It was the first of our fights that sent me driving off into the night to empty parking lots, where I sat and waited to cool off. Fights that brought him close to my face, when I could see his fists clenching and unclenching next to his sides. Now I was the one who turned away in bed, but instead of leaving me alone as he had for months, my indifference sparked aggression. I’d wake in the night and find him on top of me with little concern for what I wanted, taking my clothes off with the same insistence he’d had about wanting me to move in with him. Sometimes I submitted timidly, victimized. Sometimes I responded fiercely as if, through sex, I could get back at him for everything that was wrong about us.
Wes held on to his sous chef job at Zona for nearly two years. And then came Austin, and Gene and Gene’s wife. The day we arrived at their house, we sat in their living room, drinking iced tea as Wes wove expensive talk about the restaurant he planned to open in Austin. He was convinced his father would front him the money. Gene’s wife looked dubious. To defy her tightly crossed arms and permed curls, I spent days at their kitchen table being a dutiful girlfriend by making appointments with commercial real estate agents. We began to tour restaurants whose bad locations had led to several changes in ownership until, finally, they stood empty.
As Wes and I wandered the echoing kitchens and dining rooms, playing restaurateurs, I sometimes thought I heard the fast, haughty steps of Zona’s owner back in Santa Fe. Then I would slip my hand into Wes’s and hold on. The tightness with which he was ready to squeeze back always surprised me. At times like that, I wanted to shake Gene’s skinny-shouldered wife. I wanted to ask her who she thought she was, judging us—tell her that Wes and I were the kind of people for whom greatness was an option. I wanted to take her back to New York City for proof, back to where each of us had once shone with promise.
At other times, I saw it exactly her way. When Wes and I were in a coffee shop with mirrored walls, I’d catch our reflection. Then I could see how my once stylish haircut, long and glossy, had disappeared, as overgrown as an old hedge. In a photo booth strip of black and white photos, I saw my skin like dust, Wes’s cheekbones fading into a binge drinker’s puffiness, our eyes looking out as dull and flat as our hopes.
The night Gene and his wife were trying to get pregnant, Wes and I drove and drove past those cliff edges until we were driving in the dark and the hills were inky cutouts against the sky. And then we went to a bar so we could feel that we were part of the world once again.
We drank martinis with big green olives, magnified in elegantly tapered glasses so they looked even fatter at the bottom of icy gin. After four of them, I said I was going to the ladies’ room. Instead, I poured change into a pay phone, trying to keep my balance as I leaned against a wall.
As soon as I heard my father’s voice, glad it was he who had answered and not my mother, I started sobbing in great gulps. “I’m coming to get you,” he said.
I pictured him with his ear to the phone, thrilled to be the parent called to duty rather than my mother. I knew if I gave him the signal, he would fasten the big western belt buckle that always hung heavily from his jeans, undone until the last moment. Then, weathered and wrung out, he would slide behind the wheel of his souped-up Ford Ranger and drive through the night to rescue me. Because that’s what people did in my family—they saved each other even though they were always falling apart themselves.
“No. No. Don’t come here,” I said in the middle of my drunken crying jag. He got scared then because he’d never heard me like this. “I’m going to get your mom,” he said.
“No, don’t. Don’t get her. I’m okay.” But of course he was right. In the end it would be my mother who would come for me. She would arrive weeks later and we would pack up what little I had left and I would go back to Los Angeles to start a new life. I would pick up my battle with my father all over again when I got there. But I would never forget how he’d wanted to drive through the night to save me.
Wes and I were among the last people to leave the bar. Back in Gene’s guest room, I stripped off my sweater and pants, slipping quickly under the covers, not wanting Wes to see me. When I woke again, the room was yellow with the late afternoon sun, and I knew I had slept through most of the day. Wes was there beside me, awake too. Seeing me stir, he moved in closer.
At the touch of his bare brown legs on mine, I felt the resentment I often did when he wanted to take what he thought was his. But now, at last, I knew that we were over and that soon I would move on, and that made me feel impulsive and wild—the way I had felt while looking over the cliff ’s edge the night before. Something forbidden charged my skin. Aroused, I began to move under him.
Lost in the sound of our breathing, we didn’t hear the car drive up, the keys jangle in the door. We heard nothing until someone in the living room blasted the stereo to drown out what we were doing. We froze, staring at each other, realizing we’d been discovered.
Wes’s brown eyes, always a bit like a stranger’s to me when he wasn’t wearing his glasses, flitted slightly from side to side as they tried to take in my whole face at once. Then his pretty lips broke into a wolfish smile, revealing white, white teeth. We pressed our noses into each other’s shoulders, feeling the soft shaking of our laughter, relieved for the moment to smile like children at our own naughtiness, willing to believe for a little while longer that we might still save one another.
Makeshift Twins
LIVING IN A BUBBLE OF TWO HAD ALWAYS FELT NATURAL to me. How often, while growing up, I had heard my mother say, “Just we two.” She’d squeeze my hand, smiling in camaraderie. It wasn’t until many years after I’d been out on my own that I realized I expected such camaraderie from others. Not knowing any other way, I’d been re-creating that close one-to-one dynamic in my friendships beginning in elementary school and continuing on through adulthood. Never more so than with Liz.
We met on move-in day during our freshman year at a small college in Southern California—a gem of Spanish-style architecture with manicured lawns, hidden courtyards, and gently bubbling fountains. Liz was from Boston, where she’d been the president of her senior class and a champion on the ski and debate teams. Her beauty had caught the eye of a talent scout and she’d acted in a few television commercials that were now helping to pay her tuition. When I told her my goal was to move to New York City after college to become a magazine editor and write novels, she said, “Me, too!”
Later, Liz would confess that when I’d introduced myself, her breath caught in her throat—she was sure I was about to say my name was Annabelle, a character in the Rona Jaffe novel Class Reunion about lifelong friends who meet in college. She’d been obsessed with the novel all summer. As she confided this, she pulled the book from her shelf, showing me the cover illustration. Annabelle had shoulder-length auburn hair like mine. Further proof that Liz and I were destined to become best friends.
Like me, Liz had grown up with a single mother. Yet our maternal crucibles had forged me one way and her, another. I’d stayed tentative, forever pacing the sidelines of a grown-up world and yearning to jump in. Liz dove into the deep end on a regular basis.
On the first night of orientation, the guys from a neigh-boring dorm stormed our hallways, banging on doors and dragging girls from their rooms. I hid in my closet, convinced gang rapes were about to take place. After the whooping and shrieking died down, I emerged to find a group of flannel-nightgowned women peering into the courtyard below. On an improvised stage, there was Liz in pajama top and panties linking arms with a row of girls doing a Rockettes kick line while fifty guys serenaded them. I was in awe of her ease. While I’d hidden, she’d known just what to do. But the next day, she confided that she was just as embarrassed as I was, because she’d gone along and given them what they wanted.
Liz was as drawn to me as I was to her. She saw past my shyness that others often mistook for conceit. In a college town full of Saabs and BMWs, she didn’t judge me because I wasn’t a debutante who summered on
Martha’s Vineyard the way she did. And when she ran across the dorm hallway into my room and asked me to drive her to a pharmacy for the morning-after pill, I didn’t judge her either. My virginity had become a burden I was all too ready to unload. “I didn’t want to shock you,” she said after telling me she’d slept with the cute senior we’d met at a party the night before. She waited for him to call but he never did, the first of many men I saw take advantage of her.
Among my new friends, Liz was the only one I trusted enough to take home with me—to see the modest way in which my mother and I lived. No doorman building. Just a two-bedroom apartment with a carport in back. She was fascinated by my mother—a woman on her own who hadn’t gone to college but had read every book on our floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and saved enough for us to travel to Europe many times.
After I met Liz’s mother, I understood why she admired the capability of mine.
Grace came to town one weekend to see Liz in a play. In slacks and turtleneck, she had the slim, athletic build of a tennis player and that old-fashioned, upper-class accent you hear in Katharine Hepburn movies. Her big brown eyes and apple cheeks were just like Liz’s, but behind those eyes was someone playing along until she could get in on the joke. I wondered if her blankness was why Liz’s father, a civil rights lawyer, had left her. Or if his divorcing her was the cause.
I knew my mother leaving Nick when I was a baby had been for the best. But Liz felt the wrongness of her father’s absence like the ache of a phantom limb. Late at night in the dorm, she spoke of her summers on Martha’s Vineyard with her father’s family the way an exile might speak of her home country. Only on the island did she feel whole again.
Even though we looked nothing alike—Liz was tall and honey-skinned, lithe with delicate bones, and I was fair, petite, and curvy—people started remarking on a resemblance between us. Our mannerisms, speech patterns, and clothing styles had blended. “Les Deux Femmes,” people called us when we took a French class together. “Where’s your other half?” they asked when one of us was spotted alone.
We began to share everything from makeup to diaphragm jelly (once I did lose my virginity to a popular but forgettable boy). We started an alternative campus newspaper together and cohosted a radio show. She celebrated Thanksgiving and Easter with my mother and me. I spent the summer with her on Martha’s Vineyard doing all the things she’d told me about—beach bonfires, blueberry picking, and milkshakes at the golf club.
During sophomore year, Liz fell deeply, almost violently, in love with our English professor. He was young, unmarried, and his classes filled up fast. He spotted her in the third row of Modern American Lit and asked her to lunch one day when I wasn’t in class. Not long after, he asked her to bed. As her best friend, I was in on their secret affair, which stretched into our junior year abroad in Paris, where he was on sabbatical, and continued once we returned to campus.
One day senior year, I ran into the professor. He was turning down the path to his house when he saw me and asked if I’d take a couple of books to Liz. I stood just inside his open door as he rummaged around a dining table piled high with books and papers.
“Ah,” he said, plucking the volumes from a stack. With his beaming smile, he walked toward me—books in his outstretched arm, shirtsleeves rolled, forearm flexing—and, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, kissed me. When I didn’t kiss him back, he straightened and retreated to the dining room. For an instant I thought I’d imagined it. But as I met his eyes I knew he was already wondering if I would tell Liz—and I knew I never would. I couldn’t risk our friendship by hurting her.
In the end, Liz found out on her own that he couldn’t be trusted. One day, when he was in class and she was lingering at his house, she noticed a diary on his desk—a Pandora’s box she couldn’t resist. In explicit sexual detail, he’d chronicled encounters he’d had with her and another student on the same day. He referenced each girl by hair color—“the sexy blonde,” “the luscious brunette.” I still wonder sometimes if he kissed me simply to add a redhead to his collection.
Even after she knew of his infidelity, I kept the professor’s kiss a secret because I’d admitted to myself that part of me had liked it. Not because I wanted him, but because he’d wanted me.
A rivalry with Liz had begun to burn in me. I weighed my looks and talents against hers the way I had compared myself to my mother when I was growing up. The attention of others was my barometer. I looked for proof that people thought I was more than Liz’s sidekick. That kiss had proved it.
Intellectually, I knew better. But I was like a needy dog nudging its head under your elbow after another dog gets a pat. It galled me to recognize in myself the same pining that had driven my father to swim darkly in his alcoholic brew as others “made it” and he didn’t. Vanity, selfishness, envy, insecurity—his worst traits woven together, slithering here and there, whipping a serpentine tail across my gut and into my heart.
After graduation, Liz and I did go off to New York City to become magazine editors—or more accurately, lowly editorial assistants—at competing women’s magazines. Plucked from among scores of applicants, we were grateful to land these coveted spots. It was the mid-’80s, when bright young things ruled publishing. A literary “brat pack” included Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, and Jay McInerney, with twenty-something editors launching both Spy and Sassy magazines. People rose up the food chain fast. As I read through the slush pile and edited relationship columns, success seemed inevitable, like something you waited in line for until they called your name.
Then Liz’s name did get called, and she was promoted.
Whereas I had been a model assistant—my boss referring to me as the perfect protégé in a talk to young publishing hopefuls—I now champed at the bit for a better title. No longer content to be a good little helper, my hunger for recognition became my downfall.
On the day I got fired, the editor-in-chief called me into her office. “In the future, if you want to advance, you would do well to think more about making your boss look good,” she said. I learned the Seventeen editor I’d asked about a job had called my boss to report my disloyalty. Taking the Lexington Avenue bus home that day, I was convinced the other riders could see my scarlet “F”—fired, failure, father’s daughter.
Like any good friend, Liz blamed my bosses, not me. I found a new job soon enough—one with the title I’d been seeking. But getting fired had shaken me. Without admitting it to myself, I’d already begun looking for a face-saving exit from New York City. Then I found one. His name was Wes.
I don’t remember what Liz said when I told her I was moving to Santa Fe with a handsome chef. I don’t remember if she tried to stop me, questioned the impulsiveness of my decision. Or if she felt relieved to get some distance between “Les Deux Femmes.” If she was aware of the burning competition I felt with her—if she had ever felt it too—she never said. I think we both thought that acknowledging any jealousy between us could end our friendship.
After I moved, Liz and I kept up by phone. Close to two years later, she visited me in Santa Fe. By then, Wes had lost his job at Café Zona and was working shifts at the Hilton. Scanning the bare hangers in my closet, Liz asked, “Where are all your clothes?”
I didn’t know where they were. Maybe when Wes and I had moved from the adobe house to a cheaper apartment, a box of my jeans and T-shirts had gotten lost along the way. Maybe I’d left the better stuff at a consignment store the way I’d pawned my jewelry, because we needed money to pay rent. Like every part of my life since I’d left New York City—from my now meager book collection to my limp, falling-out hair—my wardrobe had devolved to dregs.
Too far gone to keep up a good front, I finally confessed to Liz that the moment the plane had touched down in New Mexico, I knew I’d made a mistake moving there. Wes wasn’t a mean drunk like my father; he was a depressive one who spiraled into silent broods and refused to refill his lithium prescription. As for my career, I’d wr
itten a few freelance articles for editor friends back in New York City, but I hadn’t touched my novel.
“You’ve got to get out of here,” she said when she hugged me good-bye at the airport. “Leave,” she whispered in my ear.
Being with Liz was like seeing my old self again. The shock of how far my life had veered off the course I’d set for myself in college—a path she was still on—ultimately helped convince me to leave Wes and reboot my life. The next year my mother rescued me from Austin and brought me back to Los Angeles, and I started a new job as an editor with a nonprofit organization.
Free again, whizzing along Mulholland Drive, sunroof open, Talking Heads blaring on the radio, I told myself I’d never lose control of my life like that again.
Liz and I were on the brink of turning thirty when she called to tell me her boyfriend had given her an engagement ring. I’d been in L.A. for a couple of years by then. Bracing myself in the doorway of my kitchen the way I’d done when the last earthquake struck, I matched her excited shrieks with my own—even as I thought, Oh god, oh god, I’m being left behind. In that moment, I understood my competition with Liz had never been about a desire to best her, but rather my fear of being stranded as she moved on, unable to progress to my own happy ending.
The following summer, I watched her marry on the lawn of her grandmother’s house on Martha’s Vineyard, the ocean glittering in the distance. Her aunts teased me when I made my toast because I could barely get the words out through tears. Perhaps I didn’t have the right to feel the moment so deeply. I wasn’t family. But even as I worried I would never have what Liz had—family and friends gathered together to watch me marry a man I loved—her dazzling vitality pierced me in a way I would not feel again until years later when I was a mother. Standing at the edge of a competition ring, watching my audacious daughter on the cusp of adolescence—wild, berry-lipped, with legs as long and coltish as the horse she rode, so ready to seize all that the world held for her—I would flash on Liz’s blinding beauty and remember how my heart had swelled on her wedding day.
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