The two-flat is in Bucktown. It belongs to Dana’s aunt. She owns the building, lives on the top floor, and spends the winters in Tampa. Dana checks the apartment to water the African violets and goes down to the basement to make sure no pipes have burst or pilots gone out. This is the first time she has brought Cate along. She has shut down Toaster for the night, but hasn’t told Jody. This is unprecedented and carries a certain amount of risk, which Cate takes note of.
They have until morning. Cate has ducked out on Maureen, who was planning to fix cacio e pepe and put Mad Max: Fury Road on her giant flat-screen. Cate loves cacio e pepe, really loves Charlize Theron, and of course especially loves her with a phantom arm. She has replayed quite a number of times on YouTube the part where Charlize undoes the leather straps of her prosthesis and lets it drop onto the postapocalyptic sand. She basically thinks Fury Road is a masterpiece, so this was an extremely generous offer considering Maureen does not like violent movies and thinks Charlize Theron is too hot (whatever that means). So Cate feels bad about saying no, but opens up a big box of lies anyway. She’d love to come over but can’t. Her mother is throwing a work party up at her house, to launch the spring season. Although the spring season in retail does start in January, the party is imaginary.
Cate and Dana are both shy coming into the small foyer.
“Wow,” Cate says, craning her neck, taking in as much of the hall and living room as she can. A recliner facing the TV. A medium-size Arc de Triomphe, also a Leaning Tower lamp so large it could only have been bought in Pisa and dragged back here. There’s more. A poster with LOVE spelled out in blocks. A kitten dangling from a clothesline with HANG IN THERE typed across the bottom. “Your aunt, it looks like she’s cornered the global market on cheesy souvenirs and bad Pop art from the sixties and seventies.”
“Oh no you don’t. No professional snobbery here. This is borrowed decor. We’re not here to give it a rating.”
The evidence suggests Aunt Vicky is a woman deep into creature comforts. She has a giant bed facing a second giant flat-screen TV. She has also managed to fit a whirlpool into the house’s small bathroom. The tub has a terry-covered plastic pillow suctioned to one side. Several slinky Polynesian-print robes hang from hooks on the inside of the door. On a shelf above the toilet sits a complex machine that plays ambient sounds while it heats herbal oils.
In the whirlpool, Dana grabs hold of one of Cate’s toes and says, “How’s it going with you, mental-wise? I worry maybe you’re getting exhausted just trying to hold it together.”
“It comes and goes. I’m fine, fine and then instead of fine, I’m freaking out. And then I’m not freaking out but I’m very sad that people like them exist in the same world as Neale. That their sort of wicked foolishness can take down a really good person.”
“Oh, I think you won the round. And I think Neale’s going to be okay only because you won it.”
“But really, nobody was a winner coming out of that kitchen. I’m made of something different now and it’s not just stronger, it’s way bleaker. And Neale, I can see her folding in on herself, and I hate that. And I can’t help. I know she loves me and appreciates my taking time out of my busy day to save her, but also I’m the only witness to her humiliation. If I weren’t around, she could put it all away more easily.”
“I think your friendship is so much bigger than what happened. I think you just have to give it time to recuperate.”
And then Dana is quiet. This is one of the things Cate likes best about her, that she doesn’t have to fill pauses. She can sit inside them.
After a while of letting the water roil around them and the aroma machine pump out little blasts of vetiver, letting Dana’s cell phone stream Nina Simone’s cover of “Here Comes the Sun,” Cate says, “Let me take you to bed. A giant bed.”
They have plenty of time for everything. Sex and foreplay and afterglow. Now they are searching for small scars and the stories behind them. Dana inspects Cate’s finger stumps in detail, then comes up with a way Cate can put them to use. They make love naked. Naked is rare, given their usual opportunities where even horizontal is a bonus. With her clothes off Dana is impressive. Thick in a way that’s about muscle gravity, like a gleaner in the Millet painting. Cate closes her eyes and trails her fingers over hard calves, little trapezius bumps at the top of Dana’s shoulders. But it’s not so much about parts as about the whole, the way Dana occupies herself.
Dana says, “You miss the traction of those potato sacks under you.”
But Cate has lost the ability to see their connection as lighthearted and storeroom-specific. “I feel too much in this. I’m emotionally ridiculous. What we have is totally concocted. Stolen moments. Midnight meetings. Sex that has to carry all the freight because we don’t have any regular everyday connection. We’re not building a history together. Affairs don’t have a history. They’re on the calendar in invisible ink.”
Dana considers this. “I don’t think we’re an affair. If we brought this out into real life, had the time to go grocery shopping together and plug into each other’s families, go through old photos, if we had all that, it would just be surround to a center we’ve already created together—that we’ve made ourselves known to each other. I’ve never done that before. I’ve always held back something. This is new to me. So of course I’d like to see more of you. And I’d like to not be worried that this takes something away from Jody. But I’m mostly just so happy that someone gets me, that I’ve been able to show myself and you’ve shown yourself to me. I think we already have that foundation.”
Later, when they get to thinking about food, Dana goes into her aunt’s kitchen and makes them burrata salads with heirloom tomatoes. She brought a stocked Igloo cooler.
“Oh yes,” Cate says. “Cream stuffed into cheese. Like the upscale version of the deep-fried butter at the Kane County Fair.”
“This kitchen is tragic,” Dana says as she goes through her aunt’s cabinets. “Her spices are seasoned salt and garlic powder. Look in her freezer—she’s got a bargain bucket of strawberry ice cream. Frosty Fun. And a summer camp–size package of hamburger. She didn’t even break it into smaller packets she might be able to use. It’s just a meat raft in there. I need to come over here more when she’s around.”
They are wearing just their shirts, butts sticking to the vinyl dinette chairs around the small, yellow Formica-topped table. Ciabatta crumbs drift down on Dana’s breasts as she tries to explain her life with Jody.
“I don’t know how it all happened so fast. We moved in together. We got two cats.”
“Salty and Pepper,” Cate says.
“I hate that I ever told you that. The thing is, you’d like her if you two met.”
“It doesn’t matter whether I’d like her. I’m never going to have that opportunity. I don’t even want to drag you out of your relationship with her. I feel bad enough seeing you behind her back. What I want is for you to have been free and clear when we met.”
“You can only see this from your side. From your perspective, things aren’t moving fast enough, but toward what? What makes you think if we had each other free and clear it would be better than what we have now? What if what I give you is the best I’ve ever given anyone? Why would a conventional relationship necessarily be better? Maybe we put so much value on this because of its limitations.” Then she gets very quiet, then takes Cate’s hand and leads her back upstairs to bed.
“Lie exactly on top of me. Press me down.” Then, “This. This is it.”
They stay this way for a while, pancakes on a plate; then Cate pushes herself up, away from Dana, looks down on her. “I know this is important to you. I get that. And that nothing stays the same. But doing it this way makes me feel bad about myself. The higher I feel when I’m with you—stoned in paradise, you know, like the song—the lower I sink in my own esteem. I have to stop.”
“Yes. I know,” Dana says as she reaches down around the backs of Cate’s knees and pulls them apart, slowly.
Cate’s phone makes the coin-drop sound. Maureen.
how’s the party going? send a pic.
Cate rolls off Dana, then sits cross-legged on the bed, stumped.
A pause, then the phone rings—Maureen deciding she needs to communicate more directly. Cate and Dana watch as the phone keeps ringing, which is to say, as it keeps playing “Danny Boy,” the special ringtone Maureen put on so Cate will know it’s her.
“I can’t answer,” Cate says. “There’s supposed to be a party in the background. I hate this new personal-surveillance state. More and more, I’m starting to think like Graham.”
“You have to go to the last line of defense. Say your phone ran out of juice. That’ll give us until tomorrow, then call her back.”
“I know I have to do something about this. Maureen was part of my Plan C and I seem to have tossed that plan over the side. And I don’t think there’s a Plan D. I have to let her know all this. Just not while I’m sitting naked next to you in your aunt’s bed.”
Then they watch silently as the phone winds its way through the ring’s last notes—and down the mountainside.