In Twenty Years: A Novel (18 page)

“Do you know that I made out with Jason Cohen two nights before Owen and I hooked up?” Catherine narrows her eyes, re-creating the memory. “Do you remember him? Jason Cohen? He lived on the floor below us. Played acoustic guitar. That’s what did it for me.”

Annie’s pale skin reddens, camouflaging her freckles, and Catherine can see she’s surprised at the admission. But Catherine doesn’t have many girlfriends. Who else is she supposed to share this with?

“I remember him, sure.” She nods. “But he wasn’t nearly as cute as Owen!”

Catherine frowns, reconciling her memory with Annie’s declaration. Maybe he wasn’t as cute as Owen. Maybe the years have distorted things, turned everything upside down.

“Anyway,” Catherine continues, “I was a little bit obsessed with Jason Cohen those first few days of school. I think these days, I’d affectionately refer to it as
stalking
.”

Annie knows from affectionate stalking (Google: Colin Radcliffe).

“So we made out and stayed up all night while he played, like, Cat Stevens for me, and I was convinced that he was the guy. You know,
the guy.
Why was I so hung up on finding
the guy
so quickly?”

Annie drums the table with her fingers. “Your guy
did
make you happy.”

“Yeah.” Catherine considers this for a moment. “But would you tell your daughter to be in such a rush to find
the guy
?”

“I don’t have a daughter.”

Catherine flops on a dining-room chair. “Well, anyway, the next night I knocked on his door, but his roommate told me he was having a jam session in some other guy’s room I didn’t know, and I was too embarrassed to go find him. I mean, it was the first week of school! I didn’t want to seem desperate.”

“I can’t imagine you ever being desperate.”

“When I saw him for breakfast at the dining hall, he said, ‘What’s up,’ and told me I should drop by some off-campus party that night. And I was like . . . Annie, you don’t even know. I was like: ‘Oh. My. God!’”

They laugh then because they might be almost forty, but it’s not hard to remember the giddy pit in your stomach, the accelerated heartbeat, the stammering for words, the sheer joy that accompanied youthful infatuation.

“Seriously, I died. I ran back to my room and picked out a bunch of different outfits and went over all of these things that I was going to say to him, cool music references, concerts I’d say I’d been to . . .” She shakes her head. “I was like,
insane
, Annie.
Insane
for Jason Cohen.” Catherine’s heart quickens from a rush of adrenaline of the memory, at the chance to revisit what was lost. “Anyway, I got food poisoning. From that stupid dining hall. From the eggs or the bacon or whatever I ate that morning. I was barfing into a trash can on the side of the bed all afternoon, and Owen heard me whimpering in my room and came in and checked on me. Eventually I stopped puking, and I guess he found something alluring in my greenish-hued face, but after we binged on crackers and ginger ale, he kissed me.”

She pauses, biting her lower lip.

Her shoulders rise and fall.

“I guess I’ve been thinking about that recently: if I hadn’t eaten those eggs, if I hadn’t gotten sick, if I’d gone to the party, Owen wouldn’t have kissed me that night.”

“It can’t be healthy to think about what-ifs.” Annie frowns.

“You don’t have to,” Catherine says. “You had a chance to figure yourself out before you found Baxter.” She hesitates. “That came out wrong. I guess . . . well, we were very young, that’s all. People change.”

“Oh, people don’t change
that
much.”

“I don’t know.” Catherine looks unconvinced. “Sometimes I think people change to the point where you barely recognize them.” She spins her wedding band like a top on the hard wood surface of the kitchen table. “And sometimes I wonder which is better: who they were when you met them or who they’re set to become now.”

19

LINDY

Lindy is starving, but the sight of the congealing hot wings at Smoke’s is turning her stomach. Or maybe it’s the baby doing somersaults. She envisions a tiny peanut spinning over and over on itself, fists flying, face contorted with glee. Then she tries not to envision it.
So why is it so crystal clear?
Still, though, she’s ravenous, and when some undergrads invite her back to their fraternity for a barbeque, she doesn’t hesitate. She knows they’re just doing it because they recognize her, and at least one of the guys referred to Owen, Colin, and Leon as the “old dudes with her,” but so what.

She’s traded on her fame for less, she’s sure.

Owen tags along at the promise of a keg, Colin doesn’t care what they do, and Leon seems amenable to just about anything—probably because he smoked a joint in the bathroom, which set off the fire alarm, but also because Lindy is realizing he’s just that type of guy. Not looking for problems, not looking for trouble. Happy to be. Just be.

Lindy almost tells him he’s interested in the wrong girl if “just being” is what he wants, but his company is growing on her. Besides, she’s not promising him a rose garden. Or, to quote one of her recent top five hits: “Don’t Ask Me If You Don’t Want to Know.”

She does have to return Tatiana’s calls, though, so she promises herself she’ll hide in the bathroom when they get to the Delta Tau house and do that. She’s been dodging T since last night, when she sent a flurry of texts that Lindy ignored.

Where are you?

I thought we were doing the 4th?

Why are you in Philadelphia? Why haven’t you called me to tell me you’re in Philadelphia?

Don’t you have an appearance tonight?

How can you just blow that off? How can you just blow ME off?

Damn, girl,
Lindy thinks,
can’t you just relax?
Leon is relaxed! Leon isn’t badgering me about this and that and where are you and why are you there? If I wanted a husband (or wife), I’d have one!

Lindy knows that’s not fair, that Tatiana isn’t being completely unreasonable, but Tatiana wasn’t oblivious to what she was getting into when she signed up to date her; Lindy hadn’t been in a committed relationship in years, and she made no promises to T that this would change. Sometimes she regretted her peripatetic commitment issues. It would be nice, she’d think (on a quiet evening over a bottle of wine in her big house with her big yard with her fancy security system guarding her big wall with gold records and big walk-in closet and big screen TVs and big pool with a big Jacuzzi) to share this with someone; to hear about his (or her) day, to have him (or her) hear about her day. But she’d tried that once, nearly a decade ago.

After that mess with Annie, she actually resolved to change. She called her sister from her new rental in Nashville, which was so empty that her voice echoed over the phone, and said, “I need someone on my side.”

And her sister, who listened silently as Lindy recounted how she’d planned to confess her feelings to Annie but that Annie was mooning over Colin, and so Lindy naturally slept with him, said, “Well, then, stop pushing everyone off a cliff.”

And she was right. Her little sister was fucking right, of course, but that’s why she wore pumps to work and worked in advertising and had a little suburban house with a 1.5-carat diamond ring on her finger and would be perfectly content driving her Subaru wagon, which she would fill with chubby-cheeked mini-mes for the rest of her life. Her sister had taken their parents’ free-range Berkeley hippie philosophy, their unstructured, chaotic lifestyle (before their messy, messy split), and shed every last ounce of it. Lindy spun the other way, rebellious for no reason at all.

“Try it,” her sister said. “It’s not so hard. And you should call Annie and tell her anyway.”

Lindy wasn’t brave enough for that—telling her best friend that maybe she was a little bit gone for her. More than a little bit. Instead, she opted to try the
it
her sister recommended: commitment. A few months later, just before Christmas, when the silence from Annie made it clear that she was no longer Lindy’s to love, she met a winsome
Rolling Stone
reporter, Simon, while playing a one-night gig in Austin. She liked him and he liked her, and he was down in Nashville often enough that they found a balance between never seeing each other and seeing each other so often that Lindy wanted to throttle him. And then they liked each other enough that after eight months, he asked her to marry him. She was visiting him in LA, meeting with producers, talking to labels, and Lindy brimmed with the closest thing she knew to optimism. They drove up to the top of Mulholland Drive at dusk on a late August evening, as the sun was setting in this spectacular way that turned the sky into a light show of blazing oranges and fierce magentas and hazy yellows. The heat rose up from the valley below, and Lindy and Simon sat on the hood of his Explorer, and just as she eased back onto the windshield, happy to close her eyes and appreciate this hushed moment in her life that had increasingly been filled with noise—white noise, loud noise, all noise—he shocked her by pulling out a ring.

Lindy was so jarred by it that she blurted out,
“No!”

Up on the cliff by Mulholland, she may as well have just pushed him off.

But once she said it, once Simon recoiled, and once they drove the agonizingly windy road back to his house in the Hills, she convinced herself that she meant it, and she didn’t allow herself to consider how much she loved him. Because she
did
love him. Maybe not enough, or at least not enough right then. Timing, and all that. She’d barely gotten over Annie, might still not have been over Annie. It had been only a year. And since there’s no bouncing back from a spurned proposal, that was the end of Simon.

Lindy doesn’t think about him much anymore. They wave hello at junkets, and sometimes she scans for his byline when she flips through
Rolling Stone.
But he’s a ghost now, like Bea. Someone who once was and now isn’t anymore, at least not to Lindy.

They step inside the Delta Tau house, which is beige and damp and emits a general lack of hygiene. Lindy tries to touch as little as possible (and from the look on Colin’s face, he does too), and thinks,
You have to call Tatiana.
She tells herself a million times to call Tatiana. But she’d rather push her off a cliff. Leon is here, and he’s stoned and easy, and also the father of her maybe-baby (that appointment next week is such a reassuring exit to this whole mess), so why get caught up in the messiness of babies and girlfriends and what-to-dos. A few weeks back, after four months of dating, Tatiana told her she thought she might be falling in love.
Love? Christ.
That’s what Lindy thought to herself.
Nothing good ever comes from love.

Regardless, she owes T a phone call. Love or not. Lifelong commitment or not. Pregnant or not. (Undeniably pregnant, but who has to know?) Lindy latches the bathroom door on the ground floor of the Delta Tau and inhales, then regrets it, as the air smells unmistakably of fraternity-house piss. She’s surprised to find her fingers trembling.

“Why has it taken you a day to call me back?” This is how Tatiana answers from the speakerphone in her Mercedes.

“Hey, babe. Come on, don’t be mad.”

“Mad? I’m past mad, Lindy! Where the hell have you been?”

“Philadelphia?”

Tatiana exhales, and Lindy can picture her clutching her steering wheel, firming her (lovely) jaw, stuck at a light, squelching the itch to honk her horn, flip off the guy in front of her, and rev the engine, just to quell her irritation.

“I fucking know that you’re in Philadelphia. Your whole team apparently does. A: Why didn’t I know until you landed? And B: Why didn’t I know, period?”

“It was last-minute. I wasn’t sure if I was coming.” This is at least partially true. Less of a lie than plenty of others that Lindy has told, and will tell, her.

“And C: Why did Twitter know before me?” She pauses. “You could have texted me.”

“I should have texted you.”

Lindy can hear her softening. She won’t stay mad. No one ever stays mad at Lindy, which is the brilliance of how she can keep pulling this shit. Theoretically, she’s a huge pain in the ass. No, not just theoretically. She
is
a huge pain in the ass. But she’s charming and sexy and beguiling and, goddamn it, she makes you want to work for it, so everyone does. If she weren’t famous, she’d be cut off at the knees. Because she’s famous, she’s magnetic.

Maybe that’s why she loved Annie, it occurs to her only now. Annie never worked for it. Annie just took her for what she was.

Tatiana sighs, just as there’s a knock on the bathroom door, then Colin’s voice behind it.

“Lindy! Open up!”

“Is someone there with you?” Tatiana asks.

Lindy unlatches the door, bugging her eyes at Colin to
shut up.
She presses a finger to her lips, and he nods, getting the message. He’s massaging his jaw, raising a bag of frozen corn kernels to his lip.

“No, no one’s here.” She grimaces at Colin. LIE #1.

“Are you coming home soon?”

“Soon,” Lindy says. “Maybe tomorrow.” LIE #2.

Tatiana is silent.

“I’m sorry,” Lindy offers. “I know we had plans tonight. But it’s my dead friend’s birthday today, and I have to be here.”

“Your dead friend? Oh my God, did someone die?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Seriously, did someone die? Who? What happened?” A horn honks, probably Tatiana’s own. She always had places to be, though she makes time for Lindy.

“No, no. It was a long time ago.”
A decade. A lifetime.

“So someone died a long time ago, and then it became an emergency?” Tatiana blows out her breath. “I’m trying to understand here, Linds. Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

Lindy knows that she’s not wrong, but Bea isn’t the sort of story she talks about. Tatiana doesn’t know much about Simon either, and that’s worked out just fine.
Why do we need to go around sharing the sad stories of our past just because we’re sleeping together?
Who says that anyone is any better off for doing so? What is so wrong with preserving something just for yourself? A gem to cling onto, a nugget you can tuck away and nurse and nurture that makes you
you
?

“I should have told you,” Lindy purrs. “I regret it.” LIE #3.

She only just notices that Colin’s lip is oozing blood. He’s peering in the mirror, gingerly pressing on it, grimacing.

“Will you tell me tomorrow?” Tatiana’s done holding the grudge.

“I will.” LIE #4.

“I’ll get you at the airport.”

“Sweetie, you’re too good to me.” TRUTH #1.

Tatiana seems to consider this for a moment, or maybe she’s just changing lanes, focused on the road ahead.

“I want to hear this story, Lindy,” she says firmly. “If it’s important enough to fly to Philly for a day, it’s important enough to tell me.”

“Let’s order in tomorrow night,” Lindy says.

“Something for just the two of us,” Tatiana coos.

Lindy’s fingers are twitching again, ready to hang up, ready to put an end to the ruse.

“Something for just the two of us,” she echoes. LIE #5.

After all, if you consider the web-fingered pea-size being inside her uterus, there are three of them now.

“First of all, what happened to you? Second of all, what was so critical that you had to eavesdrop on my phone call?” Lindy asks. Colin has made himself comfortable on the shuttered toilet, the bag of frozen corn against his face, as if he has no place better to be than this grimy, piss-smelling bathroom.

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. And even if I were, it wouldn’t be the first time I’d listened to the great Lindy Armstrong pull some shit on her . . . girlfriend . . . or whomever.”

“Fuck off, Colin.”