Free Quarantine: Stories by Rahul Mehta

walking down the street, and it made Frank and me sick. To prove a point, we sat extra far from each other on the couch whenever they were around.
    Now with no TV, Frank offers Chinese take-out and a movie, neither of which appeals to me.
    “What about going out?” I ask.
    “Like, out -out?” Frank asks.
    “Let’s go to a club,” I say. “We haven’t been dancing in forever. We only ever go to bars. I wouldn’t mind sweating out some toxins.”
    “And ingesting some new ones?” Frank adds.
    I think about it. Sunday night is a great going-out night, not too crowded, because all the bridge-and-tunnel kids have gone home and all the yuppies have to wake up early. I have to wake up early, too, but all I have to do at my job is answer phones and type and file, so it doesn’t matter if I haven’t slept. I remember a club on Avenue B that’s trashy and fun. We used to love it there. We decide to go.
    W hen my brother got married, I had asked my mom whether it was OK for me to bring Frank to the wedding. “You’re kidding, right?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, “I’m kidding,” though I wasn’t.
    Two days after the wedding when I returned to New York, I called my brother and cried. I hadn’t meant to cry. I had meant to say I had a nice time, it was good to see him, I’m happy for you. Instead, when I heard his voice I bawled. I wasn’t sure why.
    “It’s OK,” Rajiv said. “We’re all having post-wedding depression.” He paused, as if to consider something. “Last night Ellison shoved a fistful of pills in her mouth. She did it right in front of me. I had to make her spit them out.”
    I pictured this, Ellison walking into the room, crying, her mouth stuffed with pills, one or two slipping out, glistening with spit. Then Rajiv panicking, prying her mouth open, reaching his fingers in, bending her over the toilet, and forcing her to spit them out. What did they say to each other afterward? How did they sleep?
    “I’m so sorry,” I told Rajiv. “Is she OK?”
    “She has episodes. She doesn’t know what she’s doing,” he said. “See, you’re not the only one. We’re all fuck-ups. Don’t tell anyone.”
    That night, as I lay down to sleep, I thought of Rajiv and Ellison in their house. During the wedding, there were women in diamonds and saris singing in the front room, applying intricate mehndi designs to each other’s hands, and men in gold silk breaking coconuts on the porch. But not anymore. They were gone and the house was empty. Rajiv and Ellison were alone, listening to each other breathe.
    A round midnight, Frank and I take the subway to the club. I want to ask him about the apartment, what we’re going to do about our future and living together. That’s what I mean to say when I open my mouth. That’s what I’m thinking in my head. But instead it comes out, “Do you think we should have affairs?”
    “What?” Frank says.
    “Do you think we should have sex with other people?” I ask.
    “I know what ‘affairs’ means,” Frank says.
    I don’t think he’s surprised by my question. We’ve discussed it before, whether or not we should have an “open” relationship. Some of our friends think monogamy is unnatural, bourgeois. Frank and I sometimes agree with them in theory, but in the three years we’ve been dating, neither of us has strayed.
    “You mean tonight?” Frank asks. “You want to have affairs tonight?”
    “Yeah, maybe.”
    “At the club?” he asks.
    “If I remember correctly, anything goes in the back room,” I say. “Of course, it wouldn’t be serious. Just anonymous. Meaningless.”
    Frank and I have our pasts, whoring around New York. Literally. When Frank first moved here, he sometimes did it for money, getting paid as much as four hundred dollars depending on the act. I, on the other hand, never knowingly had sex for money. Once I went with a German guy back to his hotel and after sex, to my surprise, he gave me forty bucks. I was so