so fulfill ourselves.
“Nobody,” said Tom.
You said, “You’re joking.”
Tom didn’t mind, he said “What?” again, and then, “I made some gross love in dorm rooms like anyone but Nell was my first relationship, as it were.”
As it were, I knew this, I had never given it much thought. Tom had never belonged to me any more than he’d belonged to himself; his big insufferable beauty had disembodied him and this disembodied, suffering beauty had visited me for a time. That the visit had been protracted over a period of years qualified it, I suppose, as a relationship, but I wouldn’t call it union, communion, or love.
“Which poor chap lost out to Barry?”
Tom had fallen into the Britishisms of our shorthand and his childhood, which meant Tom had fallen down.
“I shudder to think,” he added, at which I watched you lose your patience.
“Ragnar Hjort Erlingsen,” you said, as if translating Go Fuck Yourself into its ancient original language. “Youngest ever Danish parliament member. Blond, ruthless, great dancer, and real efficient.”
I stood there smiling because a nobleman named Ragnar had licked the brackish Baltic Sea off your thighs and I am so perfectly wrong for you that maybe life will let me off this hook: dark, full of ruth, clumsy, comically inept. That you would choose a Barry over a Ragnar confirmed desire’s basic irrelevance, relieved me of taking my irrelevant desire seriously. I could retire now, retire the heart.
Tom only then found the bottle opener in one of your gilt kitchen’s six hundred drawers and cracked open his beer as violently as he could and let the discarded cap lie on the floor. You and I looked at it and thought about strawberry jam. I picked it up because I have no dignity. Tom looked at Mishti, who’d just walked in, we hadn’t even heard the doorbell, evidently Barry had.
“It’s nice to see you,” Tom told Mishti. Mishti sort of literally stopped in her tracks. She looked at Tom for a second as if he were mocking her. Tom’s face didn’t change. Mishti said, “It is?”
Tom said, “Your face is a comfort to me, here in the war zone.”
You said, “What war zone?”
Tom said, “Why the interrogation?”
Mishti said, “My face is a comfort to you?”
You jumped right in and told Mishti to describe her ex. She and Tom snapped out of the eye contact gridlock they’d screeched into, and both of them focused on you. You had turned our discomfort into a parlor game. Bizarrely, Mishti and I were both wearing black turtlenecks and black jeans. It looked as though we’d planned it but I’d never seen Mishti wear black before. Carlo came in right behind her. It seemed insane that Mishti still pretended to date him, until Carlo raised his elbow slightly to shake Tom’s hand and there in the little window of Carlo’s armpit appeared Barry. At once they seemed to require each other, Carlo and Barry, each absurd and together amounting to 180 degrees.
“Sulky,” Mishti said, game. “Hot, sulky, and idiotic.”
Tom burped. “You expel idiots,” he said.
“Insensitive verb choice,” you said, pretending to be my friend.
I tossed the beer cap into the far trash can and made the shot but nobody saw.
“I used to think idiots were hot,” said Mishti.
“They are hot,” Tom said, for a reason I couldn’t imagine.
“They’re vain,” said Mishti.
Tom went back to his open beer. It felt as if Tom and Mishti had been spending time together without me, that their rapport had evolved, and I remembered with a neat punch to the spleen that I really had been expelled.
“And yours?” You welcomed Carlo magnanimously, with a shocking toothy celebrity smile, and I wanted him to bow to you. I couldn’t understand why no one was kissing the hem of your nightgown.
“Socialite lamp designer,” he said. “She was so enamored of her own chores.”
“How so?” said Tom, who had never done chores.
“Oh you know Sometimes I make coffee at five p.m. sometimes I don’t put my socks in the dryer just so I can hang them from doorknobs isn’t that weird sometimes I just need a pineapple—”
“Those are chores?” said Joan, who had always done chores.
“Eccentricities?” Carlo modified. “And to a certain extent, in moderation, of course, everyone loves eccentricities, they lubricate life. But I thought it’d be in better taste if she’d cool it a little.”
“Huh,” said Mishti, who was nothing if not cooled.
“So that’s my dark past,” Carlo told her. “Not so dark. We had a bazillion lamps.”
How willing we were to fill