It happens one night. Sooner than you imagined it would.
To your surprise, the lounge is filled with a palpable, serendipitous energy. The kind that makes you feel glad you decided to put on pants and leave the house this evening. A remarkable, slutty effervescence you haven’t felt in some time.
You graze shoulders with a man on your way to the bar. “Classic move,” you say to yourself. You’ll play along, smiling, while feigning confusion. You don’t know anything—you’re practically a foal!
But, as you glance over your shoulder, you notice that the man’s gaze barely finds you. It’s as if you’re something unrecognizable now. A human-floater in the eye. You watch the man turn and continue through the crowd.
Something about this exchange haunts you. You shudder, as if you’ve had a premonition. You tell yourself it’s nothing, and continue to the bar.
“Martini, please—with a twist!” you chirp grotesquely to a bartender. He looks at you with disdain. Yes, you heard it, too. Like a train derailing off icy tracks. Like a piglet being kicked. “Who was that?” you say to yourself. You place a hand over your mouth, fearing that a swarm of bees might flood out of it.
It’s at this moment that a handsome, older gentleman makes his way toward you. He wears a tuxedo and approaches you directly, intently. You quickly run the numbers on the oldest aged person you’d sleep with—then raise it by ten.
“Good evening, madam,” the man says. “Would you kindly follow me?”
You smile and search for something witty to say, assuming that his intentions are to escort you to some high rollers’ table where good-natured bets have been placed on whether you are Anne Hathaway’s cousin. But the man is already walking away. He turns back, with a look of slight impatience. Feeling both excitement and dread, you pull your jeans up over your beignet of lower-belly fat, and follow him out of the room.
“Is there another part of the bar I don’t know about—a V.I.P. section?” you ask, hearing your sadly engrained millennial thirst for hierarchy and ostracism.
“Oh, yes,” he replies. “Your party is right this way.”
The man leads you to an unmarked metal door. On the other side of it, you find that you are back inside the lounge, only now a thick pane of glass separates you from the crowd you just left. This room is carpeted and depressing. A handful of people, all your age or older, lie around on couches. One man has taken his shoes off. A lone bartender stands in the corner, slurping a cup of soup.
“I think I’d like to go back to the other side,” you say.
“There is no going back,” the man replies. “If you’d like to stay at the party, you’ll have to watch from here.”
A Martini olive falls from the mouth of a sleeping woman and rolls across the floor.
“But, I don’t understand . . .” you say, teetering into mild panic.
“You’re an exiting millennial. This is how it will be everywhere now. The sooner you come to accept this, the better,” he explains, mirthlessly, as if reciting the fine print on a disclaimer you’ve ignored for years.
Seeing the shock on your face, he adds, “Truths come violently now, or not at all.”
“Then I’d like to choose not at all,” you say.
But the man just shakes his head and opens a door to the dumpsters out back.
“All right, then,” you mutter to yourself, lifting your chin like a person choosing to step into adulthood with dignity, for once. But you move around the lounge erratically, knocking into people’s drinks, sweating.
You duck behind a ficus to collect yourself. You feel raw. You look around for someone who can save you—someone from the Reagan era.
“But we had a stock-market crash and a plague! 9/11 and tanning beds! We were raised on red-40 cereals and people-pleasing! Shouldn’t any of that count for something?!” You’re screaming now.
The man finds you out back, cowering behind the dumpsters. You look up at him, your doe eyes replaced by sad, oniony bulbs.
“Where are we supposed to go now?” you ask, drenched in self-pity.
The man thinks about it. “Coffee shops?” he suggests. “Health-food stores? Auto garages?”
“But no one has sex in those places,” you say.
The man nods, confirming that this is true. You search his face, desperate for some distant hint of compassion.
“All right,” you say, wiping tear-damp hair out of your face. “I didn’t really want to come tonight anyway.”
“That’s the spirit,” he says.
Just then, a Death Cab for Cutie song begins to play faintly in the distance. And it feels as if something that’s been clutching you releases its frightened grip.
You look back at the lounge one last time, and realize that you’re going to be O.K. Because the place you’re headed has soft sheets. And fleece pants. And excellent coffee. ♦
