Are you coming?
7:28p.m.
We ordered you the salmon.
You like ponzu, right?
8:00p.m.
You need to be part of this decision, Joshua.
We have to present a united front.
Emailing you a recap of the offers.
If we move forward, I’m inclined to wait until after the Historical Society event.
Optics.
Josh braces himself against the chilly October wind whipping down Great Jones Street. He’s started adding evening runs to his gym schedule. Spending a full quarter of his waking hours at the Crunch on Bowery is a perfectly acceptable way to pass the time. Better than meetings with the humorless bald man fielding offers for Brodsky’s—property developers who want to turn the space into “athleisure concept labs” or “bitcoin bodegas.”
Inside his building, the old elevator shudders to a halt, opening directly into his fifth-floor apartment.
The fluorescent lights take a full two seconds to buzz to life, revealing the chaos, courtesy of his mother. In what’s supposed to be his living room, there’s half of a booth that his dad never got around to reupholstering, an industrial mixer, assorted hotel pans and racks, his dad’s old records and paperbacks, and questionably functional home gym equipment. A physical testament to Danny Kestenberg’s stubborn refusal to let go of things. His home now functions as a twelve-hundred-square-foot junk drawer.
At some point, Josh will pry the hideous avocado tile off the bathroom floor, rip out the chipped kitchen cabinets, and finish demolishing every non-load-bearing wall. But he’s not going to bother with the renovations he and Sophie had planned. Someone else can come in with their Miele appliances and Herman Miller chairs and create the most generic version of a Manhattan “dream home,” complete with a wife and a French bulldog.
He’s been telling himself that for the last six months. The only progress he’s made is a smattering of half-hearted sledgehammer holes, created after an especially brutal bout of self-loathing. Instead of dropping an anchor, he’d swung it through drywall.
He does some light social media stalking: monitoring restaurant openings and closings on Eater, sifting through the social accounts of every chef he ever worked with. All the James Beard winners, theTop Chefcontestants. This form of masochism is supposed to propel him into action, but it only brings the bitter feelings back up to the surface.
Peeling off his shirt, he walks back to the bathroom to start the multistep process of running the hot water in the ancient claw-foot tub. Everything in this apartment is half-broken. Josh misses the walk-in steam shower from his previous apartment. He misses Sophie in his walk-in steam shower. Or maybe he missesthe ideaof Sophie in his walk-in steam shower because they’d only had sex in there once. (She’d said it was awkward and possibly dangerous.)
Sometimes it boils over into a mix of hostility and anger: a longing for her to call while fantasizing about rejecting her offer of reconciliation. He wonders when he’ll have another sexual experience aided by more than his own hand and his porn stash.
So, when his phone abruptly buzzes to life in that very hand, it’s reasonable to conclude that he’d conjured a text from Sophie with the power of regret and self-pity. He gives himself a half-second to imagine her sheepish, apologetic message before glancing at the screen.
But it’s not Sophie’s name.
ARI CURLS UPon her air mattress—as much as one can curl up on a large plastic balloon—her fingers hovering over the keyboard, on the verge of the last line for another maid-of-honor speech on NeverTired.
Ari’s been describing the apartment as “empty,” but that’snot exactly true. It’s full of piles: piles of clothes, piles of books, piles of random shit she never bothered to put away that used to be on the nightstand. Which is also gone.
Several times, Ari has felt the automatic impulse to clean up the piles, in case Cass comes home late and stumbles over them in the dark.
But no one’s coming home anymore.
No one’s sending a wildly inaccurate ETA text with the kiss emoji.
No one’s getting up in the middle of the night to make kimchi grilled cheese sandwiches when Ari has the munchies.
No one’s purchasing the ingredients, either. There’s just a steady diet of microwave popcorn, takeout, and bowls of cereal. Cooking had been Cass’s thing. Ari had moved in and joined Cass’s life, already in progress.
Maybe it’s the emptiness of the room that emboldens her. Ari pulls her T-shirt over her head and snaps a couple selfies.Very tasteful,she decides after reviewing them.Definitely not trying too hard.She goes into the messages app to unblock Cass, sends the selfie, and blocks her again.
There. Some little gremlin inside her feels sated.
Ari likes to imagine that Cass tries to respond with words likeYes, pleaseandMore. Or maybe just the tongue emoji. But as long as Ari has her blocked, these responses live in a liminal zone. They are Schrödinger’s text messages.
