It was too hot to meet Alec’s girlfriend, but Jon, Obbie, and Marius were surprisingly loyal friends, so they came to the bar anyway.
They sat in front, by the big open roll-up window, so that the fan pushed curtains of lukewarm air against their backs. They accepted cold, slippery glasses of beer from the waitress who Marius was always saying he was going to ask out, but never did.
Actually, Jon had a suspicion that it was less Alec wanting them to meet his girlfriend, and more this girlfriend saying she wanted to meet Alec’s friends. That was the sort of thing girls liked to do, early on, to prove to themselves that you weren’t crazy, that you were a good decent guy, with a healthy knot of idiot buddies—which, luckily, Alec was.
“Where’d you meet this girl, anyway,” said Marius.
Alec took a slow swallow of beer, like he knew Marius was going to jump on him for the answer. “Costco.”
“Costco?” shrieked Marius. (No one sitting in the mostly-empty bar or passing on the street looked over. In midsummer the Chicago heat comes with noise. Car horns, pressed with damp fingers, honked on Belmont. The buses roared past in their own furious clouds of smog. Someone else was yelling down the street just then. The rich notes of Marius’s voice blended into the symphony.)
“Yeah, Costco,” said Alec. “What’s the big deal?”
“It’s just so—ugh.” Marius threw himself around in his chair, a flopping marionette. “It’s so pedestrian.”
“Pedestrian?” giggled Obbie, whose glass of beer looked small and dainty in his huge hands. He smiled his slow smile. “You don’t even have a car."
“How did you want me to meet her?” Alec asked. “Doing lines of coke at some underground house show?”
“Yeah, actually,” said Marius. “Yeah, I’d love that.”
“So what happened?” said Obbie. “Did you reach for the same rotisserie chicken and your hands touched or something?”
“No,” said Alec. “And I’m not even going to tell you how it happened because Marius is actually being stupid right now.”
Marius wailed, and the city wailed back. A firetruck barrelled down the avenue, getting caught in traffic right in front of the bar. Jon put his fingers in his ears while the other three guys twitched, acting as if the noise didn’t bother them, their hands tightening on their glasses. Jon looked into the window of the firetruck and made eye contact with the guy riding shotgun. It was an older man, maybe forty or forty-five, whose eyes flickered jealously down to the pints of beer on their table, which were still cold and showing that fact with beautiful drips of condensation.
The firetruck pulled away with a furnace blast of exhaust.
“Come on,” whined Marius. “We have to know.”
“She works there,” said Alec. “She’s a cashier. She checked me out.”
Obbie’s arm swung out like a guardrail as Marius surged forward with delight.
“I mean she checked me out like—as a cashier,” Alec said. “You idiot, Marius. I should never have texted you about today. It’s too hot out.”
“No, it’s better to get him out of the way sooner rather than later,” said Obbie. “You did the right thing.”
Jon felt bad. It was indeed too hot to deal with Marius, who today seemed to add another degree of deep, humid discomfort. “So what happened?” Jon asked Alec in an encouraging way. “You talked with her?”
“Kind of,” said Alec. “I mean I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. She’s working, you know? So I didn’t want to say anything at first.”
“Yeah,” said Obbie. “You’re not supposed to ask girls out while they’re working.”
“What the hell?” said Maruis. “Why not?”
“I don’t remember,” said Obbie. “You’re just not supposed to.”
“It’s because they can’t leave or run away,” said Jon.
“What the hell kind of things are you saying to girls that make them run away?” screamed Marius, delighted again.
Swallowing, Jon looked around for the waitress to see if she had heard. She had.
“It’s the principle of it,” said Alec. “You asshole, Marius.”
“Man, there’s something really wrong with you all,” said Marius, wiggling out of Obbie’s reach. “Completely bent.”
“How’s Rosa?” Jon asked him.
Marius shrank suddenly. The heat seemed to come over him all at once, and he slumped back in his chair. His eager eyes became dull, and redness appeared like sunburn around his ears. “That’s not even what we’re talking about,” Marius mumbled, but the words were thick and sluggish in his mouth, and his voice no longer sang out as one of the city’s summer sounds.
“Marius and Rosa are off again,” said Obbie.
“They’re always off,” said Alec.
“It’s complicated,” whimpered Marius.
Jon took his last swallow of beer, which could no longer be called cold.
“I gave her my number on a piece of paper,” said Alec. “With a note about how I thought she looked nice and she could text me if she ever wanted to get coffee.”
Jon and Obbie glanced at Marius, but Marius was now fortunately occupied by picking the peeling paint from the edge of the table.
“And that—worked?” Obbie said cautiously.
“Yeah it worked,” said Alec, signalling to the waitress for the next round. He too was now growing more susceptible to the heat. He was wearing a black collared shirt which Jon had never seen him wear before, and it was apparently made from some kind of fancy, unsweatable fabric. “Obviously it worked. Otherwise none of us would be here right now.”
“When did you write it?” Jon asked. “While you were waiting in line?”
“No, I just had it,” Alec said.
“What does that mean, you had it?”
“I just had it. In my wallet. It’s the kind of thing that’s good to have, in case something like this happens and you don’t have time to write it.”
“It was pre-written?” Obbie asked, with another wary glance at Marius. (Marius was now scrolling on his phone.)
“Yeah, it was pre-written,” said Alec. “Go ahead, laugh it up. Ha ha ha. You don’t know what it’s like trying to get a girlfriend these days. You have no idea what it’s like for the rest of us while you’re lazing around like a king.”
Obbie smiled smugly. Smugness, Jon recognized, was Obbie’s only option, as denial would not have been possible. Obbie had been with Ellen for over five years, since senior year of high school. Now they lived together in an apartment, where Obbie not only enjoyed home-cooked dinners every night, but also woke up each morning to find three small vitamins (of variety D, B12, and Omega-3 Fatty Acids) beside his breakfast plate on a small saucer.
“Does she know it was pre-written?” asked Jon thoughtfully.
“What?” said Alec.
“I don’t know how I’d feel about it being, if I was a girl. Like maybe I’d want to feel special, like it was written just for me.”
“I don’t think that’s better,” said Obbie. “Like—he sees her, gets out of line, takes the cart to some secluded aisle and writes the note, like a creep? That’s not better.”
“Ask the waitress,” said Marius, reviving instantly, as she approached with more beers. Each of them each accepted another pint from her tray, and the frosted glasses were like cooling magic in their hands. They straightened up and the city quieted for an instant. A breeze picked up down the avenue.
“Ask me what?” said the waitress. She was their age, blonde and sweating, wearing lots of loud jewelry on her arms and hands that clicked as she took their empty wet glasses. Perspiration shone on her upper lip, over a mouth heavy with orangeish lipstick.
“If you happened to be at work,” said Marius, in his charming voice, which was re-slickened by the coldness of the beer, “and a guy gave you a note that said, ‘Hey I think you’re cute, here’s my number if you want to get coffee,’ what would be—”
“Yeah, please don’t,” said the waitress. “It’s too hot for all that.”
“No,” said Marius desperately, “no, I meant, as a hypothetical—”
Jon pointed at Alec. “That’s how he met his girlfriend at Costco. That’s why we’re asking.”
“Oh,” said the waitress, smiling her orange-lipped smile at Alec, who smiled back gratefully. “Aw, that’s cute.”
“It is?” said Obbie, shocked.
“Yeah, sure,” said the waitress. “What are you asking about it for?”
“We want to know if it’s better for the note to be pre-written, like carried around in his wallet, or written in the aisle right then,” Jon said.
“Like a creep,” Marius added. (He was back to picking at the paint.)
The waitress thought for a moment. She began to chew at a piece of gum, which Jon guessed must have been hidden until now in the warm pocket of her cheek. “I guess it depends on if you give out those notes a lot,” she said finally. “Like it’s cute if that was your first time doing it. Then it’s a good story. If you saved it for the right person for years, or whatever.”
Everyone looked at Alec, who looked helplessly at his beer.
“Was it the first time?” asked Marius. “Alec?”
“Maybe,” said Alec, but the heat was too much for the effort of lying, and Marius’s smile was back and rapid, in another instant Alec burst out laughing.
The waitress rolled her eyes and left.
The joking began again, but it was friendlier now, cooler and lighter. It was made kinder by the second round and intertwined with the music that was now coming out of the bar across the street. The sun would be down in an hour, and maybe the heat wave would break. Jon listened and drank.
The girlfriend from Costco would arrive soon, and Jon hoped she would be someone who was the right person for Alec. But he couldn’t be sure what that meant, and as the joyful shouting and music and traffic sounds rose higher around him, Jon was not thinking of her, but of those other notes Alec might have written. Dozens, maybe hundreds, which had been dropped on cafe counters and handed over registers, and read by the lovely eyes of strangers, and probably now were in the trash, or thrown away, or cast aside, and might even now be litter in the alley, or swirling in the hot wind, high overhead between buildings, forever damp with the oil of sweating fingertips, with the nervous hopes and dreams of love.