The Bubble

When COVID hit, Nathan’s trivia team—“Tequila Mockingbird”—reconvened on the first official Friday night of the pandemic for a game night in one of the soon-to-be-coined “bubbles” but without one team member in attendance: Nathan himself. Nathan, the only member of Tequila Mockingbird without a spouse, lived two doors down from the team’s gay married couple, Sam and Leo, who were hosting the bubble that night. Nathan could overhear the team from his own balcony, picking up their conversation through their open sliding glass door across the courtyard.

“Nathan is a slut,” Priscilla said. “He could give us all COVID. I don’t think we should invite him.”

“But he lives right down the hall. His balcony literally faces ours,” said Sam.

“You guys, he could be listening right now. You should really keep it down,” said Tate, Priscilla’s husband.

Priscilla wasn’t wrong, Nathan thought. He was a slut. Without question. But as far as he knew, nobody was even hooking up (he certainly wasn’t) so he didn’t understand why he was being singled out and excluded from the group. To Nathan, it suddenly felt like everyone who was lucky enough to have already been paired up before the pandemic was now part of a united force field, deserving of special privileges such as bubbles and game nights, intent on keeping people—sluts—like Nathan out.

Nathan had spent his high school years pining away after boys in class, yet doing nothing about it. If he was too sexually active now in adulthood, he felt like he had earned it. He was simply making up for lost time.

Still, the pointed exclusion by Tequila Mockingbird felt deeply personal. This was a time when people were “coming together” to “fight an invisible global enemy.” Staying home to “protect each other” and “stop the spread.” At least, that’s what all the commercials on TV were suddenly pushing. President Lysol had declared that COVID would disappear by Easter. But there were still such things as facts in this world. Fact #1: Tequila Mockingbird was having a game night. Fact #2: Nathan had not been invited.

He heard plates clanking and could imagine dishes being unwrapped and set out on Sam and Leo’s dining table. They were probably having a potluck.

Even during normal times, Nathan didn’t cook so he was instantly jealous of the meal taking place down the hall. Sam was an extraordinary chef. The homemade pizzas he made could have been featured at one of the nicer restaurants down the street, restaurants that were not even open now. Pre-pandemic, Sam and Leo would occasionally invite Nathan over to partake in Sam’s latest culinary creation, simply as a fellow gay down the hall in a condo building jokingly referred to as “the Gay Dorms.”  

He could almost taste the balsamic and truffle oil on prosciutto and black olive pizza, Sam’s homemade crust. Nathan was hungry. He took one of the pre-made chicken pot pies from Omaha Steaks his mother had sent for Christmas last year and placed it on the counter to defrost.

Nathan hadn’t been on the trivia team when the two couples had formed it two years before. Sam invited him to join one night out of the blue. Nathan had been sitting alone in his condo on a Monday having his third cocktail of the night when he received a text from Sam.

“Hey! We’re playing trivia at Franklin Hall and we’re f—ing BOMBING. Come bail us out!?”

We. Us.

 He had been just buzzed enough to think joining them that night would be a good idea. Nathan was very well read which helped his general knowledge about almost everything but especially came in handy for literary categories. He was also a huge cinephile and could name all five nominees in any Oscar acting category within seconds, a party trick he pulled out from time to time to impress others. He almost always got “Final Jeopardy” correct even if it was just a guess. He loved trivia—he was superb at it.

He was also lonely which was hard to admit to himself hence the fact that he had been drinking alone on a Monday night. His entire friend group had either coupled up with each other, discovered outside boyfriends, or were living in other cities. They had all started speaking exclusively in “we’s” instead of “I’s.” Monday night trivia seemed to offer the perfect antidote to all of that. And Nathan didn’t even have to give up the drinking.

He didn’t know where Franklin Hall was so he ordered an Uber, typing the name of the bar into the app without bothering to look at the address. When the Uber driver laughed as he got into the car, Nathan assumed it was because the driver was talking to someone on his phone since he was wearing ear buds. However, after only two very short blocks, they pulled up to Franklin Hall and it became apparent why the driver had been laughing. This initial mishap would define Nathan for Priscilla.

“Who’s Nathan? Oh, he took an Uber two blocks. He’s our secret weapon,” Priscilla said at the end of the game that night. Since everyone thought this was funny, he decided to lean into it and laugh along with them.

But Nathan really did become their secret weapon and Priscilla knew it. As soon as he joined the team, Tequila Mockingbird started winning—big. Beginning with that first night when he helped bring the team up from a fifty point deficit to squeak a victory against their rival “Operation Hot Mother,” he then led them to weekly Monday night victories and multiple gift certificate prizes that they used for their bar tabs. That fall, Tequila Mockingbird even qualified for the D.C. Trivia League finals and their team finished a very respectable third place. Sam and Leo claimed credit for having found him, but Nathan started to see himself as having found them. A regular gang he got to spend time with every week doing something he loved. Tequila Mockingbird needed him now if they wanted to keep winning.

Tate and Priscilla were married, but didn’t have “married vibes.” They would often come to trivia separately, which Nathan thought was strange. Tate sometimes arrived with Sam, both of them coming straight from a workout at the local YMCA which was located down the street from Franklin Hall. They’d be all sweaty in their post-workout glow, arm veins raised and almost visibly pumping, little circles of sweat in between their pecs on their tank tops. There was also this huge need to eat monstrous amounts of food in front of all of them, like their workouts had transformed them into lumberjacks guzzling from gallon jugs of milk, grease and melted cheese dripping down their chins and necks.

Priscilla used to tease Tate about having a big head. Tate’s head was big, bigger than Nathan’s at least. But Tate was so handsome and his smile was so big, he needed a head that big to contain it.

Nathan leaned farther out over his balcony to hear Tequila Mockingbird better. Their voices had become muffled as if a fan had been turned on, but it was cold for March so Nathan wasn’t sure if it was a fan or some other noise from the building. Leaning over the railing, he was dangerously reminded of one time when he’d been having sex, bent over his balcony, and the guy had almost f— him right over the edge.

“Let’s play Cards Against Humanity,” Priscilla said. Another game Nathan was good at. He was skilled at finding just the right answer for each person. “I brought a new edition released last year.”  

“I think we got that as a gift,” Tate said.

“I’ll go first,” Priscilla said, choosing a black card: “Okay. The question is ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner?’”

“I always lose this game,” Tate said.

“It’s because you’re not mean enough, babe. You need to think darker. Think like you’re this awful person,” Priscilla said.

“Yeah, be more like Priscilla,” Leo said.

“F— off!” she said. “And thank you.”

The group selected their white cards, potential answers to Priscilla’s question.

Priscilla began to read them. “Okay, here we go. Guess who’s coming to dinner? First answer is ‘A baby elephant wearing a cheerleader outfit.’ Oh, God. Tate, that is definitely you.”

“I’m not supposed to say, right?” said Tate.

“Ugh. Next.” Priscilla kept on reading. “Guess who’s coming to dinner? ‘Nicole Brown Simpson.’ Oooo, kind of love that.”

“That’s dark,” Tate said.

“I think she’s been re-trending lately,” said Sam.

 “Did OJ tweet something?” Leo asked.

Priscilla read the last card. “‘A gin and tonic served in a pail.’”

“That’s your go-to drink…” Leo said to Priscilla.

“Somebody should have just written in ‘Nathan,’” Priscilla said. They all laughed, Priscilla’s signature cackle rising above the others into the still night air between Nathan’s balcony and theirs.

---

Nathan’s hurt feelings only increased during the following week. Then they steadily rose for the rest of that first month of the pandemic, reaching a crescendo each Friday night when the team would reassemble for another game night at Sam and Leo’s. It felt like the longest March there ever was or would be again.

The problem was that Nathan now had all this free time because he was working from home, an indefinite and ill-defined routine that people were referring to as “the new normal.” During the “before times” Nathan had never needed the full day to complete all of his work tasks. Suddenly, there were these huge tracts of free time in which he could basically do whatever he wanted. And what he wanted to do for that first month was get angrier and angrier at Tequila Mockingbird.

When the first Friday night of April arrived, he expected to see the railing lights from Sam and Leo’s balcony turned on again. When the lights were on, it looked like Christmas. He would see the warm orange glow emanating from their condo, a mounted deer’s head on the wall, a deep leather couch, Sam and Leo’s mahogany coffee table. It made Nathan fondly remember his dinners there.

But that night it was dark. Quiet. Sam and Leo were not home. Nathan looked down at the garden courtyard below him, and it was quiet there too, but in an eerie way that made it seem like a graveyard. There were only a few lights on in other apartments. People must be starting to just turn in early and go to bed, even on a Friday night. People were getting bored in quarantine.

He pulled up Facebook on his phone and went to Priscilla’s page. He scrolled through her recent pictures. There was one of her and Tate attending a wedding a year ago, a “memory” that Priscilla had shared. There were no weddings now. How odd a thing that was. A college friend’s wedding to which Nathan had responded affirmatively to a Save-the-Date postcard months earlier, had been canceled indefinitely.

Priscilla was holding a large jeweled stick of some kind, a scepter, the grip of her small hand looking too tight as if she was afraid that someone might wrench it away from her at any moment. She clung to Tate in the same way. She was wearing a blood red dress like the Whore of Babylon festooned in gold brocade set off beautifully with a pair of shiny emerald earrings. The dress matched the slash of red lipstick on her lips like she had kissed an open wound she had just made with the scepter.

In another picture, Tate and Priscilla were sitting in their living room with Sam and Leo last Christmas, all four of them in warm wool sweaters, holding flutes of champagne, smiling for the camera. Priscilla and Tate’s cartoonishly floppy dog Wainwright sat between the two of them, looking up in the direction of Tate, as if even he preferred Tate to Priscilla. As a birthday gift once, Nathan had given Tate a small Fisher-Price toy car with two Little People in the front seat and a plastic baby in the back.

“I’m a bit psychic and my prediction is my gift to you, along with the toy. I predict that you two will have a baby within the next couple of years,” Nathan said.

“Oh, we’re not having children,” said Priscilla.

“I think you are though,” Nathan said. “I’m never wrong.”

“We’re not,” Priscilla said.

“Thanks, Nathan,” Tate said, laughing at the toy. “That was really sweet of you.” Tate had the cutest little laugh. Nathan loved it.

And then it hit him: Priscilla and Tate were the ones hosting game night that Friday, not Sam and Leo.

Of course that’s where they were. He felt stupid for not having thought of it earlier. They must have figured out how mean and rude it was to host weekly get-togethers right under Nathan’s nose. Some miniscule bit of shame must have finally crept in.

Nathan fished his mask out of the black dish of keys in his foyer. It was a homemade one he’d fashioned out of a navy blue handkerchief and two hair-ties after watching a YouTube instructional video. He changed into a black T-shirt since he was already wearing dark ath-leisure sweatpants and headed out the door in the direction of Florida Avenue where Priscilla and Tate lived.

The streets and sidewalks were empty, something that Nathan was still not used to. They all lived in a very popular area with an active night life. It was weird how dead it had become in less than a month.

There was a large bay window in the front of Priscilla and Tate’s house with two large bushes partially obscuring the scene already in progress inside. It provided just enough of a view for Nathan to spy on them all undetected.

The two couples faced each other in the living room area on opposite sofas. Several bottles of wine were on the coffee table between them.

Priscilla and Tate’s condo was a ground-floor unit in a beautiful brownstone that had been built at a time Nathan viewed as one of superior, long-lasting construction. Here they all were today still living in these things. Well, not him, but Priscilla and Tate. Turn-of-the-century, Queen Anne-style, a period when there had been some genteel notion towards the idea of permanence. Houses back then were built to last.

The bay window was air-tight; Nathan couldn’t hear what anyone was saying. Tate appeared to be regaling Sam and Leo with some elaborate story, one that required lots of hand and arm motions, and, at one point, a dramatically flipped wrist flung out in front of his barrel chest in a “Stop, don’t go there” gesture that prompted the biggest laugh from Sam. Priscilla had one arm hanging off his left shoulder, occasionally offering some clarification or extra detail to Tate’s story. It was the first time Nathan had seen them not playing a game. 

A new song must have come on, one that Priscilla and Leo appeared to especially love. They both stood up, leaving Tate and Sam behind, and began dancing, moving towards the back of the condo near the kitchen. Leo wound up Priscilla and then let her go. She spun away from him like a drunken top in a twisted pirouette. Wainwright the dog had taken Priscilla’s spot on the couch next to Tate and was now cuddled up to him, nodding along with Tate as he and Sam continued talking. Priscilla and Leo drifted down the hallway, laughing and hanging onto each other.

As soon as they disappeared from Nathan’s view, Sam quickly moved over to the other sofa and sat down next to Tate, Wainwright sitting on Tate’s other side. Sam and Tate both looked towards the hallway which led to Tate and Priscilla’s bedroom. Nathan wondered what the two of them were doing. Sam put his hand on Tate’s knee and they sat staring at each other in silence. Sam smiled. Then Tate cocked his head to the side and gave Sam a brief but very deep kiss. It was startlingly intimate. Wainwright leapt from the couch and ran to his dog bed in the kitchen. Sam moved back to the opposite sofa, picked up his wine glass, and gestured cheers to Tate. Shortly after, Priscilla and Leo drifted back into the living room and resumed their previous spots on their respective sofas as if they had never left at all.

It definitely made Nathan’s baby prediction interesting. Closeted guys knocked up their clueless wives while continuing to have sex with men all the time. Nathan had slept with many of the sort throughout the years. It was a type, and they were not hard to find.

But Tate? It almost made Nathan feel sorry for Priscilla. Almost.

It was possible – he supposed – that Priscilla already knew all about Tate and Sam. If there really was a “Tate and Sam” to begin with, all Nathan had seen was a single, solitary kiss. From the way the dog, Wainwright, had appeared shocked, it seemed like it could be something that had happened for the first time. It must be nearly impossible for anyone to have an affair right now. But if Priscilla already knew, why wouldn’t they have just kissed in front of her and Leo? Why wait until both of them had left the room? Maybe they were all swingers. That would be right in line with this incestuous group. It could be the reason Nathan had been excluded from the bubble in the first place. He only swung one way, and it was with too many partners for Priscilla’s tastes. Then again, the bubble could also have been just a handy excuse to begin something they’d already been inching towards for a long time. Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe Priscilla liked to watch. Maybe everyone in that group was f—ing except for her. Nathan didn’t care. The Priscillas of the world would survive this. They always did.

But where did this put Sam and Leo?

Sam and Leo had not invited Nathan to their wedding in Provincetown five years before. There was this weird thing that had happened with Nathan several times in the past where if a couple, who were friends of his, did not invite him to their wedding, that couple would eventually get divorced. The weird rule had even extended to weddings that Nathan had been invited to but had been unable to attend for some reason or another. Even those couples got divorced too. After Sam and Leo had him over for dinner one night before the pandemic, they had been so excited to show Nathan their wedding album not considering for a single moment how that might make Nathan feel. After what he’d just seen at Tate and Priscilla’s, Nathan now felt that Sam and Leo would one day get divorced too. 

Nathan returned to his condo. He ditched his underwear, grabbed some poppers and lube, picked up his mask, and headed out the door in the direction of Meridian Hill Park which was two blocks away.

Well, sluts gonna slut, he thought.

After almost twenty years of construction, Meridian Hill Park was completed and dedicated in 1936. Built in a French Baroque style typically reserved for the homes of aristocrats, the park had an Italian Renaissance-inspired terraced fountain cascade that had made it famous.

The only memorial to President Buchanan in Washington, D.C. was also located in the park. Buchanan, rumored to have been the first gay U.S. president, had a niece named “Nellie” who had acted during his administration in the role of First Lady. So funny. President Nellie. Nathan had always heard that the gay sports bar Nellie’s on U Street was named after her. The First Lady was the First Fag Hag. Hilarious.

A few years ago, Nathan had read a gay man’s diary published after his death. The diary covered 1918-1945, a period in which Nathan had always been interested. According to the diary’s entries, there were all kinds of gay sex parties and special cruising spots located throughout the city. In one of the diary’s entries, the gay man had been standing right there in Meridian Hill Park in 1919. He described how the park was under construction and how when you were at the top of its titular hill, you could see all the way out, to be almost level with the Washington Monument. He wrote that standing up there he felt special, all alone on top of the whole city, but also lonely because he wasn’t able to be with an unrequited love, his best male friend.

Nathan had had sex in the park once before. He’d used it as a cut-through once on his way home from a party and encountered a man near a line of trees close to its side entrance. The man lingered a bit and Nathan thought that he must be cruising. “Oh, wow,” Nathan had thought. “So that really does happen here.” He’d heard rumors about the park but had never seen that kind of thing in action or considered it as an option for himself. It felt so old-school and unnecessary in the age of bars and apps, but it was also undeniably hot. Anything forbidden was hot. That night after the party, Nathan had gotten down on his knees and gave the guy a quick blowjob, amazed at how simple and wordless the whole encounter had been.

Nathan entered the park and clocked several men roaming around. Some were climbing the curved steps that twisted through the park and led to the top of the cascade fountain. Others were performing the artful act of looking like they weren’t doing anything, yet very purposefully walking. Men kept emerging from a spot behind the President Buchanan statue.

He thought of the gay man from the diary whose handsome sepia-toned picture was on the cover. His name was Jeb, Nathan remembered. Jeb could have been standing in the exact same spot that Nathan was all the way back in 1919. They had a pandemic then too.

Nathan looked out from the top of the terrace. He began to see the park and its pockets of trees that dotted the steps of the great cascading fountain as a bubble all its own. A bubble where only single souls drifted in and out of each other. Just for a moment, and then were cast away solo again, to make their way down the balustrade. He saw a couple more of them moving towards the back of the President Buchanan memorial and decided to follow them.

There were some men bent over and holding onto small cracks in the stones that made up the back wall of the memorial. A worn path behind it with small gathering areas inside a copse of trees, shielded the park from the uphill street that ran alongside it. Nathan pulled his shorts down around his ankles and leaned up against one of the trees. In very short order, a man wearing a red face mask entered Nathan from behind and started pumping away at him, fast and piston-like, while Nathan held onto the rough trunk of the tree. He sensed a group forming around them to watch. Although it was unseasonably cool for April, he could feel the body heat from the others surrounding him.

It had been weeks since he’d been this physically close to anyone, and there was something comforting about that, complete strangers risking it all to touch him, to have him. For a moment, he rationalized that getting it from behind would reduce his own chances of getting infected. Another man offered his dick for Nathan’s mouth while the first guy continued to f— him. Nathan accepted it. Everyone was barebacking. He was on PrEP. It would have almost been rude to ask for a condom. The man in the red mask finished and then someone else started f— him. But not as rough as the other one. It was dark in the copse with only the amber glow of streetlights spotlighting through the spaces in the leaves. Nathan turned around for the first time. The man who was having sex with him was looking down at Nathan’s ass, like he especially needed to concentrate on what he was doing. He was very focused. Nathan imagined that the man f—ing him was Tate. Beautiful Tate who had always welcomed Nathan into the group. Nathan reached behind and felt for the man, rubbing his pectorals through his T-shirt, tweaking a nipple which made the man groan. He had a big chest like Tate’s. When the man finally climaxed, Nathan grabbed hold of the man’s thighs and pulled him closer inside of him. The man collapsed against Nathan’s back for a brief moment, winded from his orgasm and Nathan accepted the warmness of his chest and fit himself there like a little spoon until the man withdrew himself and was gone.

Tequila Mockingbird reassembled back at Sam and Leo’s the next Friday night. The party lights surrounding the railing of their balcony were back on but the sliding glass door was shut so that Nathan was no longer able to hear the conversation from his balcony. He crept down the hallway wearing only socks and stood outside their door to listen.

“Okay, so I’ll read the black card question for everyone,” Tate said. They were playing Cards Against Humanity again. “‘With just one drop of BLANK, you can permanently get rid of BLANK.’ That’s a good one.”

“So topical,” Leo said.

A couple minutes went by as each person chose two cards to contribute for Tate to judge.

“With just one drop of ‘Rachel Dolezal’s 23andme results,’ you can permanently get rid of ‘Fraternity rape.’ That doesn’t even make sense,” Tate said.

“With just one drop of Clorox, you can permanently get rid of COVID,” Sam said. “That’s what people are saying, right?” Everyone laughed.

“One of my cards is ‘Oprah’s life insurance policy.’ Can I fit that in here somehow?” asked Leo.

“You guys, I have an announcement to make,” Priscilla said.

“Don’t you mean that we have an announcement to make?” Tate asked.  

“You both have f—ing COVID,” Leo said. “Get out!”

“I’m pregnant,” announced Priscilla.

Nathan wanted to burst in, suddenly, like in a Friday cliffhanger episode of a soap opera. He would reveal to Priscilla the truth about Tate and Sam. Then he might just lie and tell her that Tate had f—ed Nathan in the park the other night. After that, there would be a dramatic struggle and then Priscilla would accidentally fall off the balcony. And everyone would think Nathan had pushed her. And then he’d be on trial. But he’d get off because everyone hates Priscilla, even her own dog. People hate other people now, more than ever. Maybe Nathan would end up with Tate. Nate and Tate. There would be a funeral for Priscilla, but no one would come. COVID, you know.

“So Nathan was right after all,” Tate said.

Of course Priscilla was pregnant. Nathan was never wrong. That’s what he’d told them.

He knew what had hurt him the most about what they had done. He was a slut. He knew he was a slut. They did too. And that’s what they were using against him. Everyone else was getting to redefine themselves during the pandemic, and they didn’t even give him a f— chance. A week into this thing, they just decided he hadn’t changed and never would. He was being held to the standard of who he used to be, and everyone else got to become these new people. Who gets to decide what it means to be a “slut” anyway?

“We’ll all get through this,” he recalled Dr. Fauci saying after President Lysol’s latest news conference. “If we just trust each other and come together to do the right thing.”

Nathan walked down the hallway back to his door which he had left cracked. He was sick of caring about Tequila Mockingbird.

At least I’m not dead, he thought, alone again in his condo. He threw on a pair of shoes, and grabbed his keys. He was heading back to the park.   

Philip Dean Walker is the author of three short story collections: At Danceteria and Other Stories, which was released in 2016; Read by Strangers, which was released in 2018; and Bette Davis and Other Stories, which appeared in 2021. They were named Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2017, 2018, and 2021, respectively. At Danceteria was a semifinalist for the 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. He received a B.A. in American Literature from Middlebury College and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. He lives in Washington, D.C.