The Queen of Hearts

by Kimmery Martin

  Of course, this generally applied to minor dustups, not earth-shattering betrayals. But at the same time, there was so much more at stake here. I didn’t want to lose my best friend. I still loved her. And if you looked at this rationally, she’d surely canceled some of her debt with years of steady friendship: soldiering together through our careers, through raising our babies, through various social disasters, and all the other things for which you rely on your friends. Every time I needed her, she’d been there. I knew from the guilt emblazoned on her face that she felt as culpable as Nick—this wasn’t a case of unreciprocated pursuit on his part—but I hadn’t heard her side of things yet. Maybe she had an explanation.

  I hummed as I drove into the garage, moving quickly toward the elevators. I liked these elevators because they came equipped with a pleasant but bossy computerized female voice. “Don’t even think about getting on if there are more than ten riders,” cooed my elevator when the doors opened to admit me. “There’re only eight of us,” somebody hollered as I hesitated. Hurriedly, I tried to decide if a weight-challenged person near the back counted as one or two people.

  I rolled the dice. We made it up to the lobby, where I waved Drew’s work lanyard at a card reader. All the buildings in Charlotte’s uptown district connected via pedways, skybridges, and tunnels, making it easy to park for free in Drew’s building and hoof it over to the glitzy skyscraper housing the restaurant without ever setting foot outdoors.

  Just before leaving the house, I’d finally fessed up to Drew that tonight’s dinner qualified as more than a mundane social engagement. Somewhat surprisingly, he’d made it home in time for me to leave, although he wasn’t overwhelmed with excitement at me bailing on the freewheeling mayhem that passed for bedtime in our house.

  “You’re going where?” he said, his eyes drifting past me to our bed, where all four children had apparently decided to practice gymnastics.

  “Dinner with Emma,” I repeated, trying to look beguiling.

  Drew’s consternation grew. “Now?”

  “Yes. If that’s okay. It’s an emergency, actually.”

  “You have an emergency dinner at a swanky uptown restaurant with your best friend?”

  I grabbed Drew’s arm and dragged him into the master bathroom, shutting the door on the kids’ ruckus. Both of us relaxed. I met his eyes. “Emma and I had kind of a . . . falling-out,” I said. Drew started to say something, but I butted in. “More than just a fight.”

  “About what?”

  “About a guy.”

  Assuming there’d be more, Drew merely raised an eyebrow.

  “Right, then.” I took the plunge. “Do you remember me talking to a surgeon at the Arts Ball? I dated him once. His name’s Nick Xenokostas, but everyone called him X. He was not one of my better decisions.”

  “Why not?”

  Quick assessment: Drew’s countenance was peaceful. Forge ahead.

  “He was a monumental jackass, actually. It was against all the ethical admonitions of the medical school for us to date, at least while we were on the same rotation, since I was a student. He knew that, of course, and was constantly warning me not to tell anyone. But it wasn’t a deal breaker to me; I thought, why should the school control who I see romantically? It was a little bit exciting, even.”

  “Zadie the rogue.”

  I checked again. Instead of jealousy, Drew’s expression now reflected vague amusement.

  “Well. As it turned out, he was less concerned with people finding out about me because I was a student and more concerned with me finding out that he was also hooking up with another student at the same time. And also: he was married.”

  “Whoa.” Drew’s face finally relinquished its complacency and took on a more appropriate, repulsed look.

  “Wait. There’s more,” I said. “The other student was Emma.”

  Now he was truly shocked; his mouth opened in confusion. Eventually he sputtered, “I bet Emma kicked his ass when she found out.”

  “Not exactly. She knew the whole time. At least, she knew about me; neither of us knew he was married.”

  Drew processed this. “Holy shit,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry, honey.”

  “It was sordid and disturbing on many levels,” I admitted. “Lots of bad decisions on everyone’s part.”

  “You found out about Emma back then?”

  “No,” I said. “I found out about her at the Arts Ball.”

  As we say in the South, Drew hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday. It didn’t take an emotional genius to deduce from my tear-stained face and hysterical hiccupping on the ride home from the Arts Ball that something had gone awry. Both of us had had enough to drink that we Ubered home; the presence of the driver rendered me mute until we reached our house, where I’d fled to the bathtub. Drew asked me through the door if I wanted to talk, and I yelled that I didn’t.

  He nodded his head as he put it together, then folded me up in his arms.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I mean, I’m pissed, but it happened a long time ago, and Emma is a genuinely good person. It was totally out of character for her to do what she did. I’m going to let her grovel for a while, and then I’m going to forget about it.”

  Drew let me go and looked at me.

  “I don’t think I’d be able to do that,” he said.

  —

  I saw Emma before she saw me; she was already at our table, motioning to the sommelier for a glass of wine. Around her, the city twinkled through the glass walls of the restaurant. She sat with the pinched face and stooped shoulders of a much older woman, as if the ceaseless stress of the last few months had caused her body to turn in on itself.

  She stood when she caught sight of me, and she held out her hand in an oddly formal welcome. “You came,” she said.

  “Of course I came,” I said, wincing as I sat. Posset had embraced the farm-to-table craze a little too enthusiastically, settling on incongruous—and massively uncomfortable—rough-hewn log benches for seating.

  A waiter materialized and filled our water glasses; another set down a little amuse-bouche of savory phyllo and took our orders. Emma swirled her wine. Her expression changed from weariness into something carefully neutral. “I have to tell you something,” she said, her voice modulated.

  In the entire history of humanity, no good has ever come of the phrase “I have to tell you something.” Alarmed, I stabbed phyllo with too much force, causing it to violently hurl a little spray of cheese across the table. “Well, yeah. That’s why I’m here.”

  The murdered appetizer escaped Emma’s notice; she appeared to be pondering her approach. I waited.

  “There’s more than you know,” she said, adding, “About what happened with Nick.”

  Cautiously: “Okay.”

  “Zadie.” She set down her wineglass. “First, let me say, I’ll understand if you can’t forgive me. But I finally realized how selfish it is to keep hiding things from you. I want us to stay friends so badly it physically hurts, but I’ll never lie to you again.”

  “Ah.”

  “And I know you must wonder why I never confessed to you. It was an awful betrayal, but maybe you’d have forgiven me if I’d told you on my own. You’re so happy. You have the perfect all-American life: a doctor married to a banker; two beautiful girls, two handsome boys, and even a golden retriever. You’re so wholesome it’s nauseating.”

  “Thank you?”

  Emma cast her gaze to the heavens like she was looking for backup. Her eyes fluttered back down. “I’m jealous of you. I have always been jealous of you. It’s no excuse for what I did, but it is an explanation, or part of one.”

  I focused on my plate, then looked up. I couldn’t process what Emma was trying to say. “This is getting kind of concerning,” I said. “I feel like you’re about to lunge across the table and spear me wi
th your appetizer fork.”

  “If anyone gets speared with an appetizer fork, I promise it will be me.”

  “Whoa. Emma.”

  “No, no.” Emma, granite-faced, ignored my attempt at levity, but she did set down her fork. “You know, Zadie, you’ve always represented everything I wanted.”

  I considered this. “What do you want that you don’t have?”

  “It’s not that I’m not grateful for what I have. It’s hard to explain. It’s—” She looked away, taking in something I could not see. I waited.

  “I wanted to be normal,” she said finally. “I wanted people to like me without my having to try so hard.”

  “I don’t know what you m—”

  “You grew up in a regular home,” she said, so intently I startled. “You don’t know what it’s like to be different.”

  “Emma, my parents were liberal hippies in an area where a significant proportion of people still refer to the Civil War as the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’ I had to sew my own clothes! We ate hummus before that was a thing! I wouldn’t call my childhood exactly normal—”

  She held up a hand, stopping me. “My parents couldn’t read,” she said. “Until a library truck came to our county when I was eight, I barely knew there was an outside world.” The embarrassment in her eyes stilled me. “Everything you take for granted was foreign to me.”

  I’d been to Emma’s childhood home once, on a weekend road trip during college. We’d left Louisville and headed southeast on the back roads, passing acres of the black-fenced rolling hills of the grand horse farms outside Lexington. This was the land of the Bourbon Trail, of Keeneland, of artisanal pottery and bluegrass music, of prancing Thoroughbreds with velvety coats and impossibly delicate ankles, everything lush and beautiful and tidy.

  In the late morning, we got a flat tire. Apparently there was no pressing criminal action going down in Woodford County, because our breakdown was heralded by the arrival of no fewer than three police cars. The cops rolled up in sequence and swaggered out. Two of them changed our tire, oozing sweat and gallantry. The others lounged, chatting us up.

  We’d rolled to a clackety stop in front of an enormous wrought-iron gate, behind which an imposing structure was just visible. I don’t remember Emma talking much until a lull in the conversation, when she glanced behind her and said, “The people who live there must be very rich.”

  “Ay, yeah,” said a cop. He mentioned the name of the owner.

  “What a beautiful house,” said Emma, nodding toward the building behind us, with its spires and turrets and meticulously painted trim.

  The gun belts of the cops rattled, they laughed so hard.

  “That’s a barn, honey,” one said, not unkindly, but I saw Emma’s eyes gloss. After that she stayed quiet.

  We were headed to my house, an hour farther south in the foothills of the Appalachians, but our trip took a detour when we stopped for lunch. “Let’s go to your house,” I said impulsively. “You’ve been to mine a bunch.”

  “No,” she said flatly.

  “Why?” I said. “I want to meet your mom. And then we’ll head over to Falls Cove”—that was my family’s land—“in time for dinner.”

  Emma declined again, but I persisted. It was a gorgeous day. I wanted to go somewhere new and unknown and different; despite growing up in the country, I’d never been that far east into the wilderness of the state’s mountain ranges. And I wanted to see Emma’s house and meet her mother; it seemed weird that she knew my family so well but I’d never met hers.

  Emma’s mother was in her forties, but her face was the weathered crevasse of a much older woman. A pink space yawned in her mouth where her front teeth should have been. I tried to make my eyes look somewhere else when she welcomed us into the peeling pile of boards behind her.

  The floor, composed of some kind of rough-hewn knotholed gray wood, had nothing beneath it. No concrete, no insulation. Between gaps in the wood, I could see the ground a couple feet below, which was littered with stuff: tin cans, a shovel, something that looked like a rusty lawn mower engine. I was so fixated on the floor it was some moments before I noticed the interior surroundings. We stood in one of three rooms, all open to one another: a kitchen with a metal table; a tiny living area, dominated by an old boxy television; and a sleeping area with one double bed. I looked around again, but that was it. I could not imagine where Emma had slept growing up.

  I couldn’t remember much from the rest of the visit. Emma’s mother seldom spoke, but she was hospitable; she made us some corn bread in a skillet and insisted we take the last sodas from the short, round-edged refrigerator when we left. If she was baffled by the changes in her only child’s fortune, she didn’t show it. She hugged Emma fiercely, warmly, when we left, reaching up with a veiny, knobby hand to clasp the top of her much taller daughter’s head.

  I could not interpret Emma’s expression.

  —

  Now I flushed, seared by the memory. “I—I know how you grew up,” I said, uncertain how to reference the extreme poverty in which she’d been raised. “But look at you.”

  Emma cast her eyes down and started to say something. I could see right through her: a blast of confusion, a wave of self-loathing.

  “Don’t think that,” I blurted, momentarily forgetting the difficult circumstances between us. “I love you.”

  Suddenly I was very aware of the restaurant noises: tinkling glassware, murmured conversations, the swish of a swinging door between the diners and the kitchen. Emma’s eyes shone. “You did love me,” she said. “I should have given you more credit.”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Anyway,” she said, too brightly, “here we go. I’m confessing. And it’s okay; I am going to revel in the indescribable lightness of honesty, even if you decide you’re done with our friendship. I’ll accept whatever you decide, Zadie. I deserve it. When I saw your reaction to the picture of me and Nick, which was . . . not understated . . . it reminded me of what a monumental shithead I am.”

  “Well, I am a person who feels things keenly,” I said, relieved at her switch to a more conversational tone. “It’s possible I could even be described as a tad overdramatic.”

  Emma allowed herself a tight-lipped smile. “I’m aware of your tendency toward keen feelings and drama, since I’ve been your friend more than half my life. But you were entitled to that reaction. What I did to you was loathsome.”

  “Right, then.” I took the plunge. “Go ahead and lay it on me. What could possibly be worse than you having an affair with my boyfriend? My married boyfriend.”

  Emma shook her head. “He wasn’t married.”

  “I heard—”

  “I know what you heard. But that was actually just a rumor Nick started himself, to get some nurses off his back. He wasn’t married.”

  “When I went to his apartment the last time, his wife was there. I heard her.”

  Emma waited for it to dawn on me.

  “Wait. It was you? You were the one in his apartment when I went to confront him? He said it was his wife!”

  She shook her head again, a small, regretful gesture. “He didn’t say that. But he let you believe it because he thought it would hurt you less to think he was married than to know the truth. He was desperate that you not know.”

  She stopped and waited again, a patient kind of pain on her face. I mulled it over; then I gasped.

  “He was married to you?”

  Emma gasped back. “No!” she said. “Okay, so there was one calamity I managed to avoid. No.”

  “What, then?” I thought about it some more. I’d barged into Nick’s apartment one night after an ER shift; that rotation had been in the early winter. All of a sudden, it struck me.

  “Emma, that was way after Graham died. Why would y—”

  A torrent of epicurean babble inter
rupted me. “Who is the lucky recipient of the Capon Pistou with Ghee, Aubergine Confit, Wheat Berries, Dusting of Dulse, and Chervil, and who will be partaking of the Atlantic Croaker with Gambon, White Maripoix, Patato Saphron Rouille and Persillade?” Our server was a slender, energetic man with a robust mustache, who deflated slightly at our unenthusiastic response.

  “I have the fish?” Emma ventured.

  “Tremendous!” The waiter recovered, beaming, and handed her a cutting board with some unidentifiable food heaped on top. “And you, ma’am, must be having the capon.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, adding, “What exactly is a capon?”

  “Well, ma’am,” the waiter said pleasantly, “I believe it is a castrated rooster.”

  “Oh, excellent,” I said, nodding knowledgeably.

  I stared at the plate as the server pranced away. The capon was excellent, actually, and also provided a nice respite from the grim tale of yore; we were both quiet for a moment as we ate.

  “How’s the castrated rooster?” Emma finally asked.

  “Delicious,” I answered, “although I’ll confess to a moment of doubt.”

  The silence returned.

  “I know what you’re trying to tell me,” I eventually mumbled through a mouthful of neutered fowl. “You kept seeing Nick, even after Graham died. You didn’t stop, even when you knew it had killed him.”

  Emma’s eyes were far away. “That’s true,” she said.

  “How could you?”

  She hung her head, pushing her still-full plate away too. “I tried to quit,” she said softly. “I did, for a while. But something rotten inside me kept pulling me back. It would build and build until I couldn’t stand it anymore. There was nothing pleasurable or happy about seeing him; it was more like the urge to rip off a scab, or that perverse impulse you get to jump when you’re standing near a cliff. I would lock myself in the bathroom when you weren’t home and scream until I lost my voice trying to stop myself from doing it. And then I’d do it anyway.”