Alexa Loftus
My boyfriend Rollin and I are going to a dinner party that I’m hoping will save our relationship. That’s how bad of a spot we’re in and how desperate I’m feeling; I’m hoping one nice normal evening will make us forget all of the glaring facts of our incompatibility.
My best friend Kiki has invited us over to her new boyfriend Josh’s house for dinner. An hour beforehand, she texts me; she needs us to pick them up at a bar in downtown L.A. This hits me as unsettling, that the hosts of the dinner party need a ride to the dinner party. But what unsettles me even more is that at the end of the text, she has included a honey pot emoji.
Nowhere in our conversation was there talk about honey pots. It’s not a callback or a cute thing she does. It’s completely random. Senseless. Foreboding. I see that little golden honey pot and two things become clear: one, she’s drunk. And two, everything is about to fall apart.
They’re waiting on the curb when we pull up. What I know about Josh, in the month I’ve known him, is that he’s a big drinker and he wears oversized business suits ironically.
It doesn’t take a grizzled, veteran detective to deduce that your best friend’s boyfriend has a drinking problem. Though it did become extra clear when, a week prior, I bit into a deviled egg he had made and a bunch of bourbon oozed out.
Oh and there’s one more thing about Josh. In the whirlwind month he and Kiki have been dating, they are now engaged.
They get in my car; they’re extremely intoxicated. And my dream of a normal evening is dealt another blow: they need a ride to the grocery store.
Rollin and I wait in the car while they stumble into Vons. I should pull the ripcord, tell them we’ll do this another time, but it feels as though my entire life is at stake. If I bail on this dinner, I might as well walk out into the sea and never return. And it’s unfortunate that I’ve put all of this onto the two least responsible people I know.
I can feel Rollin’s misery. I’m not sure he’s ever liked Kiki, though he’s never said so. He doesn’t like most people, which has been difficult for our social life.
I think his ideal life is mainlining coffee, chain-smoking, and never seeing the light of day. He makes music on his computer, but seems almost repulsed by the idea of finishing a song. And when I try to encourage him to finish one, he looks at me like I don’t get it. And maybe I don’t. Maybe I should stop thinking of him as a musician, but rather, someone who makes various sounds.
If I’ve had anything that resembles a romantic “type,” it’s that I am drawn to outsiders. I tend to like the guy who’s a little bit to the left of a counter culture, who’s sort of doing his own thing no one really knows about. For some reason, I want that guy, I want to know what he’s up to.
Well, it’s been four and half years of being with that guy, and I figured out what he’s up to. Frankly, it’s not much.
I do think Rollin is brilliant, but a high school stoner who has died probably has better follow-through. He’s the first person I’ve dated where it feels like we have an actual friendship, but being with him is like being in a world away from the rest of the world. With him, I’m in outer space, in a bad way. It’s dark and scary and I actually think he might be committing some sort of credit card fraud.
We sit in the car, it’s deep space quiet. Kiki and Josh return with three steaks and a single portobello mushroom cap. I assume they have the rest of the stuff at home. I will soon discover that this is not true.
We get to Josh’s house and Kiki disappears to cook, leaving us alone with Josh on the patio. He drunkenly launches into some tall tale about some crazy time where he did something crazy. I don’t know what he’s talking about because I’m dissociating.
I’m wondering how I got into this situation. Why I’m drawn to tortured men who live on the fringes of society. But maybe all men are tortured, and it’s not that I’m picking the tortured ones, but in fact any man I choose will be tortured, inherently. Does this mean that to love a man is to suffer? Are Kiki and I doomed?
The three steaks and mushroom reappear, having been cooked into oblivion. Kiki hands me the shriveled mushroom cap like she is bestowing a precious gift. I think in her drunken mind, we are eating like kings. Josh proceeds to eat his steak with his bare hands.
Early on in our relationship, Rollin and I saw a theatrical production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? What a fantasy that was, that an unraveling would have so much talking, so much emotion and movement. Those actors were jumping up on the coffee table!
To have to watch this meal play out, I can’t imagine a worse night of entertainment. Such long periods of awkward silence. Everything important goes unsaid. The set and costumes look like shit, the lighting is bad.
Here I am faced with the loss of the two people closest to me and what I’m yearning for is production value.
We leave the dinner without much fanfare.
In the car, Rollin tells me he hates Josh and that’s something we can agree on. He thinks Josh is a liar, that everything Josh said on the patio wasn’t true. I didn’t hear a goddamn word Josh said but I believe Rollin, because Rollin is a prolific liar, and the one thing a liar knows is when he’s being lied to.
Rollin lies to me about so many things. Whether or not he just smoked a cigarette (he had), why he had a falling out with that person (their fault, always, though it never was.) Things are always going missing from our apartment, and when I ask him, “What happened to (fill-in-the-blank item)?” He always has an answer other than the truth (he sold it.)
I can’t tell if he’s trying to protect me or prank me. If he’s trying to protect me, well, it’s having the opposite effect: I feel very unsafe. If he just loves to prank me, that might be worse. He might actually think I’m an idiot.
It looks like the dinner didn’t save us. I have to break up with Rollin.
Over the next few months, while Kiki is wedding planning, I am trying to end it. It’s proving quite difficult– Rollin knows exactly what to say whenever I try to break things off. You’re going to regret this. You’ll never speak to me again. You can’t do it on your own. These are all of my worst fears, said to my face with great conviction.
When I start to move past these fears, he tries new tactics. There is a period where every time I try to break up with him, he bribes me with a milkshake. I don’t know why this tactic is effective. It’s not like I’m obsessed with milkshakes. But the idea of sitting down for a milkshake instead of breaking up with the supposed love of your life is apparently more appealing.
When I see Kiki again, she apologizes for the fucked up Lynchian nightmare dinner that pretty much ruined my life. I accept her apology, even though she has no idea of the damage done.
I tell her I’m struggling to break up with Rollin, and maybe I shouldn’t. We get along well enough. “What’s the rush?” I say to her. I probably had a milkshake that day.
“Because it’s your life,” she tells me. And she says it with some real gusto. I feel my bones vibrate, which is definitely a first. For someone who makes terrible decisions, Kiki is incredibly smart.
I want to return the favor and save her from Josh, tell her that Josh brings out the worst in her. That she shouldn’t marry him, because he’s going to destroy everything she loves. Instead I go with, “Are you sure about Josh?”
She assumes I’m freaked out by the quick engagement, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m freaked out ‘cause he’s a psychopath. I don’t say this, because I’m scared to lose her, but I know deep down in my vibrating bones that I already have.
She tells me, “I need you to trust me to make my own mistakes.”
Rollin buys a car off Craigslist for 200 dollars that you start by rubbing two little wires together. There is a spark when this happens, and it crosses my mind that maybe I won’t have to break up with Rollin because he’s going to explode. And if I’m hoping he explodes, then it really is time to break up. And so we do. There is no epic moment where I jump on a coffee table and exclaim, “It’s over!” The set sucks, the lighting is bad. It is maybe even fully silent when I tell him we can’t be together anymore and he finally relents.
He packs up his car and gets in. He’s so tall, it’s a miracle he can fit into a car so dinky. It looks like a toy. He sparks it up and drives off while it makes some ungodly noise. We had a great run, I think. I loved him, that’s for sure.
Kiki and I have pretty much stopped talking by the time the wedding rolls around. I’m still a bridesmaid, though when I arrive at the venue in Joshua Tree, I am informed they have taken the bridesmaid photos without me.
Kiki and Josh have decided to have a goth wedding, so everyone is wearing all black like we’re at a funeral. This theme is so perfect, I would be laughing if I wasn’t so sad.
They don’t give us the opportunity to object during the ceremony. Is that on purpose? I am making bulging eye contact with everyone, trying to figure out who else disapproves of this. But everyone is acting like everything is normal. Even though Josh’s ironically oversized suit makes him look like he’s actively shrinking.
Kiki walks down the aisle and I start tearing up. And it feels so odd to be so devastated, while seeing her so happy.
I try to be pleasant at dinner. Then one of Kiki’s lame-ass friends reads love poetry into a microphone and, not to be rude, but it makes me want to take my brain out of my skull and light it on fire.
I think about the night Rollin proposed to me. We were in our tiny studio apartment, I was filling the silence by blabbing about how I should get into jewelry! Rollin then got very nervous, grabbed something, and handed it to me. It was a ring box.
Rings are jewelry, so I suppose it was on topic, though we’d never spoken of getting married. I was so shocked, I could barely speak. He could barely look at me. I started crying, finally mustered something along the lines of maybe later. The ring box disappeared into the desk drawer, and then one day it just disappeared. I hope he got a good price for it.
At Kiki’s Satanic wedding we’ve all put the black cloaks on that Kiki’s mom made for us as party favors. We look ready to sacrifice a goat, or maybe all of the goats, so it’s disorienting that the wedding DJ is playing only the most jovial wedding music like Earth, Wind and Fire’s, “September.”
I look around for the guy at the wedding who I know is single. When I can’t find him, I casually ask around for his whereabouts; “Where’s what’s-his-face?” “Who?” They ask. They don’t know who I’m talking about. The One Single Man At The Wedding must have been a mirage concocted by the desert heat.
I end up dancing alone under the night sky. The setting is beautiful, the lighting is perfect.
***
I don’t see Kiki again for about ten years. I mean, I see her on Instagram, which is not nothing. I see her and Josh get a dog. I see they move to Santa Fe. I see she continues to make paintings that are mostly vagina-oriented.
After many years seeing photos with Josh, Josh stops being in the photos. Then I see that she and Josh have divorced. And when I see she’s going to be in L.A., I dm her to meet up at a bar downtown.
It’s so good to see us, and on the other side of Josh. If only it didn’t take so long.
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Alexa Loftus is a writer and comedian from the wild woods of Southern Illinois. She is a former staff writer on The Problem With Jon Stewart, the Emmy-nominated talk show on Apple TV+, and her writing has been published in the L.A. Times and McSweeney’s. She lives in Los Angeles. You can find her on Instagram @alexajloftus or at alexaloftus.com.