“I don’t really think that matters, though, do you?” He stops abruptly. His expression implies that he’s said something radical. He turns away from me again and steps into the darkness of the cigar shop, covering his face. The Cuban man in the window has stopped rolling to watch him. He bends at the waist. I step inside as well and rub his back. He dries his eyes on his sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Don’t be.”
“It’s been an emotional day.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I was never sure what I even meant to her,” he says. “She was the first person I ever truly loved.”
We walk to the bistro. It’s empty and intensely air-conditioned, with club music turned down low. They seat us in a round booth large enough for four people, and we slide in on opposite sides. Brian orders two beers. I order water.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about,” he says. I expect him to finish the story of my new coworker. “My mother is ill.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I don’t really talk about this with many people. She’s been sick for a long time. She has a disease that attacks her brain.”
He stares at the center of the table. I watch his attention shift from the wood grain to his memory. I watch him try to wrap his mind around an enormous truth. “It’s genetic and incurable. I talked to her on the phone today and I’m going to see her this fall, in New York.”
I take his hand. I wish I had a mother with an incurable disease. Then I could value spending time with her while she was alive. I’d have the luxury of avoiding her if her suffering overwhelmed me. I could wager that she would still be there for me, at least emotionally, when I figured out how not to be a coward. I would have time to make peace with her before she died.
“Listen,” he says. His eyes are bloodshot. “There’s a chance I may have it, but they won’t even test you for it unless they know you’re not going to kill yourself.”
“But how can you know that?”
“They interview you.”
The drinks arrive. Brian orders the Love Boat. He slides closer to me and rests his hand on my thigh. He kisses me, and his tongue is aggressive, forcing its way into my mouth. I kiss him back, out of politeness.
“I’d need to prove that I have someone who’s not going to leave me if I’m diagnosed,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be a wife. It can be a sister, or a girlfriend, or a best friend. A stable, long-term relationship. Like I thought I’d have with Erin.” He rubs my leg. “Nina, I’m wondering if you can be that person.”
The sushi chef is watching us through the glass. I see him preparing our special. I say yes, and we both know that I’m lying. It’s what he wants to hear, and there’s nothing else I can say: he needs the lie to sustain him. The knife is slicing, and the chef lowers his eyes to lift a pad of fish onto the rice. Brian holds me and cries into my shirt. I tell him I love him. I try to mean it.
Six
“And then he said, ‘This is my attempt to lay a foundation, Nina. You need to address your male-domination insecurities—’”
“Wait a minute—”
“‘—and balance your acutely sophisticated psychological level of awareness with your feminine sexual identity.’”
“I don’t understand,” says Odessa.
I shake my head.
“Stop trying to decode it,” says Claudette.
“Do I have male-domination insecurities?” I ask, leaning over the truck console. There are a few hours of daylight left, so Odessa and I are taking Claudette to the beach. She’s been isolating since learning that Jared is fucking Sofia, her best friend from private school.
“Does he mean that I’m paranoid of being dominated, or simply that I’m insouciant?”
“He means that his ego is fragile,” says Odessa. She ashes out the window and pulls her sunglasses down on her face. We go over a causeway, and the sun opens up over the ocean; we lower onto the barrier islands, and it disappears behind a row of pastel-colored luxury hotels.
“But I wasn’t attacking his ego.”
“You were emailing another dude.”
“He’s a contributor to Numina.”
“How do you know him?” says Claudette.
“We went to college together.”
They nod. I pack the dugout and pass it to Claudette. “Seth is a mongoloid,” says Odessa, parking in the dirt lot of a tiki bar. “And he’s petty. This is not what he’s upset about, and I know you know what I’m talking about.” We walk to the covered patio at the to-go window and wait for margaritas. Pet Sounds plays over the speakers. It’s the album that was playing in Seth’s father’s portable CD player when the truck hit him, the only thing that remained intact.
The county posted a red tide update this morning saying conditions were clear at Treasure Island, but the bloom is spreading like a bloodstain, and from here the water appears brownish. They’ve hauled thousands of dead animals off the beaches each week since the infection began. We promised Claudette that if we couldn’t lie on the sand, we’d get drunk. We’ll get drunk either way.
“He needs to come get his shit,” says Claudette. I knew this was coming. “It’s disrespectful. Moe could have asked anyone.”
Seth’s senior show for his six-year BFA was supposed to be held at Madre’s, the coffee shop where Jared and Claudette work. The shop’s artwork rotates once a month, and Moe, the owner, invited Seth to be the featured artist, but Seth is a chronic procrastinator. He’s constantly occupied, but when it comes to making work on a deadline, he can’t do it. At the last minute, unable to finish the paintings for his senior show, he decided instead to hang his “archive” at Madre’s “as a mixed-media installation querying the basis for painting.”
On the day he was supposed to hang his show, he arrived at the coffee shop with three Tupperware storage bins full of what any layman would consider trash—discarded takeout menus, prayer tracts, cardboard signs asking for change—to which he’d attached some abstract personal significance. He’d collected these items over a decade of “unconscious curation”: in other words, if he’d wanted to pick something up from the gutter, he had. Only later did he think about why. By the act of taking them all in together at once, viewers would be asked to glean the specific lens through which Seth viewed them, both at the time of their collection, or “connotatively,” and also “denotatively,” as a set. Or they could simply appreciate their surfaces: the marks of car tires, the historical weight of a discarded La Luz tour poster.
He opened a box of T-pins and commenced hanging these items on the wall of Madre’s. He’d completed half of one wall by closing time. He’s now halfway through his month as the featured artist and still he hasn’t completed the installation, nor acknowledged Moe’s attempts to reach him. The walls of Madre’s are full of holes. I’ve tried bringing it up with him, but he refuses to discuss it with me, and now, because I “insisted” on talking about it, he’s barely speaking to me. The last time I saw him, he blew up at me, attacking my character, basically calling me feral.