cheese and, well, the French. Real French, not Canadian French, not hip-wader, goose-squashing chalice-of-the-tabernacle French. French perfume French. French bakery French.
But what about the twenties? Rank knows nothing about the twenties. He racks his brain, hunched over the sink. Flappers. Titless women dancing the Charleston. He doesn’t fucking know. What is he doing here, with guys like these? He is a hulking, heaving hick. He is good at drinking, and lifting his fellow man over his head, and throwing up. Also, destroying lives. That’s why the not-so-good Lord placed him on this earth.
Rank straightens up. “Sorry.” He wipes his mouth on his bare arm. “That was gross.”
“No problem,” says Adam. “I just came to get some juice.”
“Don’t drink the OJ,” advises Rank. “It’s all vodka.”
Rank runs the tap to clean out the sink, grateful he had hardly eaten anything the night before.
“No chunks,” he remarks to Adam.
“Nice,” says Adam, pulling an unopened two-litre bottle of cola from the fridge.
Rank watches as Adam slowly unscrews the cap, careful not to let the carbonation out in one fizzy spew. All at once he remembers they had sex with the same person the night before, a girl named, Rank is pretty sure, Jennifer. Yes, because she said she spelled it with a V. He remembers now. He remembers laughing and saying, You do not. No one spells Jennifer with a V. And she pretending to be miffed, going, That’s how it’s spelled. You made it up, insisted Rank. You made up this lame spelling because you wanted to be different and special. It’s on my fucking driver’s licence, replied Jennifer. You want me to show you? And then Rank recalls being a little chastened. He has met people with names like Zoltan and Paco and Mercedes since arriving at school and it didn’t take long for him to realize that his knee-jerk urge to laugh in these people’s faces when they introduced themselves did not make him the most sophisticated of men.
Anyway: Jenniver drank like a linebacker. She had been all about the Jell-O shots the night before — had an endless repertoire of shooter-based games she insisted everyone play. Afterwards, Rank had found himself fiddling with her wiry black hair as they slouched side by side on the couch, twirling the curls around his finger, to which they clung as if having been cultivated for this very purpose. And then he and Jenniver stumbled into the crash pad and had the kind of sex that Rank can barely remember. He mostly recollects trying to stuff both her boobs in his mouth and a distant gratitude that he’d been able to get it up. And Jenniver leaving to pee every five minutes. And then taking a long time to come back — in fact not coming back. At which point it was about four in the morning. And Rank, on the verge of passing out, suddenly brought around by an image of Jenniver lying on her back in the bathroom bubbling vomit through her nose. So getting up to check on her. And Wade passed out on the couch. But noises coming from Wade’s room. And, after finding the bathroom empty, going to see what those noises were.
So. That had been awkward.
Now Rank and Adam blink and wince and each other at 9 a.m. in the Temple’s kitchen with its screaming white overhead bulb practically bleaching them out of existence. Rank is only wearing shorts and Adam only jeans and they face each other bare-chested like boxers.
“Hey,” says Rank, leaning against the counter. “I get that we’re being ironic when we say it — I understand that much. But what was supposed to be so great about Paris in the twenties anyway? I mean in all seriousness.”
Adam takes a swig of cola, but the carbonation invades his nasal passages so he ends up having to spit it into the unfortunate sink.
“Ernest Hemingway,” he says once he has recovered.
“Hemingway? That’s it?”
“Well, you know. Paris. Everything Paris implies.”
“Yeah, yeah. But what about the whole twenties thing. Why is that a big deal?”
Adam takes another, more careful swig, thinking about it.
Eventually he shrugs.
“You don’t know?” says Rank, delighted.
“Why am I supposed to know?” says Adam.
“Because,” says Rank. “What’s the point of having guys like you around if you don’t know that stuff?”
Adam blinks at him a few more times, trying to gauge the atmosphere. It’s tricky, because everything is slightly off. The fact that it is nine o’clock in the morning, the fact of the operating-room