Wishful Thinking (29 page)

“Jennifer works only on Wednesday afternoons now,” Melissa, who was seated at this table, too, piped in. Melissa was thriving at night school. She had brought her new boyfriend with her and looked as fresh and confident as Jennifer had seen her in years. Jennifer was happy for her. But at the moment, she just wanted Melissa to shut up. “I pick up Julien on Mondays so she can spend time with Jack, and Jack on Fridays so she can spend time with Julien.”

“But her coworker Alicia calls her a workaholic,” Vinita said darkly. “Strange, isn’t it?”

Jennifer looked at Vinita pleadingly.
Not now
, she wanted to say.
Please?

Vinita, however, had waited quite long enough. “Will you guys excuse us for a second?” Vinita said. She motioned to Jennifer. Jennifer got up, but not before grabbing her clutch. “Oh, right,” Vinita said, practically growling, “God forbid you should be separated from
that
!” Jennifer smiled at the moms, who looked confused.

“My phone,” she explained. A collective “ah” rose over the table.

“I once grabbed mine from a toilet I’d already peed in,” Elizabeth said as they walked away—another gem Jennifer was too stressed to appreciate.

The moment they were out of view, in a secluded hallway near the bathroom door, Vinita whirled around and, in a movement the force and vehemence of which stunned Jennifer, grabbed her by the arm, hard. Jennifer wrenched free, wincing.

“Ow!” she said.

“You’ve been lying to me!” Vinita hissed. “For weeks! Months? How long?”

“No!” Jennifer said. It was startling how easily she said it, the firmness with which she stated the biggest lie of all. “I’ve only used it a few extra times! I don’t see those guys
every
Monday. And Alicia’s going overboard. I don’t work late every night. You know that. On Friday afternoons, I’m with you!”

“If that’s true,” Vinita said, “then you won’t mind letting me see your phone. If there are only two Wishful Thinking appointments per week on your calendar, plus one more for sleeping, which was our agreement from the beginning, I’ll drop this.” She held out her hand. “That’s okay, right, Jay?” she said, the sarcasm in her voice setting Jennifer’s teeth on edge. “If you’ve got nothing to hide?”

Jennifer’s grip on her purse tightened, her fingernails digging into the cheap, shiny fabric. “No,” she said.

“
No
?” Vinita said. “No? You are using the app
way
more than we agreed. Way more! It’s the only explanation for your after-school mommy hangouts and your workdays that go till eight every night and your Friday afternoons with me and Melissa working only two afternoons a week. Which means that you have been lying to me for
six months
. I feel so betrayed I don’t even know what to say to you right now. And scared, Jennifer. This really scares me.”

Jennifer didn’t respond. She was thinking. Would it be better to tell Vinita everything? To be honest about how much she’d been using the app, and also to tell her about the bleed-through she’d experienced in December, which still worried her even though it hadn’t happened again? But then she would have to stop using the app so often. She’d have to go back to their agreement, and there was no going back now.

“How many times a week?” Vinita repeated in a low, hard voice. Jennifer shrugged, feeling like a bullied and busted
teenager. “And don’t stand there slouching like you’re a thirteen-year-old in trouble with her mom.” (Vinita, as ever, knew her too well.) “Look at me,” she said more tenderly, reaching out for her. “Jay. I love you, and I am crazy worried about this. I was crazy worried already, when I thought you were putting your body through a wormhole only
two
afternoons a week, with an app invented by a physicist who puts dog shit in the hands of university professors and has a torpedo in her living room.”

“I never should have told you about the torpedo,” Jennifer said, as though that were the point. (She hadn’t been able to resist texting Vinita a picture that morning.) Taking her cue from Vinita’s I’m-your-friend approach, she softened. “Vee,” she began. “Have you forgotten the position I was in when this started? Norman putting together a time log so he could sue for custody of the boys? And at work finally getting a chance to build One Stop, but having to do it the Bill Truitt way—”

“This isn’t about your
reasoning
,” Vinita said, cutting her off. “I know why you did it. But now I need to know how often you are using the app. Honestly. Every day? To be with the boys and at work? And what about Owen?” Jennifer could not stop the guilty expression that overtook her face at the mention of Owen’s name. “Oh my God—how stupid am I? Owen mentioned to me last week that he was having dinner with you, and it was a Tuesday. … Are you using it to see him too? Are you in
three
places at once, not just two?”

“You’re not asking for my reasoning?” Jennifer said, her voice growing high-pitched as a wave of indignation overtook her. “You don’t care
why
I’m doing this? Or about what was happening in my life with work, or my kids? Or that maybe, just maybe, I wanted to have a little bit of something for
me
, to spend time with the man I’m falling in love with?” At this, tears sprang to her eyes. She liked the sound of
the man I’m
falling in love with
. She’d never said it out loud before. Who could be indifferent to that?

Vinita, apparently.

“Do you think you are the only person who struggles with this?” Vinita asked, her eyes even brighter with anger now. “Do you have any fucking idea what I had to do to make this party happen for you tonight? I didn’t use time travel. I ran to Patel Brothers in between seeing patients. I cooked every night this week. I stayed up late after the girls went to bed to put together fifty paper lanterns. I—”

“Had the nanny stay late?”

“What?”

“Did you have the nanny stay late? Or did you have your night sitter come and take the dry cleaning and have the housekeeper buy the groceries so you could put together paper lanterns late into the night in your impeccably clean, three-thousand-square-foot loft?”

In all their years of friendship, neither Jennifer nor Vinita had ever mentioned this—the wildly different fortunes that had befallen them since Vinita’s marriage to Sean, and the inevitable ways in which Vinita’s resources and Jennifer’s constraints divided them. For a moment, Jennifer thought Vinita might slap her.

But instead, after an initial angry stiffening, her oldest friend’s whole body collapsed into a sigh, her expression going from tight fury to a worn, crumpled look of hurt. Jennifer felt terrible. But for the first time in their conversation, she felt she had regained a little bit of the high ground too.

“I’m not the enemy, Jay,” Vinita said, breaking the silence. “You know that, right? I’m your best friend. I’m not trying to get you to stop using this thing because I don’t want you to have a full and happy life. It’s because I want you to
have
a life. Have you considered the medical implications of this?”

“You’ve been checking me out,” Jennifer said, “and I’m fine. I would have stopped if I weren’t. I would stop.”

“I’ve been giving you basic checkups on Friday afternoons, yes. But you are due for an MRI, and now that I know what’s happening, or at least now that I’ve guessed what’s happening, since you’re still lying to me like an addict”—Jennifer rolled her eyes, but Vinita went on—“there are a lot of other tests we need to run too. For one thing, you think you’re forty today, right?” Jennifer was unable to stop herself from emitting a impatient sigh. Of course she was forty! It was her birthday! She was beginning to worry about how long they’d been arguing. Pretty soon, people were going to suspect something.

“
Wrong
,” Vinita said. “If you have been using this thing the way I think you’ve been using it, you turned forty weeks ago. Nobody else may know that you are living three days for every one that passes for the rest of us. But your body knows. Keep this up, and you’ll be fifty before I turn forty-three, and you’ll get Alzheimer’s when the boys are in their twenties!”

Jennifer knitted her brow.
In their twenties? Really?

“You can’t cheat the body, Jay,” Vinita went on. “You may be able to be in three places on the same day, but you are not in three places
at once
, remember? You are in one place for six hours, and another place for six hours, and another place for six hours, and all those hours add up. Think of how tired you’ve been. Have you had memory loss? Exhaustion? Cognitive issues? Is your menstrual cycle going haywire?”

Jennifer had been about to interrupt, to argue that memory loss and exhaustion were hardly anything new, but Vinita’s mention of her menstrual cycle stopped her cold. Jennifer’s period had never come very regularly, but for a while now it had been coming often—weirdly often. At first it had been every three weeks, but lately, sometimes, it was every two. The periods were light, as hers had always been, and she’d
just figured her body was stressed. But now it hit her: Her ovaries still counted time by minutes elapsed, not by daily rotations of the earth. By adding hours to her day almost every day, she had made her body as out of sync with the calendar everyone else kept as she was.

“All of us get a certain amount of time in our bodies,” Vinita went on, gesturing to her own. “And that time
cannot
be extended. Dr. Sexton hasn’t solved that problem yet. Keep this up, and you will age faster than everyone around you. Do you understand that? Is that what you want?”

Jennifer remained silent. Vinita had succeeded in scaring her. So she had chosen to concentrate on something she did well: math in her head. “Eight hundred hours, give or take,” she pronounced. “Thirty-three days.”

“What?” Vinita asked, flummoxed.

“It isn’t three days for every one, Vee,” she said. “It’s an extra five hours a day, four days a week, with some more hours added for sleep.” Vinita fixed her with a withering stare. “And yes,
fine
, with some more hours for Owen. But I’m pretty sure it hasn’t added up to more than thirty-three days over the last twenty-five weeks. I could go back and look to make sure, but—”

“And?” Vinita said, her voice rising. “Your point is?”

“Let’s call it five days per month. Just to make it easier. So what would be better? Four days? Three? I could cut back on the Owen weekday time. Let’s say I did that only once a week.” Jennifer squinted, continuing to calculate in her head, while Vinita’s eyebrows shot up.

“Are you kidding me?” Vinita asked. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

“I could get it down to three days per month, I’m sure. Which is only thirty-six days a year! That’s not so bad, right? And when the boys are in high school, I won’t need it anymore.”

“‘When the boys are in high school’?” Vinita repeated incredulously.

“Or junior high, maybe?” Jennifer said.

“Give me that phone,” Vinita replied.

“No,” Jennifer said.

“Give it to me!” Vinita said, reaching over, yelling now. With Jennifer parrying and dodging as Vinita attempted to seize her phone, they soon moved into full view of the seated guests, and everybody was staring. Undaunted, Vinita took another swipe, and Jennifer whirled around, holding her bag to her chest with both hands wrapped tightly around it, going totally Gollum. “Get away from me, Vinita!” she said. “Stop it!”

The next thing she knew, Owen’s arms were around her. But she fought him, too, lashing out until she freed herself from his embrace.

“Easy,” he said, backing away. “Is this some kind of birthday tradition I don’t know about? ’Cause you guys are scaring the customers.”

“This is what happens,” Jennifer said, opening her bag, locating her phone, and taking it out to stare at it, reassuring herself that it was still there, “when you
attack
someone with a surprise party. With the help of someone who knows I
hate
surprise parties.”

“You hate surprise parties?” Owen said. He looked at Vinita. Then he looked at Jennifer. He was moving quickly from worried to pissed off, she could tell.

“Surprise!” Vinita said, throwing up sarcastic jazz hands. “She’s full of them.”

“Vee … ,” Jennifer began.

“I’m leaving,” Vinita said.

“But you’re our host!” Owen said, backing up. “Why don’t I give you guys a minute?” Then he turned to Jennifer. “You okay?” he asked, looking down and meeting her eyes. She
nodded. As he headed back to his table, he threw some easygoing bullshit out to the assembled party, which seemed to reassure everyone.

Taking advantage of the interruption, Jennifer furtively stuffed her phone back into her bag. Then she took a deep breath and reached out for Vee.

“Stay?” she asked softly. “We can talk afterward, I promise. Or first thing tomorrow, if you want. No lies.”

Vinita simply looked at Jennifer’s bag. Pursing her lips, and looking so sad it made Jennifer’s heart ache, she shook her head. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Not anymore.”

Without another word, Vinita grabbed her coat, grabbed Sean—who’d apparently had enough Indian martinis not to think too much of their premature exit—and left. And Jennifer could not deny a feeling of relief as she watched her best friend of twenty-two years walk right out the door.

T
HREE WEEKS LATER
, Jennifer and Vinita still weren’t speaking to each other. Or, to put it more accurately, Jennifer had made many attempts to speak to Vinita, but Vinita was not responding to any of them. The day after the party, Vinita had e-mailed and said that she wouldn’t talk to Jennifer again until she agreed to stop using the app immediately and underwent a full battery of physical and cognitive tests administered by specialists qualified to do things like assess organ function and measure telomeres, whatever those were. Jennifer had pleaded with her by text, voice mail, and e-mail, and had even made the grand old-school gesture of showing up at Vinita’s door.
Somewhere there is a woman,
Jennifer had written in a recent e-mail,
who misses her best friend.
Even in the face of that entreaty, however, Vinita remained resolute.