“I’ve got to get back to Bushwick now,” I tell Chris. “I haven’t been home since yesterday.”
He seems to take in my outfit for the first time, the glittery bodysuit under my coat and my knee-high boots that I haven’t taken off despite his no-shoes policy. He asks where I stayed last night.
“That’s a good question,” I say. “I fell in love at the House of Yes and woke up somewhere in East Williamsburg. I don’t remember the details.”
He looks like he’s waiting for me to say that I’m kidding but I don’t. I think he knows I’m not lying; he can always seem to tell. It’s probably even easier today because I’m not wearing my contacts since I was planning to go straight back to the Inn this morning. It’s a naked feeling not having the extra layer of color to protect me.
Chris tries to pay me for my help, but I say no, don’t think about it, I’m just glad Arnie’s alright. “He’s basically my family by now too. Isn’t that right, my little pupper?”
Arnie looks all pleased about it, like he’s been trying to plot someParent Trapthing to get Chris and me together. He can be a real rascal sometimes.
“I hope you and Olivia have a long and happy marriage,” I say when I’m already halfway out into the hall. I purposely say “happy,” not “content,” to make a point that I’m not being stubborn, that I really am wishing them the best.
“We will,” he calls out. There’s a kick to it, like he knows I wasn’t telling the truth. Like he knows that I’m actually a lousy enough person to hope they are perfectly miserable together.
Chapter 28
Tara tries to decorate the Inn for Christmas.
She even paints a wreath on the front door—’tis the season and all—but it feels very empty. I’m almost glad to go back to Michigan just for the change of scenery. I expect the usual assailment to come, with my mom grilling me about when I’m going to settle down and how all the good men are dropping like flies and I’d better get snapped up soon and start getting my act together. But it ends up being kind of the opposite. I’m thirty now and something about the number seems to have made my family accept that the train has irrevocably left the station. It’s a lost cause. I’m a lost cause.
There’s a freedom that comes when people no longer have any expectations for what your life should look like, but it’s not as happy a feeling as I’d hoped. It’s like you can’t disappoint them anymore because they’ve thrown out all their hopes about you in the first place.
My little niece is one year old now and already walking and sort of talking too. The first word she learned to say was “no,” which tickles my heart, though my sister tries to spin it and insist she was saying “ma” instead. It’s the type of suburban delusion you’d expect.
My body has that hot-itchy-burny feeling the whole time I’m back, and I do my best to detach myself the whole trip. I keep my phone tucked under the table at Christmas dinner at my parents’house, continually refreshing my socials to see if Chris has posted his engagement photo with Olivia yet.
By the time I get back to New York, there’s still no sign of it, but I douse the rising embers of optimism, spray a hose in the firepit until the wood is soggy and useless. They’d be that type of couple that gets engaged privately and then does an entire coastal photo shoot before posting about it, just to ensure that they elicit maximum jealousy among exes. That would be Olivia’s thought process, not Chris’s. He wouldn’t want to make a fuss but wouldn’t push back either, complicit in the pageant-queen crime.
Tara and I gear up for New Year’s Eve at the House of Yes. They’re having something called the Surrealist Ball. “Fancy fantasy, psychedelic styles, grandiose illusions” is the tagline—exactly what Tara and I need. She’s been in a slump too, first with Hal leaving us and then with rejection after rejection for new roles. She has it in her head that she’s already peaked, that her nibble of success will have to sustain her hunger for the coming days, the coming decades.
“Stop that,” I tell her, as she talks herself down during our pregame at the Inn. “We’re just in a bit of a trough right now. It’ll make the highs that much better once they come.”
“I don’t know,” Tara says. “I just feel like the gap between where I am now and where I want to be is too wide. I thought it would feel smaller as I got older, more manageable to wrap my arms around, but it’s the opposite.”
“Well, who wants a small world?” I challenge. “Isn’t the whole point of life that it keeps getting bigger?”
“I guess you’re right. It’s just kind of demoralizing sometimes, that’s all.”
“Until you realize it’s all a simulation and we’ve been holding the remote control the whole time,” I say. “Wearethe remote controls.”
She smiles, like I’ve lost her someplace beautiful, a coral reef or a field of daisies.
It’s just the two of us tonight. Jenni and Peter are having a low-key night, what with the baby coming and all, and Hal and Astrid are doing some kind of hackathon for their start-up. And even if they weren’t, they would’ve bailed for another reason. That’s just the rhyme scheme these days.
The general admission party doesn’t start until 2 a.m. Tickets for the earlier thing are sold out. I could talk my way in but why bother. Nothing good happens before midnight anyway.
We’ve got the record player spinning to Tina Turner and we’re both hollering along, inventing new notes as we go. The upstairs neighbors, a cranky couple always in their dressing gowns as if reincarnated from a Charles Dickens novel, come down and bang on our door, threatening a noise complaint. It lifts our evening into the stratosphere, catapults us out amongst the stars, amongst ourselves. We take it as proof that we’re slaying it on our own, that we don’t need the others.
I’m taking the fancy fantasy theme seriously, which is to say frivolously. Candy-colored necklaces, a tasseled headdress, and netted gloves, plus the light-up boots that I paid $3.50 for after bargaining them down from the thrift shop’s ten-dollar discount rack. One of my best-ever purchases.
I’m hardly even drunk. It’ll be a long night, and morning and afternoon too if I play my cards right, so pacing is important. As I’m pressing lightning bolt flash tattoos into my collarbones and Tara’s too, Chris’s name pops up on my phone screen. My heart jolts up before I can tell it not to, then does a jagged nosedive once I remember he’s calling to tell me about the engagement. I nearly let it go to voicemail but change my mind at the last second. Better to just rip off the Band-Aid.
“Congratulations!” I blurt into the phone, wanting to beat him to the punchline, avoid having to hear him say the actual words.
There’s a pause on the other end and I wonder if he butt-dialedme. But then he speaks, his voice more coarse than cottony, not what I’m used to. “I haven’t asked her yet,” he says.
“What do you mean?” My breath bounces back into place, toes unclenching.
