“It’s fine, Reva,” I said. I didn’t want her to cry again.
“And the next day on the news they were interviewing a guy who was on the lower deck of the freeway and they were like, ‘What will you take with you from this experience?’ And he goes, ‘When I got out of my car, there was a brain jiggling on the ground. A whole brain, jiggling like a Jell-O mold.’”
“People die all the time, Reva.”
“But isn’t that just horrific? A brain jiggling on the ground like Jell-O?”
“Sounds made up.”
“And the newscaster was silent. Speechless. So the guy goes, ‘You wanted to know. You asked. So I’m telling you. That’s what I saw.’”
“Please, Reva, just stop.”
“Well, I’m not saying that would happen here.”
“That didn’t happen anywhere. Brains don’t pop out of people’s heads and jiggle.”
“I guess there were aftershocks.”
I turned up the volume on the radio and rolled my window down.
“You know what I mean, though? Things could be worse,” Reva shouted.
“Things can always be worse,” I shouted back. I rolled the window back up.
“I’m a very safe driver,” Reva said.
We were quiet for the rest of the ride, the car filling with the smell of cinnamon gum. I already regretted that I’d agreed to let Reva sleep over. Finally, we crossed the bridge and drove up the FDR. The road was slushy. Traffic was very slow. By the time we got to my block, it was half past ten. We got lucky with parking, fitting into a spot right in front of the bodega.
“I just want to pick up a couple things,” I told Reva. She didn’t protest. Inside, the Egyptians were playing cards behind the counter. There was a display of cheap champagne set up on a stack of boxes by the cases of beer and soda. I watched Reva eye the display, then open the freezer and lean in, struggling to excavate something stuck in the ice. I got my two coffees.
Reva paid.
“Is she your sister?” the Egyptian asked Reva, nodding in my direction as I sucked down my first coffee. It was extra burnt, and the cream I’d used had soured so that squishy strands of curd got caught on my teeth. I didn’t care.
“No, she’s my friend,” Reva replied with some hostility. “You think we look alike?”
“You could be sisters,” said the Egyptian.
“Thank you,” Reva said dryly.
When we got to my building on East Eighty-fourth, the doorman put down his newspaper to say “Happy New Year.”
In the elevator, Reva said, “Those guys at the corner store, do they look at you funny?”
“Don’t be racist.”
Reva held my coffees while I unlocked the door. Inside my apartment, the television was on mute, flashing large bare breasts.
“I’ve got to pee,” said Reva, dropping her gym bag. “I thought you hated porn.”
I sniffed the air for traces of anything uncouth, but smelled nothing. I found a stray Silenor on the kitchen counter and swallowed it.
“Your phone is in a Tupperware container floating in the tub,” Reva yelled from the bathroom.
“I know,” I lied.
We sat down on the sofa, me with my second coffee and my sample bottle of Infermiterol, Reva with her fat-free strawberry frozen yogurt. We watched the rest of the porn movie in complete silence. After a day spent meditating on death, watching people have sex felt good. “Procreation,” I thought. “The circle of life.” During the blow job scene, I got up and peed. During the pussy-eating scene, Reva got up and puked, I thought. Then she found a corkscrew in the kitchen, opened a bottle of the funeral wine, came back to the sofa and sat down. We passed the bottle back and forth and watched ejaculate dribble over the girl’s face. Gobs of it got stuck in her fake eyelashes.
I thought of Trevor and all his drips and splats on my belly and back. When we’d had sex at his place, he’d finish and instantly rush out and back in with a roll of paper towels, hold the little trash can out for me as I wiped myself off. “These sheets . . .” Trevor never once came inside of me, not even when I was on the pill. His favorite thing was to fuck my mouth while I lay on my back pretending to be asleep, as if I wouldn’t notice his penis slamming into the back of my throat.
The credits rolled. Another porn movie started. Reva found the remote and hit unmute.
I opened the sample bottle of Infermiterol and took one, washing it down with the wine.
I remember listening to the stiff dialogue of the opening—the girl played a physical therapist, the guy played a football player with a pain in his groin. Reva cried for a while. When the fucking started, she lowered the volume and told me about her New Year’s the year before. “I just wasn’t in the mood to go to a couples party, you know? Everybody kissing at midnight? Ken was being a dick but I met him at like three in the morning at the Howard Johnson in Times Square.” I was glad to hear she was drunk now. It took some of the tension out of the room. On-screen, there was a knock on the door. The fucking didn’t stop. I was weaving in and out of sleep by then. Reva kept talking.