Between You and Me (3 page)

“Okay.” She shrugs, typing her credit-card number. But we both know we won’t. Sarah brought me into the apartment share with Rachel, who worked and split the second bedroom with Lauren, who went to school with Charlotte, a chain of friendship strung out like paper dolls. But the links are gone—engaged, enrolled, enticed away. “Oh, answering machine.” She points to the blinking light of our land line. This is the one other connection we share, Midwestern parents who hate us living in New York and want to know they can reach us, even in case of blackouts, terrorists, or the Rapture.

“My mom?” I ask.

“No. It was Kelsey’s assistant.” She taps her fingers together eagerly, as she does on the rare occasions when my life brushes contact with my famous cousin’s.

“Delia,” I say, referring to Kelsey’s and my other cousin, with whom I share a birthday.

Charlotte nods as I realize I never listened to my first voice mail from this morning. “I think she said they’re in L.A. I wasn’t really
listening,” she lies. “Maybe
Kelsey
will call you one of these years.” Charlotte rolls over, as if getting a tan from the eighties light fixture. “
Then
we could sell the answering machine. You
had
to get left behind.” She resmears her flaking bleach.

“Kelsey e-mails me.” It’s my turn to lie. When I was little, I always felt my mom and Delia’s combining our parties stole my thunder, but now this annual exchange of good wishes is my one remaining link to Kelsey, however superficial. “I’ll listen when I get back. How do I look?”

She appraises me from where she lounges. “Annoyingly hot for three minutes of effort.”

“Perfect. See you there.”

I keep my phone within
earshot until the bar gets too packed, then make sure I can catch it lighting up with the eye I don’t have set on the door. As my other friends and colleagues arrive to toast me—or put overpriced drinks on my tab—I nurse my sidecar through a straw to keep my gloss perfect until he gets here. I don’t slouch, eat a Marcona almond, or excuse myself to pee. Halfway through my second drink, the headache I’ve been only a mouthful of water ahead of all day breaks.

“Happy birthday!” Lauren tugs Marshall through the suited crowd that new way that she has, hands twisted up by her shoulder, ring facing out. I pull her into a hug, smelling her Pantene and missing those nights pre-Marshall when we’d both get home from work well past midnight and commiserate over a carton of frozen yogurt in the dark galley kitchen.

“Can we buy you a drink?” she offers, and Marshall shoots her the look of a squirrel whose nut’s just been hijacked.

“My usual, thanks.” I’m tempted to ask for something aged to annoy him further, but I know he’ll grab me a well drink anyway.

“These banker bars have you over a chair. I’m getting juice,” he announces, and huffs away.

Lauren smiles after him and then reflexively at her ring, which is surprisingly large, but apparently his mother shamed him into it.
“You are fabulous,” Lauren says, trying to pull a few inches away to look me over. “The red dress. Who’s coming?”

“Jeff.”

“Logan!” she exclaims as I resume my door vigil. He has to come, he just
has
to. “I thought you were done with him.”

“No, I told him to go fuck himself after the Labor Day weekend house-share debacle, but two weeks ago, he sent me flowers at work. Out of the blue. Peonies. In January. Like, thirty of them.”

“Which you threw in the trash,” she says sternly.

“Which I wore in my hair when I had sex with him a few hours later. Okay, and that’s a lot of opinion from—” Future Mrs. Squirrel. “You.”

“He’s never taken you to meet his parents.” She invokes the smugly judgmental tone of the newly engaged, as if we’re here to discuss my report card. “You’ve never even met his sister, and she lives in the city!” She brings up the source of breakup number three of I’ve-lost-count. “I just don’t understand why you keep giving him more chances.”

“Because I want to go to brunch with someone. And Jeff and I have this . . . thing. He’s gotta grow up sometime.” I flex my palms to the ceiling, knowing I’m leaving out that, despite the constant e-mails, texts, and IMs, we haven’t seen each other since the peonies. The same ballad from the cool-down at the gym comes on and I imagine Kelsey has a sympathetic hand on my shoulder.
“Standing, reaching, calling, dreaming to get there—to get there.”

“One whiskey soda, a red wine.” Marshall slides our drinks in front of us. “And my juice.” He reaches into his jacket, extracts a flask with all the stealth of a UN missile inspector, and dumps some vodka into his OJ. I’m tempted to pull out a few bucks and tell the cheap mofo to treat himself, but my bridesmaid dress has already been altered.

“Don’t we have a nice guy for Logan?” Lauren inquires, and he squints like she’s asked him if they have a parasol.

“Really, I appreciate it.” I don’t. “But I’m great.”

Marshall points to the speaker. “Kelsey’s label’s stock is down.”

“Okay.”

“This single didn’t hold at the top for as long as her others.”

“Well, she has more number ones than Mariah Carey, so I doubt they’re going to fire her.”

“Tell her to stick with dance tracks. That’s money.”

“Oh, I’m not in touch with Kelsey,” I demur, hating when anyone outside my closest circle knows we’re related but having to concede that as my friends pair off, that circle is widening beyond my control. “Oh, look, one of the couches is free.”

“Because Kelsey’s an asshole?” he follows up. Lauren jabs him with her elbow.

“Because our dads had a falling out, and our families stopped speaking.” I reflexively run my finger over the small scar at the base of my hairline, as if reciting the answer from the Braille of raised skin. “But I wish her well.” I repeat my stock deflection as I press into the mingling throng.

I glance at my phone. Where
is
he? Two texts from Sarah, who’s still waiting for the train and isn’t sure she’ll make it, but nothing from Jeff. Why did I pick Midtown? Why couldn’t I just pick a local dive bar? Why do I need wood paneling and gold-embossed cocktail napkins? I look up at the murals of New York in the twenties. Because I spend my days in a cubicle and my nights in a box. I start to flag. I want to eat. I want to slouch. I excuse myself and make my way, past Charlotte lip-locked with a random, to the tiled hallway outside the bathrooms where I can kick off my heels and rest my forehead against the wall. I unpin my hair, hoping to relieve the tension across my scalp. The cold marble sends seismic ripples up my legs to my brain. Right.

I squeeze behind blazered backs to the couch where Lauren is falling asleep on Marshall’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. I have to go,” I say, tugging at the wool sleeve protruding from under Marshall’s ass. “If Jeff shows up, tell him I left. With a guy. Who likes red.” I kiss her cheek and then, with a wave to my drunk colleagues and gym buddies, turn to the door, which I proceed to shove toward like a hurricane correspondent. I press my weight against the glass, stumbling past the smokers—and into Jeff.

“Careful, now, you’ll crush your cupcake.” Smiling, he holds up the wax-paper bag from my favorite bakery with one hand and slides the
other around my waist, his mouth connecting with my neck. Immediately, I’m laughing. I’m laughing in the glittering cold on a perfect New York night with my boyfriend.

He reluctantly breaks our hourlong
kiss to drain the last of the Sicilian red into my glass at the quiet wine bar, and my gaze holds on his forearms, the dark hairs, the tan line from the diving watch he wore over the holiday. How is it possible to be hot for someone’s forearm? “You still have some catching up to do. I had a lot at my work dinner. Those Germans are tough to keep up with.”

“Notoriously so.”

He squeezes my thigh under the table and signals for the check, the hidden hand roving to my hem, then moving the hem up while he kisses my neck and earlobe. His fingers pause when he discovers the tops of my stockings, the bare skin beyond, and he grins, his dark hair flopping over his brow. So worth feeling the clasps digging into me all goddamn evening. “Are you wearing panties?”

“Only one way to find out,” I say, my lips grazing his cheekbone.

“Oh, no.” He shakes his head as he passes his credit card to the bartender, his hand inching higher. “There are so many ways.”

I laugh and reach for my crocheted scarf, loopping the cashmere loosely around my neck. He untucks my hair and lets it fall before kissing me again. “I love your hair,” he says. “No one has long hair anymore.” I nod, drenching myself in the compliment, despite seeing three women in this place alone with pristinely barrel-curled waist-length hair. Mine has not seen the loving attention of an appliance in quite some time.

Jeff signs the check. I hop down, making an effort to keep my movements fluid and contained, despite how everything in my vision swings slightly.

He helps me on with my coat, leading me out onto Madison, where the cold creates halos around embracing couples walking briskly as one. My coat opens so he can still see the dress as I extend my arm for a taxi. He presses his chest against mine and takes my face in his hands. “You look tired.”

I nod, wanting to curl inside his concern. “This senior analyst promotion isn’t at all as advertised. What happened to ‘management’ meaning assistants and an actual office with actual walls?”

He kisses my cheekbone. “Something more than a ten-percent increase to offset thirty more hours of labor?”

“When moving up felt
up
, not sideways, you know?”

“Mm,” he agrees, nuzzling my neck.

A cab pulls over, and he pops the door. I slide in. And then it shuts after me. Stunned, I twist to the window, my earring catching in the open weave of my scarf. I lower the window while trying to untangle myself with wine-numb fingers. “You’re not coming?” I can’t stop myself from asking like Charlotte talking to the TV.

He smiles. “I have an early meeting, and it sounds like you need to rest up, birthday girl.”

I
need
you to know if I wore panties or not, if we’re taking an inventory of what I need. I sit back, and he steps back, and here I am—back.

It’s not until I get
in the door and am kicking off my salt-stained shoes that I realize I left the cupcake at the bar. Perfect. I go to the kitchen and pull out a box of stale Corn Pops. I drop onto the couch we got in the West Elm sale that was comfortable in the store and stare at the red and green lights Charlotte nailed up last month and will probably never take down. I munch on a handful of Pops and stare at the fresh bleach spot on the carpet that still needs vacuuming. I notice the blinking and reach over to hit play. “Logan, happy birthday!” Our crackly machine can’t suppress Delia’s exuberance. Delia wouldn’t have let me throw the party uptown. A few years older, she was always the practical one, reminding Kelsey and me that it was time to let the frog go, time to do our homework. “Another year, can you believe it?” I can’t. “Call me, want to catch up. Let me give you my new cell.”

She rattles off her number, and the machine goes quiet. The Christmas lights blink. I look at my doorway, and I can’t. I can’t take this dress off and go to sleep, admit that this was it, the birthday he put me in a cab, that I’m about to get into bed alone and wake up
hungover, that I’m here,
again
, having to make a decision to wait for the next flirty e-mail, the next text, the next late-night phone call, or I have to get over him all over again. “Fuck,” I say quietly to the scorch mark on the ceiling. Then I realize Delia’s never asked me to call her back before.

One a.m., ten L.A. time. Delia will be at her birthday dinner, and I can leave a message and go eat these Pops properly—in the bathtub. She answers on the first ring. “Happy birthday!”

“Delia, you, too!” I say, trying to moisten my mouthful. “Hope I’m not interrupting your party!”

“No! We did this tasting-menu thing early, an oma-something.”

“Omakase?”

“Yes. Oh, my God, they gave me something that tasted like a perm and looked like a used condom.” She lets out a whoop like I haven’t heard since we last spoke, four or five birthdays ago. “I don’t know that everything that gets dragged up from the sea should wind up on a plate, you know what I’m saying?”

“I couldn’t agree more.” I smile.

“How was your birthday?”

“Terrific.” I hedge. “I had a party at this Holden Caulfield-y place, and now I’m just struggling to keep my eyes open.” I cross to the bathroom to see if Charlotte still has any Ambien left to quell this building clench under my ribs.

“Well, I won’t keep you. I just wanted to ask. Kelsey has a break next week before her tour starts, and she’s dying to see you.”

My reflection in the medicine cabinet shows my shock. “She is?”

“Totally! She misses you so much. How long has it been since we’ve all hung out?” She doesn’t pause for me to answer. “Uncle Andy and Aunt Michelle would love to see you.” Really? “Let me e-mail you a ticket. What do you say?”

I look at the lines, the ones my concealer has settled into around my tired eyes, the ones thick with blackened grout in the wall behind me, the ones on the spreadsheet I apparently left on top of the toilet this morning, and I take a deep breath.

“Sign me up.”