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Authors: Kate Christensen

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BOOK: Trouble
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The three young women giggled. Indrani and I exchanged a look, immediately united in our resistance against their debauchery, no matter what deeper differences we had.

“No, thanks,” said Indrani. “I think it’s time for you all to go home to bed.”

“No way,” said Ravi. “We’re in the prime of our lives now.”

“Dr. Dressler,” said the teaching assistant, whose glittering, zany eyes made her look not only high as a loon but sexually jacked up, as if she’d been hotly making out with someone for hours, “sorry. We really can leave now if you’d like.”

“I would like, very much,” said Indrani crisply. “And Elissa, in general, like I said last night, I advise you strongly against hanging out with my brother.”

“She’s hanging out with me,” said Mick, putting a jovial, proprietary arm around her.

“Even worse,” I said darkly.

“What have you got against me?” Ravi said indignantly.

“I could ask the same thing,” said Mick, as if he didn’t much care what I thought of him. He disappeared briefly into the kitchen and reemerged with two fresh bottles of wine. He put them on the table behind the couch Indrani was sitting on and deftly removed the corks with a corkscrew he took from his pocket, the same antique silver corkscrew, I was interested to note, that I had given Indrani for Christmas just the night before.

“Nice corkscrew,” I said. “Don’t you guys have any respect for the wishes of your hostess?”

Mick didn’t seem to hear. “I’ve been wondering about the origin of the phrase ‘Go soak your head,’” he said. “Soak your head in what? Why your head? Why not ‘Go shave your balls?’” He refilled everyone’s wineglasses.

“Also,” said the loveliest of the three ravishing girls, “soak your head in what? Hot oil? Dishwater? Piss?”

“Out,” said Indrani, “all of you. If you won’t leave, then at least go back outside.”

They all traipsed back out onto the terrace and the French doors slammed shut.

“Oh my God,” I said. “They’re on crystal meth?”

“They’ll be out there till tomorrow morning. With any luck, they’ll all fall off the terrace and splat on the sidewalk.”

“Doesn’t your TA worry about losing her job if she acts like this in your apartment?”

“Apparently not,” said Indrani. “She doesn’t need to; she’s indispensable to me and she knows it. Why does Mick call you ‘Shrink’?”

“I lied to him last night and told him I was a painter,” I said. “You blew my cover. That’s why.”

“You said you were a painter?”

“He was hitting on me, and I was flattered.”

“He’s a sleazeball. I think he’s a meth dealer, actually. It’s a good thing you didn’t go home with
him.”

I chose to ignore this little dig, hoping our prior conversation was just a hiccup and we’d naturally fall back into sync.

“Aha!” I said. “I wondered how he supported himself. It certainly isn’t by writing operas. He was the boyfriend of an old client of mine. I let on to him last night that I knew her, and then I had to pretend not to be a shrink, so he wouldn’t realize that I was the one who convinced her to dump him.”

When Indrani laughed, I laughed too, mostly with relief. “Oh my God,” she said. “What a weird coincidence.”

“I know. You should have heard the things my client told me about him. The minute I realized who he was, I should have excused myself and walked away.”

“How often does this kind of thing happen to you?” she asked.

“Sometimes I see clients on the subway or in line for a movie. But something like this? Almost never.”

Indrani reached forward, took a clementine from the bowl, and began to peel it. “Have you told Raquel yet that you’re leaving Anthony?”

“You’re the only person I’ve talked to so far.” Peter was a stranger; he didn’t count.

“I feel like a broken record, I know, but I’m worried about you. I can’t help it. And I’m worried about Anthony and Wendy, too.”

“Thanks,” I said, but I didn’t feel grateful; I felt a bit insulted and nettled, although I wasn’t sure why. Had I really hoped she’d be excited for me? I must have, somehow.

“Look at us,” she said, turning the peeled clementine in her hands like a tiny, naked orange brain, “you and me and Raquel. Remember we used to predict our lives and how we’d all end up? We had all those big ideas. I never thought I’d end up a single middle-aged professor, not in a million years. I was going to live in the country and write novels and have a bunch of kids with my perfect husband, remember? Did you ever think you’d end up a divorced middle-aged shrink?”

“I’m not ending up just yet,” I said. “I don’t really see your point.”

“And Raquel,” she said. “Sleeping with a twenty-whatever-year-old.”

“Yeah?” I said. “So what?”

“So,” said Indrani. “Maybe these are our so-called midlife crises. You leaving your husband, Raquel with a guy half her age …”

“What about you?” I asked, trying to turn this into light banter instead of what it actually felt like, which was an unwelcome confrontation of some kind. “You’ve been alone since Vince. Isn’t it time for you to realize you’re gay and fall in love with a woman? Or maybe go to Jamaica and meet a native and—”

“I think we’re all pretty pathetic,” said Indrani.

“Indrani,” I said. “Come on.”

“We are,” she said. “All three of us. What happened to us?”

“Are you serious?” “Yeah,” she said.

“But Indrani, we’re all doing just fine.”

“Are we? Raquel is fucking someone who’s young enough to be her own kid, you just picked up some strange guy in a bar and you’re about to get a divorce, and I’m a lonely spinster with a terrace full of meth heads. I don’t know who’s a bigger loser here.”

I laughed, relieved: she was kidding after all.

“I’m not kidding,” she said, as if she were reprimanding all three of us, me, Raquel, and herself.

I stared at her; I had seen this stern and somewhat puritanical side of Indrani before, of course, but not for a long time, not since we were in our early thirties. Back then, Raquel had just admitted to Indrani and me that she was a junkie; she had been taken to the emergency room by her boyfriend after her second overdose. She had survived, and in the aftermath of this brush with death, she had contacted Indrani and me, her two oldest, closest friends, and told us she was going to get clean, for real. Meanwhile, I was having problems for the first time with Anthony and freaking out about being a new mother, and Indrani had just been cheated on and dumped by another hot, seductive asshole. Raquel flew to New York, and the three of us camped out in Indrani’s living room for a three-day powwow, during which Indrani had turned into some kind of hands-on tough-love life coach and told Raquel and me she was horribly disappointed in all three of us, and what were we all thinking? Raquel and I had uncharacteristically lost our usual stoic, self-reliant tough-mindedness and agreed with her; at one very raw low point, we’d all cried together. In the end, after relapsing again, and more than one stint in rehab, Raquel had finally gotten clean and made a new album, I’d mothered Wendy as well as I could and stayed in my marriage, but Indrani had remained alone and preyed upon.

“Frankly, I don’t feel pathetic at all, Indrani,” I said. “I can’t speak for Raquel, but I bet she doesn’t, either.”

“I know I do,” said Indrani.

“And you think I am, too.”

“Well,” she said, then stopped, looking down at the little clementine, which she turned in her hands. “Maybe not pathetic. But I’m disappointed. I can’t lie to you.”

I looked into the fire. “Are you actually mad that I’m leaving Anthony?” I asked her cautiously. The caution was my effort to keep my anger at bay, to keep myself from telling her to stop projecting her own regrets and self-castigations onto her best friends.

“I’m not mad,” she said. “I’m concerned. There’s a difference.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I don’t need concern at all right now. I am fine. I feel like I’m coming back to life. Like this is long overdue. I wish you could trust me. I wish you had more confidence in my ability to make a sane and rational decision, no matter how sudden it feels to you.”

“I can’t believe you want me to sit here and tell you it’s all going to be fine,” she said. “I can’t do that; it wouldn’t be honest.”

“It’s what I told you when Vince left,” I said. “And I was right, wasn’t I?”

“But he was a loser,” she said. “And he didn’t matter. This is a fifteen-year marriage we’re talking about here. How could I not at least try to help you save it?”

“It’s beyond saving,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“But how can you know that when you haven’t even told Anthony yet?”

“I know that because I’ve been married to him for so long. I know what’s possible and what isn’t.” I stopped, too weary to repeat myself anymore. “Please stop lecturing me, Indrani.”

We looked blankly at each other. I was so angry at her I was shaking.

“We’re going in circles,” she said.

“I know we are.”

“I don’t think I can talk about this anymore,” she said.

“Me, neither.”

I got up and went out to the foyer and took my coat and scarf off the coat tree, took my bag off the bench. Without another word between us, I left Indrani sitting there alone on her couch. Down on the street, I walked fast, glad for the cold air on my face. I passed the bar where I’d met Peter. In daylight, the neon was muted, the facade sordidly inviting. It would be warm and cozy in there right now, and another hot coffee with rum would go down so nicely, I thought, but I passed by, the entire memory of the previous night resurging in my brain, whole, unmitigated. Still, I felt no guilt, only exhilarated disbelief that I had finally cracked open the carapace that had contained me for so long. Life was so much bigger, so much more interesting, than I had allowed myself to know.

I rode the subway downtown, slumped in my seat, rocking with the motion of the almost-empty train until I was nearly asleep. I got out at Twenty-third Street and walked the darkening early-evening blocks west and south to my building, my head full of spiderwebs, my eyes grainy with fatigue. The trees were bare, the sidewalks grimy. Tinkly Christmas carols assaulted me as I walked through a vendor’s piney sidewalk grove of chopped-down, tied-up Christmas trees. He sat in a folding chair in a little jerry-rigged shelter, hunched into his coat and scarf, a small heater burning at his feet.

It amazed me how quickly my fight with Indrani, if that was what it was, had escalated. It felt as if this rupture had always been there, waiting to happen, inevitable in the differences between us, our circumstances and upbringings and personalities. She clung to consistency and stasis after a childhood of upsetting, confusing upheavals, whereas I, having been stuck in the small California town where I was born until I left for college, having been raised by quasi-devout Catholic parents who stayed together for life despite gross incompatibility and mutual boredom, eagerly embraced any kind of change as long as it was in a positive direction. Maybe Indrani and I had both overreacted, had both leapt too quickly to our respective corners, but I couldn’t help feeling completely blindsided by her reaction. I had always empathized loyally with her and taken her side in everything, no matter what. I had somehow expected the same in return, and that had been a mistake. She seemed to need me to stay the same; I needed to change, so badly that I was willing to sacrifice a close, old friendship, if that was what it took.

I unlocked the front door of my building, climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, and let myself into our apartment. It was quiet, exactly as I had left it that morning. As always after I’d spent time at Indrani’s, our perfectly nice two-bedroom apartment looked shabby and small and plain. The old brown chair in the living room had a dark stain on the headrest; the TV screen was dusty; the hall rug had a hole right by the bathroom doorsill; the Formica counters in the kitchen were covered with burn and scuff marks, stains, and dents; the whole place needed repainting, and the rooms felt close and cramped, the ceilings low.

No one was home yet. My sleepiness was overwhelming. I went into Anthony’s and my bedroom, where I took off all my clothes and put them away, shivering even though the room was warm. I put on my pajamas, got into bed, and was asleep so fast, I wasn’t aware of any time having passed when I awoke. The room was dark, and my head ached. I listened drowsily for sounds of someone home. I saw a light through the crack under the door, so someone was there. Gradually, I became aware of cooking smells, faint kitchen noises, water running from the sink faucet, a pot lid rattling. I curled up more deeply under the covers and closed my eyes again and fell into a waking doze. A while later, the bedroom door opened.

“Josie?” Anthony said in a low voice. “I made some spaghetti, if you want some.”

“Ummph,” I said. “Thanks. I’ll be right out.”

I got up and put on my bathrobe and wandered out to the kitchen, rubbing my eyes and yawning. Anthony was sitting at the kitchen table with a book propped in front of him, already eating. I took a plate from the cupboard and scooped some pasta onto my plate. I knew it wouldn’t be cooked enough for my liking; Anthony, whose parents were both Italian, insisted on taking
al dente
literally, despite my frequently pointing out that the pasta was not nearly as good that way. I glopped some tomato sauce on top of the pasta; this, at least, would be palatable, because I’d bought it ready-made at Whole Foods for Anthony and Wendy to eat when I wasn’t home to cook for them.

“More wine?” I said, pouring myself a glass from the bottle on the counter.

“Sure,” he said, pushing his wineglass forward on the table without looking up from his book.

Sixteen years earlier, I had gone one night, alone, out of sheer curiosity, to hear Anthony Bianchi lecture at The New School. He was a political scientist who specialized in international environmental policies; I had recently discovered a sudden, unprecedented urge in myself to become more informed about such things. I sat in the back of the auditorium and was instantly smitten when he began to speak. I could hardly follow a word of what he said, I was so busy admiring his forthright, easy, confident, irreverent delivery, his profound erudition, and his ability to make the audience, which was made up mostly of college-age and graduate-school kids, laugh. He was not especially handsome or tall, but he was strikingly charismatic in the way of all men who love what they do and are very good at it.

BOOK: Trouble
11.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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