Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

“NO,” MATILDA SAID.“Absolutely not.” She’d let the mirror fall to the floor, and she was furiously hopping across the kitchen. “I’m not going to talk about this.”

“We’re going to talk about it.” Vinnie stood firm.

“Get out of here. Please. Thank you for the pizza, the mirror. I’m tired and I want—”

“This—” Vinnie said, pointing to Matilda’s stump, “is bullshit.”

Matilda had her back to him, holding on to the kitchen sink. “Why are you yelling?” she said, turning to him. “Why are you always fighting? Always mad at everyone and everything.”

“Why aren’t you ?” In the harsh light of Matilda’s kitchen, Vinnie’s left hand was clenching and unclenching. “Why aren’t you fucking pissed off?”

“Because it doesn’t do any good.”

“I disagree.”

“Maybe you need to tell your brain a new story. Go ahead, use the mirror. Take a look at your face and see how ugly it is when you’re mad.”

He took a deep breath and then he slammed his palm against the refrigerator next to her. She flinched. “Why aren’t you mad enough to ask for what you deserve?” he said.

She sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs, her face drawn and bleak. She looked like she might cry; Vinnie had never seen her cry. Matilda couldn’t even look at Vinnie. She’d tried so many times to will herself back into that pantry, back into the before, when Leo was waltzing her to the music. If only she could do it all over again, disengage, walk away from Leo and back to Fernando in the kitchen and pick up her squeeze bottle of vinaigrette. She looked up, somber. “I can’t ask for more because I did get what I deserved,” she said. “I got exactly what I deserved.”

Nathan Chowdhury had been livid when Leo wanted to sell SpeakEasyMedia.

“It’s ours,” he’d said. “We made the fucking thing and it’s finally doing well and getting bigger and better and now you want to hand it over to a bunch of corporate drones? Why? And do what?” Nathan had argued for weeks but Leo held firm and Nathan couldn’t afford to buy Leo’s half of the business. “I’m done,” Leo told Nathan. “I’m out.”

Leo was tired. Tired of working around the clock and the crappy offices that were one step up from his living room but barely. Tired of the young, clever, petulant glorified interns they employed and had to manage in every conceivable way — Leo felt like a housemother half the time. He’d walked into the tiny conference room twice in one week to find two different couples making out. Someone was constantly letting food go to mold in the tiny refrigerator; the sink was always full of dirty coffee mugs.

He was tired of being broke. Tired of running into friends from college and hearing about expensive trips and shares in the Hamptons and admiring their nicer clothes. Tired of not wanting anyone to visit his apartment because it was still the depressingly nondescript postwar one-bedroom that he’d always illegally sublet, a second-floor apartment where every window looked out onto a neighboring roof of below-code air-conditioning compressors; the rooms actually rattled when they were all going at once.

He was tired of gossip. God, was he tired of gossip. By the time he sold it, SpeakEasyMedia had fully morphed into the very thing Leo most loathed. It had become a pathetic parody of itself, not any more admirable or honest or transparent than the many publications and people they ruthlessly ridiculed — twenty-two to thirty-four times a day to be exact, that was the number the accountants had come up with, how many daily posts they needed on each of their fourteen sites to generate enough clickthroughs to keep the advertisers happy. An absurd amount, a number that meant they had to give prominence to the mundane, shine a spotlight of mockery on the unlucky and often undeserving — publishing stories that were immediately forgotten except by the poor sods who’d been fed to the ever-hungry machine that was SpeakEasyMedia. “The cockroaches of the Internet,” one national magazine had dubbed them, illustrating the article with a cartoon drawing of Leo as King Roach. He was tired of being King Roach.

The numbers the larger media company dangled seemed huge to Leo who was also, at that particular moment, besotted with his new publicist, Victoria Gross, who had come from money and was accustomed to money and looked around the room of Leo’s tiny apartment the first time she visited as if she’d just stepped into a homeless shelter. (“When you said you lived near Gramercy,” she said, confused, “I thought you’d have a key to the park or something.”)

Heading to his meeting with Nathan, Leo remembered what it was like to be charged with adrenaline, optimistically nervous. He almost walked right past Nathan who was sitting at the bar in front of an open laptop, head bent. Leo was glad to have a minute to observe his old friend, his years-long companion in the pursuit of business and pleasure and a winning season for the Jets. The welling affection he felt at seeing Nathan’s familiar profile was genuine. Nathan, who had a seemingly endless ability to stare at spreadsheets and pie charts and see a story. Nathan, who was still wearing his pants too short and his jacket a little tight and drinking his standard drink: a Shirley Temple.

And when Nathan looked up, he was visibly happy to see Leo, too. He stood and they hugged. Not the backslapping hug Leo was used to, the bro hug that was more exuberant handshake and head dip than body contact, but a true hug. Nathan drew Leo close and held him tight, and Leo was unnerved to feel himself tear up. Anyone watching might mistake their moment of reunion for something sadder. Then they straightened, did the hearty backslap, and took a few seconds to appraise each other.

Nathan grinned, nodding. “Yup, yup. I’m still the better-looking one. By many fathoms.” This was a long-running joke. To say Nathan was not conventionally handsome was generous. For a big guy, his shoulders were unusually narrow and all his weight gathered around his midsection. He had the kind of pear-shaped body more common on women. The enormous gap between his two front teeth managed to be charming. His hair was completely gone, but the bald head worked with his strong features, the fleshy nose, the severely arched brows that nearly had a life of their own.

“Want a real one of those?” Leo said, pointing to Nathan’s drink and ordering himself a whiskey.

“Afraid not. I have precisely twenty minutes until I have to leave for an uptown charity thing and I’m introducing someone so. ” Leo was not encouraged to hear that he’d been apportioned such a tiny slice of Nathan’s day. He’d have to talk fast. He went through the motions, asked after Nathan’s family, saw a few photos, listened to a recap of his “nightmare” town house renovation.

“I heard about you and Victoria,” Nathan said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s better for both of us.” Leo hoped he hit the right mix of reassurance and regret. He was glad Nathan brought up the divorce, he wanted to use it. “You were right back then when you told me we brought out the worst in each other.”

Nathan plucked the bright cherry out of his ginger ale and ate it, chewing on the stem. “I don’t take any satisfaction in being right about that.”

“I know. Just coming clean with an old friend. I should have listened to you — and not just about Victoria, about a lot of things.”

“Water under the bridge,” Nathan said. “You look good. And unless the grapevine is just desperately gnawing on very old intel, I think I heard something about you and Stephanie. True?”