“You should,” he’d said, but she’d just shrugged and sipped her drink.
“Dave,” Lil called again. I’m coming, he thought, somehow unable to gather the energy to say it aloud. It seemed to be taking him forever to walk across the garden. There were all these people in the way, more and more of them, continually stepping directly into his path. “Hey,” he said to the girls when he finally reached them. Lil pulled on his pant leg, indicating that he should sit down. “Is Emily still in there with the rock star?” she asked, raising her arched black brows.
“Yeah,” he said. “Why?” The girls laughed.
“They’ve been in there for hours,” Sadie informed him solemnly. “For the whole party, really.”
“You’re kidding,” Dave said.
“Nope,” Lil insisted, raising her eyebrows in a knowing way that set Dave’s teeth on edge.
“That’s weird. What are they talking about?” he asked peevishly.
“Musical theater,” suggested Sadie. “Curtis is really into Sondheim, right?”
“No,” cried Lil. “Andrew Lloyd Webber!”
“Oh, right,” said Sadie. “He always wears that Phantom T-shirt.” Dave tried to laugh along with them, but his stomach had begun to turn in on itself and his head felt like it might explode. He was hungry and tired and annoyed. How could Emily have spent the whole party talking to Curtis? Making conversation with Curtis was like slowly pulling out the hairs on one’s head.
“Seriously,” he said, pouring a slug of champagne into a dirty cup. “They have nothing in common. It’s weird.”
Sadie tilted her head to one side. “I don’t know. He looks kind of like Ken Posa…” This was Emily’s college love.
“Yeah,” said Lil. “He doesn’t actually look like Ken, but he sort of has the same look, you know? That shy schoolboy look.”
“Yes, yes, you’re right!” cried Meredith, nodding vigorously. “With the hair that kind of sticks up like a baby chicken. And the big eyes. Like it’s painful for him to speak.” Across the patio, as if they knew they were the subject of discussion, Emily and Curtis emerged from the back door, her bright head followed by his dull one. They walked to the barbecue, where Curtis obtained hot dogs for them, daintily handing Emily a paper plate and a fresh beer, then sat down at Dave’s wrought-iron table (it, too, had come with the apartment) and resumed their conversation.
“He’s really young, right?” asked Lil in a dramatic stage whisper, though there was no way that Curtis might hear her, being a good twenty feet away, with a wall of bodies between them. Dave nodded. “Class of ’98.” The girls emitted cries of shock and, Dave thought, delight. They stared at him, rapt, waiting for more information.
“He’s a good guy,” he said. “His parents are both psychiatrists. They’re kind of freakishly nice. They, like, come to our shows.”
“Oh, no,” moaned Lil. “Shrinks’ kids are always fucked up.”
“Um, Emily’s father is a therapist,” Sadie reminded her. She cocked her head at Dave. “We know you don’t love him.”
“He’s cool,” said Dave. “He’s great.” Then he remembered something. “You know, he’s married.”
“Wait,” said Sadie. “He’s married. He’s, like, twelve. How is he married?”
“I know!” agreed Meredith.
“He got married in college—” Dave began.
“In college—” cried Beth.
“—sophomore year, so that he could live off campus—”
“Ohhhhh.” This was not so strange. Oberlin’s housing regulations were draconian: no student could live off campus—in a house, rather than a college-owned dorm or co-op—until junior year, and even then, one had to luck into a high number in the housing lottery. That is, unless one happened to be married, which no one was, of course. But every year a few students—those with older, cooler friends or those whose nicotine habit had grown too heavy to tolerate what the brochures called “a nonsmoking environment”—lined up potential spouses and begged rides to Cleveland’s city hall in order to get around this ridiculous rule. Junior or senior year, they’d have the marriage annulled. Or so they said, at the outset. Their friend Josh Weissman, who was gay, was still officially married to a quiet girl named Jill Bialystock. He lived in San Francisco, she in Ithaca. Presumably, when Jill wanted to marry someone else (or Josh, if gay marriage became legal), they’d fill out all the requisite paperwork.
“So he’s not really married,” said Lil, with a little sigh of relief. They were all so worried about Emily—poor, single Emily—like a tribe of mother hens. Why, Dave thought, was no one worried about him?
“Not really,” Dave admitted. “But sort of. He and his wife—it’s really weird to say that—ended up getting involved.” The girls, in silence, exchanged a dark glance. “Their senior year, I think. They’d been living together for a while—in Blue House, remember?” They smiled, for they did—a big, rambling house on North Professor. Their friend Erin had lived there senior year, in an attic room with a slanted ceiling. “And they got really close. They moved to New York together.”
“Weird,” said Meredith.
“But kind of charming,” said Sadie, “right? It’s like a romantic comedy.”
“Green Card,” said Beth. “Meets Reality Bites.”
“Exactly,” said Dave, who suddenly realized that he was still standing, and sat, too hard, down on the grass beside her.
“But they broke up,” suggested Lil, anxious to get to the point.
“Yeah,” said Dave. This was why, it turned out, Curtis had moved into the practice space. His wife, Amy—who had, in Dave’s first weeks with the band, shown up occasionally at rehearsals bearing bags of vegetable chips and soy jerky—now lived in Park Slope, Dave explained, in some sort of collective, and worked at the food co-op. In November, she’d be going to Seattle with a rainforest group, to protest the WTO’s regulation on something to do with an endangered species of turtle. “She says Curtis lives irresponsibly.”
“She must know Caitlin and Rob,” Lil said excitedly. “They’re going, too.”
Dave shrugged. “She seems like kind of a freak,” he said. “So maybe she and Caitlin are friends.”
“Dave,” said Lil.
“A child bride!” cried Sadie. The girls nodded. They looked, he realized, vaguely impressed, which only served to further darken Dave’s mood.
“So, they’re getting divorced, right?” asked Lil.
“Yeah,” Dave told her. “They haven’t been together in a while. She has a boyfriend, some anarchist guy. That’s how all this started. She met this guy.” The girls looked at one another, skeptically. They were wondering, he knew, if they should go over and rescue Emily from the clutches of this Married Man. “It’s definitely over,” he told them confidently, though he wasn’t entirely sure this was true. “I mean, they were teenagers. It wasn’t a real marriage. It’s like if Beth and I had gotten married.” Immediately, he regretted this last part, though it was certainly true. All the girls looked down into their cups, stealing furtive, embarrassed glances at Beth, who had gone all red, and Meredith, who was nodding, oblivious to Dave’s gaffe.