“Did you sleep with him?” she asked, cutting me off.
I was convinced I hadn’t heard that right.
“What?”
“I want to know if you slept with him that night,” she said, shifting on her feet a little bit so that she suddenly looked stiff and almost wooden. “Why else would he call you so many times?”
She didn’t look at me. It was the anti-Helen. No flirtatiousness or leaning. Just words.
I stared at her. “Is this a joke?”
She pursed her lips slightly. “I have to know.”
“And you can’t ask him?” I asked. The evil part of me started to enjoy herself. “It must suck, not being able to trust your boyfriend.”
Helen just watched me, saying nothing.
Maybe Helen was right. Maybe there really was a girl like me. Because the urge to mess with her almost overcame me. Why shouldn’t she get to feel the way I felt? Why shouldn’t she taste a little bit of her own medicine? Her performance in my apartment the day after the Park Plaza came to mind. How would she like it if I pulled that on her? Why shouldn’t I play her game?
Because he just wasn’t worth it, I told myself. Reluctantly. I could tell her I’d slept with him, and embroil myself in who knew how much further drama with the two of them, or I could tell her the truth and wash my hands of them both right there and then. I could continue being an immature brat or I could grow up, for once.
It was a harder call than it should have been.
“No,” I said, without realizing that was what I’d decided. “We didn’t sleep together. I never even saw him that night. He just left me messages.” I held her gaze and remembered something she’d said to me once. “I’m not like you.”
She didn’t like the last part, but still she looked relieved. And why shouldn’t she? I’d just given her my boyfriend. Her boyfriend. I wasn’t sure, suddenly, that he had ever been mine.
She knew it, too. Her eyes were calculating as they swept over me, no doubt looking for my angle.
I didn’t know it myself.
“Merry Christmas, Helen,” I told her softly, and then I went to find my coat.
chapter nineteen
For the first time in years, since I’d left for school when I was eighteen, I was delighted to escape to my childhood home for the holidays. Everything in Boston had gotten way too out of control, and the best way to deal with that was to relax into the embrace of my mother’s decidedly anti-Atkins, anti-Food Pyramid holiday cooking.
Which I did with such dedication that I thought about very little else for days, except, occasionally, my expanding waistline. Happily, that was what sweats were for.
Things I was not thinking about included:
Nate Manning, and his conspiratorial smiles. The ones that reeled you in and ruined you, because you thought they were something special.
Amy Lee’s deafening, spine-crushing silence.
Helen Fairchild, who had said things I found I just couldn’t dismiss, much as I tried. I could dismiss a lot of her that girl behavior, but I couldn’t dismiss the fact that despite it, we’d remained some form of friends for over a decade.
The way Henry had looked at me at that last party, as if I was a deep disappointment to him. As if he’d never known he was supposed to be off-limits in the first place. Which made me ache.
My emotional immaturity, particularly as pointed out by Amy Lee.
Nate, Helen, Henry, and me; my rectangle of ridiculousness.
And finally, the fact that my family clearly thought I was “going through something,” if their overly careful manner around me was any indication. It reminded me of my actual teenage years. (On the upside, they’d all seemed to enjoy their presents, which was a point in my favor, I thought.)
After a few days, the joys of ingesting cookies by the handful in between three square meals a day paled somewhat, and I headed back into Boston. I might have been imagining my father’s sigh of relief when he left me at my place, but I wasn’t entirely sure. He could just as easily have been cursing the snow as my unpleasant attitude.
I picked up Linus from the kennel that same day, and despite his tremendous joy at seeing me again—which he expressed in the form of big, slurpy kisses and a lot of protest barking—my apartment seemed lonelier than before. I kicked my duffel bag into the bedroom and then returned to look around at the exact same things I’d been looking at for the past decade. I sat in my living room and glowered at the posters on the wall for a good long while, and then, just like that, I decided I’d had enough.
Unless I planned to move, which I didn’t, it was time to stop brooding and start living up to my conception of myself.
I didn’t even unpack my bag, I just set about the most intense spring-cleaning my apartment had ever undergone. I pulled down all the posters, sorted all the books, and hauled everything collegiate, untouched, ridiculous, or otherwise embarrassing out of the apartment in garbage bags.
It was brutal, and there were many painful moments. In the depths of my closet, for example, I located the baggy flannel shirt my post-grunge college crush had left in my possession. It was right next to a selection of old mix tapes from high school, piled high in a dusty brown bag, all of them so old the song lists had faded away. I got rid of both the shirt and the bag, but it hurt more than I wanted to admit.
It was mid-afternoon on my second day of Total Life Reorganization—which had involved, that morning, the purchase of actual bookshelves I planned to hang on the wall as opposed to the rickety mishmash of bookcases I’d picked up here and there over the years—when there was a knock on my door.
My heart raced a little bit, but I had, thankfully, gotten it under control by the time I opened the door. Which was a good thing, since the person standing there was Irwin.
“Oh,” I said, blinking at him. Partly because I was feeling a touch crazed, and partly because Irwin wasn’t wearing his trademark robe, preferring to rock the holiday appliqué sweater and a pair of elastic-waisted jeans. “I must be making a lot of noise. I’m sorry.”
“No, no,” he said, blinking right back at me and the chaos that must have been clearly visible behind me. “Are you moving out?”
He restrained his probable joy at this prospect, which made it possible for me to be polite.
“Just cleaning out the college-era stuff,” I said, not pausing to consider the possibility that Irwin might not be as fascinated by this process as I was. “Which is pretty much my entire apartment and everything I own. All I have to do is get this ratty furniture out of here, and figure out how to get my new bookshelves on the wall, and I’ll be good to go. Don’t worry, I shouldn’t make too much noise after dark.”
Irwin stood there, the gold menorah on his dark blue sweater practically glowing in the hallway. He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then opened it again, then shifted his weight from foot to foot, and I was starting to think we would stand there forever when he finally spat it out.
“Why don’t I help you?” he asked, and then turned bright red.
He didn’t blush a little. He turned crimson. It was somewhat alarming.
The old Gus would have screamed no way, slammed the door, and mocked the man mercilessly with her friends.
The new Gus decided that the man just wanted to be neighborly, and maybe even friendly. If our shared history was anything to go by, he didn’t interact with others often, and if his continuing blush was any further indication, this was a big deal for him.
The new Gus also wanted the damn furniture out of her apartment, and she couldn’t do it alone, superhero fantasies or no. She also had few options for mocking calls to friends, since Amy Lee was off the list and Georgia had all her calls forwarded to voice mail.
“That would be really nice of you,” I told Irwin with a big smile and let him inside.
With Irwin’s help (his name, I discovered, was Steve, but I was never going to be able to think of him as a Steve), I removed all the mismatched curbside furniture I’d col
lected since college and left it on the curb for the next owner to locate. There was a sense of closure in that—from the curb my furniture came, and to the curb it was returned. I was confident that Boston’s student population would help themselves to it all before nightfall.
Irwin/Steve turned out to be handy with power tools, and before I knew it, the walls in my living room and bedroom were lined with matching, uniform bookshelves—the kind that weren’t made of crappy plywood, and which housed my books without taking up floor space. It turned out that my apartment was significantly more spacious than I’d realized—since I hadn’t seen parts of the floor since I’d moved in.
It also turned out that Irwin/Steve was significantly nicer than I’d imagined. He was a freelance writer of nonfiction articles who lived on caffeine and deadlines, which explained his rage over my numerous interruptions to his routine. He was also the owner of a pickup truck, so the next day my new friend and I took a trip to the Pottery Barn near Copley Square and I blew a huge chunk of my savings on an overstuffed love seat, chair, and ottoman, all in a deep burgundy color with plentiful pillows. This was furniture that made me happy just looking at it. Irwin helped me haul my new, grown-up furniture back to the apartment, and I ordered us a pizza to celebrate.
After he left that night to work on another article with a looming deadline, I sat in the quiet of my new, improved home, and liked what I saw around me.
In a few short days, my apartment had been transformed from a sad and pathetic dorm room into a cozy, comfortable place that I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave. I needed a few accents, to be sure, but my home was homey for the first time. A place to read and relax, and, I was sure, grow up. You would have to, in such an environment. The apartment itself demanded it.
And if I could effect that kind of change in my apartment—the pit of dormitory despair as Amy Lee had once called it—I figured it couldn’t be too difficult to work a little spring-cleaning on myself. A new year was coming, I was turning thirty in just two days, and it was high time I introduced the new, improved Gus to the world. I was fuzzy on the details, but I knew the basic outline. I knew how I wanted to be, it was simply a question of being who I wanted to be.
I thought I had had it all figured out before. I’d had the plan perfectly clear in my head. I wasn’t going to cross over into thirty without the triple crown in hand: serious boyfriend, career, and great friends. But then Nate hadn’t acted according to the plan. And I didn’t know what had happened to my friends. I didn’t know if anything was fixable, either. But I had the career, sure, so score one for me.
It was time to accept that maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to have it all figured out by the time I turned thirty. Maybe I could just work on me, and see what else fell into place.
I was pretty sure that was otherwise known as living.
“I haven’t heard a peep out of Amy Lee and I’m guessing we’re not going to,” Georgia barked down the phone line late that night, without the slightest preamble. “Because as we’ve discussed, she’s better than us and therefore not required to behave the way she wants other people to behave.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know what to say,” I suggested, as an alternative view.
I was lounging on my new love seat, enjoying the feel of the fabric and the view of my new bookshelves. Some people lusted after cars, which had never made sense to me. For me, bookshelves could inspire whole spontaneous sonnets, so maybe it was an each to her own scenario.
Anyway, just being near them made me feel optimistic and charitable.
“Whatever,” Georgia said. She was clearly nowhere near any bookshelves. “The point of this phone call is that I rented a car and I’m picking you up tomorrow morning at ten-fifteen. And don’t you dare do that thing you do, with all that oh I’m almost packed nonsense, okay?”
Our friend Lorraine, who was famous for over-the-top parties ever since a memorable graduation extravaganza back in school, had taken over the entirety of a sprawling cliff-top mansion of a hotel that commanded nearly panoramic views of the bay below. According to Lorraine’s e-mail, The place is unbelievably high class—in the summer you practically have to be a Kennedy to get a room in the Hill House—but this is the off-season, people! We’re gonna just PRETEND to be Kennedys! Perhaps because she was feeling thirty approach, Lorraine had decided the time had come to be famous for a new extravagant party.
Everyone we knew was going.
“Ten-fifteen,” I told Georgia, with extra emphasis on the fifteen. “I hate it when you show up early. You know that’s as rude, if not ruder, than being late, right?”
“Just be ready,” Georgia ordered. “These are dark days, Gus. Don’t force me to take out my mood on you.”
That was why I didn’t tell her that we had a problem, which I had opened my mouth to do. I didn’t want to have the fight in advance. I just wanted to bask in the glow of what felt like a brand-new apartment and thus a brand-new life.
Everything else—Amy Lee, Nate, Helen, even my assorted misconceptions about Henry—was just so much detritus.
I’d taken the actual detritus of my life and placed it on the curb.
I could do it emotionally, too.
All I had to do was start cleaning out the corners, and work from there.
“What the hell happened in here?” Georgia demanded the next morning. She’d arrived—as I’d expected—a few minutes before ten. Now she was standing just inside the doorway, actually gaping at the apartment as if she’d never seen it before.
Which, of course, she hadn’t.
“I had a sudden attack of adulthood.” I finished off my coffee and grinned at her. “It’s good, right?”
“I think I’m in love with your couch,” she said with a lustful sigh. “Yum.” She walked over and sank into it, and sighed again, with pleasure. “I can’t believe how great this place looks! It’s so . . .”
“Grown up?” I fished.
“Exactly.” She grinned. “Way to go, Gus! I didn’t think you had it in you!”
I was still feeling the buzz. I’d had no idea what a difference it could make to truly love the place where you lived. Who knew happiness was as easy as spring-cleaning?
“Are you ready?” Georgia asked around a yawn. “We have the open road to conquer, or anyway, the Mid-Cape Highway, so let’s get a move on.”
I smiled. “About that. We have a small, slight problem.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t try me.”
I waved my hand at the dog.
“The kennel was booked through New Year’s,” I said, unperturbed. “I had to pick Linus up when I got back from New Hampshire, because they were above capacity.”
Georgia looked over to where Linus was stretched across the passageway between the living room and kitchen, his shaggy tail pounding out a staccato beat against the floor. He sprang to his feet the moment he realized we were looking at him, and came trotting over, all licks and wriggles.
Georgia dislodged Linus from her thigh, and then she looked at me.
“You want me to share a hotel room with this animal,” she said.
I opened my mouth to deliver the perfect retort, but she held up a hand.
“Don’t say it,” she said.
“You have no idea what I was going to say.”
“That I’ve shared a hotel room with far more offensive animals?” Georgia snorted when I tried to look innocent. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
“He’s actually in a really obedient phase lately,” I lied. “It’s going to be fun, I bet.”
Georgia looked heavenward, and then heaved a sigh.
“If I ever find out that this was deliberate, I will make the rest of your life an exercise in misery,” she promised me.
“That was a very impressive threat, Georgia,” I retorted. “But you might want to consider doing something with your hair before you try it out again. No one takes Raggedy Ann seriously.”
Georgia reached up and tugged at one of her wild curls
, which had escaped the bun she was sporting.
“Truly,” she said, “this hair is the bane of my existence. It’s always betraying me. That threat should have had you rolling around on the floor. Maybe even crying. It was that good.”
“Whatever, Raggedy Ann,” I said, swinging my bag to my shoulder. “Let’s go.”
chapter twenty
Linus stretched himself across the entirety of the backseat, and Georgia swung behind the wheel of what looked to be a Matchbox toy car. I was amazed she could fold her legs into the driver’s seat at all.
“Where did you get this thing?” I asked. “And why not a Tonka truck, if you were in that sort of mood?”
“This was the only economy car I could get on New Year’s eve,” Georgia told me. “You’re lucky we’re not taking the bus. Blame Amy Lee—we were supposed to road-trip with her, remember?”
We didn’t speak again until we’d loaded ourselves up with Starbucks goodies—lattes all around and several items from the baked goods case, because it was clearly that kind of morning. Georgia drove us out of the city, and once we started south on I-93 toward the southeast, Route 25, and the Cape, she adjusted her sunglasses against the winter glare and cleared her throat.
It was so formal, it knocked me right out of my zoned contemplation of the barren winter scenery, which I was busy melodramatically comparing to my emotional life. I turned to look at her.
“There’s an update,” I said with a happy sigh, reading her expression. “I knew it!”
I settled back against my seat, and listened.
Things with Chris Starling had been, as expected, awkward.
I don’t see any reason to hash things out, he’d told her when they’d next seen each other at the office. Right after the Sheraton Whore incident. What happened in Scranton should stay there. We’re both professionals.
“And he wasn’t kidding,” she told me, her voice gloomy. “All of a sudden he turned into Mr. Senior Associate. He stopped calling me by my first name, it was all Ms. this and Ms. that. He had his secretary call me instead of doing it himself.” She shook her head. “Basically he stopped annoying me, and the moment he did—the moment he became the lawyer I wished he’d been that whole time—I hated it.”