The Weirdness(32)

And now, as Billy enters Barometer, the very first thing that he notices is that she isn’t wearing her shoulder-mount tonight. Billy looks around on the table in front of her, feeling certain that he’ll spot her camera somewhere within reach, but it isn’t anywhere. Looks like tonight the ephemeral will go unimmanentized. Fuck.

Nevertheless, he feels determined to open on a positive note, if only to cover for the fact that he’s just been caught openly flirting with somebody else. “Denver!” he says. “Hi!” He can feel shiteatingness creep into his grin.

“Hi,” Denver says, with obvious wariness. She looks at Billy, then at Elisa, then back at Billy, some variety of deepening despair taking residence in her expression. Billy’s grin gets even wider, to compensate.

“Denver,” Billy says, voice buoyant with cheer. “This is Elisa—she’s the, uh, the other reader tonight? The poet?”

“Nice to meet you,” Denver says, her voice rimed with frost.

“And Elisa,” Billy continues, “this is Denver, my—” And right there he chokes. Can’t quite bring himself to say girlfriend. He’d spent half the day strenuously contemplating the prospect that she might be really and truly gone. Hadn’t he? And yet here she is. He’s tempted to just call her his ex, and he feels a nasty pleasure at the thought that she might feel stung. But that’d burn the bridge, and so he hesitates. Friend is right out. He needs some word that’s neutral, ambiguous. Because there’s Elisa. And he feels like there’s no sense in coming across to Elisa as taken unless he knows that Denver is really, well, taking him. So: not girlfriend, then—but what? Partner? Companion? Buddy?

Of course as soon as the pause lasts more than a second his entire thought process on the matter becomes completely transparent to everyone.

“Nice,” says Denver. She looks away, aiming whatever expression she’s wearing now at the wall, where Billy no longer has access to it. She takes a long sip from her martini.

“Uh, okay,” Elisa says, a barb in it aimed at Denver. She gives Billy a tightly wound smile, the kind of smile that hides a mouth full of clenched teeth. It’s a little fearsome, but then she gives him a kindness: she lays her hand on his shoulder. Just for the briefest second. “Good luck tonight,” she says, and then she’s off to the bar, removing her hand from his person and using it to signal the bartender with one decisive thrust.

Billy watches her go, but only for a second. With Elisa out of the picture he can at least concentrate on the task at hand: damage control. He slumps down into the available chair. Denver casts a flashing look at him then looks at the wall again.

“Really nice,” Denver says. “You’re a class act, Billy Ridgeway. Would it have killed you to say girlfriend?”

“It wouldn’t have killed me. I’m just not sure it’s accurate. You haven’t exactly been there for me lately,” Billy says, clawing desperately for what looks like it might be the moral high ground.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” says Denver. She turns back to him. “I’m here; I’m at your reading; I’m being supportive. Pretty much the opposite of what you did the night of the Eidetics opening, if you recall that night.”

Billy does. He passes on the opportunity to comment on it, though, because The Night of the Eidetics Opening serves now as shorthand for Total Failure of Character, a pure instance of asshole behavior, a kind of toxic fact which, he has learned, will cause him to immediately lose any argument in which it is admitted as evidence. Instead, he strategically rewinds back to the part of the argument where Denver used the word supportive.

“Supportive?” he practically crows. “It’s been, what, eight days since you spoke to me? I left you like twenty-five voice messages and you didn’t return even one of them. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

“Six,” Denver says.

“What?”

“Six. You left me six voice messages.”

Billy mulls this. “That’s still a lot,” he says, after a second.

“I think,” Denver says, her tone softening a little, “that it was the right number of times, maybe. I thought about this. I decided that it was enough to show me that you were sorry and not so many that you crossed the line into scary.”

“Thanks,” says Billy, brightening. “I thought about how to strike that balance, you know.”

“I believe you,” Denver says. “I could sense that you were thinking about that, actually. It’s very you to do something like that.”