The Game

Werner Herzog, Lars von Trier, and Pixar. It didn’t mean I was better than him: It just meant we were different kinds of nerds.
    “Dude,” I told him, “your wife is hitting on me.”
    “I’m not surprised. She hit on Playboy earlier tonight.”
    “Aren’t you going to do anything about it?”
    “I don’t care. She can do what she wants.”
    “Well, at least she’s not pregnant.”
    “Get this,” he said. “She’s such an idiot. That wasn’t a pregnancy test at all. It was an ovulation test. She bought the wrong box at Rite Aid. She took the test three times and each one was positive. So all she discovered was that at twenty-three, she’s still ovulating.”
    “Listen, man.” I noticed that there were scratches on his arm. “You’re driving her away. If she’s hitting on everyone in the house, it’s only because she’s trying to get revenge on you. It’s rocks versus gold, man. You haven’t been giving her rocks.”
    “Yeah. She’s a brainless alcoholic.” He paused, shut his eyes for a moment, and nodded wistfully. “But that body: Her ass is a 10.”
    When I left Mystery’s room, Katya was no longer in the living room. Papa’s door was open, and she was cuddled next to him on his bed—with her top off.
    I retreated to my room and waited. An hour later, the storm came. Voices yelled, doors slammed, glass smashed.
    There was a knock on my door.
    It was Courtney. “Are your roommates always this loud?”
    She was one to talk.
    I followed Courtney to Herbal’s room. Herbal had been sleeping in the pillow pit while Courtney commandeered his room. Clothes, books, and cigarette ash were spread across the floor. A candle sat burning at the foot of the bed, its flame licking just an inch below the comforter. One of her dresses was draped over a hot, exposed light bulb for mood lighting. And all four of the house phone books were spread across her bed, with pages torn out of each. I examined the ripped scraps: They were listings for lawyers.
    The noises coming from Mystery’s room grew louder.
    “Let’s see what’s going on,” she said.
    I didn’t want to be involved. I didn’t want to clean up anyone’s mess. This wasn’t my fucking responsibility.
    We walked into Mystery’s bathroom. Katya was kneeling on the floor with her hands clasped around her neck, as if she were choking. Her brother was leaning over her, holding an asthma inhaler in her mouth. Mystery stood a few feet away, staring daggers at Katya.
    “Should I call an ambulance?” I asked.
    “They’ll arrest her because she has drugs in her system,” Mystery said contemptuously.
    Katya looked up and glared at him.
    If she had the presence of mind to glare at Mystery, then she clearly wasn’t dying.
    When Katya finally emerged from Mystery’s room, her face red and damp, Courtney took her by the hand and led her to a sofa in the living room. She sat down next to her, still gripping her hand, and told her about the abortions she had been through and about the beauty of childbirth. I looked at the unlikely pair sitting there. Courtney was both Project Hollywood’s child and its mother.
    She was also probably the sanest person in the house. And that was a scary thought.

The next morning, Courtney burst out of her door at an atypically early hour. She was wearing an Agent Provocateur nightie.
    “What? What’s going on?” she asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “I had a bad dream. I didn’t know where I was.” She looked around: at me, at Katya sleeping on the sofa, at Katya’s brother and Herbal snoring inches apart in the pillow pit. “Everyone’s nice,” she observed with relief. “No one’s mean. Okay.”
    She returned to her room and shut her door. A few minutes later, a driver arrived at the house.
    “Where’s Courtney?” he asked.
    “Sleeping,” I said.
    “She’s got a court date in an hour.”
    He knocked on her door and walked inside. Shortly afterward, a slew of dresses came tumbling out of Courtney’s room, followed by their owner.
    “I need to find something to wear to court,” she said as she slipped on various outfits, running in and out of the bathroom to check them in the mirror. Eventually, she left the house in a strapless black cocktail dress of Katya’s, Herbal’s eight-dollar sunglasses, and Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power book tucked under her right arm.
    “It’s a silly dress because it’s a silly case,” she told court reporters that day.
    While she