Alas, even we were not spared from the shifting American attention span. Advertisers had clued in to the futility of the magazine ad, even in a targeted publication like ours. Print ads are like “tossing wet pasta down a well,” said the rep for one account, a mixed metaphor that kept us amused—It puts the pasta down the well or else it gets the hose again—as we switched from monthly to bimonthly, from bimonthly to quarterly, from quarterly to online only, from online only to newsletter, from newsletter to dust.
Only Clive was somehow bolstered by this entire experience. Not unscathed, not like me, placed with some media host family until he found his forever home. Bolstered. Even when his name still crowned the masthead, he’d begun to step away from the drier aspects of running a magazine and morphing into a full-blown psych guru. He wrote the introduction to an anthology about psychic pain. He invented a DSM drinking game that he played at intimate dinner parties with celebrities who posted videos of the experience on their private social media accounts. When the videos leaked, he issued an apology for his insensitivity that landed him on NPR. He got his own talk show for a while, which was something. Tote bags appeared with the silhouette of his face on them. His speaking fees skyrocketed. But even Clive, with his Brain-Wise? meditation kits and fancy friends, even Clive—well, I just never got the sense that any of us were as happy apart as we’d been together.
Which is why, counterintuitive as it sounds, I dreaded these dinners.
We were flaunting our former selves to our current ones. We’d become too disconnected, too leery of bridging the gap, too likely to run down a list of conversational categories as if detailing a car. How’s the family? The job? The apartment hunt? As if making deeper inquiries would open up a sinkhole of sadness from which we’d never escape. Once, at an Indian restaurant, I watched Zach sullenly picking cubes of cheese out of his saag paneer. I don’t know why he ordered it. He was in a self-flagellating relationship with dairy. I asked him if he had any fun summer plans.
“Lola,” he said, twisting his face, “are you ‘making conversation’ with me?”
We hated asking these questions. Besides, I knew all the answers already. For instance, I knew all about Clive’s apartment hunt. He’d gutted a place in my ever-gentrifying neighborhood, a duplex penthouse with heated bathroom floors and two terraces, one of which got caught in the fold of the design magazine spread about the renovations. The building was a complex for childless men who divorced early and without consequence, men who would be young at fifty. Clive had a live-in girlfriend now, a giraffe of a person named Chantal with thighs so thin, birds probably flew into them. But he was still a poster child for New York divorcees, for inoffensive fine art and impressing women half his age by boiling linguine. Sometimes I’d see him on the subway platform and hide. I was not proud of this. But I was never in the right frame of mind to deal with Clive.
And yet the temptation was always there, to grab a stranger, point, and whisper: “Ask me anything about that man over there.”
* * *
“Is Lola leaving us?” Clive barked from his end of the table.
He hiccuped but seemed delighted by it, like a baby. No one made it out of these dinners sober. Perhaps because they took place on Friday nights. Or perhaps it was because Clive never took care of the check and was impervious to all suggestions that he should. Zach’s theory was that being cheap made Clive feel like he was running for office. Gather ’round, ye townspeople, and watch the multimillionaire eat a hot dog! Mine was that it was a show of respect, like we were all on the same playing field now that he couldn’t fire us. Vadis’s was that we were overthinking it: Rich people stay rich by not spending money; she should know （she was being grossly underpaid by the bedding socialite）。 Whatever the reason, we always split the bill, which meant cutting off our noses to spite our wallets and ordering as many cocktails as possible.
“How could you?” Clive asked, feigning a wound.
“Because I’m not interested in spending time with you.”
“Liar,” he bellowed, and slapped the table.
Even drunk and sloppy, a Viking demanding mead, the man was alluring. Maybe not to me, not anymore, but certainly to the Chantals of the world. See the sharp cheekbones to which his youth had clung like a cliffhanger. See the sparkly eyes of indeterminate color lurking below the swoosh of hair that flaunted its bounty. See the chin scar from a childhood bike accident in a town with no plastic surgeons.