Frenemies (7 page)

chapter eight

N
ote to self:
The next time you feel the need to prove just how funny you are, please endeavor to do so in a way that will not involve performing the Royal Blueberry Walk of Sartorial Shame across the Boston metropolitan area at two o’clock in the morning, to the delight of Boston’s numerous drunks, one of whom you’re pretty sure thought you were Pat Benatar. Furthermore, please recollect in future that the horrifying dress in question comes with a pair of shoes (pumps!) that are not only uglier than sin but desperately, blisteringly uncomfortable.

It was a week before Thanksgiving in Boston, and the gray Saturday was so cold the air practically shattered around me when I inhaled. I jammed my (embarrassingly ugly, yet warm) hat tighter on my head and wrapped my scarf around my neck an extra turn, and yanked Linus along on his leash. It was a short walk to the park at the Victory Gardens, where dogs romped around off leash and I could brood over my ridiculous life. Today the walk felt even longer than usual. Half because of the bitter cold, and half because my brain refused to stop turning over the events of the night before.

Event one: Helen. And everything she’d said and/or insinuated, which seemed to be repeating on an unpleasantly loud loop in my brain.

Event two: it was perhaps time to realize that not all things that made me snicker had to be acted out—which was to say, it was one thing to cackle with Georgia about the idea of wearing the blueberry dresses out, and another thing entirely to
do
it. The blueberry dress—I could see now—was a metaphor. It was time to retire the blueberry dresses.

Event three: Nate. Thanks to that strange little moment we’d had at the party, and his repeated assertion that he could
count on me
, I was more hurt and confused than ever.

Event four: Henry. More specifically, knowing that Henry and Nate were roommates had started to panic me. Talk about too little, too late. The fact was, Henry could at any moment decide that he needed to come clean with Nate. He could be doing it
right now.
And yet, somehow, every time I saw him my brain vacated the premises and my mouth took over, and the next thing I knew I was exchanging insults with him. As plans went, mine needed some serious work.

I pulled my heavy coat tighter around me while I kept half my attention on Linus. I called him back from an overenthusiastic sprint toward some distant pedestrians, and then scowled. I was still hearing Henry’s threat in my head, and I didn’t like it.

Here was the story with Henry: I slept with him.

Georgia’s epic crush. Boston’s number-one male slut. The roommate of the guy I had literally just found out was cheating on me. I still didn’t understand how it had happened. It was an accident, and then it was embarrassing, and then he was a jerk.

Well, he was always a jerk. That was sort of his niche.

This was what happened that night, in its entirety:

Nate had called to tell me that he didn’t feel well and couldn’t come over as planned.
As planned
meaning
as decided after I all but begged in a humiliating conversation I could never tell my friends about; they’d disown me.
I had decided that I would be like the physical embodiment of chicken soup. I’d soothe him. And if he wasn’t actually sick, as I was trying not to suspect—well, we could talk.

So, clearly, I kind of knew.

There was a moment, the way I guess there always is, when I second-guessed myself out there on the doorstep. I hadn’t rung the doorbell yet. I could have gone back home and let things play out however they were going to play out. I didn’t have to force the issue by showing up. I didn’t have anything to prove, after all. Nate was my boyfriend. He’d actually said so himself to a third party (if Henry counted) a few weeks before. I had no reason to worry—except for the fact that I was already worried enough that I’d hauled myself over to his house to prove to myself that I had no reason to be worried.

I rang the doorbell and Henry answered. He lounged across the doorway in that lazy way he had, and smiled at me. I remembered it as a smirk, but I thought that was just retroactive editing.

That night, he was doing that thing guys do, with his hand against his belly so his T-shirt rose up and his six-pack peeked out. It was impossible not to look, so I did, even though the truth was, I never really permitted myself so much as a stray fantasy about Henry. He was hot, true, but he had always been Georgia’s domain. End of story. He said hello, and told me that Nate was in the kitchen.

And then he just stood there for a minute, and looked at me.

“What?” I said. With absolutely no sense of foreboding of any kind.

“Nothing,” he said, and then he stepped aside so I could walk into his kitchen and find my boyfriend kissing Helen in the shade of the copper cookware hanging from the ceiling.

It was a bad scene.

The thing no one ever told you about scenes like that was how completely unlike television and the movies they were. Because first of all, there was no soundtrack. That sounded like an unimportant detail, but trust me. Without a soundtrack, there was just you. Standing in a doorway, watching your boyfriend kiss a woman who was supposed to be a friend of yours. Just you. And the desire to walk back out, or blink, or do
something
to make it not real. No music as you spoke, and no writers to make you say something interesting when you did. I wanted to denounce them both—scream—demand explanations—

But I said, “Um.”

They looked at me.

“Um,” I said again, in a very high voice that sounded nothing like me, and certainly didn’t sound the way I wanted to sound, which was unaffected by what I was looking at. “What are you guys
doing
?”

As if I couldn’t see what they were doing.

But my brain was already racing, constructing stories, making excuses, making it right. Making it not only okay, but
necessary
that Nate was kissing Helen.

Before I could come up with anything, Nate sighed. He shook his hair back from his forehead with a jerk of his head. He looked pained, as if he were the wounded party.

Helen touched her hand to her lips, and then squared her shoulders. She didn’t look even slightly pained.

She looked me straight in the eye and said, “I told him to tell you.”

And then everything went to pieces for a while.

When the smoke cleared—and I mean that literally, since the meal they were cooking got forgotten in the oven in all the yelling and started smoking right around the time Helen decided she was too fragile to handle all the drama so Nate (the scumbag) chased after her to make sure she was all right, leaving me to sob and rescue the charred remains of their illicit feast—I found myself sitting at the table in the kitchen, going drink for drink with Henry.

I wasn’t sure when he’d turned up in all the commotion, but I didn’t much care. I was stunned and angry. I was hurt. I couldn’t believe either one of them could have betrayed me, and certainly not
together.
I cried, and Henry handed me a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I thought that he was a good listener. And that my nose was running. Things got a little bit blurry.

I’d like to claim that Henry took advantage of my emotional state, and part of me still thought he did. True gentlemen, it didn’t need to be said, would not avail themselves of the weeping drunk girl they found in their kitchen, especially when they were the ones proffering the alcohol. But no one ever said Henry was a gentleman, and anyway, he was drunk himself. I’m not sure why drunk men were expected to be more responsible than drunk women—it seemed like further condescension toward women, quite frankly, but that was me avoiding the subject.

There was that other part of me. The part that remembered that it was me who leaned over and laid my mouth on his. Me who pulled him to his feet and then pushed him back onto the long oak table. Just as it was me who crawled up there on top of him. I had perfect frozen images of myself doing all of those things. Of the Celtic tattoo he had on his left shoulder blade. Of the sweet hollow between his pectoral muscles. And more.

What I didn’t remember was how we got upstairs, or what else happened that night, although I had the faintest memory of talking, held up close to him in that huge bed of his. And I distinctly recalled waking up sometime before dawn, with the expected hideous headache and parched throat, in a state of horror and despair. I also remembered the actual Walk of Shame I undertook then, cursing myself all the way. When I got home, I commenced crying, which I did for a long, long time.

I never told anyone.

I mean, I told them about Nate and Helen, of course. But as for Henry, I just told them that he’d let me in when he knew exactly what I was walking into, and let me walk on into it. I may have embellished his role. I may have added a smirk, and a tone, like he was enjoying himself. I may, in fact, have deliberately suggested that he’d enjoyed the whole spectacle at my expense.

And my friends had believed me, because it was easy enough to imagine Henry the Womanizing Scum also being Henry the Guy Who Finds It Amusing That His Roommate Is Cheating.

Not that Henry Farland was anyone’s victim. Hardly. He turned up at yet another birthday get-together the Wednesday after that night. He had the gall to seem surprised that I was mad at him.

“What was I supposed to do?” he asked, his eyes registering something sharper than their usual lazy amusement. “I’m not his butler. I wasn’t going to lie for him. Isn’t it better that you know, though?”

“Thanks for your concern for my feelings,” I snapped at him. “I suppose you’re so disgusted with his behavior that you’re kicking him out of your house, right?”

“Gus …” Henry shook his head. “I’m sorry that Nate treated you like that. I mean, the guy’s a jackass. But I’m not sure I can evict him over it.”

“Men.” I glared at him. “Fucking typical.”

“And anyway,” he said. “I think we have other things to talk about, don’t you?”

“We are never talking about that,” I hissed at him.

He blinked. “What?”

“It never happened,” I declared.

“Yeah, but it did.”

“Which I’m certainly never admitting, and neither are you!” My voice sounded scathing. It was because my heart was pounding too hard. Even talking about what had happened between us made me feel weak and angry and kind of slutty.

He just looked at me.

“Promise me!”

He shook his head. “Fine. Whatever you want.”

“What I
want
,” I snarled at him, “is to live in a world where people don’t break up with other people in such a horrible,
crappy
way. Where people are
grown-ups.
”

“Oh,” Henry said, his eyes narrowing. “You mean like where they talk about suddenly having sex with someone they’ve known for almost ten years? That kind of grown-up stuff?”

“I hate you,” I told him, and stormed away.

Roughly ten days later, I was wasted and belting out classic rock. A week after that, I was back at the scene of the crime. The only thing that had changed in the interim was the fact I’d managed to rile up Amy Lee and Georgia on my behalf. Not that it took much riling, when it came to Henry.

Anyone would do the same, I thought then. In all the years I’d known him, I had never harbored any romantic feelings for Henry. Other than thinking he was incredibly good-looking in that smooth, blond way, which was sort of like noticing that the sunset was pretty. It was just a fact. And I’d had plenty of time to consider my feelings for Henry in detail during the long years of Georgia’s obsession with him. There was no way I could admit that after years spent pointing out his numerous character flaws, all the ways in which he could never be worthy of Georgia, and the simple fact of his apparent disinterest in women over ninety pounds, I had accidentally slept with him. I wouldn’t know how to begin to broach the subject. It was far better to pretend it had never happened.

Jack Daniel’s had a lot to answer for.

Besides which, I knew perfectly well that Nate had a
thing
about Henry. You might even call it
jealousy.
If he found out, it wouldn’t be pretty.

I braced myself against another rush of cold wind. Linus was oblivious to the temperature as he romped around the frozen ground with another creature of indeterminate breed. The sky looked like snow, all sullen and metallic, which only added to my unpleasant mood. Nothing like a New England winter to beat the will to live right out of you.

I smiled at the other dog owner, and whistled for Linus when I could no longer feel my toes. He surprised me by obeying immediately. (It was
really
cold.) We trudged back to the sidewalk, where I clipped his leash to the metal ring on his collar and tugged him with me across the street.

Back in the steamy warmth of my cozy little hovel, I collapsed on my couch (liberated from my parents’ garage years ago, it boasted that black-and-white zigzag pattern that was now almost delightfully retro) and kicked at the blueberry dress. I’d left it crumpled in the middle of my puny living room when I’d arrived home last night. The blueberry pumps had gone to their maker via a quiet death in the garbage chute.

When the phone rang, I was so busy continuing to justify my hate-on for Henry that I didn’t glance at the caller ID.

That was proving to be a costly mistake.

“Gus,” Helen purred at me. “I took a chance that you’d be home. I’d love to see you, just for a quick chat. Would you mind if I dropped by?”

“Um …”

“Excellent!” she cried. “I’ll be about a half hour.”

Which was how the enemy found her way into my home.

chapter nine

F
irst, though, I threw myself into one of those whirlwind cleaning frenzies, the sort you could only summon the energy to perform when someone was about to enter your house for the first time in years. (Or when your mother called to announce she was dropping by, but that was a whole different level of panic.) Having lived with me when I was eighteen, Helen knew that I had once been lackadaisical about housework, to the point of outright slovenliness from time to time. The fact that this was still true over ten years later was irrelevant. I just couldn’t allow her to assume I was still my eighteen-year-old self, based on my continuing lack of housekeeping skills.

Helen, I was sure, would take one look at the dust bunnies cavorting about in the corners and assume they were stand-ins for deep-seated character flaws she’d long suspected lurked within me. Dust bunnies were
representational
, as every woman with a subscription to
Real Simple
knew full well. I refused to let Helen think she had some kind of shortcut into my psyche based on my inability to wield a Swiffer.

It wasn’t only my house that needed cleaning, either. When you’ve had the bad luck to spend an evening with a collection of your nemeses in a Royal Blueberry Bridesmaid’s Gown (with matching bag and shoes), you’ll find that you
cannot bear
to let your number-one nemesis see you in all your Saturday morning glory. It wasn’t just that I suspected I looked bad. It was that looking bad in front of Helen would
prove
that Nate had been right to dump me for her. That I deserved it because I was fat, ugly, and unlovable.

Sure, it was pathological. Welcome to neurotic womanhood. It wasn’t like I was alone.

Every woman I knew had
specific
complaints about
that thing
that rendered her ugly and unlovable. I’d yet to meet a woman who didn’t have her own secret shame hidden away in there somewhere, clutched in tight fists by her sulking twelve-year-old child within.

Georgia, for example, never seemed to care about her weight or her clothes size. She told me once she’d never in her life fit into clothes below the double digits and paid no attention to it anyway. She
enjoyed
being statuesque. And yet she hated her ankles. For years, she’d refused to wear short skirts because she felt her ankles were so thick that she ran the risk of having people point and laugh at them. It didn’t matter how many times you told her they were fine, either, she still wept over those shoes with ankle loops and considered herself deformed.

Amy Lee, meanwhile, was obsessed with her thighs. The fact that she was tiny, had never worn a garment above a size four in her life, and had a flat stomach no matter what she ate or how little she exercised? She didn’t care. She was forever railing against the
tyranny
of bikinis and rattling on about
minimizing
her
thunder thighs.

For me, without question and despite certain Oracle of Delphi moments concerning my own thighs, it was my belly. The belly that refused to turn into abs no matter how many crunches I performed or how few carbs I ate. (This obviously led to alternating phases wherein there were no crunches and only carbs, to soothe the pain.) Either way, the belly hung there over the edge of my otherwise fabulous low-slung jeans, rounded and spiteful, despite my best efforts. I was convinced the belly made me a troll. That it was disfiguring. That it was the
outward evidence
of my true inner unlovableness. No one could convince me otherwise.

Helen knew about my belly issues. She would be able to glance at me, see the belly that damned me, and use it against me to play on my worst fears. And what could I use against her? She claimed to feel oppressed by her eyebrows, which was weak, to say the least. Eyebrows could be tweezed into submission. My belly just hung out for all to see.

A glance in the bathroom mirror confirmed it: I looked like the sea hag. (Not
a
sea hag—
the
sea hag.) It went without saying that I also looked fat. My hair was mushed into vaguely geometric shapes, and the less said about my half-hungover eyes, the better.

Of course
Helen was on her way.
Of course
she, out of all the people I knew in Boston, should get to witness the haggishness.

It was just so unfair.

So I cleaned like a whirling dervish for about fifteen minutes, which involved flinging the contents of my living room into my bedroom and shutting the door, and then attacking particularly egregious problem areas with a Swiffer and some Windex. After that I dove into the shower, where I held my breath and stood under the hottest spray I could handle. Then the coldest spray. Then the hottest again. When I climbed out of the ancient, claw-footed tub (the sort of tub that was only cool when it came with a matching, painstakingly renovated country house—otherwise it was just old and you had to use one of those handheld things clipped to a pole as your showerhead) part of me was shivering and part of me was scalded, but the bags under my eyes were gone.

I just had time to twist my hair back and throw on a pair of jeans and a sweater that I would normally wear only to work but looked like the sort of thing I imagined Naomi Watts might lounge about in on a rustic weekend. I applied a strategic layer of cover-up to approximate the flush of health. I was arranging my magazines into piles—with the more intellectual ones on top, of course, and the weeks of
US Weekly
hidden below—when my buzzer went off.

As Linus reacted with his usual hysteria, I had a moment to consider just not letting her in. She couldn’t actually
make
me open the door to her, after all.

Maybe I wanted to talk to her more than I wanted to admit to myself. I pressed the DOOR button.

Helen swept into my apartment moments later looking like an advertisement for Banana Republic’s snazzy winter line. Those who were naturally slim, after all, looked adorable in puffy white winter coats with bulky scarves. It was the rest of us who looked blown up to five times our natural size, as if we were auditioning for the role of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man’s girlfriend, not that I’d wanted to wear that coat. I tried not to hold it against her, but failed.

Once inside, Helen patted the very top of Linus’s head in a manner that indicated that a) she didn’t like dogs, b) she specifically didn’t like
my
dog, c) she suspected Linus might attack her, and d) she would very much like to wash her hands. If it was calculated to get under my skin, it worked.

I watched Helen take in my apartment and tried to imagine the place through her eyes. The same rescued furniture and posters on the wall—although I had actually framed all the posters a few summers ago, after deciding that I could probably upgrade my walls from frat boy chic to something a bit more in line with what I felt my tastes ought to be. I’d only gotten as far as early dorm room, I noticed, having been sidetracked by laziness. Aside from the posters, wherever there was room, there were books. Stacks and stacks of books. Books crammed into mismatched shelves and towers of books up to the ceiling. I liked my books.

I was a sucker for libraries and book collections of any kind, in fact. Give me shelves piled high with books and I was set for days at a time. My favorite private library was the gorgeous little den in Henry’s house, the one I’d spent some quality time in while Nate crashed out in front of ESPN. Henry’s library, of course, was probably for show. No self-respecting member of the New England elite would dream of living in a home without an ostentatious display of intellect. But that didn’t mean Henry had read any of the books himself. Nor did it detract from the gorgeous chocolate leather couches arrayed around the fireplace.

My apartment, needless to say, was not on par with Henry’s house.

“Wow,” Helen said after a moment, pursing her lips slightly and nodding to herself as she settled on the edge of my couch, her back perfectly straight. “I can’t remember the last time I was over here, and it looks exactly the same. Didn’t we have that Picasso poster on the wall at BU?”

She might as well have said,
You are still eighteen years old and a fool. My taking Nate was no more than you deserved.

Maybe because what she
might as well have said
was echoing in my ears, it cleared my head of embarrassment and led me straight into my anger. My deep, cleansing, articulate anger.

“Why are you here?” I demanded without preamble. “Why do you keep calling me, and chasing me into bathrooms, and appearing at my door? Are you stalking me?”

That knocked the little holier-than-thou smile off her face.

“Of course I’m not
stalking
you!”

“And yet here you are.” I opened my hands wide. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“I wanted to clear the air,” Helen said. She let out an affronted sound. “That was all. Trust you to take a nice gesture and turn it into something awful.”

“Which nice gesture is this, now?” I pretended not to understand. “The one when you were running around behind my back with Nate? Or the face-sucking that I walked in on?”

Helen crossed her arms beneath her chest and visibly bit back what I’d bet would have been a nasty comment. We looked at each other, while Linus rolled around on the floor between us, joyful and completely oblivious to the tension.

“You know, I understand that you’re upset,” Helen said coolly. “But
I
wasn’t dating you.
I
didn’t cheat on you.”

I opened my mouth, and then shut it again.

Much as it hurt me to admit it, Helen had a point.

I just wanted Nate back. I wanted explanations and apologies from Helen. It turned out that she was the one I was
really
mad at.

On a philosophical level, I found this appalling. Way back in my college days, I’d concluded that there was nothing more pathetic and wrongheaded than a woman who opted to reserve her ire for the Other Woman. Not her misbehaving partner, who was the one doing the betraying, but the Other Woman, who had presumably never made any promises to the woman, or anyway, none like the ones the partner had made. We used to sit and watch daytime television on Amy Lee’s crappy little set, rolling our eyes at all the betrayed girlfriends who catapulted themselves up and over the cheating body of their man to pummel the woman he’d cheated with. What was
that
all about, we demanded, waving fistfuls of SnackWells in the air. What does
she
have to do with the primary relationship?
She
was just a symptom.
He
was the problem.

And yet, all these years later, there I was doing the same old tired thing. I hardly knew what to make of myself.

Except the fact that the Other Woman in this scenario wasn’t some faceless creature—she was my friend. Or I’d thought she was my friend. So while it was possible I was betraying the sisterhood by wanting to forgive Nate, I was angry with Helen all on her own merits.

“You’re right,” I snapped at her. “We weren’t dating. But, correct me if I’m wrong here, you and I were supposed to be friends. Friends don’t steal each other’s boyfriends. It’s like the number-one cardinal rule.”

“You and Nate were never going to work out,” Helen said dismissively. “It would have been like Lisa all over again. He would have dated you forever but believe me, nothing would’ve come of it. At least you found out what he was up to. You should thank me for that.”

“Thank you?” I pressed my fingers against my temples because I couldn’t process what she’d just said. It was too astounding. I plowed forward. “You knew how much I liked him! You
knew
how excited I was about him! And you decided that meant you should hang all over him for the rest of the summer!”

“I did you a favor!” Helen retorted. “You’re supposed to be
my
friend, Gus. I can’t believe how resistant you are to even the possibility that I might be happy!”

I blinked at her. “What am I supposed to say to that? Do you want me to
apologize
that I’m not more supportive of the new relationship you have because
you stole it from me
?”

“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry for my part in this. I just wanted to let you know that. Even though, once you get over being mad about stuff, I think you’ll agree that this is for the best.”

Why did they both keep saying that to me?

“I’m glad you think so,” I replied. “But right now I’m pretty sure that’s never going to happen.”

“I know Nate,” Helen said with a shrug. Then she smiled at me, a big, wide smile. It was alarming, to say the least. “And speaking of Nate, I’m
thrilled
that you and he are able to be friends again. I know he’s relieved. He never meant to hurt you, Gus. And I’m just so pleased that you can look past your anger with him and remember the years of friendship—”

As was becoming usual around Helen, I found it hard to believe that what was happening was
actually
happening. And yet …

“—Because really what matters here is the friendship. We all need to make sure that no one forgets that, you know?” She seemed to want a response.

“Of course,” I murmured. “Friendship is what counts. As I believe I’ve been trying to point out to you.”

“I knew you’d understand!” she cried.

She went on like this for some time, extolling the virtues of Nate’s and my
friendship.
How happy she was we were
friends.
How important it was not to let emotional upset destroy
friendships
, because everybody needed
friends
, especially if romantic relationships couldn’t possibly have worked out anyway … And blah
friends
blah
friendship
blah. She wisely steered clear of our own supposed friendship.

I’m not sure when it dawned on me that she was doing damage control.

All I knew was that at some point, the more she used the word
friend
, the more I became certain that anyone who was genuinely interested in encouraging a healing sort of friendship between her current boyfriend and his ex would not haul her ass across town on a weekend to share this interest with said ex. In fact, there was only one reason I could imagine for anyone to invest this much energy in a friendship between two other people, and that reason had nothing to do with the goodness of Helen’s heart or her finer motives. It did, however, have a lot to do with that look I’d seen on Nate’s face the night before. As if there was something only we knew. Helen must have seen more of that exchange than I’d realized. It must have worried her.