“I think her ex was, like, thirty-four? When he killed himself?” he says and it takes me a minute to even realize he’s talking about Sunita’s, and I blush at my error.
“Listen, no faux pas, really. It’s just, she’s still really sensitive about it. You should know. But like in marriage, you have to kill yourself a little, right? Inside. To make it work. A long-term relationship is sexually fulfilling for, what? Maybe three years? It’s great as it is — Sun and I have been together two — you got to get creative to make it last. So you have to make a choice.”
“You can break up.” I’m not being theoretical. I mean Sunita Habersham, and him. They can break up. The earth would continue to rotate. It would be lovely, even.
“Or you can get her to realize that our societal expectations just aren’t realistic. When you have something deep, a quickie in the shallow end never hurts anyone. We’re just apes, right?”
“Oh. Another bonobo fan.”
“That’s Sun talking. She reads all that pop geek bullshit.” Elijah points at my mouth with his long, ringed finger, poking. “Those aren’t the only apes. Did she tell you about the gorillas? What they do?”
“We didn’t get that far.” I don’t want to get any further, either. I just want the women to come back. I look in the direction of the bathroom, sure they will reappear to rescue me, but they don’t.
“In gorilla society, there’s just one guy: the silverback. And he takes all the women, and kicks the other males out. The females, they stray every once in a while, but it’s permitted because the alpha male gets what he wants.”
“Sun and I are fucking.” I say it. With little outward malice.
“I know! And thanks for your contribution to our union.”
When the women get back, we’re talking about football. The real kind that involves feet. He takes the subject there the second they enter into my peripheral vision, and I let him out of exhaustion. Elijah has some “fascinating theories” on the rise of “American futbol” and its statement on the post-isolationist attitudes in the age of the Internet. I have a theory too: that he’s an asshole.
Sun sits right next to me. Close, next to me. I think this means something. I think, we are not just splashing in the shallow. We are swimming in the deep sea of love! The language of that is so horrid it sends me into a depression that lasts through the main course and into a third bottle of Cabernet.
“They have horrible wine here, unfortunately,” Elijah says, comparing the last two house wines to his contribution and I don’t know, maybe he’s finally right about something, but it’s still the kind of drink that makes things not hurt so much.
“Just amazing body. I love Madagascan grapes. We were in Madagascar — when was it, last year? Eighteen months?”
“Maybe,” Sun says. She leans over, brushes against my shoulder. “Or a long time ago, or whenever.” Sun says the last part to me. It’s almost a whisper. It’s almost just for me. It’s almost intimate, except for the fact that it’s addressed to everyone and so it isn’t.
“It was a buddhavistic moment of clarity.”
“It was okay. I guess.” Sun sniffs, then she shoots back another glass of the cheap stuff.
“It was…one of those rare moments of connection that you get. The rhythm of the drums. The surf. The rustle of the wind through the leaves. And my little Sunny.”
The Sun of this moment goes, “Okay, does anyone have a cigarette?” She gets up and walks out the door. I can see her through the window, looking left, looking right, and then nothing. She’s gone.
“Isn’t Madagascar where you encountered Chlamydia?” Roslyn asks, and I want to go home now. There is a flutter on Elijah’s brow, the reaction to a faint breeze of an ill wind, but nothing more. I reach for my wineglass and it’s just a pool of drips at the bottom, the last bottle offering slightly more of the same.
“Charuprabha. Her name was Charuprabha. But yes. That was there. She was working with Tossing a Starfish.” To me Elijah says, “They do work with the poor in the Vohipeno region. Very powerful stuff.”
“Oh, she was wonderful. I remember her visit. So well. Also, who was the Swedish friend you made? Katnis. That was it. Katnis Lumner, the young thing with the long blond hair on her legs. You make so many friends in the world, Elijah! So many connections!” Roslyn finishes her glass as well.
There are still words coming out of Elijah’s mouth, but I have reached my limit of Elijah sentences, so feel absolved of having to listen.
“Go outside,” Roslyn says into my ear, while he’s still talking. And then Roslyn pats me on the head.
I feel myself trying to get up, and I feel drunk. Tal would be mad. For her, I refuse to stumble. I refuse to recognize the uncertainty of my horizontal stability.
Sun found cigarettes. She smokes one. I walk over, and Sun keeps staring straight off to the street, one arm around her stomach. She’s wearing the white outfit again, the one she wore when I first saw her at the comic convention. There’s a jacket now, a Russian hat with flapping fake-fur ears, and the draping of a hand-knit scarf to accommodate the cold, but it’s the same.
“You wore that the first time I saw you,” is what I say to her, but it sounds like “I love you” and I don’t even know if that’s true. I usually don’t know till much later, and then from the intensity of the loss after everything goes wrong. I said I loved Becks, and I can think of Becks now, place her in a day like this one. See Becks wrapped in the red wool scarf she used to wear, those worker boots she thought made her look more working class, the ones that went into the closet forever when she became a professional. I can see Becks stumbling ahead of me, giggling drunk, as we walked through the dark from the bars of Mumbles, ocean to the right, hoping for an available minicab somewhere in the buildings to our left. I remember seeing that sight, and knowing I loved her, that I loved a mousy-haired Welsh girl named Becky, and I remember that and feel nothing close to that now. I can live in the moment, but I can’t trust the moment. This moment, where Sun exhales and I see all the smoke and I, too, want to spiral around inside her, it could be lying as well.
When Sunita turns, it’s sudden and as deliberate and forced as the smile. The earflaps jump. The rest of the smoke inside her comes out of the forced corner of her grin, and the cigarette is flicked to the street beyond.
“Don’t worry, Warren, they can’t give you cancer if you sacrifice them to the sewer god.”
“We can just go now. We don’t have to go to this concert, you know? I’m tired. This was enough. Come with me. You could spend the night.”
“Oh, come on. Nobody likes a quitter. Didn’t you like your meal? I thought the food was fantastic!” Sun’s still smiling. She wants me to be smiling. If we’re both smiling, our lips will be too tight to verbally unpack what the hell happened in there.
“That’s Elijah? That’s the boyfriend?”
“He’s okay. He can be fun. Really.”
“Wow, so that wasn’t a joke. That’s the person you’ve chosen to be your real boyfriend. Okay.”
“Hey, I don’t have to justify him to you. My relationship with Elijah shouldn’t be threatening to you, Warren. It’s a separate relationship. It has nothing to do with ours.” It comes out quick. It was already prepared, loaded in her head, and waiting to be delivered.
“So you admit it. We have a relationship.”
“Sure. Fine. But I have one with him, too.”
“But he’s a self-centered asshole!” That I say this, more than the fact that the world is kind of fuzzy and unmoored, makes me suspect I might be drunk. When I follow with, “You don’t love him,” that confirms it.
“You don’t know me. We fuck, Warren. We fuck, and we talk comic books. That’s it. You barely know me.”