All of this, and I was turning thirty in less than a month.
I looked around at my apartment. At the dorm decor and the books all over the place as if a library had exploded nearby and I’d stockpiled the remains. The mismatched furniture I’d rescued from curbs and dumpsters across the city. I dreamed of showplace houses—hardwood floors and eat-in kitchens, but I figured that would happen . . . someday.
Nothing in my life indicated I was ready to put aside my childish things. I loved working at the Museum, but a steady, good job didn’t exempt me from all the other ridiculousness in my life. I thought it was perfectly reasonable to talk shit about Henry. I was always willing to leap from zero to total dramatic outrage at the slightest provocation, because I always had before and it had, until recently, been fun. I spent entirely too many hours thinking of ways to push my friends’ buttons, just for my own amusement. I behaved like a teenager on a WB show after sleeping with someone. I wanted my ex to pay for dumping me even as I wanted him back, and I played absurd mind games with the woman he’d left me for. The one I was furious with for betraying our weird, twisted friendship though I had no qualms plotting to do the same if I could.
For all intents and purposes, I might as well be the same excitable twit I’d been when I was twenty-two.
Why was I such a baby?
I sat on the couch mulling these things over until light began to creep in the windows. I dozed then—but it was more of an exhausted coma than any restful, peaceful slumber.
I woke a few hours later, immediately cranky and with Linus panting directly into my face from about an inch away. I shoved his head away from me, and ignored the little dance he did when he realized I was awake.
“No,” I told him. “Go lie down.”
He ignored me, taking up one of his toys in his mouth and shaking it ferociously in my direction. Even my dog rejected my authority. Even he suspected I was failing miserably in the grown-up department.
I swung up to a seated position and scowled around the living room.
I was, I realized, going to have to do something about the way I lived. It was like that Rilke poem I’d taped to my walls in college: “for here there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life.”
The phone rang again then, and I groaned as I fumbled around to look at the caller ID. But it wasn’t Helen, ready for round two. It wasn’t even Nate, the way I sort of expected it to be.
It was Georgia.
“Oh,” I said into the receiver without bothering to say hello, “are we talking on the phone? Because I got the distinct impression you were giving me the silent treatment.”
“I’m sorry,” Georgia said in the same tone of voice. “Let me check my voice mail for all the calls you made to me—oh wait. You didn’t make any.”
“Which one of us threw up her hand—very daytime talk show, by the way—and said ‘I can’t’?” I demanded.
“I meant I couldn’t talk about it then,” Georgia said with a sigh.
“I’m telepathic this week,” I told her. “But not last week, so I must have missed that. Sorry.”
Georgia sighed again, more pointedly.
“Do you want to get some breakfast or not?” she demanded. “It’s fine if you don’t. We can just hang out on the telephone and be snotty to each other. We can talk about Henry. Totally your call.”
I sighed even louder than she had.
“Fine,” I said. “Give me forty-five minutes.”
We met in a place near Georgia’s condo. I found her sitting at a corner table of the small café, her hands cupped around a huge mug of coffee. She had her usually big and vibrant hair scraped back into a severe ponytail, and seemed to be practically vibrating with tension. I thought that boded ill.
“I can’t even talk about how cold it is,” I announced by way of greeting. I was also hoping to distract her. I began unwrapping myself from my layers and layers of winter wear. I draped my scarf, extra sweater, mittens, and hat on the back of my chair and sat. “I don’t understand why I live here, when I happen to know there are places with no snow, ice, freezing rain, or nights that start at like 2 p.m.”
“Because none of those places are Boston,” Georgia said with a shrug.
I nodded at the simple truth of that, and ordered myself a bottomless latte from a passing waiter. Neither one of us spoke until it appeared before me. I didn’t look at Georgia as I stirred in five packets of Splenda. When I did, she was shaking her head at me.
“What?” I asked.
“How can you put anything that sweet into your mouth?” she demanded. “Ugh. I think it would trigger my gag reflex.” She put a hand to her throat. “I think it already has.”
“I don’t understand the whole I can only drink black coffee thing,” I countered, eyeing her mug. “I bet those are the same people who will only read tedious, obscure novels because they think it makes them more intelligent. When really, they just read a boring book. Same with coffee. Why choke it down black and bitter when it can taste like dessert instead?”
“Maybe I just like the taste of it without a pound of sugar and six gallons of cream, because it’s coffee, not coffee ice cream.” She raised her lawyerly eyebrow at me.
“Maybe you do,” I said, raising my own librarian eyebrows right back at her. “But that’s just your taste. It doesn’t make you a better person. I can’t stand people who assign moral judgments to personal preferences.”
Georgia considered me for a moment. “I think that’s your way of talking about Henry,” she said. “And we’ll talk about that, believe me. And I guess we’re going to have to talk about Amy Lee, too.”
“I haven’t heard from her,” I said, watching her face. I was terrified I’d see pity or something there, which would indicate they’d talked to each other and were leaving me out. The way they had once, years ago, in a different fight I would have said I’d forgotten about. But she just pursed her lips slightly, and shook her head.
“Neither have I,” she said. “That’s a little extreme, even for her, but there’s something I want to talk to you about first and if I don’t do it right now I’m not going to do it at all.”
“Oh God,” I moaned, setting my mug down with a thud. “Are you breaking up with me too? Because I was much better with the silent treatment. I was perfectly content to convince myself that you were really busy, or held up in court, or buried in some document production somewhere without cell phone service—”
“I hooked up with Chris Starling,” Georgia blurted out, cutting me off.
That hung there for a moment.
We stared at each other, and it was hard for me to imagine that I could look any more shocked than Georgia did.
“But I thought . . .” I shrugged helplessly.
“I know!” she groaned. “I don’t know what happened to me! I was still upset about Jared, and I was so angry about the Amy Lee thing and your secret Henry thing, and we were in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and he smiled at me in that way he does and I thought Gandalf eyes and boom!”
“Boom?” I echoed.
“The next thing I knew we were half naked in his hotel room.” Georgia let out a shaky breath. “I’ve become a cliché. I hooked up with the boss. If I’d done it at the office party, I could be the laughingstock of the office as well. Not like it matters. I can pretty much kiss my dreams of a partnership good-bye.”
“Wait,” I said, reeling. “How did you get from half naked to your partnership? What are you talking about? You have to tell me what happened!”
So she took a fortifying sip of her (dark and bitter) coffee, straightened in her seat, and told me.
Georgia had been out of her mind when she left for Scranton that Monday morning. She was emotionally unprepared to deal with a week in some city she wasn’t sure she could find on a map. She was furious with Amy Lee, hurt that I had kept secrets from her, and all of that piled on top of the humiliating breakup with Jared.
“If you can even call it that,”
Georgia sniffed, “which I’m not sure you can, because that presupposes a ‘relationship’ and I’m not sure that mess qualified.”
Neither did I, but it wasn’t my place to say anything.
“Don’t give me that look,” Georgia said. “I’m the one who has to actually feel the way I do when I get crazy over inappropriate men. I knew Jared was another in a long line of complete assholes. Believe me, I knew.”
“Back to Chris Starling?” I suggested. Diplomatically.
They had been taking depositions in Scranton, which, Georgia admitted, showed Chris Starling to his best advantage. He always unsettled the people he was deposing. It was the way he looked at people. As if he already knew their secrets and was personally disappointed in them when they failed to divulge those secrets when he asked.
Opposing counsel this time around was some hotshot type, all sleek with flashing white teeth Georgia just knew he’d like to sink into her jugular. Literally and figuratively.
“So basically he was the Jared type,” I said.
“His clone, in fact,” Georgia agreed. “Obviously, I was smitten.”
“And now I’m confused. I thought this was a Chris Starling story.”
“Just listen.”
Georgia had locked eyes with Mr. Jugular, and they’d arranged to meet for illicit cocktails, all in secret, of course, since they were opposing counsel and had to maintain the appearance of propriety. Which, it turned out, suited Mr. Jugular just fine because while he’d certainly be up for whatever Georgia might have in mind—particularly in the bedroom, he made clear with his hand on her thigh—he needed to keep things extra quiet because he was, after all, engaged.
“Yuck,” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Georgia said.
Because he hadn’t even confessed it—he’d just announced it. He evidently thought it would either be a turn-on for Georgia, or incidental information to file away in case Georgia got any ideas. At no point did it occur to Mr. Jugular that, upon hearing the news, Georgia might not sleep with him.
Which had really been the slap in the face.
“At what point did I become so obvious and easy that guys stopped trying to deceive me into bed with them?” she asked me. “At what point did I start wearing that sign around my neck?”
She had sat there for a long moment with Mr. Jugular’s hand on her thigh. She was in a cheesy hotel bar in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was a Monday night. And though the setting wasn’t necessarily auspicious, Georgia felt her life shift right there and then.
“I can’t even begin to stress how very much I’d like to tell you that it was like something out of a movie,” she said now, “with a stirring song playing in the background and that light of battle in my eyes, but it was actually really quiet. There was Muzak. And this fucking guy. This engaged guy. And I realized that this was what my life was, who I was. This pathetic woman in a hotel bar, about to willingly sleep with some sleazy guy who couldn’t even be bothered to conceal the fact that he had a fiancée.” She shook her head. “That’s how little he cared about me. And I could see with perfect clarity that it started right there and then. I could take this guy up to my room and we could have sex, it might even be good sex, and I could keep having sex with guys like him, and soon enough they’d be married guys. Guys with wives and kids. Guys with houses and whole other lives. Guys who wouldn’t even bother to pretend at having a relationship with me. That would be who I was, and it all started right there in that bar with that guy.”
She sat there for a moment, and I tried to read her expression, but she looked about as remote as I’d ever seen her.
“What did you do?” I whispered.
She looked up and met my gaze.
“It kills me that you have to ask,” she said.
“I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t. Because how would you know?” She took a deep breath. “I got up and left. I wasn’t even mean about it. I just said I had an earlier morning than I’d originally thought. And then I went up to my hotel room and sat on the ugly orange bedspread and cried. For about twelve hours.”
“Oh, Georgia.”
“It was fine,” she said. “I’m fine. And it was kind of interesting to just . . . feel what I was feeling. I didn’t have you or Amy Lee to call. There was nothing particularly dramatic about it. It was just me, and the person I was this close to becoming.”
“Wow,” I said.
One unfortunate side effect of choosing to reinvent herself while taking depositions in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was that Georgia had to face the catalyst for her reinvention across the table in the morning. In the way of men like Mr. Jugular since the dawn of time, he took sexual rejection badly. He used Georgia for target practice enough that at lunch, Chris Starling actually sat her down for a talk.
“He was in rare form,” Georgia said. “Even for him. He took me to Burger King and while I was trying to enjoy my hamburger he looked up and said, ‘This morning is, of course, why you can’t sleep with opposing counsel.’?” She imitated Chris Starling’s dry tone perfectly.
I just shook my head, wordless.
Georgia snapped back at him. She had not slept with opposing counsel, she threw at him, and how dare he—
Good, Chris Starling said.
“He said it just like that?” I asked, enthralled. Georgia had made him sound so—fervent.
“Exactly like that,” Georgia said, smiling slightly.
And it had altered everything. They’d finished lunch and returned to the depositions. Chris Starling had slapped Mr. Jugular down a few times. Georgia had played her part. It was all normal, except . . . it wasn’t.
“All of a sudden,” Georgia told me, “I was aware. I knew every time he took a breath. I could feel when he looked at me. It was crazy. I felt like I was wearing a corset, like I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs, whenever he walked into a room.”
“Wow,” I breathed.
The days passed, until finally they were finished with the depositions. It was Thursday night, and they were due to fly out in the morning. Georgia once again found herself in the hotel bar, only this time, everything felt epic and terrifying instead of depressing and tired. They chatted about inane things, things Georgia couldn’t even remember. Chris Starling pointed out that it was late, and that they had an early flight. He paid the check, and then they walked to the elevator. It took a long time to come, and they’d seemingly run out of things to say. Georgia felt as if she might burst—into tears, into laughter, into pieces, she wasn’t sure. The elevator finally arrived, they got in, and the door closed, leaving them all alone inside. They stared at each other. Georgia made some crack, something about having nothing to say, because she couldn’t bear the silence for another second.
Which was when Chris Starling pulled out his big gun—that smile.
Georgia felt something melt inside of her, and it was like he’d been waiting for it. Without saying a word, he reached across the distance between them, pulled Georgia to him, and kissed her.
“Just like that?” I was whispering. I practically had to fan my face.
“Exactly like that,” Georgia whispered back.
And it turned out that Chris Starling could kiss. So well that the next thing she knew they were in his room, rolling around on his bed, and half naked. Georgia had come to in a moment of clarity.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means I sat up with as much dignity as you can when you have to refasten your bra and find your shirt,” Georgia said dryly. “And then I told him that I was tired of being treated like Sally, the Sheraton Whore.”
“Oh, no.” I put my face in my hands, and then peeked at her. “?‘Sally, the Sheraton Whore?’?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well . . . what happened? What did he do?”
“He sat there in understandable shock as I gathered up my tattered dignity and stormed away,” Georgia said. “I can’t blame him, really.”
 
; “He didn’t chase after you?” I frowned. “Maybe I don’t like him very much after all.”
“He didn’t chase after me,” Georgia said. “The next morning, on the oh-so-awkward taxi ride to the airport, he said exactly one thing to me. Guess what that was?”
“I can’t possibly.”
“He said, and I quote, ‘If you’re Sally the Sheraton Whore, what does that make me?’?”
I thought about that for a moment.
“Huh,” I said. “Ouch.”
She let out a sigh, and took a deep pull of her coffee.
“Well?” I demanded. “What happened next?”
“We flew to New York, got stuck for hours in JFK while they deiced the runways or something equally irritating since it’s December in the Northeast and you’d think they’d be prepared, and got home late last night. I believe Chris and I exchanged three entire sentences. When I got home I cried some more, pretended to sleep, and then called you.” Georgia gave me a thin smile. “It’s been quite a week, and just so we’re clear, I wasn’t giving you the silent treatment. Not deliberately.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s a lot. And your partnership dreams are involved how?”
“Hello. My boss has seen my breasts.” Georgia made a face. “And while they’re obviously smoking hot, I also insulted the man and ran away. I just shot my career trajectory in the foot.”
“Oh.” I thought about it. “Not necessarily.”
“But most likely,” Georgia said. She shook it off, and smiled at me. “But it’s your turn. Tell me the Henry story, you lying bitch, and it better be good.”
chapter seventeen
“Well,” Georgia said when I finished telling her the tangled history of Henry and me, up to and including his rejection of me after the caroling party.