Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,19
you okay? Can I bring you anything?” she asked, realizing as she said it that she was acting like she was at work.
He looked up at her, pale and grateful, annoyingly still beautiful. He stood up, and she thought he was going to greet her with a kiss or a hug, but instead he grimaced and went into the bathroom, and a minute later she heard him vomiting.
She was repulsed, of course, but then quickly remembered that he’d watched her puke on the night they met, and also there was nothing he could do, by that point, that would have truly turned her off. “I’m going to the deli, back in a minute,” she shouted through the door.
At Sunny & Annie’s she bought a liter of ginger ale, a handful of Advil in little foil packets, and three bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches. The store had a friendly smell of bacon, burnt coffee, disinfectant, and cut-up fruit sitting on ice. She felt cheerful and competent, like a nurse in a starched white uniform taking brisk care of a bunch of invalids.
Dylan and Davey looked at her with pathetic gratitude when they saw her come in the door with the supplies. They consumed them sitting on the couch in front of the TV, passing another joint, watching a movie. The girls sat on the floor for a while and then got bored and left. For a moment Laura thought she might go with them. There wouldn’t be an infinite amount of summer sunshine, and she had to work later in the dank velvet gloom of Bar Lafitte for hours. She wanted to walk around in the daylight as much as possible, to let it sink into her skin and bleach away the residue of the time she’d spent in this smoky, filthy apartment. But she also wanted Dylan, even if all he was up for was some light cuddling and aimless conversation. She wondered if he would think it was dorky or weird if she cooked him a meal. The movie was something only stoners would watch, an experimental Italian horror film that had lots of tomato-saucy blood, and Laura realized that she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten any of the egg sandwiches herself. She got up to look at the kitchen and determine whether cooking in it was even possible.
The counter was stacked with empty bottles of malt liquor, and there was a crusty George Foreman grill, but the fridge wasn’t disgusting because it seemed never to have been used to store food, only beer, and there were no dishes in the sink. She found a saucepan and a frying pan, a spatula and some forks. She could work with this. She made another trip to the deli and came back with the ingredients for a soup she’d perfected in college, consisting of one can of cream-of-potato soup and one can of creamed corn, plus milk, salt and pepper, and red pepper flakes.
“Dylan, your wife is the best,” said Davey as he ate, stoned and ravenous. Laura felt offended, a little ashamed of herself, and also thrilled. She looked down at her bowl so she wouldn’t see Dylan’s reaction.
That night after work she told Callie about the day and what she’d done, cringing preemptively in preparation for her judgment.
“So you were supposed to go on a date, and instead you sat around with him and his friends, and then you cooked for them?”
Laura couldn’t see Callie’s face—she was at the kitchen counter, mixing bran cereal into nonfat yogurt for dinner—but she could imagine her look of lightly amused pity and contempt.
Laura nodded.
“What was the date supposed to be, even?”
“I don’t know, he just said we’d be alone.”
“So it was a booty call, and then you didn’t even have sex.” Callie sat down at the table to eat her gross meal directly across from Laura, so that Laura couldn’t evade her eye contact.
“It wasn’t to have sex—well, not just to have sex. I had thought we would … go to a museum or something.” As she said it out loud, Laura realized how laughably improbable the idea of going to a museum with Dylan actually was. She tried to picture them holding hands and walking through a gallery, Laura maybe explaining or criticizing some aspect of the artwork on display. It was so patently a fantasy that she might as well have been imagining them riding bareback on unicorns through an alpine field of wildflowers.
Callie nodded like she could read the realization on Laura’s