Friendship (5 page)

He let her kiss him again before he closed the bathroom door. She put the letter back in the drawer; then she sat at the table playing with her phone and drinking another glass of wine and eating just a couple of bites of pasta so they’d be able to eat at the same time.

Ten minutes later Sam came out of the bathroom with one of her towels around his waist, and as he walked to the bedroom to get dressed—several of her dresser drawers were full of his clothes—she took the opportunity to covertly admire his muscular back. They’d met when Amy had been assigned by Yidster to cover—“from a Jewish angle,” presumably—an exhibit he was part of, and they had been effortlessly together more or less since going home together that night. At first she thought he was a little old for her—thirty-five to her twenty-seven—but two and a half years later the difference seemed negligible. In ordinary time, two and a half years of dating wasn’t all that much, but in New York time it was lots of time, especially as you neared thirty.

Was that what was nagging at Amy, the idea that she and Sam should get engaged and married because she was getting old? It wasn’t that, exactly. If she really thought things were going somewhere with Sam, she wouldn’t mind getting old. They would get old together. It was just that Sam seemed so … neutral, somehow. He would get up early and stay up late for weeks in advance of a small show somewhere, but he couldn’t ever seem to make plans with her more than a few hours ahead of time, nor could he ever be convinced to dip into scheduled work time to have any kind of unplanned fun. She’d thought artists were supposed to be spontaneous! It was as if he had some kind of phobia. Was it Amy-phobia? More likely it was some phobia of the future, of preparing for the future. And why should he prepare for the future? Everything he wanted was already here.

*   *   *

SHE KEPT WATCHING
him, trying not to be creepy about it but enjoying the sight of his wet, naked body as he pulled his clothes on. She would have loved to just run in and pull him down onto the bed, but his antipathy toward spontaneity extended even to sex. He doled out sex as a reward for good behavior; sex was for the end of the day, after you’d washed all the dishes and spent a final hour tying up the loose ends in your in-box and finally the lights were off and you could relax. The idea of interrupting this order of operations made no sense to him. This attitude was understandable, on the one hand, and on the other hand totally maddening. He seemed to exist to refute all those women’s magazine tips about Surprise Him! and Spicing Things Up. On the other hand, it was a pleasant contrast to all the other guys Amy had ever been with, whose perpetual availability had inevitably made them seem, like any perpetually available thing, less valuable—i.e., the way Amy probably seemed to Sam.

Later, after dinner and dishes and email and sex, Amy and Sam were just drifting off to sleep when she became aware of a distant high-pitched electronic peeping. It came at regular intervals, spaced just far enough apart that it would seem to have stopped, and then it would come again:
peeeep.

“What is that?” Sam asked.

“Oh, it’s the smoke alarm in the other room. I think the battery is dying.”

They were both on the verge of dozing off, Amy extra drowsy and lazy from the wine. But the peeping continued, seeming to get louder now that it had been noticed, as though it were going to enjoy putting on a little show.

“Do you want to, like, do something about it?” Amy asked eventually. Sam had fallen asleep completely, and he mumbled “What?” in Russian, as he typically did when roused.

“Well, I’m going to do something about it!” Amy said, throwing off the covers, feeling a little upset.

“Baby, just close the door. We’ll deal with it in the morning.”

“Are you nuts? It’s so annoying. I’ll deal with it now.” She was already dragging a chair from the kitchen table, positioning it under the alarm. She scanned the room for implements she could use to pry it off the ceiling, and when her eye lit on a hammer, she grabbed it.

“Amy, be careful. Jesus. Are you drunk?”

She didn’t answer. She swung the hammer at the side of the alarm, probably a little bit harder than was strictly necessary. It clung to the ceiling resolutely, she whacked it again, and this time it clattered to the floor, where it began to bleat out a loud, panicky cry. She jumped down off the chair and pried open its stomach, and it gave one last sad bloop as it disgorged its batteries. As she stood over it, feeling victorious, she became aware that Sam was standing next to her. He kicked the alarm gently, and half of it clunked over and scattered onto the floorboards in plastic shards; Amy’s hammering had shattered the case.

“Amy, you didn’t need to
break
it. Your landlord will make you pay for the new one.”

“It wouldn’t shut up!”

Amy grinned at Sam, feeling an absurd sense of triumph. He turned away and got back into bed. He was already half asleep as she joined him.

“You really didn’t have to do that,” he murmured when he felt her curl herself into his back.

“I definitely did. What was your plan—ignore it?”

“I would have closed the door. It would have died out eventually.”

“That’s, like, your thing, that you don’t take action unless or until you actually have to,” Amy said.

Sam sighed. “Okay, Amy, that’s my thing. Any guesses about what your thing is?”

She tried to come up with an answer, but as her brain spun out possibilities, they got muddled up with the beginning of dreams, and eventually she was sucked under by a warm tide of sleep.

6

“So then I was like, ‘that’s like your whole
thing
,’” but he just rolled over and fell asleep. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m subjecting you to this.”

Bev was partly listening to Amy talk, partly being very aware of the time. She’d looked at Google Maps to see exactly how many more minutes she had before the subway came. They kept going back to this inefficient coffee shop because it was locally owned and they would have felt guilty going to the Starbucks that had opened two doors down, but it had been half an hour since she’d placed her to-go breakfast sandwich order and she was starting to regret being so idealistic about breakfast. The girl who’d trained Bev at her temp assignment had emphasized promptness as much as she could without being downright insulting: “Basically, the phone starts ringing at nine, and if there’s no one here to answer it right then, it just, like, starts to create this image that’s not very professional, and so if that happens, it’s almost like there was no point? In hiring, um, a temporary staffer?” she’d said, clenching her teeth as she smiled. Bev had smiled too, saying, “I’m a real morning person.”

Amy hadn’t ordered a sandwich, and anyway it didn’t matter—Bev was sure she could arrive at Yidster at noon, if she wanted, or just not show up at all and tell her bizarrely indulgent bosses she was working from home and she’d probably still keep getting paychecks. Bev knew that sometimes Amy actually
forgot to deposit
her paychecks. Once, Bev had noticed a paycheck that sat on Amy’s coffee table for an entire week, unavoidable in Bev’s peripheral vision as they watched TV. Bev had never in her life let a check go undeposited for more than twenty-four hours.

“So what do you think I should do?”

“About which, the apartment or the Yid Vids?”

Amy frowned into her coffee cup. “Whatever. Either.”

“Uh, I’m not really qualified to give relationship advice. I don’t know. You love Sam, and he totally makes you happy. And you’re not disgusting or creepy or nerve-racking to be around when you’re together. So I personally would be fine with it if you moved in with him, with the caveat that I am supposed to remind you that you promised yourself you’d never move in with anyone again unless you were—I think what you said was, ‘related by blood or marriage.’”

Amy rolled her eyes. “I said that?” She snorted. “I must have had more money then.”

“You did. It was when you had your old job.”

“Ugh. Which brings us to the second question. Can I really let Yidster make me do something so degrading?”

Now Bev rolled her eyes. “You do realize I’m about to spend my day collating and binding, right? And trying to remember the name of the company where I’m working so I answer the phone correctly? I’m not really in the mood to hear about how you find making Internet-televised chitchat about some Jewish celebrity’s nose job
degrading
.”

“It’s not that I find it degrading,” said Amy. “I misspoke. I more find it, um, humiliating. It’s different.”

“Ha!”

Bev took a deep sip of coffee. “I’m going to go and ask what happened to my sandwich. I have to be on the subway platform exactly eleven minutes from now, so I’m getting a little bit nervous.”

“Are those Google predictions real? Do they work? They do, don’t they. Okay, cool, another thing I have to start paying attention to so that my life can be fully efficient and optimized.”

“I have no idea why you think of every app you put on your phone as this enormous new burden,” Bev said just as the countergirl called her name. She felt a surge of relief as soon as she knew she wouldn’t be late for work, and as she scurried over to the counter to pick up her sandwich, she felt a burst of affection for Amy. Silly Amy, who couldn’t figure out how to operate her own expensive phone.

When Bev came back, Amy was busily scrolling through the functions of her new app. “Bev! It tells you exactly when the train is going to come!”

“I know! Oh—and really quick before I have to go, I wanted to ask if you could go out of town this weekend.”

“This weekend? I would love to, jeez. Where are we going?”

“J. R. Pinkman—do you remember him, from my old job?—was supposed to house-sit for this couple who have a house upstate, but he had to bail at the last minute, and he thought of me, I guess, because we ran into each other recently. They need someone to, like, water their organic kale. We can rent a car near the train station in Rhinecliff. They seem neurotic but nice; before I even said yes, the woman sent a multi-paragraph email about the inner workings of their house. It looks gorgeous.”

“Will it depress me because it represents a future I’ll never attain?”

“Uh, probably. Does that mean you don’t want to go? Look, I’ll forward you all the emails and stuff, and you can peruse them at your leisure and decide. I told her I’d let her know today. Does that sound good?”

“I don’t know. I might be too busy at work to think about this stuff,” Amy said.

“Oh, okay. Well then, I can…”

“Kidding! Duh. Of course. Let’s go!”

7

Bev drove so infrequently that the mechanics of driving occupied a lot of her brain when she did it. Even after she and Amy got to the mostly two-lane part of the drive from the car rental place near the train station in Rhinecliff to Margaretville, she found herself clutching the wheel slightly. To Amy, who had never learned to drive, Bev’s focus on the road probably registered as pensiveness, to the extent that it registered at all. She’d even asked whether Bev was okay. Bev had grunted something noncommittal, and ever since then Amy had no trouble filling the intra-car silence with a steady stream of observations about landmarks they were passing or things about the area she remembered from the Woodstock wedding she’d once attended or things that had recently annoyed her (“Don’t you hate it when someone RSVPs no to a Facebook event on its wall with some comment about the fun thing they’re doing instead? ‘Wish I could make it, but I’ll be in Africa for the next six months.’ Fuck those dickwads!”), initiating a conversational volley that tended to peter out after a few halfhearted return serves from Bev.

But Amy seemed content to continue lobbing her thoughts into a void, and the resulting white noise was pleasant to Bev, even relaxing: she could feel it starting to gradually unmelt the frozen-feeling areas around her trapezius. For the rest of the weekend she didn’t have to impress Amy or even seem normal around her—Amy already knew what she was really like.

She darted her head over her shoulder again, slowing down to keep several car lengths between the car in front of her and the car she was driving. Bev had stored all the contents of Sally’s emails about the care and maintenance of the house and its surrounding organic garden in her brain under a tab marked “nuisances that are worth it.” She liked to imagine her consciousness laid out like a browser window. The open tab right now was “driving,” and she could click over from it intermittently to sample the other tabs’ contents.

There was always one tab that she kept trying to close, but it persisted in remaining open on her mind screen. It was maybe more like a pop-up window—the “Had That Year of Grad School Been Worth It?” window. It could be disabled, sometimes, but only with five or more drinks. Just the jingle of change in a pocket or the one-dollar toll to get over the Rhinecliff Bridge was enough to remind Bev of the thirty thousand unrecoupable dollars, plus interest, that she owed.

By dropping out, she had also forfeited the right to tell people at parties that she was in grad school. Had a year of easier party interactions with strangers been worth thirty thousand dollars? She knew what her parents would say to that, or rather, what both of them would think and what her father would be delegated to say.
Be your own person, Beverly. Who cares what those numbskulls think? You know who you are.
And Bev did know who she was, actually. Her parents didn’t, though, and hadn’t for years. At the end of every phone call they still asked whether she was planning on going to church that weekend.

“Oh, it’s that statue of a bear! I know where we are now,” said Amy.

Bev, who had known where they were for the duration of the drive, smiled. “Yay, right? We’re almost there!”

She half swiveled to the right to exchange a smile with Amy, but Amy seemed troubled.

“Uh, I hate to ask,” Amy said. “I can keep holding it till we get there if it’s, like, twenty minutes…”

“It’s more like half an hour. I could use a coffee. There’s a place coming up—I figured we’d make a pit stop there.”