Olivia wasn’t sure yet what she’d go with onstage. For now, she was focused on getting Sally drunk, on changing Sally’s mind about pressing charges.
“We have to do this the Persian way,” she told her twin, trying to catch the bartender’s attention. “The Persians believed that any important decision made while sober had to be reconsidered when drunk.”
“I didn’t make the decision sober,” Sally said. “I made it while tripping on mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms don’t count. It’s ‘in vino veritas,’ not fungi.”
“I don’t really drink anymore.”
“Tonight, you’re drinking,” Olivia said.
She ordered beers and tequila shots.
“I thought you said vino,” Sally remarked. “I’ll have a glass of wine, please.”
The bartender said he wouldn’t recommend it, the bottle had been open awhile, but Sally took her chances.
The place was still mostly empty, Phil in a corner, talking to a group of Second City guys: a handful of undergraduate students Olivia had seen before, standing by the tiny stage.
“You’re twins,” the bartender noted as he poured from a wine called Jared.
“I was abused in childhood by a man named Jared,” Sally said.
“Don’t listen to her,” Olivia told the bartender.
“Yes. I’m lying,” Sally said. “His name was Jarrett.”
That was true. That had been their stepfather’s name. The bartender didn’t care either way. He thought the girls were joking, and had another customer to attend to.
Olivia raised her pint, clinked it to Sally’s glass, and drank half.
“I thought I was supposed to get drunk,” Sally said. “How will you convince me not to sue Jarrett if you get wasted?”
“I have a speech ready,” Olivia said. “You just focus on drinking.”
Sally drank. Olivia didn’t have a speech ready. She just thought she could convince a drunk person of anything. She gulped the second half of her beer and tried not to roll her eyes at the way Sally sipped her wine, or held her glass, as if the glass were only there to display her perfect manicure. Olivia couldn’t help it. She was always recording Sally’s every move and storing it for later, in her library of stereotypical people’s tics and intonations. Sally had been, the last ten years, a peephole through which to look at their stupid generation. Not that Olivia thought Sally was stupid (she wasn’t), but Sally wanted to fit in, which was somehow worse. Sally did buy houseplants and subscribe to the Ezra Klein podcast, she did organize her books by spine color. She had once gone to a used bookstore just to buy the twelve most appealing green spines she could find, to bulk up that middle portion of her rainbow shelf, which hadn’t been growing at the same rate as the others.
“I can tell you’re judging,” Sally told Olivia. “You have that look of when you’re scraping me for parts.”
Olivia neither denied nor confirmed.
“I know it’s your job,” Sally went on. “I know it’s your job to look at me and everyone else and point at all that’s ridiculous about our behavior and society. I respect it. You know I do. I’m just saying, maybe not right now?”
“I’m sorry,” Olivia said, and she meant it. “It’s hard to turn it off.”
“It’s okay,” Sally said. “This is how you’ve been protecting yourself, it’s your ‘I know everything’ carapace, ‘I look at everyone and I understand why they do what they do.’ It brings you comfort. The distance you keep. You think you’re not a player, just an observer. But I need you to be a player right now. I need you to support me.”
“Sounds like you have a speech prepared.”
“I do. I knew you wouldn’t like the idea of me suing Jarrett. I know you. You don’t want to cause ripples. You don’t want drama. You despise drama. But this isn’t drama. This is my life, Olivia. I need to do this.”
Olivia caught herself doing it again, taking note of an intensity she found laughable: “This is my life, Olivia”—a line from a movie.
“Please stop it,” Sally said. “I need you to focus. How do you plan on changing my mind if you don’t focus? You can’t both try to convince me of something and scan me for material at the same time. At some point, you have to make a choice. You’re very competent, you’re very smart, you can hold many ideas at once in your head, but there are limits to your powers.”
“There are limits to your powers!” Olivia repeated, in a superhero movie voice, grabbing Sally by the shoulders.
“Do you ever stop and think about how ironic it is that you spend so much time trying to mimic your twin?” Sally said. “It’s kind of depressing, really.”
“I never pretended it was a happy life,” Olivia said.
She drank her tequila. She wanted to be nice to Sally. Why was it so hard?
At some point during Sally’s speech, Artie and Dorothy had come in. Olivia wished Artie hadn’t witnessed her fight with Sally in the car, that he hadn’t heard her reject her sister’s announcement that she was ready to sue. She knew it was a bad look.
“I understand it was important for you to come all this way to tell me,” she told Sally. “But why did you have to tell me about it in front of Artie? Wasn’t that a bit dramatic?”
“I think these conversations should be normalized,” Sally said. “I think women should stop having them only among themselves, whispering over tea in each other’s kitchens.”
“Still,” Olivia said. “You don’t know him. I don’t know him very well either. I’m not super into everyone knowing about our life.”
“That’s why I brought it up in front of your friend,” Sally said. “To get you used to it.”
Olivia said that she didn’t want to get used to it. She didn’t want to be associated with Jarrett any more than she had to, and couldn’t understand why Sally would want that either, to put this man again at the center of her life. She told Sally that everything she read on the internet was wrong, that she should fight the urge to share her trauma, that it was stronger to repress it all and let it rot somewhere in your brain than to bring it back to life over and over again, that being alive meant pushing things down deeper and deeper all the time, to make room for new stuff, and that she’d been good at doing this, Sally, she had a nice apartment, a good job, she had a lot of anxiety, sure, but she managed it, she saw a therapist, she took mushrooms, and, of course, she was single now, but she’d had a good boyfriend in college, she’d meet a great guy soon, and why put all this good life on hold for months to relive her horrible childhood, why do this to herself? What did she think suing Jarrett would bring?
Sally stared at Olivia and said “justice.” She thought it would bring her justice. “Are you not familiar with the concept?”
Olivia started rolling her eyes again, but Sally was off her stool before rotation’s end.
“I need to pee,” she said, and disappeared into the small crowd that had gathered by the bar.
Olivia hadn’t seen the place fill up. She was now aware of all the men pressing behind her back for the bartender’s attention, and she wondered how much they’d heard of her diatribe. One of them took the space Sally had just freed up, and Olivia noticed his hands before she noticed anything else, the stack of dollar bills folded in a money clip, the whole thing casually held between index and middle finger, like the bonus chip you slide the croupier at the end of a lucky night. The bartender came to the man right away.
“Bitters and soda,” the man said, extracting a tenner from his money clip.
“You’re going to have a lot more fun if you order something stronger,” Olivia told him. “We’re not very good.”
The man looked at her. The man was August Reinhardt, Manny’s son, but Olivia couldn’t have known it—he looked nothing like his father.
“Are you performing tonight?” he asked. “Second City?”
“MFA.”
“I see,” August said. “I hear it’s a battle between you guys and Second City, but no one can tell me how the winner gets chosen. Is there a jury?”
“It used to be a vote from the audience,” Olivia explained. “Like, a show-of-hands type thing. But now I think someone just brings a decibel meter and sees who gets the biggest laughs.”
“That doesn’t seem very fair,” August said. “The loudest laugh for the funniest joke. That’s not how it works.”
His bitters and soda came. He left the ten-dollar bill on the counter. The bartender didn’t quite know what to do with it (bitters and soda were free, ten dollars too big a tip for a free thing), so he left it lying there, went on to take new orders. August didn’t notice the confusion he’d caused. Maybe he was someone who was used to paying for water, Olivia thought, someone who asked for bottled and not tap at restaurants. Maybe he thought ten dollars was what bitters and soda cost.
“I think you should go back to an audience vote,” he said, “but give people time to think about the show, have them vote the next day, or a week later. Sometimes, the jokes that stay with us are not the ones we laughed loudest at.”
The man wasn’t flirting, Olivia thought. He wasn’t making eye contact, or offering to pay for her next drink. He seemed earnestly interested in finding a solution to the problem of designating a winner, fair and square.
“Are you a comedian too?” she asked him.
“I’m a lawyer,” August said.
“Is one of us in trouble?”
She wrote a whole story in her head, about young lawyers haunting comedy clubs and second-tier open mic nights in search of future clients. It wasn’t stupid. Comedians did get in trouble. When they did, they counted on their agent to point them to a good lawyer, and young agents would probably come here tonight, too—the guy could leave his card with everyone. Brilliant. Perhaps in a few years, Olivia thought, there would be a trial in which two or more people in this room would be involved.
Sally came back from the bathroom.
“Where were we?” she asked Olivia.
“Justice,” Olivia said. “You said the word ‘justice’ and then you went away.”
“Right.”
“Meanwhile, I met a lawyer.” Olivia pointed at August, whose name she still didn’t know. “Isn’t that something?”
“That’s rad,” Sally said, extending a hand to August. “I’m Sally. Do you do sexual abuse?”
“I don’t,” August said. He shouldn’t have said he was a lawyer. The bar exam wasn’t for a couple of months. “I’m Auggie.”
“Is that short for August?” Sally said. “That’s a great name for a lawyer!”
“Why is that?”
“Doesn’t it mean, like, fair and just?”
It didn’t, August said.
“And fair and just isn’t what you want in a lawyer anyway,” Olivia said.
“Do you know someone who does sexual abuse? I’m looking for representation.”
August asked a few questions, such as how long ago the abuse occurred, and where Sally lived, and where the abuser lived, and if charges had been filed and in which state. Olivia realized he hadn’t said anything about their being twins. At this point, he probably wouldn’t. She wondered whether August couldn’t see their twinness or simply didn’t find it worth mentioning to the two people already most aware of it. Her whole life, she’d been irritated by strangers stating the obvious (“Twins!”), at having to smile at their false assumptions (“I bet you’re each other’s best friend!”) or listen to them talk about some other twins they knew, as if Olivia and Sally would know them, as if all twins went to the Twin Conference in Twinsburg every summer. Now she found August’s silence around it more unnerving than the platitudes she’d come to expect. It was like when it rained and you left the bar with someone without having known that it was raining, one of you had to say it, “It’s raining,” even though the other had noticed it, too. You didn’t want to be the one to say something so self-evident, but it was awkward if no one did. It created a tension, or made a preexisting one apparent. Someone had to say it.
The bartender took the ten-dollar bill while no one was looking.
At the other end of the bar, Ashbee, who’d arrived a few minutes earlier, was giving Dorothy the beat-by-beat of his terrible date. The woman he’d bought dinner for had spent the whole evening congratulating herself for only having dated Black men this year.
“Jesus, Ash,” Dorothy said. “We’ve been over this. You have to meet them for a drink first. You can’t keep getting stuck for entire dinners.”
“I’m an eater,” Ashbee said. “I need to eat.”
Dorothy found eating in front of people almost more intimate than sleeping with them. Dinner, for her, never came before the sixth or seventh date. Back when she was dating, that is.
“Was the Black thing a New Year’s resolution?” she asked. “Is she going back to white men in January?”
“The worst part is that she was right to be proud,” Ashbee said. “I mean, not right, but vindicated. Everyone in the restaurant looked at us like our union was going to save the world. They looked at us like cute little puppies.”
Dorothy found it admirable that Ashbee kept trying to find love, but also hard to care very much about.
“Heard from Kruger?” she asked. “He completely vanished earlier. Left his phone behind in class. I think he might not even know the shooting was a prank.”
“Do you think it was a mistake to hire him?” Ashbee said, taking his jacket off. “In this context?”
Dorothy got a whiff of him as he folded the jacket on his knees. He smelled of sex.
“In which context?” she said.
“We shouldn’t have hired a white guy.”
“White men need jobs, too,” Dorothy said.
“Kruger doesn’t. Plus, I don’t think he likes teaching very much,” Ashbee said.
He explained he would’ve liked to hire Kit Lazarus instead of Kruger, but had spent a lot of energy convincing himself it was a bad idea. Two Black men out of three comedy teachers would’ve been too much, he told Dorothy. Their colleagues could appreciate one Black man in the teaching lounge, but if they saw two of them come in together, it would make them uncomfortable.
“I saw it when Han was here last semester,” Ashbee said. “When other faculty saw us together, shooting the shit or whatever, just laughing, they thought we were laughing at them. Or plotting something.”
“You’re being paranoid,” Dorothy said. “We have like seven or eight Black professors in the department.”
“Only one per research group, though,” Ashbee said. “One in Theory, one in Victorian Lit, one in Creative Writing, and so on. It’s made so there’s a Black person every five seats in a department meeting. We’re good as long as we’re scattered evenly. But put two of us next to each other, it screams communitarianism. People start freaking out.”
“You didn’t hire Lazarus because you didn’t want us to freak out?”
“I know,” Ashbee said. “I think I’m the real racist here. I’ve internalized white fragility. I’m protecting you guys. Or maybe it’s even worse. Maybe I got too used to being the token Black guy. I complained about it a lot, on the record, but I guess it’s pretty comfortable in the end. I’m alone in my lane, road is wide open, no one can fuck with me. If more Black guys rise up, though, it’s a different story. They’ll be taking my shit.”
“I hear you.”
“White people managed to convince me it was Black guys who were going to take my shit.”
“I hear you, Ash.”
“I’m a horrible person.”
“I don’t think so. I think we’re just old, is all. I used to be the same.”
“You used to be racist?”
“I used to like being the only girl around at the club,” Dorothy said. “If a second girl came in, I got nervous, and I was relieved if she sucked. Part of me thought there was only room for one of us in there.”
Dorothy was confident enough in her work now that she knew she was a comedian, not just a female comedian, but back when she’d started (the one-of-each era: one woman, one Black guy, one gay guy), she’d believed that her role as the woman was to make all the woman jokes. She didn’t like doing those very much, but she always slid a couple in her sets, to pay her dues, be allowed to stick around, and so whenever a new girl arrived, Dorothy was afraid she would steal her spot by catching the few remaining good jokes there were to make about being a woman (like there could be a shortage of those, Dorothy thought now, like the indignities of being a woman could run scarce—that was a joke in itself).
“Exactly,” Ashbee said. “We complained about being the only one of our kind everywhere, but deep down, we wouldn’t have shared our spot for the world.”
“We thought we were cool.”
“We were dicks.”
“We were selfish.”
“Were we, though?” Ashbee asked.
“You just said we were.”
“I guess I wanted you to contradict me. What kind of artist would want to hang out with another artist just like him? Same background, same potential jokes? What writer doesn’t already live in fear of their stuff getting stolen? What artist is confident enough?”
“So you’re saying we were right to hire Kruger. Different enough from you and me.”
“Is that what I’m saying? Why are you making me talk about this stuff? This stuff is boring.”
“I’m pretty sure you started it,” Dorothy said. “You brought up Lazarus. The second-Black-man theory. You brought up your nightmare white date.”
“You’re right,” Ashbee said. “Jesus, I’m boring.”
“Did you fuck her, by the way? Your date?”
“Of course I did.”
Ashbee sipped his gin and tonic through a candy-striped straw. Dorothy took out her phone to make a note about men and straws, how men loved drinking from straws as boys, then absolutely rejected the notion in young adulthood, until middle age saw them approach it again. There was a joke to be made about this, in which the straw represented confidence, growth. Maybe that’s how you knew a man had reached wisdom: when, after decades away, he found the path back to the straw.
“I want to talk about something other than being Black,” Ashbee said. It didn’t bother him that Dorothy was typing. “I really do. Lately, I’ve been wanting to talk about animals. I want to talk about ducks and stuff, vultures, rhinoceroses. I want to do a whole show about animal behavior, but funny. I’m getting so sick of people.”
“Kruger knows a lot about birds,” Dorothy said.
She’d never cared much for animals herself, and as Ashbee launched into a description of the bowerbird’s mating rituals, she let her mind wander. How nice it was to be out without a purse, she thought, sipping her vodka. Everything zipped in the jacket, everything tucked. She didn’t think those words exactly, “everything zipped, everything tucked,” but she felt them. She’d read online that some people thought in full sentences, even heard themselves think them, but it was rare for her to have definite words appear in her head before she spoke them, or wrote them down, like she’d just done with the straw note. Perhaps that was why she wrote for a living. To know what it was that she was thinking.
“And then the female will mate with the best interior decorator,” Ashbee said, about bowerbirds. “Decorating skills are what she looks for in a partner.”
Who cared? Dorothy thought/felt. Who cared what the female bowerbird wanted? Dorothy didn’t even know what she wanted. In a partner, or in general. She guessed a well-decorated home would be nice. But what else? Would she want to be seductive with Manny tonight, for example? Or would she just be a good friend? Probably she’d be a good friend. Was it sad? That even on a day that she’d truly believed, for a few minutes, to be her last one, she couldn’t find it in herself to be horny? That all she wanted was a good friend?
“How much sex do you have?” she asked Ashbee. “Do you fuck like once a month, once a week?”
“Something like that,” Ashbee said, taking the change of topic in stride.
“Something like which?”
“I’d say once a week.”
“Jesus.”
“You think that’s a lot?”
Dorothy hadn’t had sex in six years.
“I think that’s healthy,” she said.
“What about you?”
“I haven’t fucked anyone in four years,” Dorothy said. It was unclear to her why she’d decided four was so much better to admit to than six.
“Is it because you don’t want to?” Ashbee asked.
“Shouldn’t I want to?” Dorothy said. “After the day I’ve had?”
She wasn’t making a particular effort to keep her voice down. The bar was getting louder anyway, too crowded for easy eavesdropping.
“Do you want us to sleep together?” Ashbee asked. “Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Absolutely not,” Dorothy said. “I’m just saying, I was stuck in a conference room with Sword for hours, thinking I would die, and now Sword is probably home fucking his wife, as he should, and I’m here drinking like nothing happened.”
“Well, nothing did happen,” Ashbee said. “There was never a shooter in the building.”
“Sword and I believed that there was. And now he’s home, in bed with his wife.”
“It sounds to me like maybe you want to sleep with Sword,” Ashbee said.
He was trying to find the humor in all this, Dorothy knew, the funny angle. Since her confinement with Sword, though, she’d been unable to locate it herself, that right distance. She was stuck in the tragedy of the first person—the tragedy of close-up, Chaplin would’ve said. There weren’t that many quotes on comedy that made sense to Dorothy, but what Chaplin had said about life being a tragedy when seen in close-up and a comedy in long-shot, that had brought her much comfort over the years. She was usually able to snap out of self-pity by thinking the words “get in long-shot,” but she worried it was taking her too long to get in long-shot today, to get back to the third-person narrator within her that made life bearable.
“You’re a terrible listener,” she said to Ashbee.
Which he knew and wasn’t insulted by. He’d never understood the urge to be a good listener, couldn’t relate to those who boasted about the quality. Being a bad listener was to Ashbee more interesting, because then you got people to think differently about their problems, rather than just in the way they’d wanted to think about them all along.
“What about Sword?” he said. “Is Sword a good listener?”
“What I learned today,” Dorothy said, “is that when you think death is coming for you, what you really want handy is not a good listener but a good talker.”
She said that Sword hadn’t impressed her in that area. That he wouldn’t even share his planned last words with her.
“Of course he wouldn’t,” Ashbee said. “You don’t say your last words until you’re absolutely certain it’s time. The potential for embarrassment is too high. It’d be like pulling down your pants after someone asked to see your cuticles.”
“Wait, do you know what your last words will be?” Dorothy asked.
“Last words in life or last words onstage?”
It hadn’t even crossed her mind that someone could be thinking about their last line onstage.
“Last words in life,” she said.
“I think so,” Ashbee said. “I have some idea. They’d be for my daughters.”
“That’s nice.”
Ashbee thought “mandatory” more than “nice,” but didn’t say it out loud. He made the mistake of turning to look at the room behind his back, and immediately caught a glimpse of Phil, who understood their eyes crossing as an invitation to come over for a chat.
“Fuck,” Ashbee said. “Here he comes. See? I should’ve hired that second Black man. We could’ve split the Phil bill—‘I gave him Black wisdom last time, it’s your turn now.’ ”
“I split the Phil bill with you,” Dorothy said. “He asks about my experience of the world as a woman all the time.”
“He expects you to be funny about it, though,” Ashbee said. “Me, it’s like I have to be inspiring or something.”
He said this as Dorothy delayed her order of a second drink by crunching between her teeth the vodka-laced ice cubes left from the first one.
“It’s so sad when they want that,” she said, and the ice biting sent shivers down her neck.
“Inspiration?” Ashbee asked.
Dorothy looked down her glass. Close up. No ice left.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s sad. When they want that from us.”