Friendship (8 page)

“Not a lot. I mean I wasn’t online a lot today,” she said. “We’re in the country, you know. We hiked and stuff. We saw scenic vistas. The people who live in this house are weird; everything is arranged in this really anal way. They live here year-round—which I can’t even imagine how someone would be able to stand to do that. It’s so quiet here, and like ten people live in this town. I guess they go into the city pretty often. Anyway, tomorrow we’re going to—” And then she looked at the phone and realized he hadn’t heard any of it because they’d been cut off. She thought of calling back, but a wave of sleepiness overtook her and she texted “Cut off! I miss you” before rolling over and turning out the light. She was lightly asleep when her phone lit up with a reply. “I miss you too baby. I kiss you. Goodnight.” She wished he’d said “I love you,” but it wasn’t really a thing they did.

10

There was a big, muddy footprint in the middle of the patch of watermelons, and the kale had been picked unevenly—its mature outer leaves left alone, its tender inner leaves ripped out too roughly, leaving ragged edges. The house sitters had also left a load of laundry in the washing machine, which, if Sally and Jason’s flight had been delayed or something, would have moldered there for a day before anyone could have transferred it to the dryer. But other than that, Sally had to admit to herself that she was impressed by how well the pair of girls had taken care of things. She walked around the yard and then reentered through the basement, taking pleasure in surveying her domain. She liked letting people stay in her house when she wasn’t there—aside from the minor inconvenience and grossness (their skin flakes in her guest room mattresses, the hair too dark to be hers and too long to be Jason’s in the shower drain). Her house was too beautiful not to share. She hoped the girls who’d stayed there had been impressed and jealous.

She was down in the basement laundry room, loading their sheets into the dryer so that she could put her London clothes in the wash, when she heard the doorbell ring and hurried upstairs to answer it.

“I’m so sorry, but I forgot my computer charger, and I just googled them, and did you have any idea how much they cost? They cost like ninety dollars!” said the person at the door. She was taller than Sally and wearing a hooded sweatshirt. Sally peered at the girl on the steps behind her, who was smaller, with limp blond hair. The tall girl hazarded a smile. “I’m sorry. We’re the … we were here this weekend? Amy and Bev?”

“Hi!” said Sally. “Sorry it took me a minute to put it together! I’m so jet-lagged. Please come on in. Do you know where you left it?”

“I think it’s either in the dining room or the office,” said Amy, stepping past Sally, scanning the room for her lost charger. Sally stood back and let her enter. It was odd to watch a stranger move around in your house as though she lived there. The other girl hung back. Sally motioned for her to step all the way in and then shut the front door behind them.

“I’m so sorry you had to come all the way back here. Are you going to miss your train back to the city?”

“No. We can’t miss it, because it’s the last one tonight, and some of us will get fired if we don’t show up to our jobs at nine a.m. tomorrow, so we are definitely not going to miss it,” said the second girl, talking directly to her friend, basically treating Sally like an interfering parent.

“Oh my god, Bev, I am so sorry, okay? I said I was sorry. If I can’t find it in five minutes, I’ll just buy a new one.”

“Ugh, I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at me for having this stupid temp job,” Bev said. She joined Amy in rummaging around under the glass-topped dining room table, looking in the corners of the room.

“No, it’s fine, be mad at me! I’m mad at me!” Amy said.

Bev cracked a smile. “Fine, I’m mad.” She looked at Sally. “I am so sorry to invade like this, but I’m just going to head up to the study. Is that okay?”

“Sure. I mean, I think Jason might be in there, though,” Sally said, but Bev was already on her way up the stairs, taking them two at a time. Seconds later, she was running back down the stairs.
“I found it!”
she shrieked.

“My hero!” Amy said, and as Sally watched, they embraced each other without a hint of self-consciousness. “Okay, it’s five fifty-four. Can we do it? Can you drive superfast?”

“I think so.” The girls were almost out the door before either of them seemed to remember that Sally was standing there.

“Thank you so much for having us, Mrs.… uh, Ms. Katzen,” Bev said, sounding like a midwesterner. “I hope you had a nice trip!”

“Please come back anytime,” Sally called after them as they dove into the car.

When she came back into the dining room, Jason was standing on the landing. He seemed amused, if slightly bewildered.

“What was that?”

Sally shrugged. “I don’t know. I kind of enjoyed it, though.”

“Me too,” said Jason.

“Ha, you perv.”

“Not like that, just … it’s nice to see who’s been here, you know? I wonder if they liked it.”

“Of course they liked it,” said Sally, heading to the kitchen to start dinner. “They probably live in some hovel.”

“Like your old hovel?” When Jason met Sally, she’d lived in 350 square feet above an old pornographic movie theater on Second Avenue. The sad, repetitive porn music had reverberated through her floorboards.

“Nowhere near as glamorous as my old hovel,” Sally told him.

Sometimes Sally wished for her younger self to come and hang out with her, to come over for drinks on the porch, maybe, like any friend might. She could show young Sally her beautiful house and watch her be impressed, and young Sally could tell her some entertaining story about working at a gross titty bar or a used bookstore that was like a cult, some anecdote that old—older—Sally had forgotten, even though she’d experienced it.

This was impossible, of course, because of the laws of space and time. But maybe she could become friends with Bev and Amy. That might be the next best thing.

11

Bev rode her bike to the restaurant where she was meeting Steve, even though she knew it would mess up her hair and make her sweaty. She had also resisted the impulse to dress nicely, had instead worn her worst jeans and a billowy top that had once caused a well-meaning stranger to give up his subway seat because he’d assumed that she was pregnant. She knew it was dumb, that it didn’t make any sense to accept Steve’s invitation and then do her best to sabotage the date, but it was a way of affirming to herself that she was there only for the meal. Tolerating Steve’s company was the price of her dinner. At least sixty dollars, maybe more with lots of drinks, and she certainly planned to order those. It had been so long since she’d had a nice meal in a restaurant with someone else picking up the tab.

And they were no longer coworkers, at least. The new week had brought a new temp assignment: she was answering the phone, which so far had rung once, at the New York corporate headquarters of a small French bank. There was nothing to do, because no one gave her anything to do. Everyone in the office treated her as though she were brain-damaged because she didn’t speak French. By 10:00 a.m. she had decided to call Steve, and after they made plans for that evening and hung up, she’d spent at least an hour at her desk examining the restaurant’s menu online, thinking about what she would order.

As he walked into the lounge at the front of the restaurant, Steve looked genuinely happy to see her and also, she hated noticing, kind of hot. He looked like he’d come straight from work and he was wearing a nice dark-colored jacket and a button-down shirt. When he leaned in for a polite half-hug hello, she smelled his cedar cologne and felt the heat of his body through the crisp shirt. She regretted her own sweaty rumpledness for a moment, then mentally chided herself for caring.

They were seated quickly. Steve seemed to know the whole staff, glad-handing his way to their table with a series of high fives and smile-nods. They barely had time to exchange “how was your day” type pleasantries before a waitress came to their table and began listing the specials, using the New York–specific restaurant dialect Bev had almost forgotten: “I have an appetizer of house-cured gravlax on toast, and that’s going to be coming with a house-made ricotta and it’s going to be fourteen? And it’s really, really super yummy.” The girl smiled impersonally at them. “I’ll give you a minute?”

As she walked away, Bev and Steve both noticed the waitress’s butt, clad in high-waisted jeans; the waitress was the rare individual who looked good in them. They turned from the butt back to each other and were unable to avoid acknowledging its perfectness.

“Damn,” said Bev.

“She could serve drinks off that thing! I’m so glad you said something!” Steve said. “I was like … do I say something, or would that be just totally inappropriate and rude?”

“Ha, well, it’s an amazing butt,” said Bev.

“I just want to grab it! Don’t you just want to reach out and touch it?”

“I … uh. I guess.”

“Ha! You’re cool, Bev.” Steve smiled. “You want to do some apps? I’m gonna do the fried artichokes, I think.”

“I think I’m going to … uh, the gravlax thing sounded good,” Bev said weakly.

“We’re definitely doing a bottle of wine, right?”

“Definitely. Yes. Most definitely.”

The wine didn’t arrive right away, and as Bev struggled to make small talk with Steve, she felt her bike sweat curdling into the makings of a panic attack. Why had she agreed to spend the next few hours in the company of someone she didn’t like? Was she that hungry? Her scalp prickled, and she could feel a flush creeping up her neck, her milk-pale skin betraying her as usual: a transparent screen her feelings were projected onto from the inside. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom real quick,” she told Steve.

In the bathroom she scrabbled in her purse for her little pill case, broke a Klonopin in half with her teeth, then, after a split second of consideration, swallowed both halves with a handful of cold water from the sink. She ran cold water over her pulse points and looked herself in the eye, willing herself to feel normal. She took in the details of the bathroom, its studied stylishness: the
EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS
sign lettered in Helvetica and printed on heavy card stock, the black and white tiles. Noticing details calmed her down as it always did, but the drug hadn’t yet kicked in; she dropped to her knees and pressed her forehead to the tile for a moment, breathing deeply. Whenever this happened, she felt something like nausea that wasn’t nausea, quite, but it had in common with nausea the feeling of having something inside that needed to be expelled. Bev felt full of something terrible, but she was trapped in the feeling: the something-terrible was part of her, inextricable from the rest of her.

When she stood up again, the tile had made a red mark in the center of her forehead. She hoped Steve would be too busy staring at their waitress’s ass to notice. It was a lot more comfortable to feel straightforward contempt for him than to feel anything else.

“Did you fall in? Heh, just kidding, I know there’s always an intense line for the bathroom here. You know why?” he lowered his voice to a whisper. “’Cause the whole staff is cokeheads. That’s why the food is so good. They have, like, a
laser
focus.”

Their wine had arrived, thank god. Bev drank half of her first glass in a gulp. “Uh, all staff at all restaurants everywhere are cokeheads,” she said. “Have you never worked at a restaurant?”

“Nah. I worked construction in college. My dad’s an electrician.”

“Oh, cool. My family’s also in construction, sort of; my dad runs a small lumberyard.” Bev had not wanted to tell Steve anything about herself, nothing real at least, but she’d been taken aback by his revelation. She had him pegged for a child of privilege, or at least of a general contractor.

Construction and their respective families took them through the first course, which Steve ate with gusto and terrible table manners, which Bev sort of liked because she didn’t have to feel self-conscious about her own ungraceful fork maneuvers. She felt comfortable with Steve in general, she realized, and not only because of the wine and the antianxiety medication. He reminded her in some ways of Todd, or at least of how she’d felt around Todd. She thought this, then realized that if she was going to keep acting normal, it was very very important not to think about Todd. Anyway, Todd had had perfect table manners.

“You’re quiet all of a sudden. Is everything okay?”

“Oh! Yeah, sorry. Just focusing on the food. To be honest, it’s the best meal I’ve had in a while.” Why. Jesus. It was like neural impulses were just exiting straight through her mouth.

“Right? I told you! To cocaine!” Steve raised his wineglass in a toast. “Let’s get another bottle, right?”

Two bottles of wine and three courses later, Bev was rehearsing a little speech about how she had to get up early and it had been so much fun, but Steve wasn’t ready for the fun to end just yet. “Oh, they have a whole menu of after-dinner drinks! Digestifs! What do you say, Bev? I love cognac and Armagnac and all that shit. Sambuca? Pastis? Anything?”

Bev skimmed the dessert menu the waitress had left on their table, and her eye caught on a rare vintage of Flemish liqueur familiar to her from her stint pouring wine at that pretentious wine bar in Madison. She’d treated herself to many covert sips of the stuff, but never a full glass. And it really would be nice to aid her digestion. She certainly hadn’t needed to eat the lobster quenelles
and
a pasta course; a sip of Flement would sluice right through them. Her system was more used to rice and beans and kale, the staples of her low-budget grocery runs.

Moments later, she was raising a snifter of the syrupy liqueur to her lips. It tasted like sun on a field. A sense of well-being radiated throughout her entire digestive tract. It was the sensation, concentrated in a glass, of having enough money to pay for dinner out anytime you wanted.

Steve took an appreciative sip. “Holy shit. How’d you know about this stuff?”