Elisabeth Hamilton: Loafed

Elisabeth Hamilton

Loafed

We’ve got a bag of Wonder Bread in the backseat. It’s hot in the car with the vents blasting and I keep turning to check if the plastic of the bread bag is melting, fusing with the Peace Train’s blue vinyl upholstery. I like this car. It’s got window cranks and exactly one temperature option and you never have to worry about whether pressing a button will cause the car to back up, or sound its alarm, or ask you intimidating and direct questions about your mileage. It doesn’t confuse you with icons that hint at window washing and instead trigger emergency wheel locking systems. If you want to defrost the windows, you rub them with your sleeve. I long for that kind of simplicity.

Betsy embraces simplicity, in all its forms. She’s a very “in the moment” kind of person. In this moment, we’re driving down to Pacifica, where our boss supposedly lives, where our boss supposedly drinks Mai Tais with hookers, at least that’s the story Betsy claims she’s gleaned from his sales call records. I don’t think it’s true, I think it’s just something she said to make me feel better, on account of our boss being a total dickwad. Last week he overheard us talking about my ex-girlfriend having an abortion, and said, “Well, at least you can be sure it’s not yours.” Then he cackled.

He also likes to hold doors open for women and then close them when he sees me, because I’m a “feminist,” which is the word he uses because he’s too chicken to call me a dyke, plus the anti-harassment policies that the nineties instituted in our workplace, plus the fact that his boss, Liam, is a total closet-case, which makes him prone to violent outbursts, and so if Boss Man said what he means to say Liam would probably strangle him with his tie. When he calls me a feminist he comes down really hard on the “t,” and it emphasizes the pointiness of his nose. He looks kind of like a chicken hawk, and is going bald, which does make me feel better.

I’m the only out person in the office, though I suspect at least seven on our floor. It’s a wide floor, but still. Publishing is rife with sensitive types. The non-sensitive, I have noticed, are a little insecure because of this, feel the need to beef up their handshakes. Talk loudly at office gatherings, that sort of thing. I’m the only girl, though, who fits the first category, so Boss Man knows what he can get away with, where to draw the line.

“That guy needs to be loafed,” Betsy had said.

“That guy needs to be run over in traffic,” I said.

“I don’t want you going to jail.”

“Wait, what the hell is loafed?” I asked, and Betsy grinned.

* * *

Loafed, for Betsy, is a family tradition, akin to a mafia revenge killing, only with Wonder Bread. Essentially you walk into the place of business or hangout of the target, throw a bag of Wonder Bread at them, declare yourself, and walk out while the bag of Wonder Bread still steams with their public humiliation. One cannot loaf someone at home for this reason.

Betsy explained all this to me when she picked me up at my apartment in San Francisco, and we drove down 19th to the freeway. I’ve learned a lot, actually, about Betsy in this car. I learned we like the same weird old music, and that we both do this funny thing before we fall asleep where you balance your arm in the socket and let it just stand on end until all the blood drains from you hand, and you let your whole arm fall over like dead weight. I learned that she likes salt-water taffy and horror flicks and that occasionally she’ll use a word I have to look up, but that I can probably ask and she won’t make too much fun of me. She reads big fat novels and is the only person in our age group who still uses the library. Betsy thinks it’s the arm thing that really cements our friendship, but there’s room for future possibilities. We’ve only been working together at the publishing house for eight months, so every car ride still offers some little intimacy I can file away under Things I Know About Betsy. Today, it so happens, is the subcategory of criminal activity, and I, she has explained, am to become involved in these practices myself. We are simpatico.

Once we hit the exit, we’re on the hunt. Pacifica is a small town, with a stretch of Highway 1 full of stoplights, gas stations, a few dive bars and steakhouses. The coast always feels different—that same glum as the city that I love, like a sweater with the neck all the way up. Here it’s mixed with the smallness of a beach town in California, Eichlers and other 1950s-style houses in green and blue and yellow, with small square windows, as if they’re trying to hide from the salt air that’s washing them pale, making the paint chip and peel on the garages housing their pick-up trucks, making the poinsettias people have left out on the front porch look like girls in droopy chiffon waiting for their prom dates to arrive, not willing to admit they’ve been passed over. In the back, the mountains are there, when you can see them, green and mossy in the winter and the spring. In the summer they are brown and dry and crackling with the smell of oak, but here, on the coast, everything is always, always damp. I never really feel like I’m in real life in a beach town. It’s more like a Hitchcock movie.

Today we’re the voyeurs, and the bad guys, and the innocents all in one. I’ve got a knot in my stomach and chest that needs to come loose. The source of this knot, I am convinced, is Betsy’s enthusiasm. I am not, as a general rule, an enthusiastic person. Rather, I hang out with enthusiastic people and study them, their particular pathologies of exuberance, all the while feeling an intense longing in my heart, and the rush of adrenaline’s warning in my hands and feet. This practice makes me a masochist, but also a sort of anthropologist. I liken it to being on assignment in the field, rather than a lab, or a library. Today, for instance, I am learning that when you are from Idaho, like Betsy is, you do not go home and fantasize about pushing Boss Man off a clock tower while staring at the wall, then fall asleep and have unsettling dreams where you stumble along the sidewalk at weird angles and gape at familiar looking strangers. You take a bag of highly processed, doughy, spongy, marshmallowy wheat, and you turn it into action. You throw cheap bread at people, and run screaming from the vicinity. It is the American Way.

Betsy looks like she’s doing something behind her sunglasses, and she’s slowed up on the gas pedal, so I ask.

“I’m checking the bumper stickers,” she says. “He’s got that stupid one, about getting drunk and doing the running man.”

“I thought he had the ‘My Child is an Honor Student’ one.”

“No, that’s Susanna. And that’s her mom’s car, so that thing has been on there since 1995. The honor student is Susanna.” Susanna is another editorial assistant in our department, except that she likes the boss. Occasionally, they carpool. Susanna is younger than my twenty-four and Betsy’s twenty-six years on earth and Betsy thinks it’s gross Susanna even touches Boss Man’s door handle.

“Maybe it’s a Northeastern thing,” I say. Boss Man is from Massachusetts. Unfortunately for Massachusetts.

“Do they know how to do the running man in Massachusetts?”

“Or Connecticut.”

“Who’s from Connecticut?”

“Susanna.”

“Oh, so you know that about her, do you?” Betsy smirks. I ignore it. She does this sometimes, when I mention other girls.

“I didn’t mean the running man, anyway, I meant keeping bumper stickers on your car from the 90′s.”

“I think any person who puts a running man sticker on his car in the first place has some deep soul searching he needs to do. Some downright contemplation. And that, my friend,” Betsy says, tapping the steering wheel, “that is what we are here to provide.”

I contemplate. I wonder if all small towns of the West are the same, if what is so familiar to me about this beach town, about its low atmosphere and sad tenor is the thing that revs Betsy up, that makes her teenage menace come out, drive with the windows down and smack her gum and pump the cigarette lighter in the dash so she can light the last one in her pack, the lucky she’s been holding onto for nearly a week. I wonder if we’re just driving for the sake of driving, and not for the sake of seeing Boss Man’s face when he’s hit with our gooey, melted package of homogeneous crust, and I wonder if Betsy knows something I don’t about satisfaction. She seems more excited about this than I am, than how this fits with what I know about her, and that makes me wonder what it is, exactly, in between sharing my preference for lemon-flavored candies and my extremely healthy cynicism, she thinks she knows about me.

But this is morose, these are my thoughts coloring the field research. In fact, Betsy is driving with purpose, not aimlessness, toward an intersection, where there’s a sign for Nick’s Famous Crab Sandwich! and, beyond that, a wide parking lot overlooking the sea. All the signs in these towns look like they’re from the fifties, when the fifties were obsessed with what the future looked like. Apparently, in the future of everyone’s imagination, where we lived on the moon and rode around on hovercrafts, the future looked like a bowing alley, or a sleazy lounge joint. Nick’s is a low one-story building with a fake rock facade and large asymmetrically arranged red circles enclosing each white sharply angled letter of its founder’s name. The future was no more predictable to them than it is to me. I, for instance, do not predict Betsy hanging a left across the Cabrillo highway and rolling into the parking lot of Nick’s Seaside Dinners, but here we are, facing the back windows of the restaurant. It would have an admittedly nice view if it weren’t for this parking lot. Behind us stretches a curve of the Pacific, complete with bluff and sand spit, and the kind of damp that makes me pull my sleeves over my thumbs. The beach is covered with something, a row of plastic looking mounds—moon jellies, maybe, washed up from high tide.

“I don’t think he’s in there,” I say.

“He’s definitely in there,” Betsy says. She nods at a car at the rail. Sure enough, I see the running man sticker.

“How do you know these things?” I ask.

“I’m good with energies,” she says.

I am, I say, feeling definitive. Definitively, I want to curl up in the blasting safety of the Peace Train’s heater. I want to fish through the glove compartment and find stale gum and old phone numbers on napkins and ask Betsy if she can remember which guy in which bar gave them to her. I want to stare out the window at the ocean for an hour. I go on like this. I am melancholy, morose, it’s better to swallow my pain, to absorb it down into my nerve endings, what would the Buddha do, can’t we just go drink our own Mai Tais, or better yet, let’s go to the Dumpling King and get soup dumplings, I feel like some MSG, also, it’s freezing, and do you see the rows of quivering jelly death out the window? It’s a bad omen, I think, I say, I gesture.

Betsy reaches into her bag in the back and throws me a ski cap. Maybe somewhere in her sweet Idaho heart she believes she can heal me with criminal activity. Maybe that’s the secret she thinks she knows. I’m relieved; it won’t work.

“You’re not serious,” I say, convinced the joke has played out.

“I’m dead serious,” she says. “Why do you think we’re in all black?”

“Because you wish you lived in Manhattan, and that we worked for Random House and not an educational textbook company where you have to talk to eighty-year-old physics professors on a regular basis?”

“Why are you wearing all black, then?”

“Because I’m unhappy?”

“Because I told you to, and because you want revenge. Feel it. C’mon.”

“I’m a coward, Betsy.”

“Twenty-four hours ago you wanted to run him over with the car.”

“Clearly, I have some unresolved issues.”

“Put the cap on, O’Brien.”

I put the cap on over my dark brown hair, smashing it down around my ears. In contrast to Betsy’s light blonde bangs and freckles, I could be an actual criminal. Betsy just needs to throw a scarf around her neck and she’d look like an ad for Burberry. I begin to question things, not just my existence, which is generally how I occupy myself, but also the string of decisions leading up to this moment, a moment where Betsy is slicing an apple with a Swiss Army knife and offering me a section. If this were a Hitchcock movie I’d eat the apple and she’d stab me with the knife, not because she was psychotic, but because she was desperate, or angry, or some other untainted emotion that would cause her to struggle with me and flap the sheen of her blond locks under the camera. I would get to be Jimmy Stewart, awkward and slightly helpless. She would trick me into thinking I had accidentally killed her, only I hadn’t, and she was hiding behind the bluff and in cahoots with the boss man. Then I’d wander around in a daze until I realized nobody believed me, not even the police, and when I got back to my apartment in San Francisco there she’d be waiting for me, in the dark, and I’d have to throw apple cores at her head until the cops busted in anyway, due to a domestic disturbance call from a neighbor. It’s possible I would dangle from a ledge somewhere in that montage, but my mind is fuzzy on detail at the moment.

“This is not going to turn out well, Betsy,” I say.

“This is the best part,” she says. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

“I don’t think you are.”

“No, I’m ready.”

“Get in the moment, O’Brien. You hear me? Get in the moment.”

I am in the moment. I am so in the moment there is a goddamn symphony of music bursting out of my eardrums. It swells with the ocean’s tide. It also sounds sort of like Cake’s second album, but I don’t tell Betsy that, because she might find it distracting, because you don’t dwell on details in the moment. You have to be one with the moment. You have to let it flow. You have to be in the mantra of the moment. So I am in the moment and the moment is in me when Betsy and I shut the doors to the Peace Train, when I follow her in through the rock facade archway of the side entrance, into a decor that smells like stale cigarettes and fried batter, I am in the moment when we spy—We do! He is! Holy crap!—Boss Man at the bar, I am in the moment when Betsy elbows me as the hostess approaches, as Betsy twists the plastic bag’s gathered edge around her finger, and then, as the hostess looks down and sees our bag of bread, our calling card, and Betsy nudges me with her elbow, the signal, the get ready stance, but I’m looking at the bar, because beyond boss man and his bald feathered head is Susanna, and she is facing us, looking paler than a dead jellyfish on the beach outside.

Betsy is in the moment, and I am in the moment, but Betsy and I are not in the same moment, anymore. In Betsy’s moment, she has not seen Susanna, and she’s whipping the Wonder Bread in a small circle and the hostess is looking alarmed and I’m supposed to give the cue, the go ahead, I’m supposed to say ready aim fire so she can launch that Wonder Bread and we can declare our agenda. My moment is filled with Susanna. She’s looking at me with pleading, a panicked animal. I don’t know what she sees in this guy, I don’t know why, at twenty-three, she’s taken up with a thirty-four year-old guy in sales who has a wife and a one-year-old and a shitty Toyota and calls me “bro” in a tone he imagines sounds like irony, but Susanna’s glance has pierced the logic of my revenge. I cannot sanction the launch.

“I’m calling this off,” I whisper.

“What?”

“Don’t do it, Betsy.”

“Too late,” says Betsy, and the Wonder Bread flies from her hand.

* * *

I don’t wait to see where it lands, because I am out the door, running for the safety of the car and its three-quarters of a tank and mostly working ignition. I hear the hostess give a cry of irritation and Betsy give a cry of triumph and maybe that’s me giving a cry of terror while Susanna’s face pulses in front of my eyes and my heart thunders like a town clock. The wind has picked up. Down below the parking lot the bluffs hang onto their sea grass and the jellyfish ooze into the sand. This town is so dead. I could throw up but I get into the Peace Train and slam the door shut and put on my seatbelt, which seems the most critical step a person could take at this juncture, strapping oneself in as a sign of protest, or preservation. I could still throw up, but the Peace Train’s metal cave is holding me lovingly in its still warm vinyl interior, so maybe I’m relaxing now. I’m pretty sure we’re fired. I’m also pretty sure Susanna is sleeping with the boss, in which case maybe we’re not fired, and it occurs to me that Betsy knew this already, and that’s how she knew where the boss would be, and why she knew we would not be fired. Betsy gets into the car and jams the keys in the ignition.

“Yeaaaaaaah!” she says.

“Yes,” I say, to indicate I have registered her enthusiasm, and also that it is time to leave.

“Pop the mix tape in and roll down your window,” she says.

“It’s freezing.”

“Declaration, O’Brien. Declaration is key.”

“You don’t just scream ‘Revenge!’ or something?”

“Always aim for maximum impact. Music cements the memory in the mind of the accused. And you better do it now,” she says, “because Boss Man approacheth.”

“Oh, God. Wait, I don’t see him.”

“Any minute now, O’Brien.”

I take out the CD she’s carefully labeled and push it into the dash with my palm. It’s opera. I don’t listen to opera so I don’t know if there’s more to it than that, but I do know that Betsy wants me to crank that shit so I do, and I roll down my window, and we spin out of the parking lot and away from Nick’s Famous Crab Sandwich and the shore full of moon jellies, the notes of La Traviata or whatever still lingering above their fading electricity, their last dance on the sand.

* * *

Betsy tells me later that the bread hit him directly on the back of his head, and that the cry I assumed was the hostess was in fact Susanna, who tried to bat it out of the way and managed to only confuse things, sending it into a waitress and three crab sandwiches she was carrying. She tells me she knew they’d be in there because she heard them talking on her smoke break. She tells me she knows things I could know, too, I just don’t pay attention, because I’m too wrapped up in my own head. She says we’re going to have to work on that.

She’s telling me these things now because we’re at an A’s game and Betsy says it’s the most depressing thing she’s ever seen, so she’s in the right mood to speak with solemnity. This is something else I’ve noticed about the enthusiast: she can pitch her voice in a particular way so as to convey sadness, or seriousness, without actually containing the quality of those emotions in her body. She could tell me a long protracted story about a dying baby elephant and then, if somebody made a play, switch gears like nobody’s business and get ready to catch the fly. I would spend the rest of the day researching baby elephants, unable to think of anything else. Betsy, meanwhile, would be hungry, and ordering nachos on the Internet. I haven’t figured this out yet.

What I have figured out is that Susanna has, in the week-long interim where we were not fired, where Boss Man did not say anything particularly offensive to me, if nothing particularly nice, where the HR representatives were in and out of his boss’s office at least three times, and where Betsy has smiled at Boss Man with all of her teeth whenever she sees him until he is out of sight, in between all of this Susanna has quietly contacted Betsy, not me, for help with a situation. I find this odd. It’s nagging at me. I have not told Betsy I find this odd, because Betsy would tell me I’m anti-social. She would tell me Susanna is as afraid of me as everyone else in the office, because I scowl. I cannot deny that my facial expressions convey displeasure when someone else approaches my desk, but I would also offer that I didn’t make Boss Man’s head a shiny target. I didn’t seek him out at the cheap crab joint from space, did I? Technically, I have loafed no one. Betsy would say I have not taken ownership of my crimes. Ownership is a charged word, which is exactly why Betsy uses it. As for my crimes, I maintain that I supplied the operatic soundtrack to the getaway car. But Susanna, and her confidence, her quiet plea for mercy—that, I feel, was transmitted in my direction. Why Susanna has denied our exchange I don’t know. I probe a little, to see if I can find out more, but Betsy isn’t sharing.

“I told you,” she says. “She’s opening up. I’ll see if I can get any valuable information.”

“What exactly are you planning on doing? I mean, we loafed him. That was it, right?”

Betsy turns to me. The sky is bleached blue-white behind her, creating a neat halo around her baseball cap, like we’re at sea, almost, like I can’t see the rows and rows of empty bleachers and their red folded seats, and we’re up high enough that I feel lightheaded.

“Do you hate him?”

“Who, Boss Man?”

“Yes.”

“Sure, I hate him.”

“How much do you hate him?”

How much I hate him: I do not use his name.

As we sit above the field, watching the game drag under thinly fan-dotted bleachers, I look up to see a whole host of Padres fans clustered tightly together, cheering and waving their foam fingers. They’re drinking beer and laughing, and they’re up even higher than we are in the stands, which is nearly the last row as it is. I get the sense from the timing of their cheering that nobody is really watching the game, and then, as my eyes travel down the stands and back toward the field, I see a lone hot dog vendor, climbing with his holstered packs up the long flight of stairs to the top row. He looks to me like a man climbing the side of an Aztec temple, hauling the soon to be declared insufficient animal sacrifice, which I know can only end in bad things for him. I burst into tears.

“Look, it’s going to be OK,” says Betsy.

“It’s fine,” I say, covering my face with my fingers. “It’s just America.”

“Come on, let’s go,” says Betsy, pulling on my arm, gently, firmly, away from the spectacle.

We drive back across the bridge to my place, to watch “True Blood” and eat popcorn and blondies left over from when I was stress-eating about losing my job. Betsy says she’ll just crash on my couch, which is fine by me, since I hate going to sleep in an empty apartment after “True Blood.” Down the hall, Betsy hollers that I’m out of toilet paper.

“I’ll go,” I say.

“Wait, I’m coming,” Betsy says. “I love your corner store guy.” She does love the corner store guy, which is weird, but Betsy chats everybody up, whereas I just like to pretend I’m hard of hearing. I often think a monastery would be a welcome place, if there weren’t so many rules. Betsy says I say stuff like that to deflect attention from my true self, whatever she thinks that is. I really wish she would let me know. I’d like to see the full workup.

Out front of the corner store there’s a patch of wet cement where the city has dug up a water main and then covered it up again. The guy from the corner store is standing over it, arms crossed. I look down. In the wet cement, someone has written, “Fuck Teeth.”

“I don’t understand,” he says.

“Is that a tag?” Betsy asks.

“It doesn’t look like a tag,” I say.

“No,” Betsy adds, “It looks like somebody just wrote it. Like they were walking by and felt like, you know, Fuck Teeth.”

“So you’re saying that’s a verb?” I say.

“I suppose it could be meant as an adjective.”

“I think it’s a verb,” the corner store guy says.

I test it out, quietly, in a whisper. “Fuck Teeth,” I say. They look at me. “I feel that way sometimes,” I say, and we all look back at the pavement, its sentiment carved out neatly, in all capitals, without any exclamation point.

“Are you single?”

We both look up.

“I have something for you,” he says. Then he looks at me. “Toilet paper?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got some on the counter. Come inside.”

We step over the cement patch and into the store, where he hands me the toilet paper and an envelope, although his eyes rest first on Betsy before he relinquishes it to me.

“Just look inside when you get home,” he says.

“This is not happening,” says Betsy.

“No, no,” he says. “Nothing dirty. My nephew.” He looks at me. “You’re too sad,” he says.

I pay him. We go up to my apartment. My cheeks are burning. Betsy takes the envelope from me and sits down on my couch and opens it, while I begin to unravel the toilet paper in my hand preemptively. If I can’t go to the corner store ever again, I suppose I can always just steal napkins from the bakery and keep a stack on the toilet tank. It’s a lot of napkins. I wonder about Victorian plumbing.

Betsy pulls out some photographs, which I can’t see, and flips through them.

“Fuck teeth,” she says.

“What? What? Are they horrible?”

“They’re like, art pictures of random objects. Mostly. Except the last one.”

I take them from her hands. The last photograph is a headshot, art student quality, of a man wearing no shirt and a gold chain meant to accent his ample chest hair, which looks as though it has been fluffed, or conditioned, or both. The angle is slightly over-skewed, so that, rather than appearing spontaneous and alluring, as it no doubt means to be, it gives you the feeling that the photographer was as horrified as you are looking at the photo, and had possibly tripped upon seeing his subject. The man’s expression is not a leer, but not quite a smile. He doesn’t look nephew age, either. I wince and looked again.

“That’s the corner store guy, isn’t it,” I say.

“That is the corner story guy,” says Betsy.

“I can never go there again.”

Betsy, who has been holding it in long enough, bursts out laughing.

* * *

The next day I see Susanna at the coffee pot in the break room. She looks up at me with the same alarmed face she gave me in Nick’s, so maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time, and that’s just her face.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey, Tate,” she says. She starts to leave but she still has the coffee pot in her hand so she takes three steps toward the door and then stops and looks confused.

I know very little about Susanna. I know she smokes like Betsy does and I know from her computer speakers she loves Stevie Nicks. She’s played Edge of Seventeen like seventy times in the last three weeks. Her hair is sort of feathery like that early album, too, and cropped short. She’s cute, if a little bit of a muppet, with the way she bounces around the office. She’s chipper. I can’t figure out why she doesn’t have a real boyfriend. I’m stupid, and like I said, I don’t know Susanna very well, so I ask her this question while she stands there with the coffee pot.

“What do you mean, real?”

“Just, like, why do you hang out at Nick’s Crab Shack?”

“It’s not called that.”

“Well whatever it’s called.” I’m irritated that she’s splitting hairs. I want to know: does she usually confide in her attacker? Is this a sign of a damaged childhood? What did she mean by the moon eyes and the quivering lip she gave me in the Crab Shack? Was this a set-up? Did she know it was coming? I’m getting stupider, I know, and more paranoid, by the minute.

“I was having a drink.”

“In Pacifica?”

“I like Pacifica.”

“What do you like, specifically, about Pacifica?”

“Are you on drugs or something?”

“Not currently. Why would you ask that?”

“Why do you care about Nick’s?”

“I don’t care about the Crab Apple, I just want to know why you’re dating the boss.”

If it were possible that the stupid awards could be held, with shiny dresses and men in tuxedos and idiotic speeches that move the audience beyond laughter, indeed, beyond weeping, even, but simply to sheer, hysterical violence, then I have just won them, because Susanna throws the coffee pot at me, scalding contents and all.

The one thing that is good about being paranoid is that it makes you good at ducking. Also dodging, leaping, stop, drop, and rolling, duck and covering, running for the hills, and other physical maneuvers of that nature. I was a champion at earthquake drills growing up. I could hold onto a doorframe in my house like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man when I was eight. So when I see a pot of scalding (lukewarm, actually, the pot was on low) coffee going airborne, I dodge it like the true warrior that I am, and end up on the floor in the corner of the break room. Stop, drop, and roll. Susanna stands there dumbfounded, like she can’t believe what she’s just done, and we’re both suddenly aware, I think, that we’re at work, so we’ve both grown extremely quiet. The coffee drips down the wall. The pot, which didn’t break, only sort of bounced off the wall and then fell on its plastic lid, now pools coffee on the floor from its spout. I stand up and brush off my pants to avoid the runoff.

“It wasn’t hot,” says Susanna.

“No,” I say. “I see that.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Oh, god, I’m really, really sorry. I can’t believe I did that. Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Seriously, I really don’t know what came over me. I don’t usually do things like that.”

“I guess we’re even,” I said. I meant the bread, from earlier, but I guess she thought I meant the accusation, because she gets red in the face.

“I’m not sleeping with him,” she says.

“OK.”

“Really. I know you and Betsy thought that, but I’m not. He’s just—he’s nice to me. I don’t know that many people.”

“Is he?”

“What?”

“Nice to you.” It’s a strange idea. I wonder if I was nice to Susanna, what she’d do.

“Yes. He jokes around and sometimes gives me a ride. But that’s it. I just met him for a drink that one time because I mentioned I didn’t really know anybody in the city, and he offered to take me out.”

“To Pacifica? Where are you from, anyway?”

“Connecticut,” she says.

“Huh.” The coffee has made its way across the break room to my shoe. I step over it and reach for the paper towels. Susanna tries to help me but I shake my head.

“I got it,” I say. “Really.”

“I’m sorry,” she says again.

“It’s OK,” I say, “I sort of deserved it.”

Susanna doesn’t leave, though. She stands and waits, and waits. I sop up the coffee into the paper towels until my fingers are stained and smell bitter and the puddle is only a light ring on the tile. Then I stand up and dry my hands on another paper towel and while I’m doing that Susanna grabs me with both her arms and gives me a long, remorseful hug, squeezing her eyes shut with the anguish of the very passionate, and the very dramatic.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers, and then I feel her breath expand into her ribcage in a great big sigh.

* * *

Betsy picks me up in the Peace Train from my apartment on Willard Street. We’re going to the Mission to play Pacman and take stupid pictures in the photo booth and drink vodka tonics at the bar. Sometimes I try to tell Betsy about before, when Valencia was super queer, and it wasn’t full of hipsters with their dogs and babies, but she just goes, “Mmmmm,” whenever I do that, so I stopped. Moment passed, and all that. I roll down the window and let the city smells, salt and ocean mixed with oil on pavement, with stale beer and piss and overpriced coffee and a little bit of marijuana and everything else hovering over San Francisco slip into my nose, feeling everything vacate my body with that smell, and the breeze carrying it. I know when we get to the bar Betsy will bring me free drinks courtesy of the guys she’ll flirt with, and I’ll watch her, the ease she has with people, turning away from them and engaging them all at once, and I’ll feel a little jealous, and a little relieved she’s back at the table without her new companions, back to me, in my corner. But right now I’m good, a little above myself, maybe, floating right up there on the Peace Train’s ceiling while Betsy heads over on 23rd looking for parking.

When we get to the bar, Susanna is there, at a table, waiting for us.

“What’s she doing here?” I ask.

“I invited her,” says Betsy.

Susanna looks eager and sweet and everything I’m not in the mood for, but we sit down and I tell myself I’ll warm up. We’re both only mildly embarrassed about the whole coffee pot/break room/epic hug thing, but it turns out that Susanna’s just really lonely. That’s what she says, anyway, and Betsy nods approvingly at the confession.

“So is O’Brien,” she says.

“I’m not lonely,” I say.

“Yes you are,” says Betsy. “You’re always telling me you’re lonely.”

“How can I be lonely if you never leave me alone?”

“I’m getting us drinks,” says Betsy. “Be right back.”

Susanna talks while Betsy gets us a round. I find out the following: she’s from Connecticut (already known), she loves San Francisco (probably a lie, she’s only been here like three months and how anyone can love a place in three months when all they’ve done is go to Pacifica is beyond me), she doesn’t have a boyfriend because the last one dumped her and that’s why she left Connecticut.

“Me, too,” I say.

“You had a boyfriend?” Susanna squeaks.

“Um, no.”

I hate this part. I also hate Betsy, who clearly knew this was coming; Susanna’s sexual awakening, the part where we learn that she’s experimented before, the part where she asks me if I’ve ever been with a guy, the part where we bond by sharing a bunch of bullshit second base kissing stories, the part where Betsy looks at me with raised eyebrows as if she’s offering me a gift, as if she’s led a horse to water, as if this is some virgin sacrifice I was looking for when she knows better. She knows much, much better, and I am irritated.

“My last girlfriend cheated on me,” I say, to kill the rising excitement. It’s a little like kicking a puppy, but it needs to be done. “She got pregnant and then called me to take her to the clinic.”

“That’s terrible,” Susanna says.

“Yeah, the whole thing was pretty upsetting. But I figured you knew about it.”

“Why would I know about that? It sounds pretty personal.”

“I figured boss man told you,” I say. “He told everybody else.”

Susanna looks horrified. I feel morose, having told the truth of the matter, the whole seed of the vengeance plan exposed, and Betsy not here to help me out. I keep wanting to dislike Susanna, to find reasons why she’s annoying me or why I think she’s overeager or naive or something, but she just looks sad, and concerned, and I hate it, so I tell her about the corner store guy to change the subject.

“That,” says Susanna, “did not happen. You’re kidding.”

“It did,” says Betsy, sitting down with our round. “And I’ve got the evidence right here in my wallet.”

“What?” I ask.

Betsy produces one of the photos.

“Why do you have that?” I ask.

“I show it to people when they ask if I have a boyfriend,” she says. “It helps weed out the less committed.

“You are so weird.”

We drink and talk and Betsy cracks jokes that are mildly amusing and deflects attention from some guys at the bar. She asks Susanna questions, and Susanna offers answers, and it’s all pretty neutral, but I think everybody knows what’s she’s up to, even Susanna, which makes me like her a little bit more. After awhile Betsy gives up trying to get Susanna to reveal her sordid past and it becomes a good idea to stumble outside in the direction of a cab. The first one that comes we put Susanna in, and when she’s out of sight I punch Betsy so hard in the arm she shouts.

“What were you trying to pull in there?”

“What do you mean?”

“That felt like a set-up, Betsy. You made her totally uncomfortable.”

“Who says she’s gay?”

“Oh, so it’s not a set-up?”

“Stop being such a stick in the mud, O’Brien. Maybe one of us could get laid one of these days.”

“Yeah, OK, cuz we really go out on the prowl.”

“Just cuz you don’t want to go out to gay bars, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it. Don’t pull that ‘we only go to straight bars how will I ever meet anyone’ crap with me. I’ve offered. You just don’t want to try.”

“If we went to gay bars, you’d still be the one to get laid, Betsy.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. But you’ve been in a bad mood for too long. I was just trying to cheer you up.”

“Fine,” I say.

“I wouldn’t get laid at a gay bar,” she adds, suddenly.

“Not by me,” I say. It hangs there for a second. Betsy shifts back and forth in her sneakers. The sidewalk leans the way sidewalks do in San Francisco. I feel a touch of vertigo, but it passes.

“That’s not what I meant,” she says.

“Whoever knows what you mean,” I say, letting the world tilt all the way, as though this might reset it, and I could unlearn what I understand about my friend, about her discomfort, about her desire, and about mine.

“I was just trying to help,” she says. “I thought you liked Susanna.”

“Betsy,” I say, “whether or not I like her is not really your business.”

Here is the truth, because Betsy, for all her ideas, is less well versed in the language of feeling, and she has nothing to say.

I hail a cab, finally, and we ride in silence. It drops me off at my apartment and I hand Betsy some cash for my leg of the trip, then go upstairs and watch the shadows of trees wrestle on the ceiling until I fall asleep.

What I meant: Once, driving back from Half Moon Bay, we stopped at a reservoir, and Betsy took off her shirt and laid on the hood of her car in her bra in the sun, which had come out here, in this valley, away from the ocean and its churning currents. I tried not to look too much. We talked, about anything, the weather, the sun, and I began to relax a little. Before we got back in the car, and before she put her shirt on, she came up to me and slipped her hands under my shirt, around my back, and pressed her mouth against mine. I was lightheaded from the heat and the sun and started to push back, but she just said, “Stay in the moment, O’Brien,” so I didn’t say anything. Then she released me. We didn’t talk about it after, though now the things I knew about Betsy were not all simple, like the car, not rub clean with your sleeve kind of things. This day slid off the edge, like raindrops streaming across the window on the freeway, leaving a thin, nearly translucent stain. But I thought about it all the next day, and the day after that, too. I was never very good at staying in the moment.

* * *

Betsy shows up at my door the next morning. She’s brought a fistful of DVDs and a bottle of champagne with her, along with some orange juice and cookie dough.

“I thought you seemed out of sorts last night,” she says.

“This is what’s for breakfast?”

“You’ve never had Mimosas and cookie dough for brunch?”

“Not that I recall,” I say. “What did you bring?”

“Just like, a bunch of old movies. Giant. And Some Like it Hot. I’ve never seen either of them, have you?”

I say that I haven’t, although this is not true, but somehow lying suddenly seems a skill I should develop a taste for. As I watch Betsy slice rounds of cookie dough onto a metal sheet and lick the sugar from her fingers, I feel a sliver of hate slide into my gut, for this girl from Idaho, who wears her jeans a little too tight and is nice to me.

“Why don’t you leave it,” I say. “Let’s go watch the movie.”

Betsy holds up the remaining log. “You don’t want any?”

“No, not really.”

“I could skip the baking. We could just eat it with a spoon.”

“Look,” I say, “What’s happening here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” I say, “What is it you want?”

I know as soon as I say it that I want her to say she wants me, and that she doesn’t know the answer, which for Betsy means she doesn’t, and that the growing buzz is not going to go away even if she does say it, but that she won’t, and she doesn’t. The nights I had thought of turning down the light, when I felt her hand graze my leg on the couch, the pulse of blood in my thumbs when I held her car keys while she dug through her purse for cigarettes—all these things are the swirl and pulse of seduction, and she is good at that, she can’t help it, maybe, or maybe she can, but either way the thudding in my brain and my hands and at the base of my throat is nearly unbearable. I look at Betsy, leaning against my kitchen counter, cookie dough covering her fingers, hand hanging in the air, in what seems to me already a half-gesture of departure, and I make a promise: I will not cry when I tell her to leave, and I won’t think about what comes after.