And then she fell silent, her attention on the French toast she’d ordered.
“Well?” I echoed after a moment, not at all interested in my omelet. “That’s all I get?”
“I’m trying to decide whether or not I should forgive you,” Georgia said, eyeing me. “Not for keeping it a secret, or even for the whole Henry-is-evil thing, because whatever. Shit happens. But because you have had intimate and personal contact with that man’s hot body, and you kept it from me when you know perfectly well there was a time when even proximity to Henry Farland was enough to keep me going for weeks.”
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” I said, suddenly fascinated with the cheese-and-tomato omelet. “There was this whole angry denial thing going on, and I thought you’d hate me. If that helps.”
“It really doesn’t.” She shook her head. “I loved him so much it actually hurt me, like it was some separate, tumor-ish thing.”
“I know you did,” I said quietly. “I remember.”
It was horrifying, because really, how did this make me any different from Helen? The point of the divide between women like Helen and women like me was that women like me weren’t supposed to do the kinds of things women like Helen did without blinking. Crushes—particularly long-term epic crushes like the one Georgia had had on Henry—were sacrosanct. I might as well have slept with her college boyfriend, given the amount of emotional energy she’d put into Henry once upon a time. It didn’t matter that it had been completely unrequited. Betraying that required the same level of self-absorption on my part.
“Henry Farland was the archetype for all the Jareds,” Georgia said dryly. “Beautiful, lethal, completely amoral . . . I haven’t forgotten, even if you did.”
“You must hate me,” I said in a small voice.
“The part of me that will always be nineteen years old and struck dumb by her first sight of Henry when he sauntered into that party, all tan and beautiful?” Georgia shook her head. “She hates you. She might even have cried a little bit. The good news is that she’s been crying over Henry for about a decade now, and she hates him, too.”
“I would hate me.” It was true. I was all about bringing the hate. “I’m really sorry, Georgia.”
“I should hate you,” she agreed, “but I’m running out of best friends this month.” She settled back into her chair. “You’re off the hook. Henry ruined his own myth for me years ago.”
“When did he do that?” I asked. It could have been the barely-legal stripper he’d dated that one time. The infamous rumor campaign he’d instituted against poor Felicia, the girlfriend who’d had the temerity to leave him when he was twenty-three. Or his ability to be snide under any circumstances, particularly when it hurt. I hadn’t realized that something had happened to make Georgia get over him. I thought time had simply passed.
“The whole time he was in law school I was able to keep the crush intact,” Georgia said, with a faraway look in her eyes. “You know, because I figured he would go into corporate law, make a ton of money to match the ton of money he already had, and I would yearn forevermore.”
“He’s a lawyer just like you,” I said brightly. “Yearn away.”
“He’s a lawyer, but he’s not like me,” Georgia said, almost sadly. “He spends the bulk of his time trying to shut down my clients. He works for a pittance and usually out of the kindness of his heart, like he’s the personal version of the ACLU. I can’t stand him.”
It was funny when perception changed. It was almost as if I could feel my vision shatter, and then alter so much it was as if the way I’d seen before had never been. It had happened to me once before, quite violently, in Henry’s kitchen that night, and I had the inkling it was happening again in that café with Georgia.
I had to blink a few times. No wonder he’d said I didn’t know him at all. There was a caricature called Henry that I carried around in my head, but he had no relation whatsoever to the real one. The real one was a complete stranger to me—although I was pretty sure I’d glimpsed him for the first time in that hallway the day of the sleigh ride.
“You look shell-shocked,” Georgia said, with a grin. “Don’t worry, Gus. I really do forgive you. Hell, with that body? I’m jealous. I wouldn’t touch his wussy do-gooder ass with a ten-foot pole, mind you, but I’d encourage you even if he was the devil.”
“Speaking of which, I don’t get why you went along with the whole ‘he’s Satan’ thing,” I said, frowning at her. “When you knew he was practically the Mother Teresa of the legal community.”
“First of all,” Georgia said, “I am always available to mock, vilify, and tease. Why? Because it’s fun. Whatever certain dentists of my acquaintance might think.” She sniffed. “And anyway, I adored Henry from afar for years, which he knew and did nothing about. What am I, radioactive? He had it coming.”
She forked in a mouthful of her French toast and eyed me as she chewed.
“What?”
“You and Henry,” she said. “Are you . . . ?”
“I can’t even think about Henry,” I said. “I wouldn’t know where to begin, anyway. Stuff just keeps happening, and he’s off-limits—”
“If you mean because of me, he’s really not. You can have him.”
That didn’t make me feel any better. I blinked. “And anyway, there’s the Nate thing,” I said instead of thinking about Henry any further.
“Jesus Christ. Not again. Not still.”
“It’s not what you think,” I assured her.
“Oh, good. Because I think you’re chasing around after a guy who treated you like shit.” She pursed her lips. “A subject I happen to know something about.”
“Well, okay, yes,” I admitted. “It might resemble that kind of thing. But the truth is—”
“The ugly truth about Nate is that he cheated on you and only left you when you caught him in the act,” Georgia said. “Has it ever occurred to you to wonder what his plan was? I mean, what if you hadn’t caught him? Was he just going to keep seeing both of you?”
I gaped at her for a moment. Then shook it off. “You don’t have all the information,” I hastened to tell her. “It’s not that cut-and-dried.”
So I told her everything. About what he’d said to me on Janis Joplin night. Those strange, yearning moments at the Park Plaza. The Night of Seven Voice Mails. About when he pretended I was a guy so Helen wouldn’t suspect anything. About last night’s ridiculousness.
“Wait a minute,” Georgia said. “Is this seventh grade? She called you from his phone?”
“I keep trying to tell you people that she’s the crazy one here,” I pointed out. “Not me.”
“I don’t know if she’s crazy,” Georgia said with a sniff. “I’ve hated that bitch since the nineties. Since I laid eyes on her in our hallway freshman year and saw exactly what kind of girl she was. But it’s obviously crossed her mind that if she could steal Nate from you, he’s the kind of man who can be stolen.”
“I think maybe he’s just trapped,” I told her. “You know what Helen’s like. You know how convincing she seems to be to men, for whatever reason.”
Georgia sighed. “I think you want him to be trapped, because that way, there’s an excuse for how he’s stringing you along.” She held up her hand when I started to argue. “Believe me, Gus, I know about this kind of thing. I’m the poster girl for this kind of thing. You spend fifty percent of your time making excuses for some guy’s shitty behavior and the other fifty percent of your time fantasizing about how great things could be if only.”
“Nate isn’t Jared!” The moment I said it, I wished I hadn’t. Georgia’s eyebrows rose, and I felt myself flush. “I just mean, the situations are different,” I said quickly. “I knew Nate for years before we started dating. We were together for almost four months. Okay? I’m not trying to be all Amy Lee about it.”
“It’s okay.” Her voice was brisk.
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s seriously fine,” Georg
ia said. “Jared was a loser and I was overdramatic. End of story.”
When it came to Amy Lee herself, however, Georgia was less forgiving.
“Sure she had some points,” she said, stabbing at her plate with her fork. “She was probably right, in fact.”
I let out a breath.
“I thought so too,” I confessed.
“But that’s how she expresses herself to her two best friends in the world?” Georgia continued. “That’s how she takes us aside and lets us know that she has some concerns? By talking down to both of us, in front of someone else, at a party?” She shook her head. “She’s always thought she was better than us. This is the same thing as that time she was all up on her high horse about how everything was so much different for her when she met Oscar because she had a good-looking boyfriend. Please. As if the men we liked were trolls?”
“Okay, sure,” I said, remembering what was definitely not Amy Lee’s finest hour. “That was so long ago, though. She seemed a little too serious this time.”
“Of course she was serious,” Georgia said, and then sighed, and I saw sadness flood her face. “The fact is, Amy Lee had the good fortune to trip over her husband at the age of twenty-three.” She made a face. “She gets the option to have adult choices.”
“This is a little unsettling.” I stared at her. “I prepared myself the whole way over here for you to tell me that I’m the asshole in this scenario.”
“I have a very serious bone to pick with Amy Lee,” Georgia replied. “And believe me, I plan to pick it. But I don’t think you did anything wrong. Sneaky and behind my back, yes, but I can sort of see why you’d feel you had to. I had the killer crush for so long, of course you were afraid I’d go ballistic.”
“I miss her,” I confessed. “I’m not used to her hating me, Georgia. I’m used to talking to her three times a day.”
“She doesn’t hate us,” Georgia said.
“She told us to fuck off.”
“She doesn’t hate us,” she repeated, but it sounded more wistful this time. She shook her head, and then met my eyes as if together, if we concentrated, we could make it true. “She’s confused, obviously, but she doesn’t hate us, Gus. How could she?”
That question haunted me later that night, when I was once again in prone position on my couch, glowering at the ceiling.
Amy Lee had always been different from Georgia and me. We’d gone to BU for any number of reasons, most of them ridiculous (I had fantasies of my life in Boston, Georgia thought the TA she’d met on her tour was hot) whereas Amy Lee had plans. She’d enrolled at BU as part of the Goldman School of Dental Medicine’s seven-year plan. Three years of regular arts and sciences classes, then four years of dental school. While we floated from this to that, and Georgia even changed her major twice, Amy Lee remained focused.
She’d always found us a little bit exasperating, now that I thought about it. For a long time I thought Georgia and I provided Amy Lee with a bit of much-needed chaos and levity in her otherwise extremely goal-oriented world. There had been a time she’d loved us for that. I didn’t want to admit that time might have ended. No matter how much I wanted to make her apologize for that scene in front of Henry, I wanted her friendship more.
I just didn’t know what to do about it.
Because it was one thing to not call her, to share in the silent treatment, not-talking thing. It was something else entirely to risk calling her only to find myself screened to voice mail, or fobbed off on Beatrice, the receptionist. In this day and age, as Helen had already demonstrated to me, the only way to force someone into a confrontation they might not want was to show up in a place they couldn’t possibly avoid you (unless they were willing to climb up their own fire escape). There was too much technology to hide behind, otherwise. Until I picked up the phone, I was not talking to Amy Lee as much as she was not talking to me. Once I made a call, she might decide to blow it off, and then she was actively ignoring me and there was no getting around that.
I thought that someday soon I might be in a different place emotionally, where I could handle that possibility, but I wasn’t there yet.
Not yet.
Tonight I just missed her.
It actually came in handy that it was the Christmas season, I thought a few days later. I could mope through my job, or my nightly rounds of the stores in my vain hopes for inspired gifts, but at least the fact that I had to come up with gifts meant that I was moping while out and about in public. I made the usual last-minute selections for my parents, and agonized over what to get my sister and her husband. Only the kids were easy—and anyway, it was fun to shop in toy stores around Christmastime. The looks of abject horror on the faces of all the parents were sort of funny if you knew you weren’t responsible for Santa’s choices come dawn on Christmas morning. And besides, I could only descend so far into self-pity while surrounded by screaming infants, with Salvation Army bells ringing insistently in my ears.
It was this logic that got me to the last holiday party on the last Thursday before Christmas.
First, though, I’d tried to rustle up reinforcements.
“I’m happy to report that I am completely unavailable,” Georgia told me that morning, in a very alarming and perky sort of voice. “As I am currently sitting in the lovely Seattle-Tacoma Airport, enjoying the local ambience. But you have fun.”
“Is he right there?” I asked in an excited whisper.
“I’ll have to get back to you with those figures,” she singsonged. “I’ll call you when we land in Boston, whenever that might be—there’s apparently some storm.”
“It’s almost Christmas,” I said. “Of course there’s a storm.”
“We’ll talk soon,” she promised, and hung up.
I spent the rest of my day neatening up my work area in preparation for Christmas vacation. It was one of the major perks of working for Minerva. She and Dorcas removed themselves from wintry Boston every Christmas. One year it was the Bahamas, another year it was St. Barts. This year they were hitting Cancún. They were usually gone until after New Year’s. All I had to do was deliver them (and Min-erva’s numerous trunks—yes, trunks) to the airport the following afternoon and I was free.
First, however, there was the evening to get through, and the last of the holiday parties. I debated not going. After all, if Georgia wasn’t going to be there, what would be the point? I didn’t know if Amy Lee would show up—and I couldn’t decide which would be worse. If she didn’t, I would be left friendless, which could prove challenging indeed should Nate or Helen turn up. If she did show up, well, that could turn out to be a very different sort of challenge.
And I wasn’t kidding anyone, least of all myself—I wanted to go. I wanted to see what had happened between Nate and Helen. I wanted to see Nate. I wanted to look him in the eyes and figure everything out once and for all. I didn’t want to do it without backup, of course, but it seemed that I was out of luck. I didn’t have backup—but I had a boatload of cosmetics.
I dressed in my best holiday finery—my favorite high-octane jeans and the sparkly top I saved for such occasions—and spent a long time making my eyes look deep and inviting. I tried not to think about the fact that it was Helen who’d taught me how to do those things—until it occurred to me that should I succeed at getting Nate back, it would all be very ironic. And then, when I was done, and had put on my absolutely insane stiletto boots—boots that practically begged the icy Boston sidewalks to knock me on my foolish ass, the ones I’d saved up to buy and loved more than the rest of my wardrobe put together—I sank down on my couch and let myself mope for a few minutes.
Strangely, it was thinking of Helen that got me back up on my feet.
The fact was, women like Helen achieved that girl status because they got away with things other women didn’t. And the reason they got away with things was because they dared to do what they wanted to do. I, for example, would never pick up a boyfriend’s messages or harangue another woman in his life.
Not because I was above such things, but because deep inside I would be worried that the boyfriend in question preferred the other woman. Helen would never allow such a worry to penetrate her consciousness. Helen would always saunter through life as if everyone and everything she brushed against adored her. I had watched her do exactly that for years.
I sat a little bit straighter on the couch.
There was a divide between Helen’s sort of woman and mine. As an example, my kind of woman didn’t like to venture out alone. I preferred to march through life with my friends, in a pack, because we made our fun wherever we went (until recently), and because it was infinitely more comfortable that way. Helen, meanwhile, didn’t know the first thing about packs of friends. She went wherever she wanted, spurred on by her own bravado (also known as a healthy dose of arrogance, in my not even remotely humble opinion) and her knowledge that her legs really did look amazing in those shoes. I didn’t care what people thought of me so long as my core group thought well of me and shared my experiences. Helen didn’t care what anyone thought of her.
Helen wouldn’t even have these thoughts, I knew. Helen would just fluff her hair and go.
Except, I reminded myself, Helen had sat right in this very apartment and tried to pretend that she wasn’t worried about her boyfriend and another woman. That woman being me. Helen was obviously deeply concerned about what happened between Nate and me. She even seemed to care what I thought of her. Not enough to get in the way of what she wanted to do, of course, but she’d certainly tried to talk to me afterwards. In her own inimitable way, naturally, but she’d tried. I’d bet she really believed she’d been reaching out to me.
What all of this meant, I thought, was that Helen wasn’t the fearless, confident goddess I’d admired ever since I was eighteen. She chose to present herself that way. She chose her saunter and her air of entitlement. Maybe she was faking it to make it just like everyone else. Maybe she was just as worried and insecure as I was—she just didn’t let it get in the way of doing what she wanted to do.