by Megan Crane
“Fine.” My snippy tone made it clear it wasn’t fine at all. “Where are Amy Lee and Oscar?” To be honest, I was slightly hurt that they weren’t standing by to see what Helen had wanted.
“I think they’re having marital relations in one of the bathrooms,” Georgia said.
“They are not!” I replied. Although I hoped it was true. At least that would mean someone was enjoying the evening.
“No, they’re really not,” Georgia said with a sigh. “I assume they’re having one of those boring conversations about property values with other assorted married people in the kitchen. Although wouldn’t that be funny if they were bathroom boinking?”
“Sure.” I raised my eyebrows at her. “If we were seventeen.”
“I refuse to participate in those discussions, fascinating as I’m sure it is to consider the market in Natick,” Georgia said. She gave me a benevolent sort of smile. “I felt it was my duty as your friend to maintain my vigil. What if you needed someone to race to your side at a moment’s notice and pry Helen’s claws from your face?”
“And the fact that you’re standing next to the bar is, I’m sure, purely coincidental.”
“Purely.”
“We actually can’t talk about Helen,” I said after considering it. “It might tip me over the edge.” Besides that very valid fear, I knew that Georgia had never made any secret of the fact that she considered me a lunatic to waste a second on Helen once freshman year ended. She and Amy Lee both thought I should have excised Helen from my life years ago. Neither was moved when I ranted on about what friendship meant and how it wasn’t always pillow fights and sleepovers, as shown on TV.
“Okay.” Georgia considered her glass for a moment, then looked up. “I think Chris Starling was flirting with me.”
“Chris Starling is your boss!” I was scandalized. Being that scandalized made my head throb, and I rubbed at my temples. “He’s married! He’s practically twice your age! And—hello—bald!”
“Yes, I’m aware of that. The true horror is that I was so lonely, I actually flirted back,” Georgia confessed.
“No!”
“It was only for about thirty seconds, but it was a scary thirty seconds.” Georgia shuddered. “I blame Des Moines, or wherever the hell I was. It was so boring that I actually considered the idea. I actually considered sleeping with him.”
I blinked, but then thought about it for a moment.
“I bet he would be surprisingly good in bed,” I said. “I mean, there’s something to be said for men who can’t coast by on their looks, right?”
“How would I know?” Georgia asked wryly. “The only men I ever meet are entirely too good-looking, know it, and are complete assholes.”
“You have to get over that,” I told her. “I mean, where does it end?”
“Please don’t tell me you’re suggesting . . .” She couldn’t finish. She looked at me. “What exactly are you suggesting?”
I looked at my gorgeous friend, who spent all of her emotional energy on the kind of career-driven, flashy guys who had already maxed out their emotional energy banks on themselves. They all talked the same high-power, adrenaline-infused game, and they all left Georgia sobbing in her empty apartment when they were through with her.
“If you don’t have the whole young-and-pretty thing going for you, you have to make up for it,” I theorized. “Guys like Chris Starling are almost forced to develop other skills.” I frowned. “Although not actually Chris Starling himself, because he’s married. Ew.”
“What are you talking about? Relationship skills?” Georgia smirked. “The kind where you learn how to say, ‘My needs aren’t being met’ in words, not in suddenly moving to Jacksonville?” I winced. Georgia’s last breakup had been particularly harsh.
“Among other things,” I said.
Georgia shifted from one foot to the other. “I think Chris Starling might be one of those average, older guys who thinks of himself as hot just because he has money. One of those guys who thinks, okay, maybe he’s not Brad Pitt, but he’s rich, so that makes up for it.”
“Presumably missing the key point about Brad Pitt,” I said. “That being that he’s hot and rich.”
“It’s a guy thing,” Georgia said. “They truly believe that money makes them good-looking. It’s such a strange delusion. Because let’s be honest—it makes them rich, which isn’t the same as good-looking, although it will garner you the same results. That being a hot chick.”
“A money-grubbing hot chick,” I amended.
“Yes, but what do you care? You get to sleep with a hot chick.” Georgia ran her hand through her dramatic hair and rolled her eyes as she scrunched a handful of it in her palm. “We shouldn’t talk. Women do nutty things, too.”
“Like what?” I asked. “Women don’t think a good job makes them a supermodel.”
“No, but let’s say you had sex and it was lame.” Georgia looked speculative. “You would absolutely do that girl thing where you tell yourself that, you know, he was just nervous and then you keep trying but it’s still lame and then you just shut up about it, because sex isn’t that important and there are so many other facets to a relationship, and it’s not like it’s bad, exactly—”
I glared at her. “Why would I do that?”
“I’m using the general you.” Georgia made a face at me. “I think that women are always putting up with a whole lot less than they should. It’s like a reverse delusion. Men think they deserve better, women think they deserve less. That’s just how it goes.”
“With that kind of attitude, I’m not surprised you’re still single!” singsonged Helen, rearing back up in front of us. I jumped about five feet in the air, while Georgia looked as if she’d turned to stone.
“What?” I asked, not even pretending to be polite.
“Nate and I were just talking, and we have the best idea!” Helen continued blissfully.
“I very much doubt that,” Georgia snapped at her.
“What you two need to do is get in the game!” Helen exclaimed. “And lucky for you, I have a surprise. Two guys you will not—”
“If you’re leading where I think you’re leading,” I told her, “I think I might actually—”
“Helen.” Georgia interrupted me and leaned in. She towered over Helen, and looked as if she might reach over and pluck off Helen’s wings. “Whatever you think is happening here, you need to stop. Back off.”
“They’re brothers,” Helen continued as if she hadn’t heard us. “And okay—not exactly Luke and Owen Wilson, but who is? It’s not like we girls can afford to care that much about looks once we cross the Big Three Oh!”
“Excuse me?” Georgia was even more appalled. “No one here is thirty yet, for the love of God!” Helen ignored her.
Once again, it was like I was trapped on a train, and there was no getting off. There was only the inevitable horror.
“HEY!” Helen shouted across the room, completely at odds with her supposed daintiness. The woman was like a cockroach. A nuclear winter wouldn’t slow her down at all.
“Helen, I swear to God—” I began, but it was too late. Sensing another drama—another one involving the same players as the other night—the room fell quiet in anticipation. I plastered my polite smile across my face, but it felt more like a grimace. I couldn’t imagine what it looked like.
“You will pay for this,” Georgia promised her, quietly.
Helen, of course, just waved her hand in the air, in the direction of two men who appeared, from across the room, to actually be Abbott and Costello. Or maybe that was the hysteria, taking over my sight.
“Robert and Jerry, get over here!” she cried out. “I have two single girls you must meet! They’re absolutely gagging for dates!”
chapter five
It took me until my third bathroom break on Monday morning to even think about getting over it.
It being Helen, mostly, with a generous side helping of fury for Henry to go along with it.
Henry I was furious with because he was always right there to make me feel worse. Only Henry would think letting someone in so that she could personally witness her boyfriend cheating was the right thing to do. Only Henry would call that helping, the jerk.
Helen, on the other hand, was a more complicated problem. Screaming that we needed dates had been plain old nasty, and had necessitated evasive maneuvers on Georgia’s and my part, but was, in the end, just annoying. I’d spent the entire weekend stewing less about that and more about her unexpected intervention technique. At first, I’d just been stunned. And a little bit—okay, a lot—hurt. But then it had occurred to me that she was deliberately playing a game. If I could just figure out her goal, I too could play the game, and she’d better watch out because I was all kinds of competitive when I wanted to be.
I was just having some trouble figuring out why she’d chosen to drag me off into a private room so she could spout obviously crazy nonsense right to my face. She couldn’t possibly believe that she was motivated by concern for me. So what was she up to?
When I returned to my desk, I amused myself by thinking up revenge scenarios, but then decided to go in a completely different direction and deal with my rage productively. I decided to act like an adult and not play any girl games. (Not that I gave any credence whatsoever to anything Henry said.)
And what was more adult than having a rational discussion about one’s problems with one’s peers?
“I’m not sure I will ever be able to talk about Helen, that bitch, but I definitely can’t talk about it today,” Georgia snarled. “This is because I am about to board a plane to some godawful town with a name I swear to you is deliberately unpronounceable, in the company of Chris Starling.”
“Married, balding, lecherous Chris Starling?”
“The very one. Although it turns out he’s separated. Somehow, his telling me this didn’t present the green light I think he hoped for.”
“You have fun out there,” I said, rather wanly.
She made a noise that could only be described as a growl, and hung up. I told myself the pounding in my temples had more to do with what sounded like African tribal chants floating down from Minerva’s quarters—and if arias had given way to tribal chants, I might as well buy myself a month’s supply of Excedrin at once—than with any urges toward homicide.
I thought about calling Amy Lee, but that would mean coming up with excuses to make it past the formidable Beatrice, the receptionist/hygienist in the dental practice Amy Lee and Oscar shared, who didn’t believe in personal phone calls during the workday. I was exhausted by the very idea, and Beatrice, I knew, would pounce on any hint of weakness.
I made a few gestures toward actual work, and then spent the rest of my day with my earplugs in (I’d bought them during Minerva’s particularly trying Scottish-bagpipe phase and couldn’t imagine how I’d managed without them), Googling people I held grudges against.
For example: the name Henry Farland, it turned out, was etched on a large selection of gravestones in the greater Amherst area, every one of which had been photo-shopped online by some industrious amateur genealogist. None of those long-buried relatives, however, had been discovered to be the incarnation of evil during their lives, at least not so far as I could tell from the blurry headstones.
I found myself brooding ever so slightly on my way home from work that night, as I pretended to read my book on the T. I could see my reflection in the foggy glass of the windows of the Green Line car, and tried to remove the frown that seemed permanently lodged on my face with a few deep, cleansing breaths. It didn’t work.
Girl games. What an obnoxious phrase. There had been something in the way Henry had said it that—days later—made me feel immature and a little bit sullen.
The fact of the matter was, I felt I was neither immature nor sullen. I was twenty-nine, and soon to be free of the madness of my twenties altogether. I was practically in my thirties already, and once I was I would exude calm. I would be an adult. At last.
Not that there was anything wrong with the madness, I thought when I got off the T at the Hynes Convention Center/ICA stop. I headed toward home through the prematurely dark Boston night, crossing Mass Ave to march down Boylston—after all, who wasn’t a little melodramatic when they were in their twenties? Being unapologetically histrionic was, as far as I could tell, the entire point of being in your twenties. Just about everyone I knew who’d crossed the Great Divide into their thirties talked about their twenties like they’d escaped the gulag of drama simply by celebrating their thirtieth birthday. My birthday was January second and I couldn’t wait.
For some reason, I thought, looking down the street to where the Victory Gardens began and the public allotments spread out along the Muddy River, Henry Farland had been placed on this earth to challenge my claims to impending adulthood. If I concentrated hard enough, I was sure I could blame him for the Janis Joplin tragedy, too, even if he hadn’t actually been there. Around Henry, I behaved like the overwrought twentysomething I wanted to leave behind, forever one emotion away from hurling a cocktail across a room or bursting into inappropriately public tears. But the key difference was that I was not, in fact, that twentysomething for very much longer. I could choose not to behave like her. After all, I couldn’t change Henry. I could only change my reaction to Henry. And once I became the Zen goddess of social situations, I could shove my enlightenment directly down his smug—
I literally stopped in my tracks when I saw the figure outside my building—unmistakable even from this distance.
Although—happily—faced in the opposite direction, so that I could admire her delicate, pretty profile.
Helen.
One of the major benefits of living in the same apartment throughout my histrionic twenties was that I had been forced to develop numerous strategies for the avoidance of unwanted guests over the years. So while the horror of Helen’s appearance outside my door was extreme, and I planned to rant about it at length when I was safely inside my apartment, alone, and could make the necessary phone calls, she didn’t stand a chance.
I banked to the right before she turned and saw me, and then froze for a moment or so, convinced that God hated me and that at any second I’d hear Helen calling my name. But there was only the blare of road rage from the passing commuters and the far-off sound of a dog barking in the Fens. I made my way along the narrow alley between my building and the neighboring one, around the back to the freezing-cold and architecturally sketchy fire escape. As the smells of fried dinners and excess garlic wafted all around me, complete with the soothing, homey sounds of electric guitar music from the fourth floor (Berklee College of Music students) and the loud argument from the second floor (newlyweds, the rumor was), I hauled myself up to my third-floor windowsill. Rung by frigid, wobbly rung.
Another thing I learned in the madness of my twenties: don’t look down.
Once outside my apartment, I wrestled with one of the two ancient, heavy windows that offered me a stellar view of the chipped brick building across the way and stained concrete “patio” below. I knew from experience that if I could jiggle the left window long enough and in exactly the right way, I could get the lock to fall open, allowing me to crawl through it into the corner of my bedroom where I kept the pile of not-quite-dirty-enough-to-merit-the-use-of-my-laundry-quarters clothes. Sometimes they were on top of an old leather chair Amy Lee and I had found on the street during college, sometimes they beat the chair into submission.
I jiggled, and then I jiggled some more. I’d forgotten how long it took, and how loud it was. Not to mention how cold and dark it was outside on the fire escape. The last time I’d done this, I’d been basking in the warmth of entirely too many White Russians—the reason Georgia and I gained about fifteen pounds the year we were obsessed with them—and might even have been humming a merry tune. I was rather unfortunately sober tonight, however. I sent a fresh batch of hatred Helen’s way, and scowled at the window. This c
lose, I also noticed that it was in serious need of Windex.
There was a cough from behind me and I froze—convinced that somehow Helen had chased me back around the building and, who knew, maybe even up the rickety fire-escape ladder. She was a wily one. But when I sneaked a look around, there was only my next-door neighbor, leaning out his window to glare at me from behind huge tortoise-rimmed glasses. It wasn’t that he was unattrac-tive—it was just hard to tell where he could be hiding his hotness behind that bright blue robe and the wild wisps of hair not quite covering his head.
In any event, the message I was receiving was this: my next-door neighbor did not approve of me.
Which was fine. He’d moved in months before and I’d barely seen him. I didn’t even know his name.
“Oh,” I said. As if it was perfectly normal to find me hanging about on the fire escape. “Hi! Don’t call the police or anything. I actually live here, I just—”
“I know you live here,” he snapped at me. “Augusta Curtis, apartment 309. I’m well acquainted with your habits.”
“That’s me!” I agreed with a broad, fake smile. Freak-azoid stalker, I thought. The guy looked older than me, and as my friends liked to point out to me, only freaks and weirdos chose to spend their adulthood in a dump like my apartment building. “Although I prefer ‘Gus,’ actually—”
“Well, Gus, I’ve been meaning to talk with you about the level of ambient noise for some time. Since I moved in five months ago I’ve kept a journal of noise violations.” His brows collided over the top of his eyeglasses as he intensified that glare he had trained on me.
Amy Lee had been somewhat excited for me when he moved in, I remembered then, because he wasn’t the usual college kid (the only sort of person who normally rented in the building) and she figured bookish-looking meant smart and interesting. Then he’d started pounding on the wall during movie nights, and she’d declared him an enemy of the state. We called him Irritating Irwin. I had never been interested enough to investigate his mailbox to find out his real name.
