Club Himeros (2 page)

This was why people kept in touch with Vivi.  She was the central repository of information for a large number of people.  If you had a secret to tell, she was the one you told it to, and if your secret ended up repeated, that was okay because Vivi knew best.  She distributed knowledge based on some sort of cost/benefit algorithm that made sense only to her, but which was always right.  Nobody was ever angry with her for repeating a secret, and knowing she might repeat it never stopped anyone from sharing.  It was sort of uncanny.

“Good!  You
seem
okay,” Vivi said. 

She climbed out of her chair and rubbed Lindy’s shoulder on her way by, heading for the kitchen.  It was a galley type of kitchen, with a counter, in case anyone in there ever wanted to prepare the kind of food that needed to be put into a serving dish.  Said dish would then be placed on the counter, to be retrieved by someone standing on the dining table side of the room.  For some reason Lindy always wanted to have the sort of meal that required such a transaction, but she and Michael never did.  They had never even had Thanksgiving in the apartment.  While that made perfect sense—neither of them were cooks, his parents were a few hours’ drive away, and they had several friends who knew how to prepare food—it still made her sad to think about.

“Do I?  Thanks.”

“Yeah, I mean… as okay as I’d expect you to be, I guess.”

“How’s
he
doing?”

“Michael?  I wouldn’t know, haven’t talked to him.”

“Aw, c’mon, V.”

Vivi pulled the aluminum foil roll from the cabinet and tore off a square sheet of it while answering.  “We talked a little, but it’s not like he’s gonna tell me anything, right?  I’m your friend more than his.”

This was a modestly disingenuous assertion on her part, because Vivi had actually been Michael’s friend first, back in college.  Then, as now, V was a little chubby, everyone’s best friend and impossible to imagine as anything else, and secretly probably not okay with that.  Lindy was nearly positive V was in love with Michael at one time, if not still.  She was
very
positive when Vivi spoke to Michael she said
I’m your friend more than hers
. 

“So he’s doing okay,” Lindy said.

“You know how he is.”  Vivi took the foil and folded it until she has a small double-layered square that was shaped roughly like an ashtray.  Then she turned on the venting fan over the stove and lit a cigarette for herself.  “He’s not big on sharing.”

She slid the pack across the counter in Lindy’s direction.

Lindy refilled her wine glass, stood over the counter, and pulled out a smoke for herself.  It wasn’t a Thanksgiving turkey, but it would do for the moment. 

Vivi put the homemade ashtray between them and handed over the lighter.

“He’ll share,” Lindy said.  “But you have to beat it out of him sometimes.” 
And then maybe you wish he hadn’t shared at all
.

V laughed.  “Fair enough.  Well I didn’t beat anything out of him.  He mostly said he thought it was over.”

“Where’s he staying?”

“Right now he’s on Justin’s couch.  I’m supposed to get clothes for him when I leave here, don’t let me forget.”

“He
thought
it was over?  He said that?”

Lindy lit up the cigarette and took a deep drag, enjoying how the nicotine felt when it punched her in the lungs. 

She wasn’t a smoker unless she was also at least two drinks deep and in a self-loathing mood.  Oddly, the two often came together.

“You don’t sound so sure either,” Vivi said.  “You guys
did
break up, right?  You both act like he went out for milk and just didn’t come back.”

Lindy laughed.  “It wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like then?  What happened?”

She took her fourth drag of the cigarette, which was about when the pleasure of the experience turned into discomfort and a vague nausea.  It was only guilt over the cost of cigarettes that kept her from putting it out.

“I don’t know.  Nothing, I guess.”

“It wasn’t nothing.  All right, what were you guys talking about when it happened?  Help me out.”

We weren’t talking about anything.  We were arguing about how he never took his shoes off at the door even when he had mud on them, and then about doing laundry, and suddenly it made sense to both of us that this was over and he was leaving and I didn’t stop him and I still don’t know why.

Was he expecting me to stop him?  Is that why we’re here now, because I missed my line?

“It was an argument,” Lindy said, “but… I don’t know, it’s hard to explain.  It wasn’t over anything important.”

“It wasn’t about sex?”

Lindy coughed, which might or might not have been because of the cigarette.  “Excuse me?”

“I’m just curious.”

“
What
did he say, Vivian?”

“Nothing!  I swear, I just know you guys weren’t… real happy in that department, that’s all.”

“According to who?  Michael?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that!”

“Of course you mean Michael, because I never said anything like that to
anybody
.”

“Honey, I didn’t… he never said anything, it’s just something we all, you know.  We all got the same sense.”

“Oh my god.”  Lindy snubbed out the cigarette and grabbed a fresh one.  It was time to head past self-loathing and into self-harm.  “You
all
.  Like, all of you are sitting around and talking about my sex life.”

“Lindy.”

“Like it’s anybody’s business?  Like what we do in
there…
” she pointed to the bedroom with the lit cigarette and inadvertently scattered ashes from the tip across the dining room floor.  “…has
anything
to do with this.”

“Lindy.”

“You must think… oh, I don’t even know!  What did you and my
friends
come up with?  Since I don’t talk about it with any of you and god knows Michael doesn’t even talk about it with
me
, what could you possibly have latched onto to come up with
we are not happy in that department?
”

“Are you done?”

“Nearly!  It isn’t anybody’s business, dammit!”

“No, you’re right, it probably isn’t.”  Vivi was calm in exactly the same measure that Lindy was not, which was infuriating.  “But that’s what friends do.  That’s what
people
do, and when two people we’ve known for a really super long time suddenly split up and refuse to say why, this is what people come up with.  Is he secretly gay?  Is
she
secretly gay?  Did he or she want her or him to do something she or he was uncomfortable doing?  Did they stop doing it at all?  Remember when Mary and what’s-his-name broke up?”

“Yeah.  Panjeeb.  Or Punjab or something.”

“Right, and she wouldn’t say why, and nobody knew him to even ask, but next thing we were all talking about cultural differences and aren’t they a bitch to overcome and we don’t even
know
.  Maybe he had a little dick, maybe his green card just ran out and he had to go home.  She wouldn’t say, so we had to.  Nature abhors a vacuum, sweetie.”

Vivi took the half-smoked second cigarette Lindy should never have started, and refilled her own wine.  Lindy wondered if she was blushing.  Her face felt hot.

“Of course people want to know what happened,” Vivi said. “
Were they unhappy and we didn’t notice? 
Looking for clues, right?  That’s all.  And maybe some of us noticed when you guys stopped holding hands, and kissing each other goodbye, and started doing things on your own and stuff, things you didn’t used to do or
did
used to do and stopped.  I mean, with Mary we could make up stuff or we could just say,
they didn’t work out
and that would make all kinds of sense because even if they seemed happy they were only together for a year.  But you and Mikey
did
work out.  You were working out right in front of us.  You guys were what we compared ourselves to.  It’s like mom and dad getting a divorce.”

Vivi sipped her wine and blew smoke up the ventilator over the stove and waited for Lindy to calm down, which she wasn’t ready to do yet.

“Michael
did
say something,” Lindy said.  “Didn’t he?”

She sighed.  “Why don’t
you
tell me?  I’m not here to talk about what he thinks, I want to know what you think.”

“None of my answers have anything to do with what went on in the bedroom.  If he’s of a different opinion, it’s news to me.”

*   *   *

Vivi didn’t stay much longer.  A few awkward subject changes were attempted, one or two more probes to figure out what the Big Secret might be, and then she was in the bedroom taking a pile of Michael’s clothing and tossing it into a green trash bag and wishing Lindy a good night with a big wet kiss and an overlong hug.

Then Lindy was alone with her thoughts, which was a terrible place to be.  She should have been picking up the leftovers and fumigating the kitchen, but the couch was where she ended up, along with the latter half of the second wine bottle.

A part of her wished there
had
been a big something.  An affair, maybe.  She heard that was a pretty popular reason to break up.  But so far as she knew he had been faithful, and if one didn’t count getting really drunk and screwing around that one time with Tina in college—which she didn’t—Lindy had been faithful as well.

He hadn’t asked her to marry him.  That was sort of a thing, probably.  It had never been an issue for her, yet when she called her mom to talk about the whole matter that was the first thing out of her mother’s mouth. 
He should have proposed by now, you’re better off without him because if not now then he never will
.  Lindy had played it off as the foolish logic of another generation, but now she wasn’t so sure.  Yes it was true he never proposed, but she never brought it up either.

Why didn’t I propose?
She wondered.  There was nothing wrong with that.  Or if not proposing, at least broaching the subject without joking about it.  It came up now and again in safe circumstances, when nothing either of them said could be taken seriously.  Like at parties or whenever one of their friends announced an engagement.  They were trifling non-events, but suddenly Lindy could remember every single one of them.

It was supposed to be a foregone conclusion that she and Michael would eventually make formal what seemed like an informally true thing already.  Clearly, that was how their friends saw it.  Except every time someone joked about when the date was and so on, or called them Mr. and Mrs., it always made things a little awkward.  Neither of them was comfortable with the idea of marriage, clearly.

Unless it was just her that was uncomfortable.  Michael was probably telling everyone Lindy was the one who didn’t want to get married, even if it was—in her mind—an unspoken joint decision.

“Or it was about the sex,” she said, to nobody.

That was the part that was going to bother her for a while.  She knew it the very instant Vivi brought it up, and she had no idea who to talk to about it or how to get the idea out of her mind.  Her usual go-to friend when unreasonably preoccupied with something was Vivian.

She’d been with only two men in her life.  The first was a guy named Randy, in high school, and it had been only one time: two fifteen-year-olds fumbling around on top of each other in an experience that was awkward, only a little pleasant, and terribly brief.

Michael was the second, and it had only been him since.   (Again, save for that one drunk encounter with Tina that they never, ever talked about.) 

The idea that she might be
bad
at it was one that had always haunted her for some reason.  It wasn’t rational.  She never questioned whether
he
was bad at it, so why would she worry about herself?

And he was not bad at it, so far as she knew, although all she had to go on was the efforts of fifteen-year-old Randy and the occasional dirty book.  She could maybe compare Michael to the sex scenes in movies or the late night soft-core porn she sometimes discovered when she couldn’t sleep.  Lindy never had the kind of sex that looked like the cinematic version of the act, but she was pretty sure neither had anybody else.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Michael going around and telling people the sex was subpar, which would have been ridiculous anyway.  First, his experience was only slightly more extensive than hers—again, assuming there were no affairs, which she was assuming—so how would he even know?  Second, he just wasn’t that kind of person.  She supposed it was possible for him to imply something, possibly by not answering V’s question the same way Lindy had, but that was about all.

There were five or six other reasons Michael would never have brought up the sex, and plenty of reasons to think their breakup had nothing whatsoever to do with it.  There was no merit to the idea at all.  But now that it was in her head, it simply wouldn’t go.