In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel

by Shari Goldhagen

  “Nope, I’m good,” Phoebe somehow manages with a straight face.

  “Your boobs look amazing.” Evie looks as if she might grab one.

  “I had a good doctor.” This may or may not be true, but unlike her rhinoplasty, Phoebe did not use a friend of her father.

  “You didn’t go too big, that’s the key. Everyone in my industry goes too big.”

  Evie does PR for a record label and often sends packages of unlistenable CDs; Phoebe can’t recall any specifics about artists’ breast sizes. Evie’s hair is the same shocking maroon it was when they were bridesmaids at Nicole’s wedding two summers ago, when Nicole kept bemoaning how dumb it would look in the pictures. But Evie’s hair doesn’t look silly anymore. With ebony eyeliner and her own short black dress, it works, and Phoebe feels young and old and out of place again.

  “Thank God you’re finally here,” Evie continues. “I’ve been back three days, and I’m not sure I’ll last the week without killing Nic—wait till you see her; she looks like she ate Dick Cheney. And I’ll bet you a doughnut she never goes back to work once she has the kid.”

  “I’ll pass on that bet.”

  They sit on a couch in the sunken living room Evie’s mother has redone four times in ten years. Currently it’s beige with burgundy accents and goes perfectly with Evie’s hair. Bending forward as if someone might be eavesdropping, Evie says that yesterday she saw Chase getting the mail. “That boy grew up mighty nice.”

  “He’s in New York now.” Phoebe shrugs, making no reference to Sharon or their potential post-dinner drink.

  “Reeeeeeee-allly.”

  Evie’s mother shuffles in, says hello, and tells Phoebe she’s gorgeous. “So everyone still talks about the yogurt commercials.” Evie’s mother can’t stop staring at Phoebe’s boobs. “What are you doing next?”

  Wanna hold it? Sweet, sweet girl. Rock and roll, right? You should be an escort.

  Phoebe forces a smile. “I’ve got a lot of balls in the air.”

  * * *

  By the time Phoebe parks her father’s sedan in a downtown garage and she and Evie walk three blocks to the restaurant, they’re late, and Nicole is already at a banquette in the back (apparently this hostess doesn’t know not to seat incomplete parties). In an Empire-line dress, Nicole does indeed look as though she might have eaten Dick Cheney, but other than the massive stomach, she’s the same elfin person she’s always been. She presses her lips into the same condescending look she’s always given—as usual, directed more toward Evie.

  “You live downtown.” Evie rolls her eyes, and they could be back at ETHS. “Pheebs and I had to trek all the way from Planet Evanston.”

  The once-and-future feeling continues as Evie picks a bottle of wine from the list, ignoring Nicole’s protest that she can’t drink. Someone orders an artichoke Parmesan dip that probably contains a week’s worth of fat. Phoebe doesn’t partake but keeps a tortilla chip in hand, lest Evie accuse her of being anorexic again.

  “Pheebs’s brother is bangin’ and in New York and she’s going to set us up.” Evie breaks a chip in half so she can double scoop.

  “For real?” Nicole bumps Evie’s shoulder. “You’d eat Chase alive in a week, E.”

  “Bitch,” Evie says, but she’s smirking, likes that they acknowledge she’s all steel and sharp points, the girl she always wanted to be back in high school.

  And really Nicole, too, is likely the kind of person she’d hoped to become. She may have graduated top of her class at University of Chicago Law, but the fact that she married Dave and is well on her way to leaving a job at the city’s top litigation firm to change diapers really wouldn’t shock anyone from school.

  “So who are you fucking these days?” Evie turns to Phoebe.

  “E!” Nicole says.

  “Come on, you want to know as badly as I do. You get off on our Sex and the City stories.”

  “I do.” Nicole smiles in a way that’s warm and inviting and makes Phoebe want to hop a plane back to her dysfunctional Southern California life as soon as possible. “Are you dating anyone famous, Pheebs?”

  “It’s not like that,” Phoebe says, but because Nicole looks thoroughly disappointed and is growing a human being, she adds, “Jake James bought me a glass of champagne the other day.”

  “No!” Nicole.

  “The good stuff?” Evie.

  “Cristal.” Phoebe allows herself a grin.

  “We should get champagne.” Evie flags down a waiter as Nicole explains, again, pregnant women can’t have alcohol.

  Evie and Phoebe are finishing off a bottle of sparkling wine that’s decidedly not Cristal when Dave arrives to take Nicole home. In the years since the wedding, he’s chunked up considerably and has to be the only twenty-six-year-old in the Chicagoland area with a receding hairline; by the time he’s a doctor, he’ll be completely bald.

  Hugging Phoebe and Evie, Dave sighs as if genuinely content. “It’s good to see the witches of Evanston together again,” he says.

  Maybe it’s the half bottle of not-Cristal, but Phoebe’s choked up as she watches Dave help Nicole into her coat. And she wonders what would have happened if she hadn’t stopped returning Oliver’s phone calls her first year in LA. Would her life mirror Nicole and Dave’s? Would she and Oliver have a town house in the up-and-coming West Loop?

  After Phoebe makes her post-meal bathroom trip, Evie suggests the two of them grab a drink at the Leg Room; it seems as good a plan as any. There’s a crowd of assholey-looking guys at the door, but the bouncer quickly ushers Phoebe and Evie through the velvet rope. Inside it’s not even crowded, and they commandeer a red velvet chaise longue, blow off more assholey guys, and sip martinis equally as overpriced as those in LA and Manhattan. Phoebe talks about her auditions, and Evie says she wants to move to California, handle PR for people who actually want to be famous instead of mopey emo musicians. “Of course I’ll give you a discount on my services,” she says, nudging her shoulder to Phoebe’s.

  “I still can’t afford you.”

  “It would be a really big dis—” Evie cocks her head toward a table in the corner. “Is that Braden Fucking Washington?”

  Still built like an underwear model, Braden it is, and Phoebe’s heart bounces in her chest. She’s here with Evie, so maybe …

  Then Oliver is next to her with different black glasses and the same strong jaw.

  “Hey, Phee,” he says. “Long time, no see.”

  Three hours later, Evie and Braden have split a cab home, the bartender has announced last call, and Phoebe and Oliver have told each other everything and nothing about their lives (Phoebe leaving out things like shagging Adam and bad bathroom romps with past-their-prime famous people).

  Oliver offers to drive her home, and she turns over the keys to her father’s car, despite being completely sober. Too soon, the ride ends, and she invites him in like she’s seventeen again.

  Leaving the lights off, she brings him upstairs to her old bedroom, hand in hand, and wiggles free of Gennifer’s puffy coat while trying not to abandon contact. The sun is already rising, so it’s bright enough that she can read a Post-it note on the nightstand in Chase’s aggressive handwriting: Adam called twice, said to call back when you get in. She sets Oliver’s leather jacket directly on top of the message, and they sit on the canopy bed she’d wanted so badly as a child.

  In hushed voices, they talk more about everything and nothing until they stop, and he takes off his glasses.

  “I don’t know what to say, Ollie,” she begins as he leans in to kiss her. “Something happened, and after a while, I thought you would hate me.”

  “Shhhh.” He runs a finger along her throat. “Things happen; I could never hate you.”

  That is another bet she probably shouldn’t take.

  Phoebe finds herself on her back as Oliver Ryan unzips her dress for the first time in years. He dusts her neck with his lips, presses his legs against hers. She wonders if he’ll say anything about her im
plants, but he doesn’t. Licks each breast, wanders down her belly. Moves he didn’t have when they were both virgins. With an irrational sting of jealousy, she wonders who taught him. When they’re through, he covers her like a blanket, and she strokes his shoulder blades until she realizes he’s asleep.

  Maybe they wouldn’t have been exactly like Nicole and Dave but perhaps like some other kind of couple who successfully transitioned from children to adults? There’s a good chance Oliver would have transferred from Northwestern to UCLA or Cal Tech if she’d asked, if she’d returned his calls.

  But she hadn’t. Not when he left messages straining so hard to sound like his world wasn’t splintering glass because she wasn’t calling him back. Not when she finally changed her number so she wouldn’t hear his voice on the machine on those evenings she’d come home feeling like used Kleenex after dates with those not so fundamentally decent men, or from auditions that weren’t really auditions but men wafting promises in front of her in exchange for something else. Not when she came home drunk and sore, a wad of cash in her clutch making her wonder if she’d accidentally changed careers. On that night, she’d taken a pen and written Oliver’s phone number on the underside of her wrist—like the numbers tattooed on her grandfather at Buchenwald—traced them until the ink smeared, but she still didn’t call.

  It’s too warm in her bed, in Oliver’s arms, and she should call Adam back.

  Untangling herself, she goes downstairs, follows faint TV voices to the den where Sharon is on the couch. There’s a stack of computer printouts on her lap—most likely her novel set in “adorable” Chicago.

  “Jet-lagged, too?” Phoebe asks.

  “Not really.” Sharon politely sets the papers aside. “I get my best work done at night.”

  She’s wearing a pair of Chase’s boxers and one of his Mr. Bubble T-shirts (a few must have survived her brother’s Manhattan makeover). The heels are gone, and Sharon looks young and dopey in owl-like glasses that keep sliding down her nose. In a brief glance at Sharon’s work, Phoebe spots two typos, which is inherently endearing. Phoebe can imagine her all-grown-up brother with this person, reading the paper or shouting out The Price Is Right answers like he used to do with Phoebe on snow days.

  Sitting in the love seat, Phoebe gestures to the TV, where the same loop of never-ending election footage is still running. “What did I miss?”

  “They’re halting the Miami recount and something about dimpled chads. Oh yeah, and Dick Cheney had another heart attack.”

  “Good to know.”

  The images on screen change to Al and Tipper Gore alongside Bill and Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention.

  “It’s funny the way that Tipper and Al are so ridiculously gaga about each other.” Sharon pushes the glasses back up. “It’s like the opposite of the Clintons. Like, he might make a crappy president, but I guarantee you, if Gore pulls this thing off, we won’t have another Monica incident. That man adores his wife.”

  It occurs to Phoebe that the reason she stopped returning Oliver’s calls wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She had. Loved that he knew how cameras and engines worked, the way he shoved his hands in his pockets when he was nervous, loved the splattering of freckles on his chest and the copper curls of his pubic hair. It was simply that she had also loved the promise of a different life, and it had seemed impossible that the two worlds could work together—incongruous to imagine coming home to Oliver after flirting (sometimes more than flirting) with casting directors for one-line parts or selling some form of sex at the restaurant. Impossible because she was no longer the girl who Oliver helped with physics, and she hadn’t wanted him to discover that.

  Adam, though, he understands those things. Understands her not really eating dinner to save the calories for alcohol or spending a year’s worth of tips on breast augmentation. Understands dyeing her hair or learning Latin phrases for a part she’s got no shot at but wants so bad she can feel it in the back of her throat. Adam knows what it’s like to be told “no” so many times that the word becomes meaningless background noise—the whoosh of traffic from the 405.

  “Honestly.” Sharon is still talking. “Hillary will quietly leave Bill the minute he’s out of office.”

  “No, she won’t,” Phoebe says with more force than intended. “He could screw a dozen more interns and she would stay.”

  Sharon looks at her with those killer eyes wide. “Why?”

  Phoebe smiles, on sure footing for the first time in weeks. “She won’t ever leave because she believes in him.”

  3 history of flight

  It’s after noon on Thanksgiving Day by the time Phoebe Fisher pulls into your driveway. Killing the engine of her father’s car, Phoebe smiles at you not unlike the way she used to smile at you in high school—when you loved her so much it actually felt like an anvil on your chest when you had to go home (to this very same house) for the night.

  “Ollie,” she says.

  “Phee.”

  And then you both laugh at the weird time warp you’ve tripped into.

  “So yeah, I leave on Sunday,” she says.

  Even though that’s three days away, you’re fairly certain that the time warp ends here, that you won’t be seeing her again this trip, maybe this decade.

  Kissing her cheek, you tell her how glad you are to have run into her at the bar, and she says the same.

  “Well, you know where to find me,” she says, though that hasn’t been the case for so very long. You were the one who was always easy to access, the one who stayed. For seven years you didn’t know where to find her, and for a while you’d thought that might just kill you.

  But seven years is a long time, and all of that hurt has eroded, so you don’t call her on the irony; you simply nod.

  You start to open the passenger side door, and she takes your hand briefly, smiles again, and lets it go. “Ollie, don’t you ever get tired of that gray Chicago sky?”

  Sure, you’ve seen other skies—visiting your mother’s family in the east, a handful of trips to see Braden in Boulder, the one time you made it out to your sister’s place in Salt Lake City. And of course, you spent a summer under Phoebe’s California sky, the one all the songs are written about—but this has always been your home. Everyone else in your life had their various flight patterns in and out of Chicago, sometimes only leaving. Always, you stayed. And something about Phoebe’s question ignites a small flame of anger and makes your whole interaction last night less bittersweet and more bitter.

  Shaking your head, you open the door, tell her, “Take care of yourself, Phoebe.”

  * * *

  Your father:

  It can probably all be traced back to your father. Really, to the plane when you were seven.

  Your dad was never around much—first as an Air Force captain, then as a pilot for United—and you used to think of him as a sort of superhero, zipping about the globe to save the world like Batman in the Bat-plane. Wherever he went, he brought you back T-shirts, wood toys, and snow globes, all obviously picked up last minute at some airport gift shop. This only strengthened the image of him trying to maintain his alter ego. When he was in town, he’d tussle your red hair, call you “champ.”

  But the day he took you up in his buddy’s Piper Saratoga—a similar model to the one JFK Jr. would crash into the Atlantic eighteen years later—was the day everything changed.

  “You’re going to love this, Ollie,” your father had said, taking your hand and leading you to the hangar. “It’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

  For him it probably was. Your father was one of the world’s few happy people who decide early in life what they want to do and actually go on to do it. It would be eleven years before you met Phoebe Fisher, ran your fingers down the inside of her thighs, and realized what the greatest feeling in the world really was.

  “Are you excited?” your father asked, strapping you into the copilot seat.

  You’d flown with your mother a
nd sister to visit various relatives, and you hadn’t liked it, but you knew the answer to your father’s question was an enthusiastic “yes.” Your mother hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer at that point, but your father had given up on her and your older sister years before because they didn’t love the sky the way he did. So you smiled against the whirling of the engine as the plane began its furious race on the runway, but at your sides, where your father couldn’t see, you dug fingernails into the flesh of your palms, leaving half-moon indentations in your lifelines.

  “This is it,” your father said with finality as the plane broke through low clouds of thinly stretched cotton. “It’s like birth, like being born.”

  Trying to hide your fear, you nodded. If he was Batman, maybe you could be his Robin.

  “Come on, champ.” Your father offered the controls, as if bestowing a great gift. “Give it a go.”

  Tentatively, you took the yoke, a strange W-shaped interface that felt far too cheap and plastic to have any real impact on your defiance of gravity. A bright kid, you suspected your father probably wasn’t giving you a grave responsibility (seven-year-olds, you knew, were rarely placed in positions of grave responsibility). You figured it must have been like the old-fashioned cars you’d ridden in with Braden and his family the summer before at Great America, where there had been a steering wheel but the cars were on a track, their course determined without your actions. Still, you thought the plane began to plummet. Screaming, you threw your hands into the air like a girl, like your sister.

  Your father easily took back the controls.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, but after that he looked at you differently. You were not Robin to his Batman.

  He wouldn’t call you “champ” again for eleven years—not until your appendix ruptured and Phoebe Fisher and her father took you to Northwestern Memorial Hospital because your mother was dead, your sister was married in Utah, and your father was flying to Sydney and hadn’t thought to leave any contact numbers. Phoebe called the airline to track him down, and when he finally got back to Evanston, he hovered over your hospital bed, guilt wrinkling his forehead.