Daphne Read online

  “Please, all that stair climber you do, I could bounce quarters off that thing. I’m about to get a roll off the bartender.” Brook paid for her Manhattan, sipped off the top third in one go. “And everything’s okay at work? Been staying on your feet?”

  “Zero accidents on the job,” I said.

  “You could tell your staff. I don’t think they’d mutiny.”

  “They think your head’s a mess, they start questioning everything you say.”

  “Hmm,” Brook said, not agreeing or disagreeing. Over the lip of her raised drink, her eyes briefly settled on a guy in bright orange Tiger sneakers and a rumpled but immaculately cut sport coat. A CEO or CTO or “founder”—she had a radar for them.

  “What was your thing tonight?” I said.

  “I’m going to have to switch champagne suppliers. There’s such a run on the stuff, they think they can charge whatever.”

  Since Brook graduated Berkeley, she’d run her own events business. She’d started out herding Miller Lite girls around Pleasanton sports bars and ended up running high-end restaurant launches and huge private parties down on the peninsula. In a world where everyone was trying to radiate success while praying for actual profits, Brook’s margins narrowed and narrowed. I was proud of everything she’d built. But I hated all the flirting and promising and haring around she did to keep it up.

  “You should’ve seen this guy.” I pointed out Moroccan Hair Oil. He and his friends were now mixing with the Marina girls. “He dropped this godawful line on me.”

  “At least he’s kind of cute.”

  “Objectively.”

  “Good enough, isn’t it?” Brook said. “Come on, lady, if I hadn’t seen you pee your pants in gym, I’d be all over you right now.”

  “Stop trying to make me laugh.”

  “Is it that bad? Lame jokes are going to put you on your ass?”

  “No, it’s just—”

  Someone bumped my elbow. More people were jostling for a spot at the bar. One of the Marina girls started whooping again. “What?!” she shouted at Hair Oil. “You’re buying mimosas for everyone?” I felt an involuntary, uneasy smile stretch my lips. My teeth were on edge, like I’d chomped down on tinfoil.

  “How about some pool after all?” I said tightly. “Some breathing room.”

  Brook knocked back her cocktail. “Want one? I can’t let you drink that cheap white.” She measured me up again. “If you’ll be okay?”

  I hesitated. “I’ll try to be okay.”

  “We are going to have ourselves a night. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay.”

  Everything Brook and I said these days sounded performed, like we were playing some bad cover version of our friendship. Distance, always distance, but never, I thought, between my best friend and me. “I’ll just be at the bar,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I worked my way to the corner, dug out some quarters, racked up a game. I’d spent too much of my early twenties circling pool tables in empty dives, drunk enough it was like a glass barrier had slid between me and the world. I drew the cue back, relished the long shatter of the break. A stripe went in. I sank another, then another, didn’t have to police my thoughts, just move, find a rhythm, insulate myself inside of it.

  When I finally looked up again, Brook was at the bar with the guy in the sport coat. I couldn’t blame her for it. I wasn’t going to. I really shouldn’t—white smoke, cattails. I looked away, saw the group of friends guffawing again. From a distance, it looked so theatrical. Still, part of me reached out, yearned to laugh along. Next to them, Hair Oil and Marina Girl were making out. I watched their slow deliriousness, their smiling and murmuring, sealed off in their own world, brains flooded with dopamine, an ache that kept pulling you back, his lips, his neck, his—

  “Shit, they should sell tickets.”

  “B-rook, p-lease . . .” I took a moment, got my tongue back. “Don’t sneak up like that.”

  “You were so lost in the show, I couldn’t resist. Here, drink up. I find a breath of menthol gives it an extra something.”

  I took a long sip of my Manhattan, but a gummy, saline taste still sat on my tongue. Well, I could deal with embarrassment. White smoke drifting. Except when it made all the riskier stuff flare up.

  “Look at those two. The thing about skinny jeans, you don’t have to read a guy’s mind.”

  “Christ.” I had to put down my drink.

  “Sorry, I had to work him a little.” Brook was locked on Sport Coat again, calculating. “He said he wants to do something huge for Halloween.”

  “You’re planning that far ahead?”

  “Always.”

  “Take a night off. Help me finish this game.”

  “You know I suck at this. You’ll be scraping me off the floor for a change.”

  I couldn’t help a little laugh, had to prop myself up with my cue. Brook reached out, touched my arm, just to tell me she was there. For a few minutes, as we knocked balls around the table, telling dumb almost-jokes, we slipped into some version of how we used to be. Then Sport Coat started settling his bar tab. I felt Brook stiffen. Business was about to walk out the door.

  “Go ahead.”

  “You sure?”

  I palmed a pool ball, bounced it off the cushion. “At least he’s kind of cute.”

  Brook looked at me skeptically. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, what does that mean?”

  It meant that it drove me crazy when she led with her sexuality, especially in her work. And that she was even more sensitive about it than I was. But neither of us wanted to get into that. “Just don’t let him walk without your card,” I said.

  Brook crossed the room, the girls and boys in tight jeans parting before her, heads turned in her wake. Even in a roomful of strangers she moved like the host of the party. At the bar, she clamped a hand on Sport Coat’s arm. I focused on the table: the calm green baize, the light ringing off the balls, making them stand out starkly in their little pools of shadow, the dented cue bumping through my fingers, the thunk of balls dropping into pockets, the angle, the spin, the—

  I shanked the eight and clattered the cue down in sudden, ridiculous frustration. The buzzing, between a headache and a shiver, started at the top of my skull. I found myself staring around the room again. Longing, envy, remorse, hair-trigger rage—for once couldn’t I just give in? Never mind the pain, I could just thump down in a heap, my strings trailing around me. These people wouldn’t even pause, just keep on with their headlong Friday nights. White smoke, picnic tables, cattails, the willows shaking their ribbony leaves, noon light on the river, diamonds of light on the . . . My concentration kept scattering, the buzzing rising. My knees went soft. God, I just wanted to let go! Still, I sank slowly. The cue slipped from my fingers, knocked into the balls. I watched the eight roll into a pocket as my head drooped forward. I began to fold, squatting down into my heels and, thinking I might tip back, just had the control to tilt forward, my forehead against the side of the table, sticky from several million spilled beers, shit, my skin sticking to the fake wood, shit, shit, I would never get up from here, they’d just have to sweep me up in the morning, with the cigarette butts and shattered glasses, but at least, Jesus, at least, I was in the corner where no one could—

  “Hey, you all right down there?”

  A male voice. Not Hair Oil, mercifully. From my less than commanding vantage, I could only make out gray jeans with what appeared to be sawdust peppering the cuffs.

  “Um, excuse me, need any help?”

  “Fine,” I managed to get out. “Fine. Just look-ing for my quart-ers.”

  “You dropped them? Where?”

  I went one syllable at a time—“I’ll fin-d th-em. Just nee-d a sec to”—ran through my visualization as fast and clean as I could, and by some miracle managed to lever myself back up to standing or, anyway, leaning against the table.

  “Ah, okay . . . You get them a
ll?”

  I forced my fluttering eyelids fully open. He wore a tan work jacket and a black shirt, also dusted with sawdust. His hair was shoulder length, dark, shot through with silver. But he seemed young, twenty-five maybe, three or four years younger than me. I’m five-eleven. He was several inches taller, wiry with broad shoulders, though he was trying to stoop his way out of them. His eyes had a muted, oyster-shell glimmer, between gray and blue. His fingers were scraped and scratched, his features blunt and masculine. Yet he wore a tentative, inquisitive look. And the smile he gave me then wasn’t so much shy as oddly private. He seemed already to know something secret about me.

  “Don’t worry about it”—I was back in myself again, more or less—“they’re probably permanently glued to the floor.” Faux casual, I leaned further into the table.

  “Think maybe I got next game,” he said hesitantly.

  “Aren’t you supposed to put your quarters on the table?”

  “That’s me up there.” On a small chalkboard with all the other names rubbed off, I read OLLIE. His script was surprisingly florid. “You have to put your name up here.”

  I hesitated, too. “Fine. But you rack. My break. I beat myself.”

  “So, uh,” he said, doing everything he could not to seem as bashful as he obviously was, “what’s yours?”

  “What’s my what?”

  “Your name.”

  “Sorry, I can’t . . . It’s Daphne. What are we playing, house rules? Slop?”

  “Either way,” he said, “I bet you’ll crush me.”

  He put in quarters. The balls thundered out of their cage. My break was clumsy. Nothing went in. Ollie took down a cue. The walls made him hitch up his shoulders and strike the cue ball at a high, awkward angle. A solid trickled into a corner pocket. He looked up at me, grinned toothily. “You here with friends?”

  “Sure,” I said, too brusquely.

  “And, uh, what do you do? You work downtown? The peninsula?”

  “You don’t want to know what I do. You really don’t.”

  He scrutinized me again. “We calling shots?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Okay, um, sorry, excuse me, I . . .”

  As he circled the table to line up his next shot, he brushed against me. Over the years, I’ve gotten used to tracking the slightest signals from my body: The lingering tastes and tiny twitches. The tightening of my muscles—stomach, throat, bowels—heat rising in my face, my scalp beginning to tingle. The buzzing in my skull. These are my early warnings, the ripples that can become waves. But something else rang in me as his hip brushed mine. I smelled him, and he was not exactly fresh from the shower. Still, it wasn’t his slight musk but something I couldn’t place, a resonance across the senses, a steady hum, a thin, liquid sweetness, like nostalgia, vibrating right through me.

  I put out a hand for the table. But whatever it was, in the crush of that bar, had faded. My turn. “Nine ball”—I drew back the cue—“side pocket,” and in a daze sank the shot.

  At the bar, Brook was laughing/grimacing at something Sport Coat was saying. I tried to catch her attention, but she was hard at work. “Fifteen,” I said, “in the corner.”

  Ollie and I played in silence, only the clicks of the game passing between us. The bar clock read ten. The crowd was elbow to elbow. “You been watching what’s happening in Egypt?” he said. “Tahrir Square and everything?”

  I’d only caught bits of coverage at the gym, before flipping to reruns of The Grand Design. “The Middle East?” I said. “Too fucked up for me.” I made a hasty shot, caromed into the eight, and scratched. “Rules say that’s game.”

  “We’re playing slop, though, right? Come on, let’s finish up right.” He placed the cue ball on the spot, lined up an easy shot, missed it, shrugged. “Your turn.”

  I sank two more, sank the eight, and felt a catch at the base of my esophagus. Game over. At the bar, Sport Coat raised his hand for two more drinks. I saw Brook crumple a little. I failed again to catch her eye. Fine. I needed a clean escape anyway.

  “Another?” Ollie said gently, picking up, perhaps, on my turmoil.

  “No, I’d better flee for the night. It’s way past time.”

  “You live nearby? It’s just, I was heading out, too, if you wanted someone to—”

  “Okay. But, really, it’s not far.”

  Outside, it’d stopped raining. Fog cast a glimmer over the parked cars, an obscured moon giving everything the dim luster of tin. The thump of the jukebox inside made out here blessedly quiet, and I felt a moment’s relief at getting out on my own two feet. But then he was standing so close I was overwhelmed all over again. I reached into my bag for my phone, to distract myself. It was dead.

  We set off. There was hardly anyone on the streets. The damp had driven the homeless and the junkies to their SROs and shelters. I walked briskly, one arm clamped over my bag, the other swinging like a soldier’s. Turning onto Capp, I accidentally knocked my hand against his. A crackle of anticipation went through me, a couple of drinks enough to make me skittish, my emotions like horses that wanted to surge ahead.

  We came to my building. “See, really not far.”

  He whistled, low and strangely mournful. “You live here?”

  “I know, I know. My broker said this block was ‘on the edge.’ ”

  Meaning I got a deal, and that my building looked aggressively resplendent among the peeling-paint Victorians and auto body shops, the dingy corner store where you could blow dust off the Nutter Butters and chicharrones. Ollie and I stood considering my building’s four-story bamboo-and-glass façade, the hanging boxes of primrose and calla lilies that softened its lacerating sheen. THE GROVE, read the sans-serif aluminum nameplate the developers had hung above the entrance.

  “So, hey,” Ollie stammered, “I should let you go. But I wanted to, you know . . .”

  He looked like he might kiss me. My mouth went cottony and slack. My legs twitched to flee. But my feet were rooted like stumps. The willows shaking their heads.

  “I mean, if it’s okay with you, maybe we could—”

  “I really should go up.”

  “—trade numbers.”

  Relief, buoyancy, gratitude—he wasn’t going to kiss me.

  “Why?” I said. “I’ve been a bitch all night.”

  He gave me a quick piccolo squeak of a smile. “Well, I’d be annoyed, too, if I’d lost seventy-five cents.”

  “Okay, okay, got your phone?”

  He dug an ancient flip phone out of his pocket. I heard myself giving him my actual number while my thoughts rioted with what might still be possible. Maybe I’d surprise us both, ask him upstairs, get half of a quick thrill on the couch, kick him out before he started noticing my lapses. Maybe I’d ask him to stay the night, just a warm body encircling mine. I’d make us omelets in the morning, be blithe and brisk, make it clear he wasn’t coming back. Or there was the route we were already on: an awkward dinner date or two, the explanations—the educating—his sympathetic/panicked questions, eyes darting around the restaurant, wondering when exactly would be appropriate to get the hell out. Or, shit, maybe it could work for a while . . . Ask him upstairs, omelets, climb back into bed, we could spend all day . . . Shit, shit. The buzzing, a faint, menacing glimmer—I had to close my eyes as I came to the last digit. Willows, cattails. My lips parted, and I heard myself changing it, from a four to a six.

  “Want me to call you?” he said. “So you have mine?”

  “Phone’s dead,” I mumbled. “Won’t get it. Not till la-ter.”

  A ripple of concern passed over his face. “I’ll try you later, then.”

  “Tex-t.” I could hardly get the word out. When I’m having a mild attack, or trembling on the edge of a bad one, I can’t always predict what will go first: eyelids, tongue, fingers, knees . . . Every emotion is a different chemistry, a different electricity shot down a different part of the nervous system. This particular encounter—desire, fear, self-thwar
ted triumph—was making my tongue as thick as taffy. “Tex-t is bes-t,” I finally finished. “I on-ly do tex-t.”

  He looked at me with curiosity. Or was it freaked-out confusion? “Okay, no problem.” He held up his phone, grinned again. “I think this does text.”

  I could still give him the right number. Things didn’t have to go the way they had before, the few times in the last decade I’d actually tried to date. “Hold on. Ollie . . .” The buzzing subsided; my drooping eyelids came slowly up. Maybe it looked like I was batting my eyes. Or like I was drunk. Or tired. Or insane. “Ollie, I . . .”

  “Yeah?” His concern was thickening.

  “I owe you a game.” I couldn’t own up to it, the fake number.

  “Next time!” As he turned to leave, an impulse flashed up from the depths. I grabbed his jacket collar, pulled him to me. The buzzing leapt back up, rogue current prickling down to my fingers and toes, my whole body shimmering. I’d call it deadening, but that’s not quite right—it’s not anesthetic, I feel everything. It’s just that things switch off, stop working. My fingers curled into loose fists, my shoulders slumped, my knees once again started dissolving. Cattails, picnic tables, willows, diamonds of light, a man, a man waving. I stayed up. Only just.

  In fact, I had to lean into Ollie a little. Which meant I didn’t so much kiss him as mush my face into his. “Hmmggh,” he murmured—with pleasure or, more likely, surprise at my amorous little head butt. Clumsily, I pushed him away, separated us. “Tex-t me,” I said, my voice ripe and slurred.

  He didn’t ask what was wrong, thank God. Puzzled smile on his face, he turned and slipped off into the moon-tinged fog. I stood watching him go, still rooted in place. Then I went in and took the stairs up to my apartment. Carefully, one at a time, clinging tightly to the rail.

  FOUR

  YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO EDUCATE EVERYONE.”

  Over the years, I’ve come to understand that not everything Dr. Bell told me was right or even particularly responsible. In this pronouncement, however, his prescience, and his ego, have been vindicated.