Brooklyn Chronicles: Three’s Company

Monday evening around 5 p.m., I got a phone call from Ethan Greenberg. Ethan is a friend of Andy’s from medical school. He never calls.“Ethan,” I said. I’m sure my surprise was evident. “How are you?”“Good, good,” he replied, as if convincing himself. “How are you?”“Fine,” I answered. As strange as it was for Ethan to be calling, it was even stranger for him to call at this time, when he knew Andy wouldn’t be home. Thinking he’d lost Andy’s work number, I prepared for another round or two of small talk before Ethan asked for it.At first, things went just as I’d expected. Ethan asked about the pregnancy – I said things were moving along well. I asked how his fellowship was going and he said “fine.” I asked about Julie, his grad student wife. He said, “Oh, she’s great.” But what happened next deviated from the script.“So,” Ethan said. “What are you guys up to tonight?” It was a Monday.“Nothing,” I said, a little baffled. “Why?”“Well, I was just wondering if maybe the two of you wanted to get together for dinner.” He then uttered the sentence that explained everything, “Julie’s out of town visiting her parents.”Suddenly, it was clear: Ethan was Untethered Guy.Unthethered Guys are men who rely upon their wives for social interaction and then go adrift when said wives go away. Perhaps because my aunt used to tell tales about returning home from a visit to her ailing parents to find a disheveled spouse and a kitchen that looked like a bunker, I used to think Untethered Guys had to be at least middle-aged. But now that I’m in my 30s, I see they need only be post newlywed married.Ethan was sweet if somewhat spacey. Though we lived in Cobble Hill and he lived in Brooklyn Heights, I guessed that he had turned to us because he thought of us as neighbors. You had to pity his plight.“How long has Julie been gone?” I asked, wondering how far gone he was.“She left Saturday for a week,” he answered.Two days in was not so bad – more lonely than, say, catatonic.“Well,” I told him, “Andy and I haven’t talked about dinner yet. We usually order in on Mondays, but we can go out. Maybe somewhere on Smith Street?”My mind stretched back to the last time we’d seen him and Julie. It was months, maybe even a year, ago, at a party downtown at a mutual friend’s. “The four of us have to get together sometime,” we’d said then. “Maybe dinner somewhere on Smith Street.” Of course, we’d never gotten around to it, at least not until now. Although now it would just be the three of us.“That sounds great,” Ethan said, and we made a plan to meet up at the French place with the motorcycle on its rooftop sign.We had a nice steak frites dinner during which we caught up and discussed our most embarrassing reality-TV favorites. Andy admitted to his fondness for those idiotic MTV “Real World”/”Road Rules” challenges, I admitted a penchant for “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette” and Ethan revealed that he was into “The Swan.” All in all, it was a very nice evening. When we parted ways, I said, “We’ll have to do this again soon,” and meant it.Ethan must have taken this literally, because the next day around 5 p.m., he called again.“Ethan,” I said, once he’d identified himself. “We had a great time last night.”“Yeah, me too,” he said, his enthusiasm puppyish. “I was wondering – are you guys busy tonight?”The Untethered Guy was still untethered.“We have our Fresh Direct order coming tonight,” I said. “So I was just planning on settling in with ‘The Bachelorette.'” I’d TiVoed it the night before so we could go out to dinner.“Oh, great,” he said. “I’d love to come over and watch it with you.”The guy wanted to come over and watch “The Bachelorette”; could he possibly be more untethered?So I spent my Tuesday evening on sitting on the couch eating Chinese takeout and watching “The Bachelorette” with Ethan while Andy figured out how to work his new digital camera in the den. When Fresh Direct came, Ethan insisted on being the one to tip them. “It’s the least I can do,” he said, so I let him.When the phone rang at around 5 p.m. Wednesday, I knew whose voice to expect. The three of us met up for that new movie starring Dennis Quaid. When we left the theater, Andy smiled and said, “You know, Ethan, it’s starting to feel like we’re dating you.”Ethan laughed and said, “What are we doing tomorrow night?” It was clear he wasn’t joking.Not that we minded; having Ethan around all the time was fun. Not only was he a nice guy, his presence was a nice change of pace. Being a threesome instead of a couple made us feel younger somehow. We hadn’t had this casual intimacy with people since back in our college days.So last night I cooked up a pot of chili, and the three of us watched a documentary Andy had ordered on Netflix.As he was leaving, Ethan reminded us that Julie was to return the following evening. “I just wanted you to know what I great time I had with you guys this week,” he said. “The four of us have to get together sometime.”Ethan may really have meant this. We had had a good time with him, too, but Andy and I knew full well this week, predicated as it was on Ethan’s untetheredness, was more a summer fling than the beginning of a newfound closeness. After all, when Julie returned the next day, he would go back to being tethered.And so I said, “Yeah. The four of us should have dinner sometime, somewhere on Smith Street.”The Brooklyn Chronicles appears each Friday. Previous installments are available at www.nysun.com/archive_chronicles.php. The author can be reached at kschwartz@nysun.com.

Brooklyn Chronicles: Three’s Company

Brooklyn Chronicles: Three’s Company

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