“I hope you get kidnapped by aliens,” she told him.
“Maybe I already have,” said Adam.
“Good—more room to stretch out in bed,” said Wendy, who both cherished her husband’s sense of humor and also wished that, if only once in a while, he’d give a straight answer, however stupid the question was.
The majority of Wendy’s friends had stopped eating muffins years earlier, after New York magazine ran a damning exposé revealing that they were nothing more than glorified cake and possibly even more caloric. Preferring denial, Wendy devoured a corn muffin and lentil soup with the conviction that she was eating a healthy lunch. Then she headed over to Zara to check out the sale racks.
She returned to the office an hour and twenty minutes later with a top she realized retroactively was made of cheap fabric, was a shade of green best described as “broccoli,” and was already missing a button. On the other hand, it had been marked 70 percent off. And the only thing Wendy hated more than missing a sale was getting ripped off. (To her lingering resentment, Barricade’s copy chief, Hal Mooney, had surprised her on her thirty-fourth birthday the year before with a pizza party in the conference room, then asked her for a twenty to help cover costs.)
After stuffing her shopping bag in the bottom drawer of her desk—there was always the chance that Lincoln would come calling again—Wendy checked her in-box. To her surprise, there was still no word from Daphne. Surely by now the Klonopin had worn off, Wendy thought. And though Daphne had no job, she owned a BlackBerry and was therefore never far from email (and rarely missed an opportunity to write back, especially when the subject was herself ). Maybe she was simply feeling too numb to express the humility and renewed vigor that were expected in scenarios such as these, Wendy reasoned. Or maybe she’d gone in for a special “double session” with Carol. Armed with these two possibilities, Wendy reopened Leslie Fletcher’s Medicare editorial and attempted to apply herself to her job.
But her mind kept straying from the villainy of health maintenance organizations to the mystery of Daphne’s whereabouts. At four o’clock, an email arrived from Wendy’s insanely thin perpetual grad student friend Maura. It came as a welcome distraction from both topics:
W, Will you forgive me if I cancel drinks tonight? Just totally wiped out from the weekend. (Have been working like a dog. Or is it a mule?) Anyway, am finally seeing the end of the diss. Am thinking now that I might be able to finish by next summer, or, if not next summer, definitely next fall/winter/spring. (We’ll see.) But can we reschedule for next week? Promise to get to some kind of stopping point by then. Sorry again, M
Wendy was disappointed if not surprised. Whenever she made plans with Maura, she assumed there was a fifty-fifty chance of Maura’s canceling. This was because although Maura had the least taxing schedule of any woman Wendy knew (with the possible exception of Daphne), she apparently found her days to be stressful and action packed in a way that only an unstructured life of relative idleness could seem. Maura had been about to finish her dissertation—on the role of jugglers in the Scottish Enlightenment—for at least ten years. However it was that Maura actually spent her days—dotting and undotting i’s?—it didn’t apparently involve eating. Wendy had never seen her consume anything more than a handful of nuts off the bar. The few times she’d invited Maura out to dinner, Maura always claimed to have dined at home. So Wendy had learned to ask her out only for drinks, though she sometimes refused those, too. How was it possible that the most unstable person Wendy knew (again, with the exception of Daphne) was also the only one ever to have been released by her therapist in less than a decade, Maura’s therapist reputedly having told Maura that they had “nothing more to discuss” and that their “work [was] complete”? Wendy’s hypothesis was that Maura’s therapist had simply lost patience and/or decided that Maura was too far gone to be helped.
Wendy wrote back:
Dear “Professor McLane,”
Bummed you can’t make it tonight! But very exciting that you can finally see the finish line. (Keep up the good work.) And don’t worry about tonight. I’m pretty beat, anyway. Up late last night dealing with Daphne. (Don’t ask.) Let’s talk next week?
Luv, W
Caffeine, Wendy thought. She strode the necessary twenty steps to Barricade’s decrepit kitchenette, where she ran into Lois Smith, the magazine’s octogenarian receptionist, dressed in a purple muumuu and brown suede Birkenstocks in which her unaccountably bare and shockingly bulbous toes shone a frightening shade of deep purple. Lois had been a major player in the Adlai Stevenson campaign in 1956. She was also senile and often forgot whom she was putting calls through to. She sometimes forgot their names, as well. “Hello, Wilma,” she greeted Wendy.
“Hi, Lois,” said Wendy, lacking the energy to correct her (and also fearful that Lois might be offended if reminded of the fact that she’d essentially lost her mind). “How are you?”
“Troubled, my dear,” said Lois, pressing down on her cane as she made her way to the sink with an ancient-looking Tupperware vat that bore the traces of a surfeit of mayonnaise. “America shouldn’t be fighting France’s colonial wars.”
“Very true,” said Wendy, nodding.
Returning to her cubicle with a lukewarm cup of Lipton—the coffee machine had been broken for two months and the office manager laid off—Wendy was amazed and alarmed to discover that it was already three thirty. Was it possible that she was still on page two of Leslie Fletcher’s Medicare editorial? Guilt-ridden, she turned off her Internet connection.
At four thirty, feeling cut off from the world, she turned it back on. She had no new email. Yet again, she called Daphne. Both lines still rang straight to voice mail. She checked the headlines. Then she checked a Web site devoted to celebrity baby making, where she learned that Gwyneth Paltrow was pregnant with a second child. Though Wendy’s life bore as much resemblance to Gwyneth’s as a chimpanzee’s did, her mood quickly soured. In search of a distraction from her distraction, she called up the secondhand furniture listings on Craigslist, where she conducted a search for a new (old) dining room table, preferably with built-in leaves. Wendy and Adam’s apartment didn’t have a separate dining room, but she figured they could always push a larger table against the wall of the living room when it wasn’t in use. Moreover, although Wendy was a horrible cook and rarely entertained, her self-image rested in no small measure on seeing herself as the kind of person who threw raucous dinner parties complete with meaty stews in giant Le Creuset pots and bawdy banter about what ever happened to Monica Lewinsky and her blue dress.…
Somehow, it had become six o’clock. Wendy checked her email a final time. A freelance war zone journalist currently residing in Iraq had written to propose an article on the epidemic of “plastic bags caught in trees” along the streets of Baghdad. Wendy figured the guy was drunk. That or he was suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. Either way, she decided to deal with his email tomorrow.
She figured she’d finish editing Leslie Fletcher’s Medicare editorial the next morning as well. She was tired and hungry. And Lincoln had already left the office for his weekly water-color class at the New School. After shutting down her computer and gathering together her belongings, Wendy called Daphne a final time.
A recorded message announced, “Mailbox full.”
Wendy’s mind began to race. What if this one time Daphne had actually made good on her threats? (What if she’d really lit herself on fire or, more realistically, swallowed the whole bottle of Klonopin?) Only, the bottle must have been almost empty, since she’d alluded to needing a new prescription. But even if she’d had only a week’s supply left, there could be trouble. As Wendy considered the nonchalance with which she’d parried Daphne’s earlier claims, she envisioned her old friend lying in a pool of vomit on the black-and-white-checkered floor of her bathroom.
Just as quickly, she pushed the picture away, telling herself it was ghoulish and absurd to imagine such things. Everyone agre
ed that Daphne was, above all, a top-notch actress. At the same time, Wendy knew she’d never forgive herself if something had happened to Daphne and she hadn’t gone to check on her. Wendy couldn’t bear the idea of Paige getting there first, either.
Daphne was the last of Wendy’s friends to live in Manhattan. The rest had joined the exodus to Brooklyn—Sara to Dean Street in Boerum Hill; Gretchen to Kane in Cobble Hill; Pamela to the North Slope; Paige to tony Columbia Heights, overlooking the Promenade, in Brooklyn Heights; and Maura to the more-coming-than-up area around the still-polluted Gowanus Canal.
Since her late twenties, Daphne had lived in the pied-à-terre that her parents had purchased twenty years earlier on East 36th Street, near Second Avenue. The bedroom was small, the living room was a little dark, the ceilings were lower than you’d think they’d be in a prewar building. Plus, the block was permanently congested with traffic vying for entry into the Queens Midtown Tunnel. But it was more or less her own. And it had always secretly irked Wendy that while she and Adam struggled to pay the ever-increasing rent on their attic floor-through in an undistinguished brick row house on the southern edge of Park Slope, Daphne had to contend each month with only a modest maintenance fee.
Wendy had been there to visit so many times before that the doorman waved her through without making any attempt to announce her arrival. “Is she up there?” she asked, mostly to be polite, while skirting the rubber plant, Barcelona table, and chrome-and-black-leather Brno tube chairs that comprised the lobby decor.
“Haven’t seen her since yesterday,” he replied, unintentionally fueling her fantasies.
Wendy stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the ninth floor. As the numbers lit up one after the other, she found her mind returning to the image she’d conjured before she left the office—of Daphne sprawled on the floor in a pill-induced stupor. The elevator shuddered to a stop, then opened onto the dimly lit mauve hallway that Wendy knew so well. She walked ten steps to the right, pressed Daphne’s buzzer, and waited.
There was no immediate answer. Fifteen seconds went by, then thirty. Maybe Daphne was asleep. Or maybe she’d slipped out for an emergency pack of cigarettes while the doorman was in the restroom. But what were the chances of that? Daphne had officially quit smoking two years ago. Which was to say that, like Wendy and everyone else she knew, Daphne now limited her cigarette intake to infrequent “borrowings” from other people’s packs. As Wendy buzzed again, she felt her heartbeat accelerating.
After another ten seconds went by without an answer, a surge of panic climbed the length of her chest, clamping down on her lungs and threatening to close her throat. It was a physiological reaction she still associated with certain traumatic childhood incidents—getting locked in her great-aunt’s bathroom in Wilmington, Delaware, with the wallpaper featuring Victorian corset advertisements, getting separated from her mother at a carnival in the Adirondacks near Lake George. She could still remember how the tinny tunes emanating from the arcade game booths seemed to mock her abject terror, how the circling lights of the Ferris wheel mimicked her spinning head. “Daphne, it’s me—Wendy,” she called out, her face leaning into the crack between the door and the wall. Still, there was no response. “Daphne!” she called again, louder this time. “Please!”
Suddenly there was movement. Rustling. Footsteps. The clinking of a chain. The door cracked open, revealing a bare leg and a flushed cheek, followed by Daphne’s short silk bathrobe with the Japanese leaf pattern. “Daphne!” Wendy cried again, this time with relief. She felt her breath returning to her, the world coming back into focus. (It was one thing to love stories and scandals—another to wish to be among their leading characters.)
“Wendy.” Daphne spoke in a squeak. “What are you doing here?” Her cornflower blue eyes were popping and blinking. Her upper lashes were dotted with what appeared to be clumps of yesterday’s mascara. A single silken head hair had become affixed to her cheek, its tip flirting with the corner of her mouth. Wendy also couldn’t help but notice that even in disarray, Daphne looked beautiful—like some kind of French film star, with her pillowy lips, her gazelle’s neck, her almost marmoreal skin. (She had only one visible flaw: a barely perceptible scar that started at the left corner of her mouth and zigzagged down the side of her chin like a tributary to a great lake, the remnant of a childhood accident involving a diving board. Maybe Wendy was the only one who’d ever noticed.)
“I was—I was worried about you,” Wendy stammered. “I mean, is everything okay?” She couldn’t tell if Daphne was happy to see her or not. And the not knowing unnerved her. She felt as if she’d missed some essential plot point, had accidentally skipped ahead to chapter seven without first understanding chapter six.
“You’re sweet to check on me,” Daphne answered with a shy smile. But her eyes fell to the floor as she spoke. And she still hadn’t opened the door to its full capacity. That was when Wendy caught sight of him: a half-dressed man with a tangled mat of salt-and-pepper chest hair, taking a seat on Daphne’s sofa. He had a television remote in one hand and a glass of something cold in the other. “I’m just having a little talk with Mitch,” Daphne mumbled at the carpet, her shoulders hunched around her breasts, as the petals of a tulip close in around the stamen during bad weather.
Anger instantly displaced anxiety in Wendy’s mind. She was furious at Daphne for making her worry for no reason. She was furious at herself, too, for being such a fool: she should have known that Daphne would be back with the guy the next night. Wendy supposed she ought to be relieved as well to find that Daphne was okay, insofar as having Mitch back in her bed was Daphne’s version of okay. Only, how could Wendy feel relieved when she felt so stupid? So duped? So unwelcome? So convinced that the man was ruining Daphne’s life? “Sorry—I didn’t mean to disturb you guys.” Wendy unleashed a bitter laugh as she began to back away from the door, her right palm raised.
“No—I’m sorry,” said Daphne. “I shouldn’t have called you last night when I was upset. It was selfish—”
“Everything okay out there?” It was Mitchell Kroker Reporting Live from the Sofa.
“Everything’s fine,” Daphne called back to him, frantically whipping her head around to face her lover. Then she whipped it back to face Wendy. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said with a cringing expression. “But it’s not like that.”
But now Wendy felt like the humiliated one. It was bad enough to be exposed for a worrywart and a fool, but to be placed in the role of moral authority was even worse. It made Wendy feel as if she were overinvested in Daphne’s life, and as if she didn’t have one of her own. It also reminded Wendy of the way things had been in college, back when her main identity had been Daphne Uberoff’s Best Friend. At least, that had been her secret fear. “I don’t care what it’s like!” Wendy cried. “It’s your life. Just do me a favor, and next time you’re feeling suicidal at one AM, don’t wake me up to tell me you’re going to kill yourself and then not answer your phone for the next eighteen hours. Anyway. Whatever.” She laughed again. “Good luck working things out with Mitch.” She turned her back and started down the hall.
“Wendy!” Daphne called after her. “Please. I’m really sorry.…”
But Wendy kept walking, didn’t answer, didn’t know when she would. She and Daphne had had fights before. Or, rather, Wendy had got mad at Daphne. That was the usual pattern. It was built into their relationship that Daphne was the vaporous, unstable, self-absorbed, inconsiderate one, while Wendy was the consistent, solid, better friend. But within forty-eight hours, she always forgave and forgot. Some part of her was probably still flattered by the fact of her and Daphne’s friendship—felt it made her more exciting where she’d always feared to be dull, effortless where she’d always imagined herself to be plodding. Another part probably felt guilty that she was happily coupled and Daphne not. (It made the universe seem upside down.) Then there was Daphne’s difficult family situation back home in Michigan. Wendy felt bad f
or her about that, too.
Besides, who doesn’t secretly love just a little bit more than usual the “best friend” who’s busy fucking up her life for no apparent reason, especially when that “best friend” used to have it better than you?
But in that moment, Wendy found her supplies of sympathy, sycophancy, and schadenfreude all used up. Next time the phone rang after midnight with tales of heartsickness and neglect, she’d let it ring, she told herself. (Next time, she’d be too busy having sex with her husband.) And why hadn’t she been the night before? That was the part that humiliated Wendy the most—that she’d been so desperate to take Daphne’s call. To Wendy’s relief, the elevator was still on the ninth floor. She got in without looking back.
2.
WENDY HAD NO memory of actually meeting Daphne—maybe because from the moment they met, it was as if they’d always known each other; they were already, instantly best friends, holding hands on their way to class, Wendy in her “uniform” of ripped Levi’s and a black leather jacket, Daphne in red lipstick and clacking heels, her shiny black hair parted on the side and hanging over one eye, her pterodactyl fingers festooned with cocktail rings. She saw herself as some combination of the fictional character Holly Golightly and the forties film star Veronica Lake. She was frequently in tears. She laughed a lot, too. Daily life presented itself to Daphne, in turn, as a Puccini opera and some hilarious inside joke. There were always boys, later men, one after another, sometimes at the same time. “Josh will kill me if I sleep with Eduard,” she complained to Wendy one brisk March afternoon of their sophomore year, her eyes narrowed to convey the difficulty and complexity of the situation in which she found herself. “But I’m also really attracted to him. And I don’t know what to do. Will you come with me to his place tonight?”
“He’s your friend!” protested Wendy, wary of looking like a tagalong.
“But his roommate, Boaz, will be there, too.”
I'm So Happy for You Page 3
