We’ve all had a friend like that. You know what I mean.
Jon was mine.
Jonathan Vincent Carver showed up in my class halfway through seventh grade, something to do with his dad’s job. Like a military brat, he’d been moved from state to state his whole life and he had the combination of feigned arrogance and desperate yearning that often goes along with that kind of upbringing. Translate that to mean that he lied a lot, said whatever he had to say to be accepted. To be liked. They were little white lies, mostly, so my buddies and I didn’t mind much. Jon was usually good company, and by high school, he’d become one of my closest friends.
If you’re lucky, you gather a small tribe together when you’re young, people you believe will have your back in the dark times. But even the lucky don’t usually stay that lucky. College comes and people drift and change. Jon put on a mask of arrogance and faux-charm in his quest to enter the business world, the kind of thing he believed would make him a lot of money after graduation. He recognized the process, pursued it with an admirable single-mindedness, but at the same time, he held on to his high school friends and the tangible truth of our tribe, the people we’d been. It was only later that I’d realize he needed the reminder of who he’d been because he was finding it harder and harder to remember that the grinning salesman face was only a mask.
The first clue came our junior year in college. He’d been going to Fordham down in New York and come back to Boston for a long weekend right at the beginning of baseball season and he wanted to catch up. I was his touchstone, you see. That reminder he needed. He could only do Sunday night—he had no classes on Mondays that semester, but I did, and my political science professor had scheduled a test at 8:50 a.m. The test had me worried, but Jon had always been so persuasive.
We met early for dinner. He told the waitress all about our high school glory days, and then he sprang it on me—he had tickets to the Red Sox game. Could we eat in a hurry and head over to Fenway Park? I insisted that I couldn’t, offered to let him out of dinner and he could shanghai someone else into going with him. He let it go…until we’d eaten, and then somehow I let him talk me into it, but only because he promised to drive me back to campus as soon as the game let out. I still needed to study and the clock was ticking, but him driving me back would save me three quarters of an hour or so.
What he hadn’t told me was that he had a couple of pals from Fordham meeting us there—guys I’d met before, guys who only saw Jon’s mask and who had fashioned their own façades of smug assholery. He hadn’t told me, because he knew I’d never have gone along to hang out with these two.
When the game ended, the Fordham boys wanted to go out drinking. Jon extolled the virtues of this plan, trying to persuade me, but I had an early exam I wasn’t ready for, remember, Jon? And you promised to drive me back to campus?
He gave me a sour look, pulled a twenty out of his wallet, and tucked it into the pocket of my jacket like I’d just given him a sloppy back alley blowjob and this was my reward. “Sorry, man. You’re right. Take a taxi on me. I owe you.”
I couldn’t even argue. All of the abuse I wanted to hurl his way just sat in my throat, lodged there like something I’d need the Heimlich to choke up. The Fordham boys went off, having quite a laugh.
Have you ever tried to get a taxi within a mile of Fenway Park right after a Red Sox game?
Yeah. It’s like that.
The moment stuck with me. I ran into Jon’s father in a restaurant a few months later and I couldn’t help myself. I told him that story. The elder Carver seemed disgusted but unsurprised, and that was when I realized that even his parents thought their son was a bit of a prick.
We saw each other less and less. We graduated. He went back to Boston for work, while my fortunes took me to New York, to a magazine publisher where I’d been working for a couple of years by the time I got that phone call from Jon. The phone call that led to meeting Mollie and Leigh and the party in this girl’s apartment.
“Tim Donovan,” I announced as I answered the phone.
“Timmy! You don’t need your dancing shoes, but put your motherfucking drinking hat on!”
I laughed, sat back in my chair. “What the hell do you want, Carver?”
“What time can you kick off work?”
My cubicle had a great view of Times Square. Rent would drive the company out of there a few years later, but those were halcyon days, so even a little punk like me had a view. I poked my head up to see who might overhear, but the three other staffers who shared the office were all elsewhere—coffee break, cigarette break, or running errands for the higher ups.
“I usually get out of here around seven. The boss is out of town, though, so I figure six o’clock sharp,” I said. “From the question, I assume you’re in town.”
“I have meetings till three-ish,” Jon said. “Then I’ll hit up my local office for a few hours and meet you at six-thirty. Wherever you want, provided there’s a bar with women in it.”
We met at Dooley’s Tavern, an Irish pub at the corner of 57th Street and 7th Avenue. It was the kind of place we’d always frequented in college, all brass railings and dark wood soaked in decades’ worth of spilled ale, so the whole place had the stale-beer stink of fraternity basements. In those days, to me, that was the scent of nostalgia.
I slipped through the door at quarter past six and sat at the bar to wait, ordered a pint of Guinness and chatted up the bartender for half an hour until Jon arrived. The bartender’s name was Leigh, a tall brunette with wildly curly hair and mischief sparkling in her dark eyes. Smart and funny, she kept the conversation going, kept the counter clean, kept the drinks coming, managed to take care of everyone without making anyone else feel left out.
“Maybe your friend’s not coming,” she said at one point.
“Nah,” I said, “he’ll be here. He’s what you call ‘mercurial.’”
“Meaning he thinks his time is more important than yours,” Leigh observed. She cocked an eyebrow, maybe realizing that had been a little more honest than it was smart for a bartender to be if she wanted decent tips.
I smiled. “Oh, there’s no doubt that’s what he thinks.”
And you let him? She didn’t ask the question, but I could see it in her eyes.
Half a second later, Jon pressed himself against my back, reaching around me to start caressing my chest through my shirt. I spilled a couple of ounces of my beer onto my pants and laughed, twisting out of his grasp before he could tweak my nipples.
I swore at him, setting my beer down, but I was laughing as we embraced. We’d had a lot of good times together. Despite the way our friendship had withered, I was happy to see him. His eyes were glassy from the several beers he’d doubtless already had while he spent the afternoon at his “local office,” which was a stool at a strip club half a dozen blocks from our present location.
“So this is the infamous Jon,” Leigh said, placing a coaster on the bar. “What’ll you have?”
Jon grinned, studying her like she was the menu. “Is that an open-ended question, or are we just talking alcohol here?”
Leigh arched an eyebrow. “Why don’t we start with alcohol and see where that takes us?”
It might have been a bartender’s diplomacy, a way to sidestep the come on, or she might’ve been flirting with him. I wasn’t sure at the time and I’m not really sure now, regardless of where it went. It always astonished me how successful Jon was at seducing women. He wasn’t the best-looking guy in a room. Too short, too cynical, too many damn teeth in that shark smile. The pickup lines he used should have been comedy gold. Sorry about last Christmas; Santa forgot to pick me up. That shit should not have worked, and yet somehow he’d figured out the formula, the perfect ratio of cockiness to charm, to move things from conversation to copulation.
He flirted with Leigh. As I downed my second Guinness, I did the same. We told stories about our high school and college days, trying to amuse her but mostly just amusing ourselves. It felt good to reminisce.
“This guy and I grew up together,” Jon told Leigh, brow furrowed. “Hung out at each other’s houses after school, drank in the woods together, did our stupid science project together. Life goes on, right? But if you have a couple of friends you can hang onto from when you were a kid, it means something, y’know? There’s always someone who knows who you really are.”
Leigh cocked her head, her lips pursed together, pert with attitude. “You’re either sweeter than you look, or drunker than you sound.”
He laughed. “Maybe both.”
I put a hand on his back. “All right, brother. Time to get a table and order something to eat.”
He made a pistol out of his thumb and forefinger. “Excellent idea.”
Jon picked up the bar bill. I worked in publishing and he worked in sales. The guy could have sold ice to Eskimos, so needless to say he was making a shitload more money that I was. I offered to pay, but he rolled his eyes. He knew my salary.
Leigh waved over a waitress and introduced us. “Sit in Mollie’s section. She’ll take good care of you.”
Mollie looked me up and down the same way Jon had looked at Leigh. Almost elfin, she was a tiny redhead with a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and she wore a black skirt so short it might as well have been called a sash. Mollie started to lead us over to a table.
“Hey,” Leigh said as I turned away from the bar.
I glanced at her.
“He’s everything you said he was.”
“Is that good or bad?”
She smiled. “Probably both, don’t you think?”
I returned her smile and carried my third Guinness with me to the table.
In the interest of honest reporting, I must say we were drunk as fuck. We’d had our dinner and talked for hours about old times and new times. Being with Jon had reminded me why we had been such close friends in high school and college. He might have been a bullshitter of the highest order, but he knew me better than almost anyone and I knew him, and one of the first things I’d realized about post-college life was that those kinds of intimacies were hard to come by. I had started to wonder if maybe I still loved him a little more than I hated him.
We had pulled other patrons into our conversation, but most of them had left after a while, and come last call, there were about a dozen customers left in Dooley’s. Mollie had closed out her station half an hour before and sat at one of the many empty tables around us, tallying her tips for the night and making sure all of her math had been correct. In the midst of that, she’d said something nice about my eyes, and Jon had taken that as his cue to play matchmaker. He spent some time extolling my virtues, and when Mollie had taken off her apron and grabbed her coat, instead of leaving she took a seat with us and got a beer of her own. We were seven or eight drinks ahead of her.
“You know the drill, amigos,” Leigh called from behind the bar. “You don’t have to go home—“
“—But you can’t stay here!” the chorus of people with nowhere better to go chimed in.
Mollie had just said something funny and I realized I’d smiled a little too long at the joke. Smiling at her was easy. She confessed to being an actress and a dancer and that she had been writing a musical about a cocktail waitress in 1940s Los Angeles who spent her nights serving stars of the silver screen and dreamed of being discovered, but who felt invisible every moment of her life, except when she went to the movies. Sitting in the theater with the lights down, Mollie said, the waitress could always feel like she lived amongst those stars.
I fell in love a little, I think. Drunk as I was.
Jon said he’d produce her show after he made his first million, but only if he got to help with casting, so he could see if all of the stories about hungry young actresses were true. Maybe once I would’ve laughed, but you couldn’t hear Mollie talk about her dreams and think that line was funny. Unless you were Jon.
Mollie laughed politely as she finished her beer. Last call had come and gone, so I offered her the rest of mine. The staff were getting their coats on when Leigh came and stood beside Jon’s chair, hands thrust into the pockets of her ratty old pea coat, a bright raspberry scarf around her neck. Out from behind the bar, she seemed taller than ever.
“Where are you guys going from here?” she asked.
I blinked in surprise and glanced at Jon, who grinned. To him, it didn’t seem at all unusual that Leigh might want to spend more time with him, no matter that she was stone cold sober and we’d been drinking for hours. We weren’t incoherent—we’d been drinking all night, but we’d had a meal and hours had passed—but we were drunk enough to irritate sober people.
“We have no plans,” I said.
“We do now,” Jon corrected me, sliding back his chair and standing to look up at Leigh. “We’re going wherever you’re going.”
Mollie downed the last of my beer and stood as well. “Leigh and I are headed to a party, if you guys want to come.”
“Might be we’ve partied enough,” I found myself saying. Then I saw the disappointment on Mollie’s pixie features and wondered what the hell was wrong with me. “You guys don’t mind us being so far ahead of you?”
“Mollie’s got a little packet of something to help us catch up,” Leigh said.
The mischief in her eyes made Jon very happy. Mollie took my hand and guided me away from the table, and suddenly we were leaving the restaurant and walking the streets of New York, and pretty soon I wasn’t sure where we were, which was quite a feat when you consider that most of Manhattan is comprised of numbered streets and avenues. It’s hard to get lost there. I wondered if I’d lost count of my drinks at some point during the night.
Then Mollie slid her arm through mine and started to sing a wordless tune, softly but beautifully, and I stopped worrying. I worried too much, Jon had always told me. I felt sure, in that moment, that he had been right.
Mollie took a little plastic bag out of her pocket, tapped a couple of pills into her palm and swallowed them dry. She offered them around. Leigh took two, but cautioned Jon and me to start with one each, given we were already slightly hammered. I followed their advice. Always the cautious one. But not so cautious I wouldn’t take a pill a pretty girl gave me out of a plastic bag from her pocket.
“Where’s the party?” he asked Leigh.
“This girl’s apartment.”
“That’s all you know?” I asked.
Mollie bumped me with her hip. “It’s supposed to be a massive bash. Late night party, past the witching hour in New York City. What else do you really need to know?”
I smiled, recognizing truth when I heard it. This girl’s apartment really was all I needed to know.
We never met the girl. Or at least, I never did. The party raged on the third floor of an old brownstone jammed between two modern structures, like a piece of an earlier New York had been somehow passed over by the passage of time. Forgotten. I hoped for one of those great, claustrophobic elevators with the accordion gates, but the place was a walk-up. Whatever Mollie had given us had kicked in on the way up the stairs, so as the thump of blaring hip-hop drifted down from above, Jon started bopping to the music. He took Leigh by the hands and danced up the last flight of steps. At the landing there were cases of empty beer bottles, neatly set out for return and redemption.
“Empty!” Leigh said, laughing in frustration, as if she’d really thought they might be full cases of beer. Her pills had kicked in, too, and her eyes were wide and hypnotic. That’s mostly what I remember of her from that night, those kaleidoscopic eyes. I might have dreamed them, I don’t know. It’s been a long time since then.
“Fucking empty!” Jon echoed.
He picked up a case of the empty bottles, turned and hurled it down the steps. The cardboard box dulled the thump and the sound of glass shattering inside, but it was loud enough to make us all flush with guilty amusement.
The drugs racing through me, I shoved the nearest stack of cases over, toppling them onto the stairs.
Jon and Leigh looked at me in shock, then started whooping. Jon patted me on the back and yelled something about getting fucked up. Or maybe that was me doing the yelling.
They led the way out of the stairwell and into the hall. Mollie took my hand again. She cocked her head and even soaring on whatever she’d given me, I could see she was looking at me differently. What I couldn’t tell was whether or not it was good differently or bad differently.
She kissed me, and from the hunger in it, I had my answer.
The room thumped with the music. The walls breathed with it. The lights were dim and though all of the windows were wide open, the gyrating bodies were sheened with glistening sweat. Side tables were laden with top shelf booze and clean glasses that seemed to appear without being replenished by anyone I noticed. Coolers full of beer on ice stood in corners. The drugs, though…they were never on display. They manifested in people’s hands as if summoned from the ether. I saw one girl, maybe seventeen, pull a small vial of cocaine from the unruly bun of her hair.
“This is fucking amazing,” Mollie said, dancing with me. Holding my hands and gazing into my eyes.
The apartment had seemed like one big room with a bathroom and small bedroom off to one side, but as we burned up the small hours of the night and we kept dancing and drinking, I realized we’d moved into a different room, and that the place must be larger than I’d at first imagined. The sweaty little box we’d started in had given way to a much bigger space, and the music kept shifting styles, sometimes improbably as hell. Somebody put on Frank Sinatra, and then something older, a heartbreak ballad from the 1920s or 1930s, followed by a screaming bit of party blues from the Sixties. Whoever had been picking the music had to be on even better drugs than we were. Mixing it up like that only ever worked with a group of people as fucked up as we all had gotten by then.
I had no idea of the time. Once in a while I’d glance out the window, expecting to see the edge of dawn creeping into the sky, but the old building had been swallowed by modern New York, so I wasn’t sure if we’d even notice the sun come up.
Whiskey burned my throat. I blinked, coming to my senses for half a second, wondering how much time I’d lost. How much of that whiskey I’d had to drink. Feminine hands caressed my stomach, fingers stroked the front of my pants, nails scratching, stirring the most familiar of all urges. Blond hair whipped around her face as she danced, but Mollie wasn’t blond.
Frowning, I stumbled back from her, glancing around in search of her. I spotted Jon and the bartender. Leigh, I reminded myself, though I forgot her name again a moment later. So fucked up by that time.
The dancing bodies made strange shadows on the wall, undulating darkness. The music had shifted and I stumbled amongst the dancers, shoved a couple aside. The woman wore flowers in her hair and a gypsy skirt. Her partner wore a suit with thin stripes and a wide lapel, a long sloped hat. I turned to stare but the hat had vanished. The lights flickered and I turned to glance at the walls, where gaslight burned inside sconces, little flames casting odd shadows of their own.
I spotted Mollie with another guy, tall and dapper. Bow tie undone. They had taken a small mirror off the wall and were snorting lines of something off the silver glass. Coke, maybe. I had no way to know.
“Hey,” I said into her ear as I moved up beside her and took her by the hand.
Her eyes were glassy, her pupils dilated so large they were nearly all black. She kissed me, pushed her fingers through my hair and pulled me close so she could deepen that kiss. She ground herself against me and I flushed with the best of hungers. Kissed her back, put a hand on her ass and pressed my hard cock into her so she could feel what she had done to me.
Then she was kissing the other guy. Dapper fucking Dan. His hand slipped down her pants and I saw her shudder with pleasure. She reached for my hand as if she wanted me to stay, but I’d never been good at sharing. I started to back away and she paused Dapper Dan and shot me a disappointed look.
“I should go,” I mumbled. Blinking. Unsteady on my feet. I shook my head to clear it but was unsuccessful. “Come with me?”
She seemed to be considering it. Took one step toward me. Then she stopped and swayed, nearly fell over. Dapper Dan caught her.
“I don’t think I can,” Mollie said, a look of surprise on her face.
Hammered and high, stung by her, I staggered away. In the haze, I tried to focus on the room around me, searching for an exit. I didn’t recognize the art on the walls and for a few seconds it seemed to me that the music filling the apartment had strings and horns, some baroque composition that these people would never have chosen as their evening’s dance soundtrack. These people, men in black tie and women in elaborate gowns.
Bile burned up the back of my throat and I bent for a second, leaning against the wall, feeling the texture of the wallpaper under my hand. I blinked, trying to breathe, and looked around. What the fuck had Mollie given me? I’d never had hallucinations before, but now…what else could that have been?
I weaved amongst the dancers and the drinkers, all of them just as fucked up as I was by now. Their eyes looked hollow to me, their smiles false masks. Were they all so shallow, or was I just pissed at myself for being lulled by nostalgia into forgetting how much Jon had changed over the years? This wasn’t the life I wanted, but should I hold it against these others, who had never been my friends?
I just wanted out. The party around me seemed like it might go on forever, and that was all the revelers wanted. There seemed so many of them now—impossibly many—the room impossibly large, people crushing against me as I tried to find my way out, searching for Jon along the way. Bitter as I was, I needed to tell him I was leaving.
What room was I in? How had I made my way there?
Girls dressed like flappers did the Charleston in the center of the crowd. I spotted them for a second and then they were gone, my view obstructed by human flesh. By a strange masquerade of unfettered joy and depravity in equal measure.
I found myself in another room. Then another. Each seemed new to me. I bumped into a table laden with champagne flutes, spilled several glasses and saw that there was confetti on the floor, as if tonight had been New Year’s Eve and I had somehow missed it, though months had passed since then.
A dancing couple collided with me and herded me into a narrow corridor, thick with other human flesh. A doorway presented itself, the door hanging half open, and thus I discovered Jon and Leigh by accident in a bathroom complete with brass fittings and clawfoot tub. She snorted a line of cocaine off the sink while he worked her panties down, reaching for his own zipper.
The temptation to close the door, to just go, dragged at me. Instead I knocked hard, slid into the bathroom, and turned my back so as not to get a glimpse of them. In my peripheral vision I could see their faces in the mirror above the sink.
“Timmy, what the fuck?” Jon barked. “Give us a minute, okay?”
“Take all night, man. I just wanted you to know I was leaving.”
Leigh didn’t care. She didn’t know me. She did another line.
“You fucking pussy!” Jon cried in dismay. “This is the best party ever! I’m never leaving this goddamn place!”
I hesitated. Wrecked as I was, unable to focus my vision, I still managed to worry about him. I shook my head to clear my thoughts, wondering if he’d be all right.
He sneered at me. “What do you want, cab money?”
I went cold. We’d never talked about the night of that Red Sox game, but apparently he remembered it as well as I had.
“Fuck yourself,” I spat.
I reeled out of there, stumbled down the corridor and into another room. My vision blurred again and I saw those gaslight sconces flickering on the walls. They couldn’t have been there. The building might be old, but surely such things were not legal now. I went to my knees and someone stepped on my hand. My head pounded as dancers swirled past me. Some of them wore masks, as if I had accidentally stepped into some nineteenth century masquerade ball.
Darkness edged in at the corners of my vision and my head lolled forward, dreadfully heavy even as the rest of me seemed to lighten, to drift and float. Someone shoved me and I managed to crawl enough to find a wall. A window. I sucked in the cold air breezing in from outside and then I glanced out at a city that could not have been, a Manhattan without skyscrapers.
I puked out the window, body rigid as vomit poured out of me. I heaved a second time, and then a third before I could catch my breath. The cold air felt good but did not clear my head. With the back of my hand, I swiped a sleeve across my mouth and then the world turned to shadow again.
Someone slapped my face, more than once.
I tried to focus, barely managed, and saw it was Mollie. She hadn’t poured all of the beer and whiskey down my throat and she hadn’t made me take the damn pill from her little plastic baggie, but she had been the one to give it to me.
My hand closed around her wrist and I dragged her down to the floor with me. “What the hell did you give me?”
I slurred the question, but she understood.
“It was just Ex!” she said, extricating herself from me. “Just Ecstasy. But there’s something else…something…”
Mollie took my face in her hands and shook my skull, forced me to meet her terrified gaze. “We have to leave.”
Upon that we could agree. But her eyes held something other than urgency. They were full of fear.
“What…what’s happened?”
Mollie slapped me hard. “Look around, Tim. Jesus, look!”
She slapped me again and my mind sharpened just a little, the fog clearing. I slid my back up the wall beside the window and blinked, sucking air into my lungs. What I was seeing could not be. I tell myself even now that it had to be the drugs, that there must have been something in that pill, or in the whiskey I’d been drinking at the party. Some of the revelers were as I’d seen them before, wasted shells, club kids or young professionals blind drunk, having the party of their lives. Others were true husks, barely shadows of people. They might have been ghosts, but in that moment, I felt sure they had begun just like the rest…like me and Jon and Mollie and Leigh, young and searching for meaning and identity in a city that denied both, desperate to feel something other than the uncertainty of new adulthood. They’d found this party just like we had, and they’d surrendered themselves to it.
Mollie took my hand. “Come on. I’ve got to find Leigh.”
I flashed on the bathroom. The lines of coke on the sink. The sneer on Jon’s face. What do you want, cab money? Fuck them.
“We have to go,” I said, echoing Mollie’s own words.
She’d taken my hand, but now it was me dragging her. Mollie protested, but not much. Fear became her engine. I kept shaking my head, forcing the fog to clear from my thoughts, keeping my vision from fading. And yet it did. Whatever moment of crisp clarity Mollie had given me, I lost it quickly. The husks had their masks on again, looked just like the rest of the revelers, but I had seen them now. All around us were faces from other eras, clothing from decades past. The music shifted with the décor as we shoved through dancers and drinkers and people smoking all manner of things.
Fear suffocated me. It felt like a kind of madness, seizing me, building up in me like steam in a kettle. Just when I thought I might scream, Mollie and I pushed our way through the throng and into the room where we had first entered. I recognized the door. Seeing we meant to leave, several of the dancers reached for us, snagging our clothing. One girl kissed me, her mouth tasting of burnt smoke and herbs. We yanked ourselves free, and I felt so grateful that I could no longer see which of the revelers were new arrivals and which were only shadows.
The door resisted at first, but Mollie put her hand over mine and something about that moment of contact, the warmth of her touch, must have given us both a bit more clarity. The knob turned, the door opened, and we stumbled into the hall. As the door slammed behind us, muffling the thumping hip-hop we’d heard on our arrival, Mollie pulled me into the stairwell and we picked our way carefully past the cases of empty beer bottles we’d knocked over earlier. She’d given up on Leigh, no longer determined to go back for her.
Until we reached the street.
The sky had lightened slightly, deep indigo to the west but to the east I could see the soft glow of impending dawn. I glanced around, grateful that the street seemed the same as the one we’d left behind. The modern buildings dwarfing the ugly brownstone.
“We have to go back in,” Mollie said, standing beside me. She’d let go of my hand at some point and I hadn’t noticed.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Tim, we have to. I can’t leave Leigh in there. And what about Jon?”
What do you want, cab money?
I shook my head and staggered across the street. Whatever clarity I’d achieved had started to wear off and now the alcohol and drugs crashed back into my system like adrenaline had built a dam and now it had let go.
Sometime later—I don’t know how long, but there were people out jogging and walking their dogs and the yellow edge of the sunrise had just touched the eastern edge of the city—Mollie shook me awake. I’d passed out in a shoe store doorway across from the brownstone.
There were tears on her face.
“She’s gone,” Mollie said. “I went up and I knew it the second I got to the top of the stairs. The cases were gone, the ones you guys smashed. Just gone. No broken glass, no boxes, nothing. And the music had stopped.”
“That’s…” I started to say impossible, but bit down on the word.
Mollie had knocked on the door, hammered on it, until she heard someone swearing on the other side. She’d pleaded for it to be opened and when at last her pleas were answered, she found herself confronted by an old man holding his stained robe closed with one hand while he cussed her out and threatened to call the police.
“It’s over,” I said.
“It can’t…where have they gone, Tim?” Mollie asked, wiping at her tears, afraid for her friend.
I thought about all of those different rooms, the view from the window, the shifting music and clothing I had seen.
“The party’s moved on. Go home, Mollie.”
“But Leigh and Jon…”
“They got what they wanted. They moved on, too. So should you.”
Mollie stared at me, frowning at first in shock and then in revulsion. She took a step back, moved off the curb and then froze at the blaring horn of a taxi. She waited while it slid by, the cabbie stabbing his middle finger out his window as he passed. Then she hurried off.
I watched her until she reached the end of the block, where she turned a corner, shoulders hunched, and disappeared. I never saw Mollie again, but the memory of her face is vivid in my mind. Her eyes, especially. The disappointment that shaded them in that last instant, when she glanced at me while the taxi drove past. I had not turned out to be the person she thought I was.
As for Jon, I took my own advice. I let him go. The city had claimed him. Changed him. So fuck that guy, y’know?
But.
I’d let him go.
Which meant it had claimed me, too.