The Divorce Party (5 page)

She looks up at him. This is what Nate always says to her— what they always say to each other—instead of
I love you,
instead of
I’ll never leave
. I like you the most, like a promise: I want you, and I always will.

“I like you more than anyone, too,” Maggie says.

Then—before she has to take another look at their BlackBerry friend, before she has to think about any of the rest of it—a bus is pulling up with large green paneling on the side, HAMPTON JITNEY written in white letters. They get in line, head onto the bus, behind an older couple who is bickering with the driver about a surfboard: under the bus, over, under.

The first several rows are already filled with passengers from previous stops. As they pass row three, Maggie catches the eye of a model-looking woman—exotic more than pretty, and strikingly thin—who looks at Nate, really looks at him, does a double take as they walk by. Nate doesn’t seem to notice, but Maggie does. She is still not used to this, how women look at Nate. At first, she kind of liked it. But now she doesn’t care if anyone else thinks Nate is attractive, especially because their looks feel so predatory. As if how he looks is all they see. As if any of his more human qualities, or the fact that he isn’t looking back, can be made untrue, invisible.

In the first free aisle, Maggie squeezes into the window seat, Nate shoving their belongings in the rack above their heads before taking the aisle seat, handing her a brown bag.

“What’s in there?” she asks.

“Your favorite.”

“My favorite?” she says, peeking inside.

But she knows what it is, before she even looks. Nate has made her his famous peanut butter popcorn concoction: popcorn with homemade peanut butter sauce and a variety of salty and sweet herbs. It may sound disgusting, especially in the morning, but it is Maggie’s ultimate comfort food. And, with all the fancy, wonderful things Nate can cook so well, she still loves this the most.

“When did you have time to do this?”

He leans over and kisses her on the cheek. “It’s amazing what I can get done when you refuse to speak to me.”

Maggie smiles. “Ha ha,” she says, and takes a bite, then another bite, breathing in the secret ingredient (coconut) and starting to feel better. Immediately and completely better.

This is going to be fine. All of it will be fine. The reason he didn’t tell her until now about the money is that it wasn’t important to him. It wasn’t a part of him, and therefore of them either. It had nothing to do with them. Nothing is different. They will go see his parents, like they planned, go to their bizarre party, and head back to New York, to their restaurant at the tip of Brooklyn. Twenty-four hours from now, and this will be behind them.

“Good?” he says.

“Very good,” she says. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

She brushes his hair off of his face, moves closer to him, which is when she gets her next surprise. The model-like woman from the front of the bus is standing there. She is wearing a tiny green dress, bug-shaped glasses, and looks better from this angle—the thin turning into sculpted, the strikingly gaunt turning into simply striking—as if this were the angle, from below her, you’re actually supposed to be watching her from.

“Nate Huntington,” she says. “I thought it was you.”

Nate looks flummoxed for a minute, and—as his eyes register the woman, he looks
more
flummoxed, as if he has just been caught in something. And from the way he is looking back and forth between Maggie and whoever this is, Maggie wonders what he thinks he is being caught for.

“Murphy . . .” Nate says, standing up and giving her a hug. “What a small world.”

When Nate pulls back, Murphy—
Murphy?
really?—keeps her arms wrapped around his neck in a familiar way.

“Not that small,
mon ami
. Or it wouldn’t have been so long since I last laid eyes on you.”

Maggie puts her paper bag of popcorn down, trying to sit up taller at the same time, which makes the popcorn spill all over her lap and the seat. The good and bad news is that Nate and Murphy are talking so intensely, Maggie is able to brush it off before they notice.

“Murphy Buckley, this is Maggie Mackenzie. Maggie, this is Murphy, an old friend of mine from growing up.”

“You can call me Murph,” she says to Maggie, holding out her hand. “It’s good to meet you. I saw you get on the bus. I noticed your shoes.”

Does that mean she liked my shoes?
Maggie looks down at her worn, gold ballet slippers and sincerely doubts it. Maggie instinctively tucks her legs beneath herself, and pulls her hair behind her ears. It is something she does when she is feeling nervous, tugging on her best feature, or what she thinks is her best feature—her long, dark hair—and really, combined with her dark eyes and skin, someone
could
make the argument that she, Maggie, is pretty. But, Maggie knows, someone could make the other argument too. Not like Murph. There is only one argument to make about her.

“Maggie and I are getting married,” Nate says.

“Seriously? I don’t believe it!” Murph says. “You are engaged? I didn’t think that day would come. No judgment or anything. I keep saying I’m not done with marriage, and I’ve been married two and a half times at this point, but . . .”

Nate interrupts her—in a very un-Nate-like moment, as he doesn’t usually interrupt people. It may be the first time, or at least the first time she remembers, that she has heard him interrupt anyone. But she can see something in his eyes when he does it—the defensiveness—that kicks up in Nate so rarely that it surprises her, unnerves her, to see it now.

“Murph and I grew up down the road from each other,” he says. “Really next door to each other . . .” He makes a triangle sign with his hands, as if to show the location points of each of their houses—Murph at the thumbs, Nate at the index fingers. “We went to high school together.”

“If you can call it high school,” she says. “It wasn’t exactly chock-full of homecoming dances or pep rallies. More like eleven of us sitting in my parents’ living room every day with a private tutor because our parents deemed East Hampton High unworthy.” She shines her shiny teeth at Maggie. “Not exactly hard to win most popular when my kitchen supplied the Diet Coke.”

Maggie tries to catch Nate’s eyes. Is that how half billionaires are educated?

“Maggie loves Diet Coke,” Nate says.

Maggie nods, because she knows this is his way of trying to include her, which ends up making her feel worse. That this is the best way he found: utilizing a soft drink.

“Who doesn’t?” Murph says.

“Probably the people who make Diet Pepsi,” Maggie says. She is surprised by the anger in her own voice, the edge beneath the joke, but Murph doesn’t notice. Or at least Murph pretends not to notice, laughing loudly instead, her head flying back.

People are scrambling to pass her in the aisles, which makes Maggie hope that maybe Murph will just go back to her
own
seat, already. But she doesn’t seem to notice the people who need to get by. Or maybe she just doesn’t care.

“So I have a bone to pick with you, by the way . . .”

Guess not.

“How could you just skip out on our reunion? Leave me alone with all those lunatics when you know it is
the end of me
?”

“I’m sorry about that. We were still out in California, and trying to get it together to move here.”

“Excuses, excuses! We all had dinner at Soho House. Gray-son came in from Boston and Lis and Marlo flew in from Dubai. And Bedlan Blumberg hosted the whole thing because, you know, he’s so over trying to impress anyone. Yeah, right. Anyway . . . we drank like nine magnums of Veuve. I swear, I nearly passed out
at the table
. And, at three A.M., we are all totally hammered, and Buddy rises up to make a toast, and tells us that he has an announcement to make, and the announcement is that he is gay. We were like, Buddy,
no fucking kidding
. We’ve only known this our entire lives. But thanks for the tip, Jackass.”

She pauses, breathes in. “It was a blast.”

Nate starts to laugh, a little too loudly, and Maggie wonders if she missed something. It’s possible. What had she and Nate discussed about their high schools? She can’t remember now. Could it be so little that she has somehow assumed that Nate’s high school looked something like hers? One with a big gym and bad cafeteria food and an even worse football team? Or did he say something that made her think those things? She looks at him more carefully. What else did she assume that maybe she should remember to ask him about now? What else about the way he grew up is going to come into focus in the next twenty-four hours?

Murph is holding her hand over Nate’s chest, over his heart. “So have I been hearing right? You are back from San Fran, for good, and opening this
very
big-deal restaurant?”

“I wouldn’t jump to calling it a big deal, but, yes, we’re opening a restaurant out in Brooklyn, Red Hook, actually,” Nate says. And, thankfully, he steps back, so Murph has no choice but to let his chest go.

He shrugs at Maggie, as if to say,
I’m sorry.

She shrugs back, as if to say,
it’s okay.
But truthfully—if she’s allowed to be truthful with herself—it doesn’t feel okay, or at least, not exactly.

“Red Hook, huh?” Murph says. “I didn’t know that anyone actually lived there. Wow! It’s like you’re an explorer.”

“Something like that,” Nate says.

“When is opening day?”

“Our soft opening is Halloween weekend. And, if all goes as planned, we want to be up and running in time for the holidays.”

“That’s exciting.”

The person behind Murph in the aisle clears his throat loudly. Murph moves over, a drop, so he can almost squeeze past. When he waits for her to really move out of the way, when he gingerly coughs again so she will, she gives him a look as if to say,
up yours
.

“Well, I better head back up front. If I have to sit back here with you two, I’ll get seasick, Captain.”

Captain?

“We should hook up this weekend. Maybe get everyone together and head up to the Liars Saloon. Do a little drinking. Have a little fun. Old-school style. Wouldn’t that be the greatest?”

Nate nods. “If we can get away. It’s kind of a crazy weekend, and we’re actually only here because . . .”

“Oh that’s right! How could I forget? I heard that Gwyn and Thomas are having a divorce party tonight. I was surprised to hear they were splitting up, to tell you the truth. It’s temporary, I’m sure,
I’m sure
. . . I’d be willing to bet you that it is.” Then Murph turns toward Maggie. “Don’t you just love Gwyn and Thomas? I mean, just look at them! Who is beautiful enough for either of them except the other?”

Maggie shakes her head. “I haven’t met them yet actually. I’ve spoken to them on the phone many times, but this is the first time we’ll be meeting in person.” She can’t stop talking, apparently. “Face to face . . . because we were in California, and they were here, and we’ve been setting up the restaurant . . . and they’ve been going through . . .”

Murph raises her eyebrows, as if to say,
who are you talking to, me or yourself?
And Maggie wishes she had a good answer, but the truth is she has been telling herself too loudly all the reasons Nate hasn’t introduced her yet to his family. But now, she is wondering if she knows the real one.

“Well, anyway, you will love them,” Murph says. “I remember every time I was over there, they would sit so near to each other on the couch, sharing a plate of cheese or a glass of bourbon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my parents sit in the same room unless other people were there too. They are the ones who should be getting divorced, but I think my mother is too tired to house hunt.” She pauses, shaking her head. “But Gwyn and Thomas were, year after year, connected at the knees. It makes it all quite shocking, really. Because they say that determines it, you know.”

“Determines what?” Nate says.

“How happy you’ll be in your own marriage. However happy your parents were in theirs, you tend to match it, or something like it. You tend to emulate whatever you saw in your house.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Maggie says.

They both turn to stare at her. She feels her face flush red. She wasn’t planning on saying that out loud, wasn’t planning on saying anything out loud, but she just wants Murph to go away. Now.

Maggie clears her throat. “I just mean that lots of people can end up in happy marriages, even if they had a rough start of things. Even if they aren’t sure they have the best model.”

“Your parents suck too, then?” Murph says.

“Excuse me?”

But then instead of answering, she turns to Nate. “So I’ll probably be coming by. You know how Louis and Marsha love to party . . . and I can’t disappoint the parents.”

“Good, we’d like that.”

She gives them both a small wave and heads back to the front, as the bus kicks into motion, pulling them down Forty-first Street toward the highway, as the ticket agent comes down the aisle, handing each passenger a small pack of pretzels, a container of water. Collecting fifty-one dollars for their roundtrip rides.

Once she is gone, Nate leans in close to her, wraps his arm around the back of Maggie’s shoulders.

“She’s okay, Maggie. Once you get to know her a little better. She’s not a bad person.”

“I believe it. That was nice of her to give you two bags of pretzels. I think most people got one.”

“Maggie,” Nate says. “I’m talking about Murph.”

“I know who you are talking about.”

“I’m sorry she made you uncomfortable.”

Maggie shakes her head. “She didn’t,” she says.
You did.
“But what was she talking about with the marriage stuff?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when you told her that we were engaged? Why was she saying that she was surprised you’d get married? It’s not like you’re twenty or something. You’re thirty-three. Why would that be surprising?”

“I don’t remember her saying that,” he says. And he gets a look across his face, a look that Maggie doesn’t recognize.