The Decent Proposal (16 page)

She had no idea what would happen next, so she simply waited, breathless.

His eyes clouded over. He jerked his head back down toward the floor, but it was too late. He spewed six gin-and-tonics and three-quarters of a pesto-chicken wrap onto the bottom half of her skirt, her ankles, her shoes.

“Aw, sick! Fucking gross! Get him out of here!” came the general cry, as he toppled to the ground. Heedless of the state (not to mention the smell) of her clothes and the puddle of vomit quickly forming around her, Elizabeth bent over him, alarmed to see that he'd actually passed out, though before she could do
anything about it his eyelids began to flutter, and by the time the muscled bouncer reached them, Richard was looking up at her in a dazed, supplicating manner that was nonetheless conscious. The bouncer forcibly lifted him to his feet, ignoring Elizabeth's protestations, and hustled him away, screeching “Eighty-six!” into a walkie-talkie. He pushed Richard through the front room, down the flight of stairs, and out the door in less time than the spin that had caused all the trouble. Elizabeth and Keith followed behind him, with Mike bringing up a distant rear.

“I'M TAKING HIM
to the hospital,” announced Elizabeth, beelining for a cab that by some miracle was standing empty on the curb. She folded Richard into the backseat and opened the front passenger door.

“I'm coming with you,” said Keith.

Elizabeth turned, shaking her head. “All these people came here to see you,” she said. “I'll take care of him. Cedars-Sinai's just around the corner.”

“You guys, this is total overkill.” Mike strode toward them. “Believe me, this isn't the first time he's puked from drinking too much.”

“I saw him pass out,” said Elizabeth.

“What, for like a second? Yeah, that wouldn't be the first time that's happened either,” said Mike. “He just needs to go to bed. Give the driver his address. I'm telling you, he'll be asleep and dreaming in half an hour.”

“Give me your number and I'll update you,” Elizabeth told Keith, ignoring Mike even as she turned to her. “You too.”

“Don't bother. Have fun,” Mike said, retreating to the club. She stopped, tossing Elizabeth a scorching glare over one bony shoulder:

“I told you he was a messy drunk.”

ONE IV DRIP
and a few routine tests later, Richard managed to sign himself out of the hospital. The attending doctor had recommended he stay overnight, since technically he'd sustained a head injury (a tiny bump on the back of his head where he'd fallen), but there was no way that was going to happen. Since his monthly payments started coming in, Richard had been meaning to purchase a better health insurance plan than the cheap one he'd signed up for on the open exchange, but he still hadn't gotten around to it, and he was eager to keep his hospital bills from the evening's festivities to a minimum. He had no memory of the ride to the hospital, but was relieved to discover he'd come in a cab and not an ambulance.

He didn't know who he would find when he reached the lobby, and was surprised to see Elizabeth there alone, embarrassed more than hurt that Mike wasn't there with her. He'd talked up their epic friendship, but neither he nor Mike had quite followed through on it this evening. And then, of course, there was the more obvious source of his humiliation. He glanced at Elizabeth's skirt, which was conspicuously wet, the black fabric glistening in the fluorescent light of the lobby.

“Was that . . . me?” he said, gesturing.

Elizabeth nodded. She'd more or less washed away the vomit in the bathroom, which had been nothing compared to Orpheus's mess on the couch. Without warning she flashed back now to the wonder she'd experienced that night, two months earlier: about life getting messy, and the messiness actually being somewhat pleasurable.

“I'm so, so sorry,” he said. “I'll obviously pay for the skirt—”

“Don't worry about it,” she said, in as soothing a tone as she could muster. A mess was still a mess, and it was almost 2 a.m.; she still had to drive all the way back to Venice. She wasn't used
to staying up so late. “It's fine. It was pretty much all gin anyway.”

“Ugh! Don't even say that word to me!”

Keith picked them up outside. He insisted on dropping Elizabeth off at her car and driving Richard home. She was parked on San Vicente, between Melrose and Santa Monica, and when she got out of Keith's car Richard followed her.

The Pacific Design Center loomed above them: a glittering glass behemoth that looked as if it were plucked from another city's skyline and plopped into the relatively flat landscape of West Hollywood. It had a neon trim that changed color every few seconds.

“Sorry about your skirt,” he said. Again. Like a doofus. But it was all he could think to say.

“Don't worry about it!” she scolded him gently, unlocking her car remotely. The beep echoed north past the Strip, into the leafy green hills south of Sunset. She stared at him. Did he have anything else to say? She was tired. She wanted to go home.

Richard stood there like an idiot, trying to figure out what to say to her. His industry friends were already buzzing about his disgrace. When he'd checked his phone in the hospital parking lot he'd had twenty-five e-mails, some genuinely solicitous, others gloating. He'd almost changed his Facebook status to “D'oh!” but decided this might encourage people to post comments on his wall, thereby alerting even more people to his shame than necessary. He didn't need his parents or high school friends knowing what had happened. He already had enough damage control to do in the days to come.

In the end, he settled for hugging her. It was about as awkward as their first hug a few hours earlier, but he felt he had to make some sort of overture.

“Thank you,” he said. “For coming with me to the hospital, and waiting. You didn't have to do that.”

“No problem,” she said evenly. The neon trim turned from red to blue, and his eyes took on a deeper hue as they reflected the color.
Beautiful eyes
, she thought.

There was a pause. The trim turned green. She got into her car.

Richard watched her spotless Honda Accord grow smaller, until finally it disappeared from view.

THEY WERE SUPPOSED
to meet at Elizabeth's house the next day. She half expected him not to show; they'd never done two days in a row before, and when she woke up (much later than usual), it felt like the day after a raucous office party—the aftermath to an evening of workplace transgressions. If there were a lesson to be taken from her ongoing “tutorial” in dating, it was that meeting your date's friends en masse was to be avoided, especially in a setting as volatile as an alcohol-fueled party. She would have been better off meeting each of Richard's friends—Mike in particular—in a more intimate setting, at dinner, or a night at the movies. All day long—at coffee with Orpheus (she chattered nervously for much of it about Richard's impending visit that evening), in the ocean on her surfboard (the waves were puny, so she spent most of her time watching the pelicans skim the water with their long, scissorlike beaks), and in her armchair, staring at (instead of reading)
Gaskell's
Wives and Daughters
—she felt an anxiety akin but not quite identical to dread.
She
had nothing to be embarrassed about, after all, and while she was by no means eager to see Richard so soon after their night together, she
was
curious to see how he would handle the unexpected turn events had taken less than twenty-four hours earlier. (She counted to five on one hand a total of five times that day—squaring the number like this pleased her.)

At 5 p.m. exactly she heard a knock on the door, and there he stood with a gift-wrapped package in one hand and a bottle in the other. He offered up the bottle first:

“Nonalcoholic.” He grinned sheepishly.

Elizabeth walked inside to place the bottle on the kitchen counter, and he followed her, thrusting the box forward with both hands, as if it were a bowl and he, Oliver Twist asking for more:

“Here. To help make up for last night.”

What could it possibly be? Elizabeth tore off the wrapping. It was from Saks Fifth Avenue. She lifted the lid, tossed it aside, and pawed through multiple tiers of tissue paper.

It was a skirt.

She lifted it out of the box. It was black, like the one she'd worn the night before, but the material was denser, with an intrinsic shine, like the glow of an animal's pelt. It was obviously very expensive—much more expensive than the one sitting in a crumpled ball in her “to be dry-cleaned” hamper.

“You really didn't—”

“Yeah, I did. I still feel so bad about last night.”

Why was he harping on the stupid skirt? It felt to her as if he didn't want to owe her anything, as though he wouldn't be comfortable till he'd repaid her. She saw the size on the inside of the waistline: 12.

“I'm actually a ten,” she said. “And sometimes I'm even an eight—”

“Mike said this designer runs small. I called her while I was in the store. She's good with stuff like that.”

It had been a truncated call, during which Mike had coined the phrase “the Retch Heard 'Round the World” and Richard had pretended to find this amusing, while failing to tell her how hurt he had been by her coldness toward Elizabeth, and her failure to come to the hospital.

He watched Elizabeth fold up the skirt and return it to the box. When she placed the cardboard lid on top of it, it felt as though she were sealing off a tomb. Was she mad because of the size?

“Marilyn Monroe was a sixteen, you know.”

“That's actually a myth.” She was thrilled to be able to contradict him. “She was more like a ten, and that was in British sizes, which's more like a six or even a four here. She had an unusual figure anyway, a bigger bust and hips but a really tiny waist.”

She didn't need him to console her about her dress size.

“I did not know that,” he said—slowly, carefully, as if she were a maniac recently escaped from the local asylum whom he'd happened upon during a solitary walk in the woods. It had only been a week since her outburst at Factor's, and he didn't think he could handle another verbal lashing, at least not tonight. He'd been doing damage control all day, abasing himself before an assemblage of smirks (mostly electronic), and he was trying hard not to hate everyone—not to resent them for their very existence, for being there to witness his folly. He moved instinctively toward a savory smell wafting from the kitchen, so strong he could practically see it in wavy lines. He hadn't eaten a proper meal all day, thanks to his hangover, and suddenly he was starving, ready to bury his troubles in food like a boy who's skinned his knee and requires nothing more than an edible treat to make it better.

Elizabeth was relieved he didn't question her source of information regarding Marilyn Monroe's figure, which was an article on the website Jezebel. She'd been researching
Some Like It Hot
online, since he'd said it was one of his favorites, and she figured they'd be watching it eventually. It hadn't taken long to fall down an Internet rabbit hole on Marilyn herself.

They each got a slice of pizza and sat on either end of the sofa. Elizabeth reached for the remote. They had to watch
Driving Miss Daisy
(which she had also researched, and was not much looking forward to—it sounded depressing) and discuss it for two hours. They might as well get on with it. This was what the next ten months would be like, she supposed. The dance had been a momentary deviation with no lasting effects, a wrong turn easily corrected. The straight and narrow stretched before them, all the way to the vanishing point in the far—but not quite as far as it once had been—distance, nothing mysterious or unknowable about it.

The Warner Bros. logo shimmered into view.

There was a knock at the door.

Elizabeth paused the movie, jumping up from the sofa.

“Who could that be?” she asked, though she knew perfectly well it could only be one person. She opened the door.

Nothing could have prepared her for what stood on the other side.

He was unrecognizable: his dreads lopped off and replaced by a smooth, silver crown of (somewhat receding) hair. His Robinson Crusoe beard was gone too, revealing a chin and jawline several shades lighter than the upper two-thirds of his face. His clothes were clean, but had obviously been bought secondhand, lending him a frayed, business-casual look. He was wearing a wrinkled, plaid button-down tucked into pleated khakis, the threadbare edges of which ended a few inches too soon; she could see his naked ankles
sticking out of preppy “deck shoes,” their tips worn to a shine.

It was certainly an improvement. For the first time in their acquaintance, he wasn't accompanied by a smell. But he had never looked more out of place or uncomfortable than he did now, fidgeting on her doorstep.

“Orpheus!” she exclaimed. He'd looked like his old self this morning. What had he been up to?

Orpheus craned his neck, peering inside. He had to see him. He had to meet the boy who'd started all the trouble.

Two months earlier, he made the first stumbling attempts at climbing up the well and reaching Lily. He needed the trappings of a sane, reasonable man again if he was ever going to wield enough influence to persuade her to reject the proposal, and for that he needed new clothes and a haircut. For that, he needed money. And for that, he needed to give up the bottle. This was the only crack or fissure he could find among the dark walls surrounding him—the only makeshift handhold he could use to hoist himself toward her.

A clear path, but easier traced than trod. If his life were a movie, the two months between the morning Lily told him about the proposal and this moment, now, on her doorstep would have been edited into an extended montage set to soulful music with jaunty interludes, as he slowly but surely progressed. The real thing was much slower, and never sure.

It was physical torture to stop drinking. After twelve hours without a drink, his brain, used to producing stimulants to counteract the depressant effect of the alcohol, was like a tiger that's strained against the confines of a steel cage all its life and suddenly finds itself free to roam the wild. But it was less like the cage door had been thrown open and more like the cage had disappeared before the startled animal's eyes—a liberation terrifying rather than exhilarating. Orpheus experienced the worst
of withdrawal: his hands shook, he saw stars, he was sick to his stomach, and once he hallucinated an army of cockroaches swarming over his body when really there had only been one. All he had to do to end this pain was get a drink, and he did this time and time again. Why wouldn't he? He'd lived for years on a philosophy of instant gratification grounded on the notion that life was cruel and capricious. The only sort of return he could be guaranteed was an instant one.

Each time he drank, however, he woke from the aftermath determined to try harder. He continued to meet Lily each morning per their routine, but every morsel of food she gave him stuck in his throat now; every word of kindness and encouragement turned dismissive and patronizing the instant it met his ears. He did not tell her about his plan. This secret quest to reach her as her equal became his personal obsession, lending shape to his shapeless days. After two weeks of failed attempts he destroyed all his alcohol. (He always kept a stash in his carry-on, plus several more buried in the sand.) It was easy enough in the moment; he was still half-drunk when he smashed the bottles and threw the shards into the ocean. But twelve hours later, he cursed himself as he suffered through the withdrawal symptoms one last time.

“Good evening, Lily.” He stuck his pinkie inside his collar to keep it from chafing against his neck. “I hope I'm not interrupting?”

Oh, Jesus
. How was she going to explain the “Lily” thing to Richard? Or the “Elizabeth” thing to Orpheus? She was in no way prepared for the two of them to meet. But inside this squashed moment of panic, Elizabeth was surprised to find room for a speck of gratitude: there was no way to really prepare for such a meeting, so if it was going to happen she was glad not to have known about it beforehand. There was simply no time for the wringing of hands.

“Good evening, Orpheus,” she said, mirroring his formal address. “You look good.”

“Thank you.”

She stepped back, gesturing for him to come inside. A figure bounded off the sofa. Orpheus's heart drummed in his breast. The moment was here; it was finally happening.

Three days after his last bout of withdrawal, he came out the other side as dry as the discarded chicken bones lying in a Styrofoam box next to his head. He sucked on them anyway; he didn't think he'd ever been so hungry. A little girl walked up to him, staring at his greasy dreads with an innocent fascination until her mother caught up to her and jerked her away—so forcefully, she dropped her half-eaten cup of ice cream. It sailed the three feet from her soft little hands to his grimy paws in slow motion: graceful, in an arc, like manna from heaven. Orpheus knocked aside the pink plastic spoon with his nose and lowered his mouth to the cup, taking bites as if it were a watermelon slice, his slurps drowning out the child's cries. From the corner of his eye he watched the mother cart the girl away and approach a uniformed cop. When she pointed at him, he tossed the cup, scurrying farther down the Boardwalk.

It was the day before the Fourth of July and the summertime revelers were out in full force. A fat man whizzed by on a skateboard, his round, hairy belly hanging over violet corduroy cutoffs. Yellow sunlight danced inside a tangled heap of blue-glass pendants being sorted by three older women with witchy hair and flowing skirts. A perfect, heart-shaped female ass clad in bright orange nylon strutted past him, and he followed it toward the green, foamy shore, then farther still into the smooth, indigo ocean where skin of all shades, whitest alabaster to blackest ebony, grew redder in the heat of a barbecue sun that made everything go wavy.

This place had been Orpheus's prison for countless years, the site of his misery and degradation. He hated it. But for a moment he saw how beautiful it was, like a postcard brought to life. He shut his eyes and shook his head from side to side because it was too much, and he wanted—he
needed
—for it to go away. When he opened his eyes again, he felt as if his bluff had been called because everything had indeed been replaced by a single object: a fist, its thumb pointed sideways in a gesture Orpheus knew all too well,
move along
. The cop had found him.

Richard stuck out his hand.

Orpheus gripped it, shaking as hard as he could. He almost whistled in appreciation. Now here was a good-looking man in the prime of his life.

“Richard, this is my friend Orpheus. He's a—a professor of English literature.” Elizabeth flashed him an apology; she hoped he wouldn't mind the fib.

By nightfall that first day, on July Fourth, Orpheus celebrated his first twenty-four hours of sobriety with a bag of peanuts, which was the cheapest thing he could buy to fill his stomach. He'd spent all day begging sober, which was a new experience for him, and had discovered he was much better at it than when intoxicated. His trick was to assume a pathetic posture, legs in a pretzel, elbows jutting out on the pavement, head bowed into his crotch. People assumed he was crippled, and it was remarkable how much more loot he accumulated in this position. He'd never been able to hold the pose for more than an hour, but this time he lasted almost four.

He watched the red, white, and blue colors explode above him. He'd bought a pack of cigarettes too, a luxury he never allowed himself before, since every penny had to be devoted to alcohol. Having his own pack made him feel like a squire among knaves, and the pleasant sensation of satisfying his appetite and having a smoke afterward encouraged him to keep going in the
face of the emotional torture that came with a clear head and functioning memory. His son Scott had loved fireworks. The Fourth of July had been his favorite holiday.

“A professor, cool!” said Richard. “Where?”