by Laura Hankin
“If you’re playing with me right now—”
She laughed and held her arms up. “Not playing! It’s all yours. Just don’t start any fires or punch any holes through the wall.”
I couldn’t accept a gift this big. I had to turn it down. “All right, fine, no punching,” I said.
“I told you.” She stepped right up to me, cupping my cheek in her hand. “We take care of each other.”
“I . . . Thank you so much,” I said.
“Oh, it was nothing.” Forget their secrets and their rumors. To bypass the New York real estate market? This was true power. Margot smiled, then stretched her arms out, rolling her head from side to side, reaching down and touching her toes as if psyching herself up for something. “Okay!” she said when she straightened back up again. “I have to go to an opening. But the key’s on the kitchen table for you. I’ll be curious to hear how you like it. You have my number, so call me tomorrow. I love talking on the phone, don’t you?”
“No!” I said. “It makes me anxious and I’m bad at it.”
“Well.” She winked. “Practice makes perfect.”
As soon as Margot left, I started whirling through the open hallways, sliding down the hardwood floors in my socks. I opened and closed all the drawers in the bedroom, pressed my cheek against the marble countertops in the kitchen, rolled around on the king-size mattress in my new bedroom, alternately laughing and on the verge of tears. Margot had described it as house-sitting, but more than that, it felt like I had a patron.
I found a new place. Will move the rest of my things out tomorrow, I texted Sara and Rob.
Good for you, Sara wrote back. She and Rob were probably pitying me right now, imagining that I’d landed in some dump with six roommates and no fridge. I fought the urge to send them a picture of my new bedroom like a petty little bitch. Luckily, a text from Raf popped up, distracting me from my worst impulses.
Hey, our supplier accidentally gave us a ton of extra bread. Want me to bring some home for breakfast?
Normally: yes of course why are you even asking, I texted back. But I won’t be there for breakfast cause I got an apartment! You’re once again free to do whatever weird stuff you want on your couch.
The three dots that meant he was typing appeared, then disappeared, then appeared again, until finally he sent back a thumbs-up emoji.
I bit my lip. But if you’re desperate to get rid of the bread and want to check the place out, you should come by, I texted. Prepare yourself: it’s a shithole.
TWENTY-FOUR
Raf showed up a few hours later, a couple of crusty loaves in tow, and I ushered him inside. “You’re pranking me,” he said, turning around in circles and staring with his mouth ajar, so I explained the situation.
“Damn, maybe you should forget the article and stay in the club,” he joked. A sudden paranoia seized me.
“You’ve gotta come see the bathroom,” I said, turning on my heel and power walking through the hall. The moment we entered the bathroom, I shut the door behind us and turned on the shower. (Of course it was a rainfall showerhead, spraying steady, soothing jets.)
“Uh, what are you doing?” Raf asked, shifting his weight. He tugged off his baseball cap and held it in front of his chest, fiddling with it.
“The Gone Girl thing,” I said. He looked at me uncomprehendingly. Right, Raf didn’t really watch movies. (In his free time, he devoured fantasy books, the kind with cheap-looking covers and complicated titles like The Mists of the Krampledern.) “I know this sounds nuts,” I whispered, leaning in close, “but remember how they had people following me around? What if this apartment is bugged?”
He let out a breath. “They wouldn’t do that, would they?”
“They sent a woman to hit on you and make sure we were dating, so I’m gonna go with . . . yes?” We were very close now as we whispered, steam rising up around us from the shower. It swirled in the air.
“Okay,” Raf said. A bead of sweat glided, slow and smooth, down the side of his cheek, along his neck, down underneath the lip of his T-shirt. I realized I’d been watching its progress only when Raf cleared his throat. “Should we check? It couldn’t hurt.”
I stepped away from him. “Yeah, let’s.”
After a quick how-to session on Google, we searched the apartment for hidden cameras, recording devices on the walls. “Just look at these gorgeous paintings!” I said, surreptitiously running my fingers along the sides of the frames.
“You could write a whole new novel at this desk,” Raf said, ducking underneath it and checking the wood.
We opened the cabinets and shook out the curtains, doing our Couple in Love playacting the whole time, just in case. “Not to get ahead of ourselves,” I said, looking closely at the walls in the kitchen, “but if we ever move in together, I’d want our apartment to have this color scheme.”
“You don’t think it washes me out?” he asked, striking a pose, and I laughed.
As the prospect of finding a bug began to diminish, our pretending got goofier and goofier. “This flat-screen is nice,” Raf said, inspecting the gigantic TV, deepening his voice, contorting his face into a parody of a 1950s sitcom dad. “But our children will have limited screen time. It’s important for kids to play outside and eat dirt!”
“Yes, darling,” I said. “Dirt will be the main dish at every family dinner.”
Finally, after we finished our search with a thorough sweep of the bedroom, we collapsed on the bed, turned onto our sides facing each other. “I think we’re safe,” I whispered, and we high-fived.
“Shit, this bed is comfy,” he said, and pretended to fall asleep on it, closing his eyes and letting out big fake snores until I poked him repeatedly in the stomach. He held up his hands to protect himself. “Okay, okay! I guess I should head out.”
Words rose up in my throat, words that scared the crap out of me, so I swallowed them. Raf furrowed his brow at the look on my face. “What?”
I sat up. “Oh, just realizing how late it got. It’s been a long day.”
I walked him out and closed the door after him, then leaned against it, the words I’d swallowed pinging around in my head: Or you could stay. In the moment when he’d said he was going to leave, all I’d wanted was to tuck my head into the crook of his neck, to press my body into his and let him wrap his arms around me until we fell asleep together.
It wasn’t too late for me to fling the door open and run after him, to stop him before he got into the elevator. And then what? I’d ask him to stay and he’d turn me down, and things between us would get all awkward. Or worse, he’d say yes, and yes again, yes and yes and yes until one day a few months from now, one of us decided to say no. And then things between us would be more than awkward. They would be ruined.
Get a grip, Beckley, I chastised myself. You’re just lonely and horny. I was not going to screw up the best friendship I had, the only relationship I could truly rely on, just because of a strange, voracious urge to feel Raf’s lips on my collarbone.
What I needed was to get laid. I was entering my sexual peak, baby! I shouldn’t be depriving the world of my bedroom skills, which were adequate. New York City was full of attractive strangers. I’d download Tinder.
No, I couldn’t exactly go on a public dating app, where someone connected to Nevertheless might find me. Besides, I’d never been great at casual sex. The liberated women of today were supposed to be able to fuck their way through anything—boredom, grief, existential despair—but I never enjoyed sex that much the first time with someone new. I was always anxious about what they thought of me. Were my hands too sweaty? Was my cellulite too glaring? What if they, God forbid, wanted me to call them “Daddy,” so I tried but it came out sounding dumb? And then there was the running commentary in my head about their body. What was that mole on their shoulder? Was it malignant? Would I fall for them only to lose them to
this CANCEROUS MOLE?
No getting laid tonight for me, then. Instead, I masturbated, trying to keep the faceless figures in my head (going at it in the backseat of a parked car) from morphing into me and Raf, me and Miles, Raf and Margot, me and Margot.
When I finished and caught my breath, I decided that we should end the dating charade after Caroline’s gala. It had served its purpose, so it was time to “part ways” amicably. Then, the weirdness it had caused to spring up between us would simply disappear.
* * *
• • •
Later, swaddled in sheets with a thousand thread count, drifting off to sleep more easily than I had in weeks, a thought occurred to me, hazy and half-formed, prompted by Raf’s joke that I should just forget the article and stay in the club: There was a version of my life where I didn’t sell them all out. Where I was their kept woman, their pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword warrior. I lived in the apartments they found for me (with no rent to pay, and with me picking up more bartending shifts, I’d have enough money for dues!) and eviscerated their enemies, and I never had to disappoint them, never had to watch the regard they had for me drain from their faces. In my half-asleep state, that kind of life didn’t sound so bad.
TWENTY-FIVE
The piece I had written went up the next morning as a Twitter thread from an anonymous account and spread like wildfire. Iris Ngoza was the first woman to retweet to her hundreds of thousands of followers. She posted the thread with an outraged, surprised comment, as if she’d just stumbled upon it and had never heard of the man before. (Probably a better strategy than going with the more honest Please read! I set his destruction in motion a week ago!) Soon enough, prominent women who weren’t in Nevertheless began tweeting about it, and some prominent male allies too. A petition went up online, calling for the judge to recuse himself from the case, and garnered thousands of signatures.
It had been strange, thrilling, to watch the fuss and furor over my words all day long while in real life, no one gave me a second look. I moved the first round of my things to my new fancy apartment, lugging boxes and suitcases on the subway, and every time someone glared at me for taking up space, I just nodded at them serenely. I was Elena Ferrante. No, Banksy! I began to understand how power could be addictive. How, maybe, the women in Nevertheless developed a taste for it, and started wanting more.
I held on to that feeling when I went back to the house for my second and final round of belongings, letting my victory keep me warm as I said good-bye to my empty childhood bedroom, as I breathed in the air of my mother’s room and pressed my hand against her old blue wallpaper for the last time. As I lost her in one more way.
Later, as I was hanging up clothes in my new closet, Margot sent me a wave emoji. Just call her, I told myself. You won’t be annoying her. She asked you to. I shook out my whole body, and then pressed her number.
“Hi, you,” she said when she picked up. “How did you sleep?”
“Like a fucking baby,” I said.
“I’ve always thought that was a strange expression. Aren’t babies notorious for waking up multiple times a night?”
I laughed. “Excellent point. Like a teenage boy?”
“Much better. Do you think the place will start to feel like home soon?”
We talked all about the apartment, and then I prepared myself for the good-bye, but she didn’t want to stop. Instead, she whirled from topic to topic as I—dizzy and excited—ran to catch up. She was rereading Sense and Sensibility and asked if I’d ever cried while reading Jane Austen, because she wept at every single one.
She wanted to talk about the gallery opening she’d gone to the night before. “I thought I was just going as a favor to Vy—she’s looking for inspiration for her next project, so she’s trying to see what’s out there right now—but I found myself unexpectedly moved by it. There were all these gigantic sculptures, evocative of Stonehenge, asking all sorts of questions about faith and belief. It really made you think about the role of the mystical in everyday life, how so many things just happen but we don’t think about why.”
“Whoa,” I said. I imagined Margot trying to have this conversation with Caroline, Caroline halfheartedly feigning interest and then changing the subject.
“Do you believe in anything?” Margot asked me.
“Climate change.”
“Well, obviously. But beyond science, I mean.”
“Nah, I’ve always been pretty certain that life is random and that eventually we all become nothing but worm food.”
“Hmm,” she said, and I sensed that it wasn’t the answer she’d been looking for.
“But,” I added hastily, “I’ve also always thought that I could be convinced to change my mind.”
She got quiet for a moment on her end of the line. She was probably gathering her thoughts, getting ready to say something, but I wasn’t sure. Dammit, this was why I hated talking on the phone. Right as I opened my mouth to break the silence, she spoke. “For me, after my mother died, the idea of us all turning into nothing but worm food became unbearable.”
“Oh,” I said. “Of course. I understand that.”
“And yet you still believe the worm food?”
“Yes, but also . . .” I hesitated, then plunged on, feeling that, of anyone I knew, Margot might understand. “Even though I know that my mother is gone entirely, I keep thinking I see her everywhere. Like I’m catching little glimpses of her soul, attaching itself to other people so that she can come check in on me or tell me something—” I cut myself off. “It sounds silly, I know.”
“It doesn’t,” Margot said. “I’ve felt that way sometimes too. I even went to a medium once, not long after mine died.”
“Did . . . did it help you?”
“No, that medium was so clearly faking it all.”
“When did your mom die?” I asked her, even though I already knew.
“When I was twenty. It was so sudden. One day everything was fine, the next she was gone. I think the grief made me lose myself a little bit. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“It led me to that controlling relationship I told you about, and it’s why I stayed in it for so long. I just wanted someone else to tell me what to do. I didn’t even notice when he stopped helping and started hurting me instead. And then I looked up and realized I had spent years and years with someone who didn’t respect me. Someone who didn’t trust me or think that I was smart, who only wanted me to be a little plaything he could take out and use, and then shut away.”
I wished I could pass through the phone to Margot’s side and wrap my arms around her. “Oh, Margot, I’m sorry,” I said. “But you got out.”
“I did. And I won’t let people control me again,” Margot said, then let out a noise of surprise. “Oh, it’s been forty-five minutes! I suppose I should go work or something.” She paused, and then, her voice full of mischief, all traces of our serious conversation gone, said, “By the way, I wanted to ask: Have you heard about this Twitter thread that’s been making the rounds today? I think it’s really going to have an impact.”
“Hmm, interesting,” I said. “Who wrote it?”
“It was some anonymous account,” she said. “They didn’t even have any kind of profile image. But whoever they were, I’m very impressed by them.” I smiled. “I wonder,” she went on, “if you might be interested in saying yes to other things within the club as well.”
“More articles? Sure.”
“That, maybe. But also, opportunities to get closer to some of the women. A more . . .” She paused. “Curated experience. More intense too. It would require a certain commitment. Certain sacrifices.”
My heart began to pound. “Yes,” I said. “Yeah. I could be very into that.”
“Good to know. I’ll be pulling for you.”
TWENTY-SIX
That night, I work
ed a shift at the bar, a secret smile on my face. Of course none of the patrons, who were glued to the football game, had any idea that I’d become an Internet vigilante. I doubted that any one of them even had a Twitter account. I closed out a group of customers and turned to a new guest who had just slid onto a stool.
“What can I do for—”
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Miles asked.
“Um, hello,” I said, and blinked a couple times, confirming that my eyes weren’t lying to me. Yup, Miles, wearing a gray sweater with the sleeves pushed up. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping particularly well, and yet somehow he pulled it off, dammit, as if he weren’t sleeping because his mind was too busy with fascinating thoughts, thoughts that you’d be lucky to know. “What was me? And what are you doing here?” I’d mentioned the bar to him before, but he’d never come. And considering how things had gone the last time we talked, I hadn’t exactly been expecting that to change.
He shrugged. “I was walking by, so I thought I’d get a nightcap, see if you were on shift.” The bar wasn’t near the Standard, and it wasn’t particularly close to Miles’s neighborhood either. I smelled bullshit. I also smelled tequila—this wasn’t his first drink of the evening.
“Well, here I am.”
“Could I get a gin and tonic?” I poured him one, and when I handed it to him, he said, “It was you who wrote the thread about Melton.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Right,” he said, and gave me a small, wry smile. “Once you spend some time editing the Jillian Beckley voice, it becomes unmistakable.” Screw Cinderella’s prince, searching far and wide for the maiden whose foot would fit the glass slipper. Miles could see words I’d written and know immediately that they belonged to me. I hated that he recognized me like that, and I loved it too.
