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Enthusiasts, by Celeste Rapone © The artist. Courtesy the artist; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; Josh Lilley, London; and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York City and Aspen, Colorado

“Paul says I’m just dicknotized.”

Paul is Lily’s gay best friend and closest romantic confidant. Grating portmanteaus are a crucial part of their relationship.

“Dickmatized?” I pronounce the word wrong so she knows I hate it.

“That’s what he says.”

I could return the compliment, tell her I’m clitnotized (pussified?), but I don’t have much going for me besides sex. She’s better-looking and more successful than I am.

“Why did he say that?”

“Because I am.”

“No, I mean why were you talking about it?”

“I’m spending all my time with you instead of enjoying my freedom.”

Lily feels that she hasn’t slept with enough people. She likes to say she’s jealous of me. I like to say I’m jealous of her, that quality is more important than quantity. I don’t actually say, “Quality is more important than quantity,” but that’s the logic. She’s had “lovers,” after all. She uses the word nonchalantly, which I find both hilarious and intimidating. And she’s slept almost entirely with people she still knows, men and some women in her old Parisian ambit, whereas I’ve slept almost entirely with strangers no one knows. My affairs will be lost to history, but she’s built a legacy. She didn’t move to New York to escape it. She moved to forget something else.

At the bar, Lily switches her mother’s ring to her left hand and we tell strangers we’re married. This is obnoxious of us. An NYU student says she loves our accents even though I’m not doing one.

After the bar, we go to another bar, then to an afters where we lose track of each other on purpose. I end up on a couch with an energetic German named Juliette whom I’ve impressed with Lily’s opinions about Berlin. Juliette’s hair is wavy and fine. It keeps slipping into our mouths. When she finally pauses to tie it back, Lily materializes, plopping her head into my lap. Juliette asks me if I have WhatsApp. I say my phone is dead, which is not true, and she shrugs like it’s my loss. A large man takes her place on the couch, which is really a love seat. His stomach spills onto my knee; it doesn’t quite touch Lily’s head. She is fast asleep, legato respiration and faint smile. This has happened before—she can sleep anywhere.

When I leave the next day for my parents’ house in the suburbs, Lily cries. We haven’t spent a night apart since we met. It’s been three weeks. She laughs.

My parents are turning my bedroom into a guest room. Painting it takes me three days on account of some rain. The room looks so much better, I tell my mom, that it makes me want to move back in. She coughs down her asparagus—am I doing okay? A reasonable question given my history, but it annoys me all the same. I was obviously joking.

I say, “It’s fine to tell your adult son you don’t want him to move in with you.”

“I know it’s fine. It seems like something that doesn’t need to be said.”

“So I can’t move back in?”

“Honey, tell me what’s wrong. Of course you can.”

“Jesus Christ.”

We insult each other with therapy language until we’re tired enough to make peace. My dad gets home. Standing behind my mom’s chair, he puts his hands on her shoulders. She closes her eyes and sighs: content with him, me, the world. All this because we fought and made up.

My phone rings the next morning at seven o’clock.

“How are you?” Lily is wasted.

“I’m good.” I leave a space she doesn’t fill. “Not as good as you. Are you out?”

“He’s asleep, but I couldn’t and wanted to talk to you.”

Blood in my ears. “Hi.”

“All I get is hi?”

Either she’s playing dumb or she’s too drunk to hear that my voice has run cold.

“I’m glad you had a fun night.”

“When can I see you?”

At dinner, I gather the details of her hookup as though it’s just something to talk about. She met him at the party where I declined to get Juliette’s number because I didn’t know Lily and I were hedging our bets. French trust funder who owns a restaurant in Nolita. Cute place. They got absolutely shit-faced.

“ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ll fuck you in the morning.’ ” Lily rolls her eyes. “So French. He was still asleep when I left.”

“Oh?”

“It wasn’t a total waste. The food was excellent.”

“Did you use him for a free meal?”

“No, I wanted to sleep with him.” She’s wondering if she should be offended.

“I was just teasing.”

“Your mother was just teasing.”

Lily is alluding to my compulsive use of the comeback “your mother,” which would have been an annoying but innocent bit of juvenilia the first few times I said it if Lily’s mother hadn’t been dead; if she hadn’t died suddenly and recently; if her death weren’t the defining tragedy of Lily’s life. My “your mother” tick, its idiot callousness, is our first running joke. Lily says the pain fades when she’s with me and I don’t think she’s lying. We haven’t been ourselves. This is how bad I am, we always seem to be saying. Tell me how bad you are.

Lily has cheated on all her boyfriends. I didn’t have to coax the details out of her because confessions felt like complicities, but now, after this French guy and his restaurant, they feel like something else. I know I’m not supposed to hold her past against her; I heard this advice on a call-in radio show about sex and relationships when I was a teenager and it stuck with me, gathering dust. But it’s not true. You use everything.

For cheating on Psycho, Lily says she feels no remorse. He hit her. Roland was a good boyfriend, and she regrets cheating on him, but explains the affair away as a means of getting out of a relationship that needed to end. There are others in the distant past, and a more recent, different kind of infidelity: a week before she moved to New York, Lily hooked up with a man her cousin loves unrequitedly, an episode for which she professes deep guilt but chalks up to drugs, grief, and projection.

The history itself doesn’t bother me. Everyone with an appetite has history, and I want appetite. It’s the pat explanations she absolves herself with. They seem evidence of an all’s-fair fatalism that will eat me alive unless I armor myself by fucking someone else as soon as possible. It’s the only viable solution. I have no right to be angry with her since we’re liberated people having fun.

I am not aware of time. At some point we get coke and talk a lot, or I talk a lot. I don’t fuck her. She looks at the clock and says she needs to shower for work. On the weekends, she goes into Manhattan to translate documents for a law firm in Midtown. I tell her she should come back here afterward. I give her my key and show her how to jiggle the front lock in case I’m sleeping. I doubt I will be. I’ve got a plan now. Men in Santa Claus costumes and women dressed as elves are already converging on lower Manhattan to puke into gutters and pee between cars.

SantaCon began as a piece of performance art: false-bearded altruists handing out gifts on the street. Now it’s an all-day pub crawl. The transformation improved it as art, made it an affront to polite society that recalls the dipsomaniacal mall Santas of yore, but you’re supposed to hate it because, in addition to being a loud mess, it attracts a lame crowd. I don’t hate it. I can have fun anywhere. I’m standing in an Irish bar, talking to a small woman with enormous cleavage and plastic elf ears, close to making something happen with her, when the bouncer accuses me of having drunk multiple abandoned drinks. I deny the charge. He’s a squat, bristling man with beautiful pale eyes. When he reaches for me, I raise my hands and leave.

Outside, a disconsolate Santa presses his forehead against the building next door. He’s looking down at his feet, saying numbers. I can’t tell if there’s a pattern, if a pattern would make him more sane or less. He’s alone and his situation is dire and I am cutting him a wide berth on my way to the crowded-looking bar at the corner when Lily texts me. She finished her work. Should she still come over? It’s one in the afternoon. Time flown. I step aside for a contingent of Santas walking three abreast. One of them says, “My dad is highly depressed.” Another responds, “That sucks dick.”

I gave up on sleep and went into Manhattan to get lunch with an old friend who’s in town

Want to join us?

I’m exhausted.

I’ll just go home.

I have your key though . . .

The self- and Lily-respecting thing to do would be to head home, but I feel on the precipice of great achievement. I’m cresting a significant wave. The horizon is beginning to look like land. That buxom elf put wind in my sails, so to speak, and now this other, prettier woman is bumming a cigarette off me. Angry-thin with bushy eyebrows . . . I have to have her. No polite way to put it. I say maybe I’ll see her inside. She says, “Good.” I turn away to finish texting.

Nooo, I want to see you

Why don’t you go pass out at my place?

I feel weird going there by myself.

Roommates are gone till Monday, remember. There’s no chance of awkwardness.

Please?

Okay :)

Margot’s face is distinguished by a crescent of freckles across her upper cheeks and nose that would be too precious without the imposing eyebrows. She’s dressed like a cool person, but her friends are business casual. Xavier, a handsome man with olive skin, and Andrew, a blond guy with a square head, purchased their Santa hats from a street vendor. They were up all night and joined the festivities as a joke.

“Same,” I say.

“Minus the hat.” Margot touches my head.

“SantaCon is so trashy. But why?” Xavier scans the room so our eyes follow, then removes his hat. “What is the specific trashiness of SantaCon?”

The bar is less crowded than it looked from down the street. Almost everyone is sitting at a table.

“Why is it trashy?” Andrew shrugs. “The bridge-and-tunnel element.”

“They’re not specific,” Xavier says. “Drunk Santas dry-humping and fighting are specific. The ruining of Christmas for children.”

He has the faintest hint of an English accent. I want to call it transatlantic, but he doesn’t sound like an old-timey movie star.

“I never believed in Santa Claus,” Andrew says.

“No one believes in Santa Claus,” Margot says. She has a deep laugh. “He’s a game of make-believe that children play with adults.”

“Some kids really believe in him,” I say, because some kids must.

“Don’t psychologists have a term for that?” Xavier addresses the question to Margot. “ ‘Half-belief,’ something like that?”

“ ‘Half-belief’ . . . ” Margot seems to be recalling the term from a distant class. “No, dude.” She grins. “No one calls anything that.”

They are high school friends, boarding school, all three of them. Margot teaches art at a private school on the Upper East Side and Xavier and Andrew work for banks or maybe one of them works at a hedge fund.

When it comes time for me to buy a round, I explain that I lost my wallet, which sets off an elaborate eye-contact conversation between Xavier and Margot. He isn’t buying my story. She wants him to chill. They have history and I’m ruining his chance to cash in on it.

“I always lose things,” says blond Andrew of the square head without looking up from the whiskey he’s contemplating. He has both hands around the glass like it’s a large mug. The last drink pushed him past having fun. He didn’t mean to save me, was just making sure his voice still worked, but I’m grateful all the same.

Andrew doesn’t make it to Margot’s apartment, a one-bedroom on Jane Street for which she makes several apologies. Xavier tells her she needs to “level up.” He’s been leaning hard on the money stuff. I hate his vocabulary and his boarding school bloodhound nose for insecurity. I don’t care that I don’t have money, but I assume Margot requires some minimum of pedigree and I don’t want to squander my night testing the assumption.

“I can’t afford your building on an art teacher’s salary,” Margot says, as though she affords this place on it.

Xavier wants his father to buy this film studio in Taipei. It’s just what the pater’s portfolio needs, but the pater isn’t sure. I keep quiet and nurse my vodka. The rich love to talk about money, but they know it’s in poor taste. When I empty what remains of last night’s bag onto Margot’s laptop, Xavier turns to me.

“Do you like movies, Neil?”

“I hate them.”

I hand him the cocaine laptop. He looks drunk now.

“I don’t suppose you have a bill,” he says.

“I bet you do.” I wink at him and he smiles, genuinely charmed. Mining subtext is the highest form of conversation for some people.

My phone buzzes against my leg. A text from Lily: “Where are you?” I put my phone back in my pocket.

“Did you see Slapforest?” Xavier asks me, powder rimming one nostril.

My phone buzzes again—long vibrations that mean Lily is calling. I decline the call and immediately regret not letting it ring out for plausible deniability.

“Krishna Knudsen, Slapforest?” Xavier says.

I tell him I haven’t seen it, even though I have. Margot says she liked it. Xavier launches into a story about a celebrity he met at the New York premiere. The punch line is that they ran into each other the next night at some restaurant. Am I familiar with this restaurant? Tiresome. The facts are: Xavier is rich; Xavier and Margot used to fuck; I am going to fuck her tonight. The last he refuses to see so we have to keep on measuring dicks. For some people, masculine competition is the substrate out of which desire grows or onto which it must inscribe itself. Not for me—I just want to get laid.

Xavier repeats his question: Have I been to this new restaurant?

I sigh. “I’m not sure I have the energy for whatever it is we’re doing.”

Foul! Margot frowns at me for breaking the fourth wall. She enjoys the competition. Who wouldn’t?

“Calm down, bro,” Xavier says. “It’s just a restaurant.”

Margot laughs with him, but then she says, “Music!” and puts on some music. By assuming responsibility for my discomfort, she is indicating that I still have the inside track, but there will be no shortcuts.

Fortunately, Xavier continues to make an ass of himself. Commenting on the music: “Isn’t it weird how we wear out the songs we like until we don’t like them anymore? We don’t have to.”

“Yeah,” Margot says. “Why don’t I listen to every song the perfect amount?”

Xavier smirks, pleased with their banter. Margot hooks my ankle with her foot. For another hour or two, we go on like this: little jokes at Xavier’s expense, heavy eye contact when he glances down, hurried kissing and groping while he’s in the bathroom. When he takes out his phone and texts his dealer, Margot finally loses patience. Xavier looks tired—didn’t he say he had something to do tomorrow? Xavier responds by drinking from the bottle. He stops making eye contact, glances sourly at the empty bottle, complains about the lack of alcohol, tries to come to terms with the situation. I don’t enjoy this part; I’ve been on the receiving end myself.

“You’re killing me, Margot.”

Xavier wants to hear a particular song, but she won’t play it. He sings a few bars, humming where he can’t remember the words, which is most places. Margot disappears into her bedroom. The words Xavier can remember are: “My dog’s on fire, and it’s cold online.” I don’t recognize them or the melody. I doubt anyone could. Margot comes out of her bedroom wearing a robe: Xavier should call a car, she says. He asks me if I want to split the Uber with him. Tempting, I say, but I’m going another direction. I excuse myself to use the bathroom so Margot can kick him out.

Less resistance this way, less embarrassing for him. I hear them walk to the door, talking. Then a silence in which I imagine he leans in for a kiss—failed or not, uncomfortable for her either way. More talking, voices lowered. The door opens and shuts. I exit the bathroom without flushing. The past few hours have so habituated me to secondary meanings that not flushing feels like a statement, a declaration of victory: I don’t need to pretend I peed when I only went in so Margot could get rid of Xavier. But I did pee. Oh well.

I get up after the condom breaks. We have only the one between us. In sex ed they taught us that a condom should have a little nipple at the end, a “reservoir tip,” it was called, that prevented the prophylactic from bursting under the pressure of ejaculation. By the time I started having sex, all condoms had adopted this innovation, so I don’t know if the old kind really burst like that. It’s a nice thought, though, condoms breaking not in the middle of the act as they actually do, but at the end when there’s nothing you can do about it. My sense is that if I stay, this woman will let me fuck her without a condom, but by now the unanswered messages and calls from Lily have burst through the reservoir tip into my forebrain, so to speak.

You can imagine the arc of these texts if you’ve ever sent or received similar. They begin around 5 pm (it’s after midnight now), gently inquiring after my whereabouts. She’s slept well and now she wants to have sex, so where am I? She’s guessing that lunch became drinks, which is fine, but now she’s awake in my place alone, which is weird, so can I please call her? She’s called me a few times and she’s starting to worry. Could I please call her back? Okay, she’s starting to get angry. This is really fucked up. She feels crazy, is considering phoning the police to report me missing. She isn’t angry, just worried. She isn’t worried, just livid. Why the fuck aren’t I answering my phone?

I fire off a response as soon as I finish reading. The back seat of the cab smells like new vinyl. On the radio, a reporter says something nice about a Kurdish militia and then takes it back with a sweeping caveat.

I’m on my way home

Total disaster

Minor crisis, almost a major crisis

Lost my phone

Will explain in person

Explain now.

I’m way ahead of her. Like two sentences ahead of her. I highlight and cut those two sentences, reply, “Of course, bear with me,” paste the cut text back into the compose box and continue writing until I’m interrupted by a text from a number I don’t recognize that says, “Margot.” Jesus Christ.

Nice meeting you

I may have forgotten to flush your toilet . . .

You did

Sorry.

Not a big deal :)

Get some sleep.

You too

Another text from Lily:

?

The story I concoct is too elaborate. She’s right that lunch became drinks. During drinks—after, really—my friend got into a scuffle with some SantaCon bros. I managed to extract him, to “de-escalate,” but in the course of doing so, I lost my phone. That’s what I thought, anyway, so we went back to the scene of the fight, but I didn’t find it there. I used my friend’s phone to call mine, but there was no answer. Then I tried to use the “Find My” function on Apple’s website, but the site wouldn’t load, either because my friend’s phone was old or because who knows. I spent the next few hours, the last few, retracing my steps and borrowing phones from strangers to call mine. No one picked up, which I guess she knows, having called it herself. I tried to message her on Facebook with the first phone I borrowed after Robert left, but the woman whose phone it was got upset when she saw Facebook loading and snatched it back like I was trying to steal her identity. Obvious to me now that I should have tried Facebook again from a different stranger’s phone after asking permission, but I was so intent on finding my phone that I kept moving instead of thinking. (I reallllly can’t afford another new one.) Anyway, after checking everywhere else twice, I finally went back to the restaurant where we ate and they had it in the drawer of the hostess lectern (podium?), thank God. I could swear I used it after we left, but apparently not. I doubt any of this makes her feel better. Probably makes her feel worse because she’s gotten involved with a moron . . . Anyway, I am sorry. Truly. If that means anything at all.

She writes back to say she’s unlocking the front door; I better be on my way for real. I respond that I am, of course I am. She starts typing and then stops.

I ask the cab driver to pull over a few doors before my apartment in case Lily is watching from the window. I don’t want her to come down because I don’t want her to end up paying. When my card is declined, I make a big show of being surprised, but the driver isn’t buying it. I apologize profusely: he has every right to call the police—it’s my fault. He rolls his eyes. What’s his phone number? I’ll make him whole as soon as my unemployment deposits.

“You’re wasting more of my time,” he says. “Get out.”

The long text I sent Lily took me nearly the whole cab ride to compose, but with the additional time eaten up by my little performance I can be sure that Lily has read it, probably several times, so we’ll be starting from there, which is good. No need to deliver the story fresh and open up the chance of conflicting versions. She doesn’t have to believe every word. She just has to accept it.

I find her as she wants to be found: lying in my bed, naked and miserable. She meets my eyes without moving her head. I perch beside her. She sits up and pulls on a sweater. She says she doesn’t need to be comforted and isn’t interested in an apology. She just wants to clarify a few things: Was I involved in the fight, or only the de-escalation?

“Just breaking it up.”

She squints.

“I try not to fight because I’m not good at it.” This is a critical distinction: a liar would say he’d fought because fighting is sexier than not fighting. Too subtle? I don’t know. Lily is searching my face so I can’t search hers. Between us, on the bed, her phone buzzes. Multiple incoming texts.

“Hard to ignore,” she says.

“Lil, I—”

She pushes an empty glass into my chest. I fill it for her in the bathroom. She drinks the whole thing in one go, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and changes course. The details no longer matter. What matters is that I abandoned her, trapped her in my bedroom alone, left her panicked and helpless—for twelve hours! She didn’t think I was so cruel, so malicious, but that’s her fault, she supposes: her notorious poor taste. The accusation of malice offends me. Is this about Psycho? Because it sure as hell isn’t about me. Have I been reckless? Sure. Callous? Okay. But I didn’t aim to hurt her. And she’s been rash, too. She said she was going to call the cops—what’s that about? Worry, she insists. Something terrible might have happened to me. She was trapped; her mind raced to extremes.

“ ‘Trapped’?” I scoff. “You keep saying ‘trapped,’ but you weren’t trapped.”

It’s a full-on fight now.

“You gave me your key and told me to wait for you. What do you call that?”

“You could have left.”

“How would you get in?”

“You could have hidden the key if the situation was so serious. I could have come to your place to get it. What are you talking about?”

Lily starts to sob. She gulps out words between breaths. Her mother abandoned her, her father, oh God, and now me. These are absurd conflations. But Jesus Christ, what have I done? Lily hides her face in her hands, hyperventilating ragged triplets: fff-fff-fff, fff-fff-fff. You don’t cry like that unless you have to, unless your body demands it. A rabbit shakes; it’s an exorcism. I hold her. I coo her name. “I’m sorry,” I say, humming the words. “I’m so sorry.” She is tiny, shuddering, receding, and then, after a while, she comes back. I don’t know I’m hard until I feel her hand through my jeans.

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