“Three hours,” said Matt, shaking Dave’s hand. “Thanks, man. Great party. Everyone was really nice.” Lil, Tuck, Beth, and Will approached, the girls flitting around, gathering their sweaters and bags and who knows what. “Well, see you soon,” said Tuck, slipping an arm around Lil. “Yeah,” said Dave, thinking, Go, leave. I’m tired. He kissed the girls good-bye, shook their husbands’ hands, then sat down heavily in his favorite chair, an overstuffed piece of Victoriana he’d rescued from the street, and closed his eyes, before, through a boozy haze, he remembered Meredith. Where was she?
He’d barely seen her all summer because of their colliding schedules—he in Lincoln, recording; she working night shifts at the prosecutor’s office, traveling to the ends of Brooklyn to look at murder victims, corpses. And it had been some time, too long, since they’d slept together. He looked around the patio, inventorying the remaining guests: Marco and his sister, their bass player, some of Dave’s friends from St. Ann’s (fucking trust-fund drug addicts, all of them), a pair of pianists (one Eastman, the other Juilliard), three veterans of Madame Woo’s, and a number of people Dave didn’t recognize. The sky had gone dark by now, though the lights from the nearby houses—and perhaps the collective glow of the city—kept the patio bright.
At last he found Meredith, sitting with Sadie and Ed Slikowski on the railroad ties, the girls swinging their bare legs and holding to their lips pale cups, which glowed pearlescent in the moonlight. “We’re playing the name game,” Sadie informed him. “Meredith went to Riverdale.”
“She did,” Dave confirmed. But his presence, who knew why, put an end to the game. The four of them sat, in silence, watching the party go on, the guests talking, the tips of their cigarettes circling the air like fireflies. He’d lost his hot dog again. He would, he decided, take Meredith out to eat, once everyone left. Why, why would they not leave? And then, as if she’d read his mind, Sadie stood up. “I think it’s time for me to make my excuses,” she said, flashing Dave a lopsided grin.
“I’ll head out with you,” said Ed.
What about Agent Mulder? thought Dave. Agent Mulder, where are you? Did you really need to go off on your secret mission this weekend? “Thanks so much for coming,” he said, and they walked out, their laughter flowing back at him in waves. The rest of the guests followed. Dave saw them all to the door, Meredith trailing behind him, gathering her things: a thin, lacy sweater; a large black tote; a hardback book she’d put down when she came in, splayed on the coffee table, some sort of history thing.
Finally, Dave closed the door. The laughter of the guests grew progressively softer and softer as they made their way down Bergen Street. “Hey,” he said awkwardly. His throat didn’t seem to be functioning properly. And though he felt like he was shouting at her through a long tunnel, the word came out as almost a squeak. “Can I take you to dinner?”
“I guess,” she said, dropping her bag with a closemouthed smile. “We should talk, at least. This summer has just been crazy. That case, the drive-by, has taken over my life.”
“I know, I know,” Dave told her. “Let me just wash up and drink a glass of water.”
“Sure,” said Meredith, sitting down on the edge of the couch and flipping open her book. “Are you sure you’re not too tired?” she called as he slunk back down the hallway to the bathroom. He couldn’t summon the energy to answer, which clearly meant that he was too tired—but then wasn’t he always too tired? Clicking the door shut, he ran the tap and scooped cold water over his face, just as Emily had done earlier. In the mirror, his face appeared ominously gray, the whites of his eyes bloodshot, the skin around them scaly and bluish. His towel still carried Emily’s peppermint scent. He raked his damp hands through his hair, strode out to the living room, and sat down beside Meredith. “So,” he said, running his hand down her narrow arm, though any attraction he’d felt for her had vanished—and yet she was here, on his couch, just as he’d expected, so he felt compelled to go on, to carry out his plan. She was as pretty as Emily, as Sadie; prettier, really, than Beth, from an objective standpoint. “How are you?” he asked. She shrugged, lifting her arm to her dark head.
“I’m good. A little tired. I don’t mind working nights, but it takes its toll on your body, you know? It’s not natural.”
“Yeah,” he said, and thought about kissing her, if only so they wouldn’t have to talk anymore. She was tired? He was tired. Too tired to talk—and there, yes, he felt a brief stirring in his groin, but as an image, an exciting image, began to come into focus in the depths of his brain, Meredith’s pixieish features were supplanted by Emily’s stranger ones and he felt, for a moment, oh God, that he might cry. “I know,” he said quietly. “I’m tired, too.” And he put his arm around her shoulders, then reached up and stroked her hair, which felt much as it looked—nearly slick in its softness, like a wet road at night—and thought, Well, this is nice. It is. It is.
“Listen, Dave,” she was saying and twisting out of his grasp, “I need to tell you something.” The throbbing in his head had returned. Or maybe—yes, definitely—it had never left; he had simply stopped paying attention to it, momentarily. He had a feeling that he knew what was coming. Generally, when women said they needed to talk to him, they had just one subject in mind: Dave’s inadequacies, the ambiguous nature of their relationship. Nearly a year ago, the girl from Their Own Devices approached him on this topic, seated on this same brown canvas couch, her knees tucked into her chest. The earnest, plaintive look on her sunburned face had been too much for Dave and he spewed forth a stream of half-truths—which he believed to be whole truths at the time—which led to crying, followed by the slow sex of reconciliation, followed by no modification of Dave’s behaviors. A month later, she went to Yaddo to write poems, met that novelist—older, Indian, New Yorker editor—and now she was married, pregnant, ensconced in her brownstone.
In truth, he had suspected for a while that Meredith wanted to get married, purchase some sort of couple-appropriate piece of property, and do the things people did (not people he knew, just people), much as he had suspected similar things of Beth, and he’d been right, hadn’t he? But Meredith was an Upper East Sider, after all—like Sadie, he supposed, and yet not like Sadie at all—and occasionally returned from trips to her parents’ classic six on Seventy-second with words about how nice it was up there, how clean, how she totally understood why people move uptown once they have kids (Sadie, by contrast, liked to say, “Why not just move to Westchester?”). After college, and before Dave, she’d dated some superboring guy—Dockers, polo shirt, Topsiders, puffy face—from her class at Fordham Law. He now made an astronomical salary doing corporate stuff for a huge firm. They’d run into him on Smith Street once: twenty-eight going on forty. Prematurely bald, a dead expression in his pale blue eyes, jowls slopping over the collar of his shirt, cell phone clipped to his belt. As they parted he’d said, “Catch you later.” “What a loser,” Dave had moaned, too loudly. Meredith shrugged and said, “He’s nice.” That was the sort of person she was, he thought now. Boring. That was why they hadn’t been friends in college, wasn’t it? But boring, in a way, was good, he thought. He liked the little structures and demands she imposed on her life—she ate dinner, for example, at her little kitchen table every night, even when she was alone. That was good, he thought. That was healthy.