Chris Adrian: The Great Night

A little farther north, Will was trying to find a way in. He had come up the steps from Waller Street, expecting to find another staircase, but there was only the sidewalk that encircled the park and then some not very passable-looking brush separating him from a path that wound up the side of the hill. He thought he saw someone moving on the other side of the brush and took that for an indication that there was an entrance nearby. He was frustrated and late and anxious about entering the park so late in the day, because the chances of getting afflicted with an uninvited grope rose exponentially if you went in after sunset. He lived in the Castro in a sea of homosexuals, and loved his neighborhood and his neighbors, and judged no one. If anything, he felt a kinship with those lonely souls drifting through the muffling darkness, rubbing up against one another, accidentally burning one another with the tips of cigarettes. It wasn’t so long ago that he had been engaged in parallel pursuits. He had rooted in a different trough, but he knew what it was like to be lonely and to commit intimate acts that only made you feel lonelier still. The horror of it, and what made him a sorrier sort than even the most hideous troll in the park, was the fact that he had done such things while in the company of the most wonderful woman on earth. He had burrowed all through that relationship, making slimy tunnels, and at last it collapsed when his deceit and his unwarranted unhappiness were revealed.

Will sighed, and realized he had been standing on the sidewalk not moving at all, distracted by unprofitable thoughts, and it was getting very dark. He looked at his watch and became anxious again at how late he was. Jordan Sasscock was friends with both Will and Carolina, the only mutual friend he hadn’t lost when she left him, and one of the only people in his whole circle of friends who sort of sympathized with him, both disgusted and understanding in a way that made Will think that at least one person in the world had forgiven him for what he had done to her. It was entirely possible — Jordan had hinted at it — that Carolina would be there tonight. And Jordan had hinted further that she knew Will might be there too. It was the closest thing Will had had to good news in a year.

He put his head down and pushed through the bushes, slipping and trying to catch his balance on a handful of leaves. With a little more scrabbling he was up the rise and on the path. He heard a whisper, very distinct, as he was wiping his hands off on his pants, that said something like “Poodle?”

“No … get away!” Will shouted, assuming it was someone asking him if he wanted to poodle , and he was ashamed even to know what that might mean. He hurried along the path, walking up the side of the hill toward a place where he was almost totally certain there was a road that cut straight across the park and led directly to Jordan’s block.

On the other side, and farther up the hill, Molly, having wandered a little around Ashbury Heights in the fog, came at last to the high western entrance to the park. Had she known that she was going in the wrong direction and that she had already passed within a few blocks of Jordan’s house, she might have given up entirely on going to the party. She already felt painfully self-conscious — she felt that way whenever she left her house, and imagined everywhere she went that people whispered about her, saying, “There goes that poor girl” and “The poor thing!”—and lately she had learned to avoid all sorts of lesser disasters and heartbreaks and misfortunes by recognizing them from far away; getting lost on the way to a party you didn’t want to attend, on the way to a date you were neither interested in nor ready for — that was a sign from somebody that you really should turn around and go home.

She sat down on the curb and put her hands over her face — it felt like she’d spent most of the last eighteen months in this pose but lately she did it really more because it helped her gather her thoughts than because it was a good position in which to cry — and considered things for a moment. She could feel her couch pulling at her from way back at Sixteenth and Judah, but she knew she’d come too far, in both her own and other people’s estimation, to go back now. If she didn’t show up, people would think she still couldn’t move on from Ryan’s death. The truth was, she couldn’t, but she didn’t want that to be obvious to the gossipy old ladies who seemed to live in the hearts of all her friends. “Everything is not ruined,” she said, repeating a mantra that had started off as a joke, pulled from a ridiculous guide to getting over the suicide of your boyfriend. The guide had been sent to her by a distant aunt, part of the small subsection of her extended family not crazy for Jesus, and though it was less ridiculous than any of the countless Christian manuals of survivorship that flocked her way, Molly had still chortled over its obvious and unconvincing lessons in the first few months: Everything is not ruined; it wasn’t your fault; you will be loved again someday by a nonsuicidal person. But as she degraded over the months it became her secular Bible and her best friend, and once she even dreamed sexually about the author, a great big lesbian with tight gray poodle hair, swathed in purple from head to toe in her gigantic back-cover author photo.

Her date tonight was with Jordan Sasscock himself. The honor of this was lost on her, as she barely knew him. He had come into her shop to visit one of her coworkers, and then had returned again and again, buying increasingly pricey arrangements of flowers and then increasingly pricey design pieces, a process that culminated in the purchase of an exorbitantly expensive Scandinavian foam couch cunningly crafted to look just like a boulder. “I’ve been looking for one of these for years!” he said, lounging in it. He looked very appealing with his hands behind his head; the swell of his biceps pleasingly echoed in the contours of the fake rock.

Everyone else in the shop — boys and girls alike — swooned over him, but Molly hardly noticed him at first, and for the longest time assumed he just really liked flowers and good design, until he finally asked her out. That was a strange moment. Time seemed to stop and everything seemed to tremble, not just the flowers but the colors in them, the air itself, and the porcelain bells above the door, which seemed just on the verge of ringing, everything so very gently disturbed. “I’m having a little get-together this Thursday and I want you to be my guest of honor,” he had said. When she only stared, marveling at the odd ripple that stole over his face and body, he added, “Or you could just show up at some point. You don’t have to be guest of honor, if that’s too much responsibility. Anyway, think about it.” He told her his address, which she misremembered immediately.

“Sure,” she said, without thinking about it at all. “See you there.” She had packaged up his latest purchase, a transparent piece of china with a hand-painted rim of little blue flowers, and now she handed it to him, not smiling. Sensing perhaps that to do so would push his luck, he didn’t say anything else but just smiled and nodded. When he left, her boss let out a shriek of delight. “You’ve got a date with Jordan Sasscock!” she shouted, grabbing Molly’s shoulders and jumping up and down like a fool.

“It’s not a date,” Molly said. “I’m just going to his party.” It would be another hour before she fully regretted the decision to say yes, and then it would seem like the stupidest thing she’d ever done. She spent the next few days telling herself that she wasn’t ready for this, and that she was, and that she wasn’t. Now, sitting on the curb with her face in her hands, she felt sure that she wasn’t, and only because she was still in love with Ryan — or still in something with him. The feeling that dominated her day and night was not the same lovely invigorating obsession she had felt every day before his death, when he seemed like the very beginning and end of her perception, his mind and body and spirit each an occasion of persistent joy. Ever since she had come home to find him hanging by his neck from a tree in their garden, only the character of the feeling had changed, not the strength of it. She had married him the instant she met him, and now he still attracted and owned all her parts.