Lily and the Octopus

know if he liked me, and that made me anxious. Even if it was my fault he didn’t know. Even if I was not letting myself be seen.
C is for cookie, that’s good enough for meeee. Cookie cookie cookie starts with C.
I filter her analysis through the voice of my preferred, imaginary therapist and he comes up with sharper advice: It has only been two dates. Why do I need to know how this guy feels about me? Why does everything have to be settled? Do I even know if I like him? I mean, beyond his looks? I have to be better about living in the not knowing.
And suddenly it’s not about dating, it’s about the octopus. I have to be better about living in the not knowing.

Friday Evening
June in Los Angeles is the opposite of June everywhere else. Here, it means only one thing: gloom. The sun disappears behind clouds and fog and smog and haze and doesn’t reappear for weeks. Normally, I like it. Normally, I’m fine with it being the price we pay to have sunshine the rest of the year. But tonight there’s no sunset, and it bothers me.
Trent calls and proposes dinner and I say no, but Trent doesn’t take no for an answer, so I say yes to save us from going twelve rounds. I feel bad about leaving Lily for even another hour, but I also know I need to talk to someone, and if it’s not going to be Jenny it might as well be Trent. He knows how to get through to me and always has, ever since we met on our first day of college in Boston. He was a loud Texan and I was a quiet Mainer and I was immediately captivated by his southern charm, much as he was fascinated with my northern chill. It was a friendship that worked from the moment he knocked on the door of my dorm room and asked if I wanted to walk to 7-Eleven for cigarettes; he was the Ferris Bueller to my Cameron Frye.
From the time we were twenty-two, Trent would tell me not to worry. He said it was all going to happen for us when we were twenty-nine. Bad breakup? Who cares. Dead-end job? It wasn’t a waste of time. Any other stress? Why waste even a moment caring—it was all going to happen when we were twenty-nine. I questioned him at first. Why twenty-nine? Why not twenty-eight? And then I started to panic. What if it didn’t happen for me until I was thirty-one? I didn’t know how to use swear words correctly until the seventh grade, or what the Internet was until 1995. I worried about falling behind. Still, the bravado of the statement, and the confidence with which he delivered it, eventually made me a believer. I never bothered to ask what “it” was—the it that was going to happen for us. I’m not confident he entirely knew.
And then, in the very waning hours of my twenty-ninth year, I found Lily. The day before my thirtieth birthday.
Trent is already inside the restaurant when I get there. It’s our usual place. We like it because when you order a martini it comes in a chilled martini glass, and then, when you’re halfway through the drink, they bring you a fresh chilled martini glass for the rest of it. They even transfer the drink for you and bring you fresh olives. Astonishing, right? Service.
“Hi, friend. I ordered you a martini,” he says.
“Thanks. Do you have the other thing?”
“Teddy,” he says, scolding me for even thinking he might have forgotten. He slides a single Valium across the table. I put the pill into my mouth, chewing it slightly before I press it under my tongue. It works faster if you press it under your tongue. Trent gives me a minute to make it happen.
“Are you going to tell me what’s the matter?”
I hold up my finger for him to wait as I carefully massage the pill fragments between my tongue and lower jaw until they dissolve.
“Lily has an octopus.” The words taste chalky and raw, and they’re out of my mouth before I can stop them, which means I really do need to talk about this.
Trent looks confused. “What?”
“An octopus. On her head. Above her eye.” Spelling it out does nothing to alleviate his confusion. He’s giving me a look. So I sum it up and say, “Kind of like yours.”
Trent is the only other person I know who has had an octopus other than, like, on a salad. His came in 1997. We were roommates then, here in Los Angeles. I found him one night on the couch rubbing his calf and looking bewildered. “My leg is numb,” he said.
I don’t know if it’s my imagination, or my anticipation of the Valium’s effect, but I exhale and ease into a Diazepam vision of Trent and me at twenty-six, our old, dilapidated apartment as real to me as when we lived there.
Turns out the left side of his body had been growing numb for months, and a doctor-ordered MRI revealed an octopus still in its infancy. Within weeks he was in surgery, and although it was traumatic at the time, his recovery was quick and we soon put it behind us. Later I wondered why it took him so long to say something. We routinely spent hours analyzing every last one of life’s events and details: That time we broke up a lesbian fistfight. The proper thread count for sheets, and what made Egyptian cotton so great. How many celebrities could we realistically get to come to one of our parties. Why we always burned oatmeal. Was it okay to ask out a male nurse I met on fifty-cent drink night at The Apache. Why did we go to a bar