It’s quiet—some fucking Sade in the background; really, Rhode Island?—and I have no competition. There are two other dudes here, construction workers I think, they’re both wearing rings, more interested in the news than the girls. There’s no band to get in the way of things and tease the young girls, there’s no crowd, not even with all the excitement involving the dead girl. New Englanders are stingy and they hibernate at night, as if going out makes you into some kind of whore.
Of course I am not gonna go for Jessica Salinger. That would be too creepy since I was just at their house today. I have to put the moves on the friend, the one I knew she’d be out with, because girls like Jessica always have a friend around, and she’s always a little shorter, a little more drunk, a little more down to earth, literally. This friend is tapping her straw and removing it from her cocktail. This friend is bored. This friend is gonna be mine. Easy.
It’s been so long since I hit on a girl in a bar, but I know how it works. All you do is stare into the girl’s face, reflected in the mirror ahead. You let her friend notice you staring. You don’t look away. She meets your gaze in the mirror and you crack up and you apologize—it’s so good to start with sorry—and you tell her that you didn’t mean to stare but you couldn’t help it.
“You’re just so gorgeous,” I say. “And I don’t mean that in a creepy douche kind of way and I’m not gonna try and pick you up when I see you’re very clearly here with your friend.”
And then I take all my marbles away and flag the bartender and order a gimlet—I want to know why Forty was so into them—and now the girl puts her hand on my arm. “What’s your name?”
“Brian,” I say. Like Brian from Cabo. “Brian Stanley.”
“Well,” she says. “I’m Dana and this is my girlfriend Jessica. Are you here by yourself?”
“Yeah,” I say. “What about you girls? Are you here by yourselves?”
Jessica rolls her eyes and this is exactly what I want. My gimlet comes. I sip. I ask Dana what she’s doing here and she tells me she’s here to provide moral support for her friend Jessica. Jessica is feeling more invisible by the second—it won’t be long now—and I sip my gimlet slowly. Dana is Jessica’s roommate in New York and Dana is a first-year law student and Dana loves this cute little town and Dana loves this song and she loves this bar and Jessica does not love being a third wheel. She stands. “Do you guys mind if I get out of here?”
I apologize—I am Mr. Manners—and Dana says she should go and Jessica says that’s ridiculous. She says she’s tired. Dana doesn’t know how she’ll get home. “It’s not like New York where you can just call a cab,” she says. “No, I should go.”
Jessica says she’ll be in the car. Jessica Salinger has no use for me. I tell Dana it’s unorthodox and presumptuous but I could give her a lift home if she wanted to stay.
“Thank you,” she says. “But I don’t even know you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to . . .”
Two hours later, Dana is a teetering drunk girl and she’s in good hands with me. I help her out of the bar. I open the car door for her. “Just like Say Anything!” she says.
I start the car. This is it. I’ll have to keep up the gentleman act and escort her into the Salinger house. And she’s so drunk, she won’t be able to make it up the stairs alone. “So,” I say. “Where am I taking you?”
“Ugh,” she says. “Hang on. I have to find the address in my phone.”
I almost fuck up and tell her I already know the address. But she unlocks her phone—1267—and she bites her lip and she scrolls through her e-mail. “Got it,” she says. “Thirty-two Starboard Way.”
My head snaps up. That’s not Peach’s address. “Are you sure?”
She raises her phone and shows me the Airbnb page and I am fucked. A whole night wasted. “I usually stay with Jess and her family,” she says. “But they have some crazy shit going on right now. Did you see the news about the girl who they think was killed here? That was her cousin.”
“Really,” I say. And I look both ways and I use my blinker and I curse Tinder. “That’s some scary shit.”
When I escort Dana into her Airbnb, she tries to kiss me. I tell her I’m sorry. “I’m getting over someone,” I say. “I’m really sorry. I just can’t now, you know?”
Dana gets it. She says she’s been there. But she has no fucking idea. I go back to my shitty motel. I should have gotten an Airbnb.
47
I go down to breakfast the next morning and why in the fuck would I ever want to make my own waffles? Do I look Belgian? I itch and I think my room has bedbugs. And the number one thing I did not miss about the East Coast: the humidity. After the brisk chill of yesterday, Little Compton, Rhode Island, is suddenly in the midst of an unplanned natural event they call Indian summah! The girl at the front desk beams, sunburnt, small-minded: “Didja come heeah foah the Indian summah? It’s a wicked pissah!”
I came here to get my mugofurine, thank you very much, and my hole in the wall is a fetid hot zone of bacteria, I know it, and this morning when I showered, I felt like I wasn’t alone. I feel very cramped in here, as if my civil liberties have been chopped up by the bitch at the front desk, by the eleven-year-old kid who cut in front of me in the waffle line.
I am nervous. The kid’s fat dad whistles. “I think you’re beeping.”
I yank the top of the waffle iron and my waffle is blackened and there is a long line; it would be a dick move to make another. I remove my raw-on-the-inside, black-on-the-outside freebie carb from the old machine and stick it onto a plate that is sticky, that clearly didn’t make it into the dishwasher. There are kids everywhere, talk of water parks and a drive-in an hour out and isn’t it October? What are all these people doing here? I didn’t anticipate the crowds, the talk of blueberry syrup and gas prices, the New England of it all. The coffee is weak—no shit, Sherlock, I know—and the dad plops a waffle onto my plate.
“You look like you could use a lift,” he says, and he winks and it is a kind world, a fair world. I need my energy. I eat the waffle and I drink the coffee and then I do a drive-by at Peach’s house. It’s more crowded today than it was yesterday and I can’t go anywhere near it now that I fucked up with my special delivery and Jessica Salinger thinks my name is Brian. Is someone finding that mug of piss right now? I get out of the car. A couple of old ladies are power walking.
The skinny one: “And you know apparently she was a lezzie.”
The skinnier one: “Do they think that awful mother of hers might have killed her? You know I wouldn’t put it past her.”
The skinny one: “She’s putting on weight.”
The skinnier one: “She shouldn’t be going around in those flats. She needs lift.”
At least Peach didn’t come from one of those happy families where nobody can conceive of anyone in the family committing a crime. New Englanders like murder as much as they enjoy the music of Taylor Swift and the antics of the Kennedys. I want to hear more parking lot banter so I go to town, where it’s more crowded.
I enter the Art Café and Gallery and immediately I know this was a mistake. Heads turn. Elderly locals bemoan the nosy New Yorkers sniffing around and look me up and down. Were it not for my California tan I’d probably be strung up on the flagpole outside but fortunately there is a distraction. A flock of grown men in spandex enter, cyclists, and they are regulars here and they are welcome and I am invisible again. I purchase a coffee. I wrestle with the bad pump on the milk dispenser and a cyclist advises me to hit it once, hard. It works. My luck is turning.