Two weeks with no sign of Jørgen: maybe Billy should have been more worried. But he’d been enjoying having the tiny apartment to himself for a while. It had given him an opportunity to finally attempt to have a private sex life with Denver.
Denver, a filmmaker, lives in Queens. She shares her co-op house with eleven other people. She sleeps in a hammock in the attic; somebody else sleeps in a hammock at the other end of the attic. Her place is not a viable site for sexual activity. Not that Billy’s place is any better. He sleeps in a loft above the apartment kitchen, and the loft doesn’t have a door. In fact, it only has three walls. Basically if you’re standing in the living room you can see directly into the loft. Especially if you’re six foot four, like Jørgen.
To make matters worse, Jørgen stays up late, sitting in the living room till one or two a.m., smoking weed and listening to drone metal albums on his (admittedly awesome) Bang & Olufsen unit. Thank God he uses (admittedly awesome) wireless headphones; this at least gives Billy and Denver a chance. But adults shouldn’t have to fuck like that, trying desperately to finish before some third party decides to turn around. And the whole experience of rushing it? The clenched teeth, the film of flop sweat emerging on his forehead, the near-total uncertainty as to whether Denver is deriving any joy or pleasure or comic relief from the experience? It all cancels out whatever pleasure he gets from the grudging orgasm his body eventually spits out.
He’d return to having sex in the backseats of cars except neither he nor Denver owns a car. He has considered, on more than one occasion, signing up for a Zipcar account just to have a place to furtively fuck, but he never gets far enough in this plan to actually propose it out loud. Something about imagining that hundreds of other people around the city had also come up with this idea, and that he might end up fucking Denver in some car that somebody else had just used as their own roving fuckatorium … he envisions clenching buttocks, or a woman’s greasy footprint stamped on the window, and queasily dumps the whole idea.
So he was excited when he knew that Jørgen would be away. He’d used money that he didn’t really have to buy a nice bottle of wine, the start of a plan for a good evening. He’d told Denver that they’d be able to have some time alone. She’d been excited and pleased. Which was good. They were approaching the six-month mark in their relationship. A tricky point in a relationship, that six-month mark. Half a year in. Assessments get made when you’re half a year in. Half a year in is a good moment to instill excitement and pleasure, Billy thought. He thought it would maybe be the right time to say I love you, a task he had not yet accomplished.
Except then somehow he’d blown it. He’d gotten nervous about the exact scheduling of what he had come to think of as “The Event.” He’d been surprised that Jørgen had left as soon as he had after the conversation, and then had gotten confused about not knowing when exactly Jørgen was destined to return. So he began to hedge on inviting Denver over. Part of him thought that he should just call her over as soon as possible—immediately—but for the first couple of days he wasn’t entirely sure that Jørgen had, in fact, actually left. And then after that it seemed probable that he could return at any moment.
Billy sent a series of texts. He sent two e-mails of inquiry to the address that he thought was current for Jørgen. He even sent an e-mail to the address that he was pretty sure Jørgen wasn’t using anymore (Hotmail? That can’t be right, he thought, even as he was sending it). None of these efforts yielded any response. And a couple of days ago, with Jørgen already gone for twice as long as had ever seemed probable, he had to face up to the fact that he’d blown it. There would be no Nice Evening, no Event.
When he explained this over the phone, Denver had pointed out that if the Nice Evening had been truly important to him he would have been more careful to get a more detailed explanation of Jørgen’s plans.
“It is important to me,” he’d said. “I mean, it was important to me, I guess. I’m just—I’ve just never been good with details. That’s just part of the way I am.”
“So,” she’d said, after a pause. “What you’re saying is that you’re a fuck-up.”
“Not—not a chronic fuck-up.”
She’d pointed out that she could come over right now and they could still have a Nice Evening. The odds that Jørgen would choose this specific night to return—didn’t it seem unlikely? And it did seem unlikely. But Billy had gotten it into his head that the Evening was now impossible, and somehow he was unable to disabuse himself of this notion.