The Milgrams

‘I really like you guys,’ Doug kept saying, as if in a state of disbelief. ‘I think you’re chill.’

Doug was a hand surgeon. This seemed, at the time, impossibly adult. He was forty-three. We were twenty-four. He wore a thick, braided leather bracelet around his wrist. When Cora — my girlfriend — saw the leather bracelet, she leant over and whispered, ‘leather bracelet’.

That was all that needed to be said. 

The conversation was giddy and good-natured. We hadn’t seen Jasmin for a long time, and so we didn’t mind that she’d brought Doug. He drank a large sweating goblet of gin and tonic. We were all showing off a bit, about how close we were, in front of him. In some strange way that made him the focal point of the evening. 

We were pretty drunk by this point; the pub was filling up. Cora was making a concerted effort to be more ‘playful’ after listening to a podcast hosted by two comedians. She wasn’t very playful by nature. So far this consisted of taking to court each couple’s most high-stakes, low-stakes argument. The idea was that you’d bring to court the argument you had most consistently that meant nothing, really, but which had gained a special significance by virtue of being returned to over and over again.

Ours had been our sleeping arrangement. Cora needed to spoon me to sleep and I preferred to sleep not spooning. That was what it boiled down to, in the end. It was that simple. 

Jas said she thought it was romantic. Under the table she brushed my leg with the side of her foot. This was part of a game we’d been playing; what started as an accident had very quickly shifted gears. Now there was purpose. Her toes curled upwards, separating my trousers from my leg, and then the cold sole of her bare foot slid up my shin. My stomach tightened. I was trying not to think about Jake. We all were. Just over a year since we’d been organising text chains, calling friends and friends-of-friends. Long, quiet dinners with his family. The sound of cutlery scraping china.  

Cora was elaborating her thesis about spooning. I was expected to protest, and so I did. Our argument was a little too practiced, a little too domestic. The energy around the table slouched. 

‘So what’s yours?’ we said to Jas and Doug. They’d only been dating four months, but Cora clearly thought they had something to offer. 

‘I don’t really want to do ours,’ Jas said.

But Cora and I got off on pushing her, because as far as we could tell she’d only brought Doug to show off. We resented the fact that she thought we would be impressed by Doug. And we also resented that we were, maybe, impressed by Doug. 

‘Yeah,’ Doug said. ‘Does anyone want a beer?’

‘No,’ Cora said. ‘It’s only fair.’ 

‘I can get us a round,’ Jas said. 

‘There’s nothing,’ Doug said.

‘Well,’ Cora said, ‘there obviously very much is something.’ 

‘I really don’t want to do this,’ Jas said.

I made eye contact with Doug. Jas’ foot had come away from my leg. 

‘That’s fine,’ I said.

Cora kicked my shin where Jas’ foot had been just a second ago. The two sensations briefly layered and became a singular dull heat. 

‘We can talk about the Milgrams,’ Doug said.

Jas closed her eyes and said, ‘please.’

‘I just have this thing that happened to me,’ Doug said, ‘and every time I tell someone they jump in and correct it.’

‘Correct it how?’ This was me again. 

‘They refuse to accommodate the reality of the situation,’ Doug said. 

‘I really, really don’t want to talk about this,’ Jas said. 

Cora sighed. ‘Then don’t.’

Jas made a face that was totally unreadable. Then she huffed and made the face again but this time tighter, like she was clenching a thumbtack very very hard in the palm of hand. She went to go and stand by the bar. I joined her. 

‘Sorry about that,’ Jas said. 

‘It’s all good,’ I said. These were the kind of platitudes I was offering at the time. 

‘So,’ she said, ‘do you like him?’ 

I was thinking about Jas’ bare foot against my shin. I had been with Cora for three years. Just the week before Jas had texted me — while crashing on our sofa so she didn’t have to go all the way back to Camberwell —  are u still awake. 

‘He’s nice,’ I said. 

‘It’s cool that he’s a surgeon,’ she said.

‘Right.’

‘It’s so grown-up.’

‘Yeah, it is.’ 

Jas looked at me, unimpressed. I could tell she wanted me to say some more. I rose to the occasion. 

‘He has very beautiful hands,’ I added. ‘For a surgeon.’ 

A queue had formed behind us. It felt like we were learning this new thing between us moment to moment. I wanted to stay in it a beat longer, the tip of her shoe now pressing down on my toes, but she was picking up the drinks and heading back to the table. In the interim, Doug had started talking about the Milgrams. 

‘I’m from Milwaukee,’ he said. ‘Or just outside.’

‘Where’s that?’

He traced a loose outline of the USA with his finger, and jabbed towards the top of it. 

‘About there.’ 

‘Awesome,’ Cora said. She was putting on the faintest American accent, taking the piss out of poor Doug. He didn’t realise. How could he? He liked us. He thought we were ‘chill’. 

‘I thought Milwaukee was a city,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ Doug said. ‘And I’m just outside it.’

‘A little way outside?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘A little way outside.’ 

A cough, a shuffle. Doug began his story. It went like this:

When Doug was growing up he lived opposite a family called the Milgrams. They were blonde, all-American. Quarterbacks and station wagons. Every Christmas Eve Doug was sent over to the Milgrams with a bowl of white bean dip as a gift. It was in a big plastic bowl and he would have to run over when it was still warm, hurrying his little legs along so it didn’t freeze. On this particular Christmas Eve, when Doug was nine, the Milgrams didn’t answer the doorbell as usual. He tried several times. Eventually, Doug just put the dip on the doorstep and headed home. But it was so cold — ice slicking the sidewalk, huge shadowy drifts of snow — that halfway home Doug turned around and came back. He would make sure the Milgrams got their dip, unfrozen. Picking it up from the doorstep, he went round the back. 

The screen door that led from the back porch to the house was open. Our Doug went inside. 

The Milgrams were not there. In fact, almost nothing was: the house was bare. The walls were stained yellow and streaked with what looked like rusty water. A young couple sat on a single, sagging couch in the corner of the otherwise empty room, facing a muted television. He could see his breath. I felt a wild empathy for little Doug at this point, I should add. A hot stab of it straight through my centre. It was a feeling I can only describe as ‘paternal’. The man on the couch was passed out. He was so skinny that you could see where the skin tapered to fit the bone. The crooks of his elbows were scaly and bruised. 

The woman sat with her knees together. She watched the screen, mouth hanging open. Her hair was so thin it exposed a pinkish spot on her scalp where the skin was dry and flaky. Something gummy gathered around her ears. A cigarette that was just a pillar of ash smoked in her left hand, above a white porcelain plate on the floor where two further cigarette butts lay. Baby-pink lace underwear exposed her distended stomach. She turned to Doug. They stayed like that a while, staring at each other. Her eyes had a sad, blanched quality. 

‘Hey baby,’ she said. 

And when Doug ran home and told his parents they marched him right back over, only to find the Milgrams as they should have been, in a house full of Christmas lights and warmth and the smell of glazed ham. Doug’s white bean dip, however, was nowhere to be seen. It was as if the couple had disappeared, and the Milgrams — the real family; the beatific white smiles and college jerseys — were a skin stretched thin over the place. 

‘And that was it,’ Doug said, ‘no one ever believed me.’ 

‘Because it didn’t happen,’ Jas said. 

I could kind of see why she was angry. Doug was relentlessly normal. He really was. And this admission was, to his credit, truly and totally deranged. 

‘So they were there,’ Cora said, ‘and then they — I don’t know — weren’t?’

Doug nodded sagely. ‘I think of it as two bubbles,’ he said, drawing two bubbles in the air, ‘one inside the other.’

‘I don’t even know what that could mean,’ Jas said. 

Doug shrugged.

‘You’re a surgeon,’ Jas said, ‘you save people’s lives.’ 

It was getting awkward. I made an excuse, and went for a piss. Doug joined me. He tapped me on the shoulder when we opened the door to the toilet and pulled me into a cubicle. This was the closest we’d ever been. I was in awe of the size of him, his sheer physical bulk. He took out a small bag and a key. 

‘I didn’t know surgeons did this,’ I said, gesturing to the cocaine. 

‘We don’t,’ he said, sniffing hard. 

‘What if you’re called in?’

‘That just won’t happen,’ he said, with a supreme, blinding confidence, ‘that is just not a thing that will happen.’

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Shoot,’ he said.

‘The Milgrams,’ I said. Then I raised my eyebrows and held out my hands like, go on. 

He dipped a key into the bag and held it up to my nose. I obliged. Twice. 

‘You’ll get older,’ he said. ‘Things will make less sense.’ 

‘That’s very profound,’ I said.

‘I don’t know why she doesn’t believe me,’ he said. ‘I think both things can be true. Both states can exist at the same time.’ 

‘Like the bubbles,’ I said. 

‘Sure.’  

‘You know,’ I said, ‘the surface area at the point of contact between two perfect spheres is zero.’ This was a fact I’d just learnt. For some reason, I wanted Doug to think I was ‘esoteric’. 

‘Right,’ he said. He frowned. ‘You’ve had a lot of drugs.’

I think I was feeling bad about Cora. And Jas. And also about Jake. I started to see Doug’s leather bracelet as something profoundly honest. I was staring at it. It became, for a moment, all the things he wanted it to be: masculine, rugged, true. 

‘I’m good,’ I said, ‘I’m awesome.’ 

‘Maybe we cool off on the partying for a bit.’

‘The partying,’ I said. I used a tone that I hoped would signal to those who weren’t there — Jas, Cora, Jake — that I was above this, separate somehow.

‘Do you think Jasmin loves me?’ Doug said. 

I blinked. We were still inside the cubicle. There was piss all over the seat. Up close, I could see his age: wrinkles at the forehead, crow’s feet, something heavy behind his eyes. 

‘Sorry,’ he said, with a pause, ‘this must be really weird for you.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s okay.’

‘But it must be hard.’

‘No,’ I said, firmer this time. ‘It’s fine.’ 

‘So?’ he said. 

I thought of the way Jas had started putting her face against my neck when we hugged, how when we were alone we’d just sit in silence as if something awful was about to happen. We still hadn’t spoken about it. I imagined what it would be like to sleep with her. I imagined my thumb in his mouth: his thumb in hers. He had very beautiful hands. 

‘Charlie?’ Doug said.

‘Yeah.’

‘What aren’t you telling me?’

‘She loves you,’ I said. 

Doug watched me for a while. After wiping at his nose, he left the cubicle and then turned, framed by the doorway. 

‘You should stay here,’ he said, ‘and pretend you were having a shit.’ 

I obeyed. I stood there in the cubicle, door open, in front of the toilet like I was waiting. I tried to piss but nothing came, so instead I grabbed a wad of toilet roll and cleaned the seat in case someone came in behind me. 

That was the last time I saw Doug. I didn’t tell Cora about Jas. Doug became a distant memory. He and Jas had a painful, confusing break-up. Cruel texts, twenty missed calls, blocked numbers. He folded up his own life and took it to Reading, then down the asphalt neck of the M4 to Cardiff. The Milgrams stayed. Cora and I took the story into our relationships’ vernacular. If we lost something, we would claim that it might be with ‘the Milgrams’. Lost keys, passports, misplaced scissors: the Milgrams had disappeared with it all. 

*

Cora pulled me into the toilet so I could help with Jas’ meltdown. She’d got my attention with a complex sequence of gestures towards her phone, which I think was meant to indicate the scale of the issue at hand. Jas was on the other end of the line. We were thirty-four – a decade since we’d met Doug. The house party was a dud, so I didn’t mind missing out. Cora wasn’t drinking, so I nursed my beers in solidarity. The whole evening had this weird feeling of never quite starting. It felt like sitting in a parked car by the side of a busy road. 

When we were younger, parties like this had been our ‘M.O.’ Jake was always the first to arrive; then he’d hit a French exit somewhere in the early hours. He’d text Jas, who’d confirm his departure with an affectionate roll of the eyes. We’d then pile into a taxi, linking back up at ours to have an ‘afters’. Just the four of us talking until the early hours. Orange juice and vodka, muted episodes of Dawson’s Creek. The smell of clothes drying. The night always seemed more alive, sparklier, in retrospect. There were people to tear apart. Mistakes others had made that they’d tell themselves, we knew, lying in bed the next morning with a ringing headache, that no one would remember. No one except us, who’d dissect, pry, and then transform them into expansive bits that we’d still quote months later. I suppose we weren’t very ‘nice’. At the time, that didn’t seem to matter. Why would it? We loved each other; that was enough. 

Now, of course, with our thirties dragging on, the parties were lifeless. People had kids, families, ‘important jobs’. Drug use was discreet and kept to a minimum. Conversations revolved around area codes, tax brackets and rent hikes. Everyone who was sober would either group together to discuss sobriety in detail or, worse, talk of the possibilities of a Sunday morning sans hangover, of trail runs and walking holidays. It was hard to imagine what Jake would have been like if he were still with us, but I could picture his small, hard eyes finding mine in a crowded room, and a smile that meant, you can have some if you like, and, did you just hear Jas?, and, I’ll let that slide, if you will. But he wasn’t here. He hadn’t been here for a long time. 

The toilet Cora had pulled me into already had an occupant. Cora waved a hand. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘We made friends earlier.’ 

The stranger sat on the toilet, underwear bunched around her ankles. It was pink and frilly. I remember this as it was a hard image to shake: private and suggestive. I noticed the curves of her calves, the way one knee was turned inwards. There was a purplish, coin-shaped bruise on her thigh. 

‘This is Dawn,’ Cora said.

Dawn smiled at me. 

‘Hi Dawn,’ I said. I tried not to look at her. I turned away, and studied a collection of creams and ointments by the sink instead. Dawn was still visible in the mirror behind. 

‘Sorry,’ Dawn said, ‘I find it hard to go if people are around.’

‘I can leave,’ I said.

Dawn laughed. ‘Don’t be silly.’ 

Dawn had thin blonde hair, carefully coiffed. She was beautiful in a waifish, aloof kind of way. There was an American twang to her voice. That, or an international school cadence of sorts. I could never tell the difference. 

‘Guess Dawn’s surname,’ Cora said. ‘Go on.’

I looked at Dawn as if her appearance might give me a clue. She tilted her head to the side. 

‘No,’ I said.

‘Milgram,’ Cora said, beaming. 

Dawn shrugged and, from her seat on the toilet, did her best half-curtsy. 

I thought of Doug, and I realised the night we’d met him at the Southampton Arms had become inextricably linked to Jake. Even though Jake had died the year before, that evening was the first time we’d seen Jas with someone else. It was the first time I had  stepped outside of the feeling and experienced life in its dreary fullness without him. I thought of Doug’s gesture, a bubble within a bubble. I remembered the night clearly: Jas’ foot on my shin, Doug’s hands. It was all inseparable, existed firmly within Jake’s accident and everything that came afterwards. I was close to tears. 

‘Jake would have been thirty-four today,’ I said.

‘I know, baby,’ Cora said. 

‘I can leave,’ Dawn said. 

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’ 

I was embarrassed. Cora was paying no attention now. She was handling ‘the crisis’. She was offering Jas advice that operated on an emotional register entirely out of my reach. It was impressive and, all things considered, quite moving. 

‘So,’ I asked Dawn, ‘are you from the States?’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Milwaukee.’ 

‘Just outside it?’ 

Dawn shifted again, watching me in the mirror. She took a small vape from her handbag. After taking a hit, she started to urinate as if the nicotine had released a valve somewhere inside her. She pissed for a while and then stopped. 

‘Why all the questions?’ Dawn said, wiping. ‘It’s very flattering.’ 

She put the vape back in the bag, which I imagined filled with all the things I’d lost. Her hand lingered there a while. 

‘Jas says hi,’ Cora said. 

I was still thinking about Jake. All those years ago, about a month after Doug and the Southampton Arms, Jas came over and we had sex on the sofa so we wouldn’t stain the sheets. And it was like the whole time we were looking past each other, seeing the other body as a prop, a tool to move past the feeling and into something new. We were applying pressure at the weakest point. Afterwards we agreed that it had to stop, which it did, but we’d call every now and again and talk about everything but Jake. Sometimes she would send me photos of her face, expressionless, or her reflection in a pane of glass. That was our ‘deal’. I looked at Cora and she blew me a kiss.

‘Dawn Milgram,’ Cora said, ‘can you believe it? Dawn Milgram from Milwaukee.’

‘I think I need to go,’ I said.

‘I’ll only be five,’ Cora said. She inflated her cheeks like a chipmunk.

I went to stand outside. Dawn appeared by my shoulder. She put a cigarette in her mouth, lit it, and handed it to me. I didn’t smoke but I took it anyway. When we made eye contact I could see something dissolute and sad. I wondered what she was seeing within me. What bubbles there were inside. 

‘I think I did it all wrong,’ I said. 

‘She loves you,’ Dawn said.

‘I know.’ 

‘You should tell her.’

‘Tell her what?’

‘Oh,’ Dawn said. ‘Okay.’

I waited to see if she’d pull a face that might indicate what she meant, that would give me a clue as to what she was getting at. But nothing came. Her face was blank, her mouth set hard.

On the drive home I asked Cora to pull over. We sat in silence for a while. I wound down the window, and we listened to cars pass. The moon was yellowish and smudged. Two days after Jake died, Cora sat on the kerb and let me put my head in her lap. She stroked my hair and wiped my nose with the hem of her dress. She said maybe there were things we just weren’t meant to understand. And little Doug trudged back through the snow for his white bean dip. 

In the car, Cora turned to me.‘What are we waiting for?’ Cora said. 

‘I don’t know.’

I thought about Jas’ cold foot against my shin. Doug’s leather bracelet. 

‘There has to be something,’ Cora said. 

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘yeah. There has to be.’