“That there was going to be a baby.”
“And isn’t that weird?” asked Clara.
Jess said, “Totally.”
Clara wasn’t sure how Clayton put up with the frogs. And the jokes people made about Jess kissing frogs, which Clayton tolerated too in his easygoing fashion. He was easygoing about most things, which was fortunate because he was always over. Technically he had his own place, a basement room in a house of friends a few blocks away, but he was never there. After nearly three years as a couple, he and Jess were nearly inseparable, and they were good together—although this brought its own complications.
“Sometimes I think it’s anticlimactic knowing your happily-ever-after at the age of twenty-two,” Jess had confessed not long ago. It was three o’clock in the morning, she and Clara the only ones still awake, still buzzing after a night of drinking and fun. Their apartment had been full of people that night, still scattered throughout—Lori passed out with her head on the kitchen table; somebody asleep in the bathtub; and Clayton was in Jess’s bed, where he belonged. It wasnear the beginning of their final year at school, it felt like they were at the centre of the world, sitting on Clara’s windowsill, dizzy and overlooking the rooftops. They’d been singing “Landslide” at the top of their lungs until someone from a neighbouring building had screamed out of the window for them to please shut up.
Jess was smoking, which was mostly an affectation, but Clara didn’t call her on it because friends forgave each other these things, the same way Jess never said a word when Clara sang the wrong words to the songs on the CDs they played in the kitchen:We sit here in our store and drink some toast…
Jess exhaled, and they breathed in the night, city lights shining beyond chimneys and power lines, the air filled with the drone of exhaust fans from the restaurant next door. Clara was relieved to hear Jess say what she did, about the anticlimax, because that was it exactly, and Clara understood better than anyone. She knew what it was like to try to arrive at the centre of your life years too early, the way she’d hitched herself to men a decade older when she was still in high school, eschewing the trappings of adolescence, missing out on so much that mattered.
Clayton had come on to her once, years ago, before he was with Jess, and she’d had no qualms about rejecting his advances because Clayton was just such aboy, and after all this time he still was. Ending up with Clayton would be like spending your life in the town where you were born. This was a thought she found herself saying aloud.
Jess said, “Plenty of people are born in nice towns.”
“But that’s not the point,” said Clara.
“And you like Clayton,” Jess reminded her.
Which was true, but this should not be the point that it all came down to. Clara liked a lot of things, but that wasn’t reason enough to carry them forever. Here they were, about to leap into unknowns. Graduation was in June. They were thinking about grad school but had yet to apply, Clara trying not to focus too much on what was coming next, to just live in the moment, although her experience in the field the summer before had awakened a passion and given her an inkling as to the direction her life was moving. Change was inevitable—after grad, Jess’s parents would stop paying her rent, which meant she’d have to get a job, but also that she and Clayton could finally move in together. Once Jess was on her own, they said, she could do what she liked. Which meant that Clara, who had been paying her own rent all along, would probably have to give up her basil on the windowsill and find someplace else to live, begin again. Somewhere on the horizon she’d also have to start paying back student loans that added up to a figure she didn’t like to contemplate.
“But life is long,” she’d reminded Jess, and the curious nature of time was what Clara was contemplating now all these weeks later, lying awake on Jess’s floor remembering the night of the party. She hadn’t been kind about Clayton during the discussion on the roof, but what would she have done if he hadn’t been there to fight off the squirrels tonight?
It had been a strange, surreal kind of autumn, just a handful of weeks since the Twin Towers had fallen. The school year was rushing by—a blur of essays and deadlines, pub crawls, all-nighters, long stretches in the library, hands forever stamped with faded ink from admission to one event or another—but right now the minutes themselves seemed endless, each one ticking Clara no closer to slumber. What ifeverything was a paradox? Clara was in a room with two people but totally alone. And if she lay awake long enough, could those minutes stretch into infinity, warding off the future—and all its questions—forever?
—
Every evening, like a ritual, Jess and Clayton retired together to bed to read. Clara wondered if their sex life had been diminished by so much cold and slimy symbolism—how could sex itself not be a casualty when writing a thesis on the theme of frogs and sexuality in fairy tales? Surely it would seem more salubrious just to fall into bed with a book?
Clara herself had not had sex in seven months, since she went out to a dingy bar with cheap sangria and brought home a pyrotechnician who attracted her attention by lighting his wrist on fire. This appeared to be the extent of his marvels, however, plus he had a swastika tattooed on his shoulder, and even though he insisted it was from another time, she called him a cab, and had been celibate ever since.
“You can’t write off everybody because of one bad guy,” Jess insisted. “He looked like a toad. He smelled like baloney. Red flags were everywhere.”
“You’re the one who’s always saying that I need to give people a chance.”
“Normal people,” said Jess. “Not someone who’s singed off all his arm hair.”
All of it was just so complicated and mired with pitfalls that it just seemed easier not to bother, so Clara decided she wouldn’t, consigning herself to a lifetime of spinsterhood—imagining how much simpler everything could be. Clara had a very good vibrator, and some days she thought she had it all figured it out. But then there were other days, days when she looked up to find another hole in her ceiling—whichsounded like a bad thing, but this hole was letting in light. Illumination.And why the hell not?was the thought on her mind when she decided to sleep with Ferber.
—
So that was the road to here, lying in bed with the ceiling intact, finally, and Ferber snoring beside her, a few months into something vaguely resembling a relationship. The surprise of his body had been that it smelled really good, because Ferber seemed kind of greasy, sweaty. But his skin turned out to be so smooth, and his shower-gel scent turned her on more than he did; it was the chief part of his appeal.
Of course, Jess was skeptical, even though Clara was only doing what she’d told her to do, but Jess thought all the guys Clara gave chances to were the wrong ones. She didn’t think Clara had good instincts. And even Clayton had opinions on the matter, which was annoying, because none of it was his business.
“You don’t even live here,” she told him, when he suggested Clara might be better suited to someone whose respect for women was demonstrated beyond his open admiration for boobs and butts that were “more than a handful.” But frankly, men had said less respectful things to Clara, and what Ferber lacked in decorum he made up for in other ways.
However, this wasn’t something she could explain to Clayton. And any time Ferber tried to reach out to Jess and Clayton, to let them get to know him better, they would get up and leave the table, so it ended up being him and Clara alone again, and they didn’t have a lot to say. But in bed together they were great, and she even liked lying beside him afterwards. He was the kind of guy she’d never end up going to bed to read with, and not just because Ferber didn’t read.
“I’m not into the book thing,” he said the first time he was presented with her bookshelves, long before she’d ever contemplated sleeping with him, years ago when he was up in her room shoddily repairing a window screen. Clara couldn’t say she hadn’t known what she was getting into. None of it was complicated.
She breathed Ferber in, wondering what he smelled like underneath. His bodywash scent was a kind of veneer, and for the rest of her life, whenever she smelled anything like it, she was transported back to the simple comfort of his presence, which was always more comfortable when he wasn’t conscious.
But he was conscious now, one eye open. “Hey, babe,” he said. She knew that everything he said was a line he’d heard in a movie, but she was willing to play her part. Ferber was shockingly attractive without his shirt on. She knew this already from the time he’d installed crooked kitchen shelves during a heat wave and it had factored into her decision to pursue this avenue.
“It’s just casual,” she promised Jess. “No strings.”
