s bday and alot of my friends want to meet you (they’ve heard good things!!) esp Mike. Do you think you could make it?! Would be great to see you let me know and I’ll send you all the details.
He pressed SEND before he could read it over. The mouse arrow swirled over his inbox in tiny, agitated circles: what have you done? it asked him in a language only he could understand. He’d taken Elizabeth’s acceptance for granted when he promised Mike she’d be there, but after their last session and this horrendous e-mail (he read it over now—what was with all that double punctuation?!), he wasn’t so sure.
He refreshed his inbox: no answer.
RICHARD’S MESSAGE ARRIVED at Slate Drubble & Greer in the midst of an electronic war. One corporation was selling off the shares it held in another, and long-simmering resentments were frothing to the surface via rapid-fire e-mails. It was up to Elizabeth to get the two sides to calm down. Richard’s lone message with a distinct subject heading (Fri Night?!) appeared in her inbox like an innocent child teleported magically, and horribly, onto the battlefield. His e-mails were always off-putting to her anyway; she knew it could have been much worse, but she wished he were a slightly better writer. Why, for example, did he have to abbreviate so many words? All she wanted to do was get it out and away. What’s more, it was obviously an overture, and she felt duty-bound to reciprocate:
R,
Of course! Would love to come, thanks for asking. Work indeed crazy today so that’s all for now—
E
Her response popped up on the fifth refresh. Something burst behind Richard’s eyes, and he actually went dizzy for a moment from the relief. Crisis averted. He rewarded himself by watching six episodes of Family Guy back-to-back off his DVR.
HOURS LATER, WHEN the battle (not the war) was over and Elizabeth was concentrating on nothing more engrossing than preventing turkey-club bread crumbs from falling between the letters of her keyboard (she imagined that once trapped there, they would remain forever imprisoned in an eternal bread crumb hell), she allowed herself to wonder for a few minutes what meeting Richard’s friends would be like. She assumed he entertained them weekly with updates on their time together, which they pronounced “amazing” and “fascinating.” They must be itching to get a glimpse firsthand, she thought, dropping guard over her keyboard long enough to allow a dollop of mayonnaise to lodge between the l and o keys. Great. Now she’d have to get a replacement board from the misanthropic IT guy with body odor issues, who’d yell at her—again—for eating at her desk.
RICHARD AND MIKE made plans to meet up for a drink before the main event. They chose the Abbey, which was the only gay bar on the strip that straight people patronized regularly, since it happened to be a great bar—though Richard, who relished the ample and obvious admiration gay men routinely bestowed on him, would have been comfortable in any gay bar. Arriving a few minutes before Mike, he ordered two gin-and-tonics and took a double-fisted turn around the place, feasting his eyes on its considerable amenities while pretending to ignore the sidelong glances he inspired. There were four separate bars (three indoor, one al fresco), a kitchen, a café, two patios (one covered, one open), a six-foot-high fireplace, a dance floor, and a faux-cathedral tableau including an altar to Elizabeth Taylor. (In her final days, the Abbey was the only place she ever went; there was even a glossy painting signed by the dearly departed legend herself.) Beyond the iron palings separating the outer patio from the sidewalk, he caught sight of Mike flashing her driver’s license at a bouncer, pleased to have been carded.
“Gibler!” he shouted, sucking down the remnants of his first drink and depositing it on a table.
This was another one of their codes: when the umpteenth person had mistaken her first name for Kim, he suggested she change it to “Kimmy Gibler” (the hyper next-door neighbor on Full House) and be done with it.
“Dick!” she shouted back. This one was more obvious, and it was usually what she shouted at him in gay bars, uttered in enough of a monotone that it sounded as though she were yelling for penis. They hugged fiercely, and he asked after her parents (they both knew he meant her dad). “They’re good,” she said. “They say hi. So how’s the DP? Ready to meet her maker?”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I have no idea what that meant either,” she said.
He laughed. He’d missed her, even in a week.
“She’s good. Word on the street, and by ‘street’ I mean the e-mail she sent me, is she’s excited to come, so that’s good.”
“Sweet,” Mike replied evenly, motioning to the bartender for a vodka-soda. She watched him plunge a tall glass into the ice well, his tanned shoulders bulging outside his regulation Abbey tank top. It was always a bit of a shock to come back to the beautiful people after spending time away from L.A. Even if you happened to be one of the beautiful people yourself.
“What? You want a piece? I think that one might actually be G-A-Y, unfortunately,” he whispered, spelling out “gay” as if it were a dirty word. He looked down; somehow he was already halfway done with his second gin-and-tonic. “He was giving me the eye before. Looks like he could put away a mean kpenes if you know what I mean, and I think you do.” He elbowed her ironically.
Oh, Richard. She’d missed him too. Mike studied her best friend over the rim of her glass. He was looking particularly good tonight, in a tight-fitting polo and snug pair of Diesel jeans she’d never seen on him before. She guessed he’d bought them with his newfound income. A pair of aviator sunglasses were perched on top of his head like fashionable Mickey Mouse ears, rendering him both cool and adorable. How does he do that? she wondered. Pulling off the “man tiara” was no small feat.
“I cannot wait to meet this girl,” she said.
Richard gulped down the rest of his drink, leering in response. Mike could sense he was too buzzed for so early in the night, but there was nothing to be done about it now. If she called him out on it he’d deny it, and this would only make it harder to persuade him to slow down in the hours to come.
“I see you’re not losing any time,” she said. “Lemme chug this and we’ll get the show on the road.”
A little before ten, Richard and Mike made their entrance to Keith’s birthday party. Richard sailed through the Factory’s lobby, bounding up a metal staircase two steps at a time and practically leaping into the front room on the second floor. (Mike plodded behind him, placating the bouncer at the top—who had eyed Richard an unheeded warning—with a head shake and a beseeching look heavenward.) He scanned the early birds for the birthday boy, spotting him soon enough at the bar. But Keith seemed to be the only one there as of yet. Richard felt a pang of apprehension. Were he and his “business” partner such losers that no one was going to show up? How embarrassing would that be—oh, God, especially with Elizabeth on the way? Was there time to call her, tell her it was canceled—
Keith saw him and Richard ran over, throwing his arms around his neck and shouting “happy birthday!” with the perfect blend of irony and sincerity. While they were ordering the first round of drinks, five more guests arrived, and by the second round (Richard stuck to gin-and-tonics despite Mike’s subtle efforts to downgrade him to beer) there were at least thirty people there for Keith in addition to the club’s regular patrons. By the third round, the room was packed, and Richard saluted his business partner across a sea of friends, friends-of-friends, frenemies, and strangers, cheers!-ing the air. He turned and saw Mike talking to a loathsome D-girl (a catchall term for the army of women who worked on the development of film projects in their nascent stages, rarely—if ever—getting to actual film production). They both saw him looking and waved. He waved back, pulling down the corners of his mouth into a “yikes!” expression when the D-girl wasn’t looking. Mike’s eyes flashed, but she kept the conversation going without missing a beat. Next to him, a tall woman laughed, another friend of Richard’s who’d observed the exchange. He began bantering with her, the party sounds swelling around his ears, the climax of the first movement of a magnum opus that would last for hours and hours: the sustained ecstasy of a successful party, filling him, as it always did, with a febrile joy he didn’t dare articulate for fear that others would make fun of him for it.
He felt a tap on his shoulder. He whirled around.
If Elizabeth had known how appalling the parking would be in West Hollywood, she wouldn’t have come. It had taken her nearly an hour to find a space (she refused to park in one of the overpriced lots), and by the time she’d paid the twenty-five-dollar cover fee (which Richard had failed to mention), trudged up the metal staircase, marched into the knot of partygoers, and tapped him on the shoulder, it was well past 10:45. She glanced at the blonde by his side, guessing she was Ally, a minor yet regular member of his crew. But really, thought Elizabeth, she could be anyone. It was her own fault she didn’t know what any of his friends looked like, since—as Richard reminded her constantly—there were photos of all 658 of them perfectly accessible on his Facebook page.
Richard stared at her. Somehow, in the last hour, he’d forgotten she was coming. How much have I had to drink? he wondered, dismissing the thought before he could answer it. She was dressed too formally, in the same black skirt she’d worn to their first date, which ended well below the knee and made her look heavier than she was. Her starched white blouse accentuated her breasts, but paired with the skirt she looked like a maid without the apron, and her hair was pulled back in a librarianish bun. Richard glanced at Mike—beautiful, brilliant Mike—who was still engaged with the D-girl and who looked so effortlessly glamorous by comparison. His stomach bottomed out at the thought of having to introduce them finally, but there was no getting out of it now. He felt a twinge of embarrassment on Elizabeth’s behalf, his drunken mind racing to the “What’s Wrong with this Picture?” section of Highlights magazine, and causing him to actually giggle before saying hello.
“Hey,” he cried, swooping in for a hug.
Elizabeth took a half step backward before accepting his embrace. They’d never hugged before. He was obviously drunk, and she didn’t think she was going to much like the drunken version of Richard Baumbach.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, hurrying away without explanation.
Elizabeth and the tall blonde were left staring at each other. He hadn’t even introduced them.
“You must be Ally.” Elizabeth held out her hand.
“I am!” Ally shook her hand, but Elizabeth could see the panic in her eyes. She had no idea who Elizabeth was.
“I’m Elizabeth.”
Ally blinked.
“Richard’s friend?”
“Ohhhh, nice to meet you!”
But it was obvious she still didn’t have a clue.
This was Elizabeth’s first inkling that in the two months since Richard had told his friends about the Decent Proposal, he hadn’t mentioned her to anyone other than Mike, and occasionally to Keith. Mike hadn’t told anyone because she wanted to minimize the DP’s impact, and Keith hadn’t said a word because he wasn’t one to gossip. People like Ally, on the outer rim of Richard’s inner circle of acquaintances, had either forgotten about the Decent Proposal or grown tired of asking about it and being shut down. They’d moved on. #DecentProposal had gone dark a long time ago.
The crowd parted, and Richard reappeared with a figure behind him. He stepped aside like a magician unveiling his final trick:
“Elizabeth, this is Mike. Mike, this is Elizabeth. There.” He mimed wiping his hands, “That’s over with.”
Elizabeth knew Mike was Korean-American and from New Jersey, but to her she looked like a Mongolian princess: beautiful, proud, and fierce—all flint and bone. Mike radiated a hardness, not just of body but of spirit too, an iron will that rivaled even the steely reserve of La Máquina. Elizabeth would have been impressed if the poor girl weren’t so obviously filled with hatred. Her nostrils were quivering.
“It’s so nice to meet you finally,” said Elizabeth, extending her hand and smiling.
“Likewise.” Mike squeezed back, hard, matching her smile. She’d already cataloged the DP’s physical attributes, and aside from her impressive rack (which was a matter of taste), her teeth were the one area where it could be argued she beat her. Argued. Otherwise, she was nothing special. And her clothes were fucking horrible. She could do so much better, capitalize on those natural curves, take out that stupid bun. . . . Mike felt the old “Project!” urge well up inside her, but promptly stomped it down. She wasn’t going to do this girl any favors.
Richard flicked his head from one to the other, as if they were playing tennis, but after a few seconds he looked over their heads, too drunk to concentrate on them any longer. He began flapping his hand wildly:
“Keith! Get over here!”
Elizabeth watched as a tall man extracted himself from a circle of guests and loped across the room on long, elegant legs. He was skinny except for a little paunch hanging over his belt, and was already sticking out his hand when Richard barked, “This is Elizabeth!”
The shake became luxurious, two-handed. Keith stepped back and viewed her at arm’s length, like a work of art in a museum.
“Elizabeth!”
He emphasized the “beth” in a way she immediately loved.
“You’re not what I pictured at all,” said Elizabeth.
He was dirty-blond, freckled, and had none of Richard’s beauty, though from the way he let his smile spread slowly across his face—into the very crinkles around his eyes—Elizabeth found him attractive in a manner that struck her as belonging to an earlier era, when men relied on charm and charisma rather than appearance. Already she could feel his good humor infiltrating her via an osmosis that had nothing to do with the brightness of his eyes or the fullness of his lips.
“Oh, really? And what did you picture?” Keith dropped her hand, crossed his arms over his chest, and shifted his weight onto one foot: a rakish, sassy pose.
“Glasses?” She paused. “Definitely not so handsome.”
Keith scooted behind her, grasped both her shoulders, and wheeled her around so that she was facing Richard. “Ooh, I like her already!”
He pronounced “like” as “lock” and drew it out with the luxurious drawl Mike was convinced he affected, or at least greatly exaggerated. He was from Florida, for fuck’s sake, and though he claimed it was a small enough town and close enough to the state’s northern border to count as the Deep South, she still wondered. (Behind his back she called it his “Tennessee Williams thang,” and Richard tried not to laugh.) Mike resisted the urge to sneer now, and instead joined in loudest of all as the little group laughed merrily.
“So tell me ’bout this book and movie appreciation club you guys have goin’ on,” Keith said. “I just think that’s the greatest thing. Y’know I’m in a book club myself, don’ know if Richard told you.”
“He didn’t!” said Elizabeth. “What’re you guys reading?”
He mentioned a novel published recently that had polarized readers, and they were delighted to discover they both hated it. The next few minutes were spent tearing it apart and desecrating its corpse. By this point Ally had wandered away, and Mike decided they were all in need of a drink. It took a gargantuan effort not to roll her eyes when the DP asked for ice water, since it was “a long drive back to Venice.” Bo-ring! she wanted to say, and it pained her that instead of exchanging a surreptitious “yikes!” with Richard, she had to avoid looking at him altogether. An ancient sadness washed over her, like the loss of a loved one, but she could not afford to go there right now, so she grabbed Richard’s hand to counteract it, leading him to the bar, where it was too noisy to carry on a conversation but where they would at least be alone together inside a sea of people. She decided to order him another gin-and-tonic without even asking. She didn’t care how much he drank anymore.
When they returned, Keith and Elizabeth were laughing.
“Whasso funny?” Richard demanded.
Elizabeth waved her hand dismissively. “It’d take too long to explain,” she said, shooting Keith a mischievous look.
Well, they’re a lovefest, thought Richard. This should have made him happy. He’d suspected Elizabeth was a touch homophobic (her Catholic upbringing, her hurried affirmation of gay marriage, as if it were something she’d rather not think about), and he’d taken a sadistic pleasure in inviting her to a gay club. He’d expected her to feel out of her element, to be a little wowed by the experience. At the very least, he’d expected Keith to throw her off a little, but here they were, heads tilted together like old friends. Richard watched as Keith grabbed her hand, and when Elizabeth not only let it rest there but squeezed it harder to emphasize a point, some brutish, animal instinct unleashed itself inside him and he had to check the impulse to pull Keith—Keith, his friend and business partner, gay Keith—away from her. Am I actually—whatever, he told himself, except that it wasn’t so easy to throw this thought away. Instead, he had an unwelcome moment of clarity amid his fuzzy, drunken state. Usually he loved these instances, like a shaft of sunlight breaking through the clouds of inebriation and illuminating an insight by way of contrast—one that never would have been visible in a clearer, sober state of mind—but this time he shied away from the brightness and waited for the clouds to return. The light, however, remained. It had to be confronted.
Why had there been no spark, no instant connection between him and Elizabeth like the one he was currently witnessing between her and Keith? Why was it so difficult for him to draw her out? Why didn’t she ever squeeze his hand, or touch his shoulder? He knew why. There was no denying that Keith was the smart one between the two of them. Whenever they had to give notes on a script, Keith always took the lead; he read something like five magazines and one book a week. He’d gone to Harvard, the prick. Of course they loved each other. They were the smartest people he knew. And what did he have to offer, really, besides good looks (an unearned gift) and enthusiasm? He remembered suddenly his stupid joke at Factor’s: I won’t have what she’s having! The shame of this moment crackled through him like an electric shock, practically knocking him off his feet. She must have been so bored having to talk about books with him; it was probably like a remedial version of the animated conversation she was having now. Richard’s cheeks flushed with embarrassment, or maybe it was just the alcohol. Whatever. Suddenly the aforementioned sea of revelers wasn’t buoying him up but pulling him down, smothering him in its depths, and he looked toward Mike, flailing for her like a lifesaver except that she too was focused on Elizabeth and Keith, jackhammering her silky head in a manic attempt to show that she was following along. For all her glamorous appeal, Mike looked agitated, desperate even, beside the perfectly composed Elizabeth. Richard threw his head back and gulped down the remnants of his latest gin-and-tonic, rattling the ice cubes to shake away the whole scene.
Without meaning to, Mike and Elizabeth exchanged glances. They’d both been thinking the same thing: he’d had too much to drink.
“I think the dancing just started,” announced Richard, shaking his leg. He needed to move. Everything would be okay again if he could just move.
“Yeah, let’s book it to the back room.” Mike cocked her head like a delicate bird poised to take flight in the direction of the loud, thumping music leaking from beyond. “We can burn off some of that alcohol with our dance moves. That bouncer’s going to lose it if we don’t move some of the party out of here anyway. I smell ’roid rage.”
Keith began herding his guests. Mike grabbed Richard’s hand again to lead him away, and Elizabeth followed a few steps behind.
THE DJS AT POPSTARZ blasted the sort of music people listened to with their windows rolled up or their headphones at half volume to prevent the world from finding out how unsophisticated and sentimental they really were. Mariah and Madonna, Britney and Beyoncé, Katy and Kelly, Gaga and Rihanna all crashed onto the dance floor in a tidal wave of unapologetic pop, and the crowd let it wash over them; they wallowed in it; they splashed about; they drank it down with their alcohol. Popstarz was a place for revisiting middle school roots, except this time no one was embarrassed by their inability to dance, or pining away for their dance partner—other than in a carnal way that only enhanced the experience. As soon as the dance floor came into view, Richard dropped Mike’s hand and took a running leap into the middle of the crowd already gathered there. Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” had just come on.
Richard took pride in being an exception to the rule that white guys couldn’t dance. He liked to point out that it usually took some form of minority to be a good dancer: you had to be female, or black, or gay, or something. He was technically Jewish, of course, but according to him this was the one minority that didn’t count when it came to moving your body. And while he may have overestimated his prowess, he wasn’t bad. His enthusiasm counted for a lot.
Mike tolerated Popstarz. She could dance if need be, but she didn’t get any joy out of it. She hated the rhythmic pelvic gyrations that had come to be accepted by her generation as recreational dancing, the puerile lewdness of it all. She preferred the restrained head-nodding of music-loving crowds drinking in live bands arrayed on a stage, and if she had to dance at all, the practiced steps of ballroom, while admittedly dorktastic, were more her sort of thing: civilized, recognizable moves requiring at least some basic skill. She would need a few more drinks in her before she could join Richard, so she sidled over to the nearest wall and watched helplessly as Elizabeth followed her.
Keith was busy playing host; most of his guests were still in the other room. There wasn’t anyone handy she could use as a buffer. Mike had been needling Richard to introduce her to the DP for months, and now that the DP was here she would have given anything to get away from her.
They stood side by side, two wallflowers.
“So he’s wasted.” Mike nodded toward Richard, who by now was riding an invisible pogo stick, a tiny crowd heckling him from the sidelines, egging on his ass-hattery.
Elizabeth smiled her annoyingly beautiful smile.
“I think it’s our fault. He was nervous about introducing us.”
“Well, can you blame him?” Mike had meant this to be funny, but it came out wrong: antagonistic, bitchy.
“I’ve never seen him like this actually,” said Elizabeth. “We don’t really drink together.”
“Really? That surprises me.” It felt as though she were a suitor marking out her territory, proving to the interloper how much better she knew the belle of the ball. Mike hated what she was doing, but she was powerless to stop herself. “Well, you’re in for a real treat. He’s a messy drunk, I’m warning you now.”
“You just came back from vacation, right?”
Mike nodded. “A week with my parents. Sort of hellish, but what’re you gonna do?”
“How’s your father?” Elizabeth asked. “Is he doing okay?”
When Richard had told Elizabeth a month earlier about Mike’s father, he had failed to mention it was a secret. At the time, Elizabeth was an isolated acquaintance, and when he invited her to the party he forgot to tell her not to say anything to Mike. Richard danced on, twenty feet away, “raising the roof” with ironical intensity.
“He’s fine,” Mike snapped. How dare he tell this bitch about her father? The flimsy buttress of goodwill that had been barely supporting her self-restraint snapped in two, and her ability to put a good face on this night and the Decent Proposal in general came crashing down around her. She opened her mouth to say something—anything—unpleasant or hurtful, but Richard chose this moment to bounce in their direction.
The song wasn’t over, but he was feeling self-conscious. He had reached that stage of drunkenness wherein he was very drunk but acutely aware of it, and overcompensating by pretending to be sober. His dancing had gotten too wild; he needed to rein it in a little.
“Whatchoo guys talkinabout?” he said.
“What do you think?” said Mike. “You, of course. What else?” She didn’t give a shit about sounding like a bitch now. Fuck them both, she thought.
Elizabeth felt sorry for her, though she knew the last thing Mike wanted was her pity.
Richard didn’t feel sorry for Mike. He had expected her, not Elizabeth, to rise to the occasion tonight. He associated Mike’s failure with his own, and his revelation from earlier returned to him. He fumbled for something to say.
“You know whass funnybout this song?”
“What?” asked Elizabeth.
Mike stared daggers at them both.
“Th’lyrics make you think she’s like desperate, ya know? I wanna dance wi’ somebody—like she juss wants t’dance with somebody, anybody.” He paused in the effort not to slur. “Like anybody who’s willing. But then you get the full verse, and she says she wants t’dance wi’ somebody who loves her.”
“Deep,” Mike deadpanned.
Richard stared at his best friend. He should’ve known she wouldn’t get it. This was typical, in fact, of the reaction he got from Mike whenever he tried to say anything that wasn’t either clever or flippant. She was so scared of falling into the cliché of having a “deep” conversation that she was often afraid of saying anything at all. Somehow his shorthand with her, which was supposed to be a code for something deeper, had begun to supersede rather than abbreviate whatever used to lie beneath it. He realized he would never be able to have the sort of open, earnest exchange with Mike that he achieved every week with Elizabeth.
This was why he hated bringing his friends together. He acted one way around Mike and another way around Elizabeth, and there was no way to be both people at once. He couldn’t help alienating one of them. The awkwardness of the situation helped sober him up a little, and he was able to speak more clearly while answering:
“No, really. The lyrics’re good! ‘I want to take a chance on a man whose love will burn hot enough to last.’ Good stuff.”
“I can’t believe you know the lyrics that well,” said Mike. She turned to Elizabeth: “Richard has terrible taste in music. I don’t know if you’ve learned that yet in all your ‘sessions.’” She lifted her drink in one hand and used air quotes in the other.
There was a lull as the song ended, hence no need for Elizabeth to raise her voice when she said, “In grade school I convinced a group of girls to lip-synch to that song, and we each had a big cardboard cutout of a heart with flames around it that we waved back and forth whenever that line came around. It’s my favorite part too.” She smiled above her straw.
Cunt, thought Mike, even as somewhere, some part of her was urging her to calm the fuck down and stop playing the harpy. You’re better than this.
“I’m gonna go pee,” she announced, pivoting on her heel and heading for the bathroom.
Richard turned to Elizabeth.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s coming on strong, but once you get to know her she’s really amazing. I promise.”
“I don’t doubt that,” said Elizabeth. “She obviously cares a lot about you.” It was as close as she would ever come to telling him what she knew with certainty now, that Mike was in love with Richard.
She took a longer-than-necessary sip of her ice water.
Richard looked all around him, his discomfort over Mike and Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Keith, him and Elizabeth, any and all of this intimate interpersonal crap melting away as the alcohol kicked into overdrive and the euphoria of the successful party took over again. Who cared about individual grievances? What were they compared to the spirit of camaraderie he gave himself over to now among all these lovely, wonderful people? His people? He was beaming so wide, it felt as if his face might crack in two.
Elizabeth eyed him over her glass, a fainter version of his expression playing about her face.
“Collective effervescence,” she said.
“Huh?”
“The energy you get from a group of people. That magic you feel around them. Like a sum greater than its parts.”
He stared at her.
“I can’t take credit for it,” she said hastily. “It was Émile Durkheim who came up with it.”
“You’resso smart!” he exclaimed, without a trace of sarcasm. The alcohol was raging through him now; he no longer had the mental wherewithal to despair over her superiority. He was too drunk, too astonished by her intelligence and perspicacity. How did she do it? He just stood there, gazing at her with naked admiration.
A rare blush spread over Elizabeth’s features, which she hid behind her glass.
Just then Leona Lewis’s “Bleeding Love” came up. It was an unusual selection, as Popstarz favored poppier, boppier songs, but sometimes the DJ liked to throw in a slow ballad early in the night and work his way up from there. They both froze a moment, inhaling, and then turned to each other, surprised.
“D’you love thisong as much as I do?” If he’d been sober he never would have asked the question, at least not so artlessly. It was embarrassing to like “Bleeding Love,” especially as a guy.
She nodded.
He took the glass away from her and replaced it with his hand, leading her onto the dance floor.
Something surged inside Elizabeth’s chest, constricting her throat and blurring her vision—a feeling as painful as it was pleasurable. She dropped his hand and he turned, extending his arm for her to take again. She looked at him and waited a few seconds longer to identify the feeling. It was happiness, but not the muted kind she felt when she did a good job at work or had a new book she was excited to read. This was a giddy, untamed emotion she hadn’t felt since childhood. Elizabeth knew instinctively that Richard was about to make a scene on the dance floor and that it was probably going to be a disaster, and that by dragging her out here he was implicating her in his drunken antics, his carelessness, his idiocy. But instead of dreading all this she actually couldn’t wait, because even though she let loose to the radio inside her house more often than anyone would have guessed, and allowed herself on occasion to be drawn into the impromptu group dance parties that ended almost every (drunken) social gathering sponsored by her firm, it had been a long time since anyone had asked her—properly asked her—to dance.
She took his hand.
THERE WEREN’T MANY on the dance floor, and as the lights dimmed and Leona’s voice swelled in the first tortured, tenuous notes of this wantonly sentimental song, everyone looked to them instinctively. They struck the traditional pose, his right hand on her left shoulder, his left supporting her right. The beat kicked in, and they turned together as the lyrics began, Closed off from love, I didn’t need the pain. . . . Slowly at first, then faster as the music picked up speed. Elizabeth’s skirt flared out, giving her a traditional dancer’s silhouette.
In two months of sharing the intricacies of their personalities, they had never talked about music. Richard wished he was like Mike, or even his hipster neighbors, who knew as if by intuition about every cool indie band to grace the sweaty bars dotted across Silver Lake and Echo Park—the mustached men and tattooed women who climbed onto dark stages and wailed away for two hours at a time. But he didn’t care. Elizabeth was no stranger to iTunes, yet her tastes hadn’t changed much since she was nine years old and dancing onstage with a cardboard heart. The secret behind her love of roller skating was that it provided an excuse to blast this kind of music in her ears on a regular basis, and, for his part, Richard couldn’t go too long without singing along to one of his cheesy mix CDs inside his car. They both loved pop music for the same reason so many do: because it made them feel good. And while this focus on the effect of the music rather than the music itself rendered their taste somewhat indiscriminate, it was a preference by no means careless. They both deeply loved the way certain pop songs could within seconds make everything okay—a picture frame tilted askew but righted easily enough—as if all the change the world required were to be found inside a key shift. After two months of chipping away at each other’s personalities, of collecting meager specks and slivers, they had hit upon something solid, something they shared, and while it was a small find—commonplace even, in no way a point of pride for either of them—it felt significant because in the very moment of discovery they were able to pool it between them and watch it grow, a sum greater than its parts.
At the top of the second verse he led her in a box step around the perimeter of the floor: But something happened for the very first time with you. A few people hooted, catcalling from the sidelines. When they got to the chorus he let go of her, and they each did a revolution around their half of the dance floor before reuniting in the center. They switched to freestyle. Richard allowed the slow beat to undulate across his body, left to right, top to bottom, each sequence ending with a gentle version of the pelvic thrust Mike hated so much. He knew from years of practice that most guys messed up by trying too hard. All you needed was a little rhythmic motion from the body’s core; the rest was attitude. Elizabeth swayed, shimmied, and spun; she’d never thought about how she looked while dancing, and it showed in the native elegance of her movements.
The heart of the chorus kicked in, You cut me open and I keep bleeding, keep keep bleeding love. . . . Mike watched from the sidelines, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. From beside her, Keith snaked an arm around her waist, inviting her wordlessly to lean against him. For a few prideful seconds she resisted, and then she rested her head on his shoulder, swearing never again to make fun of Richard’s business partner and second-best friend, as together they watched the couple reunite in the center of the dance floor.
At the second verse’s bridge, You cut me open and it’s draining off of me, Richard spun her. Growing up, his mother had dragged him to the Boston opera regularly, and the only exception to the abject pain of these experiences was the laughter that sprang from the singers whenever it was called for in the course of a story. These baritone belly laughs and soprano titters ringing out across the stage always sounded so ridiculous to him—as obscene as farts—so it was a shock to hear one escape from him now. It turned out those stage laughs weren’t so false after all, when the source of the laughter was joy instead of amusement: so routine in opera, so rare in real life.
There was a long, standout note less than a minute from the end of the song. It happened on the word I, and Richard was waiting for it. On the words Ooh, you cut me open and—he stepped back from Elizabeth and rushed toward her, catching her up in a massive spin, rotating on a tighter and tighter axis as their bodies drew together, ever closer, spinning faster, then faster still: impossibly fast. He could feel her heart beating against his chest as they whirled in a cocoon of their making, shielded from the rest of the world by their motion. The crowd roared. They were going so fast!
Maybe a little too fast?
They began listing dangerously to one side, like a spin-top before it falls over. Richard overcompensated by wrenching their bodies in the opposite direction, which succeeded in keeping them on their feet, but at the expense of the glorious spin, which was brought to an ignominious end. Elizabeth opened her eyes. The song had at least half a minute to go, but Richard was obviously finished. He was crouching over, hands on his knees, panting from the exertion. He looked up into her face.
She had no idea what would happen next, so she simply waited, breathless.
His eyes clouded over. He jerked his head back down toward the floor, but it was too late. He spewed six gin-and-tonics and three-quarters of a pesto-chicken wrap onto the bottom half of her skirt, her ankles, her shoes.
“Aw, sick! Fucking gross! Get him out of here!” came the general cry, as he toppled to the ground. Heedless of the state (not to mention the smell) of her clothes and the puddle of vomit quickly forming around her, Elizabeth bent over him, alarmed to see that he’d actually passed out, though before she could do anything about it his eyelids began to flutter, and by the time the muscled bouncer reached them, Richard was looking up at her in a dazed, supplicating manner that was nonetheless conscious. The bouncer forcibly lifted him to his feet, ignoring Elizabeth’s protestations, and hustled him away, screeching “Eighty-six!” into a walkie-talkie. He pushed Richard through the front room, down the flight of stairs, and out the door in less time than the spin that had caused all the trouble. Elizabeth and Keith followed behind him, with Mike bringing up a distant rear.
“I’M TAKING HIM to the hospital,” announced Elizabeth, beelining for a cab that by some miracle was standing empty on the curb. She folded Richard into the backseat and opened the front passenger door.
“I’m coming with you,” said Keith.
Elizabeth turned, shaking her head. “All these people came here to see you,” she said. “I’ll take care of him. Cedars-Sinai’s just around the corner.”
“You guys, this is total overkill.” Mike strode toward them. “Believe me, this isn’t the first time he’s puked from drinking too much.”
“I saw him pass out,” said Elizabeth.
“What, for like a second? Yeah, that wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened either,” said Mike. “He just needs to go to bed. Give the driver his address. I’m telling you, he’ll be asleep and dreaming in half an hour.”
“Give me your number and I’ll update you,” Elizabeth told Keith, ignoring Mike even as she turned to her. “You too.”
“Don’t bother. Have fun,” Mike said, retreating to the club. She stopped, tossing Elizabeth a scorching glare over one bony shoulder:
“I told you he was a messy drunk.”
ONE IV DRIP and a few routine tests later, Richard managed to sign himself out of the hospital. The attending doctor had recommended he stay overnight, since technically he’d sustained a head injury (a tiny bump on the back of his head where he’d fallen), but there was no way that was going to happen. Since his monthly payments started coming in, Richard had been meaning to purchase a better health insurance plan than the cheap one he’d signed up for on the open exchange, but he still hadn’t gotten around to it, and he was eager to keep his hospital bills from the evening’s festivities to a minimum. He had no memory of the ride to the hospital, but was relieved to discover he’d come in a cab and not an ambulance.
He didn’t know who he would find when he reached the lobby, and was surprised to see Elizabeth there alone, embarrassed more than hurt that Mike wasn’t there with her. He’d talked up their epic friendship, but neither he nor Mike had quite followed through on it this evening. And then, of course, there was the more obvious source of his humiliation. He glanced at Elizabeth’s skirt, which was conspicuously wet, the black fabric glistening in the fluorescent light of the lobby.
“Was that . . . me?” he said, gesturing.
Elizabeth nodded. She’d more or less washed away the vomit in the bathroom, which had been nothing compared to Orpheus’s mess on the couch. Without warning she flashed back now to the wonder she’d experienced that night, two months earlier: about life getting messy, and the messiness actually being somewhat pleasurable.
“I’m so, so sorry,” he said. “I’ll obviously pay for the skirt—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, in as soothing a tone as she could muster. A mess was still a mess, and it was almost 2 a.m.; she still had to drive all the way back to Venice. She wasn’t used to staying up so late. “It’s fine. It was pretty much all gin anyway.”
“Ugh! Don’t even say that word to me!”
Keith picked them up outside. He insisted on dropping Elizabeth off at her car and driving Richard home. She was parked on San Vicente, between Melrose and Santa Monica, and when she got out of Keith’s car Richard followed her.
The Pacific Design Center loomed above them: a glittering glass behemoth that looked as if it were plucked from another city’s skyline and plopped into the relatively flat landscape of West Hollywood. It had a neon trim that changed color every few seconds.
“Sorry about your skirt,” he said. Again. Like a doofus. But it was all he could think to say.
“Don’t worry about it!” she scolded him gently, unlocking her car remotely. The beep echoed north past the Strip, into the leafy green hills south of Sunset. She stared at him. Did he have anything else to say? She was tired. She wanted to go home.
Richard stood there like an idiot, trying to figure out what to say to her. His industry friends were already buzzing about his disgrace. When he’d checked his phone in the hospital parking lot he’d had twenty-five e-mails, some genuinely solicitous, others gloating. He’d almost changed his Facebook status to “D’oh!” but decided this might encourage people to post comments on his wall, thereby alerting even more people to his shame than necessary. He didn’t need his parents or high school friends knowing what had happened. He already had enough damage control to do in the days to come.
In the end, he settled for hugging her. It was about as awkward as their first hug a few hours earlier, but he felt he had to make some sort of overture.
“Thank you,” he said. “For coming with me to the hospital, and waiting. You didn’t have to do that.”
“No problem,” she said evenly. The neon trim turned from red to blue, and his eyes took on a deeper hue as they reflected the color. Beautiful eyes, she thought.
There was a pause. The trim turned green. She got into her car.
Richard watched her spotless Honda Accord grow smaller, until finally it disappeared from view.