December 10, 2024
Couple Embracing, Egon Schiele, from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Scofield Thayer, 1982
Due Diligence
Terry’s date is perched outside a vaguely Nordic cafe, legs crossed, rubbing his buzz cut, wearing dark spindly sunglasses, staring directly into the sun. From across the street, Terry finds him attractive enough. This is the first time in her open relationship that her boyfriend has sent her a man, and she had worried that the mechanism of desire was contaminated, but this boy in black chinos seems fine. She watches her date wait and wait. Against the fall wind she swaddles herself in an oversized denim jacket, which belongs, she realizes now, to Jonathan.
Terry unlocks her phone with her face to message Jonathan. She stares at his last text, the yellow bicep emoji. She types I miss you, but that’s not what she actually feels—she just means I’m feeling weird right now—so she deletes it. At the moment, she misses their dog, always referred to as their son, whom she spent the morning walking, bathing, and documenting. She worries Jonathan saw the texting ellipsis, so she impulsively sends an emoji of an anatomical heart.
Her date has abandoned his book for his phone. Terry has sailed past on-time, beyond that middle ground attributable to the city’s misgovernance, is now undeniably rudely late, and has had enough therapy to know that this is her power play and her test: would he wait, even in a context not suggesting sex? Yes, fucking is the point—anything more would be outside her relationship’s contract—but she knows now at twenty-six that the physical act of love is better if he at least acts like he values you for anything else, so here we are. Her date drops his phone onto the table.
When Jonathan first suggested opening their relationship, Terry’s life billowed with possibility—but at the same was pinched by a paranoia that he wanted to fuck one of her friends. Though she objected to stereotypes in general, she believed that all men wanted to fuck their girlfriend’s friends and would if given the opportunity. Here her boyfriend was, requesting an opportunity. She countered: no friends. Jonathan just smiled, as if those well-retained teeth were capable of saying: why would you even feel the need to stipulate that. Finally he added, “Of course, baby.”
Her date rubs his head like if he gets to the center, Terry will be there. She checks to see if he or Jonathan have texted her. Neither has. She returns her phone to the pocket of the jacket she took from Jonathan so long ago she’d forgotten it was his. She rests her head against the slender tree she’s been leaning on and observes her date—Matty, she’s never said his name aloud so she tries it on, Matty, Matty, on her tongue, and decides she finds it silly, maybe too silly to say in bed—until her eyes lose focus, and she sees the blur that would reign if she’d forgotten her contacts, which she would never do.
Terry knows nothing about the woman Jonathan has been fucking since the relationship opened—like a car door, a trap door, a zipper?—not even her name. She once smelled her, something floral, a shampoo or perfume, as Jonathan slid his arm under Terry’s neck near dawn on a weekday. Later that morning, she half-wept in her office’s tiny bathroom, partially because this was an infidelity trope she was contractually forbidden from inhabiting, thus blocking her from at least achieving some righteous catharsis, which frustration upset her even more, because they had taken betrayal and given it another name, so to treat it by its first name was to act insane; she thought the very pressure of this contradiction bordered on gaslighting. This thought returned her to the office’s single-occupancy water closet where she attempted for the second time to cry as silently as possible, and as quiet sex can be all the more erotically thrilling, this crying session was all the more tragically gratifying because hushed.
Jonathan framed the opening as an opportunity for Terry to try dating women, which she’d expressed idle interest in and trotted out at parties while tipsy with queer friends from college or intimated to Jonathan himself on cozy disclosure-happy couple’s mornings, sometimes merely illustrating how the chances in life that one took for granted have a way of becoming, when glimpsed from the bourgeois capital of adulthood, pale beacons on a distant barbarian shore.
As they’d been living together for years (two), and he’d stated his intention to one day pay off all her student loans, the couple was undeniably on the marriage track (he was always using this phrase, marriage track, despite not proposing, not that she necessarily wanted that, but what exactly was the image here, a steam train?), but he’d expressed his concerns around her entering into such a contract without “due diligence,” perhaps implying that she was a lesbian who hadn’t admitted it to herself; she preferred not to think too deeply about the implications.
So Terry went on dates with women. At the very least, it had been interesting to try another kind of courtship. Some girls would sext you right away, which was less threatening than when guys did it and more fun. She examined cool tattoos and met shy pets and avoided communist roommates. There was this general performed awkwardness that allowed one to be forthright, like, oh I can’t believe I’m saying this right now, but still saying it. Terry had trouble focusing on what these women were saying because she was contemplating, another one of the stereotypes that seemed true to her, the classic ‘fuck them or befriend them or be them’ question. It just wasn’t clear. But maybe this lack of clarity wasn’t a problem; perhaps it would result in a richer romantic blend and a more stimulating relationship. If there was one thing you could say for dating men, it was that where everyone stood on the ‘fuck, befriend, be’ question could be quite clear.
It was unfair for Terry to fuck new people while Jonathan didn’t, obviously. She herself suggested during that day-spanning inciting negotiation—they’d been walking their son (“His name is Prosciutto!”) when the amendment occurred to her—that Jonathan be allowed to fuck women too. He said if she was sure. She said of course babe and gave him a kiss and felt smug about her own equanimity. Later she was like, wait. There seemed to be a certain asymmetricality here. Something a little gendered? After a few weeks it was decided that, ethically, Terry should fuck guys too.
So here is a guy, across the street, apparently too agitated to read anymore, rabidly bouncing his left leg. Her phone buzzes, and it’s finally him. Hey Terry! Just making sure I had the time right? The time they agreed to is visible above this message. Digital ellipses waggle and subside. She has the intrusive thought that though she is attracted to Matty, she is too pretty for him—people would say that if they were at a party together. Affiliation with her attractiveness is something she can bestow as a queen does knighthood. It’s one of the perks of looking like she does.
The fucking of guys has been largely theoretical, except for one incident with a colleague at a work happy hour. Jonathan and her coworker had actually shaken hands once before that night, and Terry had been struck then by their identical haircut, build, and laugh, not to mention presumed financial picture, regional background, and values. Jonathan’s eyes were an agreeable brown, however, while Eric’s were an indecent blue. Eric was basically Jonathan if he’d been turned into a vampire.
As their happy hour wound down, the fantastically drunk colleagues had been standing next to each other. All Eric did was lean. And then they were in his queen-size bed—Terry realized then she and Jonathan had been sleeping on a king—and she was laughing at a dainty lamp with a pull chain on the bedside table as Eric tried to squeeze inside her a penis like an oversized novelty check. Her body was rigid from, she didn’t know what—nerves, her sense of betrayal, maybe just being drunk and out of the game?—and made an executive decision to veto this. As a younger woman, she would’ve let him facefuck her and finish in her mouth in consolation, which at that moment would feel obscurely powerful but would leave behind a spiritual not to mention physical residue, which would be too draining and disillusioning today. Terry was wiser now, better at doing the thing she wanted to do in the first place. She told him to holster his dick. He said he felt they had this connection, but he’d ruined his, no their, shot at experiencing it, ruined it by having such a humongous cock; he kept exclaiming how he wished he wasn’t so big, astonishing the number of times he lamented how rarely and inconveniently robust was his penis—and so couldn’t they at least cuddle? She relented. They snuggled. Terry already had a man she was in love with. Why was she here with this guy she barely knew, with whom it would be awkward forever because they’d now seen this weird naked part of each other, literally and spiritually? His gray joggers were around his ankles. He was poking her thigh with his dick. It was an obscene echo of when someone is poking you with their finger to get a rise out of you. Terry found herself wondering at what age would she be spared being poked with a penis. This had been happening with surprising regularity since thirteen. Half her life she had been poked by penises, with no end in sight. Maybe when she was old and her husband’s, presumably Jonathan’s, dick no longer worked, it would stop, but even then she would probably be poked with a soft dick, which was maybe worse.
As Terry watches Matty literally stand up for himself at the cafe, forty minutes past date time, with some of his dignity yet intact, she has a vision of him poking her with his dick. She has to compare this likely future with a scene from earlier that morning, she and Jonathan splitting the paper into preferred sections, drinking coffee he’d made as they preferred it, both her feet in one of his hands, their son snoring on her chest, Jonathan sometimes breaking the silence to make her laugh, all of which made it impossible to accomplish the task she was attempting, but she liked the interruption better than the task anyway—at times like this, she felt she occupied a snowglobe, a hazy unpuncturable bubble of her own preferences. This was what one worked for, it seemed, even if one had gotten it a bit earlier than one intended to, all the work of going on dates and maintaining relationships and living life and the actual work of jobs, all of that was to end up with what she already had.
She opens her notes app and drafts a message to Jonathan. She knows she can’t change the terms and conditions of her relationship over text, but this is classic modern therapeutic practice, type out your feelings as if you’re sending them. In person later, she will explain firmly but openly and empathetically that they’ve given it the college try, but this lifestyle isn’t for her, and by the end of the week any contact must be severed with their relationship’s third parties. She realizes she won’t even say most of this in person as she types that she finds this entire episode distressing, almost disturbing, feels he framed his desire to fuck other women as an offering to Terry, when he was actually sacrificing the stability of their relationship to his own appetites. She would prefer if in the future, even if it was uglier, that he simply be upfront with her about his wants; candor is better than manipulation, the ugly truth preferable to the pretty lie. She types and types and is having a pretty good time.
“Terry?”
Matty is standing a few steps further than if they’d been chatting, hands in his coat pockets, tone and eyes suggesting beseeching distrust. I’m so relieved you’re here, they are saying, please don’t tell me you did this to me on purpose—but also, my dignity demands that I say, how dare you do this to me. But Terry’s beauty is better than any excuse. The injustice of this is an abstract shame about the world. She acts from instinct.
She hugs him.
“I’m so sorry I’m so late!” she says. “How are you? How late am I?” He looks like he is actually about to tell her how late she is, so she rushes to say, “Would you actually want to just go on a walk? You already have coffee.”
This puts him on the defensive.
“Oh yeah sorry,” he says, though he seemingly doesn’t realize he’s apologizing. She walks in a random direction. He is beside her. The initial exchange was charged, but here is the reality: they are two strangers conversing circumstantially. Terry hates awkwardness more than any other discomfort. She’s already decided this date doesn’t matter, and she won’t have anything to do with this guy beyond this hour, and this knowledge frees her up in ways she finds exciting.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she says.
“It’s nice to meet you too,” he says.
Matty checks her out and trips. She ignores the resulting coffee stain on his T-shirt. They walk a bit. The silence is unmovable until she easily moves it.
She rambles about her “son,” how she was late in part because of him, how His Name Is Prosciutto. Matty is a good boy and laughs at the name. It’s going well and then there’s nothing left to say again. They’re practically jogging.
“So Jonathan”—if this mattered, she wouldn’t have said his name aloud, but she needs anything to happen—“told me you had some sort of funny experience with me? I don’t feel like I recognize you.”
Matty looks hurt by her boyfriend’s name. She feels bad, but then she thinks it’s stupid and unreasonable on his part, so she won’t cater to it.
“It seems like weirder not to acknowledge the situation,” she says.
“That makes sense.” He passes his coffee to his other hand.
“I can’t wait to hear the story,” she says. She smiles in a way both she and her boyfriend know how to do and so never do to each other.
This part of town is for people who have succeeded in starting the most difficult period of one’s life (parenthood, as she imagines it), one which requires a lot of money to live. She and Matty have to part to pass mothers and sons (it always seems to be mothers and sons) once a block. It’s funny to her that this modern amorous arrangement is happening in perhaps the lamest neighborhood of the borough.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Matty says, acting like he’s relenting but obviously wanting to tell.
“All I’m hearing is I’ll be flattered.”
“You want me to humiliate myself.”
“Think of it as being vulnerable. Women love that.”
He stops for a Don’t Cross sign, but there are no cars.
“Explain in your own words,” she says, commanding him now, “how we came to be on this date.”
He looks at the yoga pants in a shop window as he says it.
“I fell in love with you in the park.”
“Wow.” Laughing, she has forgotten the day and her anger, and is flattered, if mildly concerned, and is in this conversation instead of floating above it; like anyone, she wants everyone to fall in love with her. “That’s a big word,” she says.
“I thought you were this friend of mine. I fell in love with my friend then. But it wasn’t my friend, it was you. Do you know what I mean?”
“Okay.”
“I saw my friend after, and it wasn’t the same—it wasn’t you. It wasn’t her either. Now here you are. Do you know what I mean?”
Does Terry know what he means? She has heard every possible romantic elevator pitch by now, so she’d thought; she has to admit she hasn’t heard this one. She tries to picture him with his hair grown out in a shirt without a coffee stain.
“Did you declare yourself to her?” she asks.
“I told my other friend—the one who was fucking your boyfriend—who told her—one assumes in an effort to humiliate me. Before your boyfriend and her broke up. If you can say break up in that situation.”
“Wow.”
“It’s been incredibly confusing. I guess your boyfriend thought you’d appreciate the story.”
“Okay interesting!”
It was fun, but now it isn’t. She had no idea this woman and her boyfriend had ‘broken up,’ and though none of this matters, her pride means she’d prefer her date not know she hadn’t known.
“Sorry this is so complicated,” he says. “I think maybe there was more dignity involved when people just cheated on each other.”
There is a scalding silence. She finds a big black dog to drool on her hand. She talks to its owner. This lasts longer than you’re imagining. Terry and the dog owner, a woman in leggings who’s kind of her plus a decade, discuss walking one’s dog in the rain. Matty doesn’t rush her.
When the walk resumes, she absently takes Jonathan’s arm; it turns out it’s Matty’s. This is a good sign. They are close because they are tangled in one big love. It’s like discovering you’ve had the same bad boss. The wind blows her nearer to him.
“So I look like your friend?”
“Weirdly, no.”
They are laughing.
“You’re around the same height. You’re a little taller. You’re nothing alike really. She’s not even blonde.”
“Blondeness comes and blondeness goes.”
“I’m sorry for saying this—she’s pretty. But you’re punishingly beautiful,” he says, slipping into a kind of mock oratory. “I feel I should prostrate myself. It makes me uncomfortable to look at you directly. Men write songs about women like you now, but they used to just kill each other.”
“That’s kind.”
“Ten isn’t a high enough number.”
“Some people, Matthew, find it offensive, even disturbing, to rate women by numbers.”
“I guess I’m positing that if one were to numerically evaluate women, one would object even to that number.”
“Okay, Matthew.”
“It is Matty, traditionally.”
“But this friend of yours, so you fell in love with her.”
“It’s not that simple. I didn’t fall in love with her. I fell in love with you.”
“That does sound like something a man would say.”
“But my other friend and her, the one who your boyfriend was fucking. The two of them are now like Uhauling.”
“Isn’t that kind of like a slur?”
“It’s literally not. My gay friends use it all the time.”
“Are you gay?”
“No but—”
“So.”
“Are you?”
She releases his arm.
“Anyway, they’re dating,’ he continues, waving his hand around. “And it’s hard to even get a hold of either of them, they’re so in the thrall of the early thing. I despise this about people dating. The couple is a fundamentally anti-social institution.”
“But couples are just obviously more important than friends. In like every sense.”
“You’re given no incentive to develop. If someone already adores you, there’s no motivation, because you can always be like, well, this person approves of me.”
“There’s more to life than developing, I mean—”
Terry is fighting with Matty, but he seems not to notice this. As he interrupts her, he is the most relaxed he’s been so far.
“A society without couples would be a better developed society. We would try to be better people, both in the like nice-to-be-around sense and like aspirational, talented, successful.”
“I’m my best self when I’m with someone. I’m my most generous.”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe. When’s the last time you dated someone, Matthew?”
“Matty.”
“I wonder if I can make you understand this if you haven’t actually experienced it.”
He waits for her to make him understand. Honking cars clog the intersections of this crowded street of prestigious shops. Sweaty men wheel dollies of white cardboard fruit boxes into the grocery. They are not strolling the placid gardens of wealth but are after all living in a borough of America’s greatest city.
“When I was growing up I was super Christian,” Terry says. “I saved myself for marriage. Well, I didn’t save myself for marriage, but I was saving, I was trying to save. People talked about how good it was to have God watching over them, and I would be like yes sure totally. My teenage brain was like you’re all full of shit, but I’d remind myself to be Christian and be open. I had this giant guilt. I was doing stuff with boys. And that was God for me for a long time, just the guilt. But then some bad things happened and I started praying on my own. I did it more and more. Without even realizing I was doing it, I would just be praying. I found out I had this net under everything, especially looking back now that I’m not feeling it anymore, the world was stable and like magic—even if it meant I would cry the next day if I even looked at my boyfriend’s penis, there was this stability that I guess you call God’s love. Even if I felt guilty at least there was a sense that my guilt mattered. Okay, sure. Society. Success. Whatever. Here’s what I’m saying. I am a person. I am a person who used to feel so lonely I would literally vomit. Now I know Jonathan will listen to every single dumb detail from my day. I’ll listen to every small thing about his too. It’s not that I’m making myself care. I actually already do care, about tiny stupid things from someone else’s life. That’s kind of magic. Smirk or whatever but I’m serious. The fact that there’s someone whose smell makes me literally drunk. I’m doing the crossword and half-listening to him take impossibly long showers. He moves and the water splashes differently. The sound of him in there is as comforting to me as any song was when I was teenager. It’s not a small thing. Maybe the comfort or complacency keeps me from being a supreme court justice or whatever you’re imagining but we don’t experience life like that. We feel like shit or we feel loved.”
Matty chucks out the brown ice that was his coffee.
“So what’s he like?” Matty asks.
“Jonathan?”
“Jonathan.”
“He’s—” she says. “I guess you would call him a reformed bro. He likes food and loves wine and spends a lot of time and energy learning about both. He’s serious about work but silly with me. I never would’ve guessed that about him. We fly out to see his family several times a year. He’s one of these men who take a high paying job meaning to save up and take a decade off or whatever. But that somehow never ended up happening. He doesn’t see himself in the other people who just took a high paying job. I think he feels weird around his colleagues. He’s really hot.”
“I’ve seen him.”
“Ah, right.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think my boyfriend is really hot, Matty?”
“If you’re into that kind of thing.”
“I am.”
“That’s good.”
“It is,” she says. She sees a deli she likes. “I’m hangry,” she says. “Let’s get off this street.”
Terry is belligerently polite ordering the vegetarian sandwich she’s had at least once a month for years now. Actually, she’s miffed because when she comes here with Jonathan, he orders the second sandwich that she considers the other half of her order, and had Matty been willing to eat, she would’ve highly recommended that sandwich and had the experience of eating at her beloved secret deli, whereas now, because he is “not that hungry,” she is getting only half of the experience, which is basically the same as none. She orders a hot coffee, specifying black even though she knows the milk and sugar are on the front counter.
Matty wanders the aisles, and it’s nice to have a break, enough time to wonder what she’s hoping to accomplish and whether she’s enjoying this. She decides, net, she’s enjoying it enough, though she’s not sure about her goals. Part of her maturation, however, has been that she feels more comfortable acting without being able to answer questions like that and not overthinking and just following her own impulses and, to be corny, bliss.
Terry thanks the counter guy no fewer than three times, and she and Matty sit outside. He holds the unwrapped other half of the sandwich as she eats. She asks what he does for work. He explains that he’s a composer, kind of. She recounts that she studied piano growing up but abandoned it senior year of high school: she’d been so worried about announcing her early retirement to her parents, only to discover that they didn’t care at all, a great relief but also a shift in her understanding of who these people raising her were, how much of what she took to be them was just her projected understanding of expectations they didn’t even possess, though of course they’d put that expectation of their expectations and, above all, that nervousness in her to begin with—and so she felt, what exactly? Somehow betrayed?
Terry is interrogating her childhood in play-therapy and drinking charmingly crummy coffee on a little bench in a ritzy neighborhood with an artistic suitor. She has all this and a boyfriend too. Life is nice now that she’s eaten; even the windchill is pleasant. Matty’s legs are splayed, and he’s put on a beanie. He watches a mother drag a teenager tapping a phone. Matty’s arm is behind the bench so a little around Terry. She can smell him, in a good way. At first she worries one of Jonathan’s friends might pass and see and not understand that their relationship is open and pity Jonathan and deride her; but it wouldn’t matter, because she and Jonathan would know the truth, and this gives her a sense of superiority. She is regent upon the isle of their coupledom; even if other countries think them a backward people, she’s still a queen.
Terry pushes herself against Matty, not nuzzling by a long shot, but enough to generate some physical and social warmth. At the very least, he’s listening. He tenses up; she likes that too. His shampoo is bright, artificial, citrusy. She is transported back to her first boyfriend, with whom she cuddled on couches at parties in front of all of her friends and God. She never even kissed that boy. She is sure this is the exact same shampoo, here and now, a decade later. She wants to ask the brand, but the parallel physical moment to this mental bordering on spiritual revery is making its own demands, including a silence that would require more will than Terry keeps on hand to break. Matty kisses her forehead.
She’s walking before he’s even up, and they enter the handsomest section of this neighborhood, trees slouching like tall freshmen, brownstones with windows unto real paintings and grand pianos and furniture actually from the mid century. It’s the kind of neighborhood that makes you wonder when you will live in a place like this.
She is telling him about her office and her job that is so generic and dull as to defy narration, unable to remember whether he asked. He nods. He makes a joke about marrying rich that is so close to a thought she’s just had that for a moment she believes they have a rare connection—but then reminds herself that this is a thought pattern to which she is prone, this overexcitement and the subsequent overcommitting—is it such a crime to want to be in love?—as pointed out many times by her therapist. She explains that Jonathan says all the time that she won’t have to work someday, and she never knows how to respond, because it’s a welcome notion, in some ways a dream scenario, but also so presumptuous.
She takes Matty’s arm again.
“I dunno,” he says, gracelessly reverting to a previous subject. His tone suggests he is confiding in her; they do have some intimacy. “I feel hurt by this thing. My friends dating each other now. I’m not sure I can defend why.”
“Feelings don’t have to be defensible.”
Her tone is of genuine exasperation.
“That does seem true,” he says.
“Honestly,” she says, because he’s shown at least some vulnerability, “I’m more in the dark here than you’d think.”
He nods in sage sympathy.
“What really happened with them?” she asks, back in a voice like they are just gossiping, even though she’s asking about her boyfriend’s quasi-affair.
“Basically my understanding of it is, they met at a wine class, these sommelier certifications people get to increase their social capital.”
“Or for their love of wine?” (He is kind of a dick.) “When was this?”
“I dunno, months ago. Mary only told me the details after the breakup. Or whatever you want to call it.”
“Mary,” Terry says, trying out the name.
She and Jonathan opened their relationship less than two months ago.
“Interesting,” she says. She lets go of his arm.
“Yes,” he says. He takes it back. She lets him.
“It was all fine is my understanding, they’d fuck, he’d take her to restaurants she’d been wanting to try—it was basically what Mary likes to get out of these pseudo-relationships with, no offense, asshole guys with a lot of money. And then she dates women to taste the sweeter, headier wines of true love.”
“She sounds charming,” Terry says.
“You’d be shocked,” Matty says. “You think you’re sturdy, but then it turns out your true center of gravity was Mary’s love and approval all along.”
“So your friend is like super manipulative?”
“Some people are just that cool.”
At the very least, this man she hardly knows has some fundamental, barely concealed contempt for her boyfriend. His late note of glee suggests that romantic contact with her would constitute an obscure victory over a guy with whom he feels a generic rivalry. All of this is to say nothing of, even if his intentions are pure, how he seems to be weaponizing the emotional strife at the center of her life for greater purchase on her body.
They have come to the park that is the jewel of the neighborhood, its site of greatest aspiration, because its perfection is lined with apartments or houses, or whatever these units are, overlooking its quaint completeness, where people walk their dogs around but not on the small circle of grass no one even sits on most of the time; they rest on the surrounding benches and look into it like a water feature. Sometimes young people break the seal, and adults follow suit. Two teenage girls in strange dark baggy clothes have done this, but it’s so cold by now no one joins them. The bench is situated such that Terry and Matty are watching the teens like TV.
“Basically,” Matty says, “I guess what I’m saying is, maybe you didn’t know this or maybe you did, but Mary didn’t know that your boyfriend had a girlfriend.”
“So basically, he didn’t tell her?”
“This is my understanding, yes.”
Terry takes her arm back a final time. He doesn’t try to retrieve it.
“I’m sorry,” Matty says. “That was shitty.”
“Then what happened?”
“I’m really sorry.”
“But then what happened?”
“They broke up. If that’s the word. I don’t think they’ve spoken since. And like I said, she’s dating my friend Alice. Who I famously thought was you.”
“I see.”
“Yes.”
“I think I should go.”
“Terry.”
“Yes?”
“I would really like to see you again.”
“That’s very flattering.”
“I mean it, I don’t think—”
“I think you just told me my relationship is exploding.”
“Can I see you when it’s done exploding?”
“This isn’t a joke really.”
“I’m sorry your relationship is fucked,” he says. “It was really great to meet you.”
He spreads his arms for a hug, and Terry steps into them. He is holding her tighter than she expected, and it feels good, so she presses her face into his chest. She isn’t sure if it’s nice because she likes him as a person or because she needs the medicine. She squeezes her eyes to head off tears, but only severs one, so it’s rolling down her face when he unhands her. She worries the teens are watching this and mocking her because they’re too young to know they should pity her.
“You’re crying,” Matty says. “That’s not good.”
“I don’t understand like”—she’s choked up—“the whole point was not to lie. It would’ve been so easy to just not.”
“This feels fairly consistent with human behavior to me,” he says.
The wind blows, and Matty leans forward to kiss Terry.
She turns her face so he kisses her cheek. The citrus of his shampoo is as sickening as flavored vodka. She’s crying hard enough now that it’s clearly awkward for Matty to be standing there with her in public.
“Well now I really feel like I can’t leave,” Matty says.
“Please go,” Terry says. “Fuck, dude.”
Still holding the other half of her sandwich, he leaves.
A moment later he is back. He forgot his beanie on the bench. He stands there a second, but she won’t look at him, so he leaves again. He chirps, “Bye,” like none of this means anything to him, which it probably doesn’t. She checks her phone to find Jonathan responded half an hour ago with a picture of their son chewing a huge branch. He also asked when she’d be home. The question seems to her another breach of contract.
She pulls up Matty’s Instagram to find Mary in his followers. She studies dozens of her pictures and who has liked them. The two women are physical opposites, hard to say whether that makes Terry feel better or worse. She is hoping to find evidence of Jonathan here, as if this would be proof of something. At a certain point, she is just trying to get to know the woman with whom she’s been sharing her boyfriend. Terry watches Mary’s story, knowing her name will be visible, and it occurs to her that this woman, Mary, likely did this exact same process in reverse when she found out. If Mary had watched Terry’s story, Terry wouldn’t have even noticed, because she hadn’t known what name to look for. She is no longer crying. This process of ‘research’ has made her feel surprisingly calm and in control.
The teens haven’t noticed a thing, are totally entangled, one in basketball shorts, presumably freezing, the other in enormous jeans. They’re just texting next to each other but manage to make it seem like they’re fucking in public. These girls are so young, and all of this is theirs, the grass, the park, the borough. The one in jeans rubs the one in shorts’ legs to warm her up. Terry stares, thinking nothing at all, watching them until they start making out, as she knew they would, and she watches that too. She pulls the jacket around herself. Jonathan can wait a little longer on her response. While it’s unclear to her whether or not this is an example of modern therapeutic practice, Terry begins drafting a direct message to Mary.
James Chrisman’s writing has previously appeared in n+1 and Joyland.