Friendship (13 page)

“Well, so … I don’t know where to begin, really, but you know how they were making me do those videos? I was doing one today, and I just stopped in the middle and announced my resignation, effective immediately.”

Sam exhaled slowly. “Oh, wow. Wow. That is big news.”

Amy felt around longingly in her pocket for the shape of the cigarettes, the lighter. “Yeah, I know. But I just couldn’t risk … I mean, the idea of putting myself out there like that, for Yidster? Even if no one saw it, I mean … I’d still see it. And you know someone would find it. There’d be comments, and I’d read them, and I’d feel angry at myself for reading them, for letting that stuff in my head, and then on top of that I’d have that stuff in my head. You don’t know what it’s like…”

Sam shrugged. “I got a bad review of my last show on some website called Fartiste.”

“Well, okay, but what I’m saying is, you don’t know what it’s like to feel as miserable as I used to feel, because of the Internet.”

“You’re right. I don’t know, exactly, how that feels.”

Sam’s family had been so poor that they hadn’t had enough to eat sometimes when they first came to the United States, and his older sister had died of leukemia when he was a teenager. He never brought up either thing, of course.

“Look, I know it’s not the end of the world. But also—and I guess this is the really bad thing—Mr. Horton’s kicking me out. He says I didn’t respond to his letter about the rent increase quickly enough.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you?”

“Well, because I thought we were going to talk more. About moving in together, or not, or whatever. I thought maybe we’d end up finding a new place together. But now I guess I’m not really in a position to … well, anyway, I was procrastinating about it. I don’t think he’s actually within his rights to kick me out. I mean, I can fight it…”

“You live above him, though. He could make living there really uncomfortable for you.”

“Yeah, I’ve thought of that,” Amy snapped. She desperately ached for the click of the lighter, that first stinging lungful of smoke.

“You could just talk to him, though. Maybe he’d see reason. He probably just wants you to pay the new rent.”

“Well, I don’t want to, as a matter of principle! And also I can’t afford to.”

“Even with my help?”

“How much help are we talking about? I have one more paycheck coming from Yidster, but that’s it, and I need to be able to, like, eat…”

“Well, as long as you don’t mean ‘eat at fancy restaurants,’ you should be fine, right? I mean, you must have some savings.”

They’d never really talked about money. Money had seemed like a part of the outside world, the world their relationship was a refuge from. Certainly the issue had reared its ugly head at times; they’d both eyed each other’s respective stacks of bank statements and bills and wondered what was inside them. And there was Sam’s charming Marxist thing of thinking that restaurants, new clothes, et cetera, were frivolities that only served to keep workers addicted and enslaved by Capital. Amy agreed with him about this, in theory, but she loved wearing a new outfit for the first time, ideally to a restaurant.

Now the moment of truth had come, and Amy decided—well, really, she had no choice—to trust Sam with the truth. “I have the opposite of savings. I have to pay two hundred dollars a month to a credit card I can’t even use anymore.”

“Is it debt you ran up because you were buying necessities with your credit card when you were unemployed, or because you didn’t want to fall behind on your student loan payments?”

“No. It’s from buying stuff that I couldn’t afford, but that I didn’t want to acknowledge to myself that I couldn’t afford, because I just didn’t want to think about money.”

“What kind of stuff? Clothes? You don’t even dress that well!”

“Uh, thanks!” Fuck it, she was smoking.

“Amy, look, I’m sorry I said that. I’m not trying to judge you. I haven’t always been responsible either. And I am willing to help you out. But I’m not exactly made out of money, either. Is there maybe someone else you could ask, like your parents or something? I’m just trying to save up for Spain right now and help my parents get their car repaired, and I can barely afford my own rent, much less yours.”

“So you’re going to Spain?”

He refused to meet her gaze. She exhaled, trying to angle the smoke away from him, but the wind blew it toward him anyway and he unconsciously fanned at it, the gesture of swatting the air in her general direction making it seem as if he were shooing her away.

“Well, I didn’t want to interrupt your bad news with my good news, but yeah, I got the fellowship! Isn’t that great? I’m excited for you to visit.”

Amy stared at Sam, the cigarette cherry burning dangerously close to her clenching fingertips. They’d spent so much time together, breathing the same air, sleeping in the same bed, hearing each other use the bathroom and not really caring or even thinking about it. For the past few months it had seemed as if they were in each other’s lives for real, maybe for good. But now it seemed that Amy might have made a mistake. Maybe she had assumed that what she and Sam had was veering in a permanent direction because they were at an age when people got married. She thought suddenly of how often during their relationship they’d found themselves at weddings, at dinners, surrounded by other couples, functioning as a unit and finding that it was easier to do so. Because couples were what society wanted, what it was built for. But maybe they hadn’t been moving toward anything, maybe they had simply been coasting on inertia.

Amy looked at Sam’s face and tried to find the familiar person she’d felt so tenderly toward. But she was looking at a stranger. A stranger who was about to go to Spain for two months.

“How would I visit you? I can’t afford to visit you,” she said quietly, and started walking back toward the stairs.

“Amy, wait, I have my checkbook downstairs. Let me write you a check. For the rent I owe you, because I’ve been staying at your place so often.”

Amy wanted to be dramatic and principled and keep walking, but of course she went downstairs with him and got the check (for seven hundred dollars) and even let him kiss her, which he valiantly did in spite of her cigarette breath. Then they parted without any more discussion, promising to call each other later.

20

Bev sat next to Amy in a magenta plastic chair, clearly trying not to puke. Her face was even paler than usual. She had acted nonchalant that morning, bustling around her apartment with her usual stomping efficiency when Amy came to pick her up, but now she was clutching Amy’s forearm with a clammy hand.

“Beverly Tunney? Beverly?” a nurse finally called out from the doorway, and everyone in the waiting room tried to be subtle as their bored curiosity made them automatically turn toward Bev as she stood up. Amy gave her arm a last squeeze, then watched as she walked past the reception desk toward the hallway that led to another waiting room, a smaller one with a low couch and two chairs. This would be where Bev would spend the last ten minutes or so before her abortion, probably staring blankly into space rather than reading any of the celebrity or parenting magazines arrayed on the coffee table.

But instead of continuing into the hallway, Bev stopped walking. “I’m really sorry. I’m not feeling well,” she said to nobody in particular before slumping to her knees, then sprawling faceup on the floor.

Amy ran across the room and crouched on the floor next to Bev’s head. A girly susurration rippled through the waiting room as everyone gasped and murmured and whispered to each other, trying to be polite. The nurse knelt down next to Amy and took unconscious Bev’s pulse. She was a serious-looking woman with big pavé-diamond rings cutting slices into her swollen fingers. “Did she have anything to eat today, do you know?” she asked Amy.

“Probably not; she’s been nauseous…”

“But you don’t know for sure? Are you her partner?”

“No. I’m just her friend.”

“But you don’t live with her.”

“No.”

“Okay.” The nurse sighed. Bev’s eyelids fluttered. “Beverly?”

Bev opened her eyes, squinting because she was staring straight up at the fluorescent lights. “Oh shit. What the fuck? Did I faint? Oh god, I’m so embarrassed,” she said, and then started to cry.

“Beverly, can you stand up? I’m going to bring you back to one of the exam rooms and you can lie down there till you start feeling better, okay?”

“Can I come with her?”

The nurse paused for a second, then shrugged her assent.

“I can still get it done today, though, right?” Bev asked as the nurse helped her to her feet, and they started walking, slowly, down the hall. “Oh, whoa. I feel weird. Can I sit down?”

The nurse opened the door to an empty exam room—there was a whiff of rubbing alcohol, a familiar crinkle of paper as Bev sat on the examining table—and instructed Bev to put her head between her knees until she stopped feeling dizzy. “Don’t let her get up and walk around yet,” she said sternly as she left the room, as though somehow the whole thing were Amy’s fault.

With her head between her knees, Bev started sniffling again. “I can’t believe I even found a way to fuck
this
up.”

“Shh,” said Amy, paper crunching under her butt as she sat down next to Bev and started stroking her back. “You haven’t fucked anything up. You’re very brave.”

21

Back when Bev and Amy worked together at the publishing house, there had been a bar on an otherwise highly gentrified stretch of Broadway about ten blocks north of their office, where the beers were so cheap and the patrons so poor and unattractive that it seemed like an elaborate re-creation of a bar in a different city (say, Philadelphia), or at least a different borough. This was where Amy and Bev and occasionally one other office friend, this slightly older gay senior publicist whose name was Adam, went after work to decompress and drink bottled Bud, which was two for one during happy hour, so you essentially had to drink four of them. One night, to everyone’s shock, Adam brought his friend Todd, who also worked in publishing, to the bar with him. Even more shockingly, Todd was heterosexual, and his decent looks were set off to great advantage by the dim, scummy surroundings. By the second round, which Todd bought, Amy and Bev had both developed semiconscious romantic ideas about him, which made the evening much more fun: playing off each other and competing slightly for his attention made them feel brighter and funnier. The issue of a third round came up; it was only 8:30, but in early winter this felt like the middle of the night. None of them had eaten dinner. They decided to have the third round.

“I always imagine that if I were rich, I would have a big pool of cash to dive into, like Scrooge McDuck,” Amy was saying.

“Who’s that?” said Bev. Her parents hadn’t allowed TV in the house until after Bev had already gone away to college, at which point they’d somehow downgraded their religiosity to a setting where it was still intense but not actually culty.

Todd began gleefully to explain the cartoon duck family tree to Bev, who nodded as though rapt as he detailed the familial relationships that linked Scrooge with Donald, and Huey, Dewey, Louie, and (least credibly) Daffy, who Amy was pretty sure had been created by a different animation studio than his supposed cousins. She rolled her eyes, turned to Adam, and started a conversation about someone they mutually disliked at work. A few minutes later, when they finished their beers and Amy suggested all going to get slices or hot dogs or something, Bev and Todd demurred. “I think we’re going to stay here and hash out the details of this duck thing some more,” said Todd. Bev smiled and stifled a hiccup.

“Cool. Well, I’m just gonna pee—you wanna come pee with me, Bev?”

Bev did a split-second eye-widening expression to chide Amy for her obviousness, but then she mutely got up and followed her to the bathroom. There was only one toilet. Amy draped a mostly symbolic piece of toilet paper across the seat, pulled up her skirt, pushed down her tights, and sat to pee. Bev avoided eye contact with her—probably because it would have seemed weird to lock eyes while she peed—and instead looked at her own reflection in the mirror.

“So you’re gonna hook up with Todd, huh?”

Bev shrugged at herself in the mirror. “Possibly. It’s a possibility.”

Amy reached for the toilet paper roll, tore off a piece, and wiped herself. “You don’t want to, like, make him go through the formality of buying you a hot dog first or whatnot? Or maybe you should just go back to Brooklyn now, think about it sober, then email him tomorrow if he still seems appealing?”

Now Bev looked at Amy, who was straightening her skirt, flushing the toilet. “I’m just wondering what’s motivating this concern, Amy. Are you trying to protect me from Todd? He works at Putnam and wears Dockers; I don’t think he’s going to flay me and make my skin into a cape.”

“Fine, roll the dice!”

As Amy moved to the sink to wash her hands, Bev, businesslike, sat to pee. She didn’t bother with the token seat guard; all the germs were on Amy’s butt now, anyway. “You’re just irritated because you would have hooked up with him if he’d started paying attention to you first.”

Amy shrugged. “No. I mean … probably not…”

“Even if I liked him, even if you knew it.”

They were silent, assessing each other. This was the stuff that was supposed to go unspoken between women.

“I wouldn’t,” Amy finally said. “I mean, not if I knew you liked him. Not if you told me and asked me not to. I wouldn’t do that, I don’t think. Not to you, anyway.” She moved away from the sink so that Bev could wash her hands.

22

Bev and Todd fell in love. Or at least Bev fell in love with Todd. Years later, after things had gone so disastrously badly, Bev would wonder whether Todd was capable of love at all, or even the barest baseline estimation of any of the things the word “love” might be understood to entail, such as “empathy.” But that spring, as she and Todd laughed over asparagus risotto at date-night restaurants on Smith Street and had more sex more times in the span of a few weeks than Bev had had in several preceding years put together, it had seemed unequivocally, to Bev, like love.