“Hi, Inez’s dad!” the girl said, giving him a goofy little wave.
“Hi,” he said. “Sorry about that. Didn’t know you were . . .”
She grinned at him.
“Coffee?” he said, hearing something helpless in his tone. “Something to eat?”
The girl brightened even more and opened her mouth.
“No,” Inez said. “We’re going out.”
Fran looked over her shoulder, waved at him, and said, “Bye, Inez’s dad!”
He caught a shred of their laughter as they were entering the elevator, cut short by its closing doors, and then that was that, they were gone. Dennis bustled over stiffly, sat neatly at Bill’s feet, then looked up at him meaningfully.
“Well,” Bill said.
Dennis held his gaze, searching, attentive, waiting for Bill to expand on this theme. And again Bill said, “Well! What to make of that, bud?”
Bill watched him slump down and rest his head on his paws in a dog’s pose of resignation.
Did Cara know about this new development? Had she known for ages? Would she say, “Oh, Inez’s girlfriend, yes, I know,” in that infuriatingly brisk way, as though the life of her child was—as with her many responsibilities at the firm—just another matter on which she was utterly up to speed, fully briefed, impeccably informed? And that clipped response would be a tacit reproach to him, a more junior employee, for not being abreast of things, for dropping the ball. Well, fuck Cara. He wasn’t going to consult her. He’d talk to Inez without her.
He went and stood in the doorway of Inez’s room as though it might yield some kind of explanation of sexual identity. Her mess was spectacular, and he regarded it with a kind of admiration while leaning against the door frame. The clothes and stuff were ankle-deep and everywhere. He couldn’t trespass if he tried. His eyes moved around the room and counted five beer bottles. On the bedside table an ashtray had become a miniature Vesuvius. Beside it, a jumbo bag of peanut M&Ms, ripped open, spewing rainbow pebbles. The one bit of space was the bed itself, an island of twisted sheets, with a few scanty and rumpled garments that his eyes jumped over hastily. A lone blue M&M, crushed into the sheets, had left a small smudge.
Later that day, he was lying shirtless on the sofa, remembering that small blue smudge, the sound of her laughter, when the door clicked. This often happened; he’d be thinking of Inez and she’d appear. But then, he thought of his daughter most of the time, so it was a matter of simple probability.
She flopped on the floor with a slap, spread-eagled, and deftly toed off her shoes so the soles of her turned-out feet made two gray flags pointing toward him.
“Well, hi, sweetheart,” he said.
She didn’t respond, just panted, tongue lolling in a cartoon of exhaustion. Her outspread limbs claimed so much of the floor’s space.
“Inez,” he said, this time both meaner and kinder.
It must have been a tone he’d never used with her before, because she propped herself up on her elbows and looked at him.
“What?”
He hadn’t prepared anything. He became more aware of wearing nothing but the shorts she’d ridiculed, aware of his handfuls of soft flesh above their buckle, of the sweat on his back. She took in the sight.
“I just want to say,” he began, and at this corny and uncharacteristic preamble, she scrunched her face into a frown. He persevered. “That . . . you know, I love you and support you whatever. And . . .”
His voice sounded strange, even to himself.
“Uh. Yeah. That’s great. Cool,” she said, with the what-the-fuck affect he knew too well, and she made as if to get up, to get out of there.
“I mean, with your friend. Your girlfriend.”
The word sounded as though it were wearing its own frame. She stared at him, incredulous, and then hooted a laugh.
“Uh,” he said, pointedly.
She kept laughing. He waited, sweating, humiliation and irritation rising. Finally:
“Fran isn’t my girlfriend!” she shrieked. “I mean, we hook up,” she said. “But she’s not my girlfriend.”
She enunciated the word with a mocking lurch.
“I’m going to tell her you called her my girlfriend.”
“No, Inez, you don’t have to do that.”
She didn’t appear to have heard him. “I’m going to nap,” she said, making her way to the freezer. “Can we get sushi takeout later?”
He watched her grab a fistful of ice cubes and press them into her sternum.
“Sushi?” she repeated impatiently.
“Yeah,” he said. “We can get sushi.”
“From the good place this time, not the shitty one.”
“Okay.”
He couldn’t remember which was the good place and which was the shitty place.
She looked at him as one cube escaped through her fingers and slid across the floor, skidding, leaving a shining trail.
“You’re not going to forget and fuck off somewhere?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve got a thing, but it’s early, I’ll be back.”
“Like, nine?” she pressed.
“Fine.”
He watched Dennis retrieve the ice cube and begin to crunch it with big, happy jerks of his jaw.
There was a time when Bill had believed sex was everything. Some days, he had felt that all he had to do in this city as a moderately famous, passably good-looking man was walk into a bar and a woman would approach him. And not just bars: anywhere, almost. A store, a park—the fucking street! It was a miracle. Like an extended wet dream of existence: wet and ready mouths, cunts, endlessly. He’d felt sex to be everything in that it seemed to be driving the world. He didn’t mean the forces of capitalism, yada yada—not boobs and billboards—but something, well, almost supernatural, a kind of wild current moving life forward that only he’d tuned in to. He’d wanted to fuck the world, felt himself to be an ongoing roar, and for a while—a few years, maybe—it had seemed the world was roaring back at him, that the more he wanted, the more it gave him. He knew this sounded like a textbook example of mania. But even now, from this sobering distance of decades, it felt more like a truth than a delusion.
Porn now was a kind of heartache. He’d summon flesh on his screen and the stirrings would be outweighed by a kind of dull pain in his chest cavity, a mourning of his own desire, maybe. He’d look down at his penis and chivy it, slap it gently back and forth like a person trying to rouse a drunk, but it would stiffen only to subside, some half-hibernating animal reluctant to venture back into daylight. He’d click in a joyless trance, in the hope that some body, any body, would wake him up. To feel some desire, and to desire more, was worse than feeling no desire at all. As for being desired, it still happened, but less and less: the small light that went on in a woman’s eyes when she realized who he was, or who he’d been.
Skimming through clips felt indistinguishable from swiping through the various dating apps he’d installed six weeks ago. The same joyless trance. Swipe right. Swipe wrong. He was “seeing” someone, as the euphemism went. He’d swiped right on a divorcée, a tawny-haired marketing manager retraining as a Pilates instructor; didn’t buy books but for the annual beach-read bestseller. Had never heard of him. Good. Fine. It had instantly become an arrangement.
She required a specific method to come and she’d stated it with a directness