OMISSIONS

by Mike Jeffrey

Valentine’s Day weekend I ran my mouth to my cousin Alex. We were at Grandma’s house celebrating a pair of birthdays, fifteen to twenty people in the dining room, kitchen, and parlor, everybody jumping between conversations, plus the clatter of silverware, the loud eaters, the basketball game on full volume in the other room, and the animals. We’re a loud family, but that doesn’t mean you have to shout to be heard, although many people were, interrupting each other, barking arguments and lobbing gossip about cheating husbands from one end of the table to the other, yelling, “That’s not right!” from room to room and into the phone, and Grandma calling down the hall for everybody to come eat. You can try to shove your voice in with the rest, which requires special timing and lung power, or you can speak quietly to the person next to you in a little bubble of privacy. There’s space for conversation under the crosstalk is what I’m saying. You can discuss delicate matters in a low voice while everyone else shouts about scandals, legends, weddings, and the Kennedys.

Alex was home from college for the weekend and a gambler like me. He looked just like his dad one of the birthdays we were celebrating that night except his swooped hair was all pepper and no salt and he wore glasses, with a slit in his left eyebrow, a scar dating back to his Little League days, a line drive to the face. Alex and I didn’t talk much outside of these functions, but it felt good and wholesome to get wine drunk with my little cousin at Grandma’s house and swap stories about bad beats and discuss the murder of Michael Jordan’s father, whether it was related to Jordan’s gambling debts or not. (Of course it was related, we agreed.)

Alex and I didn’t need to talk every day in order to trust each other we’re family and that was why he felt comfortable telling me about this friend of his, the campus bookie, who’d orchestrated a point-shaving scheme. The point guard on the basketball team at Alex’s school had run up a serious debt betting on football and buying weed and deadstock clothes on credit, and so Alex’s friend, this hustler bookie kid, figured he’d accumulated enough leverage to fix a game, thinking a one-and-done fix would pay out big without drawing attention from the corporate bookmakers or the FBI.

We’re talking small conference college basketball here. Not a ton of action on those games except during tournament season, so I wondered how many people were in on the fix besides the bookie, the point guard, and my cousin Alex. Because that was the real danger “irregular betting patterns,” too many people running their mouths, too many people trying to cash in on a sure thing. That’s how you get into trouble.

“You can get away with anything if you only do it once,” I said. “And keep your mouth shut about it.”

“The kid was getting all dramatic about how he doesn’t want to throw the game and he’s afraid of losing his scholarship, so my buddy tells him, ‘Nobody said anything about throwing any games. You go out there and play hard and win. Just make sure you don’t win by more than 10 points. That’s all. Win by less than 10 against Quinnipiac on Tuesday and you and me are all squared away.’”

It’s possible, of course, that this “friend” of my cousin didn’t exist. In high school Alex dabbled in the sneaker resale market and took his earnings straight to the tables at Twin River the shitty local casino on his eighteenth birthday, and he’d always shared my enthusiasm for stories about the old lady bookmaker on Chapin Avenue, stories about the mob extorting mom and pop shops and donating baseball mitts to orphans, and stories about Buddy Cianci living large and slimy as the mayor of Providence, cracking wise, collecting kickbacks, and staying out all night in his toupee and cake makeup. Alex had already shown me the Excel sheet he used to identify vulnerabilities in over /under lines on NBA games, so I figured he had the technical skills to pull off a bookmaking operation, if not the muscle, but you didn’t need much muscle to operate in the fantasyland environment of a college campus.

I didn’t confront Alex with my suspicions, and I don’t like to speculate too much. I was touched that he trusted me enough to tell me about that point-shaving scheme, even if he denied authorship of it, and I decided to reciprocate his openness by walking him through a scheme of my own, one I’d pulled off around Thanksgiving. I wanted to show him up too. I was running a bigger operation, managing more risk, and making more money, and in my mind, I could see my buddy /advisor Nnamdi shaking his head, furiously disapproving, because “Don’t run your mouth” was his number one rule for good OpSec, and he wouldn’t allow for exceptions in the family either. I hesitated, but only for a second, because I’d already started telling Alex the story.

This was on a Friday, a busy one. I was showing units in that new building in Davol Square in the morning, and then I had to pick up Dove from school, drop off a pack at Dante Orlando’s house, and pay my bookie his vig before I could set my scheme into motion.

Dove had changed out of her uniform, into faded leopard print leggings and a Hellboy hoodie, when she came down the front steps of the school, and she was wearing her big stupid sunglasses even though it was a dark gray afternoon deep into fall.

“How are the college applications coming along?” I asked, reaching back to hand her the aux cord.

“You’re worse than my mom,” she said, slamming the door. Then she lay across the backseat with her hood up, asked if we could stop at Starbucks, and queued up a lot of glitchy despair rap from SoundCloud. Obviously, I didn’t say a thing about Dove to my cousin Alex. I left my teenage co-conspirator out of the story. I didn’t want to catch any looks, or field questions about the nature of our relationship, or talk about how I’d promise to drive Dove to L.A. and cosign on a lease if she didn’t get into RISD. I didn’t like to think about those things, never mind speak of them.

Dove waited in the car while I ran into Dante Orlando’s house, five minutes down the road from Grandma’s.

“Right around the corner,” I said to Alex, pouring more wine into his glass and mine.

Dante’s mom let me in, kissed my cheek, hugged me close, and called me handsome. She was fixing dinner and asked if I was hungry, said I should stay and eat, she was making raviolis and homemade gravy. I told her it smelled amazing, but I was running late for an appointment, and then I hustled upstairs.

I found Dante streaming Joe Rogan on the wall-mounted TV across from the bed as he ironed a T-shirt ripping a vape. Dante was older than me, thirty-three, and receiving unemployment benefits while he promoted clubs under the table, with flecks of gray in his fade, waxed brows, bags under his eyes, stubble on his chest and black satin sheets on his bed, a dab rig and blowtorch on the nightstand. He used to be a big time gym rat, but now he just looked puffy and tired, carrying a gut under a throwback Orlando Magic jersey, and dealing with back pain I could tell from the ginger way he moved, breaking down the ironing stand, and also because he said, “You got any Percocet in that bag of yours?” his voice all hoarse after a Thursday rave.

“Not at the moment,” I said, but I never sold percs. I left opiates off the menu. That was both an ethical concern and a matter of caution for me, if that’s not a contradiction.

“Have a C4,” Dante said, exaggerating a groan as he reached to grab two tall bright yellow cans from a case on the floor. “I think I got a handle of vodka in the closet if you wanna spike it.”

Spending time with Dante was always good for my self-esteem he made me feel like a grown-up by comparison. We touched our energy drink cans and then we took care of our business: I traded him a bunch of ketamine and generic mephedrone powder for a pint of narcotic cough syrup plus cash.

“Stay for dinner,” he said, “you’ll make my mother’s night,” fetching the cash from inside a Jordan sock in his dresser, and then he asked if I was coming by Festa later, because he’d already put my name on the list. This was right before that place got shut down by the fire marshal. I hear they’re converting the building into lofts soon.

I told Dante I had to run but maybe I’d see him at the club later, even though there was almost zero chance of that. Dante was always inviting me to ticketed parties and porn star appearances at local strip clubs, places with metal detectors and sticky floors, and I hated the way he introduced me to people as “one of his closest friends.” I did take up his offer of a quick game of Madden though blew him out 50-14 if you’re wondering and then Dove and I headed to Federal Hill to meet my bookie.

I parked over by Caserta’s Pizza on that back street overlooking the repairs on Route Six and the abandoned jewelry factories on the far side of the highway, red brick and boarded up, and this time I was the one to wait in the car.

“Don’t let him talk your ear off for an hour, we got places to be,” I said, passing Dove the envelope.

“Where’s the rest?” she asked, Juul pod crackling on her inhale.

“Tell him I want La Salle parlayed with the under.”

“Don’t you owe him more?”

“La Salle. Parlayed. With the under. That’s what’s important. La Salle, parlay, the under. Say it back to me.”

“He’s gonna wanna know where the rest is.”

“What’re you, his secretary? You’re supposed to be on my side.”

She dropped the envelope into her RISD tote, hopped out and slammed the door closed behind her.

I rolled down my window and yelled, “La Salle and the under!” before she disappeared up the alley and around the corner to the oyster bar where my bookie hangs out.

My bookie adored Dove. Still does. She’d pass or receive an envelope under the table, and he’d treat her to a cup of gelato or a latte or a slice of cheesecake or an espresso martini, anything she wanted, and ask her a million questions, make jokes at my expense, and talk about his glory years rubbing elbows with stars she’d never heard of. To this day, he’s her biggest supporter. He’s always asking for her. “You ever hear from that girl anymore? How’s she making out in Hollywood, I wonder.”

Dove was back to the car in half an hour, and she slammed my friggin door again.

“How many times do I have to tell you not to slam my doors?” I said.

“I need Juul pods.”

“How’d it go?”

“Fine. He was all worked up. He just found out Sandy Hook was an inside job.”

“Did you tell him the right thing?”

“I just agree with everything he says and then he tells me how smart and beautiful I am.”

“I mean about the envelope, the bet.”

“Shhhhhh.”

We hit the liquor store next, a huge one next to a PetSmart in one of the plazas by the prison. I wheeled my cart to the walkin fridge in the back, loaded it up with thirty racks of the cheap beer, added hard seltzers and a couple handles of sweet liquor, asked the cashier for a pack of mint Juul pods, paid in cash, and saved the receipt.

You couldn’t get away from the smell of fallen leaves, and it was cold out, windy, overcast, and midnight-dark already, but I knew it wouldn’t rain. I had to really lean into the shopping cart and use my legs to rattle that big load across the parking lot, and I had to move things around to make room for it in the trunk. As I was doing that Tetrising the shit in the trunk I heard a quick blast of porn audio play from the speakers in my car.

I decided not to ask Dove about it. I wanted to know, but I didn’t want to ask, so I just flung the Juul pods into the backseat, clicked on my seat warmer and pretended like I hadn’t heard a thing. And maybe you won’t believe me, but I swear to God she leaned into the cockpit without any prompting and said, “Look at this,” and showed me the video, muted now, a deepfake of Olivia Culpo fucking some guy in a dumpy hotel room.

There I was, midway through my night’s journey, watching bleeding edge pornography in a parked car with a teenager. I could smell her dry shampoo. I checked my mirrors for witnesses and laughed inside myself, feeling ecstatically degenerate. I was aware that I was living a secret as it happened. I would never speak of this moment to anybody I was certain of it and that was what made it precious.

“Highly disturbing content!” I said, holding Dove’s phone very close to my face, scrutinizing the footage and then scrolling down into the comments. “I wonder if Olivia’s team knows about this.”

“They must.”

“That poor girl! Her poor parents!”

“She’s fine,” Dove said, yanking her phone out of my hand. “She’s rich. And it’s not even real.”

I knew the video wasn’t real “deepfake” was in the title. That’s what made it disturbing. I’m assuming you’re at least a little familiar with the concept. To be clear, it wasn’t really Olivia Culpo in the video. This wasn’t a leaked sex tape; it was a deep-learning AI’s approximation of Olivia’s face superimposed over some anonymous amateur porn girl’s face. (Don’t ask me how the technology works, I’m not even confident with the vocabulary.) I’m not sure if it was the unsanctioned transposition of “Olivia” into a pornographic context, the erasure of the other girl, or the slight blurriness of “Olivia’s” face that disturbed me the most, that glitchy ghostly smoothness. It was such a sophisticated and rapey piece of content. The view count was in the millions.

“You shouldn’t watch porn,” I said to Dove. “It’ll give you the wrong idea about sex. It’s okay to make a living off it, but it’s not good to consume it.”

Then I asked for the address to our next stop.

Olivia Culpo’s not exactly a household name, but she’s a god around here. She won Miss Rhode Island, then Miss America, then Miss Universe, and one year she was on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She’s gorgeous, famous, and rich, and people either talk shit because they’re jealous, or else they brag about their connections to her they know her parents, they used to be friends with Olivia’s childhood best friend, their younger brother played JV basketball with Olivia’s younger brother, or they ran into her in the waiting room at the gynecologist one time seven years ago. I’m in the connections camp. Me and my friend Nick used to see Olivia around back in high school. We played beer pong against her and her boyfriend once. I’ve told the story a hundred times, how we charmed Olivia and bullied her boyfriend and were asked to leave, and how Nick smashed in the face of a grandfather clock with his elbow on the way out. I told it again to Dove that afternoon as we waited to make a left out of the PetSmart parking lot, but she wasn’t paying attention, preoccupied by a thread dedicated to Olivia on a foot fetish forum.

“They have a lot of thoughts about her nail polish,” she said.

I asked her to read some posts aloud and reached my hand back, snapping my fingers until she passed her Juul, stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, everybody rubbernecking a fender-bender on Route 95.

“‘She’s hot but her feet are sort of flat.’”

“Ha!”

“‘Absolutely gorgeous girl. Sadly, her feet are not. Her toes are mangled and crooked.’”

“I didn’t expect them to be so critical.”

“I was picking the mean ones. ‘Wonderful feet with pretty soles,’ says FootFreakFoot69.”

“You’ll get a thread of your own someday if things work out,” I said, because Dove wanted to be famous too.

“‘Size 8? Looks more like a size 9 fwiw.’”

“Probably end up in court against your parents. Your parents’ll sue you for royalties.”

“We should get pedicures later.”

“Some nerd perv will deepfake your face into his porn.”

“Stop manifesting!” she said, and then cranked her music to drown me out.

We stopped at Chik-fil-A, where Dove did her makeup in the bathroom while I ate a sandwich and fries, and then we continued to our final stop, and soon I felt the armpits of my shirt become soaked with sweat.

Dove had been invited to a party by some kid she’d never met, a captain on the Bishop Hendricken football team. And I happened to know that Hendricken was playing La Salle the next morning, and that they were 7.5-point favorites at home, with the over /under sitting at 36.5. I figured a poorly rested team was unlikely to find itself in a high-scoring affair and would probably fail to cover a big spread. That was my bet.

Dove had also promised to send me incriminating videos from the party via an encrypted text app, which I planned to forward to the BH coaching staff, headmaster, and school chaplain from a burner email. I’d looked up team statistics on MaxPreps to identify the star players, located their Instagrams and forwarded them to Dove so she could target the right kids, and hopefully they’d get benched for the first half or even the whole game.

Hervé Guibert

Isabelle Adjani, c. 1980

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

Hervé Guibert

Sienne, 1979

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris

But when I was telling this story to my cousin Alex, I acted like the kid hosting the party had reached out to me directly. I played dumb. I acted like I had no idea how some high school football punk knew who I was, or why he thought it was a reasonable idea to hit me up on Instagram for alcohol, lean, weed, and Xanax, and I showed Alex the scandalous videos without explaining how they came into my possession.

I knew Alex wouldn’t get caught up on the details. We were both gamblers. He held his chin and nodded his head in approval, and cut into my story to tell me about a crooked local hockey ref who ran away to Arizona after getting his legs baseball-batted, and I tried not to appear spooked. Then Auntie Sharon yelled from the kitchen “Mikey, you want any coffee and graham crackers?”

“Sure, Auntie, thank you,” I said. “Alex will have some too.”

Once we had our coffee, I resumed my story in a low voice, telling Alex about how I sold that Hendricken kid half a zip and shatter from a weed lab, a pint of promethazine cough syrup, all the alcohol and some Xanax in the garage of his parents’ house with the voices and music of an underage party coming from the kitchen, depicting myself as coldblooded and clever, but really I felt like the lowest form of slime in the region and certain that a carful of student athletes would crash into a tree that night and die because of me, and that I would be held responsible and wallow under the weight of the guilt for the rest of my life.

Dove stood by while me and the babyfaced host of the party completed our transaction in an empty garage bay, and then she followed him into the house without a word of goodbye or anything, and I got back in my car and watched the garage door seal her off in a high school night. I guessed she was nervous, walking into a party where she didn’t know anybody in the real-life sense, intentionally underdressed in her hoodie and leggings so it looked like she didn’t care, but I knew she cared, with all that foundation on her face, and I was nervous for her too. I texted her to have fun and be safe and to let me know if she needed a ride home from the party later, and then I headed back to Providence.

I also left out the part where I had a mini panic attack and pulled into a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot, where I tried to comfort myself by thinking ahead to my Vegas trip, after I hit my savings goal and closed down my operation, when I’d ball out, touch bottom, and maybe even experience a moment of transcendence coming out of a blackout, lost in the slots at the wrong hotel at the end of a weekslong bender. Maybe Dove would come with me. We could spend a month in Vegas together en route to L.A. after RISD rejected her.

I like to think we all have these crisis moments alone in our cars from time to time, and I knew it’d be a bad idea to hide in my room and self-medicate for the rest of that night, so instead I met up with my roommate Sarah and her friends, a couple of pseudo-rustic hipster types from a local brewery, this curly-haired woo-woo girl who’d dropped out of medical school to study acupuncture and her partner, a mushroom forager who sold pipes made from crystals on Etsy. We sat under an outdoor heater drinking Blue Hawaiians on the back patio of a trailer park-themed bar, sharing tater tots and gossip, complaining about work, talking astrology and sports, and soon everything felt easy again and my jaw unclenched for the first time in hours.

Not long after midnight, Dove texted to let me know she’d gotten home safe and sent me some videos from the party. I ran to the bathroom at the bar to review the footage and compose my email to the school after a key bump or two, and then I felt like celebrating my scheme, convinced again of both its profitability and ultimate harmlessness.

I left the bar without saying goodbye to Sarah or her friends and drove over to Festa, where Dante let me in through the back door, looking methed out in his club suit, all damp from body heat and smoke machine humidity. I expected him to be thrilled and honored by my surprise appearance in his sleazy domain, but he had a situation to deal with, phone pressed to his ear “Fucking fat fuck never picks up the fucking phone when you fucking need him” as he hustled me through the back of house bowels, kicking shit on our way to a table in VIP, right near the DJ booth, where he promptly summoned a bottle of Cîroc.

“I’m bugging the fuck out,” he said, barely audible over the ridiculous music, face blinking in the strobes and sparklers. It was just us at the table, and we had a condescending view of the dance floor, but it wasn’t crowded out there either. I was kind of glad the place was dead, just the last call creatures creeping about, and I mixed vodkacranberry-Red Bulls for the two of us while he hammered away at his phone, texting at a crisis clip.

“What’s going on?” I asked, shouting, to be polite. “Huh?”

“WHAT HAPPENED?”

“Tell you later!”

Some girl fainted in the bathroom and hit her head on the toilet, and it was this whole complicated ordeal getting her out of there without alerting fellow club-goers as well as the authorities, who’d already put the place on warning, one incident after another that summer and fall overserving an underage crowd, ignoring capacity limits, habitual fights and stabbings in the vicinity at closing time. But I heard from someone else that I must’ve been born yesterday if I believed Dante’s version, because actually the girl had been drugged and sexually assaulted in the bathroom and Dante tried to bribe her with drink tickets to keep quiet about it, but word got around even though she didn’t go to the cops in the end, and that was the real reason the city sicced the fire marshal on Festa and shut the place down for good a few weeks later.

This aside prompted Alex to tell me about the sucker punch festival he’d witnessed outside Festa one night during his fake ID summer when he was bussing tables at Massimo. Then someone turned out the lights in the dining room and my cousin Ari came in from the kitchen carrying the cake and the room broke into “Happy Birthday,” and we all yelled “Hey-oooo” after the candles had been blown out.

“So did you hit on that bet or what, Mikey?” Alex asked me a couple minutes later, with a mouthful of funfetti cake.

I’d planned to bundle up and watch the Hendricken –La Salle game from the top of the bleachers with a spiked coffee the next morning, but I woke up late with a headache and heartburn, with ringing ears and stripper perfume on my clothes, so I stayed in bed and waited for the final score to get posted online.

The first thing I did was check my burn- er email’s inbox. No response to the videos I’d leaked from the party, so I couldn’t be sure that any key players had been benched /suspended. I checked Facebook next, hoping to catch wind of controversy, but all I found was a message from some girl I didn’t know.

“Hope you got to piss when you got off the train. We should hang out the next time we’re both trying to dodge our friends’ parties. Really fucking hope this is the right Mike Jeffrey...”

I was not the correct Mike Jeffrey — I hadn’t been on any trains — but I clicked through the girl’s profile anyway. She was pretty. She was from Virginia, studied marketing and sang a cappella at UNC, and now she lived in New York City, where she’d met someone who shared my name, apparently, riding the subway the night before.

“OMG, you found me!!!” I wrote back, and we went back and forth trading flirty messages for about fifteen minutes before she figured me out and stopped responding.

I didn’t think I was doing her any harm, roleplaying as meet-cute subway Mike for a minute, but I did feel bad after, so I searched my name, thinking maybe I could make up for it and help the girl track down the correct Mike Jeffrey, the New York version, same age as me but more mature and better informed. I imagined him: self-made and morally exact, wearing structured clothing instead of sweats on Saturday afternoon and making productive use of his time at all times, with a job in mutual aid or some other commendable or impressive field. But I ended up finding too many other Mike Jeffreys, all of them too real, normal beyond imagining, and not the perfect inversion of my insecurities that I had imagined.

I told Alex the final score, 20–13 Hendricken, but they failed to cover the spread, so I won too.

Alex knew it was impolite to ask but couldn’t help himself after I’d made such a big deal about it with the long story. I’ll tell you what I told him: “Five figures.”

“You ever check your all-time record?” was his next question. “Your career batting average?”

I didn’t understand.

“With your bookie,” he said. “The lifetime balance.”

“Oh God, no. Absolutely not. Although now that I think about it, after that win, I think I might be up, all-time, or at least close to even. That’s what I like to think, anyway.”

We clinked glasses and then Alex went to go Juul in the bathroom.

I rested my elbow on the back of my chair and drank more wine, wondering seriously about my lifetime balance, thinking through some numbers, NFL Sundays in the red and black, and regretting my big mouth. I sat there watching everybody, eavesdropping. They were talking about the one who overdosed at the hotel in the ’80s, and how nobody ever went to visit Rosemary after the lobotomy, and did anybody really believe that Bobby Jr.’s wife killed herself, followed by a quick hot argument about the origins of autism. I heard Grandma bragging about all the books I read, and my cousin’s husband trying to explain blockchain technology to my idiot uncle by marriage. In the other room, I heard my Uncle Dave shout, “Nobody talks and everybody walks!” That was the line he’d whispered to my dad they were best friends long before they became brothers-in-law before the principal questioned them about a prank they pulled in high school, a story everybody’d heard a thousand times. Then the dogs were all riled up and barking, and someone yelled, “Shut up, ya stupid mutts, or Uncle Bob’ll put yous to sleep,” and my cousin Ari yelled back, “I’ll put you to sleep!” and then there was a whole chorus of people shouting, “Niiiiiiit wiiiiiit!”

In the kitchen, I saw my mom looking at my cousin Ari’s friend’s phone, and from her expression I could tell she was looking at a picture of a baby. My dad’s cousin Richard was talking to my Auntie Sharon’s boss’s husband about a property line dispute that’d escalated to criminal complaints and letters from lawyers, and there were engagement rumors in the air too, Olivia Culpo gossip, and drama at work, and stories about Buddy Cianci, like when he sang Sinatra for Grandma at her birthday party in the ballroom at the Biltmore, back when Buddy was in office, hawking proprietary pasta sauce and facing federal charges, and the rude comment that Auntie Ida made to him at the party, and how Auntie Ida went to the cemetery every Sunday for years and years just to spit on Uncle Vinny’s grave, and then all the talk ran back to the house on Chapin Avenue and the feud between Uncle Vinny and Uncle Nico, Grandma’s brothers, who’d started a bakery together.

I kept my mouth shut and listened. I’d heard it all before, but the details of that feud were always changing. There were always new wrinkles, new context, new contradictions. I never picked sides. I knew there was always more to those stories than what could be remembered and shared. I kept my mouth shut, thinking about everything I’d left out of my own story, everything that gets left out of every story. The truest parts, never spoken, never repeated, or incommunicable to begin with. And then I texted Dove to see if she’d heard back from RISD yet, and she didn’t respond, but I could see she’d read the message.

Hervé Guibert

Andreï Tarkovski, 1986

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris