Friendship (20 page)

Sally seemed to be enjoying Bev’s discomfort; the novelty of being able to shock someone was, Bev could tell, a big part of why she’d unfurled this confession. It seemed certain that Bev wasn’t the first person she’d revealed her stripper history to. It was her friendship test, designed to reel you in by making you feel privileged to know insider info; you were supposed to suddenly think of Sally as a transgressor, possessed of sexual bravado and vulnerability you hadn’t previously suspected her of having. But knowing you weren’t remotely the first person who’d heard the confession made it seem like imitation intimacy. Like stripping, Bev supposed.

“I had been a painter before that, that’s actually what I studied at Brown, fine art, but then I became a performance artist, and I was making a lot of work in those days involving nudity, and I figured, fuck, might as well make some money! And all my friends were doing it.”

“Wow,” Bev said, smiling at Sally to let her know she was impressed and not weirded out.

“Have you ever, you know … done anything like that?” Sally said.

“Oh god no. No way. I get self-conscious even thinking about being onstage.”

“You totally could, you know. You have a great body.”

“I don’t think now would really be the time to start,” Bev said, pointing at her stomach.

“Huh. I even kind of forgot about it for a second,” Sally said. “Sorry. Do you ever? I remember times when I was pregnant, I would go whole days without thinking about it once.”

“Nah,” Bev said. “I’m always thinking about it.”

“You dropped out of grad school, right?”

“Yeah. I have half an M.F.A. I guess that makes me not quite a master of fine arts.”

“It’s cool. I’m more of a servant of fine arts myself.”

“Did you get an M.F.A.?”

“No. I don’t have any credentials. I decided I wanted to write only after we moved up here, and to be honest, it’s not like I’m that serious about it. I try to do it every day, though. I keep thinking that if I keep doing it, maybe one day some perfect story will just come to me.”

“So you’re writing fiction?” Bev asked.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, me too. Though I don’t really think it’s a meaningful distinction.”

“Right? Like if I tried to write about stripping, now … I mean, fuck, I don’t remember anything that happened. I would just be inventing it.”

“Maybe you should do that.”

“Write about stripping?”

“Yeah, people love that. Or, like, the bad old East Village. Write about that, and make shit up.”

Bev finished her sandwich and rolled over on the grass. It was getting chilly, and the sweat from the bike ride was cooling on her skin, and as she looked off into the woods, she caught a flash of movement. Not fifteen feet away from them, a family of deer stepped into the clearing: a big buck, a smaller doe, and a faun—white-tailed and beautiful with their wide-set, stupid eyes staring directly at Bev and Sally. Bev caught Sally’s eye and they grinned at each other. She felt sorry for Amy, back at the house, missing this moment.

29

There was a baby drowsing in the stroller pressed up against the booth next to them at the restaurant where Sally and Jason had taken Bev and Amy for dinner, and they were all trying and failing not to look at him. Amy thought she could tell, based on Sally’s and Jason’s body language, that they’d discussed Sally’s proposal about the baby, though no one had mentioned it. Bev had convinced Amy to postpone the end of the weekend, spend Sunday night in Margaretville before heading back to the city midmorning Monday, so this dinner—at a ski lodge–style restaurant named Moose Ridge—was their last meal together, for now at least. The baby had abandoned himself to sleep and lay perfectly still except for the rise and fall of his contented belly. His arms and legs were splayed at perfect right angles. Amy envied him.

Jason was in a great mood. He enthused over the wine list and menu and then, when they arrived, over the food and the wine. “I think they gather these mushrooms near here. They grow near the hot spring—it insulates them, like a natural greenhouse.” He waved a forkful in Amy’s direction. “Want to try them?”

Amy didn’t really want the mushrooms, but she also didn’t want to make a big deal of anything. She caught herself glancing in Sally’s direction for approval as she accepted the bite from Jason’s fork. Sally was smiling into the distance, vaguely in the direction of the baby. Amy made eye contact with Jason as the fork entered her mouth. “Mmm, tasty,” she said.

After dinner, back at the house, Amy stood in the backyard in the waning sunlight, her stomach uncomfortably full of morels and wine, and called Sam again. She had felt some pressure to help Sally drink the bottle of wine they’d ordered. Jason had held back because he was driving; Bev had abstained completely, despite Sally’s exculpatory declarations about “the French.” Now the ground was soft and a little unsteady under Amy’s feet. The ringtone sounded again and again, and she was just about to give up when Sam finally answered the phone, sounding groggy.

“Hi, baby,” she said, all overcompensating crispness.

“Baby.” He sighed. “I’m working. Can we talk some other time?”

“I know, babe, but we haven’t talked in so long!”

“We talked earlier today.”

“I mean really talked.
Talked
talked. Let’s talk!”

Sam sighed again, and she could hear him shifting around, maybe getting out of bed. It felt like New York was so incredibly far away. Sam always slept in an old T-shirt, and she imagined him wearing her favorite one, the one with the lion-head mascot of his high school, holes around its collar she could stick her finger through to feel his warm, muscled skin underneath. She was wandering around the way you do on the phone, reaching out and plucking leaves from low branches of the saplings at the yard’s border, then crumpling them in her palm. As she wandered, she realized how drunk she was, and also why she had really called Sam, and even as she spoke her next sentence, she began to wish she hadn’t called him, but now it was too late. She’d started.

“So, I’ve been thinking a lot about, you know, us.”

There was silence, more readjustment. “Baby. Listen, I leave for Spain soon. I just can’t think about the future right now. Also, I think this is the kind of thing that would be better to talk about in person.”

“You won’t talk about it in person, though! You never want to talk about the future!”

He stayed silent.

“I mean, do we
have
a future?”

They had reached the familiar weird impasse past which any conversation would have to include either a marriage proposal or a breakup, and neither seemed exactly possible at that moment.

There was silence on the line until Sam broke it. “Baby, you know I love you, right?”

Amy stubbornly stayed silent. She knew she was being childish, but as long as she was being childish, she wanted to go all the way with it: throw a tantrum, say unforgivable, stupid, illogical things.

Luckily, some telecom god spared her this indignity, and the line went dead; the cell signal had faded again. Ugh, but what if Sam thought she’d hung up on him? Desperately, she redialed, but to no avail.

After a few more minutes she stopped wandering around the yard clutching her phone, willing it to ring, and slunk up onto the porch and into the house. She was shivering. The meager warmth of the day was disappearing as the sky began to darken, and inside the house it was barely warmer than it was outside.

In the middle of the night Amy woke suddenly and then couldn’t shake the idea that there was some kind of creepy presence waiting silently outside her bedroom door. This house was so old; maybe it was haunted! More probably, it was Bev, hesitating over whether to disrupt Amy’s slumber with a session of midnight confidences. But no: it was too silent to be Bev. That left two options: ghost or Jason.

The floorboards creaked slightly, and Amy immediately became one hundred percent more conscious, her earlier drunkenness completely out of her system. She hadn’t been imagining the noises. There really was someone out there. She remembered in a flash that she hadn’t showered, and she put her face under the covers for a moment to make sure she smelled okay, then rolled out of bed and tiptoed to the door and opened it slowly and soundlessly.

Jason smiled and raised his fingertip to his lips. Amy crossed her arms and pretended to be confused about why he’d come, but she let him walk past her into the room. He was wearing drawstring pajama pants and a tank top, and the sparse hair on his forearms was straight and black.

He sat down on the edge of the bed, and she closed the door—they both winced at the tiny latching noise it made as it shut fully—then sat down next to him. When she opened her mouth to speak, he shushed her by putting his finger over her lips, the same way he’d touched his own mouth a moment earlier.

If she spoke, or made any noise at all, Amy knew that she risked waking Bev and Sally, and then how would she explain Jason’s presence in her room? Clearly Jason knew this too. He smiled again, a slightly nasty smile. He still had his fingertip at her lips, and without breaking their eye contact he began to increase the pressure, force it past her teeth, which parted in shock and curiosity, and then his finger was in her mouth.

Tentatively—was this what he wanted?—she touched the intruding finger with the tip of her tongue and felt herself respond to this weird gesture with a surge of physical hunger that was even more intense because it was a surprise. With his other hand he reached under her T-shirt, between her legs, shoved her underwear to one side, and pushed two fingers inside her vagina in the same peremptory way he’d put his finger in her mouth. Amy would probably have made some small surprised noise at this, but she couldn’t because there was a finger in her mouth (maybe that was why he’d put it there).

Usually Amy had to focus on some fantasy in order to come, but this reality was fantastic enough to do it for her, apparently, because she clenched around Jason’s rhythmically jabbing finger more effortlessly than she’d thought possible. Feeling that she owed him, she reached for his crotch, but he pushed her hand away, and she was grateful; it was always hard to know how to touch someone, easier to sense what they wanted from you and just try to do that. Smiling a bit impersonally, Jason set to work getting them both completely naked, moving around as little as possible to minimize bed creaking. His body was smooth, cool-skinned, and somehow expensive-looking; his dick especially had the ergonomic look of a high-end sex toy. Amy had one final moment of tension, of thinking, during the condom-related pause, about how her actions could affect Sally and, in turn, potentially, Bev. But then the pause was over, and there was nothing to think or do for the foreseeable future besides what Jason wanted, which was violent and strange and somewhat degrading and entirely thought-annihilating, a blessed relief.

30

In the moment of waking up, Amy’s first thought was to be grateful that she didn’t believe in Bev’s parents’ punisher God. Her yoga teacher God would not exactly be thrilled by what she’d done either, though, and she certainly wasn’t thrilled with herself. For one thing, it meant that she definitely had to break up with Sam as soon as possible. She wasn’t a cheater; lying and sneaking around lay far outside the range of her acting ability. She allowed herself a brief teary moment of lying in bed and feeling terrible about losing Sam. Beautiful, brilliant Sam, with his perfect butt and force field of mystery that she would now never be able to penetrate fully! She’d spent so much time feeling jealous about him—of his accomplishments, of the paintings whose company he prized over hers, over the feelings he’d had for his ex-wife—that she’d never imagined that
she
would be the one to betray
him
. She had never even thought about betraying him. That was how the betrayal had been able to happen: she hadn’t had time to weigh her options, make a decision about whether or not to commit the act. The act had presented itself to her and made itself irresistible.

Well: no, not true. Not technically true. She could have kept her arms crossed at the threshold of her room. She could have shaken her head once, a decisive nonverbal “nope.” She could have drawn the line any number of places: this far, no further. There had been infinite opportunities for line drawing and she hadn’t availed herself of any of them.

She stopped crying, wiped her eyes with the antique quilt, listened for sounds of stirring in the waking house, and rolled over and stretched, intrigued by how abnormally energetic she felt about getting out of bed. She still felt full of strange pockets of conflicting feeling: sadness about Sam, mild disgust and a queasy throb of lust about Jason. But underneath everything ran a low hum of exaltation. Things were happening to her. They were bad things, but at least they were happening.

31

The kitchen was at its best in the early morning, with white light bouncing off the glass-fronted cabinets. Sally and Bev were sitting at the table in their pajamas, drinking from oversize coffee mugs and waiting for the catalog-ordered frozen croissants to come out of the oven. When the croissants were done, Sally arranged them on a clean dish towel in a basket and put them in front of Bev with a jokey little flourish. “I thought we deserved something a little bit special for breakfast, since you guys are headed out today.”

Bev was already munching gratefully on one of the croissants. “This really hits the spot.”

“I remember being able to handle pastries even when other food seemed universally unappealing, so I thought…”

“You mean, when you were pregnant?”

“Yeah.”

Bev brushed crumbs off the front of her bathrobe. “Is it weird for you if we keep talking about it, or is it not a big deal to you?”

“It’s not weird. I mean, now when I think about it, it seems like a big deal, but it wasn’t at the time.” Sally paused to take a bite of her croissant, which she’d torn into halves and daintily placed at right angles on her plate. “Actually, besides the more recent times, there was one time right after I met Jason that I found out I was pregnant. Not with Jason’s kid, actually. There was really never a question of whether I’d keep it. Not only had I just met this wonderful guy, but I had done all kinds of bad things to that little fetus without realizing it. I still think about that when I hear my friends talk about their no-caffeine, no–soft cheese, no-sushi pregnancies—like, I would have given birth to a
crack
baby!”