Chapter 16 - 17: The One with the Foosball Table
Spring arrived in New York the way it always did — with complete disregard for whether anyone was ready for it. One week the city was still doing its winter thing, the next the trees along Central Park West had made a unilateral decision about blossoms, and somewhere in the transition, the flu made its annual argument for why the change of seasons was not, in fact, something to celebrate.
Ethan lost the argument on a Wednesday.
He woke up knowing. There was a particular quality to the morning — the specific heaviness behind his eyes, the slight wrongness in his throat, the way the light coming through the curtains seemed more aggressive than usual — that told him before he'd fully surfaced from sleep that the next several days were going to require some accommodation.
Julia was still asleep beside him, curled toward the window with the complete unawareness of someone whose immune system had made better decisions.
He dressed quietly, moving with the careful deliberateness of a sick person trying not to feel how sick they were, wrote a note — flu, hospital, back by noon, don't let me be dramatic about it — left it on the nightstand, and went out into the spring morning to find a doctor.
The community health clinic on 82nd had the particular atmosphere of a place doing its best under pressure. The waiting room was at the specific occupancy level where every chair was taken and people were making reasonable decisions about standing. The air had the antiseptic quality that clinic air always has, overlaid with the sounds of a spring flu season in full effect — coughing in various registers, the occasional child making their feelings known, a television in the corner showing a morning show that nobody was watching.
Ethan waited forty minutes, saw a doctor for eight, came out with a prescription for something that would help and the instruction to rest, which he received with the respect it deserved and the private acknowledgment that he was not going to rest as much as instructed.
He was heading toward the pharmacy when he saw Ross.
Ross was in the corridor near the ultrasound suite, wearing the expression of a man in the grip of a decision he hadn't fully made. He was pacing — not dramatically, just the small back-and-forth of someone whose body had decided that stillness wasn't an option while the brain was this busy.
"Ross," Ethan said.
Ross looked up. "Ethan. You look terrible."
"Flu," Ethan said. "You look like you're calculating something very complicated."
"I'm deciding something," Ross said.
"About the baby."
Ross pointed at him. "The gender. Carol's in there — Susan's with her, they're doing the ultrasound — and the doctor knows, and they know, and I—" He stopped. "I told them I didn't want to know. I wanted the surprise. And I still want the surprise. But now I keep thinking about the fact that there's information that exists, in that room, that I could have, and not knowing it when it's available is—"
"Driving you insane," Ethan said.
"It's not not driving me insane," Ross said, with the precision of a man who had been in academia long enough that double negatives felt like accuracy.
Ethan leaned against the corridor wall, because standing fully upright was taking more effort than he wanted to spend. "Here's the thing about the surprise," he said. "The surprise isn't ruined by knowing early. The surprise is the person. The specific person who shows up. Boy, girl — you're still going to meet someone you've never met before. That part doesn't change."
Ross considered this. "That's actually a reasonable reframe."
"I have my moments," Ethan said. "How much longer are they going to be?"
"Susan said maybe twenty minutes," Ross said. "She's very thorough with the ultrasound questions. Very thorough."
"Go get coffee," Ethan said. "Stop pacing. When they come out, whatever you decide in the next thirty seconds is what you're going with. Don't give yourself longer than thirty seconds."
"Why thirty seconds?"
"Because thirty seconds is long enough to know what you actually want and short enough that you can't talk yourself out of it," Ethan said. "Longer than that and you're just renegotiating with yourself."
Ross looked at the door to the ultrasound suite. "I want to know," he said. Then, immediately: "I don't want to know."
"Thirty seconds," Ethan said. "Starting now."
Ross was quiet. Twenty seconds of genuine stillness — for Ross, this was significant.
"I don't want to know," he said. "Final answer."
"Good," Ethan said. "Hold onto that."
"You know, don't you," Ross said, looking at him.
"I have a strong feeling about it," Ethan said.
"Tell me."
"No."
"Ethan—"
"Ross, you just decided you don't want to know. Honor the decision."
Ross made the face of a man accepting an outcome he'd chosen. "Fine. But at least tell me — is the kid going to be okay?"
Ethan looked at him. "Yeah," he said. "The kid's going to be great."
Ross nodded, slowly, and something in his expression settled.
"Go get coffee," Ethan said. "I'll come find you before I leave."
He picked up his prescription, checked in on Ross briefly — Carol and Susan had emerged, Ross had maintained his position, the interaction had apparently gone well enough that Susan had said something that made Ross laugh, which Ethan clocked as meaningful progress — and drove home.
Julia had made tea.
This was, in the particular economy of being sick, an act of considerable value. She was on the couch with her script when he came in — she was back in New York for the week, the Vancouver shoot done, the Oregon location still being prepped — and she looked at him with the assessment of someone who had read his note and was forming a clinical opinion.
"How bad?" she said.
"Manageable," he said.
"Sit down," she said.
He sat down. She handed him the tea, which was the right temperature, and went back to her script, which was the right call — she'd correctly identified that he didn't need conversation, he needed to be in a room with someone and not have to perform being fine.
He sat there with the tea and let the morning drain out of him.
"Ross okay?" she said, after a while, without looking up from the script.
"He decided not to find out the gender," Ethan said.
"Good decision?"
"Good decision for Ross," Ethan said. "He needs to meet the kid without a preconception. He's been building the story in his head since Carol told him — he needs the actual person to blow that up."
"You like him a lot," Julia said. Not a question.
"He's one of my oldest friends," Ethan said. "He's also — Ross is genuinely good. He gets in his own way constantly, but the thing underneath is genuinely good."
Julia turned a page of her script. "Tell him that sometime," she said. "Not in a big way. Just — mention it."
"I will," Ethan said.
He drank his tea and looked at the ceiling and thought about the script on his desk — the Predestination draft, which Nora Bing's contact at Warner Brothers had now read and responded to with an email that used the words compelling and commercially viable and let's talk, all in the same paragraph.
The let's talk meeting was in two weeks.
After the PhD, he thought. Which was getting very close to being a thing that had happened rather than a thing that was happening.
He was feeling enough better by the following afternoon to make the walk to Joey and Chandler's apartment, which he'd been meaning to do since Joey had called the previous evening with the particular energy of someone who had news and was performing containment.
The news, it turned out, was furniture.
Specifically, the absence of furniture — Chandler met him at the door and gestured toward the living room with the expression of a man in the early stages of a grievance.
The coffee table was gone. In its place was a vaguely table-shaped area of carpet that retained the memory of where the coffee table had been.
"Joey," Chandler said, which covered a lot of ground.
"It was already weak," Joey said, from the kitchen, where he was making a sandwich with the focused attention of someone who had decided not to be implicated. "I may have applied some additional stress to it this morning."
"How much additional stress?" Ethan asked.
"I was sitting on it," Joey said.
"On the table," Ethan said.
"There was nowhere else to sit. Chandler was on the couch, I was eating breakfast—"
"You sat on the coffee table to eat breakfast," Chandler said, in the tone of a prosecutor who had found the one piece of evidence that explained everything.
"It held fine for a while," Joey said.
"And then?"
Joey made a small gesture indicating a process that had culminated in structural failure.
Ethan looked at the carpet indentation where the table had been. "So you need a new table."
"We need a new table," Chandler said, looking at Joey.
"We need a table," Joey agreed. "The question of financial responsibility is still being discussed."
"The discussion," Chandler said, "is over. You sat on it."
"You could have warned me about the weight limit."
"Coffee tables don't have weight limits, Joey. They have implied expectations."
Ethan held up a hand. "Furniture store," he said. "Both of you. Now. I'll come. We'll solve this."
"You have the flu," Chandler said.
"I'm at about seventy percent," Ethan said. "That's enough for furniture shopping."
Bowman's Home Furnishings on Broadway had the particular quality of a furniture store on a weekday afternoon — half-empty, the salespeople hovering at a respectful distance, the showroom floor arranged so that every combination of furniture was presented as if people actually lived there, which they didn't, but which worked well enough as a convincing argument.
Joey and Chandler approached the table section with the specific energy of two people who had been arguing about this for eighteen hours and had now reached a public venue.
Chandler found a table he described as having character. It was dark wood, slightly heavy, the kind of table that communicated that it had opinions.
Joey found a table he described as modern. It was lighter, cleaner lines, the kind of table that was easier to wipe down, which Ethan noted was probably relevant information given the breakfast situation.
They argued about this for eleven minutes. Ethan browsed, let the argument run its natural course, and then wandered into the adjacent section.
"Hey," he said.
They came over.
In the corner of the games and recreation section, set up and clearly playable, was a foosball table. Full size, good quality, the kind that was built to survive actual use rather than look good in a catalog. The little plastic players were mid-action, the handles worn in the way that suggested the floor model had been tested thoroughly.
Joey looked at it.
Chandler looked at it.
Then they looked at each other with the simultaneous expression of two people arriving at the same conclusion from different directions.
"It's a table," Chandler said.
"It is technically a table," Ethan confirmed.
"It's also entertainment," Joey said.
"Also true," Ethan said.
"So we'd be getting a table," Chandler said slowly, "and also solving the entertainment problem."
"We have an entertainment problem?" Ethan said.
"We have been watching a lot of television," Joey said. "It's been fine, but variety is good."
Chandler walked around the foosball table once, inspecting it with the expression of a man performing due diligence. "Does it fit in the living room?"
"I'll measure," Joey said, immediately producing a piece of paper and a pen that he did not have a moment ago but apparently always carried, and walking to the elevator to do some spatial reasoning that was, at best, approximate.
Chandler looked at Ethan.
"Don't say I told you so," Chandler said.
"I'm not going to say that," Ethan said.
"You had that expression."
"I have a face," Ethan said. "It does things."
"You predicted this would be a ticking bomb," Chandler said. "You said that. In the store."
"I said it might create strong feelings," Ethan said. "I stand by that. I didn't say they'd be bad feelings."
Joey came back. "It fits," he said, with the confidence of someone whose measurement methodology they were choosing not to examine. "Comfortably."
"Does Monica play foosball?" Chandler asked.
"Monica plays everything," Ethan said. "And wins."
Chandler looked at the table. "We buy it, she's going to demolish us."
"She's going to demolish you regardless," Ethan said. "At least this way you have the table."
They bought the table.
By eight o'clock that evening, the foosball table was installed in Joey and Chandler's living room, which had required moving the couch eighteen inches and relocating a lamp that nobody had been happy about anyway. The assembly had taken forty-five minutes, involved three rounds of consulting instructions that Joey and Chandler each read independently and reached different conclusions from, and had produced one moment of genuine cooperation when the legs needed to be held simultaneously, which they managed.
Monica arrived at eight-fifteen with the specific expression she wore when she was entering a competitive situation — alert, pleasant, already assessing.
"Foosball," she said.
"Foosball," Joey confirmed. "Do you play?"
Monica looked at the table for a moment. "I have played," she said, which covered a lot of ground.
"Teams?" Ethan said. "Monica and Rachel versus Joey and Chandler?"
"Ross is coming," Monica said. "He texted from the cab."
"Monica and Ross versus Joey and Chandler," Ethan said. "I'll sit this one out. Doctor's orders."
"You're using the flu to avoid playing," Chandler said.
"I'm respecting my recovery," Ethan said. "Completely different."
Ross arrived, took in the foosball table, accepted a team assignment, and the game began.
What followed was not entirely a surprise to anyone who knew Monica Geller. She approached the foosball table with the focused intensity she brought to everything she cared about, which, once she'd decided to care about foosball, was foosball. Her rotation was precise. Her positioning was considered. Ross, operating more on enthusiasm than technique, contributed enough to keep the partnership functional.
Joey played with the same approach he brought to most things — whole-hearted, slightly chaotic, frequently effective for reasons that were hard to fully explain. Chandler played with the careful deliberateness of someone who had decided that if he was going to lose, he was going to lose in a way he understood.
By the third game, Monica had made the transition from playing to teaching — not officially, but in the way she sometimes did where the instructions and the competition happened simultaneously, and the instructions were the more dominant energy.
"You're spinning," she told Chandler.
"I'm rotating," Chandler said.
"Spinning is illegal in competitive foosball," Monica said.
"This is not competitive foosball, Monica. This is our living room."
"Rules exist in the living room," Monica said.
Ethan sat on the relocated couch with his tea and watched this with genuine contentment. Rachel had arrived at nine, taken one look at the score, and declared herself a neutral observer, which she'd maintained for about four minutes before starting to coach Chandler from the sideline in what she described as a spirit of balance.
At some point, Julia arrived — she'd been at a dinner across town, had texted that she'd stop by after — and came through the door to find six people in various states of foosball investment and one person on the couch watching with the expression of someone having a good time doing nothing.
She sat next to Ethan.
"How's the flu?" she said.
"Much better," he said.
She looked at the foosball table, where Monica had just scored and was being completely calm about it in the specific way of someone who was very not calm about it. "Who's winning?"
"Monica," Ethan said. "By a significant margin. She won't tell you the exact margin, but she knows it."
Julia watched for a moment. "Does she always—"
"Yes," Ethan said.
"And they keep playing?"
"They always keep playing," Ethan said. "That's the thing about Monica. She makes you want to get better, even when — especially when — she's beating you."
Julia looked at the table, then at Monica, then at Ethan. "You really like these people," she said. Not a question, and not the first time she'd said something like it, but each time it landed differently.
"Yeah," Ethan said. "I really do."
He left at eleven, walking Julia back through the spring night — the city mild now in the way it got in April, the earlier urgency of the day gone, the streets doing their evening thing.
"The Warner Brothers meeting," Julia said. "Two weeks."
"Two weeks," he said.
"Are you nervous?"
"About the meeting, no," he said. "About what happens if the meeting goes well — slightly."
She looked at him sideways. "Why?"
"Because if the meeting goes well, the next phase is a different scale than what I've been doing," he said. "The PhD I know. The tenure track I can see from here. The script in a studio development process is—" He paused. "Different physics."
"Good different or concerning different?"
He thought about it honestly. "Probably both," he said. "Which I've learned is usually the sign that something's worth doing."
She smiled. "That's a very you answer."
"Is that good?"
"It's very you," she said again, which was not the same as answering, and he let it be what it was.
They walked on, the spring night around them, the foosball game presumably still ongoing several blocks behind them, Monica's score extending in the direction it had been going all evening.
From somewhere above the city — or maybe it was just the way sound moved in April — he could hear, very faintly, the sound of someone declaring victory.
Monica.
Obviously.
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