The Lights Read online

  Harry looked at the room for support. “All he has to do is say it,” he said reasonably.

  Jason’s face was all bunched up now and mottled purple.

  “Uncle,” he said in a barely audible croak.

  Harry released him and Jason flopped to his back and gasped for air.

  Harry patted his cheek.

  “Look at this face,” said Harry.

  Jason shoved him away. There was a film of angry and embarrassed tears in Jason’s eyes.

  “You’re a jerk,” I said to Harry, and stooped to help Jason up.

  But as I did so Harry put a hand to my shoulder, really only fingertips, and stopped me with strange gentleness. He shook his head, also gently, but with authority. I don’t know what I found more offensive: the implication that helping Jason up was the incorrect behavior, or the immediate realization that Harry was right.

  Jason caught his breath and got to his feet. He put his arm around Harry and said, “Now let that be a lesson to you.”

  It is customary for members of my sex to express disdain for the idiocy of boys, but I believe this to be a deception born from envy of the luminous simplicity not accorded to women.

  Soon we called it a night. Jason and Harry were in the hall, but I stopped to pee and when I came out the filmmaker was obstructing my path to the door. I could see in his face that the affectation of whimsical eccentricity had fallen away, the real thing underneath.

  “If you want to stick around, I do have some blow,” he said.

  I said I was all right.

  “Are you seriously going to leave with these clowns?”

  “My boyfriend really likes your movies.”

  “Something tells me you mean that as an insult.”

  I smiled and brushed past him.

  “One time I got a hand job from Amber Heard when she was still a lesbian,” he said.

  “A hand job isn’t much to brag about, even from a lesbian,” I said.

  He looked at the floor, contrite. “I know.”

  Downstairs, we got sidetracked at the bar where the last embers of the party still burned, the way that late, liminal hours create a desire for unveiling, to connect with each other more slovenly and vitally. I knew I should go home; the later I was out the more of a slap in the face it was to Mark. I announced I needed to go because I thought being talked out of it would be a fun game. It was. We wound up sitting on the leather couches with a Hogwarts poet from my year who could have cared less about the festival but had been furnished a pass my boyfriend at home couldn’t afford and some kid who had been circling her all night. Harry had started circling now and I thought it would probably make for a good show. The girl was close to Jason’s age with a kitten diffidence that screamed the type who had been socially and sexually inconsequential in high school but whose Margaret Thatcher glasses and leggings would have made her worshipped by the nerd elite in undergrad (though, between you and me, she did not have the thighs for it). Harry’s rival was a wispy, bearded software designer (presumably an alumnus of the nerd elite), though even I could see how ill-matched he was: despite his greater sensitivity and attunement to cultural trends to which Harry was proudly indifferent, the fact was behind the blasé mask she was still more intrigued by the swaggering jock. Before long, Harry had us playing a drinking game of his invention called Truth, which was simply Truth or Dare without the Dare. Its crass elegance and lack of originality yet another reminder of his advertising career—in the number of times I had seen this game played during my Hogwarts career I could think of no more expedient way to get a room full of adults talking explicitly about sex. Of course it was a given we were almost immediately trying to one-up each other with who could come up with the most transgressive questions.

  Harry began with the poet, who was the ostensible motivation for starting the game in the first place.

  “When was the last time you were spanked by your father?” he said.

  She smirked coyly. “It depends who’s playing Daddy,” she said.

  “Wow,” said the fifth wheel with a nervous laugh. Although I certainly had no interest in how things turned out with the girl apart from schadenfreude out of principle against Harry’s sexual success, even I considered this kid a fifth wheel.

  “How big is your dick fully erect?” I asked Harry (there was no specific order to gameplay; by Harry’s design, whoever was quickest and loudest was the asker).

  “Wow.” Nervous laughter.

  “Six and a half, seven inches.”

  “It is not.”

  “More than six and a half, less than seven.”

  “In inches.”

  He shrugged, pleased with himself over how quickly this game was increasing his sexual mystique.

  “You have to tell the truth!” I said. “If you don’t tell the truth you’ll only have daughters and have to self-publish your first novel.”

  “God’s honest truth,” he said.

  “That’s like half your height!”

  Even if I had accidentally done him a favor, I could still remind her how short he was.

  “And it’s actually twice my body weight,” he said. “Like a hummingbird.”

  Jason made a quizzical face.

  “You shut your ornithologist mouth!” said Harry. “All right you little ornithologist—have you ever jerked off thinking of someone in this room?”

  Jason flushed. I was thrilled. He had to tell the truth. The cosmology of this game really was reductive somehow, as though simply entering into it vested the rules some metaphysical jurisdiction.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Of course it was as much in Harry’s nature to put his closest friend in a deeply uncomfortable spot as it was not in him to allow me to enjoy it for too long.

  “What about you, Oberlin?” he said, eyeing me accusingly.

  “Me? No! Oh my God, no! Oh my God, that question may actually put me off masturbation for the rest of my life, so thank you.”

  The girl looked at me with complacent superiority, like an audience member watching a predictable sitcom plot unfold.

  “Oh my God, I love your tights,” I said. “You have amazing legs for tights.”

  After the game exhausted itself the girl wandered out for a cigarette. Harry and his competitor were at a stalemate: whoever went after her would have been giving the other an advantage in his eagerness, so neither of them followed. Also the kid (evincing some taste, finally) started trying to impress me with his screenplay idea that supposedly he and his friends were going to shoot the next year. It was an instantly forgettable premise, equally pretentious and derivative, a zombie satire about a hot new app that shuts down the frontal cortex, but that people were still buying en masse because everybody else had. Harry could not contain an audible groan, as though at a sudden odor.

  “What is it with cocksucking zombies?” he said.

  “How have you even seen enough movies to have an opinion?” said Jason.

  “I read an article in The New York Review of Books,” said Harry. “But what does it say about the empire that we’re afraid of dead people who want to go to the mall? What happened to fucking minotaurs?”

  The kid bristled, but tried to sell it as nonchalance.

  “Well that’s not how the financier sees it,” he said.

  “Who’s financing?” said Jason.

  He didn’t want to hear about this stupid movie any more than anyone else did but knew that encouraging him would wind Harry up. It was a mildly cruel joke at the kid’s expense, but I flattered myself to believe it was to punish him for turning his attention to me.

  The “financier,” it transpired, was the father of a friend with oil money.

  Jason inquired about the budget.

  “We’re trying to keep it pretty small-scale, like five hundred grand.”

  He
stated this “modest” figure with self-vindication.

  Jason continued to ask encouraging questions until Harry rubbed the bridge of his nose wearily and interrupted, “You have five hundred thousand dollars in an escrow account?”

  “The money is there,” the kid asserted with a curtness implying he didn’t know what an escrow account was.

  “Look,” said Harry, “I consider it an inferior medium—no offense,” (this to Jason, who nodded, none taken) “but even I know how hard it is to get someone to give you one dollar, let alone a half million of them.”

  “Well it’s a good thing you’re not the financier,” said the kid, who went on answering Jason’s last question about locations.

  Harry interrupted again. “Make you a deal. If you keep talking about this, I’m gonna zap you.”

  The three of us looked at each other in confusion over what this could possibly mean. The kid then resumed talking.

  “I’m gonna zap you!” said Harry, happy for the first time this conversation.

  “—and I have a friend who can get us a permit for a night shoot at the Capitol building for some real production value.”

  Harry stood. He took the kid by the shirtfront, pulled him from his chair, and shoved him with explosive force. The kid stumbled back, reeling into the wall. Both Jason and I laughed, in part disbelief that this was what “zapping” was and in part because of the instinctive cowardice that makes it more convenient to align against the bullied.

  “Nice,” said the kid, from an unexpected and shaming reserve of dignity. “I hope you’re all very proud of yourselves.”

  Harry thrust his chest forward as though he was going to charge, and the kid hastily retreated from the bar.

  Harry was quiet, his face confused like a chastised dog. He was sensitive enough to know his performance had gone over the line and was trapped between commitment and apology. He shrugged it off, grunting, “Told him,” and wandered off, in search of the leggings.

  I told Jason to give me a ride home. Idling on the street outside my place I said, “Is that normal for him?”

  “For him normal is relative,” he said evasively.

  “He didn’t have to do that,” I said. “That wasn’t a joke. It was the completely unnecessary humiliation of another person disguised as a joke.”

  Jason withdrew. The cognitive dissonance that resulted from being confronted with the flaws in his hero worship was a reliable way to push him into Fort Jason.

  “And the way he was just so casually dismissive of, you know, the thing you want to do with your life? Do you honestly think it’s possible he isn’t threatened by how good you are?”

  Jason looked out the windshield, quiet. Then he said, “If we can agree I’m not asking you to not hate each other, is there any way you can hate each other but leave me out of it?”

  My heart went out to him. His youth was like a tattoo: a thing right in front of you it was easy to forget to see. It really bothered him that his friends couldn’t be friends. Up through undergraduate people of diverse temperaments are forced to form a functional ad hoc community, and he had not had enough exposure to the adult world to have discovered the mean truth that sometimes an initial disliking is too much to ever overcome. Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences:” the fact that we were more alike than we were different made the contempt that much starker.

  I took his hand.

  “What’s this?” he said, touching the nail of my thumb, which is dented in the middle and discolored.

  “My mom shut a door on it. Not maliciously. She was high.”

  We were quiet. He ran his fingertip along this old injury. We both looked ahead at the fog in the street, waiting for one of us to say something calamitous. There was the sound of Jason’s phone getting a text message. I withdrew my hand.

  He checked the message, and shook his head with a soundless laugh. I craned my head and he angled the screen so I could see. It was from Harry:

  Bitch has a BOYFRIEND. Poets be shoppin’…

  I smiled, too, despite myself. Boys being boys… I told Jason I’d see him tomorrow and got out of the truck.

  the plight of the plus one

  For the rest of the weekend Jason and I attended screenings and events together. We drank champagne with breakfast and poured cocktails into my running bottle for screenings and walked half the city between venues and also just to walk; every time you step out of a dark theater and the sun is still out, the world becomes a dazzlingly pleasant discovery. Like a dog, I came to recognize Jason’s walk: his long stride, the percussion of his boot heels. People would see us around, and the whispering followed. I didn’t care. At Hogwarts, like any environment where everyone knows everyone else’s name, gossip is the currency of choice, especially after I had so recently been his vocal detractor. But they didn’t understand, I told myself, without going so far as identifying the source of their confusion.

  Then on Monday, the whiplash. I could not get back to work despite having lost the weekend, and when I tried to read my eyes slid off the page. Returning so abruptly to my routine was like getting the bends, like my bones telling me everything was wrong. Mark asked if I was okay. He transitioned seamlessly from being jealous of my privilege to expressing sympathy for my being unaccountably upset over it. This only contributed to my feeling of overwhelming and immutable wrongness. I said I was just tired. I wanted to tell him, Your idol tried to fuck me and when’s the last time you did.

  The next week we hosted a small dinner party at Mark’s suggestion. Initially I vetoed this plan; it had been years since I’d had an independent social identity and had almost physical aversion to presenting a united domestic front when I could be out at bars. I told him there was something a little patriarchal about him volunteering me to play wifey-poo; we both knew realistically all organization would fall to me. I could not have cared less about this argument—cooking for friends is an activity I have always found enjoyable—but being my mother’s daughter I reflexively maximize the leverage of a given situation, and I really really really don’t feel like it will always be trumped by obscure fault on the other party’s end.

  Mark apologized and sulked. At first I was surprised by the extent of his disappointment, but then it was obvious that his desire for it to happen had the same root as my desire against: he wanted to be part of a life that was including him less and less.

  I relented, and the dinner was most glaring as a model of civilized behavior, even from Jason and Harry. As is the norm in literate circles, Harry’s first stop was my bookshelf, and, upon evaluation, gave it an approving nod that I did not interpret as veiled judgment or sabotage. To prevent the conversation from getting too Inside Baseball with Hogwarts gossip, Jason began discussing with Mark the various merits of the Red Camera versus the Alexa with Harry nodding along as though he didn’t consider the ephemera of film technology brain-meltingly boring; Mark progressively warmed up through the wine and feeling like part of the group and Harry indulged him with flattery. He began a discourse on the plight of the plus one, the strain it put on relationships. I had to remind myself to stop pouring wine in my glass after it was over two-thirds full.

  “When my wife went back to school I was a plus one, and it takes a lot of strength of character to support someone through that,” said Harry.

  “You were married?” said Mark.

  “Yeah. Then she fucked one of her professors in the coatroom of a party. But she was a no-good treacherous whore who will rue the day she did that to the next great American novelist.”

  “Oh, man,” said Mark.

  “Anyway, you found yourself a good one,” Harry informed me.

  “Well, she’s the lightning, I’m the bottle,” said Mark.

  I smiled and discreetly pressed my fork into the flesh of my thigh under the table hard enough to leave marks.

  wings

  On
e day in November Jason and I had plans to see a movie that was high on our anticipation list, a fall awards-bait kind of thing that had garnered advance notoriety because of some kinky sex scenes that had caused it to be initially rated NC-17. We still saw movies together regularly, preferably just the two of us, other times in groups where it became impossible for me to focus on what was on-screen if we were not sitting next to each other. On one occasion, we went to three in a single day; there was by now a compulsive quality to the way we saw everything, this vicarious rush of kiss kiss bang bang sublimating the increasingly incautious truth neither of us spoke, this unspoken thing drying my mouth so that sitting next to him in the dark sometimes it felt like swallowing was ten thousand decibels. So it was a rude shock the day this particular quasi-dirty movie opened he sent me a perfunctory text saying he couldn’t make it with no further explanation.

  I took a moment to present myself as less frantic than I was and called him. He didn’t pick up. What?! Clearly he had his phone with him, he had only just texted me. I nearly called him again but decided this would definitely come off as desperate and refused to give him the satisfaction. What satisfaction? Was I really so narcissistic to believe my emotional reaction to this rain check was even relevant in the face of whatever had motivated it? And was it a rain check, or an outright cancellation? It was all so infuriatingly cryptic, but reason prevailed that calling again would be fruitless regardless of losing face because he could clearly see that I had called, and was owed an explanation—this phrase OWED AN EXPLANATION throbbing in my thumb as it redialed.

  Once more he didn’t answer. I was in a state. On the one hand there was the indignation he had just ignored two of my calls, but on the other supposing there was a perfectly valid explanation—or even if there wasn’t—the amount of face I had certainly lost from the second call. But now there was nothing to do but wait, and maintain as dignified and casual a façade as possible until he contacted me. Waiting was the only option. Unless…

  I decided to send him a self-effacing text message communicating how not a big deal it was to dispel the illusion of being a basket case on my end, in the event he was simply not in a position to make a call but believed one was due because I myself had called twice, thus giving him the opportunity to simply text in response the explanation I WAS OWED. I composed such a casually self-effacing message, including a highly specific inside joke between us, revised it several times to my satisfaction—including the addition of a typo to make it appear more dashed off—and sent it.