Struts and Frets

In a fit of New Year’s can-do-ism, Victoria promised herself she’d find love by the end of the weekend. She waited for her Friday date, sipping the lightest beer that Hound and Wolf served, which compensated with cherry flavor for what it lacked in proof. It tasted like expired children’s medicine, was impossible to drink quickly, and would be difficult to finish at all. This was her favorite kind of drink.

Her date was late, but she didn’t look at her phone. She often pictured herself from the outside, and she imagined Harry first meeting her crouched over a screen versus encountering her, poised, with an amused, observing look on her face, so she sought something to observe with amusement.

She knew Harry’s last name even though he hadn’t told her: Rivers. If you knew a person’s first name and where they went to school and their job, it didn’t take much to find them. Failing a simple keyword query, you could screenshot their profile, crop the photo, and reverse-search the image. Harry Rivers had been easy to find, though, and she already knew he was an ER nurse with an active leftist Twitter presence who looked, in some of his photos, a little like Alain Delon. Maybe he could politically radicalize her. Her own self-involvement would be too great an obstacle to overcome alone, but together with Harry, she could join a collective. Form a collective. Grow vegetables on their roof. She was already six years into the future when she recognized what she was doing. It was a habit she was trying to break: She invented so much beforehand that getting to know people usually ended up being an exercise in revision.

Julie, her roommate and the self-styled angel on her shoulder, always scolded Victoria for researching in advance, making little tsk noises or bopping Victoria on the head with a rolled-up magazine when she caught her at it. Julie had been a psychology major in college, where terms like regression and displacement had embedded themselves in her everyday vocabulary. Now that she was in graduate school, it had only gotten worse. Once, when Julie was delivering an unsolicited disquisition on the learned helplessness of a mutual friend, Victoria began poking her all over—stomach, shoulders, hips—looking, she claimed, for the off button.

Victoria didn’t understand what kind of couple would have a last name that was a noun and still name their son “Harry.”

She’d picked Hound and Wolf for its intimate little booths, but the intimate little booths were all taken when she’d arrived. Hence the bar, where it was much louder. Voices and glassware mingled with an ethereal song, a familiar one, which she tried to place.

“This is from that movie,” she told the bartender, looking up to indicate the music.

“But which movie?” He was a potent combination of handsome and approachable. He reminded her of Chow Yun-Fat in Hard Boiled, and she thought he would look especially good holding a gun and a baby.

“I literally just saw it. It’s on the tip of my brain.”

“1981,” he clued. Two people down the bar were trying to flag him down, but his attention remained expectantly on her. “Chicago.”

“I’m right there.”

“You’re so close.”

Maybe Harry Rivers would stand her up.

“I have to go do my job. Don’t cheat and look it up.”

She had just surreptitiously brought her phone to her hip when a face leaned into her peripheral vision. He did look a little like Alain Delon, minus the sex appeal—which was to say, not really like Alain Delon at all.

“Victoria?”

She moved her coat off the seat next to her.

Harry Rivers had just gotten off a fourteen-hour shift at Langone, where a massive bleed had delayed him. Describing it, though, he sounded as if he were about to fall asleep.

She’d been up at that hospital just the other day. One of her side gigs when she was auditioning—a purgatory that was feeling permanent lately—was playing patients for medical students in didactic settings. On test days, so many students did the mock examination that she knew it by heart at the end. Last time, when one of the later neurology students forgot to test the Babinski reflex and wrapped up by asking if there was anything else that Victoria—the putative patient—would like him to look at, she said, helpfully, “Maybe you could do the thing with my feet?” He’d smiled, bringing to mind a young Billy Dee Williams.

She’d looked for him after, but he was gone.

Harry Rivers did not seem impressed by the story. He seemed increasingly sleepy, but he soldiered on, covering every first-date topic in sequence. Victoria was still working on her original cherry beer when Harry Rivers ordered his second drink, and it dawned on her that she wouldn’t be able to leave until she finished. Right then, he began asking her about herself, and she cycled between telling him about the off-off-off Broadway theater scene, hedging about whether she’d ever move to Los Angeles, and rushing through swallows of cloying lambic. She drank the last sip right as Harry ordered his third.

She was sorry to be on a bad date right in front of the bartender, and she hoped that she came across the way she felt: like a fun person who was not currently having fun.

At last, she and Harry said their goodbyes among the out-of-season picnic tables and string lights in the empty beer garden. They’d met early—Victoria had arrived at five p.m.—but it was already long dark.

“Let me know if you’d like to grab another beer sometime,” said Harry Rivers.

“Likewise,” said Victoria. They were in agreement: They would never see each other again. When she got home, she would delete the match.

She started home, past the Barcade and the Rite Aid and the twenty-four-hour laundromat with its smell of linen, cleaned and heated. A man leaned out of the doorway to tell her she had a nice face, and she glared.

She could see how Harry Rivers had been on so many first dates. For one, he’d talked at length about how many first dates he’d been on, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then that comment about the bosomy patient: too crude. And the fraternal jealousy he’d alluded to: too vulnerable. Plus, the sleepy affect. She wished she could tell him in a friendly way. Every single problem was an easy fix.

And if Harry Rivers was so clear to her, maybe the reverse was true too. Maybe he could tell her why she kept getting left.

When it first started, it could be freely accounted for by her choice of partner. Commitment-phobic, immature: the explanations came easily. But her latest relationship had been different, and its difference had cast doubt all the way backward. They’d met each other’s families and spent holidays together and had their own shared lexicon. For example, the way the syllables had jumbled together one sleepy night when he said “I love you” made the words sound like “Mew,” so that’s what they said from then on—until at some point Victoria realized they hadn’t said the real thing in weeks. She climbed on his lap and said it.

“Mew, too.”

“No, I love you.”

“Mew, too.”

Two weeks later they broke up. His reasons were vague, but their relationship had felt so specific. She kept reaching out, asking him for another, better explanation, until during one midnight call he said, “You push until you get your way, Victoria. Like right now, for example. I’m done talking, but you’re not. So we talk. Sometimes you push a little, and sometimes you push a lot, but you’re always pushing.”

Well, she didn’t call him again after that. She kept a tally in her mind of how long it had been, like a sign boasting days without a workplace accident. She knew what she was like. But what was so wrong with wanting? What was so wrong with visible desire, visible effort? Over one of their weekly meals while she was in high school, her father had told her, “Your mother’s family has some Calvinist thing going on, where they treat success like grace. You don’t earn it, it’s just bestowed upon you. It really means they think it’s gauche to admit all the string-pulling they’re doing behind the scenes.”

At that memory, she went back around the block to talk to the bartender.

“Thief. The thermal lance scene,” she announced, pointing at the speakers, which were now playing some other song.

“Choose your prize.” He gestured to the taps.

She used the frisson of nerves as propulsion. “Actually, would you want to get a drink sometime? With me? Somewhere where you don’t work?”

“Oh, man.” He tripoded his hands on the bar. “I’ll give you a qualified yes. A friendly drink, sure. A date, no can do. Fortunately-unfortunately, I’m happily coupled up.”

“Figures.”

“You didn’t hit it off with your friend?”

“I did not. At least the feeling was mutual.”

He looked apologetic, then inspired. “Wait, hey, if you’re looking to meet someone, I’ve got a buddy. He’s the greatest guy. I’ve been trying to think of someone to set him up with for a while.”

“What’s he like?”

“He’s just good. Smart, funny. He’s trying to do comedy.”

“I’m not sure I can do any more creative types.”

“He’s funny but not, like, wacky.”

“Why is he single?”

“I’m not sure. He’s had girlfriends, though.”

“Very recently?”

“Not too recently.”

“What’s his name?”

“Daniel. And I’m Andrew, by the way.” They shook hands across the bar.

“Victoria.”

“Vicky?”

“Never.”

Chemistry was a terrible thing, untethered, as it often was, from availability. She looked for the least attractive thing about him and settled on his unkempt nails. It barely changed anything at all.

“I’m seeing him tomorrow! At a party. Come meet him. No pressure. I won’t even tell him it’s a setup.”

At home, she announced, “I need another piece of information to triangulate this ‘Daniel,’” and Julie interrupted her extensive Friday plant-watering routine to come over and shut Victoria’s laptop.

They lapsed into silence while the orchids soaked in the sink. Julie had a bottle of wine, and Victoria another beer, and they sat against opposite arms of the couch, blowing across the tops of their bottles at each other. Victoria tried to make a harmony. The interval was close, and she took little sips so she didn’t overshoot. Finally, she got something like a fourth—the air between them vibrated doubly—but then Julie took a sip of her beer.

“No!” cried Victoria, pulling her feet out from underneath Julie’s. “You bitch. You Philistine. I just got it.”

Julie shrugged. “I was thirsty.”

“Can we do something fun tonight? I’m so depressed.”

“Indian Feast?”

“Indian Feast!”

Julie, who had banned Victoria from the computer, put in the order.

“Let’s play my favorite game,” said Victoria.

Julie shook her head. “No. You say you don’t like my psychobabble. You can’t have it both ways.”

“But I love attention so much it cancels that out. Tell me what that makes me.”

“Friends don’t diagnose friends.”

“I just love attention so much.”

“I know you want me to say a narcissist—”

“Yay.”

“—but the degree to which you enjoy attention is normative for your developmental stage and sociocultural environment. Sorry.”

“Boo. Something else, then. What about my mom issues? Something oedipal there?”

“There’s a lot there, but nothing that sexy.”

“My flair for drama?”

“That’s your career.”

“Did you know that some feminists say that antisocial personality disorder and borderline personality disorder are the same thing,” asked Victoria, “but one is diagnosed more for men, and one is diagnosed more for women?”

“You look up all these things yourself and then try to get me to say them about you. You’re a normal person with quirks.”

“That’s worse.” Victoria felt herself growing provocative.

“That is not worse.”

“That might be the meanest thing you’ve said to me.”

“I meet people that are really sick, Vic.”

“Sick, Vic.”

Julie drew herself up. “I’m serious. People who would love to have the kind of garden-variety angsts that you do, because then they would be able to function in society. Have relationships. Jobs.”

“I don’t have a job. Or a relationship.”

“You’re competing with people you’ve never met to win a really stupid prize.”

Victoria was icing over. She didn’t feel like herself, but then again, she’d been this way for as long as she could remember. “I get it. I’m an asshole. My problems are nothing.”

“I didn’t say either of those things. Why do you want there to be something wrong with you?”

Because there is something wrong, thought Victoria. In the absence of pathology, she was, what? Petty, needy, vain, selfish. Generally shitty. And it was all her fault.

Julie reached forward and held Victoria’s feet. “I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: You should see a real therapist. Not a student. Not your roommate.”

“Deus ex machina!” announced Victoria. Julie looked confused. “Emphasis on the ex,” Victoria went on. She showed Julie her phone. Someone Victoria used to sleep with in college had texted to say he was in town last minute and asked if she was free for a nightcap. “You could put sunglasses on a mop and Jason would try to hook up with it,” she crowed.

“I don’t understand why you want to be with a guy that you think has such a reptile brain.”

“Because,” said Victoria. She sighed and kept sighing, her diaphragm lifting until there was nothing left to exhale. “I need a win.”

On the way to the restaurant, a man on the street asked if he could put it in her, which she did her best to interpret as a good omen.

“I’m meeting a friend for drinks,” she told the woman at the front, looking past her at the people around the bar, “but he’s not here yet.”

“There’s a man alone over there,” said the hostess, pointing at the stranger as though offering a viable alternative.

“That’s all right.”

That something was different about Jason was apparent immediately on his arrival. His manner was at once lighter and more grounded than she’d ever seen it. Oh no, thought Victoria, and sure enough, he had a real girlfriend, his first. He looked happy. He had really just wanted to catch up.

The subway back to Brooklyn was mostly empty, but a twentysomething in sheepskin-lined Crocs and a “Professional Smoker” flat-brim walked all the way down the car to seat himself beside her. After a flare of indignation, she realized he was shielding her from a man relentlessly adjusting his testicles a few places down, and she was grateful.

Saturday morning was rainy. When she left her apartment and looked up at the clouds, the tall man who hung out on the corner yelled, “You need an umbrella!”

“I have one. It’s in my bag,” she yelled back, showing him.

“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t see your bag was that big.”

Everyone was in a bad mood. The conductor shut the door on two people who boarded at the last second and didn’t release them for a full ten seconds. Where the track was elevated between Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street, the wet air gave the pale view a dreamy, half-realized quality. She was going to an audition—a weekend audition, bottom-of-the-barrel stuff—and her hair would be frizzing an inch out.

At Bergen Street, a woman pushed a lime-green stroller over the gap into the car. In the stroller lay a little girl, her mouth agape, her limbs at slightly odd angles. Victoria tried making faces, but the girl didn’t respond. The girl wasn’t looking at her mother either, who rested her head on the stroller’s handle, talking or singing too quietly to hear. The mother touched the girl’s lips with a felt frog: a finger puppet. The mother lifted up a pig finger puppet too and danced them in front of the girl, who didn’t seem to track either with her eyes but nevertheless slowly reached out and touched the pig with her hand.

At last, the girl smiled, so briefly, either at the mother’s salvos or at the faces Victoria was making over her shoulder. The woman slumped a little with relief. Victoria, too, sighed. The girl stuffed her hand in her mouth, cried a little, and went back to being unresponsive. Victoria wondered if theater wasn’t the stupidest thing in the world.

The midtown building was half practice spaces, half sweatshops, according to plausible rumors, and Victoria waited with a few other twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds in a rented room. She had several versions of her headshot—smoldering, comic, pleasant, wry—and she used whichever she thought most fit the role she was trying to get. The photos had cost her nearly a grand, and there had been no return on the investment yet. Thousand-dollar photos for a Saturday audition: Life was not going according to plan. Today, the pleasant one was stapled to her résumé, on which the most impressive roles listed were from college, a fact that became more damning each month.

She evaluated the glossy photo as a stranger might. She wanted her appearance to at least have meaning, if not value. Her teeth were slightly off-center from her philtrum, and she wanted to shove them over with her fingers, but otherwise, she was nearly perfectly symmetrical. She decided that the best modifier for her beauty was “competent.” She then decided that competent beauty might be the worst kind.

She was reading for Nora in A Doll’s House, a part she’d played in theater camp during high school. Her tone was bright when she said so to the director and the reader, but they only nodded stonily. Behind them, curtains were drawn across a mirrored wall, but Victoria could see her face in the gap between the panels.

“I have existed merely to perform tricks for you, Torvald,” she said, for maybe the thousandth time in her life. Watching herself in the slash of mirror, she felt like a clown pulling an endless handkerchief from its mouth.

The redeeming feature of the trip into Manhattan would be lunch with her father’s sister, at the same Upper West Side tablecloth restaurant they always went to. The audition had gone late, and Victoria was spacey with appetite as she walked through the corridor under Penn Station, barely noticing the man clicking his tongue to match the clicking of her bootheels.

Aunt Jane had an incredible memory for the details of Victoria’s life.

“What happened to that cheesemonger?”

“He moved to Denver.”

“What about that one you met on the internet?”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“The one with all those tattoos.”

Victoria shrugged. “He disappeared.”

“Isn’t it strange to meet somebody online? I guess that’s where everything happens these days.”

“It’s nice because you know they’re looking.”

“I always assumed everyone was looking. When we took the buses to those demonstrations where we lay down on the airfield to protest the bombers dropping mines on Haiphong, we were doing it to meet guys. I mean, of course I was against the war but . . .”

“Two birds.”

“Exactly.”

She often wished Aunt Jane were her mother.

“What is with these men in the news wanting people to watch them masturbate into potted plants? Do you know what that is?”

“A power thing?”

Aunt Jane broke into a roll with her thumb and reached for the butter. “It’s the most bizarre thing I ever heard of. You know what it makes me think of? Going to Beth Israel for all those fertility treatments when I was trying to have Sammy. There would be these Hasidic men making their wives do the whole battery of tests and treatments—because of course it couldn’t be the man’s fault—but they can’t make eye contact with any women, so you’d see female doctors meet them in the waiting room, and these men would respond to the potted plant in the corner like it was the most normal thing in the world. That’s what it makes me think of.” She punctuated her points so emphatically with the roll and knife that she’d hardly made progress on the buttering.

Victoria delicately sipped her lemon water. “Maybe they should have been the ones jerking off into the pot, so—”

A bit of butter flicked off Aunt Jane’s knife onto the tablecloth. “Yes, so the doctors could finally get a sperm count sample!”

The table shook with their laughter. A middle-aged waiter appeared with a shim and stabilized it with practiced efficiency. He moved beautifully, and Victoria wondered if he was or had been an aspiring performer.

The sun was already setting when Victoria emerged in Brooklyn. When her phone got signal aboveground, she saw that the bartender had sent her the details of the party, which was prom-themed and thrown by people who “take themes seriously.” She was so engrossed that she didn’t notice a man coasting next to her on a bicycle until he asked, “What’s so interesting on that phone?”

“What?”

“Videos of people falling into holes because they’re not looking where they’re going?”

Victoria rolled her eyes. Kill yourself, she thought. He’d already pedaled on.

At home, she begged Julie to come with her to prom.

“You’ll meet this guy and then you’ll ditch me forty-five minutes from home.”

“I’ll buy you an Uber. Then it’s only twenty minutes.”

“That’s a stupid way to spend money.” But Julie agreed, on the condition that she wouldn’t dress up. Julie’s silhouette hadn’t changed in all the time Victoria had known her. She wore the same cropped cardigans she’d favored in college, in increasingly muted colors. “And I’m only doing this because you need a win,” she said.

Victoria pulled her junior prom dress from the back of her closet, and after a dinner of leftover Indian Feast, they went.

“Y’all dykes?” asked a man soliciting subway swipes. “It’s cool if you are.”

Victoria went through the turnstile, then flipped him off. Julie quietly encouraged sympathy for people who grew up without positive regard.

A man across the car had the narrow, appealing seriousness of Duane Jones in Night of the Living Dead, and Victoria briefly—guiltily—wished she hadn’t asked Julie along. She leaned on her friend’s shoulder in expiation for the thought. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For everything.”

Walking up to the brownstone in her aqua tulle, Victoria was relieved to see that the girls smoking on the stoop were dressed like her and Julie: one in an ankle-length gown and wrap, one in street clothes. She pressed the buzzer but couldn’t hear it over the voices inside. She knocked. If she were wearing different shoes, she might have kicked the bottom of the door, too, but she was in sparkly heels, also from high school. At last, a girl in a shiny green gown let them in, greeting them with an elongated hello, already turning back to her conversation. This was a place that threw parties often. Layers of decorations had aged into permanent decor: stockings over the fireplace, haunted-house chains, doily hearts curling at the edges. Through a proscenium-like opening in the living room, a black-lit dining room was visible, where a disco ball hung from a ceiling medallion that must have once circled a chandelier.

Julie was leaning over the sectional, examining the plants on the windowsill by the light of the streetlamps outside. “These are good plants.” She squeezed the wedged leaves of one. “Good turgor on this aloe.” She moved down the line: “They’re probably trying to bonsai this jade. Little leaves, big trunk. Looks good. They should move this lady, though. She shouldn’t be in direct light.”

“The maidenhair is usually on the mantel, actually. We put it here to make room for the yearbook display.” A curly-haired girl in a tiara and a costume-closet wedding dress knelt on the cushions between them.

“These are yours?”

“Everything except the philodendron.” She pointed at a climbing plant pinned around most of the window frame. “That’s inherited. I can only take credit for the last four inches.”

“Have you ever seen Desk Set,” asked Victoria.

“How many people live here,” asked Julie.

The girl touched her thumb to her other fingers like she was doing math. “Seven, right now. I think.”

“Anywhere I should put this?” Victoria lifted the six-pack she’d brought.

“Through there.”

“Roger that. You Gucci, Jules?”

“I’m good.”

In the dining room, a box solicited votes for Prom King and Queen, and a well-lettered length of butcher paper promised A Night to Remember.

Victoria moved through the dark purple flashes into the halogen bright of the kitchen. She looked to see if there happened to be anyone she knew, but the group laughing over a phone video were all strangers. She liked this part of a party. It reminded her of looking out from the wings before a performance, watching the audience before they watched her.

The counter was nearly full, and Victoria shifted cups to make room for the six-pack. Someone was fixing himself a drink next to her. He looked shockingly like a young Richard Gere, Richard Gere in the Breathless remake, or maybe Days of Heaven, and her heartbeat lifted into her throat. With a hope like worry, she wondered if this was Daniel. A tuxedoed girl bumped past her and loopily investigated each bottle. Satisfied with the cup of vodka, orange juice, Sprite, and rum she mixed, she turned back, and as if seeing Victoria for the first time announced, “Hi. I like your dress.”

“Thank you. It’s actually my junior prom dress. I like your mustache.”

The girl traced a finger along the curly line decorating her upper lip, said, “I forgot about that,” and disappeared into the dining room. Richard Gere was gone too. Victoria shouldered the loss, opened one of the beer bottles she’d brought, and went off to find the bartender.

Three men were talking politics in the bedroom at the top of the stairs.

The first said, “Who knows? Maybe we’ll be happily surprised. After all, public schools wereinvented by the KKK.”

The second shrugged sardonically. “Just another example of how the far right and far left are exactly the same.”

The third joined in with a startlingly good mid-Atlantic accent. “Ah, yes, The Horseshoe Theory: so named because someone came up with it after getting kicked in the head by a horse.”

“No thank you,” Victoria whispered, and went on.

In the next bedroom, a pair sat on the edge of the mattress, looking at each other with the intensity of two people about to break up or get together. Victoria rounded the banister of the next flight.

She found Andrew two floors later, on the roof, where people were gathered under a commercial-quality outdoor heater.

“You’re here,” he said.

“Don’t look so happy to see me.”

“No, no!” He held out his hands. “It’s just, Danny just texted me that he’s not coming out tonight. I gave him such a hard time about it, but he’s really not feeling well. If you guys meet up, the first round’s on me, okay?”

That she felt like crying was embarrassing. She smiled. “It’s okay. This is a great party.”

“I’m really sorry. I wish I’d known earlier. I was excited about this. Great dress.”

“Thank you. It’s actually my junior prom dress.”

“Here, we’re playing a game.” He stepped back and drew her into the circle. “We don’t know the rules. Eric tells us if we win or lose.”

An owlish type in a top hat was trading off numbers with—her chest tightened—the man from the kitchen, who gamely accepted all outcomes.

“One.”

“Three.”

“Five.”

“Six.”

“Nine. I win.”

“Two.”

“Six.”

“Five.”

Victoria felt a hand on the small of her back. It was Julie, who now had a tiara. Julie’s eyes narrowed the way they always did when she was confronted with an intellectual puzzle. Victoria ogled the challenger, happy for an excuse. How everyone wasn’t gaping at him, she couldn’t understand.

“This is tic-tac-toe,” said Julie, after a few rounds.

“So smart, my friend is.” Victoria kissed her on the cheek as the group dispersed. “Help me. I found my win.”

“That one?” Julie shrugged and went right up to him. “Hey. What’s your name? Do you like stuff?”

He laughed. “Stuff’s cool. I’m Mark.”

“This is my friend Victoria,” said Julie, and left.

Two hours later, they were alone, sitting where the sections of the sectional met. Victoria braided the dark blue fringe of a throw blanket, aware of Mark’s arm across the cushion behind her. He’d explained what had initially interested him about optometry and was returning the question. “What made you want to act?”

There was a short answer and a long one; she gave him the short one. “My mom is an actress.”

“That’s awesome,” he said. “What kind? Theater? Film?”

“Film.”

“Anything I would have seen?”

Victoria sighed. She braided the fringe braids together. “My mom is Mia Russell.”

“Holy shit.”

The short answer, she remembered, was more complicated than the long answer.

“But I think it’s more of a nature thing than a nurture thing,” she added.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s not exactly supportive. I just think acting is in both our genes.”

“Is that why you do theater instead of film?”

If she liked him before, she loved him now.

“I think I can kind of see it, actually,” he said. “I’m not a big movie person, but I remember her in Golden Afternoon with the short hair.”

“You want to know something funny about that one? She’s playing the mother of an eighteen-year-old, but in real life I was three.”

The party was winding down around them. Andrew flashed her a thumbs-up from his hip as he pulled on his coat at the door.

“Do you think we’re overstaying our welcome,” she asked, meaningfully.

“I don’t live too far away, if you want to keep hanging out.”

She saw the three cherries fall into a row. Jackpot.

Victoria found Julie gathering cups in the kitchen with the plant girl.

“I owe you my life. And a cab. Do you want it now?”

Julie looked from Victoria to the plant girl and back, signaling or confirming something. “Actually, I was maybe going to stay and hang out with Rachel.”

“Oh!” said Victoria. “Winner, winner, chicken dinner.” She turned to Rachel. “Julie is amazing. She is perfect. If you hurt her, I will garrote you with a bolito.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

Julie lightly touched Rachel’s wrist. “Ignore her—she watches too many movies. Bye, Victoria.”

“Look it up. Love you, Julie.”

On the subway to his apartment, Mark sat on the other side of the grab bar from Victoria, which she tried not to give undue meaning.

His building looked old, but inside, everything was new. Plastic film still clung to the appliances. A girl’s laugh came through one of the doors as they tiptoed through the apartment. “That’s Molly’s room. Then Derek’s. Mine’s at the end of the hall.”

He shut the door and sat in his desk chair. “Hey, maybe I could see you act in something sometime.”

“Maybe. I haven’t been cast in anything in, oh, about eight months.” Even that was an overstatement. The last role was in an MFA thesis play staged by a friend.

“That sucks. What do you do when that happens?”

“I have this quirky thing where I’m embarrassed by failure and don’t like to talk about it,” said Victoria and unzipped her dress.

They tipped onto the bed, and after a few minutes Victoria tried her typical segue: “Do you have a condom?”

Mark sat up. If Victoria’s beauty was competent, his was otherworldly. He had the most earnest eyebrows she’d ever seen: soft and square, the same width all the way across. Right now, they were lifted in question.

“I have sort of a sex-first, ask-questions-later approach,” she explained.

“I have sort of a longer timeline.”

“Longer like forty-five minutes from now or like . . .”

“Longer.”

“That’s cool.” Victoria pulled the comforter free from where it was tucked under the mattress, wrapped herself tightly and completely, and hid her face in the fabric. “I’ll just die now.” When had this happened? After years of premature groping and abrupt pivots to intercourse, men had come up with the bold new prank of taking it slow. Mark’s voice came from above, muffled by the batting. Eventually, he circled his body around her cushioned one until, needing cool air, she emerged.

“I need a moment,” she announced.

“You want tea? I’ll make tea.” He nodded on her behalf and left her in privacy.

Redonning the dress seemed too dramatic a statement, but she put on her bra and helped herself to a T-shirt. Over the dresser was a postcard of a Matisse painting, and she gently pulled back the corner to see if anything was written on the other side. It was blank. The back of the postcard of Picasso’s Harlequin in her own room would show a loving message from her former boyfriend. Its corner was creased from use, but she maintained—to herself—that she left it up because she liked the picture.

“Now what do we do?” she asked Mark, when he returned with the mugs.

“Same as before? We get to know each other?”

“I need a prompt.”

“Okay, like, show-and-tell? You act. Maybe you can do a scene?”

“The only thing I can think of now is Lady’s Macbeth’s ‘unsex me here’ soliloquy—for obvious, embarrassing reasons—which entails acting like a total psycho.”

“I remember that from high school. She talks about breasts.”

“She does indeed.”

She was tired, but at Mark’s coaxing, she started putting on a little show of voice exercises, then pointed to her throat as she began, “The raven himself is hoarse . . .” By the end, she was hamming it up, using a pencil from the desk for the keen knife and the comforter for the blanket of dark, like children’s theater. It struck her that, to some degree, she was always doing this: winking, holding herself slightly apart. She couldn’t stop doing it any more than she could pitch herself over a bridge, and she knew this might keep her from ever being great.

Mark, though, was clapping. “Awesome. I could never act.”

Of course you couldn’t, she thought, and it seemed like the best, most enviable thing about him.

She craved attention up until she got it, at which point it felt like a too-small garment. “Your turn to entertain me.”

“I’m not really a performer.”

“I’m sure there’s something. Like show-and-tell, like you said. Please?” She fluttered her lashes, which appeared to inspire him.

“I could show you my direct ophthalmoscope? You’ve probably seen one.” He opened a desk drawer. “Basically, it’s a tool for a non-office setting: school visits, someone who’s not dilated. It’s a lot heavier than it looks.” It was. He put it in her hand, and she nearly dropped it. “Careful, it’s about eight hundred dollars.”

“I’ll just give this back to you.”

“The bottom part is the battery.” He detached the silver base. “Then the home attachment clicks in and shines a light to look at the optic nerve.”

He turned the dial and demonstrated the light against his palm. “Big circle, medium circle, little circle. That’s for pupil size. Then all these settings I don’t use. Green light, blue light, half-moon. You look at their right eye with your right eye.” As he explained, he leaned across her, holding the handle with his thumb and forefinger, anchoring his knuckles against her face. Her vision went white. She could feel his breath on her cheek. “Reason being, you have to come really close. And if you lined up your left eye with their right eye, you’d also be lining your mouth up with their mouth.”

He showed her, and they kissed. Victoria felt a ripple of arousal like a blanket being shaken out. “That’s cute,” she said.

“A cute lawsuit. It’s pretty cool, though. The optic nerve is the only live nerve you can see. And the only blood vessels you can see without cutting somebody up. Anyway, you take these home and practice on your friends, and everybody nervous-laughs because you’re right up in their face, which is good. Half of what you’re practicing is getting that close to a stranger without laughing. Then I’d put my left eye to your left eye.”

She felt his breath on her cheek again, then didn’t. He stayed against her eye.

“What?”

He leaned back.

“What?” she repeated.

“Have you ever had your eye mapped?”

“Why?”

“There’s a mark on your optic disk that’s probably, essentially, just a freckle. But when I see it, I refer people to an ophthalmologist.”

“But it’s cute, right,” joked Victoria. “Like a beauty mark?”

“Very cute,” said Mark, but he couldn’t act. “It’s just out of an abundance of caution.”

It was odd after that. Without much ceremony, they agreed to go to bed, barely touched.

In the darkened room, orange lights came through the tiny window.

“I can’t sleep,” said Victoria, after some time.

“Because you’re worried?”

She said yes, although the honest answer was that her body was buzzing for touch.

“I’m sorry. If you go see someone, they’ll almost definitely tell you it’s fine.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “You can use my proprietary sleep technique if you want. It’s called ‘count to one.’”

“Is it exactly what it sounds like?”

“It’s exactly what it sounds like. You just keep counting to one.”

“One. One. One. One. One. One. One. It’s actually kind of working.”

She could feel cold spreading from the windowpane early the next morning. Her throat hurt from talking so much the night before. Mark made her tea again and promised he’d “follow up.” Doctor speak. So that was that. If he texted her, she wouldn’t reply.

Out on the street, chilly in her prom dress, she considered how to tell the story to Julie. She was leaning droll. It was funny, after all, the way one thing happened after another. But if Julie wasn’t at home when Victoria arrived, if she was still with the plant girl, if Victoria arrived to an empty apartment, there would be nothing funny at all in how Victoria told the story. She imagined waiting at the door, crying, Julie’s lovestruck face crumpling with surprise and concern when she saw her.

She nodded to herself as she walked. She’d felt like something was wrong with her, and maybe there was, something medical. There was some prospective pleasure in thinking her inner and outer worlds might be in accordance. Or maybe she was terrified; maybe the dull, another day at the office sensation was how her mind handled something big. She didn’t really know herself at all.

A figure in a parka loomed outside a bodega, foam coffee cup tiny between his huge snow gloves.

“Hey,” he said when she walked past, her heels sounding on the cement. “Hey, Princess.” She watched squares of sidewalk unroll beneath her rhinestone pumps. Cigarette butts, blackened gum, plumes of dried urine. As she turned into the entrance of the subway, he called out to her once more: “Hey. Hey, Princess. What happened? You run away from the ball?”

Read more from Issue 22.2.