Frenemies (2 page)

With Jägermeister, I decided, that should be no problem whatsoever.

Later, I felt blurred right through to the core when I ran into Nate outside the bathrooms.

We stared at each other in the tiny little alcove, festooned with flyers for local bands and supposedly hip postcards.

For a moment we were completely alone. Helen was nowhere near. I wouldn’t have chosen a noisy bar to finally have a moment to ourselves, but it was the first one we’d had in seventeen days. I couldn’t be choosy.

But then, with only the slightest lingering glance, Nate slid past me.

It took another whole breath for me to realize that he actually, seriously,
really
wasn’t planning to speak to me.

“Are you kidding?” I demanded. “You’re giving me the silent treatment?
You
have the audacity to give
me
the
silent treatment
?”

“Gus.” Nate sighed and shook his head. His silky brown hair tumbled across his forehead, and he shoved it back with one hand. His voice matched his eyes: sweet, rich chocolate. His hand rose as if he wanted to touch me, then dropped. “You seem so upset.”

“Weird,” I said through the tightness of my throat. “I wonder why? I guess that obnoxious
single
phone call failed to make me feel better about stuff like you lying to me and—”

“When you’re calmer, and maybe not as drunk, we can talk,” Nate said. As if he were being generous. “If you want.” As if he were doing me a favor.

“Or maybe you can go to hell,” I countered, hurt and furious. “How
could
you, Nate? How could you
do
something—”

I would have kept going. I might even have started to yell. But he reached out and put his hand on my arm.

I went mute.

“Gus,” he said fiercely, his eyes darker than usual and sad, too. “You don’t know how much I wish I hadn’t hurt you.”

“Then why did you?” I had to fight to get the question out, past the emotion clogging my throat.

“You want things I can’t give,” he said in that same hushed, hard tone, never breaking eye contact. “You’re sweet and smart and funny and … I’m not who you think I am. The thing with Helen just proved that. I’m just not …” He broke off then, and ducked his head. When he looked up, his expression made me feel sad.

“You’re just not what?” I prompted him, although everything felt precarious and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear his answer.

“I’m just not who you want me to be,” he whispered. “I wanted to be. I really did. More than you’ll know.” He dropped his hand and stepped back. “It’s better this way, trust me.”

As I said, I blame Janis Joplin. And Amy Lee for introducing the Jägermeister, as well as the thought of singing, into the night. Mix Janis with a few too many beers and unnecessary anesthetic shots, roast it all on the flames of a broken heart, betrayal, and
It’s better this way
and what did anyone expect?

It started with Bon Jovi. When I was growing up, no one admitted to listening to Bon Jovi, and now that we were almost thirty everyone seemed to know every line of “You Give Love A Bad Name.” The bar erupted in sound, as everyone indulged in air guitar and the birthday girl herself rocked out in the middle of what was, on some nights, a makeshift dance floor.

This was probably what made me believe that I, too, should take to the floor.

The guitar kicked in.

Janis started to wail, “
Come
on,
come
on,
come
on—”

What happened next was probably inevitable.

Which didn’t make it any less embarrassing.

I started off just singing. Then, right around the second chorus, something flipped inside me and I thought,
what the hell?

This was always, I had discovered through years of trial and error, the moment at which I should stop whatever it was I was doing and take deep breaths until the
what the hell
feeling passed. The
what the hell
feeling was not my friend.

So, obviously, I ignored every lesson I’d ever learned in the span of my twenties and kept right on singing. Even louder than before.

Janis Joplin lured me on, with her scratchy voice and obvious pain. I thought,
Janis and I have a bond.
Then I thought
what the hell
again, and the next thing I knew I was shouting out the lyrics.

Directly to Nate and Helen.

Into their faces, to be precise.

My memory got a little foggy on the details, whether from Jägermeister or shame I would never know for sure, but I retained a crystal-clear recollection of myself
standing on a chair
as I towered above the two of them, shrieking out my extremely drunken version of “Piece of My Heart.”

I didn’t know which was worse: the appalled look on Nate’s face, Helen’s frozen smirk, or the sympathetic expressions both Amy Lee and Oscar wore as they drove me home to my little apartment around the corner from Fenway Park. All I knew was, I’d be seeing them play inside my head for the foreseeable future.

Outside my apartment building, I waved the car away and paused to take a deep breath while I reviewed the wreckage. I didn’t feel blurry any longer, just slightly sick. The late October night was so cold and dark, however, that it was hard to take a deep breath. I was reduced to taking a few shallow ones instead. Somehow, that made it all seem worse.

I was turning thirty years old on the second of January, my perfect boyfriend had cheated on me with my freshman year roommate and then dumped me, and I had just humiliated myself in front of every single one of our mutual friends.

The good news was, it couldn’t get worse.

chapter two

I
t was clear to just about everyone that I was meant to be a librarian when, in the fourth grade, I spent my winter vacation alphabetizing, arranging, and cataloging all the books in my parents’ house. For fun.

It wasn’t clear to me, however. My plan was to take the Broadway stage by storm (which, perhaps, puts the Janis Joplin horror into perspective). When I wasn’t sorting my books into appropriate stacks, I was belting out show tunes.
Evita
,
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
,
Phantom of the Opera
,
Miss Saigon
,
Les Misérables
,
Anything Goes
, and so on. If it had been up to me, I would have sung all day. I took voice lessons, sang in the school choir as well as the church choir, and often gave impromptu concerts to my collection of stuffed animals.

I’d always had a thing for
The Music Man
, so when Broadway mysteriously failed to come calling for me in Boston, I went with my second choice and got my master’s in Library and Information Science. I soon discovered that Marion the Librarian was expected to do a little bit more than sing and wear spectacles these days, however. While I was in grad school, I happened upon a part-time job in a tiny museum no one had ever heard of—the Choate Downey Museum, just a few streets off the Common. The Choate Downey Museum boasted the mediocre art and mediocre collections of the Downey family, of which Minerva Choate Downey was the current heir and curator.

She was also a complete lunatic.

When I graduated from Simmons with my master’s in hand, I had big dreams of, say, a cushy job at Harvard or (during a brief, giddy spring fever in which relocation seemed crucial) the New York Public Library. But Minerva sat me down and offered me a full-time salary, excellent benefits, and the impressive title of head librarian. I was also the only librarian—the only employee, in fact—but at just twenty-five, who was I to argue?

Four years later, I was still head librarian of the Choate Downey Museum, and while from time to time I dreamed about a
really
exciting job—being a superspy like Sydney Bristow on
Alias
, for example—I was fairly content. The fact was, I loved what I did. I got paid to search for information, then to arrange it so others could experience the same voyage of discovery. I got to charter trips through knowledge. I spent my days researching questions no one in the world but me might ask—but if I decided the answer needed to be known, as head librarian I got to decide to search for it.

True, I had to deal with Minerva and her many delusions, but I tended to chalk that up in the “entertainment” column. After all, Georgia had the theoretically more exciting job, being a big-time lawyer, but I was the one who got to spend whole mornings seriously debating whether or not it was appropriate for Minerva to identify herself as One of the Blood to the hapless fools who got lost on their tours of Revolutionary War Boston and wandered into our front hall. I doubted Georgia had that kind of fun while filing documents and typing out briefs.

Then again, Georgia lived for corporate law. Who knew what she found fun?

“I thought we had an anti-karaoke pact,” Georgia said when she appeared before me that afternoon in the wide foyer that also served as my office. “It was my first year of law school, we chose to sing that 4 Non Blondes song about sixty times, and the next morning we
made vows.
” She was shivering, and let the heavy door slam shut behind her, but not before a blast of frigid air rushed in from the street so I could shiver too. I wrapped the scarf I used to combat the Museum’s inevitable drafts tighter around my neck.

“Hi, Georgia,” I said from behind my desk, tucked at the foot of the stairs. On good days, that desk made me feel powerful and in control. I faced the day—and the door—with confidence. On other days, I felt lost and somewhat exposed behind it. Today I was still too embarrassed from the night before to care.

“I think that if we were breaking vows around here, I should have been consulted,” Georgia continued. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“Next time I accidentally humiliate myself in front of my ex and his new skank who happens to be my ex-friend—”

“Are you sure you were
actually
friends with Helen? I mean, you were, but was she? Does she even know how to be friends with someone who doesn’t want to sleep with her?”

“—I’ll be sure to interrupt your depositions so you can race to my side and, hopefully, stop it.” I slumped down in my chair. “I just can’t understand how, in the space of two and a half weeks, I went from feeling totally grown-up to feeling about seventeen. Seventeen and
surly.
”

Georgia clomped around the side of the desk in her knee-high court boots and collapsed into my visitor’s chair, pushing her long legs out in front of her. I took the opportunity to study her. Georgia looked grown-up because she looked corporate and hot all at the same time. Georgia was tall and had wild, curly, unprofessional hair. It was a mix of reds, auburns, and blonds—all of it completely natural. She claimed she used the hair as a weapon. It was ditz hair, so no one saw her coming. She liked to pair the hair with very austere, severe suits, which confused everyone.

The Museum was thoughtfully located within walking distance of Georgia’s firm. This triumph of coincidental geography meant that I saw Georgia more than anyone else outside her law firm. Whenever she was in town and she could sneak away from her piles of documents for a few minutes, we had coffee at the Starbucks around the corner or the occasional dinner. Sometimes I thought I was the only thing tethering Georgia to the life she was no longer living outside office hours.

She looked around, taking in the lazy afternoon stillness of the Museum, which was marred only by Minerva’s latest obsession: operatic arias. Extremely dramatic music floated down from her quarters, which took over the entire top floor of the building. Georgia raised her brow toward the staircase.

“It’s been arias for almost a month.” I shrugged. “I’m expecting a change any day now. Care to place a bet?”

“I’m still recovering from her brief flirtation with grunge rock, a decade late,” Georgia said darkly. “I’m not betting anymore.”

In case I failed to mention it—Minerva sang. Very badly. Unlike me, she had never relinquished her dreams of stardom, and were it not for her Simon Cowell phobia, I had no doubt she would audition for
American Idol
in a heartbeat. Tuesdays and Thursdays, she was that scary woman who nipped into the karaoke bar (alone) and belted out five or six songs over the course of the evening to the horror of the assembled birthday and going-away partiers. Don’t ask me how I knew this—I was still emotionally scarred and, as Georgia had pointed out, vows had been made.

“Court date?” I asked as Georgia glanced at her watch.

“Soon,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure I was actually back on East Coast time, in Boston. I’ve been traveling so long, I’m never really sure where I am.”

“Home sweet Beantown,” I assured her. “Do you have time for coffee?”

“Not today,” Georgia said, and stood up again. “I’ll see you at the Halloween party tomorrow. We will look fabulous, we will be intimidating, and we will make sure no one remembers any singing incidents.”

“I’m not going to the Halloween party.”

“Of course you are.”

“Georgia, please.” I glared at her. “I wasn’t going to the Halloween party as of two and a half weeks ago. If you concentrate, I bet you can remember why.”

“The Halloween party is tradition,” Georgia argued. “There’s no reason you should give up long-term traditions just because one or two things have changed recently.”

“You must be jet-lagged. Or maybe you’re just insane.” I held up a hand when she started to speak. “
Even if
I could somehow overlook the fact that Nate is
hosting
the freaking party
in the very house
where I discovered him
sucking face
with Helen—and who could overlook something like that, Georgia? Seriously?”

“But it’s not like it’s actually
his
—”

“
Even if
I could lobotomize myself so that I no longer cared about these things, the fact remains that I made a total ass of myself last night. I can’t walk in there and pretend that I don’t care that Nate’s with her
of all people
when forty-eight hours earlier I was belting out Janis Joplin three inches away from their faces. And it’s not like I can pretend it didn’t happen, either, because everyone we know
watched me do it
!”

“First of all,” Georgia replied, looking down at me, “I need you to breathe.”

She had a point. I took a deep breath and relaxed my spine into my chair.

“If you don’t want to go to a stupid Halloween party, then you shouldn’t go,” Georgia said. “Nobody would blame you if you wanted to hide away somewhere and lick your wounds, letting Nate, Helen, and everyone else realize exactly how much all of this is hurting you.”

“Okay, good-bye. Reverse psychology is the last thing I need right now.” I debated telling her what Nate had said about things being better this way, because he couldn’t be who I wanted him to be. But I was still mulling it over, and just waved my hand in her direction. “Go to court.”

“I’m just saying—”

“Are you wearing fake eyelashes?” The best defense was a good offense. “To the
courtroom
?”

“There’s no reason not to accentuate the positive.” Georgia smiled serenely, batting those fake eyelashes at me so I could better appreciate their length. “Cosmetics are just shrewd marketing.”

“You sound like your mother,” I accused her. Fighting words. Georgia winced.

“That serves me right for talking about your wounds,” she said. Then shook her head. “Do you know, the woman called me on my cell phone while I was on my way to trial to let me know that she’d had a dream. And do you know what she dreamed?”

“Grandchildren?” I guessed. With Georgia’s mother it always came down to grandchildren, one way or another.

“That I died alone and unloved, because I was too picky,” Georgia said. “This is what she says to me, five seconds before a trial. What am I supposed to do with that?”

“Date a nice guy for a change?” I suggested, and laughed when Georgia just made a face. Because she and I both knew that Georgia’s fatal weakness was for hot guys with commitment issues, the younger and more feckless the better. If they were actively mean to her, well, hell! She’d fall in love.

“I can hardly stomach the dates I have,” she muttered. “I’m going to be late—I’ll see you later.”

I watched her haul open the heavy Museum door and stride back out into the cold, congratulating myself on avoiding further talk of the Halloween party. And also for being lucky enough not to have a mother who called me to ask when I was getting married, as Georgia’s did several times a day.

Georgia’s mother was Greek and had very clear ideas about the kind of man she envisioned her only child with: a Greek. Everything else was subject to interpretation but the Greek part was ironclad. Georgia wasn’t permitted the luxury of choosing, say, a big American mutt of indeterminate ethnic origin like her own father. Georgia had been enthusiastic about her destiny until the dark day she discovered George Michael’s true sexuality—having somehow believed he was heterosexual for most of the eighties.

These days Georgia’s mother had subsided into a sort of dull hysteria that she expressed via dramatic voice mails. You didn’t have to speak Greek to get the gist of them:
hurry up and give me my grandchildren before I die.

My mother, happily, wasn’t prone to the
my daughter is about to cross over into her thirties and is thus about to be a spinster
panic. Though she didn’t necessarily
get
me, she never overtly interfered, which I figured was the better deal. Because Georgia’s mother was just
scary.

The moment that cemented my lifelong fear of the woman came while we were still in college. We’d all been out to dinner with Georgia’s parents and were sitting in the car outside our dorm. In the throes of my collegiate self-absorption, I’d chosen to whine about how I would obviously never find love because I was twenty or some such unbelievably young age, which of course I thought was old as the hills, and blah blah blah. This, naturally, led to a withering self-analysis in which I concluded that I didn’t actually
deserve
love because of the width of my thighs. Georgia’s mother reached over and grabbed me high on the leg, startling me so much I actually jumped.

“You listen to me, Augusta,” she said, startling me with her invocation of
the name
as well as her weird, creepy voice. “You will breed strong children with these thighs.”

Needless to say, that ended the conversation. I slunk off into the dorm, embraced the post-traumatic stress along with my friends’ hysterics, and contemplated my thighs with horror ever after. Not enough, then, that they were the first part of me to register the ingestion of chocolate. Not enough that my ass, at twenty-nine, now covered more parts of my upper thighs than I had ever imagined possible when I was sixteen. No, my thighs were
breeding thighs.
How delightful. How enticing and sexy. Perhaps I should trot that one out on the off chance I ever dated again, which seemed unlikely unless the gentleman in question had an unusual affinity for interpretive classic rock—

“And have you noticed my thighs?” I could say brightly, between the appetizer and the musical number. “A Greek woman assures me I’ll breed strong children with them, you know. Very Oracle of Delphi, it’s true. Just FYI.”

When I got home from work that night, I was exhausted. It had been a long day of sending falsely cheerful e-mails around to my extended group of friends, as a form of damage control that of course fooled no one, all the while swearing to my inner circle that I was never leaving my small one-bedroom apartment again.

It was the same one-bedroom I’d been living in since I left college, for anyone keeping score on their “she’s a loser” card. It was the one-bedroom that had been considered flashy and high-end by my friends back then, as they huddled in studios or shared places with the hygienically challenged while I got my master’s degree at Simmons. The very same one-bedroom that was now considered a breath above squalor by these same friends, who had moved on to Real Adult Homes now that we were all about to hit the Big Three Oh. I would have liked to move on myself, and would have, were it not for the whole
mortgage
issue. But then, no one was a librarian for the money. (I repeated that phrase to myself sometimes as often as seventy times a day.)