* * *
The cat had developed this habit of pacing around my desk chair, waiting for me to pick her up. She was perfectly capable of jumping up herself, but all it took was a couple instances of elevator service and this was what she demanded henceforth. Boots had indulged this behavior, which was fine for him （if not his eyeballs—he’d once tried to pet her with oven mitts and she wasn’t having it）。 He wasn’t the one who worked from home half the week, editing quotes for redundancy. Sometimes I found it to be a rewarding game, trying to trick our audience into thinking Radio New York had a fresh take on the world. But a science website we were not.
Every hour, the cat meowed and pretended to walk away, stopping close enough for me to grab her. Then she’d squeak as if this whole process weren’t her idea.
We were engaged in this dance the next morning when my phone lit up. I was in the midst of reading a first draft of an article on ad-hoc “rage rooms.” Several commercial loft spaces had figured out a way to make money between corporate inhabitants. The rooms charged people $75 each to smash up television sets and mirrors but offered no face shields or gloves. It was a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or a trend piece. Whichever came first. Rage rooms were more expensive than escape rooms because, as one proprietor told our reporter, “you can’t unsmash stuff.”
The text I received was from a college friend, Eliza Baxter, asking if I wanted to have dinner. Eliza and I had not been close during college, but after graduation we decided that if only we’d been mature enough to look beyond our surface differences, we would’ve been great friends. She moved to Cincinnati shortly after this realization and so now our friendship was composed of supportive social media behavior and the rare dinner occasioned by her law firm sending her here.
Yes, I texted her back, IN. Where are you staying/restaurant requests?
I scanned our refrigerator door, knowing that behind it lay a week-old container of garlic sauce and a carton of brown rice （a healthy idea whose time had never come）。 Boots would not mind making a meal out of this.
Bronxville!!! Long story don’t ask—she went on to tell the story anyway—Jordan’s mom is having a “breakdown” so staying up here for two nights one of which I’ve bargained to have to myself yr so lucky FUN, I wrote.
know where I want to go please hold …
When I clicked on the link, I brought my face close to the phone and then took it away again, playing an invisible trombone. I felt like I was being interrogated. Yes, officer, this is the spot. This is the mirrored bar and fancy cocktails. This is the Szechuan bisque, the sweet-and-sour leeks, the General Tso soufflé.
Can we go anywhere else I was just there
She sent back a frowning emoji. Forlorn. Round. Yellow. The woman was never in town. She was stuck comforting a mother-in-law who despised Eliza for idiosyncrasies like not being Jewish.
Jordan’s friend is the sous chef!!
Being forced to return to the same restaurant two nights in a row was a first world problem if there ever was one. Too often New Yorkers treated experiences as vaccinations. They went to the Whitney every two years, Coney Island every five, the ballet every twenty. I did not want to be one of those people. Besides, nobody said I was required to order the General Tso soufflé, to post videos of its salty plateau folding in on itself.
* * *
Boots had never even heard of Eliza, which was part of a developing problem. It used to be that the introduction of new people was a thread that led to tales of summer adventures or first jobs—anecdotes of import, the kind that emerge in green card interviews and lend subsidiary definition to any relationship. But after a while, a Rubicon had been crossed. We were on symbolic ground. Recently, one of his friends mentioned a desire to go fishing in the Grand Canyon. I said it was as beautiful as advertised, but there were surprisingly few fish there. Boots shot me a distrustful look, as if I’d intentionally duped him into believing I was someone who’d never been to the Grand Canyon. He was older than me by several years. Even Johnny Two-Chicks over here, with his few relationships, should appreciate the difficulty of intravenousing a lifetime of formative experiences into someone else’s bloodstream. Vadis and Clive had come the closest to fluency in my life, but only because I’d spent nine hours a day with them for as many years.
Perhaps if, like Boots, I’d been gifted with a dormitory full of bright, uncomplicated people, I wouldn’t have needed to look farther afield. But as it was, the temperamental discrepancy between our friends was the size of the aforementioned canyon. We would be at some civilized picnic in Prospect Park with these tucked-in citizens who traded in good-natured ribbing and I’d receive a series of texts from Vadis about how the DJ she’d stopped fucking had broken into her apartment and defecated on her （open） laptop. Eventually, my guilt over not adoring his friends burned off like a fog. No more farro salad, please. No more mass emails that began with “gang.” No more quantifiable drug use and convenient politics. No more yapping about the past as replacement therapy for the present.