“Bye, Nina,” she said, as if we were friends.
He watched her drive away, but remained looking out at the darkening street after her car had turned the corner, as if deep in thought. “Sorry about that,” he said.
“That’s okay.”
“Did you have any questions for me?”
“Not really.”
He seemed offended. “I’ve read your novel. I am the only one who’s read it aside from you. There’s nothing you want to know?”
“You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
“I see.” He lit the blunt, which was now a wet roach. He burned his fingers and reached inside the wooden box for a clip. He held the metal end of it and passed it to me.
“I guess I have one question,” I said. “What do you write?”
“Everything is writing,” he said. “At the moment, I’m working on my Bumble profile.”
I’M ONCE AGAIN stoned on Jared’s porch. His roommate is out selling drugs to teenagers getting drunk at the Bends, Seth is at a Black Box show opening, and I have the night off. Over the two years since I met him, my friendship with Jared has become strategic. It normalizes me to Seth by giving Jared the opportunity to approve of me. It enables him to explain me to Seth at key moments. And it gives me someone other than Seth to cry to when Seth ghosts me. While maintaining that, due to seniority, his first loyalty is to Seth, Jared also validates my frustration when Seth says things like, “I hope you know that the time I give you is not time I already have.”
Importantly, Jared encouraged me to finish my last twelve credits at the community college. “Don’t do it because you’re told to,” he said. “Do it because journalism is dying.” He proofread my applications to MFA programs. When I was accepted, he was instrumental in convincing Seth to move with me to New York.
I treat Jared as if he’s someone I can confide in, though he isn’t always; he’s a gossip. But, as he says, “Trust is an action.”
At the moment, Jared is mansplaining polyamory, and I am performing compassion through active listening.
“If Claudette is uncomfortable, then she and I need to talk about that,” he says. “It does me no good if she talks to other people. I’ve been honest with her about my expectations and involvements with other women.” He passes the blunt.
“My understanding is that this complicates her relationship with Sofia,” I say.
“And of course I feel badly about that,” he says.
“But this is how you’re made.”
“I am the way I am, and she chooses to be with me, knowing who I am.”
Jared doesn’t reveal his other paramours to one another unless they ask him using specific names, as in “Are you fucking Sofia?” This is necessary to preserve everyone’s privacy. Otherwise, he has a difficult time forming connections with people, and forming connections is what he naturally does as a polyamorous person. “Homo sapiens are not biologically inclined to monogamy,” he says, citing the landmark pop science book Sex at Dawn. To restrict this part of himself is equivalent to torture. “I am capable of feeling deep love for more than one person at a time. Haven’t you ever wanted to be with someone who wasn’t your partner?”
I wouldn’t admit this to him. I also wonder if he isn’t sending a coded message—if he wasn’t watching me with Brian on the beach a few weeks ago. We’re only, at this moment, two blocks from the location where he came on my face in the dunes. My neutral expression asserts that it wasn’t me he saw, just in case it was.
“This is a touchy subject for me,” I say, “because of my mom.”
“Right, the unicorn.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“Have you met any of her partners?”
“No.”
“What’s your relationship like with her?”
SINCE LEAVING FOR college, I’ve only seen my mother a handful of times. This occasion stands as an exemplar: I was home for Thanksgiving and asked if I could come to Lutz, an hour from my dad’s. I didn’t want to drive all the way out there, but I knew I’d have to if I wanted to see her. I was on my cell in my father’s kitchen while he shouted at Bill Maher from the living room.
“I’m not asking for pity, but it really sucks to be me some days,” she explained. “I don’t have the time or energy to talk about it. It’s just hard for me to host people. I don’t have the space or the time to clean for you.”
I apologized. She complained that her work schedule was punishing—my sense was that this was by design. She had been this way since leaving my father. As long as she worked upward of eighty hours a week, she never had to get close to people, and she would always have something or someone to gripe about.
“That’s both-sides-ism, Bill!” my dad yelled.
“Hang on, Mom, let me step outside.”
“Go far away so he doesn’t yell at you,” she said. This was supposed to be a joke about how my father was someone who yelled at me, except that he wasn’t. If she made him my enemy, though, then she would have more of me, even from another city, even as she kept me at an uncloseable emotional distance.
“I don’t want you to feel bad,” I said, shutting the front door.
“It’s just honestly really hard for me to have visitors or take time off work.”
“It’s easiest for me to come now because I’m in Florida.”
“I can’t commit to anything, Nina. I’m sorry.”
HER TRAILER WAS in a park called Slash Pines. Mobile homes were near the street and RVs were in the back, near the swamp. My mother’s home was somewhere in between. She’d left a key in a hanging planter on the porch, where she also kept her bicycle, a tiny refrigerator, and some dirty deck furniture. Inside was clean, the window air-conditioning unit turned down to sixty-nine, churning with two pine-tree-shaped car fresheners taped to the vent. The dust on her sewing machine suggested it wasn’t used. Cases of liquor sat stacked against the refrigerator, her kitchen serving as extra storage for the bar where she worked. “I don’t even drink,” she’d told me, as if working in a bar was an ironic twist of fate that had befallen her—her, of all people.
I lay on her floral-print couch vaping and texting with my RA, Shower Dave. I only ever saw him leaving the men’s communal bathroom wrapped in a towel. I hoped to sleep with him by the end of the semester. The competition was stiff among female residents on my floor. I sent him half a dozen thirst traps, and hours later, we had both cum repeatedly. By the time my mother came in, I couldn’t pull out.
I try to maintain a healthy skepticism toward any organized system of thought, Dave was saying. We’d transitioned from sexting to falling in love. I’m glad I wasn’t raised with a religion.
She was frowning, taking off her sneakers.
I’m the opposite, I said. I like being told what to do ;-)
“Who are you talking to?” she said, but proceeded into the tiny kitchen before I could answer. She left the lights off while she opened the cabinets.
“My roommate.”
Let’s test that theory, he said.
She extracted a jar of peanut butter and stood there, watching me as she ate it with a spoon.