“Yes,” Sam said. “I mean—I’d like to. I should be so lucky.”
“What’s the next one about?”
“Love and sex. That kind of thing.”
She shook her head. “When I was young, we just talked with our girlfriends about who we were sleeping with—not the whole world. You millennials make everything so public!” She looked off at nothing. “I did always want to write a book, though. It seems so romantic.” Then she turned back to Sam. “My friend Danielle Steel writes books. Do you know her?”
Sam shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t know Danielle Steel.”
“Oh.”
“So what would you change about yourself, if you could?” he asked.
She considered it for a moment. “My neck.” She pulled back the vaguely crepe-like skin beneath her jawline until it was taut, the stacks of bracelets sliding noisily down her forearms. “But I’ll go to Dr. Markowitz for that.” She released it and laughed hoarsely. “Not some medium or whatever.”
“Your neck looks great,” Sam said gently. “You don’t need to do anything to your neck.”
“You’re sweet,” she said, pulling at her neck again. “I wish I’d been more grateful for my youth when I was young. But so it goes, right?”
When she said this, it occurred to Sam that he should appreciate his own youth now while he still had it; and then this, the next thought, that there was a very real possibility that he would still be pathologically self-conscious and anxious when he was this woman’s age, and that idea, of the years sprawling out before him, of never being able to quiet the chorus of self-obsessed insecurity, of it just going on like this for decades, filled Sam with a dread so black that it was nauseating.
It would be better to be dead, he thought, and the feeling was potent in a way that made him want to say it out loud, to stand up from the dinner table and announce, “I want to be dead!” He did not want to die, in a practical sense—the corporeal permanence of death terrified him—but rather, to already be dead, to skip the death process and coast into a static condition of un-being, was something he fantasized about often. Certainly that had to be better than sustained consciousness.
Does everyone feel that way?
Say something.
“So it goes,” Sam said loudly, and he took a bite of chicken breast and chewed it very slowly.
* * *
At the end of the night, Sam put on his jacket and said goodbye to the other guests. Buck was in the kitchen, filing dishes into the sink. It smelled like olive oil and lavender, and Sam thought, for a moment, about how nice it would be to have a home like this.
“Thank you for having me,” Sam said. “It was great to get to know your friends.” This was a lie. He had been uncomfortable for the entire night, anxiety gnawing at him, that sense of being uneasy wherever he was ratcheting up in intensity the longer he’d stayed. He felt ambiently guilty, as he often did. Maybe it was because he hadn’t brought a bottle of wine, as everyone else had, even though he was sober and so he would not have been able to drink it; but, as he had considered it, a recovering alcoholic showing up to a dinner party carrying a bottle of wine was likelier to cause concern than the rudeness of showing up empty-handed.
A Diptyque candle, he thought. You should have brought a Diptyque candle.
Buck turned to face him. In some animal part of Sam’s brain he wondered whether Buck wanted to sleep with him, and whether that was something that Sam himself would like, too. Sam thought that he would. He didn’t know Buck well but the older man seemed interested in Sam, although Sam couldn’t quite divine what the nature of that interest was—if it was friendly or flirtatious, driven by lust or curiosity. For a moment he imagined himself wrapped in Buck’s arms, Buck’s stubble on Sam’s face—how good it would feel to be held, rough or tender—and then, just as quickly, that desire browned to loneliness, like fruit oxidizing, and Sam felt stupid and greedy for wanting it in the first place.
“I’m glad you came,” Buck said. His voice was softer now, more liquid. The two men stood for a moment, hips squared toward one another, and again Sam noticed the way the atmosphere thinned slightly. “If you’re curious about the shaman,” Buck said, “I’m flying up to have dinner with him in a couple weeks. You should come with.” He said this so coolly it sounded unremarkable. Maybe for Buck it was.
“Where does he live?” Sam said. “The shaman.”
“Oregon,” Buck said. “Portland.”
“Oh, that’s where I’m from,” Sam said, surprised.
“Kismet.”
“I think you basically have to be a shaman to live in Portland,” Sam said. “Or a vegan chef. Or a scrappy, fiercely opinionated writer at an alt-weekly. Or you work at a coffee shop but pay your rent by selling restored vintage clothes on Etsy. Those are the only four jobs in Portland. Everyone does one of those four things.”
Buck didn’t laugh. “Right,” he said. “You should come.”
“It’s really nice of you to invite me.”
Now Buck smiled, but it was at how Sam had sidestepped the offer. “Think about it,” he said.
* * *
Outside Buck’s house on the street, in the cool still night, a siren wailing somewhere distantly, Sam hugged his arms around his shoulders and walked toward his car. At certain moments it still felt implausible that he actually lived here, in Los Angeles, after having spent so many years in New York, like at any moment he might wake up to find that he had just dozed off on the F train early one morning and dreamed up the last two years of his life. He liked silent, empty nights like this—not the crowded anonymity of being one of a thousand bodies weaving their way up and down congested Manhattan sidewalks but an open sky, a sleepy residential neighborhood, his feet padding soundlessly down the hill. In New York, Sam had been lonely but never alone. Here his solitude was verifiable, externalized; it existed out in the world, shadowed by streetlight.
He was twenty-eight now. Time only moved forward. He was old enough to feel ashamed of not having accomplished more, though people liked to remind him, in a way that irritated him, that he had accomplished quite a lot, but when he went to things like a rich guy’s dinner party he still felt like a little kid playing dress-up, miming out the behaviors of his parents but never quite getting it right—a laugh that went on a little too long, fumbling with the dinnerware, standing on the edge of a circle of people chatting congenially and swirling their drinks as he waited for a point of entry that never materialized.
Maybe it was because he was sober that he always felt out of place. Still, he kept getting invited to things, which was curious to him—that his discomfort was felt but not seen, that he had developed enough of a mask over years of enduring awkward social situations that people couldn’t instantly intuit how he felt all the time. What a thing, he thought—to be well liked by everyone but yourself.