I stared at her, waiting, but she still said nothing. Just stared at me with those big, brown eyes, her always ungroomed brows furrowed above them.
“What the fuck?” I said evenly. Then I screamed the question again as I realized that Dex was likely lurking in the apartment, hiding somewhere. I shoved past her into the bathroom, whipping open the shower curtain. Nothing. I darted forward to check the closet.
“Darcy, don’t,” she said, blocking the door with her back.
“Move!” I screamed. “I know he’s in there!”
So she moved and I opened the door. And sure enough, there he was, crouched in the corner in his striped navy boxers. Another gift from me.
“You liar!” I shouted at him, feeling myself begin to hyperventilate. I was accustomed to drama. I thrived on drama. But not this kind. Not the kind of drama that I didn’t control from the outset.
Dex stood and dressed calmly, putting one foot and then the other into his jeans, zipping defiantly. There wasn’t a trace of guilt on his face. It was as if I had only accused him of stealing the covers or eating my Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream.
“You lied to me!” I shouted again, louder this time.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he said, his voice low. “Fuck you, Darcy.”
In all my years with Dex, he had never said this to me. Those were my words of last resort. Not his.
I tried again. “You said there was nobody else in the picture! And you’re fucking my best friend!” I shouted, unsure of whom to confront first. Overwhelmed by the double betrayal.
I wanted him to say, yes, this looks bad, but there had been no fornicating. Yet no denial came my way. Instead he said, “Isn’t that a bit of the pot calling the kettle black, Darce? You and Marcus, huh? Having a baby? I guess congratulations are in order.”
I had nothing to say to that, so I just turned the tables right back on him and said, “I knew it all along.”
This was a total lie. I never in a million years could have foreseen this moment. The shock was too much to bear. But that’s the thing about the sucker punch; the sucker element hurts worse than the punch. They had socked it to me, but I wasn’t going to be their fool too.
“I hate you both. I always will,” I said, realizing that my words sounded weak and juvenile, like the time when I was five years old and told my father that I loved the devil more than I loved him. I wanted to shock and horrify, but he had only chuckled at my creative put-down. Dex, too, seemed merely amused by my proclamation, which enraged me to the brink of tears. I told myself that I had to escape Rachel’s apartment before I started bawling. On my way to the door, I heard Dex say, “Oh, Darcy?”
I turned to face him again. “What?” I spat out, praying that he was going to say it was all a joke, a big mix-up. Maybe they were going to laugh and ask how I could think such a thing. Maybe we’d even share a group hug.
But all he said was, “May I have my watch back, please?”
I swallowed hard and then hurled the watch at him, aiming for his face. Instead it hit a wall, skittered across her hardwood floor, and stopped just short of Dexter’s bare feet. My eyes lifted from the watch to Rachel’s face. “And you,” I said to her. “I never want to see you again. You are dead to me.”
Two
Somehow I managed to make it downstairs (where I gave Rachel’s doorman the gruesome highlights), into a cab (where I again shared the tale), and over to Marcus’s place. I burst into his sloppy studio, where he sat cross-legged on the floor, playing a melody on his guitar that sounded vaguely like the refrain in “Fire and Rain.”
He looked up at me, his expression a blend of annoyance and bemusement. “What’s wrong now?” he said.
I resented his use of the word now, implying that I am always having a crisis. I couldn’t help what had just happened to me. I told him the whole story, sparing no detail. I wanted outrage from my new beau. Or at least shock. But no matter how much I tried to whip him into my same frenzied state, he’d fire back with these two points: How can you be mad when we did the same thing to them? And, Don’t we want our friends to be as happy as we are?
I told him that our guilt was beside the point and, HELL NO, WE DON’T WANT THEM TO BE HAPPY!
Marcus kept strumming his guitar and smirking.
“What’s so funny?” I asked, exasperated. “Nothing is funny about this situation!”
“Well maybe not ha-ha funny, but ironic funny.”
“There is nothing even remotely funny about this, Marcus! And stop playing that thing!”
Marcus ran his thumb across the strings one final time before putting his guitar in its case. Then he sat cross-legged, gripping the toes of his dirty sneakers, as he said again, “I just don’t see how you can be so outraged when we did the same thing—”
“It’s not the same thing at all!” I said, dropping to the cool floor. “See, I may have cheated on Dex with you. But I didn’t do anything to Rachel.”
“Well,” he said. “She and I did date for a minute. We had potential before you came along.”
“You went on a few lousy dates whereas I was engaged to Dex. What kind of person hooks up with her friend’s fiancé?”
He crossed his arms and gave me a knowing look. “Darcy.”
“What?”
“You’re looking at one. Remember? I was one of Dexter’s groomsmen? Ring a bell?”
I sniffed. True, Marcus and Dex had been college buddies, friends for years. But it just wasn’t a comparable situation. “It’s not the same. Female friendships are more sacred; my relationship with Rachel has been lifelong. She was my very best friend in the world, and you were, like, the very last one stuck in the groomsman lineup. Dex probably wouldn’t even have picked you except that he needed a fifth person to go with my five girls.”
“Gee. I’m touched.”
I ignored his sarcasm, and said, “Besides, you never painted yourself as a saint like she did.”
“You’re right about that. I’m no saint.”
“You just don’t go there with your best girlfriend’s fiancé. Or ex-fiancé. Period. Ever. Even if a gazillion years elapsed, you still can’t go there. And you certainly don’t hop in bed with him one day after the breakup.” Then I hurled more questions his way: Did he think it was a one-time thing? Were they beginning a relationship? Could they actually fall in love? Would they ever last?
To which Marcus shrugged and answered with some variation of: I don’t know and I don’t care.
To which I yelled: Guess! Care! Soothe me!
Finally, he caved, patting my arm and responding satisfyingly to my leading questions. He agreed that it was likely a one-time thing with Rachel and Dex. That Dex went over to Rachel’s because he was upset. That being with Rachel was the closest thing to me. And as for Rachel, she just wanted to throw a bone to a broken man.
“Okay. So what do you think I should do now?” I asked.
“Nothing you can do,” Marcus said, reaching over to open a pizza box resting near his guitar case. “It’s cold, but help yourself.”
“As if I could eat now!” I exhaled dramatically and did a spread eagle on the floor. “The way I see it is, I have two options: murder and/or suicide…. It would be pretty easy to kill them, you know?”
I wanted him to gasp at my suggestion, but much to my constant disappointment, he was never too shocked by my words. He simply pulled a slice of pizza from the box, folded it in half, and crammed it in his mouth. He chewed for a moment, and with his mouth still full, he pointed out that I would be the prime and only suspect. “You’d wind up at a female corrections facility in upstate New York. With a mullet. I can see you now slopping out gruel with your mullet flapping in the prison yard breeze.”
I thought about this and decided that I’d vastly prefer my own death to a mullet. Which brought me to the suicide option. “Fine. So murder is out. I’ll just kill myself instead. They’d be really sorry if I killed myself, wouldn’t they?” I asked, more fo
r shock value than because I was really considering my own death.
I wanted Marcus to tell me that he couldn’t live without me. But he didn’t take the bait in the suicide game as Rachel had when we were in junior high, and she’d promise that she’d override my mother’s classical music selections and see to it that Pink Floyd’s “On the Turning Away” was cranked up at my funeral.
“They’d be so sorry if I killed myself,” I said to Marcus. “Think they’d come to my funeral? Would they apologize to my parents?”
“Yeah. Probably so. But people move on fast. In fact, sometimes they even forget about you at the funeral, depending on how good the food is.”
“But what about their guilt?” I asked. “How could they live with themselves?”
He assured me that the initial guilt could be assuaged by any good therapist. So after a few weeknights on a leather couch, the person, once racked with what ifs, would come to understand that only a very troubled soul would take her own life, and that one, albeit significant, act of betrayal doesn’t cause a healthy person to jump in front of the number 6 train.
I knew that Marcus was right, remembering that when Rachel and I were sophomores in high school, one of our classmates, Ben Murray, shot himself in the head with his father’s revolver in his bedroom while his parents watched television downstairs. The stories varied—but, bottom line, we all knew that it had something to do with a fight he’d had with his girlfriend, Amber Lucetti, who had dumped him for a college guy she met while visiting her sister at Illinois State. None of us could forget the moment when a guidance counselor ushered Amber out of speech class to give her the horrific news. Nor could we forget the sound of Amber’s wails echoing in the halls. We all imagined that she’d lose it altogether and end up in a mental ward somewhere.
Yet within a few days, Amber was back in class, giving a speech on the recent stock market crash. I had just given my speech on why grocery-store makeup was the way to go—over more expensive makeup—as it all comes from the same big vats of oils and powder. I marveled at Amber’s ability to give such a substantive speech, barely glancing at her index cards, when her ex-boyfriend was in a coffin under the frozen ground. And her competent speech was nothing compared to the spectacle she created when making out with Alan Hysack at the Spring Dance, fewer than three months after Ben’s funeral.
So if I were striving to destroy Rachel and Dex’s world, suicide might not be the answer, either. Which left me with one option: stay on course with my charmed, perfect life. Don’t they say that happiness is the best revenge? I’d marry Marcus, have his baby, and ride off into the sunset, never looking back.
“Hey. Give me a slice after all,” I said to Marcus. “I’m eating for two now.”
That night I called my parents and broke the news. My father answered and I told him to put Mom on the other extension. “Mom, Dad, the wedding is off. I’m so sorry,” I said stoically, perhaps too stoically because they instantly assumed that I was solely to blame for the breakup. Dear ol’ Dex would never cancel a wedding the week before it was to take place. My mother turned on her sob switch, wailing about how much she loved Dexter, while my father shouted over her in his “Now, Darcy. Don’t be rash” tone. At which point, I dropped the closet-story bomb on them. A rare hush fell over the phone. They were so silent that I thought for a second that we had been disconnected. My father finally said there must be some mistake because Rachel would never do such a thing. I told them I never would have believed it either. But I saw it with my own two eyes—Dex in his boxers in Rachel’s closet. Needless to say, I said nothing about Marcus or the baby to my parents. I wanted to have their full emotional and financial support. I wanted them to cast the blame on Rachel, the neighborhood girl who had duped them just as she had duped me. Perfect, trustworthy, good-hearted, loyal, reliable, predictable Rachel.
“What are we going to do, Hugh?” my mother asked my father in her little-girl tone.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “Everything will be fine. Darcy, don’t you worry about a thing. We have the guest list. We’ll call the family. We’ll contact The Carlyle, the photographer. Everyone. You sit tight. Do you want us to come out on our same flight on Thursday or do you want a ticket to come home? You say the word, honey.”
My father was in full-on crisis mode, the way he got during a tornado watch or a snowstorm or anytime our declawed, half-blind indoor cat would escape out the back door and dart out into the street, while my mother and I freaked out, secretly delighting in the drama.
“I don’t know, Daddy. I just can’t even think straight right now.”
My dad sighed and then said, “Do you want me to call Dex? Talk some sense into him?”
“No, Daddy. It won’t do any good. It’s over. Please don’t. I have some pride.”
“That bastard,” my mother chimed in. “And Rachel! I just can’t believe that little tramp.”
“Dee, that’s not helping,” my father said.
“Well, I know,” my mother said. “But I just can’t believe that Rachel would do such a thing. And how in the world could Dex want to be with her?”
“I know!” I said. “There’s no way that they’re actually together, right? He couldn’t really like her?”
“No. No way,” my mother said.
“I’m sure Rachel is sorry,” my dad said. “It was a very inappropriate thing to do.”
“Inappropriate isn’t the word for it,” my mother said.
My father tried again. “Treacherous? Opportunistic?”
My mother agreed with this assessment. “She probably wanted him the whole time you were with him.”
“I know,” I said, feeling a fleeting sense of regret that I had let Dex go. Everyone viewed him as such a prize. I looked at Marcus to reassure myself I had done the right thing, but he was eyeing his PlayStation.
“Has Rachel called to explain or apologize?” my dad continued.
“Not yet,” I said.
“She will,” my mom said. “And in the meantime, you stay strong, honey. Everything will be fine. You’re a beautiful girl. You will find someone else. Someone better. Tell her, Hugh.”
“You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,” he said. “Everything’s going to be just fine. I promise you.”
Three
Ironically, it was Rachel who had introduced Dex and me. They were both first-year law students at NYU, and because Rachel insisted that she wasn’t in school to date, but rather to learn, she passed her friend Dex, the most eligible man on campus, along to me.
I remember the moment well. Rachel and I were at a bar in the Village, waiting for Dex to arrive. When he walked in, I instantly knew that he was special. He belonged in a Ralph Lauren ad—the man in the glossy ads squinting into the sunlight on a sailboat or bending thoughtfully over a chessboard with a fire roaring in the background. I was sure that he didn’t get sloppy, fall-down drunk, that he would never swear in front of his mother, that he used expensive aftershave products—and perhaps a straight-edge razor on special occasions. I just knew that he could enjoy the opera, that he could solve any Times crossword, and that he ordered fine port after dinner. I swear I saw all of this in one glance. Saw that he was my ideal—the sophisticated East Coaster I needed in order to create a Manhattan version of my mother’s life.
Dex and I had a nice conversation that evening, but it took him a few weeks to call and ask me out—which only made me want him more. As soon as he called, I dumped the guy I was seeing at the time, because I was that sure that something great was about to be launched. I was right. Dex and I fast became a couple, and things were perfect. He was perfect. So perfect that I felt a tiny bit unworthy of him. I knew I was gorgeous, but I sometimes worried that I wasn’t quite smart enough or interesting enough for someone like Dex, and that once he discovered the truth about me, he might not want me anymore.
Rachel didn’t help matters, because as usual, she seemed to have a way of highlighting my shortcomings, underscorin
g my apathy, my indifference to topics that she and Dex cared so much about: what was happening in third world countries, the economy, who stood for what in Congress. I mean, the two of them listened to NPR, for God’s sake. Enough said. Even the sound of the voices on that station makes my eyes glaze over big time. Never mind the content. So after a few months of exhaustively feigning interest in stuff I cared little about, I decided to come clean with the real me. So one night, as Dex was engrossed in a documentary on some political happening in Chile, I grabbed the remote and switched the channel to a Gidget rerun on Nickelodeon.
“Hey! I was watching that!” Dex said.
“I’m so tired of poor people,” I said, tucking the remote between my legs.
Dex chuckled fondly. “I know, Darce. They can be so annoying, can’t they?”
I suddenly realized that for as much substance as Dex had, he didn’t seem to mind my somewhat shallow outlook on the world. Nor did he mind my unapologetic zeal for pursuing quality goods and a good time. Instead, I think he admired my candor, my honesty about where I stood. I might not have been the deepest of gals, but I was no phony.
Bottom line, Dex and I had our differences, but I made him happy. And for the most part, I was a good and loyal girlfriend. Only twice, before Marcus, did my appreciation for the opposite sex spill over into something slightly more—which I think is a pretty admirable record for seven years.
The first minor slip happened a few years ago with Jack, a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old I met at Lemon Bar one night while having a few drinks with Rachel and Claire, who was my best friend from work, former roommate, and the most well-connected girl on the East Coast. Rachel and Claire were as different as Laura Ingalls and Paris Hilton, but they were both my friends and both single, so we often went out together. Anyway, the three of us were standing at the bar chatting when Jack and his friends clumsily hit on us. Jack was the most outgoing of the group, full of boyish exuberance and charm, talking about his water polo tales from his very recent Princeton days. I had just turned twenty-seven and was feeling a bit tired and old, so I was flattered by young Jack’s obvious interest in me. I humored him as the other guys (less cute versions of Jack) worked on Claire and Rachel.