“Okay,” said Emily, walking past him toward the kitchen, which was really just the back wall of his living room. “I also got some stuff for ceviche.” She began unpacking thin bundles of green, frondy things and clear plastic bags of fish. “I can make my dad’s recipe. It’s really easy. Do you have any white wine?” Emily’s family had lived in South America—Chile or someplace—for a few years, her mom on a Fulbright, and picked up all sorts of interesting recipes, which Emily would occasionally deploy. The whole lot of them spoke Spanish as a result, even Emily’s sister, Clara, who was crazy and lived in a halfway house in Durham. None of the group had ever met her. Emily hardly ever spoke of the girl and they constantly forgot that she had a sister. From time to time, she’d mention Clara in passing and they’d think, Who?
“All right,” she said now, washing her hands. “You can squeeze the limes. I’ll cut up the fish.” A moment later, she’d found a cutting board Dave hadn’t even known he owned and the blue bowl his mother had given him when he’d moved in. She pulled out another bag, filled with small, pastel creatures. “Octopus,” she said. “In Peru, they use black clams.” She looked at him. “The limes are right there.”
“Right,” he said. There seemed to be way too many limes. At least a dozen. “Tell me again what you want me to do with them?”
“Forget it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll do it.”
“Okay,” he said, and sat back down on the couch, watching as she poured salt on the fish, set it to soak in water, then sliced and squeezed the beautiful green limes. “You know how this works, right?” she said, briskly slicing the white slabs of fish into squares and piling them in the blue bowl. “The lime cooks the fish.”
“Wait,” Dave asked, “you don’t actually cook it at all? Don’t you have to boil it or something first?”
“No, Dave.” Emily laughed. “I just said. The marinade cooks the fish. It’s a chemical reaction. It, you know, alters the molecular structure of the fish.”
“Is that safe to do at home?” he pressed. “I don’t want to poison everyone with day-old raw fish.”
“It won’t be raw,” Emily told him, grabbing a large pot for the ribs, which would be brined overnight, then marinated. “Didn’t you work in a restaurant?”
She was, Dave thought, amazingly efficient. It would have taken him hours to put all that together, and he would have cut corners in a disastrous way, deciding not to peel the shrimp or something. Who else would come over and help him like this? Not Sadie, not since she’d dumped Tal for Agent Mulder—as Dave liked to think of him—and effectively disappeared. “So he has, like, a gun?” Dave had asked Sadie too many times to mention. But then, he had to ask dumb questions like that, because he couldn’t ask the real question, which was, “Um, Sadie, you’re, like, seeing someone who works in law enforcement?” Dave had only met the guy a few times, though they’d been dating—oh my God, he thought, as he calculated the months—a year now. No. More. Which, in a way, made things easier for Dave, as he didn’t have to worry about liking the guy, or even becoming friends with him, and then feeling weird about Tal, who asked about Sadie in his emails, always, and Dave always said the same thing. “She’s okay.” Not, “She’s still dating that Fed she dumped you for.”
“He works weird hours,” Sadie explained, when her friends complained that she never brought him around. “And he’s always away.” But they suspected otherwise. Or, at least, Dave did. He was an FBI agent, which was just insane. He wore, like, suits. He would not mix. “He did philosophy at Brown,” Sadie told them. Yeah, like a million years ago. The guy had to be at least thirty-five, probably more like forty. “He’s not some sort of freak.” In truth, Dave’s few encounters with him had been relatively pleasant. He had a sort of craggy, Peter Coyote thing going on, and he listened intently—even intensely—when Dave explained the minutiae of copying out scores, which he was still doing, though less frequently, and said, “That sounds so satisfying. I love the way music looks on the page,” which was exactly—too exactly—how Dave felt. And yet, he was an FBI agent. He’d been investigating their friends. Okay, not their friends, but people like them. People they all sort of hated, but still. Though he wasn’t anymore. He’d had himself taken off Rob Green-Gold when he started seeing Sadie. Which, Sadie said, was why he was out of town all the time. Apparently, all the anarchist activity—his specialty—was elsewhere, in Seattle, and Albuquerque, and Florida.
“Is Sadie bringing Agent Mulder?” he asked Emily. “She said she might.”
“I’m not sure,” said Emily, dropping the rib bones into Dave’s big pot. “I think she’s afraid that Lil will bring Caitlin and Rob, and it would be weird for him.”
“Oh, right,” said Dave, with a smirk. “Why doesn’t she just ask Lil not to?”
“I don’t know,” said Emily. She smiled faintly. “I think maybe she thinks”—she smiled broadly at this construction—“Lil is still mad about Tal. She doesn’t want to talk to her about Michael. And stuff.”
“Hmmm.” Dave shrugged. If he thought about it, he was possibly still mad at Sadie for dumping Tal. He tried not to think about the fact that he’d been nearly as annoyed when Tal and Sadie had started dating as when they broke up. At least that had made sense. This new guy—okay, not so new—made no sense at all. And Tal had pretty much stayed out of town since. Dave pushed all this from his mind and turned to Emily. “What’s up with your play?” he asked. It had been a year or so since a team of producers, serious producers, had picked up the play for a small Broadway house (Broadway proper, not off-Broadway, as she’d initially been told). Every once in a while, she’d mention that she’d been in a showcase for backers or some such thing, but otherwise the production didn’t seem to be moving forward at all, which sucked, really, since her career, if it could be called that, didn’t seem to be moving forward at all either.
She’d been in New York for six years now and worked steadily—doing the terrible stuff, like dinner theater in Connecticut, and the weird, experimental stuff, like Brechtian productions at La Mama—but still couldn’t make enough money off acting to leave her day job. And despite Lil’s and Sadie’s urging, she refused to ask Tal for help. And he, maddeningly, refused to offer. (“Maybe he just doesn’t think she’s good enough,” Lil had recently suggested. “Maybe he just doesn’t think,” Sadie corrected.) On her lunch break, she ran to auditions. Evenings and weekends, she rehearsed or took dance and voice lessons or toiled at the gym. When she landed a part in some long run or tour, her company allowed her an unpaid leave and in the event of such an occurrence, she saved nearly every penny she earned. That is, what she had left after paying her rent and utilities and student loans. Unlike the others’, her parents hadn’t been able to pay for even a fraction of her tuition. Every penny they earned went to Clara, who was always in and out of some expensive mental hospital, or needing money for bail or lawyers or rent or psychiatrist’s fees or who knows what. Rent, probably. And food.