Once More With Feeling

  ‘Sarah?’

  I hadn’t paid attention to the figure who moved past me on the dark street – I’d been far too busy scowling at the shovelled sidewalk in front of me – but I knew that voice. I would know that voice anywhere. I stopped in my tracks. It felt like it took a long time to turn, and then there she was.

  We stared at each other.

  I could hear horns in the distance, and the ubiquitous sounds of emergency vehicles racing somewhere in a hurry. But this little side street was quiet and still, and there was only this. Only the two of us, staring at each other across so many years, so many memories.

  Her hair was longer, and spilled out from beneath the hat she wore to scrape below her shoulders. I thought she looked particularly stylish in a smart black peacoat and a bright patterned scarf. Almost French, which I knew she would take as the highest possible compliment. She had a couple of briefcase-like bags slung over her shoulder and a plastic Duane Reade bag dangling from one gloved hand. She looked elegant and accomplished, sure, but she also looked like Brooke. Brooke. Those impossible cheekbones. That wide mouth that I always thought of as laughing uproariously, never the way it was now, still and serious. Those dark, far too incisive eyes of hers that had always been able to read me much too easily.

  Meanwhile, I felt like I was moulting. My hair was no longer in its professional bob, and so was sneaking down my cheeks toward my shoulders. I was unlikely to be confused for a French person in my puffy parka and snow-boots. I didn’t look anything like the upmarket corporate lawyer I’d been when I lived here, or even the lawyer I played in Rivermark. Next to Brooke’s gleaming perfection – and her address – I felt nothing but scruffy.

  For a moment the gulf between us seemed so wide, so vast, that the fact she looked so familiar actually, physically, hurt me. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even imagine what look must have been on my face.

  ‘Brooke,’ I whispered.

  Just her name, and it was so little. It was so much less than what I should have said, what was careening around inside of me, bursting to push free and light up the winter night all around us. Or maybe make it tremble.

  But her eyes shone with something like the heat I felt in mine, and her mouth crooked into that familiar smile that I knew better than my own. And she threw out her arms as if she’d been waiting for me, for this, for a long time, and then she hugged me on that cold street as if we’d both come home at last.

  ‘Jesus, Sarah,’ she whispered into my ear, her voice thick with emotion and her free arm slung tight around me. ‘It’s been way too fucking long.’

  8

  ‘My grandmother died two years ago,’ Brooke said by way of explanation as she led the way into the brownstone, up the stairs, and to the door of her converted two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. ‘Let’s be clear that working in the publishing industry does not lead to buying a condo in a Greenwich Village brownstone. Not at my level, anyway. That was all Granny Chersky.’ She fiddled with the locks and then tossed the front door open, ushering me inside with a wave of her hand. ‘She was mean as a snake there at the end, but she was also very rich, apparently. May she rest in peace.’

  ‘Holy crap,’ I said as I walked inside, because there was no other possible response, and then I just … gaped.

  Hardwood floors stretched before me toward a whole wall of windows overlooking the street. There was a kitchen and a bathroom off the small hallway near the entrance, and then a two-storey sweep of glory, the likes of which I’d seen on television shows but had certainly never seen in real life. Not belonging to a person I actually knew. I felt a physical pang – like a sharp cramp – and knew it was simple jealousy. I couldn’t even beat myself up for it. The place took my breath away.

  Once inside the great main room, with the wall of windows two storeys high and another wall of books – miles and miles of books spread across acres of shelves that stretched the length of the apartment and had a rolling ladder propped up against them like a real library, making that cramp turn vicious and nearly take my feet out from under me – I stared around at what looked like a real fireplace on the third wall, in the centre of a cosy seating area. And then I turned back toward the interior and saw the staircase that led up to the second level, where there was a space lined with windows that looked like some kind of indoor sun porch or something equally lovely and unheard of, opening over the room beneath.

  I liked my house in Rivermark. But the whole reason people left the city and moved to places like Rivermark was because it was impossible to find – much less afford – places like this in Manhattan. I wasn’t just jealous that Brooke got to live here. I was jealous of the entire life she must have now to go along with living here. So jealous I wasn’t sure I could speak through it, so I didn’t try.

  This is the life you gave up, I told myself, even though there had been no rich grannies lurking around in my family tree, waiting to bestow New York City real estate upon me. This is what you turned your back on.

  It didn’t matter if that was unreasonable. That was what it felt like.

  ‘There are two bedrooms up there,’ Brooke said, coming to stand next to me and looking towards the upstairs, too. ‘I use the front one as a kind of den and office.’

  She didn’t pretend that it wasn’t perfectly normal for me to stand and stare, speechless, in an apartment this beautiful. This was a city filled with people living on top of each other, but in vastly different circumstances. I’d known people who’d gone to insane lengths to get a glimpse of new apartments in desirable buildings the moment it was hinted they might be up for rent again. This place was like the ultimate Manhattan fantasy apartment. Of course we had to put our troubled history on hold so I could properly stare at it all.

  I thought maybe my mouth was hanging open, and I was too awed to care.

  ‘Wow …’ I said. Maybe not for the first time. ‘I think I actually hate you.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘You’re not alone.’

  When I looked at her again, she was shrugging off her coat and tossing it over the nearby armchair. I sank down onto one of the sofas when she indicated that I should, feeling as if I’d accidentally discovered that someone I’d thought I’d known everything about was, in fact, the lost Anastasia or something equally far-fetched and improbable. A secret princess. The hidden heiress to some robber baron fortune. Yet I remembered grumpy, beady-eyed old Granny Chersky and her modest house in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, that she steadfastly refused to light or heat adequately. She had been anything but glamorous. She was the last person in the world I would have thought might be sitting like a magpie on a secret stash of wealth.

  The old radiator in the corner clanked to life, the noise making everything seem normal again, suddenly. Even paradise had old pipes and cranky heating, apparently. It let me breathe. It made the cramps subside. I peeled off my own parka, and took entirely too long to pull off my scarf and gloves. Wasting time in the sudden stretch of silence and I knew it.

  Brooke only waited, sitting down on the couch opposite me, across the expanse of a glass coffee table piled high with magazines and interesting little objects, including the tiny ceramic turtle we’d each bought in Costa Rica. It made a deep swell of something like gladness move in me to see it, green and happy-looking and hanging out with her here even if I wasn’t. It made me hope.

  And then we … looked at each other.

  ‘This is weird,’ she said after a long moment of that. She shook her head. ‘You look so much the same, and so different. I’m having trouble reconciling the two.’

  I felt exactly the same. I’d just been looking at all those old pictures, after all. Brooke at eighteen, twenty-three, twenty-five. This was Brooke at thirty-three, and while it was still Brooke, she was definitely changed from the last time I’d seen her, and certainly from my memories of her. She wore jeans tucked into stylish boots, and her dark hair hung down past her shoulders looking sleek instead of tousl
ed. She wore a simple black sweater that seemed to scream effortless chic, and she looked like what she was: a senior editor at one of the major New York publishing houses. Not an easy job to get or keep, and yet here she was. I would have told her I was proud of her, but was afraid that would sound patronizing.

  ‘You look like a grown up,’ I admitted, and she laughed. The familiar sound made me laugh, too.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, her dark eyes warm on mine. ‘And if you look like a grown up, I can’t imagine what I must look like. Yikes.’

  I knew what I looked like, sadly. I’d seen my reflection in the mirror she had on the wall as I’d come in, and it was as I’d feared. Dark blonde hair completely frizzed out from being shoved under a hat all day, face reddened from the cold. And there was no getting away from the look of too many recent and unpleasant life changes stamped on my face, like an advertisement for insanity. Or a quiet little breakdown. Having not had to dress for any office today, my jeans were faded and old and the winter boots I wore were better suited for navigating snowdrifts than important meetings. And I wished I’d thought to wear something other than that same old blue hooded sweatshirt that I was beginning to worry I would wake one morning to find welded to my body. As much a part of me as my pain.

  Had there been a competition as to who had thrived without our friendship, it was clear that I would not be winning it. I raked my fingers through my hair as if that might help. I doubted it. Then I wondered what I would have thought if I’d come to see her before – if I’d found a way back to her while I was still proud of the life I’d been living. What would that have looked like? How would I have felt?

  But I knew that I wouldn’t have come here, before. I wouldn’t have looked her up at all if my life had been what I’d thought it was. A complicated mixture of guilt, shame and something far too prickly to call hope sloshed around inside me as I recognized the truth of that. And the realization that she probably knew that too, that she knew me well enough to guess that my being here wasn’t spurred by simple nostalgia. For a moment that made me feel almost naked … But then, I reminded myself sharply, this was why I’d come here, wasn’t it? Because she did know me. Because she’d known me inside and out for years. Just not my most recent years.

  ‘I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,’ I said, when I realized the silence had gone on too long. I gave up on my appearance and my might-have-beens. It was what it was, and fingers through the hair and a parcel of regrets certainly weren’t likely to solve the problem at this point. I picked at one of the cuffs of my sweatshirt.

  ‘A little bit,’ she agreed. She shrugged, and smiled again. ‘But it’s so good to see you that I can live with the suspense.’

  ‘Are you good?’ I asked instead of explaining myself. I was stalling. ‘Your life, I mean?’

  ‘I think so.’ She looked around, as if seeing the apartment for the first time. Taking pride in it, maybe. I knew I would, if it were mine. It was the kind of place that made statements about how fantastic the life lived in it must be. Though that could be me projecting. ‘I have a great life. I love my job. I have good friends when I want to go out and I have a terrific place to relax when I want to stay in. It’s pretty much the exact life I wanted when I dreamed of these things way back when. That’s pretty cool.’

  ‘It’s very cool.’ I was afraid, I realized then, a little bit surprised at myself. Or if that were too strong a word – anxious. I was anxious. There was a ball of tension in the pit of my stomach and I could feel it grow heavier with every kick of my heart.

  Brooke smiled wider, and settled back against the couch. She didn’t look anxious at all. Or she’d become far more difficult to read since I’d seen her last.

  ‘That’s the press release I trot out for my parents, especially around the holidays,’ she confided dryly. Her brows rose. ‘The truth? My job can be unbelievably frustrating, the hours are crappy, and I sometimes wonder why I’m killing myself to do it well when it would be much easier to give in and do something else entirely. I haven’t had a serious relationship in years and the dating pool in this city is pathetic if you happen to be a smart, educated, straight woman with standards.’ She waved a hand in the air. ‘My standards come and go depending on my level of desperation, which at this time of year is pretty high, I can admit. I refuse to get a fucking cat to complete the picture, and I’m starting to think about the very real possibility that if I want kids the way I always thought I did, I’ll have to do that on my own.’ That crooked, self-deprecating smile again. God, how I’d missed her. ‘But this apartment rocks. That part is true.’

  I blinked. Then I let out a breath, feeling that heavy knot inside of me dissolve. Or ease, anyway.

  And then, as if it were any given night from all our years together, as if no time had passed at all and it were just another random Tuesday on our beat-up old couch, I knew I was going to tell her everything. Every last sordid, humiliating detail. And the first words were the hardest, so there was no point waiting for them simply to happen organically. They wouldn’t.

  ‘Tim cheated on me.’ I just blurted it out. ‘I walked in on him in bed.’ I sighed – or maybe choked – ‘With Carolyn.’

  For a moment, Brooke seemed to turn to stone. I wasn’t sure she so much as breathed.

  ‘Carolyn?’ she echoed. Horrified understanding flashed across her face. ‘Not …?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But … But she … Carolyn?’

  ‘Carolyn.’ I nodded again, as if that confirmed it. I blew out a breath that had been too shallow, anyway. ‘Doggy style.’

  She put up a hand as if to stop me. As if she needed a moment to process that mental picture. Which, naturally, I fully understood.

  ‘Doggy style?’ she asked in a hushed, deeply appalled tone, when she could speak.

  ‘Doggy style.’

  ‘Like … full on?’ She put her hands out as if to brace herself against the coffee table. I could see – and appreciated – how she suggested the position yet refrained from fully acting it out. ‘One hundred per cent?’

  ‘More like 150 per cent,’ I said, considering. Remembering, despite myself. Beyond the blue, for once. ‘They were really, really into it. Complete with red faces and expressions.’

  I couldn’t help myself. I made the face. Carolyn’s face, Tim’s face – it was kind of a composite of everything I hadn’t wanted to see behind my blue blouse, hanging there between us. I hadn’t even known I had it lurking inside of me, waiting to be shown. To be acted out like this, making it all real. And that much more awful, if shared. But here it was.

  Brooke sucked in a breath and closed her eyes as if in pain. ‘Oh. God. Wow. This is the worst story I’ve ever heard.’

  And for some reason, that seemed to warm me up from the inside. It made it all slightly less awful, somehow. I kept right on talking, bringing her all the way up through the accident and the coma and the pictures in the closet with the Sheet of Shame falling on top of me.

  ‘Like a sign,’ she said. Her dark eyes glowed. ‘I always told you that thing was magical.’

  ‘So you did.’

  ‘Maybe the next time I tell you to write down every guy you ever kissed on a sheet we hung in the middle of our dorm room, for all to see, there will be a little less push back,’ she said in that amused way of hers that I remembered so well it made me want to cry out in recognition, even if she was bringing up what we’d always referred to as our Very First Fight.

  ‘Maybe I will,’ I agreed, unable to bite back my grin.

  The story all told, even including today’s tour of our history here in New York in search of some kind of explanation, I felt lighter than I had since sometime back in August. I leaned back against the couch and waited for Brooke to pass judgement, as she always had, somehow making everything better as she did it. Or at least making it all make sense, in her inimitable way. Separating my life into easily digested sound bites, making it all part of a better, broader Story of Me, of whi
ch Brooke had always been the best and most faithful narrator.

  Tonight she only studied me for a long moment, and then got to her feet.

  ‘I think this calls for wine,’ she said, heading toward the kitchen, which was, I was happy to see now that the first wave of jealousy had passed, small and cramped as Manhattan kitchens often were, rendering this absurdly lavish apartment something less than perfect. A needed dose of reality, I thought. Thank God. If it had been something out of Architectural Digest like everything else, I suspected I might have tossed myself out of the wall of windows.

  Because it wasn’t just that her apartment was pretty, I understood even then. It was that this was her dream. That she’d achieved it. And for the most part, she was happy. Not perfectly happy, but happy nonetheless. I’d thought I was there too, not so long ago, and I’d been horribly, humiliatingly wrong. Yet I had the sense that Brooke’s happiness was the real deal.

  She came back in with a bottle and two glasses, and set about pouring. When we each had a glass, she lifted hers and tapped it to mine, then took a sip. I followed suit, not surprised to find it was a much more sophisticated vintage than one we might have sucked down while lurking out on stoops in this same neighbourhood all those years ago.

  ‘I feel as if you’re deliberately restraining yourself from saying something,’ I said after a moment. Carefully. Very, very carefully. ‘Which makes me think you’re even more grown up than you appear to be.’

  ‘I have learned tact and manners, it’s true,’ she said, her lips curving. ‘Though I generally try to keep such things in my professional sphere and let it all hang out at home. What am I, a saint?’