moved to DC and dabbled in real estate, made some seed money, and now the Post just gave his restaurant four stars.
“It’s so sad, though,” Barkley’s boyfriend went on, “because the man has tried everything. You know, I’ve been dating him for almost two years? Before that, he had four years of Freudian therapy, like major, five days a week. That didn’t work, so he became a Buddhist. Yeah, right. Then it was Yoga and Pilates—that lasted maybe a weekend. Now it’s juice cleanses. I’m like, honey, look inside yourself! Your internal happiness is not going to come from cashew milk! Didn’t you see Eat Pray Love? Hashtag get over yourself.”
I felt a little accosted by his jabbering, but also slightly intrigued. He looked like he had just graduated high school, and the hashtag thing was weird. I considered asking his age, but before I could open my mouth, he started in again.
“Did you know Barkley’s father was Bill Clinton’s adviser?”
I took my hand away from Sumner and said, “No, that didn’t come up.”
“Well . . . are you ready? He was closeted! The man had sex with his wife once in his life, to have Barkley. Am I oversharing?”
I let out a noise not unlike a yelp.
“Sorry. Anyway, the guy hung himself when Barkley was thirteen. So his psycho mother just puts away the pictures, and they don’t even have a funeral. Total batshit.”
He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me right in the eye, as if we’d known each other for years.
“The scary thing is, Barkley never grieved. The man is pushing fifty, and it’s like he’s still that thirteen-year-old boy. A filthy rich, traumatized, scared-as-hell teenage boy.”
He sighed again and pulled out a vape pen. “Super fun times. Anyway, I’m Preston. And I’m dying to know . . . Where’s your dog?”
CHAPTER 3
BLANK CANVAS
Post college, I worked in a lot of restaurants in the Boston area, the kind with laminated menus and flat-screen TVs everywhere, just in case you needed five angles of a baseball player from where you were sitting. I dated the bearded bartenders with great smiles, popped Adderall with the skinny hostesses, let the busboys flirt with me. All my friends started getting married, and I was a bridesmaid a few times until I couldn’t handle it anymore. Weddings were supposed to be these joyous occasions, but I sometimes felt they were kind of sad, with the gimmicky taco stations, the cupcake towers, the old-school photo booths, the inebriated confessions from random family members, all steeped in a sense of forced merriment. So I just stopped going, which ended up alienating a lot of my former friends. Even then, I was sick of the boyfriend/husband question. Somehow, “I screw bartenders who still wear themed pajamas” didn’t seem like good conversation fuel.
In my midtwenties, I moved to New York and got a job as an assistant to a narcissistic TV actress named Sunday. She was really friendly until she could sense the connection between me and Giles, her sweet architect husband, which was not sexual but was significant nonetheless. Giles and I would pretend we were an old couple trying to find something we lost, or talk about how all our friends were dying. We’d imagine we were technophobic, saying stuff like, “Is Siri in the cloud?” Our repartee was more of a betrayal for Sunday than if I’d been blowing him. I don’t think she made him laugh, other than when he was laughing at her, like when she would ask if Denmark was a country, or if she looked fat in her pants due to the fact that she ate three peanut M&M’S. When she fired me, I wasn’t surprised. I knew I needed to move on. But I did have a hard time saying goodbye to her Great Dane—for me it was always about the dog. He was a big, goofy hunk of love named Larry, and he looked at me with eyes that said, please, don’t leave me with her for the rest of my life, she puts me in kennels half the time, you’re the only one who really cares except Giles and he’s a workaholic. It was as if his soul was pouring out of his eyes. I cried, of course, hugging the dog awkwardly in the entryway. “Bye, buddy,” I said, and his soft whine literally broke my heart.
When I went back to her apartment a few days after to pick up my umbrella and a