It took a few minutes for Matt to emerge from the bathroom. He had a large wet patch on his knee, but it wasn’t too pink. “You think they’re salvageable?” she asked, sort of hoping the answer was no.
“Oh, definitely. It’s no big deal.”
“Whew. I try not to get too attached to my stuff, but it’s like…not to be the ‘capitalism is a prison’ person, but it’s kind of true.” Laurie resettled at the opposite end of the couch where he had been, just as he returned to his place there. She leaned back against the end of the couch and pulled her feet onto the cushion so her knees were up like a contemplative teenager on My So-Called Life. “Have you ever seen Fight Club?” she asked.
She said this knowing that even a smidgen of self-awareness would have led this man to take note of the fact that she had just asked him whether he had ever seen the movie that was quoted at the bottom of his every email. The slightest sense that he might not be the smartest, the most savvy, the most calculating son of a bitch in the room would have caused him to catch on instantly. Of course, he had no smidgens to speak of, no sense of the potential for him to be outwitted, and probably no memory of what was currently in his email signature, since it seemed likely that he rotated it between Fight Club, Jonathan Franzen, and perhaps Walter White. Ironically, of course.
“I love Fight Club,” he said. Not one smidgen. Smidgens were absent.
“Me too,” she answered, widening her eyes. “You know the part where he goes to lunch with Matthew McConaughey, and McConaughey starts pounding on his chest? It’s, like, amazing.”
Matt frowned a little. “I think that’s in Wolf of Wall Street,” he said.
“It is not!” she said, trying to be put out but endearing, the way people on awards shows do when they have to banter. “It’s in Fight Club!”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Give me your iPad!” she said. “I’m going to show it to you.”
She didn’t usually believe in self-congratulation; she really didn’t. But in her head, she did hear “Ode to Joy” playing, just like in Die Hard, as he handed the tablet to her. “Suit yourself,” he said with a little smile.
“You are going to owe me such a huge apology,” she said, narrowing her eyes as she went directly to his iMessages, facing his tablet resolutely in the direction that didn’t allow him to see the screen. She quickly scanned them until she saw one that said, “pretty sure it’s real, man.” She opened it, still grinning and screwing up her face like she was confused by the multitude of buttons. She gave him a giggle. “Sorry, I’m having a blond moment.”
“When I’m right, I might make you buy me dinner,” he said.
“Not if I make you buy me dinner first,” she said, opening the message, which was an exchange with a guy listed in Matt’s contacts as “Rocky.” Time was limited, but she was able to spot a mention of what Matt called “the bird we talked about,” and to see that Matt was planning on meeting up with Rocky at Sea Spray on Saturday at 6:30. Rocky, Saturday, 6:30, she chanted to herself. Then she opened up YouTube and searched “Matthew McConaughey chest beating.” She allowed her face to dramatically fall. She even opened her mouth a little, and she hit Play. The scene started. She looked over at him.
“Wolf of Wall Street?” he asked, with all the humility of a man growing intellectually aroused by the experience of being right about Fight Club.
She nodded. She handed him back the iPad and covered her face with her hands. “I’m so embarrassed.”
“Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “Nobody knows everything.”
Except meeeeeee, she imagined him saying. But only to himself. But gleefully. And not for the first time.
Matt carried himself with the unshakable confidence, she realized, of someone who had never really had to worry about anyone thinking he might be full of shit. This was his superpower. And there had probably been a time when he was not full of shit. There had probably been a time when at least some part of this was genuine, perhaps a time in college when he was sleeping with various feminists and listening to them talk about the music that they loved, and then he just started exaggerating his level of interest in Ani DiFranco a little bit to get them to like him a little bit more.
And maybe he thought he could just have a cozy antiques shop for tourists, and the clean-out and downsizing business was just “synergy.” And maybe at some point he found out some little item was more valuable than the person who sold it to him had realized. And before he knew it, he had decided that people who didn’t know what things were worth didn’t deserve to have them and wouldn’t miss the money anyway. He had probably eased into forgery the way he eased into owning Gen-X feminist heroine T-shirts: He used what was at hand. These shirts pleased the women who could give him things that were worth money. They were the ones cleaning out their parents’ places, their grandparents’ places, the houses that had once belonged to their world-traveling great-aunts who maybe knew famous artists even if they did not, admittedly, actually know Andrew Wyeth.