Friendship (14 page)

Theirs was a meeting of minds and bodies, the kind of passion you read about and saw in movies but never thought you would experience personally. Especially if you were Bev and had grown up with parents who, on anniversaries or other romantic occasions, had been known to pat each other on the shoulder companionably and mutter “Love ya.”

Todd was devoted to the kind of gesture that, to a non-besotted person, might have seemed over-the-top or annoying. He brought Bev flowers and slightly damaged books from the Strand that he said reminded him of her. They went to museums together and sat together on park benches, assessing passersby and making up little stories about them in a way that Bev had done before only with women, namely Amy. They also did something together that Bev had to admit to herself that she’d fantasized about for years: they lay around on Sunday mornings with
The New York Times
, eating bagels and drinking coffee. This was one of the things that people who didn’t live in New York—people like Bev’s parents—probably thought that people who lived in New York did all the time, like seeing Broadway musicals. But until Bev met Todd, she’d never actually done it. Todd’s apartment was great for lying around and eating bagels in: big east-facing windows let in the perfect amount of sun, and his leather couch invited lounging and napping and easily accommodated two people, especially two people who were so delighted with each other that they could lie entwined for hours, sharing the same section of newspaper.

Todd had somehow contrived to live by himself in an old doorman building in Brooklyn Heights; though he worked in publishing, previous generations of his family had not. A former version of Bev would have found Todd’s neighborhood, like his Dockers, horribly dorky, but now she loved how close he was to the Promenade. And on the nights she spent at his place, she loved how close he was to the subway that took her to her office, wearing yesterday’s skirt and a different shirt, looking so radiantly happy that people she barely knew in the production department commented on her glow. She muttered something about taking vitamins.

“Vitamin
D
,” said Amy with a disgusting wink. She had instantaneously gotten over her initial pique about Todd’s preference for Bev over her and now was excited for her infatuated friend, but at this point she was so caught up in admiring the vista of new career prospects that had unexpectedly opened before her that she wasn’t paying the closest attention to Bev’s transformation. She took the gossip blog job just before Bev announced her own life-altering decision.

“You’re moving
where
?” Amy had almost spat out her yellowtail scallion roll. They were having a celebratory lunch at Tomo during Amy’s first week at her new job, and Amy had spent the morning being interviewed on MSNBC about some trouble Britney Spears was having. Now Amy was having trouble eating daintily around her TV spackle, trying and failing not to leave big smudges of industrial-grade lip gloss on the chopsticks.

“To Madison. Todd’s going to law school at the University of Wisconsin in the fall. He didn’t want to tell me till he knew he was accepted, but as soon as he found out, he asked if I would move with him and…”

“Madison … WISCONSIN?”

“It’s small but it’s a great college town. There are more NPR listeners per capita than anywhere else in America. There are farmer’s markets and microbreweries just like there are here. And you can rent a house for what I pay to rent a room. I’ve been there before. You’d like it.” Bev tried to smile. “I mean, you will like it. You’ll totally visit, right?”

Bev squinted at Amy, hoping Amy wouldn’t start crying. If she did, Bev would too, and also Amy seemed to be wearing false eyelashes, which would look terrible if she let the tears pooling in her eyes fall.

“You can’t do this to me! I mean, sorry, obviously this is not about me. But your job and everything! You love New York City! You’ve always said that living here was the goal of your life!”

“I love Todd.” Bev said. “I don’t particularly love my job…”

“Yeah, I picked up on that,” Amy said. She’d started shredding the slim white envelope that had once contained her chopsticks into tiny pieces of confetti in her lap.

“I don’t want to have a long-distance relationship, Amy, and I have never met anyone I want to be with nearly as much as I want to be with Todd. I can’t lose him.”

“He’s not planning to move back here after school?”

“He, uh—he really loves the Midwest. He wants to live near his parents. My parents live there too, obviously … eventually we might think about Chicago?”

“So, you’re getting
married
to this guy?”

“Well, I assume we’ll probably have that conversation at some point.”

Bev watched as Amy’s face contorted fleetingly into hundreds of facial expressions at a rate of one per nanosecond.

“Just go ahead, Amy—get it out of your system now, and maybe we won’t have to deal with it later.”

Sentences emerged from Amy in a relieved, vomitous gush. “You’re making a huge mistake, and I hate to see you sabotaging yourself like this. Todd is perfectly nice, but the world is full of Todds. There’s only one of you, and you belong here. I’ll be miserable without you. Um … what else. Oh, yeah! Yes! What are you going to
do
in Madison? Are you going to go to law school too?”

Bev smiled; it was sort of nice to listen to someone else articulating your own worst fears.

“There’s a university press … If I can’t find some kind of publishing job on the fringes of academia right away, I’ll get a restaurant job for a while … I don’t really care what I do, Amy. I’m ready for a change. It’ll be nice to live somewhere where everyone and their brother isn’t vying for the same crappy twenty-five-K-a-year editorial assistantship that just opened up. And we’re going to live in a
house
. Like, with multiple rooms in it!”

“Multiple rooms in Madison. Wisconsin.”

“I knew you would be like this.”

Amy had picked morosely at the edge of a filament of sashimi with her chopsticks, then put it in her mouth. “Well, isn’t this how you’d want me to be?” she said through a mouthful of fish.

*   *   *

THE WORST THING
about Madison—and there were many bad things competing for the title—was that Bev was forced to take up jogging. Todd loved jogging. He loved entering marathons, loved nursing the same ninety-eight-calorie light beer at a party full of cheerful midwestern law students all night because he was “in training,” loved subscribing to
Runner’s World
and reading it on the toilet. Bev emphatically didn’t love any of these things. Cheap, high-gravity microbrews were one of the best things about the Midwest, in her opinion, and if she was going to have to spend an hour talking about tax law with some wide-faced blonde who inflected her long
oh
sounds like Marge Gunderson, she was going to need to drink several of them. Also, jogging hurt. It was true that she’d gotten faster, but this victory was oddly unsatisfying. Getting incrementally better at something you had zero interest in doing made Bev feel as if she were back in high school. It was the same feeling she’d had right after taking the SAT2 in calculus; she had known at the moment she closed the test booklet that she would just scrap the calculus part of her brain and never use any of that knowledge ever again. She had imagined the now-empty drawer in her brain where she would one day shove another kind of knowledge. It would just clunk right into place, like a printer’s toner cartridge. Back then, her goal had been pure, focused: chalk up achievements, win scholarships, get out of the Midwest.

And now she was back in. But at least she was no longer a pure annoyance to Todd on their morning two-mile trot around the perimeter of their cornfield-flanked town-house development. Sometimes she could keep pace with him for a few minutes before falling back and letting him sprint on ahead. Later she would find out that she’d rubbed away half the cartilage in her left hip socket during this period; something about her form had been off, or she’d been wearing the wrong kind of shoes. Or maybe some bodies were made to glide lightly along the earth’s surface and Bev’s just wasn’t one of them.

She was on her way back from a particularly punishing run in the early autumn of their second year in Madison when she spotted Todd sitting on the stunted porch of their house with his head in his hands. His shoulders were heaving. When she realized he was weeping, she felt a surprising surge of glee.

Bev was still in love with Todd, but now the love was more complicated. It seemed to have mixed with a strain of seething resentment that resembled nothing so much as the frustrated rebelliousness she’d directed, in her teens, at her parents. Since they’d moved in together, the flowers and dates had slowed to a trickle and been replaced by a stream of Bev-improvement strategies, like the jogging. Todd would let his gaze linger on her round butt and the soft jut of her midsection and wonder aloud whether she ought to try cooking something slightly healthier every once in a while. She’d been filling her daytime hours, when she wasn’t working at the wine bar, by frying and sautéing her way through classic cookbooks, and a lot of the old-fashioned recipes were loaded with meat and cream and butter. Todd had also bought her an unasked-for GRE prep book. She’d stood next to him at a party as he told his friends that she was looking into grad school, but she wasn’t.

One time she’d been lying in bed beside him, staring into his eyes, thinking about how much she loved him, and he’d been staring back just as intently. When he opened his mouth to speak, Bev was expecting a compliment at the very least, or maybe the suggestion that they “play kissy face,” his cute-shading-into-gross euphemism for sex.

“Maybe you should see a dermatologist, honey—I don’t think it’s normal for a woman your age to have this much acne.”

Her skin wasn’t even that bad, but she’d been picking at it, and after he said that, of course she picked at it more.

So it was nice for Bev to see Todd, perfect Todd, crying. She wiped her forehead with the sweatband on her wrist and trotted up the steps to the house, ready to comfort him. Maybe someone in his family was sick or he’d been unfairly accused of plagiarizing a paper or something. She would be a solid rock he could turn to in times of crisis, and he’d look at her the way he had on those mornings of lox-breathed make-out sessions back in Brooklyn and realize that he never wanted to be without her.

This vision was eradicated in an instant when he looked up and looked straight through her, as though she were a dog or a mailbox, some banal part of the landscape. “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s nothing. Go take a shower.” His voice quavered like a teenager’s. Dumbfounded, Bev obeyed him.

As she soaped herself, she imagined that she heard him, somewhere in their little house, wailing like an inconsolable child, but the noise could have been coming from the pipes. Probably it had been, because when she got out of the shower, he was completely dry-faced and fine, silently flipping through one of his textbooks at the kitchen table.

“Please tell me what you were crying about,” said Bev, naked in her towel.

“Oh god, honey, you know … it was something so silly that it’s just not worth rehashing.”

“I don’t care if it was silly. I want to know! I want to know everything about you! I want to be there for you.”

“And I don’t want to talk about it, so the nicest thing you could do for me, honey bear, is respect that, okay?” He smiled with his mouth, but there was something steely and strapped-in that she’d never seen before about the upper half of his face. “Now go put some clothes on, you’ll catch a chill.”

Bev had a momentary flash of the early days of their relationship, when neither of them had worn real clothes indoors for basically weeks. She thought of walking toward him, touching the whole length of him with her warm, shower-damp body, but instead she went upstairs and put on her clothes.

Bev was in Pick ’n Save the next day, in the checkout line, when she grabbed the local paper and saw the story about the car accident that had killed Todd’s classmate, the wide-faced blond future tax lawyer. A lot of things ran through her mind all at once, including a lot of completely reasonable explanations for Todd’s behavior, but after she had loaded the trunk of her car (technically Todd’s car, just as their house was technically Todd’s house) with the makings for boeuf bourguignon and pulled out of her parking space and drove away from the shopping center and onto the little two-lane road on the way back to the town-house development, she plugged her cell phone’s hands-free attachment into her ear and dialed Amy.

“Ahhh! Bev? Oh my god! What’s going on? Hi!”

Bev heard Amy shuffling around. She imagined Amy standing at the window of her apartment, looking out at the BQE. She could see Amy’s funny face in her mind’s eye perfectly, and suddenly she missed her so much she almost couldn’t speak.

“Hey, dude. Sorry I’ve been kinda incommunicado for the past few weeks.”

“No worries, I know you’re busy at the restaurant and with Todd and stuff. I miss you, though.”

“I miss you too.” Bev would have called Amy every day if the pleasure of hearing her best friend’s voice had outweighed the stress of feeling that she had to construct some kind of narrative that made the pointless midwestern life she’d chosen make sense.

“So what’s up?”

Bev wound her way through the cornfields, taking the long route, the groceries in her trunk spoiling slowly in the Indian-summer heat, as she told her best friend about Todd’s crying, his classmate’s death, and her suspicions. Amy listened without interrupting, with uncharacteristic reserve.

“Did you take a Klonopin, dude?” Amy finally asked. A kindly midwestern GP had prescribed a generous supply of benzos to Bev, to take as needed, when she’d broken down crying during a routine exam.

“Two.”

“Do you have any evidence that he had something going on with this girl, besides the crying?”

“Well, I work most weeknights, and he goes to school in the daytimes; our schedules are totally opposite. He goes out with his school friends without me pretty often. It’s hard to imagine anyone easier to cheat on than me, basically.”