Let’s See What Happens

Salt & Cypress is the sort of place that encourages good behavior. Monterey cypress trees overhead, local wine in thin glasses, the Pacific doing something expensive-looking beyond the terrace. It is difficult to misbehave there without feeling you are lowering the property value.

Lisa and I managed.

We had finished dinner and moved to the bar for one final drink, which is a phrase people use shortly before making decisions they would not ordinarily defend in daylight. The man beside us started with the sunset. He was maybe thirty, handsome, well dressed, confident without being obnoxious, and entirely transparent about why he had introduced himself. Lisa understood immediately. So did I.

She looked at me. I knew the look. He thinks he has a chance.

I smiled into my wine. Let him.

In retrospect, that was probably the point at which one of us should have become an adult. Neither of us volunteered.

He began talking to Lisa, which seemed reasonable. Lisa is very easy to talk to when she wants to be, particularly after wine, and she gave him just enough attention to encourage him. I joined in. He shifted toward me. Lisa noticed. I noticed her noticing.

It had stopped being about him before the conversation started.

The truth is that Lisa and I both know what we look like. There is no useful modesty in pretending otherwise. We are not walking around Silverdale wondering why people occasionally stare. Most days it simply is not interesting enough to think about. That evening, unfortunately, it became interesting.

I was wearing a black dress I knew suited me. Lisa had chosen something fitted and elegant and was sitting with the comfortable confidence of a woman whose boyfriend was at home and whose evening contained absolutely no actual romantic risk. He complimented her. She accepted it. Then he complimented me. I thanked him.

Lisa glanced sideways.

There was something annoyingly competitive in it.

So I leaned slightly closer to her.

Not to him. To Lisa.

My hand rested for a moment against her forearm while I said something perfectly ordinary, as though we had momentarily forgotten he was there. She looked at my hand, then at me. For perhaps half a second she was genuinely surprised.

Then she understood.

Her expression changed.

Oh, we’re doing this now?

Apparently we were.

She moved a little closer too.

He noticed. Of course he noticed.

What followed was almost embarrassingly easy. A touch on an arm that lasted half a second longer than necessary. Lisa leaning toward me to say something she could easily have said from where she was sitting. Me brushing a loose strand of hair from her shoulder with an intimacy so artificial that only someone who knew us very well would have recognized how ridiculous it was.

Lisa nearly laughed. I nearly did too. That became part of the challenge. Whoever broke first lost.

Meanwhile, the man had become visibly uncertain whether he was flirting with one woman, two women, or interrupting something already in progress. I should have felt guilty.

I did feel guilty.

I continued anyway.

Wine is very good at allowing two incompatible moral positions to coexist.

Eventually Lisa put a hand lightly on my knee while asking me a question about dessert. There was absolutely no reason for her hand to be there. I looked down at it, then at her. She gave me the smallest, most innocent smile I have ever seen on a guilty person.

That one almost got me.

He had stopped talking.

We both noticed.

Lisa removed her hand and took a sip of wine as though nothing whatsoever had happened.

I decided retaliation was justified.

When he asked me something, I answered without looking at him. I looked at Lisa instead. Not dramatically. That would have ruined it. Just long enough.

Lisa’s eyebrows rose.

For one second, I think she actually wondered whether I had overcommitted to the bit.

Then I smiled.

She understood.

The corners of her mouth twitched.

He did not.

By then he was trying to solve us. That was probably the cruelest part. We knew exactly what he was thinking, and rather than make things clearer, we kept giving him new information.

Eventually he laughed and said, “Okay, so which one of you am I supposed to be flirting with?”

Lisa looked at me.

I looked at her.

“Were you flirting?” I asked.

He laughed again. “Come on.”

And then, after another minute or two of increasingly optimistic conversation, he made his proposal. Not crudely. Almost politely, which somehow made it worse. Something about how there was no reason anyone had to choose, that we were all adults, that his place was nearby.

He let the sentence trail off.

Lisa turned toward me very slowly.

There are moments when friendship becomes telepathy.

Did he really just—

Yes.

Are we done?

I should have said yes.

Instead, perhaps because I had already behaved badly and therefore felt oddly committed to consistency, I leaned toward Lisa and said, “What do you think?”

That genuinely caught her.

Not because she thought I meant it. She knows me far too well for that. But she had not expected me to hand her the grenade.

Her eyes widened for the briefest moment.

Then she recovered.

Lisa always recovers.

She tilted her head, considered me with ridiculous seriousness and said, “I don’t know. You’re very persuasive tonight.”

That nearly ended me.

I had to look away.

He, unfortunately, interpreted this as encouragement.

That was when we finally stopped.

Lisa laughed first. I followed. Not at him exactly, although I cannot pretend he was entirely excluded from the joke.

“We’re going home,” she said.

He looked confused.

“Together?”

“No,” Lisa said. “Very much not together.”

“She has a boyfriend,” I added.

“Who is probably wondering why dinner has taken four hours,” Lisa said.

“And I don’t sleep with men.”

There was a pause.

He looked at me. Then at Lisa. Then back at me.

I watched the entire evening rearrange itself behind his eyes.

To his credit, he laughed.

“You two are awful.”

The sentence landed harder than I expected.

Because he was smiling, and because he had every right to be annoyed, and because somewhere between the third glass of wine and Lisa’s hand on my knee I had stopped thinking of him as a person and started treating him as something between a prop and a scoreboard.

I felt my face go hot.

“Yeah,” I said. “We were.”

Lisa looked at me.

I turned back to him.

“Sorry. Really. We got carried away.”

He shrugged, still smiling.

“I noticed.”

That made it worse.

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

He lifted his glass slightly.

“No harm done.”

There probably wasn’t. But that wasn’t quite the point.

Outside, the ocean had gone black beyond the trees and the air had cooled enough to make both of us realize we had stayed longer than intended. We made it halfway to the parking lot before Lisa turned on me.

“You started that.”

“I absolutely did not.”

“You touched my arm.”

“You put your hand on my knee.”

“You leaned into me first.”

“You encouraged him.”

“You encouraged me.”

This was, unfortunately, true.

By the time we reached her car, we had both constructed detailed versions of the evening in which the other person was entirely responsible for our moral decline. Neither account survived serious examination.

Daniel texted while we were standing there.

You alive?

Lisa showed me the screen.

“See?” she said. “A good man. Waiting patiently at home while you corrupt me.”

I stared at her.

“Lisa, you put your hand on my leg.”

“That was acting.”

“You enjoyed it.”

“That is irrelevant.”

It was not irrelevant.

It was, however, very funny.

The next morning I woke with the uncomfortable clarity that follows an evening when nothing terrible happened and you nevertheless behaved worse than necessary. I am still a romantic. I still believe intimacy should mean something, and that people deserve to be treated as people rather than props in someone else’s entertainment. Apparently I am also capable, after enough wine and the wrong look from a friend, of forgetting all of that for forty-five minutes.

I would like to say I learned something profound.

Mostly I learned that Lisa and I should probably not be seated together at a bar when either of us says, “Let’s see what happens.”

Nothing good has ever followed that sentence.