You, Again(88)

She tries to remember the awful things they’d said, rekindling her anger just long enough to get past the heartsick feeling.

Occasionally, it feels like Ari is placing a rug over a gaping hole in the floor. But sometimes you can only address one crisis at a time.

After a few weeks of shadowing Brad, Ari leads a workshop on her own: a small session on a boat cruise around the D.C. harbor. After the workshop, while the employees of some awful lobbying firm enjoy the “premier dinner buffet,” Ari stands outside on the deck, shivering in her peacoat, watching the Washington Monument pass. Incredible how humans have been shamelessly building these behemoth penises for thousands of years.

She adjusts the coat to cover the hideous blue button-down, pulls her shoulders back, and snaps a series of four selfies: two silly, one semi-silly-but-still-cute, one serious/sexy. “See,” these photos say, “I’m carefree. I’m finding myself here.”

She types the caption, “Enjoying the nation’s #1 erect phallus,” then posts all four pics, rearranging the order several times. It’s probably the first time she’s taken a boat selfie since she and Cass got married. Maybe it’s fitting that there’s a monumental dildo sharing the frame in this one, too.



* * *





SCOURING THE BINS at Academy Records is Josh’s perfect time-wasting activity. It feels good to put on pants with a non-elastic waistband and join the fraternity of middle-aged men who communicate by one-upping one another with their pointless knowledge of free jazz and minimal techno. For the last few minutes, he’s made a conscious—some might say valiant—effort to tune out the insufferable manbun lecturing his normcore companion about the “auditory detritus” in Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land.

He refreshes his email app, even though he has push notifications on, and it’s highly unlikely that his fucking embarrassing query to a chef in Sonoma he’d worked with briefly four years ago will get answered a mere two and a half hours after he’d composed it.

If it gets answered at all.

Still, the fact that he’d sent it is a tangible thing he can cross off his to-do list. I’m not, in fact, spending all my time feeling a combination of bitter and heartbroken and angry and sorry for myself.

I’m also sending emails.

Over the last three weeks, certain memories have already lodged in his brain, expanding and contracting. Walking to the train with an angry ringing in his ears from the shock of their last interaction. Waiting for her to call and apologize. Hearing nothing.

For a few days, he hadn’t spoken to another person. Hadn’t gone outside. He’d just sat on the sofa with his slowly dissipating fury, like an inflatable mattress with the tiniest leak—every fucking thing in the apartment reminding him of some stupid thing Ari had said or done.

Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” plays over the sound system, its two chords repeating like a meditation. Sometimes melancholy music has the inverse emotional impact. It’s a strange form of masochism. Can you take this plaintive piano melody? You can? Then how about this Miles Davis solo, bitch?

Tues, March 14, 6:03 p.m.

Briar: Excited for tonight?

Remember your POSITIVE talking points.

I peeped her IG and determined that she’s like five ten.

A lot of people have that size kink thing where the woman is tiny and the man is a tree, but I think two people who are roughly the same height are VERY aesthetically pleasing.

Btw let’s talk photo filters soon.

You need a better selfie strategy.



Speaking of masochism.

He taps the link to the woman’s Instagram. Beach vacation pictures. Elaborate restaurant dishes. She’s been a bridesmaid three times this year and it’s only March.

Josh absentmindedly taps the home icon, refreshing his feed.

At the top of the screen is a ghost. A face he hasn’t seen in months.

Thanks to this fucking algorithm that knows exactly how to toy with his brain, Ari is staring back at him, smiling.

Josh quickly shoves the phone into his pocket, as if it doesn’t obey the principle of object permanence.

“The tracks on this extend past the very idea of beginnings and endings,” Manbun opines from a few feet away, his voice projecting like he’s on a stage. “There’s just one aural frame.”

The piano melody seems to get louder over the sound system—complicated and flourishing over the constancy of those two chords.

Josh puts the record down and retrieves his phone again, holding it with both hands, reopening Ari’s post. He swipes through the four photos, each one sending a completely different message. It’s a post specifically devised to confuse him.

He slides the carousel of photos back and forth, looking at all of them, letting his brain memorize the slightly new angle of her face in each photo. Being careful not to accidentally tap the heart icon with the pad of his thumb.

The caption reads, “Enjoying the nation’s #1 erect phallus.” Does it have some meaning beyond a mere dick joke? Has she met someone? Is it code?

He’s been skipping therapy. Some topics are just too big to explain in a fifty-minute session. Better to go without and wait until he gets a handle on the narrative.

He doesn’t want the fucking help right now, anyway.

“Peace Piece” dissolves into discordant notes, the song almost breaking apart.