“Great,” Ari says quickly. “Yeah, really good.” She nods and looks over his shoulder. “Fine.”
“How’s…your wife?”
A strange expression passes over her face. She shifts thetentacle from one hand to the other. “She’s spending the semester upstate as a visiting scholar. She’s…fine.” Her mouth turns into a tight line before curving into an approximation of a smile. “According to Instagram, she’s fine.”
Josh is genuinely stunned for a moment. Not because of the apparent breakup—that doesn’t surprise him at all. It’s the uncharacteristic shakiness of her voice.
“I’m sorry,” he says, actually meaning it. “What happened?”
“Two weeks ago, Cass showed up at the apartment with a ‘totally brilliant young adjunct professor’ she met at Bard. Katya. At first I didn’t think anything of it, because we’ve been practicing relationship anarchy.”
“ ‘Relationship anarchy’?”
“Yeah, we unchained ourselves from society’s expectations of a long-term relationship.” Ari’s nodding as she says it but she swallows hard enough that Josh can see her throat bob. “Then I saw the movers covering the furniture in bubble wrap and I realized that she didn’t bring the woman with a PhD and huge breasts back to our place for a threesome.”
Oh fuck. She’s on the verge of tears because of his awkward attempts at polite conversation and how the hell do you navigate around divorce talk?
“I—”
“I guess she’s doing the relationship anarchy thing with Katya now.” Ari rocks back and forth on her boots with jittery energy. “I mean, this woman is twenty-six and raises goats on a hobby farm and Cass always liked blondes”—she spits the words out quickly—“so why wouldn’t she reinvent herself yet again with an even younger woman?”
“That’s—”
“Ironic? No. Maybe it’s Alanis-ironic. The goats are cute.Cass posts a lot of photos on Instagram.” Ari takes a huge breath in, shrugging her shoulders tight against the side of her head. He just barely stops himself from reaching out to touch her shoulder. Is that a thing that people do to comfort each other? Too intrusive? Too intimate? “Anyway. That’s my sob story. How are you?”
Josh blinks, still trying to process the last two minutes. It’s been so long since he’s had a conversation with someone who’s not trying to set him up with a catfishing victim.
“Fine,” he lies.
“Really?” Her eyes move back and forth across his face. It’s the kind of close scrutiny he’s been avoiding for months.
“Do I not seem fine?”
“You’ve literally never seemed ‘fine.’ ” She lets out a little burst of laughter. Her right hand—the one that’s not holding the tentacle dildo—jerks up, as if she’s about to touch him on the arm. Josh braces himself in anticipation but she moves it at the last second, grabbing something that looks like a giant purple tongue. “Doyouwant to talk about it? We could finally share that bottle of white zinfandel?” It’s something between a question and a suggestion punctuated with an ellipsis.
“No.” He pauses for a half-second—just long enough for Ari’s expression to shift into disappointment, ensuring that the invitation was genuine. “How about an actual drink instead?”
5
“THETIMESRAN A HITpiece instead of a review. Suddenly it was open season on me just because my dad owned a deli.”
Ari sits next to Josh at a bar in a boutique hotel around the corner from CreamPot, with a tumbler of Jim Beam and a glass of malbec, respectively. Josh looks less polished these days: There’s a slump in his shoulders, like he doesn’t want to take up so much space in the world. A patchy beard covers the lower half of his face, muting the way his feelings are written on the surface.
“The phrase ‘just because my dad owned…’ doesn’t exactly make youmoresympathetic,” Ari observes. The place is quiet in the lull between late brunch and early dinner. It’s a relief to sit elbow to elbow, rather than across a table, where Josh would be able to see her every microexpression.
“That fucking piece made me radioactive. I was trying to breathe new life into the business. Suddenly, all these people who probably hadn’t eaten at Brodsky’s in years were accusingme of dishonoring my father’s memory.” He sets his glass down on the coaster with a bit too much force. “I’m not the heir to some great culinary legacy. My father believed that any dish with more seasoning than schmaltz, salt, and pepper had no place on the menu. I’m allowed to want more than that. I was supposed to create something important. I was supposed to have a Michelin star by now.”
“Maybe to some people,” Ari says, “a pastrami sandwich with just the right amount of mustard is more impactful than an award from a tire company.” Josh stares at his wineglass, unconvinced. She clears her throat and grasps for a subject change. “Well, at least you have…Sarah?”
“Sophie.”
“Right.” She leans in. “Your ‘good girl.’ ”
He rolls his eyes. “You don’t remember her name, but you remember that?”
“Seared into my brain,” she says, tapping her temple. “Did she end up being the missing half of your black-and-white cookie with the arms and legs and the weird little penis?”
The bartender looks up.
