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It all started on a rainy February day in Manhattan. Heavy, tepid drizzle fell on and off throughout the day. Shreds of cloud shrouded the tops of the skyscrapers. That evening MacClaren's was crowded and humid, everybody damp, everybody glad the day – and the week – was over.
Lily had arrived early to secure our booth, and had been defending it tooth and nail for an hour and a half before Marshall and I arrived. Marshall slid into the booth beside her. He put an arm around her shoulders, pulling her into him and leaning down for a kiss. Lily stopped him with a finger.
“Oh no, no no no.” She edged away. “I love you, but the mushy stuff can wait until I'm back from the bathroom.” She climbed out of the booth awkwardly. “How can you leave a pregnant woman on her own with nothing but virgin cosmos for company for an hour and a half?” Then she was gone, moving with the speed of the boulder from the Temple of Doom.
“I didn't know pregnant people could move that fast,” I said, as we watched her go.
“Meh,” Marshall said, waving a hand. “You should see her when I make enchiladas.”
I pointed a finger at Marshall. “Beer?”
“You know it.”
So I got beer. Lily had joined Marshall and I in our heated discussion about whether The Piano or Schindler's List was the better film (coming down on my side, of course, with Schindler's List) when Robin shouldered her way past the crowd at the bar and slumped onto the bench beside me. Her clothes were sodden; her hair hung in dripping hanks to her shoulders.
We had fallen silent to stare at her. She glared back, at each of us in turn. “What?” she said, splaying her hands. I leant back to avoid her fingernails. “It's raining outside, in case you didn't notice.”
“Yeah,” Marshall said, a lazy half smile beginning on his face, “but you look like you fell in the Hudson. Where have you been?”
“Nowhere.” Robin opened her bag and began rooting through it. “It's gone freaking Biblical out there.”
“You just came from upstairs and you look like that?” I said. Robin paused in her search of her bag to throw a glare in my direction. “Why didn't you bring an umbrella?”
“Ted, I came from upstairs. I wasn't going to bring an umbrella.”
“Anyway,” Lily said, reaching forward to hand Robin a hairbrush from her own handbag, “Marshall and I went for our scan today. We got pictures!” She had pulled them out of her bag too. She brandished the print-outs across the table. She was beaming so brightly it was almost difficult to look at her. Marshall was wearing a matching expression.
I took the photos, shuffled through them. A spectral silver silhouette shifted through little movements, barely discernable expressions. I smiled.
“He's big for his age,” Marshall said, leaning forward to point a finger at the photographs in my hands. There was a tremulousness to his voice, and a laugh in it too. I glanced up at Lily. She widened her eyes at me, bit her lip.
Robin's cold wet hair against my face made me jump. She was leaning in front of me to peer at the photos. A smile, a small one, brightened on her face. “Hey,” she said, taking the pictures out of my hands gently, “look at little Marshall Junior.” She glanced up at Lily with a twinkle of mischief about her eyes. “He looks kinda like Barney.”
Marshall grabbed the pictures from her hand. “What?” Holding them up to the light, he squinted at them.
I laughed. “Where is Barney, anyway?”
“Oh,” Lily said, taking the pictures from Marshall without glancing at him, “he has a date. He told me earlier. He said to save him some hot wings.”
“Like that's going to happen.” I snorted.
“He should be back soon.” Lily made a face. “He gave me a detailed timeline.”
Robin handed Lily's hairbrush back across the table. “I have a date.” She folded her hands on the table and looked at us.
Marshall made a noise in the back of his throat and buried himself in the menu. I directed my gaze to Lily. “Hey – can I see those photos again?”
Lily ignored me. She sat up straight, wrapped her hands around her glass. “Tell me,” she said to Robin.
And so the evening progressed. Robin's date was with a successful lawyer she had literally collided with at the bagel place around the corner from her studio. He had bought her a replacement bagel after she had smeared the first one down his suit. She had asked him if he wanted to get coffee. His only 'but' was that he was four foot nine.
Marshall had helped win a big case at Honeywell & Cootes. An oil company seeking permission to clear stretches of the northern taiga had been denied. The pristine white forests would remain unmolested. And that was only in the morning.
Goliath's HQ ascended daily, a stone skin sheathing the steel skeleton. I told them about it, describing the feeling of knowing that there, on the dirt and cement of Manhattan itself, my building was rising, stone upon stone. We ordered hot wings and nachos. I got the feeling that nobody was listening, so I stopped. Eventually.
It was a Friday, so Marshall and I drank. It wasn't long before Robin begged off to get ready to meet her pintsize date. She left with a glance back and her handbag held over her head. After that, it wasn't long before Lily was ready to go, and Marshall followed her. As Lily made her gradual way to the door, Marshall lagged behind to whisper to me. “I'd love to stay, but I'm not letting my pregnant wife hike across half the city by herself. You know how it is.”
I slapped him on the back. “No problem, man. Go, and lay with thy woman, I command thee.” The grin he threw over his shoulder as they left the bar told me I was right about the laying with part.
I stretched out my legs under the booth, propping my feet on the opposite bench and hunkering down under the collar of my coat to avoid the stares of the crowded drinkers around me. I flipped through The Architectural Review, but buzzed, warm and vague, the sentences ran through my head like sand in a sieve. The photographs, though, were still beautiful. In my mind, my building towered against a blue sky in the glossy pictures.
Under a paper napkin, in their bowl, I had saved two hot wings for Barney. Their edges glistened dark red. I kept ordering beers, nursed each one. After an hour, I lost the booth when I went to the bathroom. After two hours and three unsuccessful approaches to girls at the bar, I ate both hot wings, finished my beer, and left.
Outside, the rain had slackened, but only barely. It drummed on the sidewalk, constant white noise. I turned my collar up and pulled the brim of my hat down (I had recently taken to wearing flat caps), and stumbled up the steps to the street, feet slow and clumsy. Turning the corner and starting up the steps to my building, I almost tripped over someone sitting on the fifth step up.
“Whoa, dude, sorry.” I held out a placatory hand, focusing on the figure on the steps as he looked up at me. I stopped, stupid, hand out in midair. It was Barney.
“Oh,” he said, “hey.”
His hair was plastered to his skull, made dark by the rain. His suit was sodden. He barely met my eyes. I lurched forward, half-falling to the step beside him. It was cold. The wet seeped through my pants. I wrapped my coat further around myself. “Dude,” I said, leaning into his shoulder, “where've you been? I've been waiting for like two whole freakin' hours in there. I saved you hot wings.”
His shoulders shucked with a humourless snort. “Thanks. Sorry.”
Sandwiching my hands between my thighs to keep them warm, I shifted closer and tried to meet Barney's eyes. He turned his head away, but not before I noticed something. “Hey.” I peered into his face. “Hey! What the hell, man. What happened to your face?”
Red ringed his left eye, undershadowed by ugly purple. His eyelids were almost closed. Barney glanced up into Manhattan's starless sky. Rain fell onto his bruised face. He ground his jaw. “I know, right?” he said, voice thin. “This priceless piece of art, this invaluable chick-charmer.” He gestured to his face. “I suppose I could always play the celebrity boxer. Or cop. There must be mileage in it.”
“Barney.” The buzz had left me. I was shivering, despite myself, and wondering if the thing about haemorrhoids and cold surfaces as true. I stared at him. “Tell me what happened.”
Barney looked at me, then, his right eye wide and clear, left half-lidded and bloodshot. I winced at the sight of it. He almost smiled. “Lily told you I had a date, right? Well, everything went exactly according to plan.”
“Really?” I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Yes!” He grinned, flinching when the expression hurt his eye. “Her name's Katie, she's an English concert pianist. She's playing Carnegie Hall all week. Dark hair, dark eyes – totally not the boobs you'd expect on a concert pianist, lemme tell ya.” He was gazing past me now, far away. “It was gonna be legendary.”
A beat of silence passed that the city filled with traffic noise and rain. “So what happened?”
A semblance of a smile passed over Barney's face like a shadow, and was gone again. He sighed. “She had a boyfriend.”
“Ah.”
“He was along for the ride, to protect her in the big bad city, you know the drill.”
“Uh huh.”
He slapped his knee with his hand. “Boyfriends.”
“Yeah.” I nodded along with his frustration. Rainwater trickled over my scalp, running down my collar. I shifted; my wet clothes stuck to me. Rain drummed on my shoulders. “Barney, you've gotta come inside. You're gonna catch the 'flu out here and I don't wanna be stuck taking care of you.”
Barney wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth on his heels. He shook his head.
“What? Why not?” The beer had left me with nothing but the seed of a headache and a cold uncertainty in the pit of my stomach. Barney's shoulder pressed against mine, his knee against the outside of my thigh. “Barney, come on. It's the middle of the night. It's wet, it's freezing. Quit playing games.”
Hugging himself tighter, Barney looked down at his shoes. After a long moment of rain and traffic, he spoke. His voice was quiet; I could barely hear him. “Ted,” he said, as I leant toward him, “am I a bad person?”
I laughed. It bubbled out of me as I sat back, rain falling into my eyes, blurring my vision. “Of course you're a bad person,” I giggled, “dude, that's not even a question.” Trying to hold the laughter in, I covered my mouth with my hands. Barney stood, turning away. I climbed to my feet again, shirt sticking to my skin under my coat. “Barney, come on.” The laughter trembled through my voice as I put a hand on his shoulder.
He shrugged it off, and I subsided. He walked away from me; came back again, injured face full of tension. I wiped the rain from my eyes. “I'm a bad person,” he said, and his voice wobbled. “Really a bad person.”
“No, wait, come on.” I shrugged, gestured with my hands. “You're not really a bad person. You've got all this stuff that looks bad on paper, but in actual fact I think you're... okay.” I reached for adjectives that were both honest and flattering, and couldn't come up with many. “Look, I wouldn't be your friend if you were really a bad person.”
“Best friend,” Barney chimed.
“Yeah. Okay. What is this all about, anyway? Can't we have this conversation upstairs?”
Barney lingered. At first, it seemed as if he was going to give in. He gazed up at the windows on my floor. A corner of his mouth twitched. “You really think I'm a good person?”
“I wouldn't go that far.” I watched him. “I'll stretch to 'not awful'.”
He looked at me with his bruise-mismatched eyes. An unfamiliar smile flirted with his face. The rain poured down between us. “Good enough.” In two steps he crossed the distance seperating us and grabbed the front of my soaking shirt in one fist. The other hand wound into the hair at the nape of my neck as he, with the look of one diving into shark-infested waters, crushed his lips against mine.
Kissing Barney wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. He was rain-wet. He tasted like Scotch and cold. My hands flailed uselessly at my sides, clenching and unclenching. His fingers were hard against my neck. On my head, my shoulders, the rain pounded. The moment went on and on, clear and cold and brittle, like the sustained note from the rim of a wine glass.
It was Barney who broke away first. I felt his breath on my face, warm, and I opened my eyes. He stared at me, inches away. I stared back. My mouth hung open. His one fist still clenched in my shirt. He released me, by degrees, fingers opening and his hand falling back to his side.
Then, he turned away from me and started walking. Crisp steps, one-two, one-two. I gaped after him. The clockwork of my brain had ground to a halt. I watched, dumb, as Barney's silhouette hailed a taxi. He disappeared inside it, and the car sped away, throwing up a mist of rainwater. It turned the corner at the end of the street and was lost to sight.
I stood in the rain for what felt like an hour, until my fingers and toes went numb and my clothes were plastered to my skin. Then at last I found the impetus to start up my brain again. I imagined gears gnashing and squealing. My feet carried me forward a couple of steps. Then I turned and staggered back to the stairs, and up them. I was going to bed.