She lied: “Yes, of course.”
“Get ready, Nick,” Simon called from downstairs, where he and Zachary were putting away the dishes.
“Wish you would,” I said to Julia, whom I wanted to get to know better.
“Next time. You and Simon will have fun.”
Are you sure? “It’s really fine.” I conceded: she would go to the river.
Julia had been to Helen’s before, anyway, and had loved it. “What?” Zachary said when she said she’d visited in the past and even liked it, characteristically envious that she and Simon had gone and done a thing without him. “Well, I never get invited to anything, so that’s no surprise, I guess,” Zachary said before pulling away from the remaining dishes he was washing to fume upstairs, bitter until Julia escorted him out of the house for their swim. His jealousy was absurd, even banal, and he knew we knew that, which made him firmer in his belief that he had to feel this way about it. This, I had learned, was what he always did. He was captivated by his own emotional impermanence, that he entered and left the room as present as smoke unless he focused himself, usually through the prism of his sexual desire, long enough to condense into simpering human form. What little enthusiasm he could ever muster for himself or others was usually short-lived, and disappeared as he inevitably devolved back into a kind of ongoing self-loathing. He was, moreover, a frequent liar, someone who loved to lie, even if the lie was unnecessary: “I used to sleep with him,” Zachary told me once about someone on tv. Julia shook her head and mouthed No because no.
Julia too seemed ever poised to vanish before us, as if the lines that distinguished her from the world were fading. She was lanky, with long black hair that framed her pale, triangular face, and she often appeared distant, even indifferent to the conversation around her, though this remove lent her a certain liquidity, in speech and movement, like that of an octopus quietly spilling across the sand as it jettisons itself forward, tentacles and voluminous head billowing in the current. In this, she was ever the escapist—quite literally, sometimes, as at night she was always the first to leave the bar, disappearing before saying goodbye to any of us. Likewise she was stone quiet most of the time, giving her the necessary space for thoughtfulness (contra Zachary’s usual, talky rush to poor judgment) when she expressed an opinion, and both Zachary and Simon hung dutifully on her every word.
Her mother had apparently survived a small plane crash in Canada early on in her pregnancy, and the shock of their tandem survival revised Julia’s family into tentative life, as if they lived only by chance. Three years ago, her father went out the windshield on a freeway in Michigan. Bad luck follows some with remarkable persistence, and it did so with Julia, all the way to her would-be love life, which she skirted through a devotion to Simon. They spent much of their time together. (She had boyfriends, though she committed to none with the same intensity as she did to her friendship with Simon.) He kept her as his closest confidant, but she read this intimacy as some more fundamental connection, one above friendship—and perhaps even romance, though she was no fool and knew that he would never “fall for her” (and I don’t think she ever fell for him either). Rather, she seemed to view their friendship as a sibling-like alliance, truer than one conditioned by sex and desire. Love of Simon purified her and, in a way, her love purified him. They believed, foremost, in one another. For Simon, we all fell into a disorganized line that began with her, then Zachary, and then me, though my place was peculiar since I was the one who was sleeping with him. I was no threat to her, or at least not in a way that led her to any animosity toward me, and we got along well.
She wanted to become a writer, did write, or at least was making various much-discussed attempts to do so. What do you want to write about? I asked. “My friends.” I understood: but what do your friends look like in fiction? She wasn’t sure what I meant by the question. “I’ll send you a story sometime,” she said.
I was curious so I pushed her to do so since I imagined she might possess, in her fiction about her friends, a skeleton key to Simon. She stalled for months, but eventually sent me the draft of a novel that began: “Our friendship was over.” Whoever it was that she included in this “our” was not entirely clear, though the primary character besides the narrator seemed to be based on Simon, and the book wobbled along a narrative arc that carried him from café life in New York to South Carolina, where the narrator retreated to a small coastal town for some unclear reason. She had never been to South Carolina whereas I had, since I was from North Carolina, and when I pressed her on why she had chosen to write (unconvincingly) about the low country, she balked and said, “Let’s talk about the ending instead.” It concluded abruptly, with the Simon character appropriating a small fishing boat that he took out into a storm in a quasi-suicide attempt, though what would become of the character was unclear. Before that, not much happened, which didn’t bother me as a reader, though the flicker of events that composed the book never achieved a clear picture. Perhaps that wasn’t what she wanted. She asked me for my thoughts, but we never got around to talking about them. Her prose was flinty, coldly pretty, and smart.
Zachary and Julia were, in a sense, two runaways. Both refused their pasts and rarely discussed what their previous lives, the ones before New York, had been like. Zachary was dopey, though he was from an “upper middle-class Republican” family in New Hampshire, people who were “big on Romney” in the 2012 election, so I always wondered how lost he could be given his northeastern pedigree and the financial security his “big on Romney” parents provided him. Simon, who knew much more about them than I did, wrote off their reluctance to divulge anything personal to me as nervous insecurity.
“They don’t know you yet,” he said. “Let them get to know you.”
Simon was “wealthy-ish,” his word, but he minded that people suspected that he was well-off, as I had when we first met, and he often downplayed his background by constantly mocking “rich taste,” which was, at bottom, his taste. Despite assurances that he was like everyone else who was “struggling,” he never managed to lose his prim, boarding-school manners nor his upright and boyish tone, which he often deployed with me early on in our relationship. This moneyed affect irked me, the performance of a class difference between us that seemed to cryptically matter to him. (My parents were what passed for working-class in the postindustrial south, my mother a school teacher and my father an accountant.) I’d roll my eyes, and eventually he took the hint, dropping the attitude, though certain vestiges remained several months into “our thing.” He called me “darling” in that obnoxious way gay men sometimes do. Rather, he forced himself to call me darling, appending a smile to each use of that word like it was a gift he was offering me, a quarter he placed in my open hand that I could finally spend. For most others, he repressed these tics with charm and good looks. He was handsome and smart and I liked him, whether I was his darling or not. When I said stop calling me that he said OK, and did. He went with honey.
With them, I felt like no one, a flat type that they could fill with their ideas of the person I ought to be, the person Simon ought to date. For Julia, this meant I was an upwardly mobile writer who might someday be responsible for some decent novel (that I was, up to that point, a poet who sometimes wrote about art, “like Frank O’Hara,” seemed not to factor into her picture of me), and therefore I was a Person of Interest, someone to know. Zachary, who was much more suspicious in general, made me even more of a blank: a harmless fuck that Simon used to bide his time until what, he wasn’t sure. To him, I was not someone who would alter Simon in any meaningful way. Knowing this, I wondered what Simon was to them. And who they were to him. I had hoped going upstate would allow us to clarify ourselves to one another.
Simon’s house was a modest two-story built in the early forties. It sat on top of a hill amid tall, uncut grass. It had never been renovated, and it sagged under its own weight, accumulating dust and grime with each passing season. While the house technically belonged to his parents, who had needed somewhere to park cash in a real-estate holding, they never visited (they lived in, and never left, the Upper West Side of Manhattan)—and