“Whoa,” she says with a theatrical shudder. Now I seem slightly scary. That’s not a bad thing, necessarily, especially when you factor in the acronymic compliment, but I should balance it with some self-deprecation.
“So I built a program to gather and keep track of all that stuff,” I say. “And then I sold it to a bigger company, and now I bore unsuspecting women at parties who have the misfortune to ask me what I do.”
I’m watching her responses closely throughout. Visibly paying attention is crucial, especially when you’re talking about yourself and thus at risk of appearing not to pay attention. When I was maybe thirteen I heard my mother on the phone with her friend Stacey, talking about the latest of her post-divorce near-boyfriends, each of whom had some insurmountable flaw (no job, drank too much, participated in Civil War reenactments). My mom, defending this guy, said, “I know, I know, but… he pays attention to me.” I remember hearing Stacey say, “That can go a long way” (although obviously that part is an invention of memory; they were on the phone), and my mother saying, “Exactly.”
But I’d like to check on Maya in case there’s an opening, and I can’t just look over Lauren’s shoulder, or I’ll be one of those guys who look over your shoulder while you’re talking. I’m getting worried, because this conversation is going pretty well, and if it lasts much longer Maya will be off-limits. (I’m assuming their friendship contains a tacit noncompete clause.) “I’m going to get a drink,” I say. “Do you need anything?” She’s hardly touched her vodka and cranberry, so I’m free to head to the other end of the kitchen and glance at the people milling in the hall. The population has increased, but not to the Malthusian degree it would take to make the party memorable. Gretchen is leaning against the sink talking to two women with their arms around each other’s waists. They look like some complicated riff on butch/femme stereotypes: one wears a slip dress and too much makeup, the other a baseball cap and low-slung jeans, but the former is large and hirsute while her partner is waifish and delicate and kind of stunning. It’s hard to tell if the arrangement is deliberate irony or just an unusual intersection of body type and sexual self-identification. Of the new arrivals, the only one I recognize is a coworker of Cynthia’s who once started a conversation with me about hip-hop. (He liked certain kinds of hip-hop but not other kinds.) I’m standing at the little bottle-crammed table pouring Coke into whiskey when Maya is suddenly next to me.
“Could you fix me a gin and tonic?” she asks. The proximity of her body is overpowering.
“Sure,” I say. There must be more to say than that, although I can’t think of what it could be.
Maya says, “Thanks,” rotates 180 degrees, and goes back to talking to Justin. When I hand her the drink a minute later she takes it without even interrupting her conversation to say thank you — a kind of antiflirting and hence a kind of flirting, an effortless triangulation, arousing hope and jealousy in us both. Well played, Maya.
And I’m still left with no one to talk to except Lauren, and every minute I spend talking to Lauren takes me further out of the game vis-à-vis Maya. I scan the room as if I’m looking for someone specific who was here a minute ago. Lauren is examining the Magnetic Poetry set on the fridge, the special Lesbian Pride edition, half words like dyke and cunt and partner and dog and the other half prepositions. Gretchen is smashing a bag of ice against the counter to break it up. Maya is laughing at Justin, who appears to be doing an impression of Lenny from Of Mice and Men. Cynthia’s voice comes from down the hall, and something characteristically trusty about its timbre makes me regret getting her the camera. It is at this moment, as I stand alone in my friend’s kitchen, my right hand fingering a little Ziploc bag in my pocket, that I conceive my ill-fated plan.
Inhale, exhale, commit.
I return to Lauren and pick up where we left off. See, I just went to get a drink. I break out some intermediate-level tactics: Asking a Question That Refers to Something I Learned About Her Earlier; Suggesting We Continue the Conversation Sitting Down. We move to the grubby couch in the living room, which is not as comfortable as it looks because the cushions are fifteen years old and have had the buoyancy squashed out of them. The party has finally overspilled the kitchen, and guests stand in clusters around the swept-out room. Lauren and I sit at forty-five-degree angles and turn our heads the rest of the way to face each other. I don’t do anything sexually assertive like holding eye contact or casually touching her arm. I watch closely for signs that her interest is waning. I tell her the How I Was Unfairly Accused of Making Obscene Phone Calls story, probably my number one anecdote: funny, raunchy but not dirty, unbraggadocious. I wait for her post-anecdotal No way! Really?s to dry up, and then I pull the trigger.
“Hey, I don’t know if this is something you’re up for,” I say, “but I’ve got some Ecstasy with me.” That’s bold enough, and I pause to let it register, but it’s only step one. “And I was wondering if you guys”—I incline my head toward the kitchen to indicate Maya and Justin—“would be up for doing some.”
“Oh my God, I don’t know,” she says. “I mean, I haven’t done it in a really long time.”
“All the more reason,” I say. Do I sound like I’m pressuring her? Pull back. “Listen, if this isn’t a good night for it, that’s cool. But if you guys feel like it, we can hang out and do it here, or we can go back to someone’s house, or whatever.” Like a salesman I stop talking and let her dismiss her remaining objections herself.
“I think I want to do it,” she says, and how could she not? Everyone loves Ecstasy. “But I have to talk to Maya.”
“I’ve totally got enough for those guys,” I say. It would be great if there were a way to exclude Justin from the invitation, but I can’t see one that doesn’t push the sleaze factor, already dangerously high, into the red. “Go talk them into it.”
I stay on the couch and watch through the kitchen doorway as she engages Maya and Justin in a little huddle. I’m hoping to see a flash of excitement on Maya’s face; what I see instead is Lauren explaining something and Maya touching her arm and nodding. “It’s fine,” Maya says twice. Justin looks over at me with a vaguely cynical expression.
And now Lauren is heading back toward me with a nervous grin, alone, and five minutes later the two of us are in a taxi, hurtling up to the Richmond, where she apparently lives, and I’m leaving the party with a girl but it’s the wrong girl, and I’m unsure whether I should be feeling remorse or triumph.
There’s a right way to do these things. At the corner store I purchase two large packs of sugar-free gum and two large bottles of Gatorade. We sit at her kitchen table, clink glasses of water, down these little aspirinlike tablets. Lauren lives alone, so there’s a cat, which is going to set off my allergies in about forty-five minutes. On the walls are paintings by talentless friends; black-and-white photos, presumably by Lauren herself; Kodachrome snapshots of her parents in their youth. I conceive the idea of an exhibition of parental photos from the walls of girls’ apartments, a show that would be situated somewhere between found art and ethnography. Maya does not appear in any of the pictures. I am trying hard not to get hung up on Maya and how she’s occurring without me right now. If the world would just freeze whenever I’m not around, I’d be less worried about missing something important.