Friendship (9 page)

“Oh, I just—a few years ago I decided I was tired of not ever having any idea what to order, and I took a class.” She was such a better liar when she was drunk! She had also gotten really good, at the wine bar, at the flicking motion that undid the foil overwrap on a bottle top with an efficient single twist of her wrist.

“Damn, Bev. You’ve got hidden depths.” Steve leaned tipsily toward her. “I have to get to know you better. Find out allll your secrets.”

Was he fucking kidding with this? At the same time, the cedary smell and the creamy shirt were enticing. The smell and feel of luxury were overwhelming to her hungry senses. She took another honeyed sip. “Hey, you didn’t say where you lived,” she said casually. She could leave her bike locked to a stop sign near the restaurant; no way she was dealing with it right now.

“It’s funny, actually, so near here,” Steve said. “I’d love to show you my place. It’s nothing fancy, but I have a huge flat-screen. We could watch
Parks and Rec
, or something.”

“It’s already over,” Bev murmured.

“No worries, dude. I DVR’d it.”

12

Amy was tempted to ignore her ringing phone—it wasn’t even seven o’clock!—but she saw Bev’s name on the display, hit “talk,” and lay back down in bed with her eyes closed while Bev spoke.

“Have you ever taken the morning-after pill?”

“No, but…”

“Do you know anyone who has? I think I might have to take it, but I want to know first whether it’s going to ruin my whole day.”

It emerged that Bev had gone on a date with a guy she’d met at one of her temp placements, some suit-wearing dude.

“Gross,” Amy said.

“Fuck you! Judging me when I’m at my weakest!”

“Whatever. You know I think it’s disgusting to fuck strangers. Make out with them, by all means, go home with them, I guess, or take them home, but don’t actually allow them to insert their body parts into your orifices—that’s the first law of self-respect.”

“According to Colette, washing your vagina every night before bed no matter how tired you are is the first law of self-respect.”

“I love that you know that. Did you check the wastebasket and the floor before you left? Maybe there was a condom wrapper.”

“Thanks, Nancy Drew.”

“I’m just trying to be helpful! Also, when is your period due?”

“It’s … next week, in theory, or maybe a week and a half from now? I haven’t been keeping close track. Probably because I haven’t gotten laid in several eons.”

“Oh, well … it seems like you should take it, then, right?”

“I guess? But I’m not even sure that I had sex, and it’s forty dollars I definitely can’t spare.”

“I’ll totally give you the forty dollars. This is important.”

“I’m not taking money from you, Amy. You know I can’t do that. I also just don’t want to ruin my day. I’m so hungover, I don’t want to add mystery ingredients to my body chemistry, and I have to be in Midtown by nine.”

“Okay. Well, I still think you should, but if you’re sure you don’t need to … But do you promise never to do this again? And get tested ASAP?”

“I definitely won’t. Do it again, I mean. Please, you know this is the first time I’ve maybe had sex in like … uh, I’m not even actually going to do that math, it’s too depressing. Do you want to get coffee, as long as we’re both up?”

*   *   *

THEY TOOK THEIR
coffee to the community garden where Bev had cultivated a little patch of cucumbers. She was a junior member of the garden, so her plot was near the back edge, where rats sometimes chewed through the fence and pillaged the growing vegetables, but otherwise it was nice to have a plot there, a five-by-five square of tangible life accomplishment that Amy admired.

Bev greeted a middle-aged woman who was crouched near the entrance pulling weeds. They walked past Bev’s plot, toward the back of the narrow yard, to the ring of benches near the composting toilet. It wasn’t clear whether they were really out of the weeder’s earshot, but the overgrown rows of plants made the yard feel muffled and private.

They sat there in silence for a moment as Bev sipped her iced coffee.

“Well, you had sex with someone who wasn’t Todd! That’s good just in and of itself.”

Bev glared at her.

“B, I’m just trying to put a positive spin on the situation. And I mean, maybe you should date this guy! He’s probably rich. It’s not a bad thing!”

Bev sucked hard on her straw. “It’s definitely a bad thing. You have no idea. He lives in one of those new condos with the floor-to-ceiling windows. I woke up this morning, and the first thing I noticed was his gaming console. He has, like, a PlayStation or something. And zero books. Also I sincerely have no idea whether we did it or, like, what motivated me to go home with him…”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

Bev wrinkled her forehead. “Um, we had finished dinner, and I was going to make my excuses and leave, but then he was like ‘One more drink!’ and then I guess we were going to go back to his place to watch TV? I remember him telling me how big his TV was.”

Amy giggled. “And that sealed the deal for you? The size of his … TV?”

Bev rummaged in her tote bag and fished out a tissue, and for a second Amy thought Bev was going to start crying, but she was only blowing her nose. Amy didn’t want to embarrass her by looking straight at her while she snorted into the tissue, so she looked up into the grapevines, where a bird was trying to grab onto the flimsy vines long enough to pluck a few grapes; it kept losing its footing and flapping wildly a few inches from its target as the overripe grapes scattered onto the ground below.

“Did I tell you I had drinks with Mary last week?” Bev asked after she was done getting all the snot out of her nose. Mary was someone Bev and Amy had both worked with at the job where they’d first met.

“No. How is she? Is she still with that guy?”

“She is. She had, like, unexpected psychological insight into me, I thought.”

“Why, what did she say?”

“She said that it’s hard for me to accept that there’s anything good about me, so I always hang out with people who never give me any positive feedback.”

Amy drank some of her coffee and tried not to see what Bev had said as an accusation exactly.

“Not … ‘people’ so much as ‘guys.’ Like Todd. How Todd never said anything nice, like, gave me a compliment or anything, and that somehow made me like him more. Or how when people said something nice about my stories in class, I stopped trusting their opinions.”

“Well, everyone has that, I think. I think that’s just part of being human, actually.”

“Is it? I keep meeting humans who seem to just
love
themselves. Like that guy last night. It’s weird, it’s like … the more objectively horrible they are, the more likely they are to love themselves.”

“To seem to love themselves.”

“Well, yeah.”

“And are these humans mostly dudes?”

“No, not even. I mean yes, they skew dude. But mostly they’re just people who seem to know what their spot in the world is and inhabit it comfortably.”

“Well, get Mary to explain it. I’m at a loss, personally.”

They finished their coffee and a few minutes later agreed to leave the garden. The sun was coming up over the grapevine-covered wall. It seemed destined to be an exceptionally hot day, and Amy tried to imagine what she might do with it. All kinds of things needed to be done, of course, but none of them more than any others. She and Bev turned toward each other to say goodbye. They saw each other so often that they didn’t usually hug when parting, but to Amy right then it felt appropriate. It didn’t to Bev, though, apparently: she made no move toward Amy. “I’ll see you soon,” she said as she turned away, as though sentencing Amy to some dire fate.

13

The next day, Amy woke up at a normal time. She lay still, waiting for the details of her disturbing dream to come back to her. She’d been in some long hall, some sunny corridor, opening doors one by one and finding unexpected people behind them. Her dreams tended to be full of comically blatant symbols: bags too heavy to carry, secret hidden rooms. This one, she hazily remembered, had culminated at some kind of party where she’d watched from a distance as a blurry man went down on one knee, as in an advertisement or reality show, and proposed to a pretty girl. The diamond ring generated blinding flashes of light, the couple embraced cinematically, and dream-Amy had felt pierced by the ring’s rays with cramplike pangs of grief. As she opened her eyes, she thought of explaining this idiotic dream to Sam. Making fun of it. Still dozing, he put a lazy paw on the curve of her hip and pulled her toward him, and she rolled into the warmth generated by his body.

They pried themselves out of bed and Sam got into the shower and Amy went to her kitchen to start the coffee and clean up last night’s dishes, but as she sponged the counter and listened to NPR with a quarter of her brain, the brokenhearted feeling generated by the dream persisted. It had nothing to do with logic, nothing to do with her actual life. She stared out the window, looking at the flashes of movement between the leaves of the backyard tree: finches bobbing from branch to branch, shaking off a few mulberries each time they landed. It was already the first week of August, it would be her birthday soon; she would be thirty.

Sam had made a portrait of his ex-wife that Amy thought about sometimes when she thought of getting older. It was painted with thick brushstrokes, and the woman’s face was half in shadow, with purple stains under her sad dark eyes. Amy hated to look at the portrait. She avoided the corner of Sam’s studio where it hung. She hoped someone would buy it so she’d never have to see it again.

When he got out of the shower, Sam came up behind her at the sink and nuzzled her neck. What a jerk she was to be sad. What did she have to be sad about? She turned and pressed her lips against his and felt the luxury of his soft mouth, a minor treat she could revisit in sense memory for the duration of the day. He pulled away from the kiss before it could get too full of intent.

“What are you doing later?” he asked her.

“Nothing. Why, what are you doing?”

“Mmm, I dunno. I have an interview today for that residency. If it goes well, I thought we could go out to celebrate.”

“What residency?”

“It’s that one where a bunch of painters stay in this rich lady’s house in rural Spain. She’s just this rich lady who loves being surrounded by painters or something. And they give you a studio, and you’re in Spain, and then it looks really good on your CV and buyers are impressed. I don’t know, I thought it was worth a shot.”

“Geez, how long would you be in Spain for?”

Sam shrugged. He lazily moved a spoon around in his cup, stirring honey into his coffee.

“I don’t know. I guess it’s flexible. Probably at least a couple of months. You could visit! It would be fun.”

“A couple of
months
?”

“Yeah! What?”

“Two months is a long time! Won’t you miss me?”

“Of course I’ll miss you! I’ll miss you a ton. But you’ll send me such great emails. You are the best emailer. I would partly be going away to get your emails.”

“You can stay here and I’ll send them anyway, how’s that?”

“Oh, baby. Come on. It’ll be romantic when you visit me.” He pressed the length of his body against her back again as she scoured a formerly nonstick pan that had lost its nonstick coating. “And there’s no guarantee I’ll get it. Let’s not have a fight about it until I get it.”

“Huh. Okay, that seems reasonable.”

The drone of the NPR host’s voice filtered into their silence for a moment, and Sam petted her hair.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, though,” Amy said.

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah, uh. So Mr. Horton shoved this letter under the door the other day … he’s raising the rent. It’s more than I can pay, I think.”

“Oh, so … Do you want me to chip in a little? I’m here all the time. You’re right, it’s only fair.”

“Uh, would that mean … Would you live here? Like, would we live together?”

Sam laughed. “It can mean whatever you want, baby. I mean, it’ll mean I’m paying some of the rent so you can keep your apartment and you won’t have to look for a new place and all that nonsense. You don’t want to move, do you?”

Amy looked around at the sunny little kitchen, the wide planks of its wood floor, the familiar tree outside the window. It was a best-case-scenario one-bedroom, even if it was basically under the BQE. “I guess I always thought that if I left this place, it would be because I was moving in with someone.”

“Uh-huh…”

“But I also thought, like, I wouldn’t just
live with
someone. Because then when you break up, the two worst things that can happen to you are happening simultaneously. You’re breaking up, and you’re looking for an apartment.”

“Well, we won’t break up!”

“But does that mean we’re going to get married?”

“Amy,” Sam said, taking a quick gulp of coffee. “Are you proposing to me? That’s not very romantic.”

Amy rolled her eyes. “Sorry. Sorry not to be superromantic all the time, like you, Mr. Fucking Romance.”

“Hey, hey. How did we get here? Look, I’m applying for this thing. If I get it, we’ll talk about what that means. If I don’t, we’ll plan some other things. But there’s no point in having this conversation now, right?”

“What does
any
of that
mean
?” said Amy, humiliated to find herself on the verge of tears.

Sam reached up and turned off the radio, shutting
Morning Edition
up in mid-sentence. “Baby, baby, baby. You’re my baby. I couldn’t live without you. We’ll figure this out. I’m not going anywhere right this minute. And I’m totally willing to chip in on the rent—how much is the increase? I’ll just pay whatever the difference is from your old rent. That makes it so there’s nothing to decide.”

“If you say so, I guess. We definitely need to talk about this more. But right now I have to go to work.” Amy sniffled. “At my stupid job. That I hate!” Giving up and succumbing to the tide of irrational sadness that had welled up from her dream life and crossed over into reality, she put her head down on the kitchen counter and allowed herself to sob for a solid minute while Sam stood over her, mussing her hair and whispering to her as if she were a skittish animal. After the minute was up, she went into the bathroom and washed her face, took out and reinserted her contact lenses, applied deodorant and tinted moisturizer. When she came out, Sam was intently sketching the nail clippers, which he’d posed on the back of his coffee cup, and rather than disturb him, she kissed the top of his head and quietly walked out the door.