Emma Rathbone - Losing It

When I arrived, I immediately realized there were a number of things at odds with the laid-back island vibe the restaurant was trying to project: the scalding sarcasm with which the high-school girl at the entrance was passing out leis, the aggressive air-conditioning, the flat-screen televisions projecting a cage-fighting competition, and the handful of twentysomething men below watching it with an itchy air of aggression.

I was glad I’d brought a shawl. I stepped out of my shoe, which was stuck to the sticky floor mat. The lei girl was writing the specials on the whiteboard and pointedly not turning around to greet me, and then there was Jack, by the palm tree next to the host stand, looking, I got the distinct feeling, as if he’d forgotten I was coming.

“Heeeeeey,” he said, overcompensating, greeting me as if I were some college buddy. “How’s it going?”

“I’m good.” I nodded.

“Cool. Cool,” he said, and looked around the restaurant. “I’m glad you caught me. This is my last night here.”

Caught him. As if he hadn’t had nearly a week to respond to my e-mail. I had to hide my disappointment by rummaging through my bag for some ChapStick. “Mmm-hmmm,” I said, using it liberally. “Great. Me too.”

He regarded me with a look that at the time I had a hard time deciphering. But later I knew what it was — the troubled expression of someone in over his head, who had bitten off more than he could chew, but knew that if he just tolerated it for a little while it would be okay.

“Thanks, Chelsea,” he said to the lei girl. And then to me, “You want a drink?”

I nodded.

We walked down an aisle between booths. I slid into the one he pointed to, and he went to the bar. I stared at the starfish tapestry on top of the table. I flipped through the huge laminated menu and wondered what was taking so long. I looked over to where he was standing with his friends and tried to identify by their postures or demeanors if they were talking about me.

It was like slowing down five hundred horses, but I forced myself to regain some measure of composure. It was purely survival. I couldn’t stand it to let my center erode and sit there all vague and dispersed.

But when he sat down, I wasn’t some paragon of poise nor did he immediately have the upper hand. It was all somewhere in between, both of us toggling between different versions of ourselves, glinting and dimming, trying to intuit where to give or take, what the stakes were, what the other person expected.

Whatever had happened at the funeral was there again, or at least some slight part of it. It wasn’t just the fleeting alchemy of that humid afternoon, I was grateful to realize — we actually liked each other. He was looking at me fondly, almost despite himself, as if there was some essential part of me that universally tickled him. There was something there, I knew it.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“I’m reading the ingredients in the drinks,” I said.

“They’re just drinks.”

I felt delighted.

“Are you aware,” I said, “that you have a drink on your menu that’s basically got a piece of pizza in it?”

“The Crazy Mary.”

“That’s what it’s called?”

“It’s got cubes of cheese and pepperoni.”

“Why would you order something like that?”

He sat back and affected a faraway gaze and a raspy voice. “People come here to escape.”

I laughed. “Are you doing an impression?”

He looked happy.

“I’m being steely,” he said.

“I thought it was someone specific.”

“It was, sort of,” he said.

“I’ll have the Zeus,” I said, pointing at the menu, when the waitress came. She looked at us knowingly and then left after Jack ordered a beer.

“You sure about that? The Zeus?” he said.

“You don’t think I can handle it?”

“You ever seen the movie Cocktail ?”

“Who was your impression of?”

He sat back. “This guy,” he said. “This old man that ran a lodge we would — my family — would stay at in Alaska sometimes in the summer.” A shadow passed across his face. Was he thinking about Alice? Later, when I reframed the whole night with that — that he just lost his mom — it all made more sense. The guy was a frayed cord, a jagged edge. But the other thing was that under the grimy stained-glass lamp of that restaurant and in that weird situation, we were still both actually having a good time.

“He was always saying these indecipherable but ominous things,” he continued, playing with a straw wrapper. “He’d be like, ‘Gray skies this morning, sure to spit on a goose’s wing.’”

I laughed.

“Or like, ‘Wind is up, kiss a squaw.’”

“What does that mean?” I said.

“Anyone’s guess,” he said.

I don’t know how we got onto the subject but we were discussing what it would be like to be stranded at sea and how we would both react to the situation. And he said something I didn’t expect that really threw me. He said, “I’ve always known that in a situation like that I would be the one to freak out or jump overboard or something.” The guilt on his face brought the conversation to a halt. It was obvious he’d said something he felt was true, something he’d thought about a lot. When I turned over this statement, it was all wrong to me. It seemed to negate everything preceding, everything buoying him and me and this whole night and all the unacknowledged assumptions we had about each other.

“No,” I said, with too much conviction, “you wouldn’t be like that.”

He looked through the window and into the blue-lit parking lot. His smile guttered out a little. I watched him, and a fear rose around me, I didn’t know where it came from, that he was going to be rudderless and unhappy, going through life. That he was going to be a sad man. I tried to shake it off.

My drink came. It was in a huge plastic cup, the kind of thing you would take to a baseball game, filled with blue liquid and green ice cubes and swirly straws and a few little umbrellas.

“Holy God,” I said.

“I told you,” he said.

“Is this even legal?”

“It’s for sorority girls,” he said. “They like to order it to impress us with how, like, adventurous they are.”

“You shouldn’t say stuff like that to me,” I said. “I’m not the kind of woman who doesn’t like other women.”

“So you like sorority girls?”

“I don’t not like them,” I said. “I don’t really know any.”

“Well, I know a lot.”

“I’m an enigma, I guess,” I said, after a moment.

“An enigma wrapped in a huge scarf.”

“It’s a wrap,” I said.

Now and then he would draw back a little and I could feel what he was doing. It was all too much, and it wasn’t the right time, and he didn’t want to get involved with this twenty-six-year-old woman and her complicated wrap. She was probably always cold. She would be needy and critical at the same time and he could see himself doggedly following her through a mall holding a bunch of shopping bags while she bought a ton of bath beads and acted insane, and really, he just didn’t have time for all this. Or maybe he was too young to envision all of that, but I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t like that. I wasn’t like that. And it didn’t matter how old I was and also, what was going on right now, as we were talking, how easy it was — that was actually pretty rare. It didn’t happen that often between two people and he needed to grab on to it while he had the chance and it’s tragic the way so often the things we want are presented to us before we’re ready, before we can recognize them for what they are.

We were talking about pets: “The reason I don’t like cats that much is because I can tell that if they were just a little bigger they would try to kill me,” I said. By this stage there’s a high red in both of our cheeks. Now and then I get the sense by the way he laughs or the way his eyes go all liquid, that he’s never actually talked to a girl before for an extended, connected amount of time, or never really had a good time doing so.