Alexandra slouched over the laptop in bed, letting herself take in the language of lingerie, the pure ballet of it—bustier, demi, basques. Her gaze seized up in the lace, scalloped edges. Hypnotic trims. She clicked her basket full, as she pulled at the smooth pad, producing a weather of fallen women, and the repetition managed her imagination in a thin spectrum. Then she got up and went downstairs for a drink to dull out the buzzy trance of choosing amongst minor variation.
Her son was with Genevieve until.
Until was a time that still seemed far away.
Across the street stood a bland restaurant with faux age painted on the walls and nostalgia designated by a certain cast of ochre light that rubbed off the edges of objects. She took a seat at the bar and ordered an amaro. There were framed posters with red Cyrillic letters spelling out Kino-Eye, and there were framed laundry detergent advertisements from the middle of the last century, women tipped back into martini glasses, holding lather in one hand and pearls in another. She half-noticed songs as she drank drink after drink. “La Vie en Rose.” “Sinnerman.”
“I know you,” a man said.
He had dark hair, teeth very white against his skin, and a face not unfamiliar in the half-light. But it was his hooking of his bag beneath the bar that gave him up. She remembered the abruptness of his movements as he settled himself beside her.
“Robert,” she said, and she kept on with her amaro.
But Robert insisted on buying them a round. He ordered a drink that made the bartender sigh, and she talked for a few minutes about her new job, a job, that’s what it was, nothing disappointing or epiphanic, just a company with a few procedures she knew. For a moment, she thought of the messages Jeremy sent her on behalf of So-So and Jill. So-So is skeptical of the new couch, but Jill thinks this must be the emery board she’s needed her entire life. In this way, some time passed quietly.
“Where’s Cassandra?” Alexandra said finally.
“Cass,” Robert said. “Her auntie died. She went down with Wally for the service, said I should stay and work. Not established enough to take time yet. It’s no matter to her. She doesn’t need me to distribute her grief. She’s well-adjusted. She has a shelf for white socks and a shelf for black socks. She talks about the man upstairs. She says, ‘You just keep on trucking until the man upstairs calls your number.’”
“And you?” she said.
“I’d have taken an excuse for a day off,” he said, then, quickly, “not that it isn’t sad. I know it is. I just never met the woman.”
A certain blurty quality, puppyish in its stops and starts, made him easy to be around. She forgot to eat and let him talk. She gave her card to the bartender and put her hand around a glass hot with the shaking flame of a burning votive. When he went outside to smoke—the drinking secret of boring men, he called it—she laughed a little. She waited, and she thought of how the place was arranged to feel like a memory, so you were seeing time refract back at you, the future memory already hinted in the deliberately worn patina.
He came in rubbing his hands.
“Place is nice,” he said. “So nice it almost makes me feel guilty.”
“But then?”
He gripped the bar. It had been epoxy-finished with newspaper clippings, and Robert’s hand rubbed a black-and-white print of a mushroom cloud shyly. “But then I’m drunk,” he said, “and you’re here, and I think we in my profession yodel on about self-care, so maybe I’m just a role model.”
“How is the clinical work?”
“Used to bum about the failures. Now, I go to work, and I think plug in,” he said. “That’s what Cass told me. Just plug in. It’s up to them to flip the switch, but you can set up the conditions for the work to work.”
“Just plug in.”
“I set the scene.”
He took a chubby little box from his pocket and looked at it. “When’s the last time you saw one of these?”
“Stone Ages must be,” she said.
“My stone says eleven-seventeen.”
“I guess it’s time for you to get a new phone,” Alexandra said. “Unless this was your way of saying good night.”
Robert shrugged. “I’m not allowed the doodads anymore. Cass said it was making me an angsty teenager in my middle age.”
“Because.”
“Because I’d Cathect and then watch my own Cathexis. Because I’d check every ten minutes, and if a day later I only had two Favors, I’d be asking her if I should delete what I Cathected.” Robert trailed off and stared at the tower of glass coupes behind the bar.
“Worried people didn’t like you as much as you thought or that everyone could see people didn’t like you as much as you thought?”
“Both,” Robert said. “More.”
Without any why behind it, she reached out and spun the mint garnish poking out of his drink. “I’m interested in more.”
“My sister and I, we’d argue. We’d be at it all day over an article about Afghanistan. She’d be saying I didn’t understand, I’d never been to war, you can’t be on here starting offensives when you’ve never seen combat. And I’d be angry all day. I’d be asking Cass why Marissa didn’t see we could’ve lost her.”
“And the Connections couldn’t make up for that.”
“The Connections are pure hypocrites. When my parents lost their house in the subprime crisis,” he continued, “I didn’t see people in the streets. Instead, online my friends say war’s appalling, banks are appalling, system’s appalling, but all I see on Cathexis is wealth and empty words. I couldn’t stop noticing. Paris. Tokyo. Cruises. Vacations three times a year. My parents are good people. They didn’t want me or Marissa’s money. They wanted to do it themselves, be old people their children didn’t fret over. They wanted to do it right, and they did,” he said. “If it could happen to them.”
“Then how is this fair.”
“How is any of it.” Robert paused. “I’d see the private school graduations. I’d see the elaborate birthdays. Everything’s appalling, but what are they doing? Buying new shoes. And I know what this sounds like. What I do. But the only thing that makes me bitter and not like everyone else is I don’t believe that it’s taking it personal. I believe everything’s personal.”
“Cassandra isn’t bothered?”
“She’s well-adjusted.”
“The socks,” Alexandra said.
“Right,” he said. “She thinks I’m crazy. I’m saying, the world can fuck off but I can’t stop looking, and she’s saying, very calm, very skeptical and pitying, fix your blood pressure with a flip phone. She says half my problem is it’s easier to see evil than to fix it.”
“If not fixing, what’s the social work?”
“My sister goes to war so they can ski in Aspen on family money and my parents can buy two-for-three cereal boxes, but I’m the one deranged by my device, and jealous.”
“I don’t think you’re deranged,” Alexandra said. “I think for you, high-def television isn’t enough.”
“But I love my friends too,” he said. “It’s simple as maybe they don’t care if they benefit from something rotten and think my life’s a knock-knock joke, but we turned each other onto bands in college, got stoned, and ate the same vanilla instant pudding.”
“I know what you mean,” she said.
“Do you?”
“You want taste in common to mean something more than coincidentally owning albums.”
“That simple.”
“I was in advertising,” she said. “Which essentially means I have a doctorate in pop psychology.”
“Cass, she says, so what if there’s a system. Be happy playing along because if you really believe there’s a system, you can’t change it anyway. At least enjoy it.”
“How does that work?”
He scrunched over her shoulder and whispered. “In the system, you don’t think about it.”
“Except now, when you say it,” she said.
“I undercut myself.”
“But you do it so well you nearly make a point,” she said.
“Cass says I need to hunker down on what I can control. She sends me blog posts about it. She tapes notes in the bathroom so when I’m brushing my teeth, I get the message.”
“What do they say?”
“I am the change the world needs,” Robert said.
“That all?” They shared a little laugh and she pulled the zipper of his jacket, a quick smooth motion, ending with her hands leaned against his knees. She did it before she thought of doing it. She watched him drop his gaze.
“And I am loved.”
“Oh,” she said, easing back perpendicular in her seat.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re a neat lady. I don’t want you to feel bad.”
She went for her wallet and tossed bills down on the bar, one, two, three. It was late, and there was no home to go to. Alexandra stood, looked back at him, already a memory.
“Spaghetti thrown against the wall doesn’t feel anything, Robert,” she said.