“So,” she said, standing up and walking toward the kitchen sink. “I’m getting married.” Dave felt his jaw drop. He willed it shut.
“You are?” he asked stupidly. “But how?” Meredith tossed her head back and laughed.
“Well, it’s not as complicated as you think. You hire an officiant, send out some invitations, buy a dress.” The blood rushed to Dave’s face.
“That’s not what I meant,” he heard himself say, nearly shouting. “You know that’s not what I meant. Don’t fucking make fun of me.” Now he was shouting. He sounded, he knew, like a cornered child, whiny and on the brink of tears. And the worst of it was, he didn’t care. Not a bit. He really, truly didn’t care at all. He felt, if anything, relieved. And yet: the little men inside his head were beating their mallets even harder and faster, and now their compatriots inside his ears were sending tidal waves of hot blood from one section of their home into another. “What I meant was, how are you getting married when I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone else. Who’s this asshole that’s marrying you, when you’ve been seeing me at the same time you were seeing him.”
“Dave, come on,” said Meredith, shaking her head. “We haven’t seen each other in months. Or did you not notice?” She laughed. Dave was having trouble following her words. “I mean,” she went on. There was more! “Dave, we just went to parties and had fun. You were never serious about me. We never really talked.”
Dave glared at her, folding his arms across his chest. The hammer, so distant before, now beat inside his skull. “You never wanted to talk,” he said. “All you wanted to do was go out. And we were serious. We were…” He searched for a word, which increased the force with which the small men beat their mallets. Not “lovers,” yech. “We were dating. We were moving toward something.” Meredith laughed again. Dave shifted miserably on the couch.
“No, we were moving away from something. Dave, do you think I’m an idiot? You see, like, a different girl every night. And besides, you’re not the sort of guy I’d ever marry.” Now the blood was swishing in his ears, thick and hot. A near-physical urge to grab Meredith and shake her, forcing her to speak to him sensibly, overtook him. He folded his arms more tightly around his chest.
“What,” he said, his voice sounding strange and trembly, “what do you mean by that?” She shrugged. Her nonchalance was awful.
“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot. I suppose—”
“Forget it,” he said, “fucking forget it. I know the answer. I’m not some loser like that Tim asshole, some guy you can push around, some corporate drone.” She shook her head, sadly, pityingly, Dave realized with a sick feeling.
“Do you mean Phil? You know, Dave, see, this is it. This is the problem. You don’t know anything about Phil. Do you know what he did before he went to Fordham? He was in a band, just like you. A kind of big band, in Seattle, Red Scare.” Dave bit the inside of his lip to keep from screaming. Red Scare was big. They’d come to Oberlin, played at the Disco, in ’91, opened for the Pixies. He’d worked that night. The lead singer, he remembered, had OD’d, many years ago. “You just have these ideas about people, who they are, what they’re like, but none of it is real, none of it is based on the actual people or the things they do or say.” She was angry, too, now, and he was glad of it. “You’re delusional. You just decide things are true—you and I are ‘going out’ even though we haven’t seen each other in months? Come on. And you just seem incapable of worrying about anyone’s happiness other than your own.”
This was unbelievable. Truly unbelievable. This boring woman was in his house telling him what was wrong with him. A woman who owned Bananarama albums and went through Oberlin without taking a single English class, a woman who was so dull and status quo that he couldn’t even be bothered to speak to her in college. But then, as suddenly as it had arrived, his anger left.
Why, if he was so terrible, had she spent so much time with him? And why was she wasting her breath yelling at him, if she didn’t care about him at all? Resting his head on the back of the futon—he was so tired, so tired, and hot—he asked her these questions. She smiled at him. Pityingly. Again.
“I do care about you. I didn’t plan on saying any of this. I just wanted to let you know that I’m, you know, engaged. So there was no ambiguity. I figured we’d stay friends. Because that’s really all we are, all we’ve been.” She held out her left hand and he saw, for the first time, that it held a rather large diamond in a plain silvery setting. Platinum, he supposed. That seemed to be the material for such rings.
“I don’t understand,” he said miserably, knowing he should stop, “what you mean when you say I’m not the sort of guy you’d marry.” Before she could answer, Dave let out a strange little croak and—he stretched out this part of the story when he told Sadie about it a few days later—slumped sideways on the couch, odd-colored lights flashing on the insides of his eyelids, then blackness and that awful sensation of falling, falling, into a bottomless cavern, but this time he couldn’t rouse himself. He’d passed out, dead away.
Later, when Meredith talked to Sadie about it—they became great friends after the party—she said that Dave’s arm felt hot on her shoulder, terribly hot, but she didn’t think anything of it. His face, too, was red, bright red, but she figured the color came from anger, not—as the paramedics informed her—from severe heat prostration (he’d been in the hot sun all day, drinking, his fair, fragile skin unprotected). She thought, at first, that he was joking around, pretending to be stricken with grief over her announcement or slain by her harsh assessment of him. “Dave, I’ve gotta go,” she told him, and washed her wineglass, before realizing that he hadn’t moved, not an inch. When she tried to rouse him, she found his skin burning—“I’ve never felt anything like it,” she told Sadie at Robin des Bois the following weekend, “it was like touching an electric stove”—and strangely dry, like the leather seat of a car. Even more alarming, he wouldn’t wake. She called 911, asked for an ambulance, wondered where the nearest hospital was (Long Island College Hospital on Atlantic?), then ran upstairs and got Katherine and Matt, to see if they might drive Dave (and her) to the hospital. By the time they’d figured out which was the nearest (it was Long Island College), the ambulance had arrived, its sirens audible five minutes before it pulled up in front of the brownstone, where Curtis’s Karmann Ghia had been parked just an hour before. Burbling into walkie-talkies, the paramedics lifted Dave onto a stretcher, hooked a scary web of tubes and masks and things onto him, hoisted Meredith into the vehicle, and zoomed off. Dave came to as they lifted him out of the ambulance, rolling his head from side to side and moaning. They’d strapped his arms down to the stretcher with small cloth ties, which Meredith thought barbaric, but apparently people often awoke hysterical and pulled their IVs out, spurting the paramedics with blood, and undoing all the good the drips had done. “I’m sorry,” he told Meredith in the solemn voice of the terminally ill (as portrayed on film, at least). “If I hadn’t been so scared, I would have laughed,” she told Sadie. “He might have been dying, for all I knew.”