You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [71]
“Domestic FUCKING bliss!” Stevie cries, throwing his arms in the air as though he’s just crossed the finishing line of some Olympic event conducted entirely in his own head. He begins rejigging the hydraulic mechanism for another round.
“Oh my God, you guys,” Heather says, wiping Sprite off her cashmere sweater. “People live here.”
“You know what?” Stevie says. “I bet they fucking do.”
Ted nods apologetically, his mind beginning to sail.
Lauren walks into the kitchen. He looks up at her from the floor, his hand splayed in a pool of milk, cat food all around him. He raises his hand to wave, feeling liquid drip down his arm.
“Looks like you’re having fun,” she says.
He experiences an overwhelming sense of gratitude that she is still wearing the orange cardigan.
“Duude. You gotta get up outta that food over there, man, don’t let it waylay you, don’t get detained by it.”
With Stevie’s encouragement, Ted rises and suddenly he and Lauren are face-to-face, as if conversation were now supposed to ensue.
Stevie gazes at the two of them and with the wily eye of a stoner clocks their little tension. “So do you—,” he begins, but unable to manage, dissolves into a fit of laughter. They watch him because he is something to watch that is not each other. “So do you come here often?” he finally gets out, folding over in hysterics, slapping the counter, weeping.
“You’re such a loser,” Heather says. “Come on, you guys, let’s go upstairs,” and she leads them up the back staircase onto a landing, from where, through another open door, they can see a fully clothed boy standing in a nearly overflowing bathtub swatting at a floating house plant with a tennis racket, cheered on in his novel sport by three other boys gesticulating furiously, tubside.
“This is all so meaningless and destructive,” Heather says.
Ted risks a sideways glance at Lauren and is rendered momentarily inoperative by the realization that she was in fact already looking at him when he glanced, this causing their eyes to meet. At lunch—what seems a thousand years ago—she grinned twice at comments he made and none of her friends laughed.
Heather announces she is going to put an end to the bathroom vandalism and marches across the landing, calling out ahead of her, “Hey there!” leaving Ted and Lauren alone by the banister. Acid house pumps from the living room up into the brightly lit stairwell.
Stevie has advised Ted that if he finds himself toasted and needs to simulate normal conversation, he should adopt a simple compare-and-contrast strategy: state an uncontroversial fact about yourself—who you have for history, what you did last summer, et cetera—followed by a question eliciting the same information from the other person. This is what people do in real life, Stevie always says. Just behave as if the given circumstances were real. The method seems partially effective until the music changes abruptly to Lou Reed, at which point Ted becomes convinced all remaining facts about his life are deeply controversial.
“Sorry Stevie was such an asshole,” he says.
“Whatever. You’re not joined at the hip.”
Lauren’s casual eloquence stuns him. “You’re right,” he says, “we’re not.”
Caged longing presses up through his chest and into his throat. He wants to tell her he’s never had a girlfriend, never even had sex, only been kissed twice, and that this makes him feel like an ugly creature and a freak, but he concludes these thoughts are better kept to himself.
“I love your sweater,” he says.
“Thanks.”
“And I like that thing on your neck—what is it?”
“Jade,” she says, touching it with her fingers.
“I bet it’s warm. It must get warm when it hangs on your neck.”
“This is criminal!” Heather yells from the bathroom. “You’ll