Chapter 75: Monopoly Hell
Monica's apartment. Ten in the morning.
Chandler, Phoebe, and Joey were on the couch when Andrew arrived, watching a talk show with the collective energy of people who had been told to be somewhere and were waiting to find out why. The television was doing something involving a studio audience and strong feelings about relationships, which felt appropriate given what Andrew suspected the morning was about.
"Morning," Andrew said.
Three variations of morning came back at him.
"Where's Monica?" Andrew hung his jacket by the door.
"Bedroom with Ross," Chandler said. "They've been in there twenty minutes. Whatever it is, it's significant — Monica made her serious face before she closed the door."
Joey looked at Andrew with the expression he wore when he sensed that other people knew things he didn't. "Do you know what's happening?"
"I have an idea," Andrew said. He sat in the armchair. "We'll find out when they come out."
They watched the talk show. The studio audience had strong feelings about a man who had not told his girlfriend something important, which continued to feel appropriate.
The bedroom door opened at ten-thirty.
Ross came out first, which told Andrew something — Monica followed situations she was managing, and when she followed rather than led, it meant the situation had gotten away from her.
Ross looked like a man who had made a decision and was at peace with it and was also braced for the room's reaction to that peace. He had the particular quality of someone who had done something irreversible in the last twelve hours and had already moved into the phase of living with it.
Monica came out behind him with the expression of someone who had been arguing for twenty minutes and had not yet accepted that the argument was over.
"I just want everyone to know," Ross said, before Monica could redirect, "that Carol and I talked. She's been honest with me about what she wants. And I've decided to — I'm going to be a father." He paused. "Carol and Susan are going to raise the child together, and I'll be part of his life."
The room processed this.
Joey processed it first, because Joey processed emotional information faster than intellectual information, and this was clearly emotional. He stood up and pulled Ross into a hug with the full-body commitment he brought to everything. "That's great, man. That's really great."
"It is not great!" Monica's voice went up a register. "Ross, Carol is in the process of divorcing you. She is in a relationship with another woman. And now she wants to — to —" She pressed both hands to her temples. "What does she want from you exactly? Because from where I'm standing it looks like she wants everything and is offering you nothing."
"Monica." Ross extracted himself gently from Joey. "I know how it looks."
"Then why—"
"Because it's my child." He said it simply, without drama. "Carol was honest with me. She wasn't strategic about it, she wasn't trying to get something — she sat across from me and told me the truth and asked me a hard question. And I know my answer." He looked at his sister with the particular Ross Geller expression that appeared when he had made up his mind and was prepared to be immovable about it. "I'm going to say yes."
Monica looked at him. Her expression moved through several things — exasperation, worry, love, more exasperation — and landed somewhere that wasn't acceptance but was adjacent to it.
She looked around the room for allies.
"Phoebe," she said.
Phoebe, who had been following this with the bright fascinated attention she brought to most human drama, seemed to realize she was being called upon for a position. "I—" She looked at Ross. Looked at Monica. "I think Ross seems really sure about this."
"He's sure about a lot of things that turn out to be wrong," Monica said, with the particular sisterly directness that required years of accumulated evidence to deploy.
"That's fair," Ross said, undeterred.
Chandler and Andrew had been exchanging the specific glance of two people who understood the full dimensions of a situation and were quietly assessing their options.
"Okay," Chandler said, with the manner of someone who had decided to resolve this through structure rather than argument. "Here's what we're going to do."
He went to the cabinet under Monica's bookshelf and began looking through it.
"Chandler," Monica said warningly.
"I'm looking for Monopoly," Chandler said. "Because this conversation needs a different format."
"Monopoly!" Joey sat back down with the full enthusiasm of a man for whom this development was entirely positive.
"Yes!" Phoebe had already brightened. "I want to be the dog."
"Nobody is playing Monopoly," Monica said.
"Monica." Andrew looked at her steadily. "Ross has made his decision. You're not going to un-make it by arguing about it, and you know that, and you also know that he has thought about this more carefully than it looks like from the outside." He paused. "Play Monopoly with your brother. You can be furious at Carol later, when Carol is actually in the room."
Monica looked at him. The expression she wore when she was deciding whether Andrew was right about something — the particular narrowing that preceded either agreement or a more targeted argument.
Ross sat down on the couch next to Joey and put his face in his hands briefly, not from grief but from the specific exhaustion of having had the significant conversation and now needing to have all the subsequent smaller ones.
"Fine," Monica said. "Monopoly. But I'm the banker."
"Obviously," Chandler said.
The game began with the standard optimism of people who had forgotten how long Monopoly actually took.
Monica was the banker and took this responsibility with the focused intensity she brought to anything involving money and rules. Ross was playing with the specific distracted quality of someone whose mind was partly elsewhere — he kept forgetting whose turn it was and accepting Monica's reminders with the absent gratitude of a man running on two tracks simultaneously.
Phoebe had claimed the dog piece and was moving it with great personal affection for it, occasionally speaking to it between turns in a way that nobody questioned.
Joey had acquired three properties by the second circuit of the board through a combination of luck and the particular Joey Tribbiani approach to negotiation, which involved being so genuinely enthusiastic about deals that other people agreed to them before they'd finished the math.
Chandler was playing with one eye on the board and one eye on the room, which was his natural state.
Andrew had Mediterranean and Baltic, which was the Monopoly equivalent of having a plan that required significant patience to pay off.
"Can I just say," Phoebe said, moving the dog past Free Parking, "that I think it's beautiful that Ross is doing this? Like — a child is going to exist who wouldn't have existed. That's—" She gestured broadly. "That's the whole thing, isn't it?"
"Thank you, Phoebe," Ross said.
"It's not beautiful, it's complicated," Monica said, without looking up from the bank.
"Things can be both," Phoebe said serenely.
Monica rolled the dice with more force than was strictly necessary.
By noon, the game had reached the phase that Monopoly always reached — the phase where two people had significant holdings and everyone else was managing survival through negotiation and strategic bankruptcy avoidance. Monica and Joey, improbably, were the powers. Ross had landed on Monica's Boardwalk hotel twice and was philosophical about it. Chandler had constructed an elaborate alliance with Phoebe that was about to collapse because Phoebe had forgotten they had an alliance.
"Phoebe," Chandler said, with the patience of a man who had accepted his circumstances. "We agreed you wouldn't build on Connecticut."
"I know," Phoebe said. "But it seemed lonely without a house."
"It's a property, not a—"
"Chandler." Phoebe looked at him with the particular Phoebe sincerity that was impossible to argue with because it was entirely genuine. "Everything gets lonely."
Chandler looked at the ceiling.
Andrew got up quietly and went to Monica's kitchen.
He knew the contents of Monica's refrigerator the way he knew most things about Monica's apartment — through repeated presence and the kind of attention that was habitual rather than deliberate. He found eggs, good cheese, some leftover roasted vegetables, fresh herbs. He found bread that was a day old, which was better for certain things than fresh bread.
He made frittata — the kind that took twenty minutes and produced enough for six people — and brought it out on the cutting board with a stack of plates.
The Monopoly table went quiet in the way tables went quiet when food appeared.
[Cooking (Expert): 8/100]
"This doesn't mean the game is over," Monica said, serving herself first with the authority of the banker.
"Nobody said it did," Andrew said.
Ross looked at the frittata and then at Andrew with the expression of a man who had been fed at the right moment enough times to recognize it as an intentional act rather than a coincidence.
"Thank you," he said.
"Eat," Andrew said. "Your turn after Phoebe."
They ate and played and the afternoon moved through its paces. Monica and Ross eventually declared a temporary ceasefire around two o'clock, which everyone understood meant the conversation wasn't over but had been suspended in favor of something more manageable.
Which was, Andrew thought, approximately the best outcome available.
Joey won Monopoly at three-fifteen through a mechanism that nobody entirely understood but that everyone accepted as legitimate because Joey's genuine delight at winning was too uncomplicated to dispute.
"I want a rematch," Monica said immediately.
"Not today," Ross said, standing and stretching. He looked at Andrew. "Walk with me?"
They walked south on Bedford, the April afternoon doing its tentative warmth thing.
"I called Carol this morning," Ross said. "After — after our conversation yesterday. I told her yes."
"How did she sound?"
"Relieved." He thought about it. "And grateful. She said—" He stopped. Started again. "She said she knew it was a lot to ask. That she didn't have the right to ask it." He looked at the sidewalk. "I told her she did. Because it's the truth."
Andrew walked beside him and said nothing.
"I know how it looks from the outside," Ross said. "Monica's not wrong that it's complicated. But Andrew — it's my child. Whatever else is happening, that's the thing I keep coming back to." He glanced over. "Am I being an idiot?"
"No," Andrew said. "You're being Ross, which is different."
Ross almost smiled. "Is that better?"
"Usually," Andrew said.
They walked another block. A pretzel cart on the corner, a cab leaning on its horn, the ordinary sounds of the city going about its afternoon.
"Carol said she wants him to know me," Ross said. "Not just — not just biologically. Actually know me. She was specific about that." He said it with the careful emphasis of someone storing something valuable. "I think she meant it."
"She did," Andrew said.
Ross looked at him. "You sound certain."
"I know Carol a little," Andrew said. "When she says something specific like that, she means it specifically."
Ross nodded slowly, absorbing this.
"Ben," he said. "She wants to name him Ben."
He said it quietly, with the particular quality of a man saying a name for the first time and feeling the weight of it settle.
Andrew kept walking.
"That's a good name," he said.
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