Chapter Text
Stan looks back at his short, ridiculous life and wonders why he ever thought he knew anything. He traces his problems back to one long summer, the summer after his junior year of college, when he was still lying in bed, putting off his walk to work, and saw that he could now get married. Technically, he supposed, he’d had this right in Colorado for a while, but something about the Supreme Court decision that weird June morning made his brain start doing crazy things, like daydreaming about getting down on one knee and actually asking Kyle to marry him. It didn’t help that Stan was interning at the Center that summer, and the mood in the office was jubilant, nearly surreal. When Stan and Kyle met for lunch the first thing out of Kyle’s mouth was, “We should do it,” and perhaps out of sheer joy and definitely without considering the big issues, Stan just said, “Sure.” He took the rest of the afternoon off and went down to city hall, where he and Kyle filled out the paperwork and left, an hour later, as husbands.
It’s only nine years later that Stan is sitting across a boardroom table from Kyle in Kyle’s lawyer’s office, trying to make sense of why he ever thought getting married at 21 would be a great idea. He really loved Kyle, loves him still, and despite everything that’s happened, he can’t believe Kyle didn’t love him, either, or he wouldn’t have suggested it, like a crazy person, over lunch at the Jimmy John’s on Alameda the afternoon they found out about Obergefell.
But now Kyle loves some guy named Jasper who’s got a 10 percent stake in some blog post aggregator start-up app or something and, consequently, 30 million dollars. Stan has spent hours of his recent life awake in bed at night as he asks himself the existential question of why and how some guy with that much money, with season tickets to Opera Australia and a 1969 Corvette Stingray, also needs Kyle so badly. Kyle doesn’t like opera, he likes fart jokes, and he sure as hell can’t drive stick, and he’s been Stan’s best friend for 30 years and his husband for nine and now they’re sitting in this stupid room arguing over who gets custody of their corgi and whether it’s possible to sell their adjacent cemetery plots.
“I’d love to be able to recoup my money,” Kyle is saying, whilst he doodles aimlessly on a scrap of paper. “They’re good plots, and that stuff’s not cheap.”
“Oh, like you even need the money,” Stan spits out, and he instantly hates himself for it.
“Don’t respond to that,” says Kyle’s lawyer, a severe woman with an asymmetrical haircut. Those never work on anyone, but Kyle’s lawyer is working one right now, which somehow just serves to make Stan sadder.
Wendy is Stan’s lawyer. She grabs his thigh and gives him a squeeze, because it’s the only way she can offer him emotional support, which is verboten when she’s trying to be tough. “My client would like to keep his plot,” she says, shuffling through her notes. “We’d agree to allow a sale of Mr. Broflovski’s plot for half of the gross profit.”
“Both plots are joint acquisitions, though,” says Kyle’s lawyer, “so both should be liquefied.”
“Gotta bury me somewhere,” says Stan.
“Quit being so maudlin, Stan, you’ll live,” Kyle shoots back.
“Should we move on to the condo?” Wendy asks.
Kyle’s lawyer clears he throat. “My client would like a break for lunch.”
As soon as the words are out of her mouth, Kyle’s got his phone out. He’s probably reading sexts from Jasper or something, Stan figures, and he gets up and leaves the room before he can force himself to stand there and wait for Kyle to look up and give him a mean stare.
Wendy gets up and follows, saying, “Hey,” grabbing Stan by the shoulder, her pocketbook slung over her arm, like she’s in a rush. “Are you going out for a sandwich?”
“I can’t eat sandwiches anymore,” Stan moans, “we got engaged over sandwiches.”
“I know,” she says, “but sandwiches are pretty commonplace, so you can’t stop eating them forever.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“For lunch?”
Stan knows he should offer to take her out, because she’s doing this for him at a huge discount. Instead, he shakes his head and says, “I’m sorry. My life is falling apart.”
She grabs him. “I know it seems like that, but it’s not. You’ve got a good job, and you’re a great writer, and you seriously have to just hold it together until the end of the day so I can keep Kyle from taking all of your money, okay? I need you to hold it together. Can you do that for me?”
Without agreeing, Stan lets her tell him she’s going to bring him back something from Ba Le. Without much else to do but wait, Stan gets another watery coffee from the firm’s break room and sits down on a Barcelona ottoman in the lobby, directly across from the elevators. He hopes Wendy doesn’t get him anything with pate on it.
This whole experience is surreal; typically Stan would be at work, but all he can do is replay the best times in his relationship with Kyle. They had sex at 15, which was really young in retrospect; it was precocious, after homecoming, dirt from the football field still caked under Stan’s nails from a second-quarter sack. They lit candles, played a mix CD of cheesy 80s hits; why “Like a Prayer” made sense for their first time, Stan doesn’t know, but he’ll never be able to listen to that song without cringing ever again. They went to separate colleges, Stan at Boulder and Kyle at Kenyon, and by the time they got to junior year they knew they had to spend the summer in Denver together, they had to, because the distance was making them both crazy. It wasn’t all bad; they were better at phone sex than regular sex, at least back then, and Stan still remembers the Capitol Hill bedroom they sublet with its bohemian turret in the corner of the room and creaky floors that woke up their roommates the first time they dared sex before work. All summer they ate Velveeta shells and watched entire seasons of new comedies on Netflix and talked about what kind of life they wanted, now that they were married. They bought a townhouse in the neighborhood just two years ago, as if they both knew that was where it started. It had ended there, too, six months ago, with Kyle confessing that he’d met this other guy, and they’d been hooking up on business trips, and could Stan try to comprehend that maybe it wasn’t normal to marry someone you first fucked at age 15.
“I was a child then,” Kyle had said, “I didn’t really know what I wanted,” and he said it in that high-strung way that made it seem as if he was talking himself into it just as much as he was telling Stan. “I didn’t realize when I was a sophomore in high school that I was committing myself to, you know — this.”
The problem is that Stan loves this. He isn’t ready to let go of it. He’ll tell that to Wendy, when she gets back with his banh mi. Stan isn’t going to be able to get through the afternoon. He’s accepted that he can’t fix it, but he still doesn’t know why this is happening.
It’s surreal when Kyle sits on the bench next to him and says, like it’s nothing, “This coffee is terrible.”
Stan goes stiff and nearly chokes and Kyle says, “Easy, hey,” and pats Stan on the back with the hand that’s not holding a coffee cup. It doesn’t help that Kyle looks amazing, just back from a business trip to LA where he got a new pair of slacks that fit him like he’s trying to prove a point. Stan himself could barely manage to get on any clothes this morning, and is wearing the same thing he wore yesterday, jeans and an oatmeal button-down.
“You don’t have to talk to me,” says Stan, and what he really means is “please don’t.”
“I like talking to you. Just because I don’t want to be married anymore doesn’t mean I don’t want to talk.”
“Well, maybe I don’t want to talk.”
“Why do you have to be like this?” Kyle asks.
“Because you’re ruining my life!” Stan’s voice nearly breaks when he says it, but it’s honest. He wishes Wendy would get the fuck back here already.
“Stanley, you’re 30,” says Kyle. “You’re not done yet. Your life’s barely started.”
“You’re wrong.” Stan is done with his coffee and he crushes the empty cup in his hand. It’s cathartic. “My life started the day you said you wanted to marry me. I wasn’t ready, okay? I wasn’t ready to be a grown-up. Maybe I wasn’t ready to commit to one person for the rest of my life.”
“So then this is a good thing, right?” Kyle sighs. “That’s what I’ve been saying this whole time — we were too young.”
“No,” says Stan, “fuck that. Because I loved you, and you wanted it, so what was I supposed to do — walk away? I wasn’t ready to get married, Kyle, but I didn’t want to give you up, either. And I have spent all of my life, all of it, building something with you. For you. I gave up my youth for you. Why isn’t that worth anything to you?”
“It’s worth a lot to me, Stan, but I don’t want to be married anymore.”
“What does Jasper say,” Stan asks, “about the fact that you skipped out on a 10-year marriage to be with him?”
“Oh, don’t bring Jasper into it.”
“Just answer the question!”
“Well.” Kyle pauses for a moment. He takes his hand off Stan’s back. “I’ve told him what I’ve told you many times: I was young, and I was caught up in a moment, and you were my best friend—”
“We were boyfriends.”
“—and I liked the idea of seizing on that moment, and I don’t know, I think Jasper gets that I’m flawed, and he’s okay with it, because he’s been around the block a few times and lived through the 80s and 90s or whatever, so I guess he understands that cheating on you makes me flawed but I’m still an okay person. I mean, Stan, you treat me like I’m some kind of ideal. But I’m just a person, you know? And we were better as friends, so, whatever.”
“I don’t want to be your friend! You’ve ruined my entire life.”
“Oh, jesus.” Kyle sighs again, and gets up. “Grow up, Stan. I didn’t want to be buried in South Park, anyway.” He tosses his cup in the garbage and Stan hears the leftover coffee splash against the side of the trashcan. “Just sell your fucking plot and I’ll let you keep the dog, okay? Think about it. I’d better go before that bitch Wendy catches me down here with you.” Kyle lunges for the elevator door, which is closing.
“Kyle,” Stan says weakly, but Kyle begins to slap his palm against a button. The doors close and Stan is left there, worse off than before.
It’s a depressingly real metaphor for Stan’s life.