Honestly, We Meant Well Page 9

  There are sixty-four of them. He’s not proud that he can spot this, but the fact remains: there are sixty-four of them. Most of them don’t have handles as egregious as @RichForYou; rather, they err on the side of a subtler narcissism, adding tags like official and thereal to their given names, as if their identities were frequent targets of imposters. None of them is actually famous, nor have they, as far as Will can tell, actually accomplished anything. Still, that doesn’t stop them or their followers from treating their posts with the sort of reverence most people reserve for a Vermeer portrait or the Sistine Chapel. Here, for example, is @TheCaleb-Nation (this is an actual name—a real, actual name) standing shirtless against a wall. Behind him, painted onto the brick, are two Technicolor angel wings—which, given @TheCalebNation’s position (hands behind back; left knee cocked just so), appear to be springing from his spine. Beneath the photo’s 4,918 likes is a collection of a hundred fawning comments. @WesNWeho, for one, would like @TheCalebNation to be his guardian angel. Meanwhile, @Trevtastic wonders who needs wings when you got those lats? Reading them, Will starts to feel nauseated. Is this what Rajiv actually wanted all along? He tells himself no. He reminds himself of when they were first together—how, on cold mornings, Rajiv would hug Will from behind and slip his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. He decides that Rajiv doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s not thinking deeply—he just likes pretty things.

  Clicking the camera option, Will holds his phone out in front of him and takes a quick selfie. It’s awful: the lighting’s all wrong, which has caused the upper half of his face—the good half, he’d like to think—to be darkened by shadows. He’s also set himself at a bad angle; instead of the Aegean serving as the backdrop, he’s managed to snap what appears to be the bar’s exterior cleaning closet, a cubby stuffed with bleach, a bucket, and a red mop. He switches seats; he tries again, and then again. Each time there’s something wrong. First, it’s the lighting: the Aegean is there, but it’s washed out and bland—it could be a lake in New Jersey. His appearance isn’t helping things: in the past four pictures he’s taken, he’s had the charred appearance of a burn victim. There’s also the matter of his chin, which has suddenly seemed to double.

  Finally, after a few more attempts, he gets a good one—or, if not good, then passable. A shot where his nose isn’t bright red, or where every freckle on his left cheek doesn’t look like it’s been excavated by a dentist’s drill. Quickly, he posts it to Instagram, along with the caption #Greece is the word. Then he sits back. Across the street in front of him, a kid in an oversize tank top dribbles a soccer ball, occasionally flicking it up so he can juggle it off his knees. Watching him, Will wonders how long it’s been. Thirty seconds, maybe? A minute? He isn’t sure, though he wants to check. At first, this causes him to laugh—the absurdity of it all. He doesn’t need to affirm his existence by incurring the favor of strangers; he doesn’t need to stare at his reflection in some digitized puddle. But then, glancing at his phone, he feels something else—a nagging, or a tug. A nervous energy that starts at his elbows and ends at the tips of his fingernails. The need to look, to scroll, to assure himself that his efforts have been—at the very least—seen. And so, he picks up his phone. He opens Instagram and runs his thumb along the screen. Then, when he sees that there’s nothing—no red hearts, no cartoonish speech bubbles—he immediately checks again.

  “You want me to take one?”

  It’s the waiter, balancing a bottle of Mythos on a plastic tray.

  “Uh, no, thanks,” Will says, setting his phone down. He feels his face burn.

  “You sure? You’ve been at it for a while.”

  “You mean, it’s taken you awhile to bring me my beer.”

  The waiter lifts an eyebrow. He sets the beer down and says, “Touché.”

  “I’m sorry, that was rude.” Will looks at the bottle, the beads of condensation working their way down its sides. “Your English is very good, by the way.”

  “I grew up in Astoria.”

  “Oregon?”

  “Ha, no.” He smiles. “Queens.”

  “Right.”

  The waiter nods, like he’s expecting Will to say something else. When he doesn’t, he places both hands on the small of his back and stretches it. His spine arches, and his shirt pulls against his chest.

  He says, “Well, have fun with your photo shoot,” and leaves.

  Watching the waiter go, Will deletes the selfie. He takes down two swallows of beer, scrubs the moment clean, and returns to Rajiv’s feed. The picture he had been looking at now has 120 likes, along with six additional comments, two of which are from people Will actually recognizes. This unsettles him. While the commenters aren’t friends, they are sort of substantial acquaintances—or, at the very least, substantial enough that Will would have expected them to take his side, in the event they knew sides actually existed. So he scrolls down further, swiping past an image of Logan wearing a #PuraVida shirt and then one of him wearing no shirt at all. Finally, he stops on a shot of Rajiv wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, and a red tie. His left arm is draped over the shoulder of a man nearly twice his age, and in the background is a sign bearing Fama’s logo—a yellow F, twisted to create the filaments of an Edison lightbulb.

  Stoked to be joining the Fama Fam, the caption reads. And big ups to this dapper gent for bringing me onboard. #FamaFam #Namer #Whatsmyname?

  Will doesn’t have to stare at the image for long to recognize the man. He—François Tremblay—is the director of the firm’s verbal department and Rajiv’s new boss. He’s also the person who conducted Will’s last interview, the one he suspects stopped him from getting the job. Zooming in on François’s crow’s-feet, the streaks of gray in his hair, Will remembers the look François gave him when his assistant led Will into his office: a startled, unshielded jolt, like he had just seen the ghost of someone he’d forgotten once existed. For his part, Will pretended he didn’t recognize him and did his best to stay calm. He thanked the assistant, shook François’s hand, and sat in the open chair across from him—a red egg with a deep back and high arms in which he could never quite get comfortable.

  “So,” François said, looking at the résumé his assistant had handed him before leaving. “Will Wright.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Ha. Get it? Wright, right.” Will laughed and waited for François to join in. He didn’t, though. He just kept staring at the résumé.

  Here’s what Will remembered, and François—at least at first—did not: they’d met seven years ago, when Will was sixteen.

  It happened in Dolores Park, where Will had hung out nearly every nice weekend of that summer. The first time he went, he was a little drunk; his parents had invited some of his mother’s colleagues over for brunch, and as Will helped clean up, he polished off the half-finished mimosas scattered around the living room. Then he packed a rucksack and announced that he was going hiking in Claremont Canyon. He wasn’t out to his parents at this point—that would happen a year and a half later, over dim sum at Hong Kong Lounge 2 in Chinatown (Will: Mom, Dad, I’m gay. Dean: Good for you, kiddo. Who wants some Fish Nugget Porridge?). Still, he feared that if he told them the truth about his destination, they would somehow divine his intentions and start peppering him with questions. So—Claremont Canyon. A charade of compasses, maps, and hiking boots. A getup that he traded for flip-flops and a pair of knockoff Ray-Bans as he rode the train beneath the bay.

  Once he emerged from the BART station, he went straight to the park. There, after surveying the crowded grass pitches, he spread a towel out next to the largest and most attractive group of men he could find and took off his shirt. He didn’t know if he was worth being admired, but he didn’t want to rush the moment, just in case he was.

  François was the first person he met. After staring at each other for nearly an hour, he sauntered over. Will was lying on his stomach, flipping through his AP European History textbook, when he heard a deep, accented voice above him say hey.

/>   Will looked up, shielding his eyes against the sun.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You mind if I sit down?”

  “Uh.” His palms had started to sweat. “Sure.”

  François lowered to Will’s towel, propping himself up on a tanned arm. His dark hair was buzzed short, and he smelled like sweat and sandalwood.

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Will.”

  “I’m François.” He extended a hand, and Will took it. “Nice to meet you.”

  Will asked, “Are you French?” because he didn’t know what else to say.

  “Canadian,” François said. “Quebecois.”

  “Like, from Montreal?”

  “No,” he laughed. “Quebec City.”

  Will looked down and picked at blades of grass. He felt suddenly stupid, like he should have known that François was from Quebec City, and that it had been ignorant to assume that any Canadian with a French accent was automatically from Montreal. He wanted to start over.

  He said, only, “Oh.”

  François nodded, smiled, then laughed again. “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Nineteen,” Will lied. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two.” He glanced down at the textbook, which still lay open on the towel. “You’re a student?”

  Will shut the book and slipped it beneath his shirt, hiding its cover. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m a student.”

  “Where do you study? USF?”

  “No, no.” Will shook his head. He thought for a moment, trying to think up something that would make his parents proud. “I study cultural anthropology. At Brown.” He added, “I’m just home for a long weekend.”

  “Cool.” François looked uninterested, and Will felt a pang of disappointment—he’d wanted him to be more impressed.

  A cool breeze drifted up from the south, and Will felt goose bumps prickle his bare skin. To his left, a wiry gray dog chased a Frisbee down a small pitch.

  “You want something to drink?” François asked after a brief silence. “I’ve got some stuff to make margaritas in my car.”

  They drove south, toward Bernal Heights Park, where François said he knew of a spot with an empty parking lot and a great view. For his part, Will focused on being unfailingly polite. He offered to make the first batch of margaritas, pouring too much tequila and not enough mixture into a giant orange thermos that François had stashed away in his backpack. Once they had arrived at the parking lot—which Will now remembers as being nothing more than a small shoulder off an abandoned access road—he waxed poetic about the vista, which was partially obscured by power lines and the ragged tops of trees. And during the unbearable silence that lingered when François killed the engine, Will found himself praising the car itself, noting everything from its cracked leather seats to the yellow Vanillaroma air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror.

  “I’ve always wanted a Jeep, particularly an old one,” Will said, licking tequila from his lips. “But, you know, being at school in Providence it doesn’t really make sense.”

  François nodded and slipped an arm around him, his hand dipping beneath the collar of Will’s shirt.

  He said: “Can I kiss you?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to kiss you.”

  “Oh! Yes!” His voice sounded different, and he worried that he seemed too eager, like a waiter who’d just been asked for the wine menu. “Of course.”

  His tongue was thick. It filled Will’s mouth with startling efficiency, pressing against his teeth as he coaxed his lips to open wider. He lingered here for a moment, pausing as he rearranged his body over the Jeep’s center console into a position that allowed him to take more control of Will. Then, once he had found it—once he had one knee on the driver’s seat and his own shirt was off—he began moving his mouth down Will’s body, starting with the smooth pockets of his neck and ending, inevitably, at the zipper of his shorts.

  Will finished quickly and immediately began to apologize. Then he offered—again a bit too excitedly—to return the favor, plunging his hand into François’s pants.

  “No, no,” François said, wincing and then laughing. “It’s okay.”

  Will’s cheeks flushed.

  He said, “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.” François reached over and tousled his hair. He slipped the key into the Jeep’s ignition, and the engine rumbled. “Where should I drop you off?”

  * * *

  Now, seven years later, Will thinks of how the memory seemed to creep up on François over the course of their interview; how it seemed first to stalk him, taunting him with a few spare details, before assaulting him with everything else at once. Neither of them acknowledged it. Rather, Will shifted and reshifted, working hard to sit up straight in a chair that would not allow it. François, meanwhile, read and reread his résumé. Occasionally he looked up and asked Will a question, but mostly he kept his gaze downward, his left palm resting atop a Slinky on his desk.

  “So,” he asked after a few minutes, “did you enjoy the case studies we asked you to do?”

  “I loved them,” Will answered. He leaned forward, and the egg rocked on its stand.

  “Karen, who I believe you met with last week, seems to think you’d be particularly good on the Pringles account.” He stretched a few coils off the Slinky, then let them descend. “She liked the name you came up with for their new chili flavor.”

  “Right. The Ridge-Cut Fire-Roasted Chipotle Potato Chip.”

  “Yes. That one.”

  “I thought ‘ridge-cut’ evoked the artisanal vibe that’s so big right now, while ‘fire-roasted’ implied spicy without actually, you know, announcing it.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I’m fascinated by the narratives of foodstuffs,” Will lied.

  He smiled again, but not quickly enough; by the time his lips curled, François had already turned back to his résumé.

  “And it says here you’re graduating from Berkeley in a little over a month.”

  “Yes. In forty-eight days, actually. But who’s counting, right?”

  “Which makes you what, twenty-two?”

  Here, François looked up, and in the slight narrowing of his eyes Will saw the workings of a certain arithmetic: the subtraction of years and ages, squared with memory and law. Watching it happen, he wanted to tell him to stop. He wanted to tell him that there had been other men, and other cars. That in the beginning, he’d kept his cruising to the confines of the park, but when that bored him—when the Castro clones started feeling monotonous and safe—he’d looked for other, more thrilling opportunities. The YMCA in Oakland. A Barnes & Noble bathroom frequented by straight husbands. Once, a town hall in San Mateo County. He wanted to tell him that he wasn’t alone—without exception, his hookups were older, guys in their midthirties and early forties who looked at Will’s youth just as François did, with equal parts suspicion and lust. To be with someone younger—someone who was more of a reflection of himself—struck him as impossible and dangerous. It would be admitting to something that was still a half-formed thought, like slicing open a cocoon while the caterpillar’s still wiggling around inside. So, he kept it casual and transactional. The sort of behavior that was defined by its present, as opposed to its future. Still, it was thrilling. The first half of his adolescence he had spent in a numb fog; he had watched himself as if he were a stranger, half an inch removed as he fumbled with bra straps on friends’ parents’ couches. Now, he was suddenly aware of his own skin—how a man’s hand felt as it reached beneath his shirt; how anticipation announced itself in goose bumps. Each time when he was finished, he’d take BART home, where, after a scalding hot shower, he’d sit at his computer and record his observations of what had just happened. He still had dreams of being a writer and was young enough to believe his life merited a story. As such, he took great pain in cobbling together these descriptions, recalling and committing to record the most minuscule of
details: the pressure of a body on top of him, the bitter taste of cologne licked from a neck. Each file he tagged with the date and saved to a new folder he had created on his laptop—one that he called Anatomy and Physiology.

  He told François none of this. As much as Will wanted to assure him that he was fine and undamaged—that what they had done had been as much his decision as it had been François’s—he said nothing. He felt that to do otherwise would be rude or presumptuous; that it would force François to dig up bodies he had long since buried. Instead, he let him finish the interview, asking limp questions about an internship Will had last summer at a literary agency. When he was done, and when the only sound either of them could hear was the Slinky’s coils rising and falling, Will did the only appropriate thing he could think of: he smiled and asked about next steps.

  “I’m sorry?” François had set down his résumé and was now busying himself with an email.

  “The next steps.” Will said again. His voice felt small. He had the sense that he should be apologizing, though for what he wasn’t entirely sure. “In terms of … the job. I just wanted to know what the next steps are.”

  “Oh.” Francois turned back to his email. “I guess we’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  “Another Mythos?”

  Will squints up at the waiter. “I don’t know. How many have I had?”

  “Three, so far.”

  He thinks. He can’t decide if he’s hot, or drunk, or both.

  “They’re bigger than the beers where I’m from.”

  “You say that like it’s a problem.”

  He says, “I probably shouldn’t.”

  The waiter shrugs. “I guess that depends on what you’ve got to do today.”

  “Nothing,” he says. “I have absolutely nothing to do today.”

  “And here I thought you had another photo shoot.” The waiter smiles. “You should probably have a fourth. I’ll bring you something to eat, too. You like olives?”