Friends Like Us (26 page)

“Shut up,” I say.

He offers me the sleeve of his shirt, and I wipe my face and nose with it.

“Will?”

I sniff. “I was just thinking about a really sad movie I saw a few years ago.”

He pulls me toward him for a hug, and I let him. I rest my head on his warm chest; he pets my hair, working his fingers through the curls. Somewhere in the back of my mind is the idea that maybe there is a reason we’ve avoided contact for the past six months.

The word “don’t” scrolls across the news crawler in my brain,
DON’T DON’T DON’T DON’T
, and then
JANE JANE JANE JANE.

But then I just turn it off,
click,
and I tip my face up to Ben’s. And once more, here we are, we’re kissing.

There’s only one thing worse than kissing your best friend when he’s two weeks away from marrying your other best friend. And that is sleeping with him. If there’s anything worse than that, I’d like to know what it is. Within the bounds of the law, of course. Certainly, murdering your parents would be worse than sleeping with your best friend, etc. Murdering anyone! All forms of abuse and probably some categories of theft would fall under the “worse” classification. But beyond that? I’d like to know.

Ben traces his finger across my cheek. “Oh, crap,” he says. “Oh, boy.”

I adjust my right leg, which is caught between the couch pillows, and pull my arm out from under his body. It’s fallen asleep, a tingling stump. I shake it to try to get the feeling back, bang it against the edge of the couch.
Whap, whap, whap,
an unintentional echo of things. “Can’t feel my hand,” I say.

Ben props himself up on his elbow, staring so intently at me that I feel like I might be getting sunburned. I want to turn away. We’re so completely squished together, chest against chest, thigh to thigh, nose to nose, there’s nowhere else to look, so I’m forced to watch it pass over his face, all of it—the last half hour of lust and desire and, in the middle of it, sadness; his guilt and confusion and heartbroken remorse, and also, holy moly, the transformation, the face of my best friend altered, his eyelids heavy, his mouth edging up at the corners, the gooey vulnerability of Ben in love. With me. His feelings are so full-on true and irrefutable; he is so emotionally bare that, in spite of our actual nakedness, in spite of having just had sex with the boy I’ve known since I was fourteen, and with nowhere else to turn on this narrow, saggy sofa of truth we’re resting on, I just have to close my eyes. I close my eyes to it.

“What we just did,” Ben whispers.

“I know.”

“We’re really in it now,” he says.

The TV murmured in the background while we made love, and I was grateful for the noise, as if the industrious sounds of the Hitchcocks and their seventeen children could drown us out, could somehow make it okay.

He licked my ear as two of the Hitchcock girls made their own laundry soap. I kissed him and moved my hands lightly down his back as the mom in her long denim skirt homeschooled the children.
How long did God take to create the earth?

“Six days,” I murmured, lost. Ben laid his hands on my hips as the boys prepared to go deer hunting.
The sisters are doing spring cleaning while the brothers go hunting,
one of them said. For a brief and confusing moment I thought that Ben and I might be related. I touched the side of his neck and thought about Jane and wondered if he was thinking about her, too. Had it been only an hour since she’d strolled into the living room wearing my second-to-last pair of clean shorts, bright yellow ones, and promised to do my laundry tomorrow, and then made little puppy dog noises until I said okay? Only forty-five minutes since she’d happily waved good-bye to us and said, “Smell you both later!”?

I considered how two people could devastate another with one ridiculous physical activity, the unlikely insertion of parts. How this would devastate her. How it would rearrange everything. And, yes: I was desperate to rearrange everything.

But the pressure of Ben’s limbs, the heat of his body, reminded me that I was being rearranged, too. I loved him, finally.

I moved myself underneath him, felt the sofa cushions shift under the small of my back. He slid inside me with a shocking, irrevocable moan. They were making dinner. Someone, Theresa or Tristina, was using a mortar and pestle, energetically pounding and grinding … although now that I think about it, I might have imagined that part.

There was a commercial for car insurance and a promo for a very special episode of another reality show, about a family of giants who run a bakery.
Big People, Little Tarts.

“Willa,” Ben whispered. I folded my arms and legs around him and pressed my cheek against his. “You.”

And then it was over. There was our fast breathing and the weight of Ben on top of me, surprisingly comforting; with the hand that was dangling off the couch, I patted around for the remote and turned off the TV. So long, Timothy and Tomothy, the twins. My own breathing slowed. I could feel Ben’s heartbeat returning to normal.

I have known him for all these years, but I had never felt his heart before.

“Yes,” I say now. “Oh, boy.”

“What are we going to … I mean … God, what have we …?” Ben pulls back, dislodges from me, and springs off the couch in a quick movement; he sits, his back to me, naked on the floor. “Dammit,” he says quietly. “Goddammit.”

My whole body goes cold. “Really?” I look around for a nonexistent blanket as my arms and legs suddenly turn prickly and warm. I touch my hand to my forehead. My hand is freezing, my forehead hot. I feel like a broken oven. I grab a pillow and try to cover myself with it. “Because I know this is … but you can’t just …”

Ben doesn’t respond. He just sits there for a minute, and then he jumps up and puts on his clothes. He turns to me, the face that rested tenderly against mine a few minutes ago now pinched with anxiety. “You have to get dressed!” he says, gathering up my shirt and shorts. “You have to get dressed right now!”

I can’t keep up with this, with the lightning shifts, the mad swings from contentment to panic, love to … whatever this is. I thought Ben and I just consummated our long and complicated friendship, and that together we would now deal with the repercussions. But did I just become the faithless slut who ruined him? I pull on my bra and underwear, trying to still my shaking hands, newly aware of the mole on my thigh, the shiny stretch marks on the sides of my breasts, the dark hairs below my belly button.

With a clatter, Ben clears the two bowls of now-cold pasta from the floor where we’d moved them, somewhere between the
That’s a Lot of Hitchcocks!
theme song and the family’s weekly trip to the grocery store for twenty gallons of milk and a cart full of ground chuck. He busies himself in the kitchen, stuffing our half-eaten dinners into the garbage, loudly washing the pots and dishes. He has the water on full blast, a monsoon; he’s hunched over, arms working. Steam rises from the sink. He must be sterilizing those pots and dishes.

I’m dressed now, perched on the edge of the sofa, surveying the room. It looks the same as it did earlier today, the faded blue-and-green rug neat and centered under the gouged coffee table, the ancient yellow lampshade straight. It looks like nothing happened here.

Jane will come home.

She’ll collapse onto a chair.
I’m pooped! How was your night?

Good. Ben made spaghetti. We had sex.

He turns off the faucet and makes his way over to me, sits down next to me, takes both of my hands. His are damp. I think I’ve been here before, or somewhere like it. I stiffen, brace myself.

“I’m sorry,” he says. I try to stay still, frozen in this spot, to keep my distance, to let it just happen; what an amazing thing, to lose even more. There is less and less of me. “I need to figure this out,” Ben says.
Yes, figure it out. It was a mistake. Put the pieces back together.
He sighs. “I feel crazy and confused.”
I’m not coming to visit you two in D.C., just so you know.

For a long time, he doesn’t say anything, just sits. My hands in his are starting to sweat. I have to scratch my nose. I can’t be the one to pull away. There is a strand of hair tickling my face. My nose twitches. I might be going mad.
Just let go of my hands already.
“Well?”

“I love you,” he says.

Oh.
Relief floods over me, warm and liquid. “Good.” For the millionth time in just thirty minutes, it all changes again. And everything complicated washes away.

Jane rushes through the door, a bright burst of color in a pink tank top and my yellow shorts. “I swear to God, he bit me! That little Amster bit me!” As predicted, she flings herself onto the living room chair. As she plops down, a tuft of stuffing bulges out of a buttonhole in the brown cushion; one of us pokes this same gray foam back into the chair at least five times a day. The strap of her shirt slips down her shoulder. Her hair is messy, and her face is flushed and beautiful. She looks from Ben to me and back to Ben—her head bobbing, arms folded, legs splayed. “I was putting him to bed, and he started crying and kicking, and then the little fucker bit me!”

Ben moves over to her, stands behind her, and starts rubbing her head, the way he stroked mine. He glances at me, pained, then turns his attention back to Jane’s scalp.

“Look!” she says, holding out her long arm and examining it, then turning it over, wrist up. “Okay, there’s nothing to see, but that’s just lucky. The kid has sharp little teeth!”

Ben’s hands move from Jane’s head to her collarbone. “Poor baby,” he says. His voice catches, and he clears his throat. He massages Jane’s shoulders.

“Ouch! Ben! Too hard!”

“Sorry,” he says, loosening his death grip.

“You always were
kneady,
” I say. I make a little squeezing motion with my hands.

Jane says, “Oh, boo!” and Ben presses his lips together so tightly they disappear.

A pool of acid sloshes around in my stomach. “Are we going to tell her?” I asked, on the couch, before she came home. “Are we going to
not tell her
?”

“I think I should be the one to tell her,” he said.

“I’m her best friend!”

“I’m her fiancé.”
Fiancé
: it surprised us both with its strange effect, the self-conscious emphasis of a word that has no precise English equivalent. Her betrothed? Her intended?
We never intended … 

“You win,” I said.

“Will.” Ben moved so that his bare knees grazed mine. “How are we supposed to feel?”

“Like shit,” I said, but I didn’t; not exactly. I rested the back of my hand against his face.

“She’s going to hate us,” he said, and it took a minute for the quiet reality of that statement to sink in.
No,
I thought,
she won’t
. He looked at me, stricken. She would. She would hate us. How could we live with that? We kissed again, an inoculation against it.

Now, still standing behind her, Ben glances around the room, his eyes darting.
It looks like you’re playing pinball with your eyes,
I would like to say as his gaze bounces from ceiling to floor to rug to television.
Like you’re playing eyeball!
Instead I swallow hard and observe how Jane begins to relax as the tension of the evening eases out of her while it simultaneously slithers up into Ben’s spine.

“What did you guys do tonight?” Jane asks, her voice high and tired; she sounds like a little girl.

A noise comes out of Ben’s throat, somewhere between a cough and the death cries of a strangled cat, and my own breath stops for a second, and I think,
He’s going to tell her.

He fake coughs a few times, one hand cupped over his mouth in a ladylike way. Jane’s eyes are closed, and she’s sunk deeper into the chair. Ben’s hand returns to her shoulders. “I made spaghetti,” he says, “and we watched TV.” He keeps rubbing, calmly now.

I’m observing Ben’s hands, his fingers digging gently into the skin just below Jane’s collarbone, thumbs circling the knotty muscles. “The spaghetti was crap!”

“Mmm.” She rolls her neck. “This feels so good.”

“I mean, really,” I say. “The spaghetti was awful. The worst!” Ben lets out an exasperated sigh, like the parent of a recalcitrant toddler. Is his shirt on inside out?

“We should take cooking classes after the wedding, honey,” Jane murmurs. “We both suck.”

“Yeah.” Ben has found a spot on the wall above my head to focus on.

He won’t tell her, at least not tonight.

Right here, on this couch, we took each other’s clothes off; his hands lingered on my waist, and he laughed and said, “Twelve years. You really know how to play hard to get.”

He won’t tell her. He gets so much mileage out of being loyal Ben, unassuming and steadfast and true, but he just cheated on the woman he’s supposed to marry in two weeks. How long will he keep our secret just to preserve the image, this idea of himself?

I stare at him, even though he won’t look back. He’s still massaging Jane, his hands moving over her broad shoulders, her upper arms, pressing and squeezing, and right here, right now, I give myself over to it, to the whole sordid, complicated mess; to this new, imperfect man; to the inevitable breaking of all of our hearts. Jane’s, yes: shattered. But Ben’s, too. And mine.
Love can be ruthless.

Will they say good night to me like it’s any other night, walk into Jane’s room, and fall into bed? I wrap my arms around myself. A part of the far wall has begun to warp in the heat of this long summer, the white paint turning brownish. The kitchen faucet drips.

“God, I am so glad to be home,” Jane says with a little contented shudder, and, in our dingy, warm living room that still smells of pasta, I know exactly what she means. She wriggles and adjusts herself in the chair, her whole grateful, deluded body at the mercy of Ben’s moving hands.

Chapter Twenty-three

Ben stops cleaning the bathroom mirror for a second and stares at his reflection in the blurred, streaky glass. He’s been wiping the mirror with a rag for five minutes, but the glass just keeps getting dirtier and dirtier. “Remind me,” he says. “Who is Al?”