He was tan in October. His sleeveless muscles twitched. Chad did not fuck around.
He was showing some friends videos of himself and telling the stories that accompanied them. The friends appeared interested.
The coffee shop was cold, the air conditioning blasting here in the southern fall. Nashville was hot. Chad was hot. His friends were hot. The baristas, they were really hot. One had a nose ring and even that couldn’t make her ugly. Everyone was 27 or could’ve been. Everyone had never been fat. Germantown, this little renovated neighborhood north of Broadway, rich in Victorian buildings, cafes and some lingering felonies, was home to the kind of young urban professional lucky enough to grab something before the boom in prices.
Chad was lucky, smart and tough. He had bought his townhouse outright with three roommates six years ago. Now it felt like the world was coming to him. He’d always bet it would.
He thumbed through more of his recent videos until he ran out of stories. Another friend brought over his iced coffee. He took out a deck of cards and started dealing. It was 11:30 a.m. on a Wednesday.
Chad’s suffering was not less than yours or mine, not really; it just differed by shade and style. It was not the adrenal suffering of overtaxed parents or the lassitude of bread-stuffed office workers. It was not the consequence-laden suffering of soldiers or surgeons. It was not even the quiet suffering of the lonely and damned. Chad suffered from a barrage of disappointments.
His iced coffee always seemed to have too much ice. I mean, always.
His roommates seemed to be slobs at the worst times, just when he was in the mood for a clean home, a fresh leather couch to relax on.
The girls that Chad felt indifferent towards wanted to date him and then marry him. The girls he was really into, the perfect, sweet angels, had these strange walls up around him, and he couldn’t exactly be himself and blamed them for this. If he felt crazy about a girl, it would take him the longest time to convince her to sleep with him. With the others, it was often a matter of hours. With anyone he really liked, somehow, it took weeks or, in one case, two months. And the next day he suffered this out-of-body discomfort—talk about suffering. He lost them. By some twisted luck, the girls he desired most, sooner or later, found a way to make him recoil from them.
These were Chad’s crosses: over-iced coffee, repressed dates, Uber Eats drivers who made him come out to the street, friends who were fun three or four times then talked about themselves too much on the fifth, a townhouse too far from the bars and a truck too bulky to park on the street, pools of stranger sweat marring his bench at the gym, and orgasms he could never depend on to last the perfect length of time.
The world conspired to provide Chad with experiences that were just a smidge shy of what he would have settled for.
When he met Lisa, another Germantown resident, a transplant from LA, they seemed to understand how to talk to each other. In a half hour, he was ready to leave his friends at the tapas bar and take her duckpin bowling down the street. She said no, but she would text him later. He came over to her place at midnight. He got in her bed and she was waiting for something to happen, but he kept on with a story about a deadlifting competition he’d had with three friends from home. Whoever lost had to wake up at six am and throw eggs at the newspaper truck and film it. These bets were very important to them and couldn’t be taken lightly.
Lisa said, “So I’m guessing you won.”
“Hang on,” he said, “I’m getting there. So it’s Billy’s turn first and he puts chalk on his hands…”
She kept listening. Eventually, she stopped expecting him to make a move. That’s when he decided to.
“What’s the problem?”
“You missed your chance.”
“No, I didn’t,” said Chad.
But she rolled over and closed her eyes. He let himself out.
Lisa was no stranger to suffering herself.
She liked deep conversations and her friends really did not. She felt acutely the absence of these kinds of conversations in her life. Her friends wanted to talk about dating apps, cleanses, and adventures on a budget. She barely liked her friends.
One problem was that around 24—she was 29 now—she realized that everyone was ready to be her friend. It was a mysterious consequence of Lisa’s beauty, this nonsexual gravitational pull other women seemed to feel toward her. There was virtually no one she met who, should she be interested, would reject her overtures at becoming closer. When everyone was available, no one seemed perfect.
Eighteen months before she met Chad, Lisa’s mother died. She was only 66 and everyone had commented as much at the wake: “Only 66. Only 66.”
She had a bet with herself that her father, back in LA, would remarry sometime before he died. He had always kept company with female friends and it never seemed to bother her mother. Surely one of them would now rush to comfort him and they would discreetly start something, some new thing between old people. Lisa wouldn’t care. She hated calling him now, so maybe she wouldn’t hate it as much if there was someone with him when she called. Maybe he would try harder to pick up his side of the conversation if someone was listening, in the kitchen next to him, in the other room tidying.
Shortly after her mother died, Lisa got caught in a big lie.
She was wearing a tight pants suit and dark marble-patterned glasses, sitting in a park at lunch, when she got a text: “Was it you in my house?”
Her friend Cassidy, whom she had known all four years she’d lived in Nashville had recently had her own father visit for two weeks. He was in town for an extended work trip and staying in Cassidy’s loft. He took Cassidy, Lisa and two other friends to dinner the first night he was here. He was the kind of 50-something-year-old guy who had the energy of a 40-year-old but the wisdom and patter and wisp of the veteran. He was uneager, he didn’t have to prove himself to younger people. He dressed casually and brilliantly. He was successful enough not only to support his own wife and other kids back in LA, but to invest in various other real estate schemes around the country and, Lisa knew, enable Cassidy’s loft, utilities and martinis. At the bistro on 12 South, Lisa, like the other girls, played into the dinner dynamic of plying him with important questions, and seeking his philosophies. He did not appear to answer Lisa any differently than he did her friends. But it was after dinner when the others had used the restroom as a group and Cassidy’s dad unpeeled the plastic from a toothpick in the vestibule and bit down on the tip, that he looked at her with new eyes and said, through clenched fangs, “Are you good or bad?”
Lisa looked around the restaurant. She thought of asking what in the world he meant. She thought of leaving. She thought of sighing and shaking her head. Instead of any of that, she saw in the reflection of the glass door darkened by the southern night Cassidy and the others fast returning. “Bad,” she said quickly.
She was over at Cassidy’s three other times that week, never with a particularly good reason. That Saturday night, bored to tears at a Biergarten, she texted to find out her friend’s location. When she arrived, both Cassidy and her father, and the others they were with, were smashed. Lisa drank quickly and efficiently. Cassidy disappeared to another bar for an hour and that was her fatal mistake. Her dad spoke to Lisa as innocently as he had during that first bistro dinner. But by the end, he confessed her beauty. He confessed her limitless perfection. He said she would make all men, great men but especially weak men, fall. He would fall, he said, if she wanted him to.
“You’re married. Cassidy is my best friend here.”
“Don’t say her name,” her dad said.
Lisa drank. “This is so crazy. Honestly. I’ll probably never see you again. How would I even see you tonight, you are in her home.”
He gave her his number and said to come to the loft in two hours. She was to wait outside until he waved her in through the alley.
“I could never look at her,” Lisa said.
The father shook his head. “Some things happen outside of time.”
Two days after he flew back to LA, Cassidy came to Lisa’s apartment and cried to her and her roommate.
Lisa’s roommate asked the most gentle and earnest questions. “Why do you think he was with someone? How drunk were you? Has he ever done anything like that?”
“No, never. I can’t explain it, I just had this feeling as soon as I woke up like someone had come over. Someone had been there. I was sure. Also, from the moment he got to town, he was like telling me stories about when he was young and how much Nashville reminded him of the old days in San Francisco. He just became a different person. I think he brought someone to my place. I think he did something in the room right next to mine.”
Lisa couldn’t bring herself to reply.
“That’s so intense,” said her roommate. “I can’t imagine it. He seemed like the nicest man. Are you sure you don’t just feel far from him? We make up the worst things in our minds.”
“Maybe,” said Cassidy.
Then came the text in the park. Cassidy never told her how she found out. To Lisa, it was so obvious that she couldn’t understand how it took that long.
She did not respond to Cassidy’s text. There was never a confrontation, never an explosive moment filled with bawling and recrimination and whore-calling. Cassidy just dropped from her life. Like a piece of crust from a seagull’s beak, like a sodden toothpick into a street trash can, Cassidy simply fell away.
Lisa made some new friends the next week. They were equally incapable of deep conversation, you know, the really honest stuff, but they were about as attractive as Lisa herself. Lisa preferred friends who were her equal in good looks. Rather than feel competitive with them, they bolstered her sense of her own capabilities, walking into a bar or a restaurant or across a walkway.
She asked her new friends good questions and encouraged them and told them they were beautiful. She had no plans to sleep with any of their fathers. Because Lisa would never do that.
In the summer, she got fired from her job at her digital marketing agency for lack of accountability. Her boss told her, “Really this is about your lack of accountability,” when she fired her. She got a new job within a month.
So when Lisa met Chad, down a job and a best friend, a mother in the grave and a father soon to call and tell her he’d found someone new to love him, she was as ready to be reminded of her charms as ever.
She waited seven days for Chad to reach out after his initial rejection. With proud, strong guys like Chad, there was a chance he wouldn’t. But on the morning of day eight, he asked to see her again.
Per her ritual, Lisa enhanced and colored her hair. She got her finger and toenails painted, and whitened her teeth. She visited her lash bar for new extensions. She bought new underwear and new lotion for her face. She wrote in her journal for an hour that afternoon, took a long shower and sprayed French perfume on her wrist and neck.
When Chad came over, he wasted no time telling stories. He teased her a bit and they drank wine. He tried to kiss her and she let him. Then she abruptly pushed him back on the couch and said, “I have great skin.”
“I see that,” he said.
“My pores are tight, my cheeks are so smooth that if people touch me, it becomes a problem, because they want to do it over and over. I barely shave my legs because I am almost hairless.”
“Can I touch you?”
“You can listen. I started getting love letters when I was 12. If I smile in a restaurant, men across the room think I’m hitting on them. They’ll even come over to me. Even if they are with someone, they’ll come over.” She set her wineglass down and stood up. “My skin actually tastes sweet. Men have told me that. I lick myself sometimes and even taste it. Do you wish you could taste it?”
“Yo, you are the weirdest girl I’ve ever met…”
“If you want to stay here,” Lisa said, “you better tell me what you want and why.”
That’s what Cassidy’s father had done. He was so grateful. With Chad, she wasn’t sure yet. She didn’t know if he could be honest. But something about his face and his lips and his arms promised her the chance to feel something.
Erica and Mark were friends of both Chad and Lisa, but Chad and Lisa had not put it together that they both knew them.
Erica and Mark had lived together in Germantown for two years and were probably going to get engaged soon. They both wanted to get married someday but desired no children or any of the other trappings of domestic life, like a mortgage or a monthly neighborhood game night. They cherished their three dogs as much as they did their own relationship. They had two Labrador Retrievers and one Siberian Husky. The Retrievers were named Andy and Cleveland and the Husky was named Princess. Andy, Cleveland and Princess were loyal, loving creatures and slept on the bed with Erica and Mark every night.
In theory, Erica and Mark liked to travel. But because of the dogs they rarely got away. They both worked from home. They would get up around ten, put on their long dark jeans and leather jackets, grab coffees from their favorite coffee truck and take the dogs for a long walk around the neighborhood. Then they would go home and put the dogs on the couch and have sex. Then shower and begin the day.
Erica was tired a lot. Her mother called it her cross. Like Chad, she seemed destined for the suffering that was not grand, momentous, all at once, but tepid and steady and harder to spot, the paper cuts of every hour. If she woke up at ten, she was tired by one. If she napped until three, she had trouble falling asleep when she got in bed and tossed and turned too much, woke up late and the cycle repeated. Her limbs seemed to always carry the heaviness one felt after too much time in a jacuzzi. She had a certain amount of freedom to rest as was necessary and couldn’t imagine a schedule, a routine, that did not permit this level of recuperation.
Andy, Cleveland and Princess needed to be walked and fed, but Mark was there to help when she couldn’t face it. Mark was a wonderful man to live with. There were friends of hers who loved their boyfriends as boyfriends but detested them as roommates. In Mark she found a man so suave and easy to live with, so “chill” and decent, that she couldn’t imagine what a fight between them would look like. The biggest thing he seemed to ask of her was time alone. This suited blissfully the rhythms of her recuperation. And on their morning walks, which were as often silent as not, she felt more connected to him than ever.
Her friends told her about long, winding philosophical talks they had with their partners. They sounded exhausting and ultimately pointless. They were trying to fix something that wasn’t broken. They were overthinking, overtaxing their minds when what they really needed was to enjoy each other. Erica and Mark enjoyed wine, sex, shows, and walks. They reveled in the simple miracles of their nice little corner of town. On Sundays, they went to the Farmers’ Market.
Mark was a video editor and worked most of the day with his headphones on. Sometimes Erica studied his silhouette through the glass door to the sunroom where he sat before his laptop and hard drives. He looked more slender than he was, seated, hunched. He was six-foot-two and solid. He was not a fighter, but he was tough. He had the dark brown hair of any woman’s favorite actor. Tattoos sleeved his right forearm and left shoulder. Tattoos on strident, angry men were a turnoff to Erica. On quiet, peaceful men like Mark, they just fit. His voice was gentle and he always seemed to be preserving it for a speech at the right moment. But Mark had never given a speech. Nothing had ever seemed so out of order to him that a speech was needed to rectify it. He was able to accept the world utterly as it was, and if it wasn’t ideal, he met it with a shrug. Soon after the shrug it was time to walk the dogs.
One October morning, on the edge of Municipal Park, Erica held Princess with one leash and Mark held Andy and Cleveland together with two others. They wore their leather jacks, faded jeans and shades. Another couple passed them and attempted to nod hello, in the friendly way transplants to Nashville had been indoctrinated to. Mark never exactly returned hellos from strangers and did not this time either. Erica might have but didn’t. The couple in question was desperately looking. She felt if she had said hi, they would be talking for hours. She had no energy for that.
She got a text. She said to Mark, “Chad wants us to meet at the Irish bar tonight. He says we haven’t been out together in forever.”
Mark shrugged. “I’m down.”
“I’m super tired, but if you want to, I will.”
He shrugged again. “Whatever you want.” He had taken his phone out.
They found a bench and let the dogs drag their leashes behind them as they sniffed tall grass. The couple they’d passed earlier was now on the other side of the playground between them. Sarah watched as the man, a freckled redhead with adult acne, drove two of his fingers into his companion’s belly. She wrestled his hand and they both laughed. People stared because of how much noise they made. It looked so unpleasant to Erica, being tickled as an adult, by an adult.
Mark and Erica got up, snatched the leashes and kept walking, toward the street. They waited at a crosswalk.
Mark yawned and stretched. “I’m shot.”
“Yeah,” said Erica.
“We should really relax today,” he said.
She stared at brownstones across the street. Her long chestnut hair ran the length of her back. Other women had complimented her all her life on the volume and sheen of that hair. “Do you think we laugh a lot?”
Mark twitched a bit. “Hm?” She didn’t repeat the question. “I think we do.” He gave it some more honest thought. “Neither of us is that funny.”
Erica nodded.
The walk signal came on. They stepped into the street and a red Honda slammed its brakes short of the crosswalk, nearly ramming them. Erica and Mark got their bearings, gave him a long humorless look and crossed.
In the car, a fat man waved his apology. He was so fat his stomach rested on the steering wheel. He sat there being fat and sorry, watching this beautiful couple on the crosswalk, going home to have sex in front of their dogs.
On Saturday night Chad had a group of people meet him at the only Irish bar in Germantown. Among them were Mark and Erica. They settled at connecting high-tops away from the TVs. Many familiar faces arrived. Lisa showed up last.
Germantown, you see, was thriving on a Saturday, but unlike Brooklyn or Sojo, Venice Beach or Fisherman’s Wharf, unlike in Boston or Chicago or D.C. or Austin, this little refurbished patch of Music City blended silence and mayhem together street by street and corner by corner. On one block you were alone in the omissions of the moonlight. On the next, you were bathed in the white string lights that decorated every bar patio and café porch. A thoroughfare could feel as remote and treacherous as the worst underpass in the South Bronx, and in five hundred feet you were back in Nashville, a new construction, pristine, foretelling a vivid and immaculate future full of the sharpest, most tech-savvy and fashion-forward people the country over.
Germantown was a great place to live, an even better place to eat and a strange one to visit because you’d have to bypass many tourist traps to arrive here, and you’d better know some locals to steer you to the real spots, the ones only the beautiful know.
Lisa greeted Erica and Mark with cool enthusiasm. Chad was surprised they all knew one another, but his face didn’t register it. Being surprised was not a worthwhile expression to Chad. When he got Lisa alone, he bought a round of beers for everybody they knew there and asked her to help carry them.
“What is all that?”
He had opened a plastic baggy in front of the row of lagers and spilled small capsules out on the oak bar. He snickered. “You’ll never guess.”
Lisa picked up a capsule and squinted at it. “Are you about to Roofie everyone?”
“They’re Viagra.” His voice squeaked with laughter. “We did this years ago, dude, and it was so funny. Help me crack them open.”
He began.
“You’re going to spike all your friends’ beers with Viagra? What the hell is the point of that?”
“Um, cause it’s amazing. They start getting massively torqued and have no idea why.” He cracked up. “Come on, help me.”
Lisa stared at the line of draft beers and the eight or nine capsules left on the bar. She let out a pointless sigh and started cracking the pills into the beers and rattling the glasses so the contents dissolved in the foam. When they were done, they delivered the beers to the other end of the bar where their eight or so friends, guys and girls, drank greedily.
Chad winked at her. He leaned over. “I took one too.”
Later Lisa found herself asking the bartender for water to stay hydrated. Erica came up beside her and asked for the same. They hadn’t hung out much but liked each other a lot. Erica instinctually rubbed Lisa’s shoulder and told her she looked great. Lisa thanked her.
They stood beside each other in silence filling their bladders, sipping noisily until the peter of the last drops echoed in their straws.
Chad came over and kissed Lisa hard on the mouth. Then he went towards the dartboard.
Lisa rested her hands on the bar. She peeked at Erica. “Have you ever done something utterly wrong?”
Erica sat on a stool. “Yeah. Have you?”
“Yeah.”
Everyone had gone home but Chad, Lisa, Erica and Mark. They sat on the patio outside the bar and ordered late-night cheeseburgers. They ate and ate.
Mark was whispering to Erica about his irrepressible erection. Chad guessed out loud what he was talking about and cracked up again. He started clapping and told them what he’d done.
Erica stared in disbelief for many minutes. Ultimately she and Mark laughed as well.
“Erica,” said Chad, “yo, you feeling anything?”
“Am I supposed to? Isn’t it just with men?”
“I think women feel something,” said Lisa. “I don’t feel much though.”
“Wait,” said Mark, “you guys spiked yourselves?”
“We go down together,” Chad screamed. The waitress came over and said please don’t scream.
“Sorry,” Mark said on Chad’s behalf.
“I had the craziest idea,” said Chad. “We’re all super torqued right now, right? Yo, hear me out.” His arms flexed incidentally as he spoke. His t-shirt was so small on him. “Let’s do this.” He held his breath and looked at all of them. “I go back with her,” he pointed at Erica. “You,” he pointed at Mark, “go back with her,” he pointed at Lisa. He clapped again. So loud it startled the table. Everything he’d said felt like an order.
“Wait… what?” said Lisa.
“Yeah, come on!” Chad yelled. “Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it, just everyone say yes.”
They all looked at one another. Erica tried to laugh. Mark and Lisa were completely silent.
Another couple came out on the patio, probably a decade older than the Germantown residents. They had seen a concert nearby and were grabbing a quick late-night bite before relieving the babysitter. They lived, most likely, on the outskirts of Nashville.
They sat one table away from the four stoned hot people. The man ordered a Blue Moon. His wife ordered a Merlot. They asked for chicken skewers and a large basket of sweet potato fries. The husband said, “I loved it. If you want to be negative about it, that’s up to you.”
“I love seeing music in general, you’re acting like I don’t like going out. I just didn’t love her voice. It was so, almost, fraudulent. Like who sounds like that?”
“What do you think singing is? It’s supposed to sound different from speaking.”
“Why are you acting like you produced the set? Why can’t I criticize it without you getting defensive, like you discovered this musical talent, or she’s your girlfriend or your daughter?”
He smiled at the waitress as she dropped off their drinks. When she was gone, he said, “The way you talk to me about causal things like this is why our daughters are being so fresh lately. They listen to you. You think they don’t notice when you sound like this?”
“Sound like what?”
“Your voice sounds like a siren. I wouldn’t talk to a dog that way.”
She took a breath. “Reset,” she said. She smiled at him and imitated a robot posture. She shook her body and wiggled her face. “Reset complete.”
He hesitated a while, then did the same thing. His robot face made her laugh. They both laughed loudly and shook their heads.
“Ok, the singer could’ve been better,” he said.
“Finally!” his wife said. They clicked their drinks together. “To singers that should’ve been strippers,” she said.
This made him laugh and he tipped his head back to keep from spitting out his beer.
Chad and the others had craned their necks when the older couple began fighting. As the argument turned to laughter, they went back to their own discussion.
“Seriously,” Chad said, “how crazy a story would this be.”
“Nah man,” Mark finally said, “we don’t mess around on each other.”
“Nah man,” imitated Chad. “Of course you don’t because you haven’t yet. But you aren’t married, thank God. Look at these miserable creeps behind me. Bro, you’re just two people. Look at Lisa. You have no idea how sexy this girl is. Like, she’s quiet, but she will blow your mind.”
Lisa looked at the table. She believed she deserved Chad. She believed she deserved everything Chad was. This was what he was. She looked up at Mark.
“Erica, you’re not into this, right?” Mark said to his girlfriend, the mother of his dogs.
Erica had dressed her best tonight. Her hair was perfectly straightened, her eyelashes a mile long. The Viagra had done something. She said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Chad grabbed her hand. “What does that feel like?” he said, meaning his hand on hers. “Not bad, right? It’s just that, times a hundred.” He looked at the table. “Yo, enough of this pussy shit. This is a great idea. You all know it. We all want it. Let’s split and we’ll meet up tomorrow. We’ll come back here for breakfast and laugh. Lisa goes with Mark. Erica comes home with me.” Silence. “Guys, it’s skin. Skin and bodies.”
Lisa said, “Whatever anyone wants to do.”
Mark stared at Erica. “Whatever you want, baby.” He didn’t shrug.
Chad endured a full minute of smiling silence. He pounded the table. “I have a serious question. Can anyone say one reason why we shouldn’t do this?” No one could. He asked again. “Can anyone name one reason why we should not do this? Like what is one reason it shouldn’t be done?”
Nobody said anything. Lisa got up and stood in front of her chair. Chad reached for Erica’s hand and she gave it. They left together.
Mark got up and walked out with Lisa. By the door, she said she needed to use the bathroom. She went and washed her hands. On the way out she nearly bumped into the husband from the table next to theirs on the patio. He was coming out of the Men’s Room. He apologized even though she was the one who hadn’t been looking. She didn’t reply. She walked quickly towards the door and left with Mark.
Back at his table on the patio, the husband sat with his wife. The check had come and she was signing for it.
“Thanks for this one, honey, I’ll get the next.”
She laughed. “This babysitter’s going to kill us. It’s one am.”
“Did you see those younger people at that table that just left?
“Yep. Young and free.”
“I just bumped into one of the girls outside the bathroom.”
“Oh?”
He finished his water and grabbed their car keys off the table. They got up together and walked toward the door. “It was a little creepy.”
“What was?” said the wife. “That girl?”
“There was something wrong with her eyes.”