He turned up smiling.
“Oh c’mon, that’s it?” Jenna said, with a new edge.
It wiped the grin from Will’s face.
“When’s someone gonna bare their soul here?” she said. “I don’t have a sense of what’s in your heart. It’s all surface, it’s all cute little jokes.”
He couldn’t tell if she was kidding. She was clearly drunk, but he felt wrong-footed all the same.
“Consider mine kept a little lighter, then,” Will said, his face changing before their eyes, his temples graying, his wrinkles dredging. “I guess there’s plenty of ways to skin it.”
“But what about fate?” Jenna said. “What about love and sex? What about her?”
“I didn’t say anything about any of that, either,” Jack said, stepping to Will’s aid.
“You’ve been together, what, seven years?” Jenna said. “That’s a long time.”
“You’re right,” Will said.
“And so you must have something to say? We just want to know,” Jenna said. She was in control of the table now.
Will shrugged. Whitney shrugged. They were at least a united front.
“I’ll just come out and ask some questions, then…” Jenna said. Her eyes were bright, turned all the way up all of a sudden. They reflected the overhead lights like carved stones, and they were trained on Will. “People talk about the seven-year itch, right? So is it a real thing, or is it bullshit?”
“Must be one of those things they made up for a Marilyn Monroe movie,” Whitney said.
“Really?” Jenna said. “I thought it might’ve been like taste buds, you know? The way I don’t like the same food I liked when I was fifteen.”
“‘I believe in the taste-bud theory of relationships,’” Will said, smiling, trying to lighten things again. “Is that the sort of thing you were looking for?”
“You tell me?” Jenna said, looking at Whitney. “All three of you are a full iteration of taste buds further along than I am. What changes?”
“You’re up next, aren’t you?” Whitney said, her own bright eyes dialing in a little now. “Don’t you still have to go?”
“C’mon, let me in on it, Whit,” Jenna said. “Do you feel like a different person than you did when you were my age? Different ideas? Different desires, different kinks? It’s gotta evolve, right? To keep things fresh, to keep things hot? I just think about it a lot, you know: What happens to your brain? What happens to your code? What happened to your skin and your tits and your ass?”
She’d shifted tenses. Whitney heard it if no one else did.
“Guess you’ll have to see for yourself when the time comes,” Whitney said. “Some people know themselves right away; some people spend their lives figuring out who they want to be when they grow up.”
A woman climbing a ladder for a bottle of wine bumped the light overhead, and they all strobed a little.
“I wonder which one of those people I am,” Jenna said.
“Like whether you’re Jenna or Leonard on any given night?” Whitney said.
Jenna didn’t react. The men may as well not have been there anymore.
“C’mon,” Whitney said. “Quit filibustering. You’re up. The floor is yours.”
“I went in a little different direction,” Jenna said. “It’s a different sort of…”
Whitney opened her arms wide, like: Please, proceed. She’d seized the table back.
“Well, uh…” she said, yanking a strap of her dress, maybe feeling the strain of the fabric. “I believe in life after death. I believe in the Buddhist’s conception of reincarnation and Dante’s conception of Purgatory and the secular Jew’s conception of Heaven and Earth. I believe time moves faster sometimes and time moves slower other times. I believe that marriage is a fallacy and that monogamy is obviously unnatural. I believe that women have all the power but that most are too weak to use it. I believe seduction is sexier than sex. I believe that Paris is sexier than L.A., which is sexier than New York. I believe in Picard frozen foods. I believe in cafés noisettes. I believe in Michel Houellebecq. I believe people have more control over their lives than they give themselves credit for. I believe that people deliberately make themselves miserable by making bad choices. I believe I could kill a person if I had to. I believe most people are fucked up in the head and that feet are super gross. And I believe”—she’d stopped looking at her notes, even though there were plenty left; she was bored suddenly—“in the taste-bud theory of relationships.”
“And there you have it,” Will said. “A-pluses all around.”
The four of them stood there breathing dumbly, a little worn out, a little beyond the threshold of amusement. They were out of wine but they’d already had way too much. The half-eaten salmon toasts were buried beneath the grave of crumpled napkins that they’d used to keep the honey off their hands. The air shifted around them. Behind their faces were four distinct temperatures, but each was ready to get out of there. Jenna moved first to retrieve the check. The same routine. Straight to the counter, into the in-between spaces. It was getting crowded now. There was a stack-up outside on the street. Whitney made a silent appeal to Will, but Will’s face was following Jenna. It made her want to murder him.
When the bill landed, Will did some frantic accounting and determined it was somehow exactly right. The handwritten tabs hadn’t failed tonight, and maybe they never had. They settled up with cash—twenty-five euros each—and they bused their dishes and wiped down their table, erasing the evidence that they’d ever been there.
They fell from the tight quarters of the restaurant into the cool alleyway and the breeze of the street. It was still May—the temperature was still diving in the early evenings. The men pulled on light jackets, Jack’s tenting him, twice the size of Will’s. Jenna wore nothing but her dress and looked entirely unbothered by the breeze. The bones in Whitney’s shoulders poked through her
