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The Obvious | Nov 05 2003

E reported over dinner (excellent new Italian place on Vanderbilt) that it’s over between her and J, who is in love with and has evidently returned to a woman he once had a long-term affair with, under the nose of the woman’s then live-in boyfriend. E said that the cuckolded former boyfriend, who is either a big fucking idiot or someone who gets off on being betrayed, once phoned his girlfriend at J’s apartment, right after his girlfriend and J had had sex, to ask what she was up to.

“Lying naked with J,” she said, as though joking, which in a sense she was, the joke being that the joke wasn’t a joke.

E ordered meat ravioli; I had vegetable polenta. The food was yummy and we both liked the décor, which made E think of a bed and breakfast, and me of the hull of a ship. We sat at a table for four and I noticed that you couldn’t fit two chairs under the same side of the table at the same time, that either the table was too narrow or the chairs too wide. I pointed this out to the waitress, who kept leaning over the table and tilting her head in such a way that made E think she was flirting with me. I disagreed, or rather I thought that if she was flirting with me, which I suppose she was, she didn’t actually mean anything by it and was instead pretending to mean something, which to my mind made it different from flirting, which is all about possible, not pretended, meaning.

E said that her instant messaging program lets her know when J’s computer has been idle more than a certain number of minutes, this being information she uses in her speculations about whether J is talking to, emailing, or having sex with the other woman.

I suggested the obvious: Delete him from the program.

She responded with the obvious: This is her only remaining connection to him.