The Cousins

That night the men appeared like fully grown trees, transplanted just for us. They lined the narrow bar. They unzipped their puffers and shook the snow from their limbs. They ordered Campari sodas because they had already been drinking. They surrounded us. We were in their grove. We felt two feet tall and very alive. They had penetrating eyes and jaws covered in stubble, and all they wanted to do was laugh. The men had always been doing something amazing, something better than we could ever imagine. Skiing. The Knicks game. A new French restaurant, not yet open to the public.

My cousin and I had been waiting for their arrival. We liked waiting at the dive bar we always waited at. If we waited long enough at the dive bar, the men usually appeared. If no one appeared, we sat outside and smoked and complained bitterly. This ritual brought us close, closer than most cousins. We were also close because my other cousin, her stepbrother, had recently died from taking laced drugs.

Before my other cousin’s death, I hadn’t thought of my cousin in years. Early on, there were the years we took baths together in the claw-footed bathtub in my grandparents’ house. In the photos, our mouths are open and red with laughter. In adulthood, the photos took on a symbolic power. We would text them back and forth, glyphs of our childhood romance.

Then there were the years of family vacations. I knew I was supposed to remember these vacations fondly, but the memories possessed a dismal 19th-century ambiance. Cold sea, sand-covered pieces of saltwater taffy, near drownings, countless arguments over dinner, usually about the price of lobster. My cousins and I were not sweet to each other. We devised cruel games. Someone always ended up locked in a closet or shut into a trundle bed in a hotel room. I remembered crying in the car on the way home, my parents' concerned faces cast in shadow, the dashboard aglow, the turnpike blurring. I knew I was supposed to remember the vacations fondly because they were before. All the memories of before were supposed to be pure and rosy, imbued with life in the way only sudden death can imbue memory. After the vacations, there were the years when my parents and my cousins’ parents didn’t speak. Then came speaking, just before death.

Drinks were bought for us. We searched for feedback, soft and reactive. Everything we touched left a subtle indentation. My cousin was more forward, breaking a glass sometimes. I would apologize for her, but I never really cared. It was the kind of behavior that had made her a bad child. But a bad child in the body of a young woman can be quite charming. I was always a good child. Or rather, my cousin often served as a reminder to my parents that I wasn’t so bad. My cousin and I were recent liberal arts grads. We wore vintage boots. We knew about the literary canon. We were learning which parties to be seen at. The men had gone to all the same colleges that everyone we knew in New York had gone to.

Only they were a little older, a little more established. They had half-figured out their hair. They smelled more expensive. Sandalwood, milky heliotrope. They had brightly colored cashmere sweaters with holes in the sleeves and shoes they wanted you to comment on.

We knew all the men through Lucas. Lucas’s father and my uncle were close. I had never known Lucas growing up. But my cousin had. I knew she was a little obsessed with him. Lucas had a restaurant, a truck, and an ex-girlfriend who was a moderately famous model. So the obsession was reasonable.

I mostly ignored Lucas. One of his friends was usually available to occupy my attention. But somehow tonight, in the frenzy, I found myself by his side. He was surveying two lesbians across the bar. The lesbians were the same shade of blonde and looked like sisters. “Unusual,” Lucas said.

“Because there are never any lesbians here? Or because they look like sorority girls?”

“Both.”

“Yeah,” I said, “kind of hot.”

“Not really my type. But conceptually hot.”

“Sure.”

The lesbians nuzzled into each other, their bouncy blowouts mingling.

Lucas looked at me. I tended to avoid making direct eye contact with him. Partially because he was so tall and partially because I have an aversion to direct eye contact. “You still live above that horrible sushi place?”

“We’re neighbors, remember?”

It was true. We were neighbors. Though I never ran into Lucas, at least not in daylight. He was not a “daylight person.”

“And you’re Isaac’s niece? Do you ever go to their place upstate?”

“Yeah, I know you bought them that freaky statue.”

“Oh, you don’t like the tiger?”

“Every time I go up there, we do yoga in the room where that tiger lives, and I’ll be upside down in downward dog, and I’ll just see that tiger baring its teeth at me. Where did you get that thing?”

“Morocco. I think you love the tiger. Do you want a Campari and soda?”

“Sure.”

“Look,” said Lucas. And I did finally look at him, squarely in the face. Lucas had eyes like a fish and a face from another time. Normally, when people say “face from another time,” they mean the Victorian era, but he was a little Neolithic. He always looked as if his lips and undereyes had just been stung by a bee. But this perhaps made him even more attractive. “We have to go to this dinner,” he said, “but we should hang out later.”

“Later” and all its implications. I felt guilty. I remembered Lucas and my cousin standing outside the bar together a few months ago. I saw her placing one of her wired earbuds in his ear. They weren’t facing each other, but standing shoulder-to-shoulder, watching the cabs pull up to the curb, the white thread of wire floating between them.

So I tried to sound curt as I said goodbye to Lucas. The men donned their puffers and hugged us, one long right arm after the next. Their eyes were a little wet from all the laughing, their pupils a little larger. They left as quickly as they came, leaving the bar door swinging in their wake, leaving a gasp of cold air that sobered us for a moment.

“Fucking Lucas,” said my cousin. As she threw her head back, the ends of her hair flicked into the glass of beer on the bar behind her. “He’s so ADHD. It’s like we have the same brain.”

My cousin was an actress. This always made me seem like less of an actress. But we shared similar impulses, a shared interest in people. Her parents were analysts. Mine were just analytical. But within our shared data points, it was true that certain things about my cousin were dialed up a notch. She was admittedly more extreme. Louder, kinder, harsher, able to change the energy of a room, enter with charm and ease, fling her limbs around. The more erratic she became, the more I giggled. I became still and exacting. Careful with my eyes and my body. Careful with everything but my language. The men tended to like this. They would say things like “I think your cousin is off her meds.” “No,” I would respond, “she’s very much on her meds. We’re both highly medicated, actually.”

We assumed it was the end of the night for us, the end of men asking how we knew each other, the end of us responding, “We’re cousins.” “Step-cousins, actually.” We lingered at the bar for a while longer, but not even the presence of two boys my cousin knew from school could revive us. One spoke to me for too long about his library job, and I was reminded of my own sad summers, hours spent pushing around a gray metal trolley and reshelving books. I thought about bullying him a little, just to flirt and bring the mood up, but he had one of those large heads that soulful, melancholy people sometimes have. So I just gave him my number to end the conversation.

Finally, at 2 AM, my cousin received a call. I could feel my face growing warm as she answered. Lucas was coming to pick us up in his truck. He was with a friend, Jack. Jack was very British, the kind of guy that could play a handsome football hooligan in a movie, but in reality just grew up in Notting Hill. Mostly, his accent allowed him to be endlessly amusing. He said “windpipe,” and we laughed. He said “gutter,” and we laughed again. He and Lucas played well together. They were dogs of different breeds but with the same golden coloring.

Sandwiched between the various kinds of debris in Lucas’s four-door Tacoma, we headed for the bridge, toward his apartment. I love being driven around by a man who is a little drunk. Being driven around by a slightly drunk man is like being driven around by God. Because like God, there’s a small chance he might kill you at any moment. Lucas was such a man. The truck rattled. The skyline seemed to be collapsing in through the window. As he drove, Lucas talked about the Hamptons. He referred to the Hamptons as “the beach.” He recounted a time he and Jack had made a massive paella on the beach, in a huge round frying pan. I imagined them building a fire. I imagined they were the first men to have ever existed.

I imagined the two of us procreating with the two of them, birthing beautiful blonde babies to gobble up the paella. This desire needed to be banished.

Lucas’s apartment was only a few blocks from mine, right on the edge of the vast darkness of the park. The stairs were carpeted. A pile of sneakers in rare colorways indicated his door. My cousin and I slipped out of our boots like tired soldiers. The apartment was warm, familiar in its decor, though altogether nicer than the men’s apartments we tended to frequent. Beer was delivered to the coffee table, an assortment of canned IPAs. I settled onto a small wooden stool and tucked my knees up underneath my dress.

“What’s up with this stool?” I asked.

Lucas looked down at me.

“It’s a birthing stool,” he said.

“Perfect, because I think I’m due in a couple of hours.”

“Yeah, you seem quite pregnant.”

“Wishful thinking. Let me guess… this stool was imported from Morocco?”

Our drinking became propulsive. We could tell the men were most impressed by acts of wit. Meaningless displays of wit. Wordplay was best. It came naturally to us, and came just as naturally to the men. We harassed Jack and Lucas about the bachelor party they were leaving for the next day, a party for an “asshole art dealer friend” on a private island. We brought up Epstein, partially because it was a decent joke and partially because maybe we unconsciously felt ourselves becoming engrossed by our own private island. I began to feel as if I might have been born in Lucas’s apartment, like I might die there too.

With every joke, the men were surprisingly fast on the uptake. And we were fast. And everyone was delighted by this, delighted by the sudden feeling of being the kind of men and women who were meant to know each other, who had in fact known each other our whole lives in different iterations. And for a moment, I was in high school, wandering through a foggy suburb with the boys at night. It was summer, and every glistening dark lawn was an invitation, one that we inevitably accepted. We lay down with our heads very close together and passed around a joint. I was so excited that I worried the boys could feel my skull buzzing. “Who can you have the best sex with?” asked Lucas.

“Someone who you know well enough to know you like them,” replied Jack, and he looked at my cousin as he said it. “But don’t know well enough to know that you don’t.” Lucas nodded in agreement. And we all laughed knowingly, and the laughter sounded like a series of dry “huhs” with the beer growing sour in our mouths.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in a relationship?” asked my cousin.

“Emotional cheating,” I responded automatically, but no one seemed to be listening to me.

“Well, when I was with my ex,” Lucas began, and there was a tone of seriousness in his voice, and I could feel the pleasure of our superficial rapport receding.

“And this was at the end, when things were getting really bad…”

I saw Lucas’s model ex-girlfriend as Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, hair piled high, screaming at Lucas from the bathtub.

“...we were in a fight, breaking up, really, and I told her I just wanted to find the ugliest girl in the bar and fuck her.”

“Jesus,” my cousin exhaled. “That’s really cruel.”

I could picture Lucas’s real ex now. Or rather, I could picture one of her ad campaigns. But I couldn't imagine her face reacting in real time to Lucas’s words, crumbling, etc. I realized I was beginning to unconsciously rock back and forth on the stool, that the stool was creaking a little. I consciously tried to sit still, then adjusting myself, I turned to Lucas.

“Well, I guess you knew how much beauty meant to her, and you wanted to show her how little her beauty meant to you. That you didn’t care about her beauty at all.” My cousin nodded in agreement, our eyes meeting briefly.

“Yeah,” said Lucas, “I didn’t care, at least not in that moment.”

“Did you actually fuck the ugliest girl in the bar?” I asked.

“No.”

“Of course not,” Jack grinned at my cousin again.

I sensed the division; the decision had been made. I sensed how long I’d been ignoring the subtle pressure of Lucas’s attention. How my cousin was moving now, perching on the arm of the couch closest to Jack, asking, “Jack, would you like to have a cigarette?”

Until that moment, it had seemed impossible to cross the threshold of the apartment and re-enter the cold. And I felt like a child feels when the grown-ups ruin the game simply because they are tired or bored. There is nothing the child can do in the face of that adult boredom. Jack turned his head toward my cousin. His face was backlit by a mid-century-esque standing lamp, and as he opened his mouth, the perfect “w” of his upper lip was stark against the wall behind him.

“Right. Yes, let’s have a cigarette. Lucas?”

Lucas got up and opened a cabinet. Inside were several cartons of foreign cigarettes, presumably purchased duty-free in an international airport.

“Take your pick.”

Once my cousin and Jack were through the door, Lucas motioned for me to come sit beside him on the couch. I did not go to sit beside him, but instead hovered above him awkwardly. I could see the top of his head, the space at the crown where his golden curls were starting to thin.

Lucas began to peel off his sock, and I wondered briefly if I was about to take part in some fetishistic ritual. And then I started to laugh, because Lucas’s foot was covered in tattoos, bad ones, the lines thin and faded. And then I was holding his ink-covered foot in my hands like it was some sort of small, injured animal I’d found on the ground.

Lucas drew me up to his face and kissed me rapidly, again and again, as if punctuating some unspoken sentence.

I pulled away.

“Wait,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because of my cousin.”

“What’s this got to do with your cousin? She’s outside with Jack. What do you think they’re doing out there?” Lucas sighed. “Look, I don’t think I’m sexually attracted to her. I’ve known her for so long. Like, since she was a little kid. Known her family. My dad–he’s been really trying to be there for Isaac, since everything…You agree it’s a little intense, no? A little too close to home.”

“So I’m not close to home?”

“You’re once removed.”

“I mean, she’s still my first cousin, even though she’s my step-cousin.”

“No, I mean like emotionally removed.”

“I know, I know,” I said, even though I didn’t really know what “emotionally removed” meant in this case.

Had Lucas been at the funeral? I could not remember the faces of anyone at the funeral besides those of my family. I remembered the sound of real wailing. I had never heard anyone wail at a funeral before. I remembered holding my cousin’s hand for a long time, though I am not sure this actually happened. Perhaps it just felt like I was holding her hand. I remembered someone handing me a small plastic water bottle and asking if I wanted to look in the casket. I said “No.”

I remembered a guru-like woman dressed in white leading the ceremony. I remembered my aunt's face in a beam of light cast from the high windows of the multi-faith funeral home. I remembered traffic and soil and saying the Mourner’s Kaddish and eating a single piece of marinated eggplant. I could not remember Lucas. And that, of course, was why Lucas wanted me instead of my cousin. Because my brother was alive and his sister was alive. We were once removed, and thus we could fuck without consequences. Or at least without what he considered consequences. Grief is strange in this way. Just because you feel it doesn’t mean you are entitled to it as much as someone else. There are degrees and rules. But the mind can’t always obey these rules. One memory always compelled the next, as if I were under some kind of contractual obligation. I felt the heat of that July, the full Mediterranean sun. I am answering a FaceTime call from my mother. She is wrapped in a towel. With the glare, it is nearly impossible to make out her face on the screen, but before she has said anything, I know something is very wrong.

I decided to start kissing Lucas again. His lips were a little dry and searching, but the kissing was exciting because it was faux-illicit. And as soon as I started this kissing again, my cousin and Jack opened the door. I could tell they had been waiting outside, cautious to re-enter.

Jack was very cheerful. He asked us if we wanted to have group sex. His cheeks were flushed from the cold.

“I don’t think cousins are supposed to have group sex,” I tried to laugh and make eye contact with my cousin, tried to assess the damage, but she seemed just as cheery as Jack and launched into some unfinished joke about his intimacy issues.

“Cousins this, cousins that! You’re step cousins,” Jack was standing his ground. “It’s fine. Lucas had a thing with my sister once. It’s all a little incestuous.”

“She snuck into my room. She got me in trouble.”

I pictured a girl version of Jack. Blonde and fairy-like, sneaking into a room with a four-poster bed.

“God, Americans are so boring.” Jack took my cousin's hand and then mine. He led us into the bedroom, which was filled with pink light emanating from a large Japanese paper lamp hung above the bed. Lucas trailed behind him. I sat on the bed next to my cousin. Lucas and Jack loomed over us, like the shadows of buildings in midtown at noon. Jack kissed Lucas, and then kissed my cousin, and then kissed me. Lucas followed suit, kissing me and then my cousin. I watched their kiss carefully, looking for signs of “sexual attraction.” Their faces met awkwardly and separated swiftly. It seemed we had reached the inevitable conclusion. It was a bit like the game Coke and Pepsi, which I remembered playing with my cousin at various bar mitzvahs. Maybe Lucas was Coke, and Jack was Pepsi, but no, that wasn’t how the game worked exactly. I recalled the game involved choosing a partner and a lot of running back and forth. But this new game was more of a test. We were testing the limits of our enclosed reality. I wondered if I should, if only for my own benefit, make a bet as to how long this would continue, perhaps set a timer on my phone discreetly.

I let Jack lift my dress off. My cousin was undressing too. I had seen her naked many times, in childhood and beyond. She was wearing a new bra, a light pink push-up bra. It wasn’t doing much for her tits, really. The bra just made her look young. I wasn’t even disturbed by her tits, but I was beginning to feel disturbed by her moaning, her heavy breathing, the sound of Jack’s mouth on hers, the sound of her enjoying it. I felt a visceral sense of disgust. I am convinced you can only really hear the true sound of kissing when you’re disgusted by it.

Lucas was on top of me again, his IPA-scented breath hot and oddly comforting in my ear.

“Should I ask them to leave?” he whispered.

But my cousin was already on the floor, and I could see the pale moon of Jack’s ass bobbing up and down. I saw my cousin’s family dog, a rambunctious poodle-mix named Hotchkiss. Hotchkiss was rambunctious because he was unneutered and thus perpetually sexually frustrated. My cousin had fondly nicknamed his penis “the pink crayon.” And his behavior was such that, at any given moment, he might extend his pink crayon and mount whoever happened to be closest to the floor. Hotchkiss was also prone to seizures, and though he took preventative medication, his condition often haunted me, especially since he had been brought into the family shortly after my other cousin’s death.

Though Hotchkiss barked and slobbered and humped like any other dog with testicles, I was constantly sobered by the reality that he would not be long for this world if he ran away or missed a dose of medication. I started to picture Jack’s humping turning to seizing. At first, my cousin wouldn’t be able to tell, she would just think he was coming, but then he would start biting his tongue, maybe, or foaming at the mouth. Her eyes would blink open, and I would see the fear in her face, and she would see me transfixed and frozen. I would have to act. I would have to give Jack his medication. The medication would be in the pocket of his puffer, an EpiPen-like needle. After a quick scan of the instructions, I would ready the needle and thrust it, with full force, into the pale flesh of his convulsing ass. His body would grow limp then, and he would collapse on top of my cousin, the two of them heaving together in sweaty exhaustion. Sex, I thought, seemed to always begin with humping and end with seizing.

To my surprise, Lucas fucked like someone who is typically in love with the people he’s fucking. When he fucked me, I was sure I wasn’t far from being fucked by someone who loved me, that it might happen sooner than later. On my back, I felt an urge to keep my eyes open, so I could catch glimpses of his big blue fish eyes, which were not staring into mine, but fixed on some distant point across the room. But he flipped me over, so I couldn’t keep staring at him. I still could not close my eyes, so I stared at our shadows on his blank white wall, which looked pink really, due to the hanging Japanese lantern. My vision began to fill with concentric circles. He came quickly. I didn’t really care.

“Sorry,” said Lucas, tucking me into his shoulder, “I’ll be better the third time we have sex.”

I laughed. “Are we going to have sex a whole two more times?”

“Maybe.”

I could hear my cousin and Jack through the wall. I realized with some embarrassment that it was I, or rather Lucas and I, who had driven them to the next room. I was struck by the way in which, when you know someone well, the general noise of sex becomes specific, the sounds of pleasure alien, and yet all too familiar. Her noises reminded me of the noises she made while eating really good ice cream. And a feeling of despair came over me, like the feeling of despair that ensues when porn is still playing on your phone after you orgasm.

I looked up at Lucas, up at his neck and chin, really, which were covered in a layer of freckles and stubble. He was smiling a little.

“Are you enjoying this?” I asked, cocking my head towards the wall.

“I’m glad they went to the other room at least.”

“Did you know that if you look up the most viewed porn videos in America, ‘step’ is in like all of the titles?”

“Though I’m not sure ‘step-cousins’ are really a thing in porn. Not a lot of cousins in porn. And anyway, I actually watch way less porn than I used to,” he said. “Come, it’s bedtime.” He switched off the hanging lantern.

In the morning, Lucas wasn’t in bed. I found him and Jack on the couch watching soccer. Soccer, I imagined, was sort of a cornerstone in their transatlantic male friendship, along with casual homoerotic exploits. My cousin was standing by the door.

“Let’s go to the park,” she said, studying the backs of Jack's and Lucas’s heads. “God, wouldn’t it be nice to switch places for a day? Just to sit on the couch doing that?” Her face had slipped into one of her frightening characteristic glares.

I looked at Lucas. His bare, tattooed foot was tapping mindlessly against the glass surface of the coffee table. I wondered when they were leaving for the island.

The men had returned to being men. We bid them goodbye. They hugged us with their long arms. Lucas asked for my number politely, and I avoided looking at my cousin's face while I typed it into his phone. We slipped back into our boots and padded down the carpeted staircase.

The street was bright and lined with mothers in long puffers pushing strollers, fathers with overstuffed backpacks. I felt like one of their placid, snow-suited infants. Some of the families were accompanied by dogs, mostly of the same poodle-mix breed, playing nicely together.