Friendship (24 page)

Bev looked great, glowy and shiny-haired, wearing a new shirt that matched her pale blue eyes. She smiled radiantly at Amy, and Amy felt like rushing toward her and throwing herself into her arms and crying on her shoulder. And she could have, but she checked herself in deference to all the people around them. What if someone she knew saw her weeping in the middle of the Flea? She bit her inner cheek and took a seat in a folding chair opposite Bev.

“I missed you, dude!” Bev said, reaching out to touch her knee.

Amy almost started crying again but instead bit her cheek harder.

“I mean, I know we’ve both been busy, though. How have you been? How’s the job search?”

“Terrible. There’s really nothing right now—no one’s hiring right before the holidays. I’ve just been emailing people I know, trying to get them to have coffee with me, and massaging my profile on LinkedIn, which is more depressing than words can say. Sorry. This is so boring, let’s not even talk about it.”

“Stores are hiring right before the holidays,” Bev said. “I mean, temporary positions mostly. But if you just need something to help you pay the bills while you look for your next real job…”

“Well, that’s exactly what I need. But I can’t work in a store, Bev. I mean, what if someone found out? It would be so humiliating.”

“Someone who? I don’t mean this as an insult, but like … no one cares if you work in a store, Amy. Plenty of writers have service jobs.”

“At the beginning of their careers, sure. Not in their early thirties. Or, well, not after they’ve already…”

Bev didn’t say anything. She didn’t look at Amy, either—instead she scanned the perimeter of the room, as if she were looking for someone.

“Look, I know it doesn’t seem like I did anything important. But there was a time when people totally recognized me on the subway! I got thousands of emails. Thousands! They were so mean, too. Everyone was so mean to me. That has to have meant something. It has to have happened for some reason; there has to have been some payoff for that, and it can’t be that I work in a
store
!”

Bev turned her gaze toward Amy again.

Maybe it was being pregnant that made Bev seem so distant and foreign, but Amy felt that in the past, she’d been able to count on her for immediate reassurance that she was doing the right thing, that she was right, just in general. And also, it was usually Bev who’d needed help in the past. But now it was all Amy being uncertain, being in trouble. And she thought she could see in Bev’s squinting, impersonal gaze that she just wasn’t up to being leaned on.

“Hey, I meant to mention this earlier, but Sally’s meeting us here. Is that cool?”

“What?”

“I wanted to hang out with you, but I also wanted to see her, and this is my one day off. Sorry, but my hours are nuts. Because, uh, it’s the holiday season. And I work at a store.” Bev smiled, but her tone of voice was slightly tart.

Too late, Amy realized how insulting she’d been. “I didn’t mean to imply that working at a store was somehow … anyway I didn’t mean … Well, it’s different for you!”

“Okay. Whatever, Amy. We definitely need to talk more about what’s going on with you. But look, for right now, be nice to Sally, okay? And I’ll try to steer the conversation away from Jason, so you won’t feel too weird.”

“No. I can’t do this. I’m sorry. I really don’t want to hang out with her. It’s too weird. I know you guys are friends now, but I’m not … I can’t handle seeing her right now. I just wanted to hang out with you!”

“Is it because you feel awkward about what you did with Jason, or because she’s going to help me with the baby, or what?”

“I guess both of those things, and also because she’s this random person who’s invaded your life—our lives, and I feel … usurped by her.”

“You’re being crazy. You could never be usurped.”

“Really? Why? I feel like I’ve been being pretty much the worst friend, and she’s giving you everything I can’t, like money.”

“I don’t want money. Well, not from you. I want you to think about me. Call me, text me. Be curious about what’s going on with me, not just use me to unload all your bad feelings, like I’m your therapist. I need you to care about me, not resent me.”

“What, like I’m jealous of you?”

“You’re jealous of everyone.”

“
You
used to be jealous of
me
!”

“Not really, Amy.”

“You’re full of shit. You were jealous.”

“Maybe sometimes. But I’m definitely not right now. But that’s okay, right? We don’t need to feel mutually superior to each other. That’s not the point of friendship, Amy. I mean, maybe it is for you, but it’s not for me.”

“All I’m saying is I want to talk to
you
and not you and
Sally
!”

Again Amy felt as if she was about to start crying, like a toddler having a tantrum. Rather than make a fool of herself in front of Bev and all the Fleagoers, she jumped up and started making her way toward the exit of the underground mall. As she pushed her way through the crowds, she hoped that Bev would chase after her, ready to help and fix and make sense of everything. But of course Bev wasn’t following her, and it took forever to escape the crush. Tides of people surged through the halls, and it seemed to Amy that everyone was pregnant. She walked out of the bank vault feeling invisible, like a ghost, alone in a sea of couples and children and happy, rich friends.

37

The email from Jackie arrived at a particularly bleak moment. Amy had been sitting around the creepy loft all morning in front of her laptop, headphones on to foreclose the possibility of conversation with the hippies, telling herself she was gathering her strength and was just about to go to the café around the corner, where she’d disable her computer’s access to the Internet and spend time revising her CV to reflect her newly adjusted set of goals. She wanted to position herself as someone who wasn’t a writer so much as a “content creator” or, better, a “content strategy consultant”—someone who might be able to work for brands or ad agencies, not blogs like Yidster. It was getting close to noon now, she was hungry for lunch, and her limbs twitched restlessly because they craved motion, but somehow she couldn’t stop mindlessly scrolling through Tumblr, liking photographs of food and animals. Her actual cat lay at her feet, occasionally pawing her and trying to engage her in play, but she fobbed him off with some desultory petting and then continued to ignore him in favor of the cats on the screen.

So when Jackie’s note popped into her in-box, she found herself grateful and relieved. Even better, Jackie wanted to have lunch as soon as possible; she knew it was “a long shot” but maybe
today
—because she was “having trouble figuring out some of the loose ends you left behind.” Possibly she also had a vulturish interest in seeing how Amy was doing, so she could gossip about it with Lizzie. But who cared: it would mean getting out of the house. Amy accepted readily, with the stipulation that the restaurant be nowhere too near the Yidster offices. They agreed to meet at a down-home southern restaurant in Carroll Gardens. Amy noted with a twinge that it was near a Starbucks and a Trader Joe’s, both places where she should go and fill out job applications. Bev was right: she just needed something to get her through the month, and no one cared if she worked retail; it was pointless to keep living on her almost maxed-out credit cards out of some kind of misplaced pride.

Jackie, sitting at the restaurant’s bar waiting for Amy, looked shockingly great. Her curls were less frizzy, her retro-red lipstick was applied more evenly than usual, and she was wearing a polka-dot dress that accentuated her small waist and concealed her large, flat behind. When the waitress dropped off two menus and a cocktail list, she grabbed at the cocktail list. “We have to toast your quitting, right?”

Amy nodded, realizing that she shouldn’t drink if she was serious about applying for cashier jobs after lunch. Well, she promised herself, she would do it soon, almost certainly tomorrow.

They ordered Manhattans, and two sips in, Amy began to imagine that the whole afternoon or maybe her whole life would be like this: hard, bright winter light slipping into the dim, cozy restaurant; hilarious chitchat with Jackie, who turned out to be so much happier and so much more fun than she seemed when she and Amy had been coworkers. Jackie launched immediately into an anecdote about Avi losing his temper and attempting some Krav Maga–type maneuver on the malfunctioning copier before the editorial meeting that morning. Amy was almost sorry she’d missed it. Her laughter seemed to please Jackie so much, and it was refreshing to be around someone who, for whatever misguided reason, admired her and wanted her approval. Halfway through her drink Amy caught herself thinking about how lucky she was to be unemployed, with a vast sea of possibilities opening up in front of her. She didn’t know what any of the possibilities were, but that seemed exciting, not terrifying, in this moment.

Their sandwiches arrived, and they set about consuming them ferociously, Jackie smearing the bread with red lipstick as she ate. Amy tried to be more restrained, but they were very good sandwiches. As she tried to avert her gaze from the little slices of pickle and flecks of coleslaw falling out of Jackie’s roll, though, her gaze stuck and fixed for a moment on Jackie’s engagement ring, which shimmered with a rigid intensity in the golden restaurant light.

Amy felt a visceral, impulsive pang of desire, the kind that could make someone grab food off a stranger’s plate. She wanted the ring so badly. She thought, crazily, of stealing it. She wanted to take it off Jackie’s finger and put it in her mouth. Would it be completely weird, if she were ever rich, to just go ahead and buy herself an engagement ring? She loved how it gave Jackie, this totally unspecial person, a sheen of value. Because it actually meant that Jackie
was
valued. It was a symbol, and it was the thing it symbolized. Someone thought Jackie was worthy of wearing a little rock worth thousands of dollars. Amy found that she wanted to cry. This kept happening lately, more and more often. She took a large sip of water and heard the satisfying crackle of ice in her water glass, the cubes like giant diamonds catching the light and refracting it. She wanted a diamond as big as an ice cube, and she wanted the kind of endless, outsize love such a diamond would symbolize. Seriously, had her drink been drugged?

“These are really strong, huh?” she said to Jackie, trying not to slur her words.

“Yeah, but it’s good. I needed to steel my nerves for this conversation,” Jackie said. “Okay, Amy … I didn’t bring you here to ask you about Yidster loose ends. I could give a fuck about Yidster.”

“I thought that was bullshit. So what’s up?”

Jackie cleared her throat, seeming nervous for the first time. “I interviewed for a position at … okay, basically, your old job. I just got the offer this morning. They seem really cool, and it’s much more money than I’ve been making at Yidster, which I could definitely use … I mean, Amy, the handmade napkin rings alone! You don’t want to know … Anyway, I was worried, though, because of your experience there, and I just … wanted to know if you had any advice. Or, like, words of warning?”

Amy shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a job. It wasn’t the right job for me, but I’m sure you’ll be fine. Besides, I hear things are really different there now.”

Jackie forked around a bite of slaw. “Yeah … well, anyway, they actually asked me if … uh, well, they asked me what you were up to, and I told them you had left Yidster. It seems like they would be interested in your working there again, in some capacity, if that was something you wanted.”

Amy snorted. “Are you kidding? You couldn’t pay me to…”

“Well, the thing is, they
would
pay you. A lot. I mean, they just got that big investment from GigaWatt. I probably shouldn’t say how much they’re offering me, but. Uh. Let’s just put it this way … When I told my brother, who went through eight years of med school, he said, ‘Wow, Jackie, if I’d only known that I should have just been joking around on Twitter all those years instead of dissecting fetal pigs, I would have done things very differently!’”

Amy laughed. At least it was partly a laugh. It began as sort of a gag, but she managed to make it sound credibly laughlike about halfway in.

“I thought you should know, anyway. I mean, I know you probably have lots of offers, and this is just something to consider. I’d love to work together again and … you already know the lay of the land there. I don’t know, I just wanted to know if there was some horrible secret reason not to work there, I guess!” She smiled as though this had been a joke, but Amy knew she was really imagining some kind of blog-business Bluebeard’s closet.

“No, they’re fine. I had a bad experience there. It’ll be totally different for you.”

“You should call them, Amy. I mean it, they would take you back in a heartbeat. I mean, they might make you grovel a little. After all, you did get fired. But you’re a big girl, anyway, you can handle it. Oh, and the commenters will love it! They always loved you.”

“Ha. Uh, if by ‘love,’ you mean ‘thought of inventive ways to murder daily,’ then sure, they adored me.”

“Well, that’s inevitable, right? I mean, you’re a woman, it’s the Internet … and you’re getting combat pay, basically, to deal with it.”

“Have you experienced that kind of thing before, Jackie?”

“Oh, totally! You know how various zealots and neo-Nazis and Zionist wackadoos home in on Yidster once in a while. I’m not unfamiliar with trolls.”

“Yeah, but it’s different when it’s about you.”

“Well, it’s … not really ever about
you
,” Jackie said, and sat back, took a meditative sip, and looked very pleased with her wisdom. “So you’ll think about it?”

“Sure. I mean … I have a lot of other stuff going on, but it’s definitely worth thinking about.”

Jackie smiled. “Good. I hope we can work together again. It’ll be good to have another woman there, if it works out. We can have each other’s backs.”

Amy swallowed a surge of BBQ-bourbon bile and pushed herself away from the table. As she stood and tried to walk calmly toward the restroom, smiling, she passed their waitress, on her way to drop their check. The door to the bathroom closed behind her, and Amy noted in the last second before she dropped to her knees that there was a fan loud enough to obscure any noises, and she knelt on the sticky floor and watched her lunch unspool in reverse into the bowl. She tried to do it quickly.