Friendship (15 page)

“Do you guys still do it?”

“Um … yeah. Well. Not tons. Usually, like, waking up in the middle of the night and kind of … sleep-raping each other. The kind of sex where you wake up in the morning and are like, ‘Did that happen?’”

“Eugh.”

“Should I ask him about it?”

“Well, my impulse would be of course you have to confront him, but that’s me. I mean, don’t ask right off the bat if he was fucking her, obviously. Just ask if that’s why he was crying. You knew her too, right? It wouldn’t be so weird for you to be like ‘Hey Todd, I heard so-and-so died. Horrible—are we going to the funeral,’ et cetera.”

“And then what if…”

“Well, geez, Bev, if he was cheating on you with her, then you have to be jealous of a dead person, which is heinous, but I don’t see any way to avoid it. And also you have to leave him, move back to New York, and live with me until you can manage to find a job here, but that’s not all bad, is it?”

“It sounds pretty bad. I already moved to New York with nothing once, after college. I didn’t anticipate having to do it twice. It wasn’t fun. I ate peanut butter soup.”

“You ate what?”

“This recipe for the cheapest soup possible; it fills you up and it’s really nutritious. I found it in a vegetarian cookbook. You combine a cup of peanut butter with whatever vegetables are on sale, plus a can of whole tomatoes. It’s good over rice. Or, well, not
good
per se, but it’s food.”

“Well, what else are you going to do?”

Bev thought about it. She could go home and never mention anything to Todd and quietly wait for things to return to what was currently passing for normal. That was one option. Another option was the one Amy had just suggested. A third option was driving her car into a tree, which under the circumstances seemed melodramatic, possibly unwarranted, and, if warranted, poetically just in a way that did not appeal to Bev. The accident that had killed the blond, smiley tax lawyer had taken place on the highway, had involved an overturned tractor-trailer.

“I guess I’ll do what you said.”

“You guess, or you will?”

“I will.” Bev paused. “Do you still have that same couch that’s really uncomfortable to sleep on, or have you upgraded?”

“In part because of what you said the last time you visited, I am the owner of a pullout sofa bed now. It’s all yours for as long as you need it.”

“Okay. It’s a deal.”

What Bev found hardest to explain to herself, when she remembered this period of time, were the three days she had stayed with Todd after discovering his betrayal, before finally buying a plane ticket, packing up her minimal things, and moving in with Amy in New York. Partly it had seemed wrong to leave someone who was grieving, even if he was grieving for someone with whom he had been cheating on you (under your nose! for months! and all your mutual “friends” had known about it!). When she’d finally come home on the day of the newspaper headline, after she’d driven through the fields for so long that she was low on gas and the backs of her thighs were deeply imprinted with the lines of the car seat’s upholstery, Todd had been waiting for her on their stoop. He had embraced her somberly and led her to the kitchen, where he’d made dinner—Greek salad with grilled chicken and bottled low-fat dressing—and poured them both large glasses of white wine. She sat and ate mechanically and drank big, sour gulps of the wine as he reached his hand across the table to her and, with tears streaming down his face, told her everything. Really everything. At some point, much too late, she put down her fork and put up one of her hands to shush him.

“I don’t need the details. You know? I would prefer not to know the details,” she said, and the sound of her own voice was like listening to someone else’s voice on the radio, some reasonable NPR host’s voice filtering softly in from another room.

“I’m sorry. I just needed to tell someone, and … honey, you’re the closest friend I have here.” He wiped his face with a paper napkin, paused, sniffled, and forked up a bite of salad. “I understand if you want to leave, but I hope you know how much your support means to me. I feel so terrible right now. This is a very strange situation.”

It was a strange situation, to be sure. Bev had never experienced anything like it. How could she speak or think or make decisions while, in her brain, all her neurological furniture was being forcibly rearranged? Her memories of the past few months, her hopes for the future, and her assumptions about the present were all obsolete. Each conscious thought that occurred to her now prompted a strange kind of examination. Did the thought jibe with what she now knew, or was it outmoded? Most of them were the latter. But what would happen to those thoughts? Where would they go? She didn’t want to give them up just yet. It was like owning a dress you knew no longer fit and never would again, but still not wanting to give it to Goodwill. But it was also like being repeatedly punched in the stomach.

Worse, somehow, on top of the druggy sense of constant neural reordering was the weirdness of wanting to turn to Todd for comfort, forgetting—from one moment to the next—that he was the reason she felt terrible and so could not, by definition, make her feel better. She tried to say some of this to him, but instead she began to sob. He stopped talking and came to her side of the table and put his arms around her and also sobbed. Realizing that he was not necessarily crying for the same reason she was—was likely not—made Bev sob harder.

But on the third day, after Todd left the house for the first time for reasons he left vague but at an hour that Bev knew meant he was attending his classmate’s memorial service, Bev put her clothes and books into a suitcase and a large green duffel bag and called a car service to take her to the airport. She called Amy as soon as she figured out when she would be landing and then called the owner of the wine bar and tendered her resignation. The owner assured her it wasn’t necessary to be so apologetic, that it was a college town and people came and went easily in these kinds of positions.

“I just feel so bad,” Bev told her. “I really thought I’d be here much longer.”

“No point in feeling bad about something that’s a done deal,” the owner told her. “You knock ’em dead in the big city!”

The flight was unusually turbulent, but for the first time in her life Bev experienced no terror that the plane might crash. Maybe she had attained the ideal state that Buddhists strive for: nonattachment, even to her own life. More likely she was going to need to see her old shrink when she got back to New York and to start taking antidepressants again as soon as possible. It couldn’t be healthy to care so little about whether you lived or died.

*   *   *

AMY’S APARTMENT BECAME,
temporarily, Amy and Bev’s apartment, a circumstance that by the third month had started to seem difficult to sustain much longer. Bev was trying to be a dream roommate, folding up the sofa bed every morning and hiding her bedding in the closet, cleaning up after herself and Amy without being asked and without making a big deal about doing so. But it was a small apartment, and Bev could tell that Amy was used to living in it by herself, that simply by being there, she was cramping Amy’s style. She needed to move out, but without a job, that was impossible, and she hadn’t found one yet, not even another service job. The restaurant managers who interviewed her seemed to intuit her fragility; they spoke to her with a gentleness that was more than professional. She was still crying a lot; anything could make her cry: a song sung by subway buskers, a dead pigeon in the gutter, an ad for life insurance with an older couple holding hands, talking frankly about what they wanted to leave as a legacy. No wonder she was blowing the interviews. It was impossible to seem upbeat and customer-service-oriented when you weren’t really feeling sane.

But even though it was happening so slowly it was almost indiscernible, there were times when Bev could sense that she was making progress. She and Amy cooked meals and watched TV together, and Amy would make a joke, they’d laugh, and Bev would forget for a fraction of a second that she was in pain. In those moments she felt as good as she was capable of feeling. But sometimes Amy retreated into her room and Bev felt more alone and out of place in the world than ever. Everything that had happened to her in Madison seemed as if it had been her fault—her fault for going there in the first place, for trusting Todd so completely, and most of all for valuing being with Todd over her life in New York, over her friendship with Amy. She’d tried to explain this to Amy, and Amy just shrugged and told her that there was never any point in regretting anything, because you couldn’t change the past, so it was a useless waste of mental energy to even think about it. It was basically the same thing her old wine-bar boss had said when she’d quit, and she hadn’t quite bought it then, either. Bev got that regret was pointless, but she also didn’t think forgetting everything bad that ever happened was the way forward. She didn’t say this to Amy.

When Bev told Amy that Todd was coming to town for a weekend trip to see friends and that he wanted to see her and also drop off some of her stuff, Amy had been against it. She said the apartment had a “no emotional manipulation” policy. But Bev had convinced her, of course, and now he was coming, under the condition (Bev’s idea) that Amy be there to chaperone.

*   *   *

BEV AND AMY
sat at the kitchen table, a bottle of cold white wine between them, half an hour before Todd was due to arrive. The first time she refilled their glasses, Bev had put the bottle back in the refrigerator, but the second time she just left it on the table; she knew they would finish it before it had time to get warm. She felt oddly becalmed, but maybe it was just numbness. She’d imagined what it would be like to see Todd’s face again. She had shower-monologued scathing condemnations of his behavior and his personality so many times that it didn’t seem particularly relevant that the moment was on the verge of really happening; she’d almost lived it already. So when she heard the buzzer, the stab of terror that shot through her viscera took her by surprise.

“This was a terrible idea. Oh my god. I can’t do this. Can you just go downstairs and get the stuff and tell him to leave?”

Amy wrinkled her forehead, her eyebrows—those hyper caterpillars—a-twitch. “If that’s what you want. Are you sure?”

Bev took a few deep breaths. The buzzer sounded again—a little obnoxiously, as though Todd were unused to having any of his needs go unmet even for a few seconds.

Amy rolled her eyes. “Grow up, Todd.”

Amy’s attitude, the way she’d summed up Todd’s problem, gave Bev courage. She walked over to the intercom, hit the “talk” button, and said “Be right down” in an almost totally normal tone of voice, as though Todd were no more threatening than the FedEx guy.

On the stoop she barely looked at him, just said “C’mon up” and stood to one side to allow him to pass. He paused, as if expecting her to offer to help with the giant cardboard box in his hands or to start climbing the stairs first, but she did neither. There was no way she’d kick off their interaction by turning her back to him, letting him climb a flight of stairs with her ass at his eyeline. He was wearing khakis, and he seemed, Bev judged, to have gained a small but consequential amount of weight.

In the apartment, she watched as Amy, still seated with her wine, returned Todd’s mild, phony greetings with an icy stare. Finally she said “Hi” in a way that made that single syllable sound sarcastic. Bev felt an odd mixture of awe and annoyance. Couldn’t Amy just act indifferent and normal? No. She had to make it completely clear that she despised Todd, as though some imaginary audience were watching, judging her on consistency.

“Let’s talk in private for a sec,” Bev heard herself saying. She was afraid to meet Amy’s eyes as she led Todd back toward Amy’s bedroom and shut the door.

He put the box down with a small grunt, and then they were unavoidably looking at each other. Todd attempted a smile, winced, but held her gaze. Just standing this close to him—close enough to smell his soapy, faintly milky, familiar body smell—brought Bev back to their earliest days together, those hallucinatory hours in bed and the brief and equally unreal-seeming times they’d had to be apart, when she’d floated through life lost in a fantasy of effortless and endless love. She forgot all her carefully planned insults immediately. She wanted to bury herself in his arms and die there.

Todd seemed to be on the same page. “Bev, you don’t know how much I’ve missed you. Feel free to say no, but … can we hug?”

Why deny him? Why deny herself? She stepped into his arms. She hadn’t touched anyone or been touched in a while, unless you counted the horrible armpitty intimacy of the subway; and his body pressing against the answering areas of her own was too much. She started to cry. Todd smoothed her hair and whispered “Shh” as her tears and snot soaked into the shoulder of his polo shirt.

When Amy slammed the door open, they broke apart as though they’d been caught doing something bad, which they had.

“No fucking way is this happening under my roof. Look, asshole, you are here to give Bev her things and leave, not to rip off the scab she’s spent a lot of time and effort generating over the fucking gaping emotional wound you inflicted on her.”

“Ew,” Bev said under her breath.

“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t think of a less disgusting way of putting it, but you know I’m right! Don’t get sucked back in. Todd has ruined enough of your life.”

“Please stay out of this, Amy. It really isn’t any of your business,” Todd said quietly, and then both of them looked at Bev.

It was up to her, she realized, to align herself with one or the other of them. If she chose Amy, she was in for—in the immediate future—a lecture, more tears, cigarettes, more wine. Maybe ice cream. But beyond that point, the future was uncertain. If she chose Todd, her immediate future might contain apologetic, teary, possibly incredible sex, though it wasn’t clear where they would do it. In the long term, though—that was the thing. She already knew what it would be like, in the long term, with Todd. She could pretend to herself that she didn’t know for a night, but not for much longer. And what she’d be sacrificing, besides the months of scab generation that Amy had mentioned, would be Amy. They would still be friends, but something would be lost. Obnoxious as she’d been about it, Amy had taken a risk to try to protect Bev—from Todd, and from Bev’s own worst impulses. Amy had never done that before; if Bev rejected her help now, she probably wouldn’t offer it again.