The Smart One (2 page)

Her phone rang again, but she didn’t bother to look at it. Her mom had been calling every day (a few times a day, actually) trying to persuade Claire to come to the shore with the family. “It’s important to me,” her mom said, over and over. If Claire had been anyone else, she could have told her mom the truth, that she didn’t want to go and sit with her family for a week at the beach, that it would make her already pathetic life seem worse. But she wouldn’t do that, because no matter how old she got, she still hated hurting Weezy’s feelings, and the times that she did left her feeling so guilty she couldn’t sleep. But for now, she let the phone ring. She had stuff to do, like looking at her bank accounts online hoping something had changed, and watching TV.

Claire sighed and switched the channel. She could always make something for dinner. There was a box of macaroni and cheese in the cupboard and that would be fine, she realized. Yes, if Maddie and Jack were still out there when she wanted to eat, she’d just make that. Calmed by the fact that she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone today, she pulled a blanket over her and settled down on the couch to watch an old eighties movie. She figured watching people go to the prom would be soothing.

CLAIRE FIRST MET DOUG AT
a Super Bowl party of a friend of a friend on the Upper West Side. They’d sat next to each other on the couch and watched the game, eating guacamole and laughing at the commercials. Anytime Claire needed a beer, Doug stood up, took her empty bottle, and returned with a full one. At the end of the night, she was happy to give him her number when he asked.

“Doug Winklepleck?” her best friend, Lainie, had said. “That’s an unfortunate name.” Claire agreed, but continued to date him.

After they’d dated each other for a few weeks, Doug said, “I would like to be exclusive with you, if that’s what you want as well.” It sounded like a business proposal, but Claire was happy to agree. Doug was straightforward, and Claire appreciated that. He had a thin face, and a nose that was almost too big, but not quite. He was handsome in
his own way. He was a systems developer for a fund of funds, a job title that meant nothing to Claire and that she never quite fully understood. He had his ties on a rotating schedule and contributed the maximum amount to his 401(k). He was, by all accounts, admirable.

On one of their early dates, Doug took Claire to see the elephants arrive in Manhattan for the circus. They were marched through the Queens Midtown Tunnel at midnight and Doug told her it was something she had to see. “I can’t believe you’ve lived here for five years and you’ve never seen them,” he said. “That won’t do.”

They went to a bar on Third Avenue that had a jukebox, long wooden tables, and smelled like yeast and bleach. They played darts and shared a plate of buffalo wings, which was a tricky thing to eat on an early date. And when it was time, they rushed out to the street to wait for the arrival.

Claire stood there, leaning against Doug, buzzed from the beers and the strangeness of the night. She shivered and watched the big, sad elephants march into Manhattan. They were wrinkled and dusty and magnificent. She wanted to cry for them, wanted to run up and touch their rough skin with her hand, to place her palms flat against their hides. It was all she could do to stay put in her place. She drew in a deep breath and said, “Oh.”

“See?” Doug whispered into her hair. “I told you. It’s something to see.”

And right then, Claire felt like Doug was the right choice, the person she’d been waiting for, and anytime she started to think otherwise, she’d close her eyes and whisper, “Remember the elephants,” until the feeling went away.

THEY MOVED IN TOGETHER NINE MONTHS
after they met, and then, about a year after that, Doug proposed. The ring was dull, silver, and thick, with a vine etched all around it. Along the vine were tiny dots of diamonds. Claire hated it. “I knew you wouldn’t want a big, showy ring,” Doug said. She’d just nodded and looked down at her hand. Of course she wanted a big ring. She’d always wanted a big diamond, even if she knew she was supposed to say it didn’t matter.

And the thing that bugged her, the thing that really drove her crazy,
was that Doug had never asked her. If he had, he would have known. She suspected that he surprised her with this one so he wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money, which was even more annoying, because he made a good amount of money—a lot of money by anyone’s standards. It wasn’t like she could look at the ring and think,
Well, this is all he could afford, but I know he loves me
. It wasn’t. He could have bought her something spectacular, but he decided to be practical. And who wanted practical for an engagement ring?

They were engaged for four months. Claire tried to remember where the shift happened, when things started to fall apart, but she could never quite figure it out. There were no screaming fights, no cheating, no admission of an Internet porn addiction or a hidden drug problem. They just simply began to crack.

Almost every conversation they had led them to a disagreement. Had it always been this way? Claire didn’t think so, but maybe it had and they’d just never noticed. Maybe now that they were facing the rest of their lives together, everything seemed bigger and more important.

“You only want two kids?” Claire said one day. Doug nodded. He’d said this before, but she’d always thought he was flexible.

“Two is a good number,” he said. “Two is affordable.”

“What if one of them dies?” Claire asked. “Then you only have one left.”

“Why would you say something like that?” He looked away. “What’s wrong with you?”

When Claire wanted to go out to dinner three nights in a row, Doug said they shouldn’t, to save money. When Doug talked about moving to Long Island, Claire told him he was out of his mind. When Claire watched reality TV, especially the singing competition show that Doug hated, he told her she was contributing to the downfall of American culture. When Doug wore his BlackBerry strapped to his hip in a holster, Claire told him he was a nerd. It went on like this, until most nights were spent in separate rooms of the apartment, watching different TV shows.

“You’re always so mad at me,” Doug said, more than once. “It’s like whatever I do disappoints you.”

“That’s not true,” Claire said. But she wasn’t sure.

Then one night, after an argument about whether they should order Thai food or sushi that ended with Doug calling Claire overdramatic and Claire calling Doug controlling, he had sighed. “What’s going on with us?”

“It’s just Thai food,” Claire said. But it was too late.

“Something’s wrong. This isn’t right.”

“You can get the crab wontons,” she said. Doug shook his head.

Claire stayed in the apartment and Doug moved out, saying that he would pay his part of the rent for two more months while she looked for a new place. It all happened quickly. There were two nights of talking and fighting, of Claire crying on the couch, and Doug crying a little bit too, and then it was settled and he was moving out and Claire still hadn’t told anyone what had happened.

The Monday after Doug left, Claire got dressed, took the subway to work, and was standing in her boss’s office talking about a grant proposal when she started crying. Crying! Like she was seven years old. It had been mortifying to stand there and try to hold back her tears, and even more so to have her boss jump up and close the door to her office, then guide Claire to a chair to ask her what was wrong.

Claire had told her everything—the engagement, Doug’s moving out, the apartment, how she still needed to tell her family and cancel the plans that had been made for the wedding—and Amy had listened, nodding and handing her tissues, making sympathetic noises at certain places.

“It’s such a mess,” Claire said. “I’m sorry. It’s a mess, I’m a mess.”

Amy had sent her home then, instructing her to take the week off. “You have so much comp time. Take it. We’re covered here. There’s nothing that can’t be done next week. Just get things sorted and settled.” Claire thought how strange this was, since the extent of her personal conversations with Amy up to this point had been about the salad place across the street that they both liked. When they ran into each other there, they’d laugh and say, “Funny seeing you here,” and then they’d discuss whether it was better to get walnuts or pecans on your salad, or to leave them off altogether since nuts were so packed with calories.

“I don’t need a whole week,” Claire said, but Amy held up her hand.

“Take it. This is your life and this is important. There’s a lot for you to figure out. It wouldn’t hurt to rest and be kind to yourself for a few days.”

Claire was forever grateful for this. She hoped that one day she could show the same kindness to someone who worked for her. But she was also deeply embarrassed and when she finally did return to work, she couldn’t look Amy in the eye. It was like she’d taken all her clothes off in front of this woman and then expected it not to be awkward. It was awful, really.

Claire had spent the whole week in her apartment. She didn’t leave once. She called her mom to let her know about the engagement and refused the suggestions to come home to Philly, and screamed, “No!” at the idea of her mom coming to New York.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Really. I just need to sort things out.”

“Oh, Claire,” her mom had said. And Claire had to get off the phone before she started crying, because those two words coming out of her mom’s mouth were the worst. She’d heard them so many times before—when she got a D in calculus, when she crashed the car in the high school parking lot, when she got arrested at the shore for underage drinking.

Claire e-mailed her friends, but didn’t take any phone calls. She made it seem like she wasn’t in New York.
I’m sorting things out
, she typed.
I’m doing fine
.

That whole week, Claire took baths at night. She soaked in the tub, filling it with water as hot as she could stand. When the water started to cool, she would let some of it drain out and then turn on the faucet to let new, steaming water pour in. She emerged from these baths pink-faced and dizzy. She would wrap a towel around her head and another around her body and stare at herself in the mirror. She looked like a newborn hamster before it got its fur—a doughy pink blob of see-through skin, unrecognizable and delicate.

Claire hoped for some revelation during these baths. She thought that soaking in the soapy water would clear her head. But it didn’t. Mostly she just tried to figure out where she’d gone wrong. Sometimes
she wondered what would happen if Doug were still there. Almost always she replayed the moment in her head when the actual breakup happened, when Doug said he was going to move out, and Claire said, “What am I going to do now?” She hadn’t meant to say it, didn’t even realize it was coming out of her mouth until she heard it, and immediately she was ashamed. She didn’t want to be that person, didn’t want to hear her teary, pathetic voice in her head, admitting that she was lost, saying, “What am I supposed to do now?” like she couldn’t figure anything out for herself. And so she soaked in the water and hoped that somehow the words would steam out of her.

During the days, she watched talk shows. On Tuesday, the guest was a kidnapping specialist, who talked the audience through gory details of women being dismembered and raped. Claire forced herself to watch as a reminder that things could be much worse. More than once, the man looked at the audience with serious eyes as he repeated his most important advice: “Never let them take you to a second location,” he said. He pointed at a different person with each word.

Apparently, the odds of being killed went up enormously when you let an abductor take you somewhere else. Claire let this thought run itself over in her head. She ordered takeout every night, and figured she was safest in her apartment.

Claire returned to work without one thing figured out. She had considered moving, but the thought of finding a new place that she could afford seemed impossible. And so she stayed put and dipped into her savings to pay rent after Doug stopped sending her checks. She told herself that it was actually less expensive this way, because to move she’d need money for a deposit and a broker fee and a moving company. It was the right thing to do, she thought, to stay where she was for the moment.
Never let them take you to a second location
, she’d remind herself.

Of course, six months later, all of Claire’s savings were gone and she’d started charging anything she could on her credit cards—groceries, subway cards, taxi rides, the electric bill. It was easy to live in New York on credit.

At least ten times a day, she signed on to her bank accounts to look
at the numbers, trying to make sense of them, trying to make them add up differently. She studied the numbers, like if she looked at them long enough, more money would appear in her bank account. But that never happened. After staring at it for about an hour, she’d begin to get a panicky feeling, and she’d have to sign out quickly, clicking the button at the top, like closing the screen was going to make the problem go away.

Sometimes at night, Claire dreamt about that crazy blond lady on TV, the one who tried to fix the financially irresponsible, adding up their bills, telling them, firmly, that they needed to change their habits. In her dreams, Claire saw this woman walking up to her in a no-nonsense suit, accentuating every word as she said,
You cannot live like this. You have got to take responsibility. You have got to live within your means or you are going to end up—Broke. Without. A. Penny. To. Your. Name. Or. A. Place. To. Live
.

In the dreams, Claire would try to run away from her. When she woke up, she’d always think,
Even my dreams have money problems
. Then she’d try to tell herself it wasn’t that bad.

This past month, she’d realized that she was totally screwed, that she probably wouldn’t even be able to pay her full rent next month. She wondered about this in a sort of abstract way, as if the apartment were so absolutely hers that the landlord wouldn’t be able to kick her out. But she knew that wasn’t the truth. She knew her borrowed time was almost up.