Friends Like Us
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2012 by Lauren Fox
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Fox, Lauren.
Friends like us: a novel / by Lauren Fox.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“Borzoi book.”
eISBN 978-0-307-95742-9
Cover photographs (top) composite of Lori Andrews/ Flickr /Getty Images and Eva Mueller /Getty Images; (bottom) Eva Mueller / Getty Images
Cover design by Abby Weintraub
1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction 3. Choice (Psychology)—Fiction 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3606.O95536F75 2012
813'.6—dc22 2011023867
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First Edition
v3.1
For Andrew
Contents
Prologue
This is what I’m thinking about when I see her: I’m thinking about a Saturday morning, six years ago, when Jane and I decided to make omelets.
In the small kitchen of our apartment, Jane pulled a frying pan from the cupboard, and I took five eggs out of the carton. We were both still wearing our pajamas; neither of us had anywhere else to be.
“You know,” I said, “my mom never let me crack eggs when I was a kid.” I tapped one against the side of the bowl and plopped it in. “I used to be very clumsy!” I swept my hand to the side in a dismissive gesture—
can you believe that?
—and with that brush of my hand, knocked the remaining four eggs off the counter and onto the floor. They made a clapping sound as they hit the linoleum, four little thwacks in rapid succession, like a quick round of applause from the gods of comic timing. I clapped my own hand over my mouth as Jane stared at me in disbelief.
She looked down at the floor, yellow yolks and gooey whites oozing and spreading, then back at me. She tilted her head with a funny little smile on her face and was silent for a moment. And then she said, “I find that very hard to believe.”
I’m standing in line at the bank, idly adjusting the shoulder strap on my bag, and I’m remembering how we started laughing then, and how that laughter escalated until Jane had to sit down, clutching her stomach as she gasped for breath. How just as we were regaining control, finally, just as our torrent of giggles was finally subsiding, Ben called out from the other room, “What’s so funny?” and set us off again, sent us to that place you go with your best friend, to the rollicking inauguration of an inside joke that will remain hysterically funny, only to the two of you and to the annoyance of many others, for years.
I used to be very clumsy!
we would say to each other, at first when one of us had done something that was actually klutzy and then, after a while, just whenever we felt like making each other laugh—at the grocery store, on a walk, in the middle of a movie. It never failed.
This is what I’m thinking about, really, because this is how it works once in a while, when the universe cracks you over the head, when it gives you what you need, whether or not you want it. I’m standing in this long line on a Friday afternoon, and I’m remembering that careening moment of hilarity six years ago, and I’m thinking about sketching it when I get home, I’m thinking about drawing a panel where Jane, in her oversize plaid pajamas, gazes at the broken eggs on the floor and says,
I find that very hard to believe.
I’m smiling to myself, and at just that moment, I catch the eye of the baby in line ahead of me, the brown-eyed baby in the puffy snowsuit peering over his mother’s left shoulder.
They’re a few customers ahead of me, close to the front. The baby sees me smiling and, deciding that my smile is meant for him, returns it: hugely, wetly, toothlessly. I’m bought and sold. I wave.
“Guh-weeee!” he squeals, delighted. I waggle my eyebrows at him. “Ah doo DAH,” he yells, his voice raspy with glee. The elderly woman in front of me turns around and smiles as if I’m responsible for this display of adorableness, and the goateed twenty-something dude behind me chuckles. We have morphed, suddenly and happily, from a disconnected line of distracted bank customers waiting to complete our most mundane transactions into a community of baby lovers, charmed by this dark-haired blob of sweetness.
I wave at him again. “Hello,” I say. “Hi!”
And that’s when the baby’s mother shifts him in her arms and cranes her neck, and although she’s wearing an expensive gray coat and a burgundy cashmere scarf instead of her old blue down jacket, yellow homemade scarf, and her father’s Green Bay Packers cap (which together completed the fashion-forward statement:
emotionally unstable football fan
); although I haven’t seen her in five years; although there are other differences, including her new human accessory, she is, unmistakably, Jane.
The baby grins again, open mouthed with pure joy.
Jane’s expression I can’t read at all.
Twenty minutes later, at the table by the window of our old coffee shop, I have to wrap my hands around my cup to stop them from shaking.
“So, this is Gus,” Jane says, her pride obscuring whatever else is lurking underneath it. She has him propped on her lap, his snowsuit half off, as he gums a pumpkin scone. “He’s nine months old,” she says, her face, for the moment, as open to me as it used to be.
The industrial coffee grinder powers up with a metallic
hiss-clank.
Gus winces, and I reach across the table to touch his hand. It’s wet with drool; I pull my fingers back at the slobbery shock of it and smile, trying to pretend I’m not slightly disgusted. Probably when you have a kid you get used to the general condition of moistness. “Gus,” I say, drawing out the
u.
“Hi, little G
uuuu
s.”
Gus chortles, then throws his head back in full-on hilarity at my joke, his fat little body quaking with laughter.
“Oh, my God,” I say, enchanted, and Gus laughs harder.
Jane smiles, then casts her gaze downward at the baby’s head. “He likes you,” she says shyly. He reaches up for a hank of Jane’s hair, which she gently works free from his fist. I feel the old bond with her, the irresistible, magnetic attraction that has always been there between us, and who cares if we’re using her baby as a prop? Gus looks at me and starts giggling again.
“Is this your
life
?” I say, meaning, do you spend your days in the company of Mr. Personality, this marvelous, shining little boy? But I see immediately that she takes it the wrong way: I see by the way she hunches her shoulders and leans in protectively toward the baby, the way she seems, suddenly, diminished, as if I’ve consigned her to a stereotype, a supporting role, a smaller life than the one she leads.
That’s not what I meant,
I want to say.
That’s not what I meant!
But when you haven’t seen the person who was your best friend in five years, a small misunderstanding might expose a canyon of hurt, and after all that, what can you possibly do to fix it? What point is there in even trying?
“Yes,” she says, pushing her hair back. “My life. Gus, and my marriage”—her marriage; the word slices through me—“and my job, and a million other things.”
Things you lost the right to know about.
She breaks off a piece of scone and chews it slowly, then rests her chin lightly on Gus’s head, strokes his cheek with her hand. I look down at my latte. It’s too late in the day for caffeine. I take a sip of it. I’ll be up all night.
“The thing is,” Jane says, and I look up at her again, startled by the gap between my expectations and reality. Jane’s hair, which used to be just like mine, is smoother than it was when we lived together, shinier, the curls perfect ringlets, the color a richer shade of brown, as if she not only has the money to spend on it now, but she does; she spends it. She’s wearing glasses, which she didn’t back when I knew her, funky black-and-green frames, her dark eyes behind the lenses big and clear and calm. Her skin, as always, is pale and perfect. She looks beautiful.
I’m not sure how I look. Probably the same as I did five years ago: maybe slightly disheveled, because I still roll out of bed and face the world; maybe a little tired, because I frequently drink too much coffee this late in the day, and then I stay up drawing until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m.—just like I used to, only these days I actually get paid for it; maybe I look kind of okay, too, because in the wake of turning thirty I’ve come to appreciate certain things about myself: the angle of my cheekbones, the thickness of my hair, the fullness of my lips. Right now I just see myself reflected in Jane’s face, like I always did.
Gus arches back into his mother’s body, points his hunk of scone up at the ceiling, and waves it around. “Willa,” Jane says, “I’ve thought a lot about what I would say if I ever ran into you.” She pauses. My face goes hot. I nod. I think that we both do, and do not, have so much to say to each other. “Five years ago, you … I …” She makes a gesture like she’s flicking a bug away. “I was shattered.”