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“Jerry.”
Jerry was yanked out of his observations of the neighboring table full of women in large hats. Due to this event, he would experience a setback in material that would force him to think more creatively than ever before, allowing him to reach a new standard of comedy as a result, but he would be unable to uphold it, and he would finish his career vaguely unsatisfied. Neither he or Elaine would ever trace it to this day.
“Jerry, you remember that fiasco where George pretended to be in a relationship with you-”
“-so he could let down his girlfriend more easily?” Jerry finished, gesturing for her to hurry up so they could move on to less personal things. Elaine wasn’t going to let that happen so easily.
“And remember when he dated that woman who looked identical to you and he got so upset when Kramer pointed it out?” Elaine continued, as nonchalant as a salesman.
“You know, I remember getting upset, too. It’s not very comforting to the masculinity to know you look like a woman, especially a woman like that,” Jerry said, trying to get the wheel away from Elaine, who was steering the conversation right into an iceberg he could see coming from a mile away.
“That’s an impressive can of worms, but let’s keep digging here, shall we?” Elaine countered, businesslike, lowering her voice to let him know that she knew that he knew but that it wasn’t going to earn him any sympathy.
“Elaine, I don’t want to think about whatever signals George has hopefully subconsciously been sending,” Jerry said, making a gesture that would mean “Safe!” in baseball but in this case meant that the current topic was anything but. “I met the guy in fourth grade, he’s too close to get… that close.”
“Fourth grade?” Elaine asked, incredulous. “I thought it was high school. Geez, fourth grade… was he always so…?” She wrung her hands exaggeratedly.
Jerry nodded his head reluctantly, and continued, reluctantly, “Yeah, about two months in I had to beat him up because he was trying to impress the other boys-”
“Boys?” Elaine raised her eyebrows. Jerry rolled his eyes, but continued.
“Yes, boys. He wanted ‘connections,’ so he made me fight him, except he jumped me, so I started fighting him for real and we, uh.” Jerry dropped his voice and looked around mock-conspiratorially. “We both got detention.”
“I’ve never heard your parents talk about that,” Elaine wondered with amusement. “Woulda thought they’d be all over it.”
“Oh, they don’t know,” said Jerry, humor dropping off his face. “It was a feat larger than Watergate and if you go telling them now-”
“I won’t tattle, don’t worry,” she scoffed. “I’m not another Megan McKlinskey.”
“Who?”
“Girl who told my parents that I was sniffing glue.”
“Were you?”
Elaine jabbed an angry, wordless finger at him. He raised his hands in surrender. Elaine used the opening to push farther up the hill. “So, you and Georgie?”
“Check, please.”
“Jerry, you’re gonna have to address it sometime,” she wheedled.
“But I don’t have to address it out loud, in public, right now, ‘Lainey.”
“You’re not giving a speech, you’re dissecting your best friend’s twisted feelings for you. It’s not that hard.”
Jerry glared at her, then twisted away to sulk as melodramatically as a stage whisper. He glanced back at Elaine, who was trying to hide a grin.
“... twisted, huh!” he muttered. Elaine stifled a laugh. “And you, the best man at that lesbian wedding? Shameful, Elaine, what you’ll say behind closed doors.”
“What time is it?” Elaine asked him suddenly, like she had woken up from a dream.
“Nine twenty-eight, why?”
“I wanted to write down the exact moment that Jerome Seinfeld said ‘Gay rights!’”
“Hey, I denounced hypocrisy, not homophobia,” Jerry said, leaning back, finding a false sense of security in the shallow back-and-forth.
“George will be crushed by this, you know,” Elaine said, like she wasn’t dropping a conversational ice cube on the floor. Jerry stepped on it immediately.
“He told you and not me?” he asked indignantly. Elaine analyzed her situation in an externally silent, instant, internal monologue, like a Yu-Gi-Oh character. She decided to act as the Socrates to Jerry’s Theaetetus instead of gloating over her argumentative victory immediately.
“Jerry, I’m gonna give it to you, bullet point by bullet point.” Her body language mimicked that of a step-dad giving a step-son a difficult talk in a bad eighties movie. “Consider an odd man repressing the fact that he’s in love with his best friend.”
“Elaine, you must be flattered,” Jerry muttered.
“To stop being so repressed, he has to come to terms with his sexuality and his awkward feelings at the same time.”
“Huh,” huh’ed Jerry. “Because he has so many twisted, uncomfortable conversations within him, he never addresses any of them. He’s going to die like that.”
“Funny, I’ve never thought about Georgie dying.”
The two of them sat in silence for a moment. The women with the hats left. Jerry’s career was sealed.
“Anyway, Elaine, what would I say to him?” Jerry looked at his coffee and ignored what he'd just said.
“Well, what would you wanna say?” Elaine asked incredulously, not having expected to have made it this far.
“‘Want to’ is the wrong way to put it.”
“That you’re flattered, but sorry?” she pressed on.
“Well, uh,” Jerry began to flounder.
“That he should’ve kept it to himself but you can still be friends?”
“That’s-”
“That you know a guy he might like instead?”
“Ss-it’s-ah-m.” Jerry glided between syllables like a train falling into a ditch. Elaine finally recognized the look on his face and stared. Jerry stared at his coffee.
Wisely, she didn’t say anything for a while. The cafe traffic might’ve read their faces as bored. Elaine needed the restroom, but she felt like the tables would start floating off the floor if the moment slipped into the processable past. Anyway, Jerry might leave while she was gone.
Kramer slid through the door and started a rant about Joe DiMaggio.