1
Gabby and the Love Pilgrims
It all started with Alice’s best friend, Gabby, and a particularly potent bout of heartbreak. Gabby was one of those people who was always in love. She wafted from one long-term relationship to the next, her heart remaining open to the promise that something new meant something better.
Love was as vital to her system as breathing or sleeping, came as naturally to her as exercise and fashion. Gabby was both very fit and very stylish, unlike Alice, who was as averse to working out and chic clothing as she was to love. They’d been an unlikely pair since the third grade, Gabby outspoken and pretty. Alice quiet and gangly, her wild curls cut into the unfortunate shape of a bowl. So often, people speak of opposites attracting in love, but the same is true of friendship, perhaps more so. This was certainly the case for Gabby, forever confident that her one true love was out there waiting to complete her, and Alice, sure she was complete enough on her own.
That was what Gabby’s ex, Brian, stole from her; the confidence she had in love. He did it not by cheating or neglect or abuse or any of the ways men tear down women they don’t value. No, Brian just ended it. Out of nowhere. One weekend, they were jetting off to Hawaii, flying business class on miles he’d accrued from his work, and the next, a moving truck pulled up to their curb. Two burly men carted out their sleek sectional sofa and Amish dining table, leaving only the things Brian found garish. He wrote her a check for their purchase price, which Gabby tore to pieces the moment the moving truck drove away.
Brian offered her no reason for unceremoniously terminating their five-year relationship as one might cancel the cable subscription. It wasn’t a matter of stark incompatibilities about wanting to have children, relocating for a job, or supporting rival sports teams. They both liked the Dodgers, wanted two kids, and were perfectly happy to spend their days on the West Coast. In the absence of logical reasons for their abrupt separation, Gabby blamed herself. Like the furniture and paintings he’d left in her condo, she decided she was too bold, too brash, too opinionated. Alice watched her best friend shrink before her eyes. Where before she’d laughed generously, she swallowed her joy, releasing little coughs of amusement in its place. And if anyone hit on her, she looked at them like they were a foreign species, as though she did not understand how they could desire her, someone so unlovable.
Alice had never liked Brian. He was rude to waiters—the cardinal sin to Alice, who worked in the service industry—and Uber drivers. Dismissive of homeless people. Condescending to women, particularly to Gabby, who insisted that he was only trying to help when he corrected her grammar and disparaged her grasp of current events. It seemed impossible that someone as emotionally astute as Alice’s best friend would not see the way he spread rudeness like confetti over everything around him. But she was blinded by love.
That was how she described it when, after ignoring Alice’s check-in calls for two weeks, Gabby finally announced herself ready to leave the apartment and meet her best friend for a drink.I was blinded by love.Eyes gouged, burlap sack over head, absolute darkness.
Alice had just finished her shift as a cater waitress passing around flutes of champagne and caviar on pastry puffs at the Carousel House in Chase Park when Gabby texted, asking if she was free to meet.Please don’t make me drink alone, Gabby wrote, already at the bar. This left Alice no choice except to agree to meet her when she was done folding up chairs and breaking down tables.
Alice had been working for Cuisine by Caroline for eight years. While the job itself was routine—an hour of circulating trays of bite-sized food followed by the more precarious task of ushering larger trays laden with entrées between tables of increasingly intoxicated guests—each event was its own sociological experiment. Alice loved studying partygoers the way a biological anthropologist might study the habits of animals in the wild.
At the fiftieth anniversary party she’d just worked, she watched the attendees eye the couple of the hour, noting a mix of envy and awe as they tried to decipher their secret to lasting love. If Alice had not met them at the beginning of the evening, she would not have known they were a couple at all, let alonethecouple the party was celebrating. There was nothing particularly notable about them, no sparks you could sense across the room, no covert handholding beneath the table to suggest they were as in love as on the day they married a half century ago, nothing to indicate why they succeeded where so many failed, nothing for their guests to emulate or extract from their good fortune. This was love, Alice thought. Random and unremarkable. Not worth the trouble.
Alice rode her bike straight from work to the bar, where she arrived slightly sweaty, her white button-down shirt splotched with béarnaise sauce. All she wanted to do was go home and shower. Her knees ached from being on her feet all night, and she could feel her curly hair frizzing in a particularly unflattering way. But Gabby did not trust herself to be alone at the bar. Alice didn’t trust her either.
The bar was four blocks from Gabby’s apartment, where they used to play trivia with Brian and his friends every week. Really, Gabby and Alice talked while Brian and his friends argued each other out of the right answers because none of them were willing to admit that one of their teammates might know more about college basketball or dead presidents than they did. Perhaps Alice should have suggested a place they were less likely to run into Brian, but she liked the small beach bar with its license plate collection and assorted Pop-Tarts for sale. Plus, on a Tuesday night, it was empty, giving Alice the space to drink in all her sweaty, frizzy-haired glory and Gabby the freedom to cry as much as she wanted.
Alice stepped into the bar and found her best friend lounging on the white leather couch in the back, dark circles under her eyes and an oversized sweater somehow making her appear even lovelier than usual. Gabby waved Alice over, wild floral wallpaper whirling around her as she sipped a cocktail that had turned her tongue turquoise. Behind the couch, bookcases filled with hardbacks, Tiffany lamps, and candelabra made the space seem like an old-time library. It gave Alice that Narnia feeling, as though she could push a shelf in and enter another realm.
Gabby lifted her drink to Alice, offering to buy her one. “It’s called a blue lady.” The inside of her mouth looked radioactive when she forced a laugh and added, “Like me.”
Gabby wasn’t normally prone to self-pity, and it wasn’t like this was the first time she’d been dumped. She always insisted that it was easier to be rejected than to reject, a point with which Alice starkly disagreed. Alice could not endure even the idea of rejection let alone the reality of it, which was why she always ended relationships the moment nausea or insomnia hit her, her body’s telltale sign that things were starting to get more serious than she could handle. By contrast, Gabby believed that the pain of realizing someone was nottheone was more heartbreaking than the disappointment of someone failing to recognize your greatness. So why was it different with Brian? Why wasn’t she shrugging him off like she did Jeff or Greg or Stella or Ryan or Tyler or all those other misguided souls who had walked away from the best thing that would ever happen to them? What was it about Brian that made his rejection a mark on her character rather than his?
Alice declined Gabby’s offer of a blue lady, saying simply, “I’ll keep my tongue pink for the night.” She bounded up to the bar to order a tequila soda.
Alice hated seeing her best friend like this, all blotchy-faced and drunk over a man as self-involved as Brian, especially since she knew Gabby would find someone new in a matter of weeks. Every time Gabby became single, someone swooped in as though the city had put out a signal announcing her availability. She’d probably meet someone on the way home from the bar. Still, it was clear from the tears, and from the near incoherent rambling that Brian was the one and she’d never love like that again, that Gabby did not want to move on. So Alice sat beside her, letting Gabby drink those blue ladies until her lips looked like she had hypothermia and her words started to lilt.
When Gabby said, “Do you think I should call Brian?” and reached for her cell phone, Alice decided it was time to take her home.
On the short walk to Gabby’s condo, Alice steadied her so she didn’t trip on the sidewalks. By the time they got to her building, she was bawling, not caring about the glances from neighbors walking their dogs.
“I really thought we were going to be together forever.” Her nails dug into Alice’s forearm for emphasis. Alice wanted to tell her that forever was a fallacy even when the relationship was perfect, which clearly Gabby’s was not. Someone who believed in love as much as Gabby did, did not want to hear this, even when heartbroken, so Alice nodded sympathetically and allowed her arm to be a target for Gabby’s misdirected grief.
“I mean, we got a cell phone account together. We were talking about rescuing a dog. Who goes to the shelter with you and decides two days later you’re through? Who does that?” Her nails threatened to draw blood, desperate for an answer Alice couldn’t provide.
Gabby released Alice and ran her hand through her dark hair. “Sorry, I just, you’re the only person who I don’t have to pretend I’m okay with. I’m not okay. I’m heartbroken.”
Alice searched through Gabby’s purse and coat pockets, finally locating her keys in the right back pocket of her jeans. She helped her best friend up two flights of stairs and forced her to drink a pint of water, which proved a mistake, because as Gabby was gulping it down, she realized the glass was from Brian’s favorite brewery. That started the waterworks again, and it took Gabby a good half hour to tire herself enough for Alice to get her into bed. If this was love, Alice didn’t wish it on anyone.
Alice brushed the bangs away from Gabby’s forehead. “You’re going to be okay.”
Gabby hugged her tightly. “I love you,” she said.
“I love you too,” Alice told her. This was the only kind of love Alice wanted.
Alice had never intended on being the type of person who avoided falling in love, but she’d learned long ago that she was not equipped for its emotional turmoil. At twenty, she had been on track for a very different life. She’d always planned to become a doctor, like her mother. The idea of any other career had never occurred to her. She wanted to help people, and medicine seemed the most logical way to do that. The other parts of adult life, a husband, some children, a mortgage, retirement funds, she assumed would naturally follow.
Alice did try for that life. In med school she felt self-conscious around her peers, who were simultaneously more focused than she was and partied more intensely than her body would allow. More significantly, unlike Alice, they never doubted themselves when they had a scalpel in hand or a diagnosis in mind. Alice’s instincts were right. Headaches and vision changes were signs of migraines. Then she would start to think that they could also be indications of glaucoma, and if she mistook migraines for glaucoma, the patient might go blind all because she had leapt at the first conclusion that sprang to mind. At night, she’d toss and turn, imagining that blind patient who had lost his ability to see his children, to marvel at modern art—that blind patient who was not a patient or a person at all, merely a description on an exam. Still, if hehadbeen a person, he would now be blind all because of Alice. She could make that mistake with a real patient. She could forever ruin a person’s life. That risk outweighed the fact that she could save a person’s life too.
Dating was no better. Her mind was equally acrobatic when she thought about the outcome of a romance. In fact, she did meet someone at med school. Taylor, with light brown eyes and cheeks that flushed when he was about to kiss her. Alice liked kissing him. She liked eating with him. She liked walking beside him. He was two inches taller than she, something to be appreciated given her six-foot stature. Alice would put her book down for Taylor when it was well established that she would not put her book down for anyone, not even her mother or Gabby. As soon as Alice realized that she preferred Taylor’s company to Isabel Allende’s or Agatha Christie’s, the ambient tension she always felt in her body intensified in her chest as full-on panic. He was her favorite person, and at any moment she could lose him. He could decide he didn’t feel the same way about her. Or, even if he did, something could still happen to him. One day, in some shape or form, their relationship would end.
