Justin Taylor - Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever

Alison is heavier than I expected, with curly dark hair and sad eyes. She looks Jewish, and is deep in conversation with a much older woman who I think is the reason we’re all here.

You know what I mean when I say that.

Leah is saying good-bye to the famous critic and I am throwing out our cups, thinking about how long it will take to get home and what time I have to be up for work tomorrow. Is it early enough for a nightcap somewhere? If we hurry. I run into Richard at the garbage can.

He insists I take his number, which he’s already written down on a napkin. “Just think about it,” he says, placing one hand firmly on my shoulder. “You look like you could use someone to make you a real dinner. A growing boy like you. Really, anytime.”

So sometimes I have dinner over at Richard’s.

It’s a different night. We’re leaving a bar, up by Leah’s place again. It rained while we were drinking and the city looks delicate, refreshed. All the streetlamps have birthday-candle haloes.

Leah is hanging on my arm. It’s no big thing. She’s not stumbling, just making sure I feel her presence, her there- ness. We reach her building.

“Gentleman you are,” she says. “Walking me home.”

I smile.

“So you want to come upstairs?”

She slips a hand into my pocket, squeezes.

“Well,” she says, “what’s it gonna be?”

“If you really need me to say it,” I say. “I mean of course.”

“Awesome,” she says, and pecks me on the cheek. Hand still in my pocket. “But you’re not staying over.”

But then she lets me.

I live in Murray Hill. Leah lives up by her school. This means that in order to see her I need to take the 6 to Grand Central, ride the shuttle to Times Square, then finish my trip on the 1. Or spring for a cab. Not that I’m so broke, but still.

Richard has a rent-controlled place in Alphabet City. The neighborhood, seedy when he moved in, has gentrified smartly over the decades. Richard has stories about the prostitutes who used the corner Laundromat (which has since become a coffee shop) as their home base, about the bums who would sleep in his building’s stairwell, ready to fight you if you roused them, about how all the real character has been driven from the city, though it is nice to be able to walk around at night.

A cab home from Richard’s is eight bucks, tops, and often Richard insists that I take some money to pay for it. “Refuse me twice and you’ll make me cry,” he’ll say, half-serious. (It’s sometimes hard to tell with Richard what is genuine and what is theater.) I act exasperated — you’re making me feel like a kid, I say — but accept the cash, grinning, and only then can we complete our good-night ritual: a hearty, protracted embrace during which he pecks me on the cheek, or maybe tries to plant one right on the mouth.

I’ve begun to crave the undivided affection Richard gives me on our nights together. Sometimes when I’m at work I find myself drifting off, thinking of the low light by which we dine, how he’s taken to keeping a bottle of my preferred bourbon in the house. “I don’t know about another round before dinner, Richard,” I might say, and Richard might say “Oh come on —you young people are supposed to be able to take it.”

It’s hard to say who’s more surprised the night I respond to Richard’s latest hysterical come-on by stretching myself out on the couch and then laconically unzipping my fly.

I no longer think of Leah as the love of my life, but I do still sometimes think we might make each other the happiest. It would be more like teaming up than being married. We could do all kinds of things together: whatever she wanted to. I could work, she could sculpt; she could have girls too if she wanted. She could bring them home to us sometimes.

I know it’s silly, but I think about it.

Also I think maybe it isn’t so silly.

I’m imagining the two of us at a party together, her wearing a black dress with a plunging V neck, me not in anything particular, and she’s talking to some old friend of ours. She’s telling a funny story about something I said on account of having misunderstood something she said, and how we argued until we realized what the original miscommunication had been, and how afterward everything was okay.

Richard fucks with a ruthlessness utterly disconnected from his demeanor, that carefully crafted mélange of snark and fey. He tops, for one thing, and sometimes when he gets frisky he gets rough. The situation ought to allow for nothing in either partner but animal instinct. Instead, I’m feeling oddly trapped inside what is shaping up to be a muddled, but essentially analytical, drunk.

How have I wound up in this apartment, on my belly, on this bed, greased?

Obviously I don’t mean this literally, but in the grander sense.

Richard’s trying to get me into position for a reach around, but I’m not helping because at this particular moment my being fucked feels like it is happening in an adjoining room. In that room, I think, Richard has given up on parity and is now calling me filthy things.

The smoke alarm goes off. The salmon. Richard pulls out. It is a rushed, painful exit that makes me gasp. Richard runs to the beige disk and snatches it off the wall, disabling it. He opens the oven and surveys the ruined food. The salmon is blackened and hard; it looks like scorched warped bricks.

“Goddamn, goddamn,” Richard says. I hear the quaver in his voice.

We stand at opposite ends of the kitchen, two naked men, first not looking at each other, then looking.

I am eating fried pork dumplings out of a white box balanced on my lap, a lot less drunk than I was before, which I think is good. Richard has spareribs and makes a show of sucking the meat off each bone. I start to tell him all about Leah, figuring there is an obvious segue from that into breaking up with him, but I can’t find it, so I just keep telling old sex stories.

“Ugh,” Richard says finally. “I ate a pussy once in college. That was plenty. ”

“I think we should be just friends,” I say. Richard stares at me, gnawing on his last rib. “Okay, I know it sounds stupid,” I say, “I mean we’re sitting here and—” I make a sort of encompassing gesture with my chopsticks.

Still, Richard says nothing.

“I don’t want to hurt you. Really. But this is a mistake for me. I thought maybe it wasn’t, but it is. I hope you can understand. We can still see each other. I love it when you cook dinner.”

Richard clears his throat, starts to talk, stops, then says: “You know, I try and remind myself that you’re all the same, but apparently there are some things in life a person never gets used to.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t. You’re trying so hard to be understand ing but the fact is you couldn’t possibly understand. You apparently think that you’re my boyfriend. You think this ”—he mimics my gesture—“is my whole life.”

I let Jason from the office talk me into letting his fiancée, Danielle, who works in legal, set me up with her good friend Candace. In an e-mail CC’d to Jason, Danielle sends me Candace’s e-mail address, along with a short note explaining that Candace is recently out of a long relationship and probably won’t be looking for anything too serious right off. I write to Candace, who I’ve been told is expecting to hear from me, and reintroduce myself. (We met a couple months ago at somebody’s birthday party, but that was before she was single.) She writes me back a few minutes later, saying she remembers me, and in my next reply I ask if she’d like to get together some evening after work for a drink. She doesn’t write back for a few hours; in fact, I’m getting ready to leave the office when she does, though since she wrote to my work e-mail — the only contact info of mine that she has — it would have forwarded to my BlackBerry if I hadn’t still been at my desk. She says she’s looking at her schedule and next Wednesday works for her if it does for me.