Friends Like Us (31 page)

“Twenty-seven looks good on you,” I say, forgetting, for the moment, everything I was rehearsing just seconds ago.

He bounds over to me and sweeps me up in a hug, murmuring, “Hi, Wilbur,” into my shoulder. I’m so relieved that for a moment I am not myself; I’m this person Ben is holding, a bright receptacle for his love.

“Some pig,” I say.

He pushes me away and looks at me intently and then kisses me, hard and passionate, like he means it and is also joking, both. His face is cold against mine. He snakes his hands up my shirt and rests them on my bare back. They’re freezing, too, and I jump, I have the instinct to squirm away, but I don’t; I relax into the feeling of Ben’s icy hands.

“Mmm,” he says, pressing his fingers into my skin and holding me. It’s enough to be captured in this moment completely, enough to make me think that maybe it’s not as hard as it looks, being happy.

“I have news,” he says, still holding on to me. “Crazy good news.”

“You
don’t
have flesh-eating bacteria!”

“No! Turns out it’s only leprosy!” He slips his hands from under my shirt and steps away, notices the cupcakes and smiles at me, a big hungry grin. I’m still breathing the scent of him, that pink soap they have at the library and the laundry detergent we’re almost out of and the spicy, licorice smell that is Ben.

I pull out my chair and stand behind it. “Well?”

“Okay,” he says. “You know I’ve been having … not exactly doubts about grad school, but hesitation. I mean, I want to go, and the applications are out there, but back when we were considering moving out east … I mean, Jane and I …” His gaze darts to the wall behind me, then back. “Ever since then I’ve been thinking maybe there’s something else I should be doing, just for a little while, some kind of work, before I commit, before I get down to it. Something meaningful, something that doesn’t involve the constant mental repetition of the alphabet and a nineteen-year-old pothead as my closest colleague. You know?”

I nod. Of course I know. I glance down at his present, wrapped in paper I made myself from a brown grocery bag.
The Underachievers
is a notebook full of cartoon sketches of Ben and me as we go about our regular lives, in superhero costumes. The Underachievers have breakfast. The Underachievers watch a movie. The Underachievers walk to the mailbox on the corner. Occasionally, in my book, one of us picks up a piece of trash from the sidewalk, or takes a spider from the bathroom wall and puts it outside. Lesser superheroes of greatly diminished expectations.

Ben sits down at the table and touches the edge of his store-bought cupcake. “For me?” he asks.

“Happy birthday,” I say softly, smiling encouragement as the barometric pressure inside my body begins to plummet.

He takes a bite. A few crumbs dot his lower lip, and he licks them off. “I applied … a few weeks ago I applied to this program, not thinking I’d get in. I don’t know. I did it on a lark.”

I joined the marines! On a lark!

I sold my kidney! On a lark!

“I mean, I’ve never built anything before,” he continues. “But I’ve been accepted. And they’ll be paying me enough money to get by, maybe even to travel a little bit.…” He sits up straight all of a sudden and looks at me, and it’s as if he’s just been zapped by an electrical spark; he seems to realize with a physical jolt that this crazy good news of his—whatever it is—is going to affect me, too. “I’m going to Ecuador, Will. I mean, if I say yes. And if you think I should. It’s a four-month program. I’ve wanted to go since high school. Well, you know that. I’m going to be helping to build an orphanage in Ecuador.”

An orphanage! I see the word in my mind, and it pings around in there, ricocheting through my skull until it runs out of meaning. I’m still standing behind my chair. I grip the edge of it, hard. “I am so glad you don’t have flesh-eating bacteria. What a relief.”

Ben lifts his cupcake. “I thought you’d be happy for me. Four months isn’t that long.”

“I am happy,” I say. Things you could do in four months: Train for a triathlon. Gestate practically half of a baby. Begin graduate school. Lose your boyfriend to an orphanage in Ecuador.

“I’ll be back, you know,” he says. He waves his free hand in a gesture of
pffft.
“Four months! I’m coming back.”

Well, if you have to say it.
“I know you are.” We’ve been having this conversation in a dark apartment. It’s only 4:45, but the sun has already set. “Duh! Of course you are!” I move to turn on the light, and the apartment is suffused with a homey, deceptive glow.

“I need to do something good,” he says.

“It’s just for four months.” I pull out my chair and sit down across from him.

“Right.” He seems pleased and relieved. He’s probably already making a list of what to pack.
Soap, shampoo, condoms???

“And the orphans!” I say. “They need you.”

Ben’s smile fades a little. “Come on.” He reaches across the table for my hand, but I’m busy folding and refolding my napkin.

“Although,” I say, “there are things you could do right here, of course. You know, local orphans just looking for a place to live. A nice bungalow by the lake.”

“I guess,” he says, furrowing his eyebrows, not sure if I’m serious; neither am I. “But, I mean, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

“Homegrown orphans!” I say, shaking my head to dam the tears that are trying to escape. “With a much smaller carbon footprint than your Ecuadorian variety.”

Ben’s forehead wrinkles even more deeply, his affect morphing from puzzled to disturbed. “You’re being kind of …” He would never actually say it.

“Locavorphans, is what they’re called.” I blink hard. “Pesticide-free and fresh to your table.”

Ben scrapes his chair back and stands up. He moves to hug me. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I guess I kind of sprang this on you. It’s just, I really wasn’t expecting to get in. I kind of sprang it on myself. I haven’t said yes yet, you know. It’s not a done deal.” He lets go of me, takes his plate to the kitchen and puts it in the sink with a rough clatter. “Maybe you need some time to process this, or whatever. Maybe I should just go out for a little walk. I’ll go pick up some milk.”

“I already got milk,” I say quietly.

“Well, I’ll go get some more.” He stands behind me and lays his hand on my head. “Let’s just … I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” he says. “Okay?” I’m silent, staring at the table—my plate, my origami napkin; Ben’s still-wrapped present, untouched. “Okay?” When I don’t answer, he grabs his jacket and answers for me: “Okay.”

Alone in the apartment, I feel like I’ve just stepped off a roller coaster, my body thrumming, arms and legs shaky. I go into the kitchen and wash a pile of dishes. I’m placing them on the drying rack when the phone rings. For a sharp, quick second, I think that it will be Jane.

“Hey,” Ben says. “I’m going to pick up a few things, as long as I’m here.” I’m stopped cold. This voice. This man. My choice: Ben, not Jane. “Maybe I’ll head to the co-op, too?” He sounds patient but uneasy, like he’s trying to coax a cat out of a tree.

“Okay,” I say, on cue this time. “Sure thing!” I force myself to sound carefree, to compensate for my previous clingy, tearful cynicism. “Take your time!” I say. “See you whenever!”

The balance of power between us has shifted. When did it happen? Just now, at the table, over birthday cupcakes? Or sometime over the past few months, after we became lovers? I was in control for all those years, even when he was with Jane. But now, suddenly, Ben holds the cards. And they’re in Spanish.

Or maybe this is just what it’s supposed to look like, the two of us bouncing back and forth on a seesaw, playing the game little kids play where they aim to balance in the middle, legs dangling: trying for equilibrium.

Four months really isn’t that long—if he even goes. He didn’t say he was definitely going, just that he’d been accepted.

I’m in the shower and feeling slightly better about things, just rinsing the shampoo out of my hair, when the door bangs open, and he pokes his head around the light blue shower curtain. “There you are,” he says, as if I’d been hiding. “I bought oranges!” A peace offering: we both love oranges. Ben lets the curtain fall back and then, a minute later, the plastic crackles again, and he climbs into in the shower with me.

“Oh!” I say, smiling, surprised. “I’m sorry, were you on the shower schedule for six-fifteen?” There are lingering habits, remnants of a friendship imperfectly translated into love. More often than I would have imagined, sex begins with puppyish wrestling; our lust is sometimes tinged with a jokey kind of embarrassment. We are who we are—our bodies the willing participants in a game our brains play.

But not now. He steps toward me, braces himself with one arm on the tiled wall, and leans forward to kiss me, his head under the faucet, his face wet on mine, no joking to take the edge off, no paving the bridge with goofy laughter. “Because I was pretty sure I signed up for Tuesday,” I say, and he shushes me. His body is urgent and his breath is fast and his hands are on me, on my face, my neck, my soap-slippery shoulders, hips, stomach; we’re wet bodies and lips and tongues; he presses himself against me, his hands tangled now in my hair. He whispers something in my ear, but it’s drowned out by the pounding water and my own loud, disoriented thoughts. The water goes lukewarm and then almost cold, but it doesn’t matter, because the borders of my body have turned to liquid and I’m melting into him, every bit of me.

“Jeez,” I say afterward, wrapped in a towel and lying next to Ben on the bed. “Shower sex. Such a cliché!” I’ve managed to forget everything that happened this afternoon and am basking in the foolish postorgasmic certainty that everything will be
just fine
.

“Oh, yeah, sorry about that,” Ben says. He elbows me lightly. “I know you can’t stand clichés.”

“Pedestrian.” I inch toward him. Little electrical tingles run up and down my skin.

He angles his leg over mine and crosses his arms above his head. “Hot, though.” He turns his face to mine. “So, you’re feeling okay about this, then?”

“Hot shower sex? Sure.”

“No.” He kisses my ear. “Four months in
Ecuador.
” He pronounces the word with an exaggerated Spanish accent, as if to emphasize that we’re just messing around here, just having a lighthearted little conversation.

A rush of warmth floods through me. “No, I’m … I thought we …” I adjust the towel that has fallen away from my chest. Humiliation is physical: a transformation of molecules, a shuddering rearrangement of the limbic system. What did I think? That fifteen minutes in the shower would be such a powerfully amazing experience that Ben would realize that he could not leave? That it would flip our imbalance and remind him of just how tremendously lucky he is to have me? “Well, I thought we were going to talk about it,” I say finally.

“We are,” Ben says. “We are talking about it.”

“You said it wasn’t a done deal. What if I tell you not to go?”

Ben sighs. “Willa, I don’t know.” Neither of us says anything for a long time, and then Ben finally does. “I don’t want you to tell me not to go.”

I reach up to touch my hair, which I can already feel is drying funny. Ben is staring at the ceiling, his eyes dark in the dim, shadowy room. There’s a definition to his face that I’ve never seen before, never in twelve years of knowing him: a knife-sharp clarity in the set of his lips, the square of his jaw. Adult Ben, fully and completely. And as I’m taking in the new, decisive fix of his profile, I finally see exactly what is lurking here in the space between us—not just remorse over what we did to be together, not a stubborn obstacle or the pulse of missing her, but Jane herself; her long body; her thin arms; her pale skin; her curly hair; her clever, kind, accommodating self: Jane, human and warm and gone from us.

“Then I won’t say it,” I tell Ben. I curl toward him, rest my arm across his solid chest, squeeze myself closer to him, let the towel fall away, press my cool, bare skin against his. The radiator in the bedroom clanks on. Four months.

He half turns his body and edges up against me, his arms too tight around my rib cage, his face in my damp hair. We’re thigh to thigh, ankle to ankle. I arch my back awkwardly so my stomach touches his. His elbow digs into the dip of my waist. I accidentally jab him with my knee; he grunts, but doesn’t move away.

We can’t get close enough.

Chapter Twenty-six

Seth tosses a small, poorly wrapped present onto my kitchen table. “So tell me more about this holiday of yours,” he says, “this Hah-nu-
kah
.”

“Well, it’s a complicated story.” I hold the tip of a lit match to the bottoms of the candles to melt them, so they’ll stick into the holes better. “There was this band of rogue Jews. Bad-Ass Jews.”

“Ah, yes, the Bad-Ass Jews. Of the Bad-Assian Mountain Range, near Assopotamia.”

“Yes. And they were hanging out in the second temple, after they foreclosed on the first temple. And they found that, tragically, they did not have enough oil to make French fries, so they made potato pancakes instead.”

“And that’s how come we have eight nights of Jewish Christmas!”

“And why we give each other eight pairs of socks, one for each night!”

Seth picks up the lumpy little package he’s brought and waves it in front of me. Back in the day, it was a running joke in my family that by the sixth night of Hanukkah, whether we needed them or not, we would be getting socks; while our Gentile friends were oohing and aahing over their new video games and the coolest technological accessories they’d gotten for Christmas, the Jacobs kids were unwrapping cotton footwear.
Kids,
our mother would say, dismissing our disappointed faces,
you can always use a nice pair of socks.

“Oh, no!” I say. “But I cut off my feet and sold them so I could buy you a beautiful hat!”

“And I cut off my head and sold
it
, to buy you these socks.”

“So tragic!”

Ben left two weeks ago. For three days I lay in my bed and I poked my fingers into the electric socket of my memory. Ben would not come back to me. Not come back. I cried and cried and cried and cried. My bed was covered in a damp blanket of crumpled white Kleenex and balled-up sheets of paper from my sketch pad, halfhearted attempts at drawings ripped out and discarded. By the end of the third day I didn’t think I could cry anymore, but I was wrong, and that night I cried some more. My stomach was sore from it. My eye sockets ached.