“On the Zoom of Doom.”
Ah. He didn’t know whether to laugh or wince at her epithet for their first interaction. “I didn’t really watch TV growing up.” He tried to think how to summarize his relationship with TV, which was really a proxy for his relationship with his parents, but then he thought, why on earth would he do that? “I just never got into the habit of it.”
She was staring at him with an odd sort of intensity. He was pretty sure she somehow knew his “I never got into the habit of it” was a more polite way of saying that he looked down on television. Hehadstopped short of quoting his dad’s refrainTelevision makes small minds smaller.
She finally shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She wasn’t going to call him on being a snob. She started toward the house. “Have a good day.”
The thing was, in addition to being a snob, he was also self-interested, and, apparently, superstitious. He thought about how, so far, he’d been doing all his writing in the mornings. Evenings here were more akin to what writing—or attempting to write—had been like at home: sitting and staring at a mostly unmoving cursor. He thought about how the walks with Blair were getting him out of his head. How the noncocooning method of writing seemed to be working.
What if he also got out of his head in the evenings, when he wasn’t getting anything done anyway?
“Zombies, you say?” he called after her, sealing his fate. He was already considering raising a crow army, what were a few zombies added to the mix?
“Yep,” she said from just outside the main house. “It’s based on a video game.” She held up a hand. “But before you get snooty, it’s prestige TV. It’s won a bunch of awards.”
“I wasn’t going to get snooty,” he said reflexively, though a TVshow about zombies based on a video game was exactly the sort of thing he would get snooty about. He did suspect zombies would be too heavy-handed a metaphor. Weren’t they always? But if he hated it, he could just keep his opinions to himself.
He could, right?
At leastThe New Yorkerwasn’t here to listen to him opine. And hey, even if they were heavy-handed, zombies had endured for decades as a cultural trope.
“What time?” he asked. “And can I bring anything?”
She smiled brightly. “I’ll cook. Are you a vegan, or do you have any allergies or restrictions?”
“You’re the LA person.”
“Is that a no?”
“That is a no.”
“All right. Let’s say seven. Just let yourself in.” She reached into her pocket and extracted a fob, which she tossed to him. “I’ve been meaning to give you this. It only works on these sliding doors. I figure you should have it in case I’m ever…” She trailed off and for a moment looked almost confused. “In case I’m ever out late and I need you to feed Edward or something.” She made a silly face that struck him as overly performative. “But don’t worry. I’m never out late.”
Edward, slobbery and jumpy, greeted Jack at the door that night.
The sliding doors to Blair’s house from the pool opened onto a small room that on the one hand seemed to be a mudroom—it had a bench and hooks on which coats and dog leashes hung—but that also resembled a kitchen in that it contained cupboards, a sink, and a wine rack.
“Hi!” Blair called. “We’re in the living room.”
He followed the sound of her voice through a kitchen that flankedan open living and dining space. As in the pool house, the overall impression was both airy and cozy, which should have been a contradiction but somehow wasn’t.
“‘We’?” he asked as he rounded the kitchen island.
She was setting out cutlery on a wooden coffee table, and she hitched her head toward one wing of an L-shaped sectional on which was perched possibly the largest cat Jack had ever seen. It was black and fluffy and stretched out fully like it thought it was Superman. It must have been three feet long.
“Morticia and me.” She pointed to the cat-Hulk. “Have a seat.”
“Morticia looks like she’s bigger than Edward,” he said as he tried to slide by her.
“She is. She’s a Maine coon.”
He didn’t know what that was, but he gathered it was meant to explain Morticia’s startling size.
“She won’t move for you, but you can just shove her off the sofa.”
“I would never,” he said, moving past the creature to the other part of the sofa. Blair moved one of the place settings, which had been placed at ninety-degree angles to each other, meaning they would be sitting side by side.
“Morticia has always been aloof, but when Reggie and I split up, he took our other cat, and she’s still mad about it. Which is funny, because Morticia wasnotnice to him. We never would have separated them if we thought either of them gave a crap. But apparently she misses him.”
