Friendship (6 page)

Amy smiled and sat back, then reached toward the cup holder. “Might as well fill my bladder to capacity, then,” she said, taking a glug from the bottle of Poland Spring water she’d bought forty-five seconds before their train’s scheduled departure.

When they got to Catskill Coffee, though, there was a sign posted above the register:
NO PUBLIC BATHROOMS
. Bev wordlessly grabbed a paper cup and began filling it from the thermos on the counter that had a sign indicating it was the strongest brew, and then she watched with half her attention as Amy approached the cashier. He was sweaty, red-cheeked, hemp-necklaced, maybe in his second year at Bard.

“Hey, I’m so sorry to bother you,” Amy began.

The boy turned his stoned gaze toward her. “Yeah?”

Bev could never pinpoint exactly how Amy went about doing what she did next. It was like watching a nature show about an animal that can strategically change color. Amy certainly hadn’t gone to any trouble today to avoid looking dowdy: her thick brown hair was pulled back in a haphazard lump, and she was wearing a grease-stained sweatshirt that emphasized her broad shoulders. But as Bev watched, she somehow turned the entire Bat Signal beam of her personality on the cashier. Her tone was confiding and personal, as though her need to pee was an inside joke only she and the boy shared. He said something noncommittal, but in a friendly tone of voice, and Amy laughed, color rising to her cheeks. Emboldened, he made a real joke, and Amy cracked up with total abandon. She was still laughing as he reached for the key to the bathroom.

As she waited for Amy to finish peeing, Bev leaned against the counter and sipped her coffee. She could have been a shadow or a ghost or a breeze, for all the attention the cashier paid her, and as usual, she both relished and resented her ability to will herself invisible. She was physically unimposing, that was part of it, tidy and petite but also self-contained. Amy entered a room and diffused little particles of Amy into every corner of it. Bev was solid.

She knew it was selfish, but she was glad Amy had failed to become an actual celebrity, though it had briefly seemed as though she might be on the cusp of doing so. When they first became friends they’d been assistants at the publishing house, jobs they’d quit almost simultaneously—Bev for a stupid reason she couldn’t usually bear to think about and Amy because she’d somehow snagged a high-profile job at a locally prominent gossip blog mocking New York City’s rich, powerful, corrupt, ridiculous elite. But Amy had made the mistake of mocking the wrong rich, powerful person, and the person, who was friends with the blog’s owner—a rich, powerful, corrupt, ridiculous person himself—had intervened. The owner had instructed Amy to post a retraction and apology, which she’d refused to do, mistaking her own stubbornness for some kind of principled stance worth fighting for. The owner retaliated by firing her in a way that made it seem as though she’d either misunderstood some basic concept or made the whole thing up. Amy had gone from being a rising star to being an untouchable in a matter of days. If it had happened a few years later, Amy—and Bev, for that matter—would have known what everyone who’s lived in New York for more than five years knows: that such shamings were inevitable and could always be overcome just by waiting for enough time to pass until someone else’s more recent shaming eclipsed your own in everyone’s ADD-addled memory. Amy also thought she’d stood up for something important, when basically she had stood up for her right to be mean on the Internet. She assumed that being fired in such a public way meant that she’d be blacklisted, and because she believed this, she effectively was: she stopped going to parties, so people stopped inviting her; she didn’t apply for good jobs, so she didn’t get them.

Amy’s life was okay now—stable, certainly better materially than Bev’s—but everything about it was curtailed, a diminished version of what might have been. In drunken, vulnerable moments, Amy sometimes talked to Bev about her “comeback,” which was eternally just around the corner. These were the only times when Bev felt pity for Amy, whereas Amy, Bev assumed, felt pity for Bev a lot of the time.

The rest of the time, Bev felt her affection for Amy mingle with a comfortable, manageable level of envy, for the small but dedicated blog audience Amy took for granted, for the thoughtless way Amy spent money that was literally impossible for Bev, and for having the ability to make the essentials of life—money, attention, keys to the bathroom—come to her without her making what seemed like much of an effort. For the millionth time, Bev reached inside herself and turned the envy off completely, as easily as twisting a tap shut.

Bev could decide to put up with Amy because she’d often been the recipient of that Bat Signal beam herself. That was the thing about Amy; she said and did the exact right thing at the exact right time just as often as she said and did the exact wrong thing at the exact wrong time. When Amy gave Bev a compliment, Bev knew that she meant it because she was thoroughly, hopelessly incapable of lying or even being less than honest: she was the person who, when you asked if your new haircut was bad, would tell you it was, whereas everyone else would allow you to delude yourself. When Amy had told Bev that she thought Bev was a good writer and should see how far she could take her talents, Bev had known that she’d meant it. She had been the first and so far the only person to see Bev’s potential.

Amy came out of the bathroom smiling; she tossed the keys back to the cashier with a big, cheesy wink, then half skipped toward Bev and grabbed her hand, pulling her to the car. “I can’t wait for our fun weekend getaway to start! We’re going to drink a lot and eat so much food and go to bed early!” she trilled, swinging Bev’s arm as they walked out to the car. A surge of love for Amy welled up in Bev. Of course she loved Amy; they were allies in a world full of idiots and enemies. She couldn’t afford to harbor resentment toward her even for a second. And besides, she had something that Amy, despite her stable and basically okay-seeming life, would never get to have again: the potential to make a good first impression on the world. When the time was right, Bev knew, she’d will herself un-invisible. She just had to figure out exactly how to do it.

8

When Bev first started making friendship advances toward Amy, she was so dogged that Amy thought Bev might want to sleep with her.

Bev wanted
something
, that much was clear. She had been hired at the office where Amy worked a year after Amy started there. Amy had the best prospects for advancement in the editorial department, and all the other assistants knew it. She was the protégée of an editor who was on a hot streak; his books were bestsellers, and his anointed former assistants had all gone on to great things—i.e., they had become full editors before their thirtieth birthdays, which in book publishing was the greatest thing anyone could realistically hope for.

Bev was meek and put-upon; her office clothes were poly-blend jackets and skirts from the part of H&M where you went when, broke, you still had to try to dress for the job you wanted. Amy wore Marc by Marc Jacobs blouses (so coveted, in the early aughts) with short sleeves that showed her tattoos. She’d been Bev exactly one year earlier, and for this reason she avoided her as much as possible.

Bev either didn’t notice or did notice and still blithely persisted in her attempts to cultivate Amy’s friendship. “Hey,” she said one day while waiting outside Amy’s boss’s office for his signature on a form attached to a clipboard—Amy’s boss was, as usual, on the phone—“You seem like you might like Sleater-Kinney. I have an extra ticket to the show at Roseland on Thursday. Do you want to go?”

“Um, I have to check,” said Amy, thinking fast. “My boyfriend and I might be doing something that night.” This was unlikely; Amy’s boyfriend at the time was a pot-dealing sometimes musician, and the things they did together didn’t tend to require advance planning, because they mostly involved sitting on the couch, smoking joints, and watching pirated DVDs.

“Relax, Amy, I’m not gay,” Bev said, and Amy looked up from her screen, where she’d been pretending to check her Outlook calendar. She was shocked by Bev’s perceptiveness. “I just like Sleater-Kinney. It’s possible to like them and be heterosexual. It’s not like I invited you to go see Tegan and Sara.”

In spite of herself, in spite of her overwhelming desire to maintain her place in the office hierarchy, Amy laughed. “Okay. Well, but I hope we can still go to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival together,” she said, and Bev cracked up. They kept making jokes, eventually devolving into one of those punchy overcaffeinated office gigglefests, until the marketing director, who
was
gay, came out of her office and shot them a dirty look that was kind of a joke but was still mortifying, and then a second later Amy’s boss came to the door of his office and, without really looking at either of them, made it clear that he needed Amy to do something other than sit on her ass and chat with Bev. Bev, for her part, grabbed the clipboard off the edge of Amy’s cube and rushed into his office, hurriedly explaining its importance. After he’d signed it, Bev scurried back out of his office, but not before depositing the Sleater-Kinney ticket, which she’d had in her blazer pocket the whole time, in Amy’s in-box, as if it were just another interoffice form or letter to file.

*   *   *

ROSELAND WAS PACKED
with girls in their twenties who were wearing comfortable shoes and no makeup, and Amy felt better than she had in ages. Next to her, Bev pogoed around to the music unself-consciously, singing along with the band. Amy also wanted to do these things, but she’d had only one plastic cup of light beer and there was still an outside chance that Bev might take the opportunity of any display of Amy’s vulnerability to sabotage her in the office somehow, and also she never danced. She stood silently watching the band, feeling the music reverberating up through the floorboards and into her tensed legs. A terrible gulf of experience existed between the Amy who’d seen this band as a teenager and the Amy who now spent her days filing things and dropping clipboards into in-boxes and killing time on the Internet. Bev turned to her, brushing sweaty hair out of her face, and yelled that she had found out in advance what kind of beer the venue sold and had brought some in her tote bag. Did Amy want one? Amy did, and soon after she drank it, she started bending one knee and then the other in a kind of rhythm. By the time the band played its final encore (an inspired cover of CCR’s “Fortunate Son”), you might have even said she was dancing.

*   *   *

IN THE WEEKS
that followed the Sleater-Kinney show, Amy and Bev started taking their lunches together in the park across from their office building, where previously Amy had eaten her lunch alone while reading submissions. Amy offered to read the proposals that Bev championed in ed meetings and gave her tactical advice about how to appease her boss. Bev took Amy to cheap bars in her deep-Brooklyn neighborhood and listened to Amy complain about her pothead boyfriend. Their friendship officially transcended the workday, surprising them both.

That summer, Amy and her pothead boyfriend finally broke up, undramatically for the most part, except that Amy had to find a new place to live in a hurry. Luckily for her, her alpha-bitch maneuvering at the publishing house had paid off in the form of a promotion, which enabled her to convince herself that she could afford to live alone. She’d had to clean out her retirement account to afford the first and last month’s rent plus security deposit, but the sacrifice seemed necessary. It felt psychologically important—after all those years of premature cohabitation and sedated early evenings eating chicken curry on the couch—to find out what she was like when left entirely to her own devices.

But on the first night in her apartment under the BQE, after the movers left and the energy of packing and carrying and unpacking drained from her limbic system, she surprised herself by not being ready to revel in solitude just yet. She sat at the kitchen table, hungry but too exhausted to figure out how to get food, drinking a dented bottle of Poland Spring water she’d been nursing all day in the July heat. She watched the daylight fade outside her uncurtained windows. A creak in the floorboards above made her jump. She realized that without being aware of it, she’d always assumed that she was safe when her ex-boyfriend was there, which made no sense to her conscious mind; if someone had broken into their apartment, he probably would have offered the intruder a bong hit and played him some prog rock. But still, up until this moment in her life, Amy had been going around assuming that her safety was at least partially someone else’s responsibility. But it never really had been, and now it was impossible to pretend otherwise. She was completely alone.

It was nine o’clock. Without quite realizing what she was doing, she dialed Bev’s number. They weren’t yet the kind of friends who called each other out of the blue for no reason, so Amy was relieved when Bev picked up.

“Hi! How did the move go? You must be exhausted.”

“Oh, the movers did most of it. I just carried the little stuff, the breakable stuff. The real nightmare is unpacking, of course.”

“Want me to come over and help?”

“No! I mean, don’t help. I don’t want to do any more tonight, and I wouldn’t inflict that on you. But do come over! I mean, if you want.”

Fifteen minutes later, Bev was standing at Amy’s door with a bottle of wine and a paper bag full of take-out sushi. “I had just ordered this, but I always order enough for two people,” she explained. Her hair was in shiny plaits, making her look even more innocent than usual, like a milkmaid on an antique can label. Amy felt a pang of gratitude so extreme that tears briefly, unnoticeably came to her eyes.

They ate the sushi and drank the wine on a little ledge of roof they could crawl to from Amy’s fire escape, which the broker who’d shown Amy the apartment had described as a “deck.” Rotting fallen leaves clotted one corner and made the hot summer air smell more like the woods and less like car exhaust. They balanced the plastic trays of spicy tuna rolls on their laps and looked out at the cars on the BQE and, beyond that, the storage warehouses, the Navy Yard, and, across the East River, Manhattan, just visible between the nearby buildings, skyscrapers with all their lights on, wastefully twinkling.