They are late to dinner, but they are in no hurry to get there. Bunny is glad that she can’t see Josh’s face because they are walking side by side, and because of how tall he is. She doesn’t want to see his face when she says, “Before, when I asked if you were scared, I was talking about ECT. Are you scared something might go wrong?”
Josh admits that initially he was scared. “For the first few rounds,” he says. “But not anymore. Why?” he asks. “Are you thinking about it?”
“No,” Bunny tells him. “No. I’m trying to think about nothing.”
When they get to their table, Andrea stands up to show off her new yellow T-shirt. Running her hands down the front of it, as if stroking the embossed cat, she says, “You guys are too much.”
Teacher says, “Yeah, it was a big night.”
The quiet that follows is the unspoken “elephant in the room,” although to associate Nina with an elephant, regardless of context, is always going to be wildly inaccurate.
“The worst part was how happy she was,” Chaz notes, and then after a pause, he says, “Or maybe that was the best part.” Nina was elated by her self-desecration. While it wasn’t quite doing away with herself, it was doing away with a part of herself. With each success comes confidence.
Jeanette pushes away her plate. “I can’t eat,” she says. “They took her. My baby.” Jeanette wipes her nose with a napkin. “My Nina. They took her to a hospital in Boston. To some specialist.”
“McLean’s,” Josh says, and then, as if he thinks an explanation is warranted, he adds, “I went to law school near there.”
Josh is a lawyer? How odd. Not odd that he is a lawyer, but odd that, until this minute, Bunny knew no such thing about him. At a party, you could clock it: from the moment of introduction to the moment of having heard all of it—that he is a lawyer, what kind of law he practices, where he went to law school, and if he graduated in the top of his class—would come in at under forty seconds. Yet, how is it that, after how many weeks of being something like bunkmates going through loony-tunes boot camp together, she knows next to nothing of the practical matters of Josh’s life beyond what happens here? How did it never occur to her that he has a life beyond here, just as he knows next to nothing of her life beyond the dark despair of it? Why don’t they engage in polite cocktail party conversation? Perhaps uncover shared interests or friends in common? Could it be because, what difference could any of it make? Could it be that this, only this, that they are here, is all anyone needs to know about any of them?