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“Montréal.”
He looks up. “Excuse me?”
“Montréal,” she repeats.
“In February?”
“You said anywhere. I choose Montréal. Take me to Canada, Roman Roy.”
***
It’s fucking freezing. Roman gets them a hotel in Old Montréal, where there’s enough foot traffic that the sidewalks are passable. But Tabitha likes to explore, and she makes them traipse all over the city, down streets that are hidden beneath inches of ice and exhaust and road salt.
He has to keep up with her: it’s one of those tests people do. It’s not conscious on her part, but if he fails they’ll both know it.
He asked her out at a sex party, as a joke, and she said yes, as a joke, and both of them refused to admit that they didn’t mean it and now here they are. It set the tenor for their whole relationship: they’re daring. They don’t take anything seriously. They have that joie de vivre that most 30-something, brunch-munching couples can only daydream about.
She thinks he’s funny, but usually in the wrong ways. Not the jokes he makes, but all the flaws that the jokes are supposed to conceal. She zeros in on them no matter how hard he tries to keep them hidden. She doesn’t mean to be cruel about it, is the thing.
Like his whole deal with sex. He can flirt just fine, as long as he knows it won’t go anywhere. Up the ante, catch people off-guard—it’s a competition. See who breaks first. Roman usually wins because he’ll make a joke about fucking his mom or killing his dad, and the other person blanches.
They’re in a nightclub when another couple approaches them. She’s in a mesh top that’s ten years too young for her, but she pulls it off somehow. He wears a leather harness. They’re obviously interested in something—swinging, foursome, whatever—and Tabitha’s responsive.
“Our place is only a few minutes away,” the woman says, slight accent, and Roman understands, right off the bat, that these strangers have won. He can’t escalate.
“I have to take a piss and get another drink,” he says, two different excuses running into one sentence, and then, “How does anyone get hard this far north, anyway?”
The other couple drift away, and Tabitha laughs. “You’re like an alien,” she tells Roman, and pulls out her phone right there by the bar and adds the little alien emoji after his name.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like you only learned how to be a person second-hand.” She laughs again. “Is that what happens when you grow up in a media empire?”
He shrugs, pretends it doesn’t sting. “We can go find them again, if you want.”
“Babe, it’s fine if you don’t want to hook up with anyone,” she says. “You just have a weird way of saying it.”
He laughs, then, too, which is his way of redeeming himself. It makes a nice sharp line between the two of them: fuckup Roman who says weird shit to people who want to fuck him, and funny Roman who makes fun of the fuckup.
He tries not to hate Tabitha for making him do this to himself. He picked her because she thought he was funny. It’s not fair to turn around and get pissed at her for it.
It’s just that it's a kind of violence, the way he carves himself up. Here’s a drumstick, there’s a breast. White meat or dark? Throw out the gristle and eat around the bones.
He’ll never get rid of all the nasty bits. The best he can do is pretend he’s put them there on purpose, so that when people meet him they think, What a piece of shit, and not, What a freak.
But then here’s the person who knows him best in the world, the only one he’s really putting on the performance for, and she sees right through it. He’ll never fool anyone else.
“We can call your driver to get back to the hotel,” she offers, and he snaps, “I like walking,” and storms out onto the icy sidewalk.
***
Roman had French lessons as a kid, but they stopped when he went to St. Andrew’s. He remembers bits of the grammar; he usually does fine if he sticks with the present tense, or even passé composé. He never did master the subjunctive—can’t tell anyone how he's feeling, not in French and not in English and not in his own head either.
“Je voudrais un chocolat chaud, s’il vous plaît,” he says, only his pronunciation isn’t for shit, and the guy thinks he asked for a cat-chocolate instead of the hot chocolate that he doesn’t even want.
Roman has this gift for turning everything into bullshit nonsense. It’s cross-cultural, apparently.
Tabitha’s French is beautiful. “Désolé,” she says, jerking her head at Roman conspiratorially, and chats with the barista in an accent so well-formed it makes the Québécois sound Texan.
“You’re so polite in French,” she tells him, once they’ve settled at a table. “You’re like a whole different person.”
“Yeah, well,” he says. “Private tutors.”
“Maybe they should have taught you English, too.”
He grins. “They did.”
She thinks that’s sad, and he’s not sure why.
***
They go up on the big Ferris wheel. The city is blotted out grey by the dirty packed snow, Roman’s breath clouding the windows of the climate-controlled cabin they’re sitting in.
“When was your last serious relationship?” Tabitha asks suddenly.
He looks at Mont Royal, rising up behind the business district, and shrugs. “Serious how?”
He can feel her studying him. “When was the last time you were in love?”
His stomach flips. He’s still staring out at the city, smudgy and distorted behind the condensation on the glass. She's just waiting quietly.
“I’m like the last bottle of high-quality lube in the middle of an orgy,” he says finally. “Everybody wants a piece of me.”
She sighs. “Rome…”
“Fucking, what?” he snaps. “What do you want from me? My mommy didn’t love me and my daddy didn’t fuck me, and now my head’s all fucked forever?”
“Well, is that true?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
He chances a look at her, and she’s staring back at him like he’s a dying baby animal she found by the side of the road. Tire tracks over his body, not a scrap of decent meat on him. Disgusting. Pathetic.
“It’s hard to be with you sometimes,” she says, and he flinches. “It feels like you need things that I’m not giving you, but you won’t tell me what they are.”
He looks back out the window. Contemplates smashing the glass and jumping. They’re only 10 or 20 stories up, the wheel turning slowly, suspending them there.
“It doesn’t fucking matter,” he says, and then he leans forward to point down at the ground. “Hey, check it out. I think a bird just shat on that guy.”
Roman already knows that he’s going to die alone. He knows that whatever is wrong with him, whatever makes him shut down when other people come close to him—that’s not going away. It’s part of the rot spreading into his skeleton, wrapping around his heart, spoiling the flesh so deep he can’t cut it out.
When he was younger, he actually did assume that it was something to do with his parents. Shiv slept around, and Kendall liked coke at least as much as he liked people, and Roman couldn’t fuck. The three of them were a team—not a particularly tight-knit one, but still. They had come out of the same fucked up family in the same fucked up house, and so now they were all fucked up, and that was all there was to it.
But then Kendall got married, and even after Rava left him he still had relationships—usually short and dysfunctional, but relationships nonetheless. And then Shiv got married, and Roman knows about the infidelity but he also knows she’s close to Tom in a way that Roman’s never been with anyone. And Roman’s still stuck exactly where he was at 15, and 20, and 30—an incomplete person with the dating history of a circus freak.
Except, he can’t even blame it on his looks. He looks fine, he’s pretty sure. Average, at least. Ugly people are really just victims of circumstance, whereas Roman’s a victim of himself. His siblings know how to love people, or at least how to fuck them, and he doesn’t.
Whatever. It’s fine. Most people die alone, anyway. Roman has a tactical advantage, because at least he knows it’s coming.
The Ferris wheel keeps turning, and eventually they’re back on the ground, shivering in the bitter harbor wind. Roman slips a little on a patch of ice, and Tabitha grabs his arm to steady him. He hates himself for shaking her off, even as he’s doing it.
***
He likes to make fun of strangers in public. It’s the one enjoyable thing about all of this fucking walking that they’re doing.
“Oh, Jean-Pierre,” he says, putting on a wobbly falsetto. “Please, you don’t understand! I have withheld my most shameful secret from you all this time!”
Tabitha snorts, following his gaze to the middle-aged couple navigating the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The woman wears a cherry-red parka; the man has a combover. This is one of his favorite games: Pin the Voice on the Loser.
“Ah, Céline,” Tabitha says, dropping her voice to play along. “Nothing could ever make me think ill of you!”
“But what if I told you… I’m not really a person at all!”
“What can you possibly mean, dearest Céline?”
He’s laughing. “Oh, Jean-Pierre… Underneath this hideous parka, I am but a phantom, stranded unhappily on this mortal coil. Didn’t you ever wonder why my hand kept slipping through yours, all those years we were together?”
“But you left me! You told me you could not love a man with my receding hairline and poor hygiene!”
“It was a lie told only out of kindness.”
“My broken heart will never be healed.”
“Ah, Jean-Pierre, kiss me! Remove this off-the-rack garment from my buxom shoulders and have your way with me right here!”
It takes Roman a moment to realize that Tabitha dropped out of the conversation a few turns ago, and he’s been doing both of the voices himself. She’s giving him one of those looks again.
“You’re so weird,” she tells him, and throws an arm around his shoulders.
He feels inexplicably defensive.
***
Their hotel room is massive. The bed is a sea of pillows and sheets and fluffy duvet; sometimes, Roman wakes up and he can’t even see Tabitha underneath it all.
“Let's just stay here today," he says one morning, yawning.
She lifts herself onto one elbow, her blonde hair ruffled, and shrugs. “Okay.”
They order room service—or rather, Roman offers room service, which is a mistake because the front desk girl only speaks French.
“Est-ce que vous avez des préservatifs?” he says, his mouth slack over the vowels.
Tabitha cracks up and Roman remembers that preservatives doesn’t carry the same meaning in French. “Not condoms!” he shouts into the phone, Tabitha laughing in bed and the desk girl laughing over the receiver. “Preservatives—jams or jellies or some shit, I don’t know—”
“Confiture,” Tabitha supplies, and he shoves the phone at her.
“You do it, then, you always know the right fucking words—”
She takes it, and gets them the fucking marmalade, her sentence constructions all casual and flowy where his were stilted and formal. She studied abroad in Paris as an undergrad, four months and somehow that’s all it took for her to fit in seamlessly in Montréal, too.
Roman could live here for a year and he would still stick out like a sore thumb. It’s too weird a place: half-English, half-French, the streets all sloping along the sides of Mont Royal, the old port neighborhood bumping up against the shiny new buildings downtown. To belong in a city like this, a person has to be self-assured like Tabitha, not playing at it like Roman.
When the food arrives, there’s a note scrawled in blue pen: Sorry—no condoms.
“That’s okay,” Tabitha says. “I’m on birth control.”
The comment rankles him. It’s not that he minds if she’s sleeping with other people—though he’s pretty sure she isn’t—it’s that there’s an implication running through it about Roman. About the sex they’re not having, and about how it’s because of him, not because of her.
They both know perfectly well that’s true, though. So why does it bother him so much?
“Hey,” he says when they’re done, pushing the empty plates away. He kisses her, uncertain, their lips meeting at the wrong angle. She tastes like citrus and coffee.
She pulls back and examines him, raising an eyebrow.
“What?” he says, squirming.
“What?” she repeats, incredulous. “Roman, you never want to fuck.”
“Well, now I do,” he says, defiant. “Is that a problem?”
She opens her mouth, hesitates, and then just says, “Not for me,” and repositions them so their second kiss is better.
She’s definitely hot, on an objective level. Roman noticed that the first time they met. It’s not really what he’s thinking about right now, though.
He’s never understood this part. He’s pretty sure he’s supposed to look at Tabitha—her hips, her chest, her flat stomach and smooth skin and full lips—and feel something. A compulsion to fuck her, or whatever.
But there’s a disconnect somewhere. He’s turned on, in the sense that he can feel the blood rushing to his dick. Only, he’s also paralyzed, in the sense that when he thinks about what to do next, every image in his head embarrasses him and he just gives up without even trying.
They kiss for a long time, long enough that it’s gone past the point of hotness and become its own kind of humiliation.
“Babe,” Tabitha says. “Not that this isn’t nice, but is there, like, something else you want to do?”
Roman’s trying to come up with an answer, and for some reason everything in his head is structured in the subjunctive. It is necessary that… It would be better that… It is too bad that…
He needs her to stop fucking looking at him like that.
“Just, like, do whatever you want to me,” he says finally, staring at a mole on her neck. “Whatever. I’m game.”
“I’m asking what you want, though.”
“Well, I’m… returning the favor, then.”
“Rome.” She pulls herself up on her elbows. “Do you actually want to do this?”
“Yeah,” he says, and shifts so she can feel his dick, half-hard, against her thigh.
“Okay,” she says after a moment. “Can I take your shirt off?”
“Fine,” he says. “Whatever.”
She gets them both down to their underwear, which makes him cringe.
“What do you want to do?” she asks him again.
He’s going to kill himself the next time someone asks him that.
“Just, like, normal shit,” he says, and forces himself to reach in between her legs.
She’s wet, which he supposes means that he’s been doing something right. Unfortunately, it also means that she really will go through with this, if he asks her to. It’s that game of one-upmanship again, and he’s losing spectacularly.
He makes a genuine effort: hand inside her panties, fingers circling her clit—he knows what to do mechanically, he’s not totally green—but he can feel his face flushing, and not in a sexy way.
He can’t take himself seriously when there are genitals involved. It’s not that he finds them off-putting, in and of themselves. It’s more that he knows there are scripts he’s supposed to be following, and his performance is always unnatural. He says his lines but he can’t force himself to believe them.
He’s been staring past Tabitha’s face for the last few minutes. He’s becoming intimately familiar with the texture of the pillowcase. He shuts his eyes and kisses her neck instead.
“Roman, are you enjoying this at all?”
He groans, retrieves his hand, and flops onto his back.
She exhales.
He yanks the covers up over his chest.
“What if you just, like, did something to me?”
“Something like what?”
She’s still being patient, which makes the whole thing worse. It’s like he’s asking to become the world’s first charity cum-dump.
“Well, what do you usually do?” he says, staring at the ceiling. “You know, the whole sexual buffet, up for grabs. Take a plate.”
“I don’t usually think about sex as something that I’m taking away from the other person.”
“Well,” he snaps. “I don’t usually think about it as something that requires an explicit verbal contract in order to commence.”
She sighs again, and then sits up. “I think maybe that’s enough for right now.”
Roman puts his clothes back on while she’s in the bathroom. The metaphors are mixing in his head: he’s rotting diseased meat, he’s Swiss cheese with a hole punched through the middle of him, he’s the Kool-Aid everyone knows not to drink. He can’t do this, and the toast he ate for breakfast is pitting in his stomach: another disgusting dish in the ten-course meal that is Roman Roy.
Technically, though, he’s not the one who backed down. That’s almost as good as if he’d actually gone through with it.
***
They go to the fine arts museum. Roman doesn’t know jack shit about art, but Tabitha likes the Renaissance stuff.
It’s mostly saints and Christ figures and Madonnas. It gets repetitive after approximately three rooms.
They pause in front of a gigantic St. John.
“He’s kind of cut,” Roman says absently.
Tabitha eyes him. “He’s starving in the desert.”
Roman shrugs. “He can still be cut.”
“Hmm.”
By the time they make it back to the lobby, it’s snowing outside. Fucking Canada in the wintertime.
It’s coming down thick and fast, and even Tabitha thinks it’s better to wait it out from the warmth of the museum. They find a bench. Roman crosses and uncrosses his legs, and Tabitha scrolls through her camera roll, examining all the photos she’s taken on this trip.
“You know I’m attracted to you, right?” she says, apropos of nothing. “Physically?”
He senses a trap. “Who wouldn’t be?”
“Are you attracted to me?”
“Obviously, Tabs. You’re hot. I’m hot. We’re hotter than sin on a Sunday.”
She hesitates. He can already tell he doesn’t want to hear it.
“Do you worry that I’m not attracted to you, when we’re together?”
The door opens, and a gust of snowy air hits him in the face. He tries to use it as an excuse not to answer her, but she just waits it out.
He’s making conditional constructions in his head, nestling the auxiliary verbs and trying to decide whether she’s expecting a past or future tense. The grammar is slippery. He’s out of his depth.
Finally he says, “Why are you asking?”
"I just thought you might want to talk about it.”
Talk about what, exactly? he thinks, but doesn’t care to open that particular can of worms. He’s reasonably certain there’s a snake in there, waiting to sink its fangs directly into his dick.
He’s doing that thing again, where he’s irritated if she doesn’t know what’s wrong with him and outright pissed if she tries to figure it out. The problem is that he can never decide which words to use, and then she doesn’t say the right ones back, and in the end it’s worse for him than if they’d both just left well enough alone.
He needs a different language, he thinks. Not English and not French and not sex and not love. He’s tried those ones already. There has to be some other way of going about this.
When the sky calms, they bundle up and go outside.
Within an hour, all of this fresh snow will be stamped down, made filthy by the traffic creeping along the streets. For now, though, the city is hushed, swaddled in a layer of dazzling white.
He can sort of understand why Tabitha wanted to come here now. It’s pretty, as long as he doesn’t look beneath the pristine outer layer.
***
They spend their last night in a dive bar Tabitha’s found. It’s dark and grimy and not the sort of place Roman would ever walk into on his own. No one there speaks English.
Roman gets spectacularly wasted and watches Tabitha play pool. She keeps begging him to join in, but there’s a small crowd of onlookers, and he’s drunk enough that he doesn’t really feel like swanning around for them right now. Tabitha loses a game to a stranger, then wins one against herself. Roman’s drinking vodka sodas like a sorority girl.
They stay until the place is closing down, the pre-dawn air frigid in their lungs as they step outside. They’ve been here nearly three weeks and it’s still a shock how fucking cold it is. It’s a searing pain cutting through the liquor every time Roman inhales.
“I wanna make new words,” he tells her.
Tabitha giggles. “Okay, babe.”
“M’serious,” he slurs. “They’re all wrong, Tabs. The old ones.”
“Mm-hmm.” She’s dancing, twirling them around, dangerous on the ice-block sidewalks but neither of them cares. “Alien language for an alien man.”
He’s drunk enough this time that it doesn’t really hurt. He wants to explain about how his words will work, how they won’t refer to things but to the spaces in between those things, how the missing parts of himself still need names and he’s the one who has to come up with them.
He can’t tell her any of this, though, because in order to say it he needs the new language, and he hasn’t invented it yet. Everything’s jumbled in his head, the words and the spaces and the way he wants to speak them but no one’s ever taught him how.
He laughs at her joke and follows her back to the hotel.