On New Year’s Eve a group of us went to a party. Mark was my plus one. He had provided a notable lack of impediment between Jason and me so far, a result of his willful obtuseness to my emotional swings and having largely extricated himself from my new social life. A similar instinct, I suppose, as when an animal knows it’s going to die. But he was bolstered by the results of a poker game before the party. This was an enthusiasm of his, the nocturnal hours he spent playing online while I was in the bedroom thinking of another man was probably the only comfort in his life. Poker night was naturally a Harry initiative, so its purpose was of tense and unrelenting competition over camaraderie, thus an even sweeter victory to Mark when he took the pot. He crowed privately to me how he had “schooled those fools,” a light in his eyes that had been no scarcity when we were a little younger. Like his ineffectuality in other masculine pursuits, gambling held no interest for Jason, and Mark was too happy to be curious how we had been occupying ourselves during his victory. And hopelessly oblivious to my own happiness that we were both beating Harry.
Earlier in December Harry had sat Jason down and told him quite earnestly that ambition, true ambition, consisted of terminal dissatisfaction. Contentedness is not the endgame of ambition, it is an affliction of want, to be found in perhaps one out of ten or twenty in a given population, and while it is possible for friendship to emerge between those similarly afflicted (but even this is thorny: see Hemingway’s resentment of Fitzgerald or Franzen’s of Wallace), a romantic relationship is impossible. Because an equal partnership is no more possible than between a garden and a gardener. Relationships don’t exist between gardens.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I interrupted the recounting of this conversation. “How much does he know?”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
“You can’t be talking about this, do you understand?”
“Jesus Christ, of course I’m not talking about it. He just knew something was up between us and he was reading the tea leaves.”
“Are you sure about that? Are you sure he was only reading tea leaves? Because you have a very big mouth and it would make me very unhappy if you were using it to turn this into a story.”
“I’m not an idiot.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“He doesn’t know anything.”
We were both lying. His was self-evident. He had the biggest mouth in the world and half the reason men have sex in the first place is for the story. Mine, characteristically, was much more subterranean and abstruse. As much as I was insisting on the motions of not getting caught, I still sat next to him at group outings and held his hand under the table. When he did not sit close enough to me I would engage him in petulant text exchanges—any observant person, of which Hogwarts almost entirely consisted, could detect the rhythm of the two of us picking up our phones. One great source of fun was to establish that an assignation’s cue would be my departure from the group but then delay leaving until he was bursting with frustration, only to later chastise him for his obviousness. Being in love is the most charismatic hell. You watch every layer of sense and accountability fall away until you are reduced to a state of infantile helplessness, helpless to reason with your feelings, helpless to feel anything less than all of it. It’s a gap in continuity, a wrecking digression: the self is a narrative, a certain number of events in sequence that being in love obliterates—this narrative imploding into a tormented present tense that you would choose to relive continually for the rest of your days if you could. And, without a doubt, I wanted Harry, my chief rival, to know about it, giving him taunting glances, mutually aware of my territorial victory, of how much he hated that there was nothing he could do about it.
“He cannot know a single thing; do you hear me?” I said.
Anyway, the party. Early on Jason began chatting with an Amazon girl who came to nearly his height in heels, with whom he made incremental progress over the night. I was beside myself. Literally, I was beside myself, that way your wrath actually becomes a separate and autonomous entity from yourself, then you become your wrath. He went to refill their red plastic party cups at a drinks station near a life-size statue of that Steve Buscemi–looking goblin thing from Lord of the Rings in a diaper and sash and holding a light-up party scepter. I made my way next to him and said, “She’s not even that pretty. She’s got a snaggletooth and she probably bought that dress at Target.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Like I even care,” I said. “There’s tons of cuter girls here, is all I’m saying. I don’t care.”
“It’s good to know you’re watching out for my interests,” he said.
“You’re only doing this to me because she’s tall,” I said.
He walked away. I followed. We had been together an hour ago, unknown to the others in our party. There is no greater bonding agent than conspiracy, which requires a more complicated but durable kind of honor. But now he was transparently curating his moment at the countdown with this Amazon whore.
He was CURATING in front of me.
“Are you punishing me?” I said.
“Are you leaving with me?” he said.
“I thought that maybe we were a little bit more considerate of each other than that.”
“No, you thought you had two boyfriends for the price of one.”
The conversation was dangerous. We were standing too close to each other and anyone could have recognized it as people who just fucked having a fight.
I felt a hand on my arm pulling me away. It was Harry. He asked what I was doing.
“I just think he can do better,” I said. “What’s wrong with a little quality control this day and age.”
“It was a rhetorical question. Manage your shit.”
“Does it bother you that I’m the one sucking his cock?” I said.
He looked at me.
“Did my dad teach you that look?” I said.
“Have pity on one of them,” he said.
I remembered suddenly that Mark, abandoned to classmates across the room, still had eyes that worked regardless of how inconvenient it was for me. I had not really forgotten this, and I hated Harry perfectly for reminding me.
I returned to Mark and went through the motions of talking about the futility of resolutions and wasn’t it crazy we were so close to the future in Blade Runner and so on. A playwright started talking about showing the novel he was working on to a contact at The New Yorker. Harry took some pleasure in explaining to him the unreality of this effort. This playwright had recently taken his first fiction class in which he demonstrated clear talent for the medium, and had been so inspired by the experience he’d written a full manuscript in several months. Equally vexing to Harry, this classmate was what was referred to as “Austin straight:” effete and sexually ambiguous but identifying as hetero, with a high degree of romantic success because he was as unthreatening as the scarves he wore in warm weather.
“That’s cool, man, but The New Yorker won’t really consider your shit unless it’s submitted through an agent,” said Harry. He had a spreadsheet of literary magazines and his own submission history on his computer, and currently led the fiction writers in publications, having placed stories in the Paris Review and One Story. “You wanna aim a little lower, and, honestly, it’s a mistake to be showing these people unpolished work.”
“Oh, he loved it,” said the playwright. “He’s showing an excerpt he thinks might work out to the fiction editor.”
I enjoyed the look on Harry’s face, but only fleetingly. Jason and the Amazon were sitting on a couch, and her knee was touching his like our knees had touched in the movies, and she was looking at him starry-eyed like he was telling her that the kind of life you live is the story you tell yourself, and all I could think about was the impending countdown, how at the end of it he would take her in his arms and kiss her, and how badly I wanted to throw my champagne in their faces when it happened. My hands were shaking at the thought of it.
“Look at him. I can’t believe what an idiot he is. Someone should warn that girl she is dealing with a literal sociopath. Can you imagine what pretentious nonsense she’s falling for?”
The look Mark and Harry gave me revealed I’d been speaking out loud.
“Someone really should warn her.”
The playwright moved the conversation to the role of “the novel” in the future. He was enjoying a more attentive audience as a result of the potential imprimatur of The New Yorker.
“I mean, what place will it have for a generation raised on iPhones?” he said.
I angled away from Harry and said what an interesting question that was, touching his arm.
“It’s done, you know?” he continued. “Kids today just aren’t wired for it. But that’s kind of exciting in its own way, you know? To be part of, like, a dying medium.”
“You know what I think when people start talking about ‘the novel’?” said Harry.
“What’s that?”
Harry punched him in the mouth.
After Jason and I escorted Harry from the party and saw him off on his motorcycle, the two of us were left on the street.
“Should he be driving that thing?” I said, not hiding my scorn. I was being a drunk grotesque, so it was a pleasure to have someone who was more of a drunk grotesque to be better than.
“What if you stayed the fuck out of it? What would happen?” said Jason.
“Oh, don’t worry, I don’t have a single opinion. But I do have a question for you.”
“Does the question involve staying out of it?”
“Do you know what happens when you love someone who hates himself? Do you know what happens when he turns on you, which he will, eventually?”
“Do you really have this much trouble with a simple request?”
“I’m just asking if you’ve thought about it.”
“Is there some kind of mental block that makes you incapable of this one thing? Because who my friends are, or who I may or may not fuck later, or where she may or may not have bought her dress, are all equally none of your fucking business.”
“FINE. I’m unbelievably fine with everything you’re saying. I’m going inside.”
I walked a few steps, but he didn’t try to stop me so I turned back.
“Was it true you hadn’t jerked off thinking about me?” he said.
I pretended not to know what he was talking about.
“When we were playing Truth. You said you hadn’t masturbated thinking about me. Was it true?”
“What are you even talking about? It was a stupid game. This is the most retarded thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth, and that’s saying a lot.”
“Just answer the question.”
“Yes, it was true.”
“No, it fucking wasn’t!”
“Simmer down.”
“You can’t play a game called Truth and then lie.”
“I’m really glad this conversation isn’t being recorded so you won’t ever have to hear how retarded you sound right now.”
“And you’re lying now! I’ve still got your come on my dick and you can’t admit this basic fact even now!”
“Simmer down.”
“Tell me to simmer down again and see what happens.”
“Big talker.”
“Your boyfriend is watching us.”
I turned to the house. Mark was standing in the glass to the side of the door, looking out with confusion. I could not believe he was still confused by anything in the universe. The look on his face made me understand how a person could take pleasure in kicking a dog.
“He’s my fiancé.”
I went inside, brushing past Mark and saying something about what idiots those guys were, I needed to make new friends.
I drank more champagne, and commiserated with the people encouraging the playwright that he should really think about pressing charges, and pretended not to be monitoring Jason and the Amazon, and visualizing her shocked sputtering whore face as my champagne hit it with the vividness of a movie you’ve seen a hundred times. As midnight approached we were all corralled out to the back deck where there were several old broken toilets; the house was situated over a ravine and there was to be a ceremonial clearing of the shit from the previous year. The owners of the house hoisted the first toilet onto the railing in preparation. The music playing was skipped to the intro of the Katy Perry song “Firework,” timed so the chorus would kick in at midnight exactly. When the countdown started I shouted along with an ebullience to match everyone else’s, or exceed it. I was reminded of a screenwriting term Jason used—“the ticking clock”—a climactic, tension-generating device often manifesting as the literal timer of some weapon of mass destruction that the hero must disable. Five!… Four!… Three!… I rooted for the hero’s failure, more than ready for everything to be blown apart.
The toilet was flung into the ravine below, breaking apart on the rocks. Jason swept the Amazon into his arms. Mark reached to sweep me in his arms, but I pulled away. There was a frenzy of movement inside the house, then a thickly muscled dervish burst out on the deck. It was Harry. He had stripped down to his boxer briefs and was wearing the Baby New Year sash from the Steve Buscemi goblin. The scepter was in his hand, lights strobing, and his arms were pistoning and his hips gyrating to the music with abandon. His reappearance was met with peels of raucous and disbelieving laughter, even by those who had been advising legal recourse. There was the shattering sound of another toilet hitting the rocks. Harry’s hands were now on his knees and he was grinding his rear into the crotch of the playwright, who gamely thrust in return, taking the wand and slapping it against Harry’s haunch. It filled me with fury that somehow Harry’s grotesquery was making him more popular. Jason stood with his arm around the Amazon, staring in great merriment at this display, her head bent into his chest, shoulders quaking. I had visualized at such length and intensity throwing my champagne in their faces, the undulating O shape of the whore’s mouth as she searched for a reaction, that I barely noticed the distinction between the scene playing in my head and the reality as it came to pass.
Three days later, Mark was on the road back to his parents’ house in the Hudson Valley. There is not a word for the look in someone’s eyes when you tell them you don’t love them anymore. Jason was in a state. Mark had broken my phone in the aftermath of the party and by the time he left I was all used up. I was receiving several long emails of frantic eloquence from Jason a day; he did not know what was going on apart from a terse response from me not to come over and it was killing him, as it does when you are powerless to affect the outcome of a situation and can only assume it has gotten away from you. But his pain, so preventable by simple communication on my part that I would be on his doorstep soon enough (file under: be careful what you wish for), and Mark’s pain, formerly so preventable by the smallest courage to tell him that following me across the country was such a bad idea that in the weeks before leaving New York I would wake up at night with my stomach in a knot, were both essential elements of the process that seemed reasonable to me: everybody had to hurt more than they needed to. Otherwise the process consisted of crying and binge-watching teenage TV melodramas on my laptop and pharmaceuticals that I was reminded to take again by the surprise of my teeth biting the quick of my fingernails.
A few days after Mark left I had a visitor. The thought it might be Jason angered me. I wanted nothing more than to see him, but there was a process. Being angry at him was nice; Galvan self-loathing is a magnet that will reverse polarity at whim or convenience. But it was Harry.
“Well, isn’t this some shit,” he said.
“It is. It is most definitely some shit,” I said.
He shook his head with a pleased grin. “Little shopper,” he said.
“Was there something I can help you with?”
“Get out of your goddamn sweatpants. We’re gonna shoot some guns.”
We went to an outdoor gun range east of the city where the gas station had notepads for Bible study and bumper stickers that said things like Legalize Freedom. At the range he told me they still refused to allow Jews to become members, then gave me a look that was either superiority that I fell for it or that it shocked me, I couldn’t tell which. After a rudimentary lesson he held a dim view of my marksmanship.
“Your grouping pattern looks like it’s been fucked by a retarded child,” he said. “Watch me. Your breath and your shot are smooth and continuous. You’ve been to enough yoga with your lesbo friends, the idea isn’t foreign to you, shit just blows up in the end.”
He raised the gun and fired several rounds in a target many yards further down from the one I had been shooting at. Several shots went through the center mass of the black silhouette.
“In general it’s preferred for targets to have more identifiable lifelike features, and to be moving rather than stationary,” he said. “There is an instinctive human resistance to taking another life that could be the difference of having your face shot off in a combat situation if you haven’t simulated it as closely as possible.”
“You really, really would love a credible opportunity to shoot another human being,” I said.
He fired several more shots into the target’s head, and ululated in a Middle Eastern way. Then he reloaded the gun and gave it to me. I actually had been observing him and tried to emulate his calm concentration. I closed one eye.
“Keep both eyes open,” he said.
“That doesn’t feel right,” I said.
“Well it is. You have to make your eyes sort of Chinese-y.”
I squinted and my vision doubled, but I maintained focus on the front site between the doppelganger of my hands and inhaled slowly, and between the inhalation and exhalation pulled the trigger. I was still off by a mile, anticipating the noise of the recoil and jerking, but realized that the feeling of the gun in my hand as a loved and powerful part of myself and not an ugly man’s toy was as good as I had felt lately.
“I’m having unbearable penis envy,” I said, turning to Harry.
He cringed, taking my arms and steering them so the barrel pointed down range and not at his face.
“Finger off the trigger,” he said. “Finger off the trigger.”
Later, we took out our earplugs and collected the spent casings and dropped them in a plastic bucket.
“You’re not the bad guy here,” he said.
I looked at him, but he continued picking up casings.
“When my sadistic whore ex-wife completely emasculated me, she wanted nothing more than to have a baby,” he said. “She didn’t want her career to keep her from having a family and the agency was willing to let me go down to part time. But I was too selfish for that, and I knew it. What we do is the most selfish thing in the world. And I had years on my side, but she didn’t, so she did what she had to. Could she have done it better? Yeah. So could I. So could everyone. People are a mess. People do shit to each other. Most of it is pretty understandable in their shoes and forgivable if it doesn’t become a habit. So do me a favor and take it easy on the man cub. I have a lot of fondness for him, you know. But he is soft in a way that you and me aren’t. It’s not his worst quality.”
I was surprised he was willing to admit the likeness between us. I didn’t think he could say it about a woman.
His eyes lit then.
“Look at that,” he said, and gestured down-range, but I couldn’t see whatever I was meant to.
He walked onto the range a few yards out and pointed to a caterpillar in the grass, though it was unlike any caterpillar I had seen. It was green and totally smooth and very large like something out of the rainforest, at its plumpest nearly the circumference of my thumb. I would never have spotted it from the distance like he had, and realized that to do so required a degree of attunement to the natural world, which I secretly feared my lack of trivialized me as an artist.
His eyes lit again and he took a stick from the ground, which he used to pick up the caterpillar and run it to the dirt bank at the far end of the range, then jogged back, beckoning me.
“Oh, come on,” I said.
But I followed and stuck my fingers in my ears as he sited carefully with a rifle and fired once. We walked again to the end of the range. What remained of the caterpillar was a spatter of incandescent green against the furrow of dirt like gemstones. I seized Harry’s arm, unable to believe how pretty it was.