Chris Adrian - The Great Night

Ryan broke a set of china cups. They were beautiful — Molly had had her sensibilities refined in the weeks she had been working at the shop — translucently thin and so light it was hard to be sure, with your eyes closed, that you were actually holding one. She had one at her bedside with a candle in it, and she made a habit of watching the light burn down in it every night before she went to bed, which was something Salome had said helped her when she was feeling generally awful and had no faith anymore that the beauties in her life would ever measure up to the horrors. That was the only time she ever hinted at what she knew from Gus and Tyler about Molly’s flight from graduate school, and it was followed immediately by a tirade that was both about how Molly would never even know bone china from porcelain, and how Salome’s sister was still trying to make Salome look bad in their mother’s eyes, even though the woman had been dead for a year and it required a medium to communicate the slander. But Molly thought it was about the nicest thing someone who expressed affection through china could have said.

The display, a Christmas tree of tiny cups, came tumbling down, and Ryan turned this way and that, trying to catch them. Molly had noticed him when he came in, because she was supposed to notice everyone and greet them — it helped to keep them from stealing things — but she didn’t really remark him, or notice that he was remarkable, until she saw him in the midst of the collapsing display, catching a cup but then breaking it when he caught another. She learned in those first few seconds that she really looked at him that he had a lovely face, that he had big hairy forearms, that he was pretty nimble for someone who walked into displays of china, and that he was a quick thinker, since he managed to save three of the cups, with one balanced on his head and one in either hand.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay,” Molly said, though of course it wasn’t. Salome was in the back, inventorying her disappointments, but she came out at the crash, and failed so utterly to be gracious that Molly was embarrassed for her. Salome cried, which Molly might have found excusable if this had been a dinner-party accident and it had been her grandmother’s heirloom china that got destroyed, but it seemed like egregious behavior in a shopkeeper. She didn’t have to demand that he pay for what he had broken; he offered right away. But that didn’t stop her tears, and he kept buying things, accompanying her around the shop and listening with a sympathetic face when she turned the conversation to her sister’s personality disorder. Molly watched him as she swept little scattered china bits — he tried to help but Salome wouldn’t let him — looking down at the floor whenever he caught her eye. Salome rang him up herself, dry-eyed now, but Molly half expected her to start crying with joy at his truly grand total.

“What a nice young man,” Salome said after he had left, and then said she was going to take a nap on the daybed that she kept in the back. She always said that big sales exhausted her, and Molly wondered if there wasn’t something postcoital for her about their aftermath. Molly was alone out front when Ryan came back, and had settled into her shopgirl pose, with her elbows on the counter and her chin in her hands, watching the traffic go by on Hayes Street and feeling quite detached from the things that probably ought to have been bothering her just then. Some days her experience of life felt like one big shrug, but there was something as much contented as uncaring in that figurative gesture. Still, when he came back in, she stood straight and threw her hands up and said, “Hey!” And then she blushed because she thought it must have looked like she just gave him a high-school cheer.

“I actually meant to get flowers,” he said. “But I forgot.”

“We have those,” she said, and then added, when he stared at her a little longer without speaking, “in abundance.” She showed him around the roses and the lilies and the daises. He nodded at everything she presented, and spoke very quietly when he said one or the other of them was pretty, as if he was afraid too much noise would draw Salome out again from the back. “How many do you need?” Molly asked him at last. She had been handing the flowers to him as they walked back and forth among the stock, and now he was holding a bunch big enough to completely obscure his face.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, so she handed him a few more roses and a few orchids and a single dendrobium. She had worked long enough at Root and Relish to recognize a hideous arrangement of flowers when she saw one, but when she offered to fix them up for him he said he could do it himself when he got home. “I’m just going to scatter them around,” he said. “A few in each room.”

“Alrighty,” Molly said, wrapping up the stems. She handed them to him with a smile. You were always supposed to hand things over with a smile; that was one of Salome’s inviolable rules. The customers weren’t always right, and you were even allowed to insult them, provided you did it in a way that they probably wouldn’t understand as an insult, but you always, always, always had to smile at them. Molly had tried out the smile and the gesture at home and been reminded of rehearsing her band smile as a child, standing in a line with her sisters while her mother gave them feedback: Mary you are too stiff, Molly you are too loose, Malinda too much gum is showing, and Melissa don’t close your eyes when you smile. What was on her face was practiced at first, but when he smiled back her face shifted uncontrollably, and she thought he smiled a little wider and looser himself, and then she blushed, even before he asked her out. She said yes without a second thought, which always, in future reflection, whenever her depressive nostalgic daydreaming led her back in time to the day they met, went to show what a different person she was back then, the sort who went out with strangers all the time, who took numbers from men in the laundromat and the grocery store and in line for the porta-potty at outdoor concerts. Even at her most burned out and frazzled, freshly on the run from her job and her family, she still hurled herself thrillingly and mostly unself-consciously into the adventure of getting to know somebody new, into the dinners and walks and conversations and the fucking, which all went to show, she ultimately decided, how much less ruined other people’s tragedy left you, compared to your own.

They didn’t even wait until the end of the date to have sex. That was a first for Molly, but it felt like the right thing to do, and she didn’t worry at all about whether or not he was going to respect her later, or come back for a second date, though even before they had exchanged a dozen sentences, she knew she wanted to see him again. He came to her apartment in the Sunset and stood in her door with the giant haphazard bouquet of Root and Relish flowers in his hands. “Hi!” she said, and kissed him, meaning for it to be something really innocuous, a greeting less formal than but not really that much more intimate than a handshake. But she tripped over her threshold, and broke her fall against him with his lips. If she had been holding her head at a slightly different angle, it would have been a totally unsensual bonk, but there was something lucky in the way they were lined up. Huh , she thought, and she might have said it, too, as she pulled her head back but left the rest of her leaning against him.

It seemed like very good fortune, to lean against him like that, and when they seemed to decide together that dinner could wait, and started making out there in her doorway, it seemed lucky to her, too, for their desire to align as perfectly as their lips had, and for a collision that might have been disastrous to be a wonder, instead. She kept thinking, Oh, that’s nice and How fortunate , when she discovered how meaty the high part of his chest was or how soft the hair was under his arms. That’s lovely , she thought, as he started to heat up and put off an odor like warm bread and warm grass. By the time he came it smelled like someone had just mowed a lawn in her bedroom, but lovelier and stranger than that was the sense she had, as they rolled and humped and pressed their faces all over each other, of how nicely they fit together, however they combined. She had always been a little incredulous, back in college biology, that all the vital chemicals and enzymes that kept us alive and thriving just happened to run into one another all the time in exactly the way they needed to. Absent the Directing Intelligence, in which she no longer really believed, it seemed too good to be true. Suddenly it was easy to believe that two bodies could come together and together and together, over and over again from the dawn of time to the end of time, with barely a misstep. It wasn’t the first time she had had really good sex, but it felt that night that there was as much an abundance of luck in her bed as an abundance of pleasure. Later she would always feel the luck as much as the love between them — it felt like the universe had showered good fortune on her in his person, and she felt luckier and luckier and luckier to be with him, until her luck was suddenly exhausted.