Nick muttered, “Not that drunk.”
“And I mean, speaking of metamorphosis,” said Jess, who clearly wasn’t done, “you come home and you’ve got a different name now. Now you’reClare. Who evenisthat?”
“It’s a nickname,Jessica.” Clara was gathering empty bottles now. She hadn’t seen any of this coming. All she’d intended was lighthearted fun, some loosening of inhibitions, but now Jess was a loose cannon. Was it the wine? What was happening? Clara wanted to stick a cork in it. This wasn’t fun at all.
“I just mean,” Jess insisted, “that you’ve changed. I get it. But so has everybody. You don’t need to be all superior.”
“Superior?” demanded Clara.You two are cuteis what Jess had said, so patronizing. In June, when Clara arrived back in the country after being away for years, Jess couldn’t make time for them to get together, not even just for an hour or two. She was too busy for that. “You thinkI’msuperior?”
“I think you think you are,” said Jess. “You think you’re better than all this. Better than everything.” Then she went quiet. “I’m sorry.” she looked around with surprise at the world outside her mind. She looked far away now, and small. “I wish it were tomorrow.”
—
“Are you okay?” Nick asked Clara once they were in bed.
She said, “It’s nothing. But are you?” Jess had no right to bring up his past, which was none of her business, and Clara didn’t care about any of it anyway. If being with someone older had taught her anything, it was that not every detail mattered. So much got lost, forgotten, or swept away, and that was even by design.
Clara wondered if her friendship with Jess could turn out to be one of those details—something packed up in a box ofartifacts, like participation awards and yearbooks with earnest inscriptions by people whose names you didn’t recognize.
Nick said, “So you were screwing Ferber.”
“You know about Ferber. The handyman.”
“The one with the biceps,” Nick said. Not all of Clara’s history had been packed away. She was grateful for what Ferber had taught her about the human form, but his kind of body was not her preference. The mind wants what the mind wants, Clara knew, and while she might have been drifting, she considered herself fortunate to have never been driven off-course by what society expected of women: sculpted bodies, and conventional journeys, marriage, mortgage, motherhood. She’d made her own path, however wandering, and she wondered if Jess truly wanted all the things she had or just thought she was supposed to.
Jess was right—Clarahaddisappeared. But did anyone really escape feeling superior? You make the choices you make because they’re better than the other ones.
Nick said, “Shhhh.”
“What?” She hadn’t said anything.
“I hear them.” She listened too. The sound of bedsprings and a rhythmic moan—whose, she couldn’t tell.
She said, “Oh, god. This is terrible.” Bounce, bounce. “We can hardly judge, though.”
“I’m not judging,” he said. “I only want to go to sleep.”
“It won’t last long,” she said. “I mean, how long could it last?”
“She’s so drunk,” he said.
“This can’t go on.” They waited, but the sounds continued. “This is mortifying,” she said. “It’s good for them though, right? Intimacy. It’s healthy.”
Nick said, “It’s possible this is too intimate.”
She nuzzled his shoulder. “Or maybe it’s giving you ideas?”
He rolled away. “Eh, no,” he said. And then they lay side by side listening, because what choice did they have?
“I could bang on the wall,” said Nick.
“Do you think they know we’re listening?”
“They’d know then,” said Nick.
Clara said, “Maybe they don’t even care.”
“It is possible we brought this upon ourselves.”
