Dilrod was Stefan’s oldest friend. Since high school their values, places of work, tastes in women, music, movies, and books — Dilrod didn’t read, actually — had diverged dramatically, but they’d known each other so long that time itself provided a string of connection. By keeping in touch they were staying loyal not so much to each other as to their own young, reckless pasts, which they somehow hoped — though, Jill thought, they’d never admit this — to meet again.
She ordered Thai for dinner, which seemed like the easiest thing. She hadn’t cooked a real meal since Phoebe came. Sometimes Stefan did, or her mother visited for a weekend and built up a battery of stews and lasagnas she left behind in the freezer in individual Tupperware containers, solid Midwestern comfort food that Jill had hated as a teenager but now made her weepy with gratitude.
“This is great,” Stefan said, coming into the kitchen. It was only the dinner table set with real plates and place mats and utensils but it seemed, after the chaos of recent months, an unaccountably luxurious, grown-up affair. She’d even put candles out, though Phoebe’d started crying so half the holders were empty. Even so, they smiled at each other. “I’m so excited about this,” he went on. “A real meal, it feels like ages.”
“I just hope it doesn’t mess her up, like that spicy broccoli I had that time,” Jill said. “Or those cheeses.”
“Yeah,” he said absently, turning away, then went off for more candles. Jill sighed. Stefan was amazing with the baby; he coddled her, changed her diapers, rocked her to sleep, did half of everything except the breast-feeding. He was all she could have wanted in a father. But in the past few months — after he went back to work — he’d started making these ironic, self-parodying jokes about having an “old lady” and calling the baby a “rug rat” and being an old-fashioned dad who didn’t change diapers. Everybody was supposed to play along with this, because to imagine that’s how he truly thought or felt would be ridiculous, but of course by dint of making the jokes he was also raising an issue, a thin whine of complaint and protest.
Also, this: he didn’t look at her the same way. He didn’t look at her much at all.
Maybe this was temporary. It was a time of adjustment, necessarily difficult. They were bound to lose themselves a little. Maybe they’d have a good night, with a friend, and be grown-ups together — though of all people, she thought, it was a shame they had to be grown-ups with Dilrod.
He showed up at eight, an hour late, smelling of vodka and cigarettes, hugging them both a little too hard. His name wasn’t actually Dilrod, it was Alan Dilworth; but in high school Dilrod sounded funnier. While she reheated the pad thai in the microwave Stefan made drinks, asking all about the new woman, where they’d met, who she was.
“She’s awesome,” Dilrod said. “She drove me to the airport so that I wouldn’t have to pay for long-term parking. Finally I’ve met somebody who anticipates my needs instead of putting herself first.”
Jill held back a snort. To say this was the source of Dilrod’s relationship problems was so off-base as to belong in a different country from the base, a different solar system. What killed her about Dilrod’s women was that they were invariably intelligent, attractive, and reasonably successful; they were independent filmmakers, schoolteachers, dental hygienists. She always thought they could do better than Dilrod, but apparently they couldn’t.
Though he wasn’t, she had to admit, bad-looking. His vibe was teenage prepster gone to seed: chest muscled but stomach slightly paunched, his wispy blond hair like dandelion weed around his head, his eyes a little bloodshot but still a piercing blue. He wore striped collared shirts and frayed khakis. He was in sales for some computer company and had managed to hold on to his position despite the tumult of the past ten years, so he must have been good at it, or at least had a knack for survival. He stood in the kitchen with a drink in his hand, gesturing, his mouth open, so obviously happy to see Stefan that you had to like him for it. He’d added two days on to his business trip just to see them.
“So, dude,” he was saying, “you’ve got to come out and meet her. Come next month, for my birthday. Take some time off work.”
“Things are crazy right now.”
“You always say that, dude.”
“It’s always true.”
Stefan was happy too, laughing and shaking his head at everything Dilrod was saying. They would never hug each other, these two, nor write or call during the intervals when they were apart; but stick them in a room together and they almost swooned with affection.
She put the food out, and they ate. Phoebe’d been so fussy that Jill had curtailed her diet drastically, restricting all but the blandest foods, and now the shrimp exploded on her tongue. Would all experiences be as dramatic as this when she experienced them again, this time as a mother — spicy food, alcohol, sex? She was still waiting for that last one, waiting for both of them to feel something other than exhausted. Dilrod was telling a long story about his ex-wife and her frightening Croatian mother. Stefan was laughing, harder than seemed warranted. Jill sat back and let her attention wander. Being a mother was all about attention, every moment on a hair trigger, alert for the baby’s cry. But right now Phoebe was asleep, thank God, and she’d let herself drink half a glass of wine and her mind go pleasantly blank. She felt her muscles, her body, the container of her physical self, as if for the first time in years.
“Sweetest,” Stefan said, smiling, “I think you’re falling asleep.”
For an hour or so she nodded off with the baby, and when she came back they were arguing. From the other room it had sounded serious, but it turned out to be about movies. In particular, a director whose films Stefan loved and Dilrod thought was ridiculous.
“Any time there’s a mansion in a movie,” Dilrod was saying, “and in that mansion there’s a tent, and inside that tent there’s a person listening to Nick Drake — I hate that person and I hate that movie.”
“I love Nick Drake,” Stefan said, slurring a little. During the time she’d been gone, they’d finished off the vodka.
“You know who I’m into lately?” Dilrod said, shifting in his seat. “Billy Joel. Valerie and I saw him in concert last summer and I have to say he totally rocked.”
“You can’t sit there telling me that you hate Nick Drake and Billy Joel totally rocked. This is an impossible statement.”
“ ‘This is an impossible statement,’ ” Dilrod mimicked, in a high, girlish voice.
Stefan’s red face deepened to beet. Jill stared at Dilrod. She’d forgotten what a dick he was. She could see what he obviously couldn’t — how his scorn still lashed at Stefan. When the two of them were together, Stefan returned to his former self, the awkward son of German immigrants who was desperate to fit in. She’d been to Stefan’s hometown in Illinois, where he’d slammed beer from funnels and joked with football players and talked about girls in God only knew what way. All those guys were sales executives and lawyers now; Stefan was the outlier. He was a social worker married to a freelance book designer, and his parents smiled stiffly while others in the neighborhood bragged about how well their kids were doing.
College had set him free. That was where he learned — just as she had, around the time they met in a philosophy class — that there were legions of them, the misfit kids from all over the country, the readers, the too-smart and the uncool, the secret music fetishists and film trivia mavens, and that they could get together and form their own army, their own band. Weirdness was their passport to citizenship in this new country, and taste was the stamp on it. Liking Nick Drake — well, that was practically a law.