Friendship (16 page)

Bev left Todd’s side and stood next to Amy.

“Of course it’s Amy’s business. And she’s right, unfortunately.”

“You heard her! Get out of here! And I don’t want to hear about any sappy text messages or anything like that, either—just leave her alone! I feel sorry for the next girl who comes into contact with your poison, you dickwad!”

“Okay, enough,” Bev said, though she was smiling.

Todd tried to give Bev a look, like
what a crazy bitch
, but she shook her head. She saw in his posture that he’d given up; cowed, he walked toward the door, wiping uselessly at the dark patch her tears had left on his shirt. “If you change your mind, I’ll be here another two days. I really think we should talk. We left things on such a bad note. Don’t you want closure?”

“This
is
closure,” Bev said, reaching past him to open the door and let him out.

23

When Bev felt well enough to leave the gynecologist’s office, they took a cab back to Amy’s apartment. As soon as they walked in, Amy turned on the TV, then shuddered when it turned out that MTV was playing a marathon of
16 and Pregnant
. She flipped away quickly, but to no avail, because every other show was about pregnancy, too, or food.

Bev lay full-length on Amy’s couch while Amy sat on a cushion on the floor near her feet. It was early, golden dusk, and they were both wrapped in blankets because the weather had turned colder but Amy’s landlord hadn’t turned the heat on yet. Dying sunbeams were coming in through the window and painting the floorboards with bars of light. They settled on an old rerun of
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
. The middle sister was scared to have sex while pregnant, for fear of hurting her baby. She and her fiancé took a special sex class where a woman in a cape showed them how to use a foam wedge and a spooning position. “Let’s go home and [bleep] these pregnant girls!” the fiancé said at the end of the class.

Bev and Amy watched a couple of minutes of this in stupefied disbelief, and then Bev flipped the channel back to
16 and Pregnant
, where a girl with tears pouring down her face narrated the daily misery of her new fun-free life with her infant. “It’s too much, being a mom and a daughter and a wife all at the same time,” she told the camera, but then a minute later said that she loved her son and wouldn’t change anything. Bev ignored Amy’s attempt to catch her eye; she could tell Amy was trying to get some kind of read on her impassive expression, but Bev didn’t feel like talking. It got darker and darker, and when the sun finally disappeared all the way, Amy went to the kitchen to start making some kind of dinner, and Bev was alone with her thoughts and the flickering teens.

She watched for a few more minutes, as much as she could stand, and then flipped the channel to the local news. A building had burned down in the Bronx and a botoxed TV reporter stood in front of it, trying as hard as she could to convey concern even though her eyebrows couldn’t travel a millimeter downward.

Bev’s familiar mental spirals were starting again, the habitual, incessant wish to be anywhere and anyone except where and who she was right now. In this mood, she could find a reason to envy anyone: the Kardashians, the pregnant teens, even the people wrapped in sooty blankets, smeared with ash, pouring wild-eyed out of the blackened building. They all had in common that they were not Bev, and she envied them for that reason alone. This was horrible, and she knew it, but then she felt guilty for having horrible feelings, and this just made being Bev more uncomfortable and put her back at the beginning of the spiral. She had to do something, anything, to wrench herself out of the pattern, and what she usually did was buy a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of decent red wine and lie in bed with them, watching
30 Rock
reruns. But the evil alien cell cluster inside her was exerting dictatorial control, making those sources of comfort (
30 Rock
excepted) seem worse than unpalatable. She was more trapped than ever, trapped in her brain and her out-of-control body.

Amy came back into the living room with two bowls of Annie’s mac and cheese, and they picked at the bowls as they watched the weather report. It was supposed to be beautiful and sunny for the next week.

“I don’t want to go back there,” said Bev finally.

“What? Why? Did you not like the office? I did think that one nurse was kind of brusque and rude.”

“I don’t know. I’m just terrified of the whole thing.”

“Because you’re afraid of it hurting, or…”

“I just really, really don’t want to do it. I start to feel like I’m going to faint if I even think about going back there.”

“I don’t get it. I mean I do, but … Bev, you have to! You don’t want to continue being pregnant, right? You realize that the alternative to not being pregnant is tethering your life to another human’s life forever, right?”

“I definitely can’t handle that.”

“Well, I wish there was a magical spell we could cast, but there isn’t. You have exactly two options.”

“Ha. So much for all this endless ‘choice’ that’s supposed to be available to me!”

“Well, you have one!”

They silently munched the mac and cheese for a minute.

“I wish I could just leave the baby on the doorstep of that couple we house-sat for in Margaretville,” Bev said.

Amy laughed, as Bev had intended her to. “It’s true. I should have said you have three choices. Adoption does exist. But think how weird your life would be for the next nine months. Explaining it to everyone you know. God, explaining it to your
parents
! Not to mention random strangers at your temp jobs or whatever. Random strangers who’d, like, congratulate you while giving up their seats on the subway.”

“Wait. So if this was happening to you, you’d have an abortion because you’d rather not have
awkward conversations
?”

“That would be one of the reasons!”

Bev tried to frown angrily at Amy but instead started giggling as she imagined Amy responding to a subway stranger’s congratulations by saying that actually, she was giving up the baby for adoption. She would do it, too, that was the thing.

“What? What?”

Bev did her best Amy upspeak. “Um, actually? I’m just kind of warehousing this baby for someone else? I’m not really in a place in my life where I want to have a baby right now? So, like, thanks anyway. Oh, and thanks for giving up your seat.”

They laughed somewhat hysterically for a minute, and then, when they calmed down, Amy’s eyes were bright with laugh-tears.

“I’m not saying it’s a
terrible
idea,” said Amy.

“Wait, what?”

“Adoption in general. And I think it would be nice to give it to people you kind of know, or are friends of friends. Not people you
actually
know, that would be weird. But that couple seemed cool. Or, well, not cool, but like good, interesting people.”

“Okay, no, let’s stop talking about this. I’ll suck it up and take a Klonopin and go back to the clinic.”

Amy hesitated, about to say something, but then decided not to.

“What?” Bev said. “I’m not going to be insulted.”

“Uh, okay, this is insane. But what if someone wanted to, like, pay your medical expenses and also pay you for your time and, you know, mental anguish?”

“Like, what if someone wanted to buy my baby.”

“Well … yeah.”

“Ha!”

“Okay, whatever, just think about it.”

“I am thinking about it, and I think you are completely insane!” But Bev was smiling, and as she smiled, she realized how long it had been since her face had made this shape.

Amy was also grinning. “Dude, you know what? I think we should have a drink.”

“What? No. Yuck.”

“No, come on! It’ll make you feel better. French people drink when they’re pregnant all the time.”

“It just doesn’t sound appealing.”

“One little glass of wine doesn’t sound appealing? It’ll be good for us to get out of the house, too. Let’s go to a bar! Be around people! Let’s just go to the Mexican restaurant at the end of the block and get one margarita.
One.
”

“Ughhhh.”

“Just come sit with me while I have one, then!”

Two margaritas later, Bev and Amy were not at the Mexican restaurant anymore but in a cozy corner of the art school bar five blocks south, which was having a special on shots of whiskey and cans of PBR. Bev’s nausea had melted away with that first drink; she felt that it would be a public service if doctors would just tell miserable women that there
was
a surefire cure for morning sickness, but she guessed there were laws against it.

The bar’s ceiling was decorated with crepe paper and tinsel, and as Bev looked up at it, she fleetingly thought of how tacky and sad it would look in daylight. But it wasn’t daylight, and the mirrors and neon reflected off the tinsel and lent everything a glowy dimness. With her Irish tolerance, Bev was barely buzzed. But she felt more comfortable in her skin than she had in days, which was a miracle. She was pretty sure that even the French would disapprove of drinking a shot of well whiskey while pregnant, so she gave hers to Amy, who definitely didn’t need it; she was almost slurring her words. For some reason they had googled Sally and Jason on Amy’s phone and were now squinting to read a
New York
magazine profile on the tiny screen. “Urban Rustic” was the headline.

Sally Katzen and Jason Park had rehabilitated every inch of their Victorian house themselves after buying it in 2003 for what they seemed to think was a “small” amount of money. Their initial plan had been to live in it during the summer months, but after a while they realized they loved the area so much that they wanted to live there all the time. So they sold their loft on Great Jones Street (“Ugh!
Why?
” Amy said) and moved to the mountains, coming into the city frequently for nights out and to explore their favorite neighborhoods. They also spent a lot of time at the upstate antiques fairs and outdoor flea markets in search of the unique decor finds they’d filled their space with, such as the copper drawer pulls in the kitchen, the old barn door that was now a desk …

“Do you think they do it?”

Amy pinched the photo, then moved her fingers apart to enlarge it, and they scrutinized Sally and Jason, who were posing ironically with a pitchfork in their sunny garden. “No. Look at his Rag & Bone work boots. There is no way that man is heterosexual.”

Bev sighed. “So Sally has the perfect life, essentially.”

Amy spluttered, spitting out PBR. “Perfect how? Married to a gay dude, living miles away from anything, writing epic emails about the specifics of her house’s septic system?”

“Well, but they must be good friends, at least, right? Living in this gorgeous house with your best friend … I don’t know, what could be better than that?”

“Oh, Christ, Bev, did you read this part? This is creepy. ‘Park and Katzen’s simple design sense would be marred by boxes of plastic toys, it’s true, but while they’re particular, they hope not to be anal-retentive if they become parents.’”

“But she totally will.”

“She absolutely will. But more important: they want to have kids!”

“Amy, you’re drunk.”

“So? That doesn’t automatically make it a bad idea.”

“Trying to
sell a baby
to people we’ve met once? I think that is categorically a bad idea.”

“What if they paid all your expenses and, you know, some extra? What if you could talk them into paying off your school debt?”

“What’s in it for you?”

“Jesus, Bev, nothing! I’m just trying to help, and it seems like selling a baby would be preferable to your …
having
a baby. I mean, Jesus Christ.”

Bev sighed and took a dainty sip of her PBR. “First of all, my life … Well, it’s not like things could get much worse, you know? Maybe somehow this would be what I need to stop sinking lower and lower. Because I don’t know what else would ever motivate me to finally get my life together.”

“Oh, don’t say shit like that, Bev. You’re having a rough patch, that’s all.”

“I’ve been having a rough patch for as long as we’ve known each other.”

“I think you might have been having one before that, too.”

“Right, well, that’s not a rough patch. You, on the other hand, are genuinely having a rough patch right now, I think.”

“I don’t even want to talk about it. Tonight is about you,” Amy said, and then spent the next half hour complaining to Bev about how she was probably breaking up with Sam, who was abandoning her for Spain, and she was getting evicted and had quit her job and had no money.

Bev nodded and was understanding and asked the right questions as she waited for Amy to finish talking. This was how their friendship had always been.

24

Incredibly, there were no cafés or libraries in Margaretville that would allow Sally to get work done on her novel. Not in neighboring Roxbury or Fleischmanns either. There was one in Woodstock, but once you were thinking of going that far away, why not just go ahead and drive into the city and go to the library at Judson Memorial Church and see if the old magic was there, and if it wasn’t, or if it was closed for renovations (again!), Sally might find herself, the way she had today, in a café in the East Village that several incarnations ago had been a bar where Sally herself waited tables and go-go danced twenty years earlier. At this point it would be about four in the afternoon,
which was crazy
, certainly a crazy time for Sally to be just opening her laptop for the day. It meant she wouldn’t be able to have dinner ready until maybe ten at the earliest. Of course Jason wouldn’t say anything, but obviously he’d be irritated; being served dinner at ten was objectively irritating. It was one of their things that she did the cooking, another vestige of his patriarchal-culture upbringing that Sally had at one time found exotic, thrilling. They were leaving for London on Friday, and she hadn’t packed at all yet. He would do something to show his irritation, but it would be subtle and interpretable as a nice gesture, like maybe she’d arrive home to find some Jasonish utilitarian meal already cooked, or all their bags packed and waiting by the door, so that she’d have to wear her worst underwear and skip her hair products for the rest of the week rather than pack them again.