Friendship (23 page)

“So what does your husband do?” Allie asked as they emerged from the subway. The wintry day had turned chilly, and they huddled in their coats and walked quickly toward MooBurger Organic.

“Oh, I’m not married.”

“Sorry, your … partner? What sort of work—”

“No. I mean, I’m single.”

Allie paused in her determined march toward the burger place’s counter to place her order.

“Oh my god. You don’t have anyone to help you? Does your mom live nearby?”

“No, I … you know, I’m from Minnesota. I’m not really that close with my family.”

“Do you live by yourself?”

“No, with roommates. But I’m saving up to move into a place of my own soon. I work at Push It—you know, on Smith.”

They ordered their free-range, grass-fed Whopper equivalents and sat down to wait for them to be ready.

“Sorry to be so nosy. I’m just … kind of in awe! I mean, you’re doing something pretty unheard-of.”

Bev laughed out loud; she couldn’t help it. “I think, statistically speaking, it’s incredibly more common than, you know—”

“What I’m doing? Yeah, I guess you’re right. I mean, I read the newspaper!”

Bev was willing to bet that Allie didn’t read anything but the Sunday magazine and Styles, but she tried to quash her negative thoughts.

“You must think I’m really boring and suburban,” Allie said, as if reading her mind.

“No. I’m just really jealous of you,” Bev said without thinking.

Allie grinned. “Ha! Uh. You won’t be, soon. I mean, I think I know what you mean, but there are things about pregnancy, motherhood, you know, the whole thing, that are the same for everyone. But it’s important to have help. I don’t mean, like, paid help—necessarily. You need good friends, the kind you can call if you haven’t slept and just need to take a shower. Do any of your close friends have kids?”

“My closest friends? No. They’re still more in the … behaving like infants themselves stage.”

“I think that’s why I decided I wanted to have kids,” Allie said. She gazed past Bev out the window of MooBurger, and her expression transformed from bovine content to super serious and sage. “There didn’t seem to be any other way to snap out of that. I didn’t want to just segue from that into, you know, death.”

“It’s as good a reason as any.”

“This is very personal, but … what was your reason?”

“I hated my life, and I wanted it to change,” Bev said.

“Samesies, basically.” Allie shrugged, and suddenly Bev didn’t dislike her anymore. She was starting to see that what Allie had said about motherhood being the same for everyone—though it was still a lie rich people told themselves to feel morally okay—was also partially true. What was happening to her body and Allie Heffernan’s body was a great equalizer in some ways. Already Bev could see that and viscerally feel it. She felt part of the great undifferentiated mass of humanity in a new way. It wasn’t altogether pleasant, but it was interesting. The novelty of getting all these tacit nods of what felt like approval or at least understanding was a little bit overwhelming. She supposed it was because she was visibly doing what women her age were expected to be doing, and regardless of how she’d gotten there or how she would pay for it, she had a new status in the eyes of the world: Mother.

Their order number was called, and Allie sprang up to fetch the burgers. Bev’s came in a bag, and she grabbed it, poised to make her exit. She hadn’t even unzipped her jacket. Allie unwrapped her burger and immediately started tearing into it so ferociously that it took her a second to register that Bev was leaving. “Oh, do you have to go? No, come on, stay!”

“I do. Sorry—the store gets really busy around now. Hey, come in and visit me sometime. I’ll totally give you the friend discount.”

35

Amy was lying on the ominously sagging futon in her creepy sublet with her eyes closed and her mind racing, trying to pretend to herself that she was asleep, when her phone came alive with a text from an unfamiliar number. “In Manhattan. Meet, chat?” With a hint of wariness in case it
wasn’t
Jason, she wrote back: “In Brooklyn. Some other time?” Within seconds, the reply came: “Shipping out tomorrow, London calls. I could come to your place.”

Amy’s heart somehow plummeted and sped up simultaneously as she scanned her field of vision. There was no way she could invite Jason or anyone back to this place. For one thing, she would inevitably encounter one of her eight roommates. For another thing, there was no window in this attic crawl space, for which she was paying five hundred dollars a month (futon included).

The price had been the main attraction of the weirdly chopped-up loft—and the fact that they hadn’t checked her credit, were okay with her renting month to month, and permitted her to bring Waffles because they already had four cats and so didn’t mind one more. Everything else was not an attraction.

She texted Jason that she would meet him at a bar a few blocks away.

She was going to have to find somewhere even worse if she didn’t get a job soon. She had spent the last of her final Yidster paycheck on December rent, but now the new year loomed more forbiddingly than it ever had in her life. Seeing Jason would take her mind off her problems. He might even take her to his hotel, if she could make it seem like a kinky treat and not a pathetic necessity.

She still couldn’t quite believe that this was where she’d ended up, but after she’d quit her job and lost her apartment, the dominoes had fallen with increasing speed. Sam had gone to Spain, telling her, before he left, that it was important for his work that she not contact him too often. She surprised herself by not even wanting to. She felt guilty for cheating on him before they’d officially broken up, and they weren’t even officially broken up now, or maybe they were; she hadn’t wanted to ask. He didn’t know she was living in a crawl space. She missed him, but it was as if there were cotton batting around her thoughts of him: she couldn’t get too close to them, it hurt too much; thinking about him would allow all these other thoughts to escape too, and it was better and easier to remain numb.

It was bizarre to think that just a few months ago she had thought that she and Sam would move in together, get married, and have children. If he called her on the phone right now, it would take her a moment to recognize the sound of his voice.

Amy walked to the bar, where she ordered a double Jameson on the rocks. She sat at a little table in the corner and surveyed the scene. There were a few underage-looking students and a little group of the bartender’s friends at the bar, chatting and keeping her occupied on this slow night. The bartender was low-light beautiful, with a swooping wedge of pink hair. She’d called Amy honey when she gave her the drink. People like this bartender made her feel at a disadvantage for not wearing makeup, but Amy had never figured out how to walk around in eyeliner and lipstick without feeling clownishly costumed. The pink-haired bartender probably did not worry about feeling costumed, or maybe she relished the feeling. Amy felt suddenly as though a costume would be perfect for the circumstances she found herself in. She ought to be wearing a pencil skirt, seamed stockings, blue-red lipstick. Maybe then, instead of being lame and nonsensical and hopeless, her circumstances could begin to seem glamorous, decadent.

She looked down at her drink and was surprised to find that it was mostly gone. She looked up and saw Jason walking toward her, wearing almost the same outfit he’d worn for the photograph Amy had made fun of, with Bev, in this same bar. She wished she was hanging out with Bev tonight, but instead she was getting drunk and getting ready to have sex with a married man. She didn’t even really understand why she’d been avoiding Bev. Maybe for the same reason, months ago, that Bev had resisted telling Amy she was pregnant: because telling her would make it real. At drinks with acquaintances and on job interviews, insofar as those things were still happening, Amy had been able to portray her circumstances as madcap and fun—situations someone confident enough not to give a fuck found herself in all the time. The problem was that Amy
did
give a fuck. She gave many. She hadn’t completely failed to notice that her life had escaped her control. Bev would home in on this and, without meaning to, force Amy to come to terms with reality. So even though she missed her friend desperately and craved nothing more than to dial the phone and hear the sound of her voice, Amy kept not dialing. Seeing Bev would be like opening her credit card statements and really knowing, instead of just being vaguely sure, that she owed too much to ever repay.

She didn’t want to see Jason anymore at all. She could just get up and leave at any time, she told herself. She knew she wouldn’t leave, though, because it would mean going back to the attic.

And then he was there, anyway. Jason smiled at her, the same catlike, serene smile he’d smiled when he’d pushed his finger past her lips. “Another?” he said, gesturing to her drink.

“Yes, please. Jameson,” she said. “Um, I was bracing myself.”

“I hope this won’t require being braced,” he said, and went to get the drinks. In his absence, she glanced at the label of the trim-fitting leather coat he’d left on the back of the chair. It was Prada.

As he took the first sip of his beer, Jason made a face. “Oof, this stuff is skunky. She needs to change the keg.”

Amy looked at him in disbelief. “Are you going to ask for a new one?”

Jason sniffed his drink. “Well, yeah, I can’t drink this. Is yours okay?”

“Of course it is! How can you fuck up a whiskey on the rocks?”

Jason shrugged. “I dunno. Too much whiskey, not enough rocks, vice versa.”

“It meets my exacting standards,” Amy said.

“Good! Well, maybe I’ll have one too,” he said.

Amy watched as Jason ambled over to the bar and explained the situation to the bartender. There wasn’t the faintest flicker of annoyance on the bartender’s face. In a moment he returned, bearing a glass that matched Amy’s.

“Free! I like this place,” he said.

“She likes
you
,” Amy said. “If I’d tried what you just pulled, she would have just stared at me silently until I apologized and slunk away.”

“Not a big deal to ask for what you want,” Jason said lightly. “Also has to do with how you ask for it.”

“Sometimes you don’t even have to ask,” Amy said, hearing the forced jollity in her voice.

“Mmm. Yes, right. Well, I hope you don’t feel bad about what happened in Margaretville. I don’t. I really like you, Amy.”

“Of course I feel bad! I sort of … I mean, I pretty much have a boyfriend.”

Jason pantomimed looking avidly around the room, then smiled his slightly evil smile again. “Do you? I don’t see any boyfriend.”

“Well, we’re sort of on a break right now. I mean, he’s not in the country. I don’t know, I think we’re not really together. But I’m not exactly single. And I definitely wasn’t single when we…”

Jason’s eye crinkles conveyed understanding that verged on condescension. “Okay, fair. You might have noticed that I’m not single, either. But I would suggest that none of that has much to do with our current situation. In my experience, it’s not a good idea to expect one relationship to bear the burdens of all your various … needs.”

“I never thought my needs were so burdensome! And anyway, I don’t. Expect that. I have what I need. That should be enough.”

“I don’t suppose there’s really such a thing as ‘enough,’ at least not in this context,” Jason said, and put his hand on Amy’s jean-clad knee under the table. She almost laughed—everything he was saying, the whole situation, and the knee grab, it was all so textbook—but then he moved his hand up her thigh, and then he was pressing his thumb along the fly of her jeans with pinpoint accuracy.

They drove in Jason’s car to the Wythe Hotel. In the lobby, Amy wished again for high heels and a skirt, an appropriate disguise for the stranger she was becoming. There was a panicky moment as they passed the restaurant when she thought she’d made eye contact with one of Sam’s friends, but she reassured herself with the fact that there was nothing obviously inappropriate about what she was doing. As far as that guy knew, she was just walking around in a public place with some man who wasn’t Sam. She felt excited, verging on panicky, but the whiskey muted the shrilling of her nerves just enough that she made it into the elevator and up to the room, and soon Amy found that she was nowhere, that she had sort of ceased to exist except as a related constellation of sensations. Occasionally her consciousness resurfaced to make a mental note of how good she felt, and this meant losing the mindless good feeling for a moment, but it always came back.

It lasted a long time, and then, when it was over, she felt depleted, endorphin-drained, as if she’d come down from Ecstasy. Jason had to leave; he was expected back upstate. He told her to stay in the hotel room as long as she liked, and she wished he really meant that she could stay there indefinitely.

As soon as the door clicked shut behind him, Amy rolled over and fished her phone out of her purse and, rushing so she wouldn’t be able to stop herself, texted Bev, asking her to meet in the morning at the Brooklyn Flea. Then she set an alarm, shut the blackout blinds, buried herself under the sex-smelling covers, and tried to burrow into sleep, which finally came in its most thin, nightmare-filled, and restless form. As she drifted between states of consciousness, a thought kept repeating: the uncomfortable realization that despite all the adventure of the past few hours, her circumstances had not changed at all.

36

The outdoor flea market had moved indoors for the winter and had lost a lot of its charm in the process. The vendors and shoppers were now crowded together in the massive basement of a former bank, and the enclosed space made the goods look tawdrier. Why were people lining up to get a closer look at some overpriced old T-shirts? The basement’s lighting didn’t flatter anyone, either. Amy caught a glimpse of herself in an antique mirror that was for sale for three hundred fifty dollars. She winced. Compared with the very young crowds milling through the market, she looked about a thousand years old. Well, she had barely slept. The young Fleagoers probably hadn’t slept much either, but they could still bounce back, whereas Amy was thirty, too old to drink as much as she’d drunk, eat as little as she’d eaten, and have sex for as many hours in a row as she’d had sex. She hastened toward the food area, where Bev was waiting.