Bad Habits

by Amy Gentry

  No wonder she held so much “influence” with the Joyner Fellowship committee. It wasn’t a thank-you for her ex-husband’s loyalty. She had been blackmailing Joyner for years.

  It fell into place. When Bethany had first arrived at DHU, Emerging Studies only existed as an interdisciplinary degree, not a full department. But within a few years of her arrival, the Joyner Foundation came into existence, offering a fellowship so extravagant for the humanities that the academic community sat up and took notice. The university had acquired its reputation in those early years, as rising superstar Bethany Ladd’s students won the award year after year, forging connections between DHU and prominent European institutions that reinforced the department’s cachet.

  Bethany Ladd had done more than put the Program on the map. She had built it from the ground up, her very own house of cards. An intellectual pyramid scheme.

  If only I could find something that linked Bethany directly to the foundation, not just to Joyner. I kept digging. But before I could get through it all, headlights slid along the wall. A quick glance confirmed that Bethany’s car had pulled up outside.

  Panicked, I looked at my phone. She must have left the reception early. I cursed myself for having stopped to look instead of just grabbing the documents. I emptied them into my bag and slid the empty folder back under the bed. Maybe I could still get out with them, if I could fool her into believing I was there for her. I shed my coat and sat on the bed, trying to look as if I’d been waiting, while the door opened below.

  “Bethany?” I called into the darkness after a moment of silence. “Is that you?”

  She appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Hello, Beauty Queen.”

  I made an effort to smile, painfully aware that Bethany had always been able to see right through me. “I used the key. I was going to surprise you.”

  “It’s certainly a surprise,” she said mildly.

  “I—​I wanted to apologize.” I put on a serious expression. “I didn’t mean to bail on you last Friday. I was just overwhelmed by the news about Bird and I needed some time to process.” Was my voice shaking? I forced myself to stand up and close the distance between us by a few steps.

  She regarded me coldly. “I saw you at the service earlier.”

  I stopped in my tracks.

  “I was disappointed that you didn’t come to the reception afterward,” she went on. “That’s why, when I got an alert that someone was in the farmhouse, I hurried up here. I was so hoping it would be you.”

  “Alert?”

  She held up her phone. “My trusty security app.”

  Of course. The electronic key, the light system.

  “This place is so isolated. I like to keep track of comings and goings. I would hate to come out here to write on some lonely night and surprise a thief.”

  My face went hot. She was not fooled for a second. “I was just about to message you to come join me,” I said lamely.

  “You were taking your sweet time about it.”

  I stammered. “I thought you might be mad after the other night. I—​I was thinking of ways to make it up to you. I’ll be your research assistant. Anything you need.” I tried to add a note of flirtation, but the effect sounded desperate even to my ears.

  “What’s that sticking out of your bag?” She gestured to a corner of paper and said in a mocking tone, “Don’t tell me you brought your proposal to work on at last.”

  The mention of the Joyner, intended to humiliate me, gave me a backbone instead.

  “As a matter of fact, I finished it. All I had to do was get away from you.”

  As if she hadn’t even heard the second part, she dropped the smirk and said, with genuine excitement, “Mac, that’s wonderful! Let’s take a look.”

  She stretched out her hand, but I stepped in front of my bag.

  “Why bother? You don’t need to see it. I’ve seen your letter for Gwen. You pick who you want. ‘The best fit.’ ” I laughed. “The Joyner isn’t really the Joyner at all, is it? It’s the Bethany Ladd. Or, to be more accurate, the Elizabeth Armstrong.”

  The lines at the corners of her mouth deepened by perhaps a fraction of a millimeter. After a brief pause, she said, “Can you expand on that remark?”

  “You would know more than I would about the details. All I know is you’re blackmailing Joyner, and screwing the rest of us.”

  Her lips folded tight, she gave me a long look, as if she were reading me, gauging my readiness for something. Nothing I ever said or did seemed to surprise her. It enraged me.

  “Don’t you have anything to say?” I spat. “This game you’ve been playing—​jerking me around, making a show of being scared you’d lose to Rocky, pitting me against Gwen and then turning around and handing the Joyner to her. What was it all for, Bethany? Does the power turn you on?”

  She heaved a deep, weary sigh. “You really should have come to me with that letter, Mac. I could have given you the answers you’re looking for.”

  “I don’t want answers, Bethany. The only thing I want from you—​the only thing I’ve ever wanted—​is the Joyner.”

  “That’s really all?” She looked a little sad.

  “And if I don’t get it, I’ll go to the department, the press, and the police with what I know.”

  She walked past me and set her laptop bag on the desk as if it had suddenly become unbearably heavy. “Nice to see you back in the game, Mac.”

  I ignored her. “What I can’t understand is, why the elaborate system? Why not just take the payoff for yourself?”

  She shook her head. “Of course, you don’t understand. You think everything is about money. There are other things.”

  “I’ve heard that one before,” I said. “So, tell me what’s so much more important to you than money. It’s not justice, obviously, or else you’d have turned in the evidence against Joyner instead of keeping it for your own personal use.”

  “Is safety a good enough reason for you?” she snapped. “I did my part for justice, Mac. I helped the Feds put my ex-husband away. He was out in less than two years—​pissed off, no doubt, at his bitch of an ex-wife. Can you blame me for holding back a little something for myself, to safeguard against catastrophe? What would you do to guarantee no one could take away the life you earned for yourself?”

  “I—”

  “You think you’re not ruthless? You’re just a hard worker? ” She threw it in my face like an insult. “Wait until you’ve really achieved something. Wait until you have something to lose. Then you’ll see how ruthless you can be.”

  “You don’t know what I’ll do. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know everything about you.”

  “Just because you read one essay—”

  “I was you, Mac!” she exploded. “You think I came from money? I was a high school dropout from the Florida Panhandle when I met Peter. I flunked the temp agency test three times before they sent me to answer phones at Peter’s rinky-dink real estate office in Tampa. Nobody’d ever called me smart or pretty before Peter.” She cast me a sharp look. “How old were you, Mac, when you first learned you weren’t worthless? Who told you?”

  I looked away. Of course, she knew it was Gwen.

  “Peter was no mastermind. He was lousy at everything, even real estate.” She laughed. “What he really excelled at was the good life. Looking like he had it, and making other people want it. I was part of that, his perfect wife. He taught me how to dress, what to order at dinner, and how to say as little as possible to cover up the fact that I was still a stupid hick underneath.”

  I’d never seen Bethany like this. When she had opened up to me the night at the hotel, she had seemed in control. Now the memory seemed to be fighting its way out of her.

  “He met Joyner on the Florida links, and when we moved to New York, he started working Joyner’s connections, passing himself off as a real estate genius at a time when everyone was investing in real estate. But in a Ponzi
scheme, you have to keep roping in more and more marks, and that means more chances for something to go wrong. You have to woo new investors, keep the old ones from pulling out their money, and act like you haven’t got a care in the world. Golf all day, dinners and openings and parties all night. His concentration started to slip. He left me at home a lot. I got my GED. One day I surprised him with the news that I was going to CUNY. I thought he’d be pleased, his hayseed wife going to finishing school at last. That was the day I learned what Peter really was.”

  Sucked into her story, I had sat down on the bed without realizing it. “What . . . he was?”

  “Peter’s a sociopath,” she said matter-of-factly. “With everything else spinning out of control, my growing independence must have flipped some kind of switch for him.” She shuddered. “I think things might have gone very badly indeed if the fund hadn’t collapsed. He ran away. Thank god.”

  She leaned back on her desk, playing idly with the lamp switch.

  “I had no money—​all of his assets were frozen—​but I was good at something. I enrolled in CUNY under my maiden name and a variant on my first name. After that, Columbia. I was finishing my doctorate when the Feds tracked Peter down.” She flipped the lamp off, then on. “The minute I testified, I knew it was a mistake. A five-year sentence commuted to two, minus time served, was the sum total of his debt to society. With good behavior, he was in prison a grand total of eighteen months before popping out, good and mad.” She paused, as if weighing whether to say the next thing. “I was starting my first academic job by then at Penn. The night I found out, I slept with Rocky for the first time.”

  “He was your student.”

  She hopped off the desk. “He was old enough to make his own decisions. And it wasn’t all take. I helped him get a job so he wouldn’t have to go back to Ukraine.” She looked exhausted suddenly. “I earned my life, Mac. I went to Robert Joyner to secure it for myself, forever. I didn’t do it to hurt anyone.”

  I snorted. “You think you haven’t hurt people?”

  “There are always winners and losers. If we didn’t game the system, do you think people like you and me would ever win? Or would it all go to the Gwens of the world?”

  It was a thought I’d had a million times. Why did Gwen deserve the Joyner instead of me? Because she was perfect? I’d be perfect too, with her money. What was money if not just another word for gaming the system? Maybe that was what Bethany had meant by calling it a placeholder. Power, privilege, luck, even brains—​if you had enough of one, you could do without the rest. But money was the universal.

  Bethany stepped forward, and I stepped instinctively back.

  “I’ll give you the Joyner, dear, if it’ll make you happy. You don’t have to threaten me. And anyway”—​she pointed to my bag—​“you don’t have enough in there to prove anything. Just a cozy relationship between the university and an alumnus-run nonprofit. Trust me, it’s not the dirtiest money anyone’s seen, not by a long shot. Everyone prefers not to look too closely into these things.”

  “What about Rocky?”

  “Rocky was a mistake, made out of fear. I’m not scared anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you came back.” She put a hand on my cheek.

  “I didn’t come back for you.” I tried to move away, but her eyes wouldn’t let me.

  “Even better.” She pushed my hair back behind one ear, touching my earring. “We could be so good together, Mac—​the academic power couple Rocky and I never were. All I was waiting for was that proposal. Now I know you’re ready. You’re right, I don’t need to see it. I know it’s brilliant.” She leaned in and kissed me.

  I could taste her breath, bitter and salty, like olives, and all I could feel was chosen. That vertigo. Her hands slid under my sweater, and I yanked at my jeans as we stumbled to the bed, Bethany pulling me closer, choosing me, devouring me. She made her way down my body, past my navel, to the darkest part of me, her tongue lapping like warm black waves until the abyss became unbearable and I came like one of those last-minute slips on the way to sleep, a deep underwater swallow. Then I pulled myself upright and pushed her down under me.

  What felt like a long time later, we lay in our sweat, heads together and bodies splayed apart. One of my feet dangled over the side of the bed, and one of hers propped against the wall.

  “My Beauty Queen.” She sighed, and I could feel her head vibrate at the point where it touched mine, a single, hot point of contact the size of a dime.

  “Why do you always call me that?”

  Without looking, she reached a hand up and stroked my hair off my forehead dreamily. “Maybe I’m just jealous that you never had to feel ugly.”

  There was a pause while I processed this. Despite the swimminess of sex, my head felt clearer than it had for a long time.

  “You changed Rocky’s name, too, didn’t you? It was the same as Peter’s: Pyotr.”

  “A damn good reason, if you ask me.”

  “He said he got it playing soccer.”

  “Well, he could hardly say his adviser didn’t like screaming out her ex-husband’s name when they made love, could he?” She said it lightly but a bit testily.

  “You named him Rocky, because you felt weak. Just like you named me Beauty Queen, because you felt ugly.” I felt curiously detached, as if I had solved a puzzle. “You have a pattern.”

  “So I do.”

  She didn’t sound amused.

  “And Bird.”

  She sat up abruptly. “What about him?”

  “You named him that because you wanted to feel free.” For the first time since I’d started the Program, I could see the outlines of things again, crisp and sharp. “Is that all it means, ethical negation? Taking what you need from people, so that they’ll feel so empty inside, they’ll always need you back?”

  “Everyone feels empty inside, Mac. It doesn’t make you special.”

  “It doesn’t make me your plaything either.” I stood up.

  I knew I must be escaping her at last, because I could see the alarm on her face despite her efforts to compose it. “Besides, darling, you don’t need me. It’s what makes you different from Rocky or Bird or any of the others. When I push you out of the nest, you’re going to soar.”

  “I think you just answered my question.” I stood up and took a step away.

  “Wait, Mac!” she said in a strangled voice. “There’s something important I need to tell you.”

  Then the lights all came on at once.

  “Hi, girls,” said Rocky.

  December 30, 2021, 2:59 a.m.

  SkyLoft Hotel, Los Angeles

  Stepping out onto the tar paper roof under the lidless night sky feels like slipping naked into dark, freezing water. A shock and a glory. I hear Gwen gasp softly behind me, and I know she feels it, too.

  I notice a random brick lying nearby and use it to prop open the emergency exit door, the kind that locks when it swings shut. When I glance over at Gwen, I see her silhouetted against the stars, few and faint in the light pollution, but beautiful all the same.

  Tears spring to my eyes in the stinging wind. It’s not regret I feel, exactly. Because when I look back at all the things that led us to this moment, I can’t honestly say that I’d do anything differently. At every step, I fought for what was mine. I’m still fighting for it now.

  It’s just that, in a way, every beautiful thing in my life—​even this—​is because of her. And somehow, despite everything, I know that’s how she feels, too.

  “What happened, Mac?” she says. “We used to be best friends.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sometimes it felt like . . .”

  “Like we were sisters?” It’s the purest version of what I wanted, all those years ago.

  “Like we were the same person.”

  She sounds so sad. I want to grab her hand and tell her it’s okay. But it isn’t. Because Gwen knows something about me that no one can know. She kno
ws who I really am, and what I’m capable of. She knows about the cold, hard hollow at my center.

  “But we weren’t the same, were we?” I say. “It only felt like that because I wanted to be you.”

  “I wanted to be you, too.” She turns toward me. “You had passion and ambition. You always knew exactly what you wanted. I envied that, I thrilled to it. You don’t know what it’s like, having too much.”

  “No, I don’t,” I say coldly.

  “It can paralyze you,” she says, ignoring my tone. “The things you need—​every passing desire, however fleeting—​it all materializes before you can really choose it. Things happen just because they can. You lose the habit of wanting things. It’s like—” She gestures toward the starry void. “It’s like you’re floating in space. There’s nothing to grab on to.” Her voice becomes fervent. “Rocky was the first thing I’d wanted for so long.”

  “He wasn’t worth it.”

  She grins ruefully. “Don’t you think I know that? It’s childish, but that’s how I knew I wanted him for myself. Not for my parents, not for you—​not even for Rocky. He didn’t really approve of our relationship either. It made me less perfect.” She pauses and presses her hands to her chest. “But I’m not perfect. I’m human.”

  I think of Mom and Lily, their needs pressing in on me so tightly that I sometimes don’t even feel fully human in their presence, more like some sentient vending machine. How hard I have fought to escape that feeling without abandoning them, as if there were really any difference. “Maybe you wanted to be me, Gwen, but you didn’t want my life.”

  She bows her head. “I didn’t want mine either.”

  “Fuck you,” I say. “How dare you not want your life. I clawed and scratched my way to every one of those things that came so easily to you. How dare you act like they’re not worth it.”

  “Are they, Mac?” She turns to me. “Are they worth everything you did to get them?”