“Yes,” he said.
“It’s … hi, it’s Lauren? From the deli?” She realized after she introduced herself that she had never told him her name.
“Hi, Lauren.” He sounded not one bit surprised. He sounded like he’d been waiting for her cal .
“So,” she said. “So, I decided to give you a cal .”
“So you did.” He was silent and Lauren waited. She decided not to say one more word and just when she was about to give in, he asked her to dinner.
“Sure,” she said. “That would be fun.”
“It’s nice,” Mark said on their third date, “that you eat.” Lauren had just ordered steak. His comment made Lauren sure that he had only dated anorexic girls in the past, thin, waify people who only ordered salad. The whole idea made her tired.
They went back to his apartment that night. It was clean. No, not clean. It was OCD. There was almost nothing on the shelves. No magazines lying around the coffee table. No pictures or knickknacks. Nothing. It looked like an apartment after she’d staged it to be sold, wiped clean of al traces that a human lived there.
“It’s nice,” she said.
“I know,” Mark said.
His bed was low to the ground, with a plain, dark blue cover. He stood in the bedroom and started taking off his shirt, unself-consciously, as though they had been together for years. He hung it up in his closet and then took off his pants. Lauren stood there, trying not to watch but also trying not to have it be obvious that she wasn’t watching.
“Do you need a shirt to sleep in, or are you okay in your underwear?”
“A shirt would be nice,” Lauren said. Who the hel was this guy? He went over to his drawer and took out a perfectly folded T-shirt that said
“Colgate” on it.
“Did you go to Colgate?” she asked.
“No, I went to Princeton.”
“Right.”
Lauren went into the bathroom to change, and for the first time that night got very nervous. She didn’t know this guy at al . She had never met any of his friends, had no idea if he was tel ing the truth about where he worked, or even what his name was. Lauren had just watched American Psycho on TV the other night, which was a mistake. She was short of breath. Had she even agreed to stay over? Al he’d said was “Do you want to come back to my place?” This was pretty presumptuous of him, wasn’t it?
She took her phone out of her purse and sent Isabel a a text message that she was at Mark’s apartment, and then she sent the address. At least someone would know where she was. Although, if she was dead, it wouldn’t help much, would it?
When she got out of the bathroom, Mark was sitting up in bed reading a thick book. “You are crazy,” Lauren told herself. “You are nuts. You have just been single for too long.” Lauren imagined that with each year she lived alone, she would get crazier and crazier. She would be stuck in her weird way of living and would never be able to meld together with someone.
Mark smiled at her when she came out of the bathroom, and waited for her to climb into bed before he turned off the light. She felt his lips on her neck, and then he positioned himself over her while he softly sucked on her clavicle. No, she decided. He is not a kil er.
Lauren waited for Mark to get less weird, but it didn’t happen. He changed his pil owcases every other night and left porn magazines in plain view in his bathroom. He had certain ties that he wore only to meetings, and he wouldn’t let Lauren sit on his bed when she was wearing clothes she had worn outside. But hands down, the weirdest thing about Mark was this: His favorite food was macaroni and cheese.
He didn’t like the fancy kind of macaroni and cheese that was retro-trendy and served in pricey restaurants, with Gruyère and lobster. He didn’t even like the homemade kind that was gooey and comforting. No, Mark favored the fluorescent noodles that were created from powder, milk, and butter—the kind that came in a box for $1.79.
At least once a week, Mark made a box of macaroni and sat down in front of the TV to shovel it into his mouth. He didn’t share. He ate straight from the pot. He ate the whole thing.
If he were a different person, maybe this wouldn’t have been so shocking. But he wasn’t. He was Mark. He wore suits that Lauren was pretty sure cost more than the rent for her apartment. He sent back bottles of wine at restaurants after he’d tasted them and declared them “off.” She’d never met his family, but she was sure that they would be horrified to learn what Mark did with his macaroni. Could she date someone who attacked pasta like this? She watched him closely each time he did it, sure that she was witnessing something deeply personal and tel ing. It was like watching him masturbate, but Lauren couldn’t turn away. It was fascinating, disgusting, and delightful al at once.
“Do you like him?” her friend Mary asked after their seventh date. Lauren shrugged. She didn’t feel like talking about whether or not she liked a boy with her friends. It made her feel like a child they were al entertaining.
When they were younger, Lauren and her friends talked about boys constantly. They told each other every detail and dissected each sentence.
But as the years went by and they moved into separate apartments, it changed. These weren’t just random boys they were going to date and then break up with. These were boys they might end up marrying. And so, they stopped sharing so many details without even realizing it. Wel , most of them did. Their friend Annie was slow to catch on, got drunk on red wine, and told al of them that her boyfriend Mitchel had a tiny penis. At their wedding, it was al Lauren could think about.
Lauren wanted to tel Mary about the macaroni and cheese, and how when Mark had met her one-year-old niece, Lily, he had taken her hand without smiling and said, “Hel o. Hel o, Lily.” She wanted to ask Mary if it was bizarre to like a guy who’d brought you a fish. She wanted Mary to help her decide if Mark was a sociopath or just a little strange.
Mary looked at her expectantly, rubbing her stomach and groaning at fake contractions. Her little boy, Henry, bopped around the room, and Lauren knew she couldn’t do it. It was too odd to sit there and tel Mary these things, too strange to talk about Mark bringing her a fish, while Mary toddled after her toddler. So Lauren just said, “Yeah, I do. I do like him.” It was the truth, she thought. Just not al of it.
The day that Rudy died, Lauren went to feed her before school and found her bel y-up and completely white. She let out a little scream and her parents came running. Her dad looked shocked, and her mom looked as though she had opened a Tupperware ful of mold.
“We’l have to flush him,” her dad said.
“Rudy’s a she,” Lauren said.
“Of course she is.” Her dad put a hand on her shoulder.
Her mom had left them to it, let them carry the bowl to the upstairs bathroom and dump Rudy in the toilet. Her dad had started to carry the bowl to the downstairs bathroom, but her mom yel ed at him, “That’s the guest bathroom.” She said it like he was crazy, like everyone knew you weren’t supposed to flush fish in guest bathrooms. She shook her head and said, “Take him upstairs.”
“Do you want to do it?” her dad asked, and Lauren shook her head. He looked relieved and pressed the flusher. They stood next to each other and watched little Rudy go round and round.
Lauren didn’t cry during the flushing, and she was embarrassed when her dad hugged her good-bye. But that day in school, during a spel ing test, tears began to fal out of her eyes. She was mortified. You didn’t cry in sixth grade. Lauren especial y didn’t cry in sixth grade. She was tough. But as the teacher read the words “Submarine, crystal ized, immigrant,” Lauren’s tears dropped onto the page and made a mess of her test. She felt awful that Rudy had died. She couldn’t even remember if she had checked on her the night before or not. What if Rudy had been dying al night?