by Lia Romeo
Candace is holding court in the back room of Art Bar, in the Village, and as soon as I’m settled into one of their comfortable armchairs with a glass of wine I feel better. Some other girls I knew from the high school orchestra are there—Lisa Hannity and Joyce Kim and Mary Mulhaven, who all live in or around Manhattan now—and I haven’t seen them in almost ten years, so there’s the obligatory catching up on who’s married (almost everyone who still lives back home), who’s had plastic surgery (Katie Hanson—boob job), and who’s dead (Chelsea Henley—car accident). And then Lisa asks me if I’m dating anybody, and I find myself telling them all about the situation with Ben and Lewis.
Don’t tell him.
That’s pretty much the consensus. “It didn’t mean anything,” Mary says, “so there’s no reason he has to know about it.”
“Plus, you were drunk, right?” says Lisa.
“And it was only a kiss,” Joyce adds. “If Gary knew how many guys I’d kissed when we were first dating . . .”
And it’s true. It certainly wasn’t anything that would happen again. And it certainly didn’t have any bearing on my feelings for Lewis. It was just a mistake, a stupid mistake . . . and after all, if Lewis had come home on Thursday or Friday like he said he was going to it never would have happened. There’s really no reason he has to know.
I go home around midnight, after a round of hugs and promises to keep in touch and meet up again. I change back into my sweats, crawl into bed and sleep soundly . . . until six a.m., when I sit bolt upright in bed with a terrifying thought.
What if Lewis already knows?
He told me he can see it whenever somebody does something really bad. Kissing Ben wasn’t that bad . . . not bad enough to get me sent to Hell (at least I hope not!) . . . but maybe it was bad enough that he would know about it.
I have to tell him.
And the thing is, even if he doesn’t know . . . even if he has no idea . . . I still have to tell him. I can’t build a relationship on a lie—even if it’s a lie of omission. After all, then I’d be doing exactly what Lewis was doing when we were first dating, before I knew his secret.
I have to be honest.
I really don’t want to be honest.
And just at that moment, as if the universe is reading my mind, my phone rings. Who could be calling me at six a.m.? I lean over and look at the name on the screen, and suddenly my heart starts beating fast and my hands start shaking. It’s Lewis.
I think about letting it go to voicemail, but instead I take a deep breath, reach over, and pick up the phone. “Hello?”
“You’re up,” he says, sounding surprised. “I didn’t think you would be. I just wanted to hear your voice on the message machine.”
It certainly doesn’t sound like he knows.
“I thought you were coming back Thursday or Friday,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says, “I’m sorry. I thought so too, it’s just that everything ended up taking longer than I thought. So what are you doing awake?”
He definitely doesn’t know. Which means I’m going to have to tell him. My heart sinks. “Um. Hanging out.”
“Well, you want to come hang out over here?”
“Yeah. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
I put down the phone and get dressed in jeans and Lewis’ cashmere hoodie, then go into the bathroom to brush my hair and put on some makeup. My hands are still shaking, and I try three times to draw a straight line with my eyeliner pencil before giving up and just brushing some copper shadow across my lids. As always, Lewis’ diamond is nestled in the hollow of my throat.
AS SOON AS I knock on Lewis’ door, he opens it and literally sweeps me into his arms, carrying me back towards the bedroom. “No! Stop!” I protest, but he ignores me and begins covering my face with kisses. He tosses me down on the bed. “Stop!” I say again, and he must hear something in my voice this time, because he does.
“Is something wrong?”
“I have something I need to tell you.”
“So tell me.”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“Why not?”
I take a deep breath. “I kissed my ex-boyfriend.”
Lewis pulls back as though I’ve physically struck him.
“Or, I mean, he kissed me.”
“And what did you do . . . when he kissed you?” There’s something dangerous in Lewis’ voice, and I feel—as I’ve felt a few times before—almost afraid of him.
“I kissed him back. But then I stopped—as soon as I realized what I was doing.”
Lewis stands, walks over to the window, and stares out at the city for a moment. There’s something wounded in the set of his shoulders. The sky is just beginning to turn rose and gray with morning light.
He suddenly whirls around. “How could you not realize what you were doing?”
“I don’t know. I had a couple of drinks, and I . . .” I realize how pathetic it sounds, and look down at the bed sheets. “There’s no excuse. I made a mistake, a big mistake, and I’m really sorry.”
“Well,” Lewis says softly, almost contemplatively, “that doesn’t do me much good, does it.”
“It meant nothing,” I tell him, “less than nothing, and I can promise you it would never happen again—”
He cuts me off with a swift chopping motion. “You should go home.”
Hot tears spring into my eyes. “You want to just throw away everything we have, because of one mistake?”
“Of course, I don’t want to,” he says. “But I don’t see that I have any choice.”
“You could talk to me, you could try to understand!—”
“I don’t want to understand,” he says. “I thought you were better than that. It would break my heart to understand that you’re not.”
I’m crying openly now, tears streaming down my cheeks. “But Lewis, I—I really care about you—”
“I was in love with you, Lucy!” he exclaims, and for the first time I hear the anguish in his voice. Then he reorganizes his features into a mask of control, and when he speaks again his voice is flat and cold. “Now are you going to pick up your purse and leave, or shall I pick it up and escort you?”
I bury my face in my hands for a minute, shoulders shaking, wanting nothing more than for Lewis to come over and put an arm around me and comfort me. But I know he won’t. So I stand, wipe my eyes, go over to the corner and pick up my black tote, and begin walking down the hallway towards the door. Then I turn. I can’t leave without asking this one last thing.
“You were in love with me? Past tense?”
“Past tense,” Lewis confirms, and he walks by me down the hall to the front door and holds it open. I walk out, and the door slams shut with a final, definite thud behind me.
– 26 –
I SIT ON the steps outside Lewis’ building and cry for a few minutes, then stand up and start walking. I’m not walking towards the subway, or even uptown towards my apartment. I’m not really walking anywhere. The only destination that sounds remotely appealing is Lewis’ bed, and I can’t very well go back there. So I’m just walking.
It’s seven-thirty a.m. on a Sunday, and the city that never sleeps appears to be sleeping. There are only a few people out on the mostly empty sidewalks, and almost all of the storefronts are covered over with metal grates. The sun is bright, but there’s a chill in the air, and there are hardly any leaves left on the few trees planted along the sidewalk. Almost without my noticing, winter has started creeping in.
I walk past block after block of closed storefronts, empty restaurants and office buildings, until I end up in front of Century 21, the discount department store. For a moment I entertain a fantasy of going inside and buying something wildly expensive, a Gucci bag or a pair of Kate Spade sunglasses, to make myself feel better, but when I look at my watch it’s only eight and the store doesn’t open until eleven.
So I keep going, turning down streets at random until I find myself in the middle of a square
in front of an enormous pillared church. A few people are ascending the steps, pulling open the giant wooden doors, and I find myself following them, opening the doors and stepping inside.
The interior of the church is vast and spacious, with rows of wooden pews, stained glass windows, and statues of saints in alcoves. People are seated in the first few pews, and a priest is mounting the stairs towards the altar. Clearly a service is about to begin. I hesitate in the back of the church, thinking about going up to the front and sitting down. I haven’t been to a church service since before college, but maybe it would provide me some comfort.
Then again, church really doesn’t seem like the appropriate place to seek solace for relationship problems . . . especially relationship problems with the devil. I give the assembled faithful a last look, then turn around and go back out the door into the sunshine. Back on the street, I see a subway station, and since I’m not sure where else to go, I go down the stairs and get on the E train towards home.
I get off at Penn Station and walk east towards my building. But when I’m standing in front of it, the thought of actually going inside seems unbearably depressing. There’s a Starbucks on the corner, so I go in there instead, wait in line—there’s always a line, even at eight-thirty on a Sunday—and buy a tall skim white chocolate mocha and a blueberry muffin. I’m waiting for my drink and looking around for a place to sit when I spot a familiar blonde head, bent over a laptop at a corner table. It’s Melissa. Before I can decide whether to go over and say hi or look away and pretend I haven’t seen her, she looks up.
Our eyes meet. She waves, tentatively, and I wave tentatively back. She motions me over, and I grab my mocha and carry it over to her table. “Hi,” she says. “You’re up early.”
“So are you.”
“Yeah,” she says, “I haven’t been sleeping very well.” She gestures to the grande cup in front of her. “Thank God for coffee—I’m on cup number three.”
“Three? How long have you been here?”
“Since they opened at six,” she says. “What about you? What are you doing awake on a Sunday morning?”
I look down, break off a piece of my muffin and eat it while I think about what to say. It tastes dry and crumbly and has no appeal whatsoever. “It’s a long story,” I say finally.
“I’ve got time,” Mel says.
“Do you? Because you didn’t the other day.” The words are out before I can stop them. I don’t want to get in an argument, especially not here in the middle of Starbucks.
“I know,” she says. “I’ve been feeling bad about that. You’re my best friend, and I want to be there for you.” She reaches across the table and puts her hand on top of mine. “I’m sorry.”
I open my mouth to tell her it’s okay . . . and burst into tears.
“Lucy? Lucy, what’s wrong? Are you all right?”
I’m crying too hard to get any words out, and so Mel takes charge of the situation. She slides her laptop into her tote, puts one arm around my shoulders, grabs my mocha and her coffee in her other hand, and guides me out the door and down the street. I cry all the way through the lobby, up in the elevator, and for twenty minutes on the couch in the living room, until I finally stop crying long enough to tell her the story.
When I’ve finished, Mel sits for a moment, deep in thought, shaking her head. Then she looks up. “You know what this calls for?”
“What?”
“Emergency brunch.”
Emergency brunch is a tradition that started our sophomore year at Cornell, when Mel was dumped by Jeremy Henley, the president of the junior class. Jeremy broke the news on a Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning, when Mel told us, Nat declared that we were all skipping our classes and going out for pancakes.
We had an emergency brunch when Nat sent a topless picture to her fling Sam Duncan and he shared it with his entire fraternity, and when Mel got rejected from Yale Law (she had to “settle” for Columbia), and we had them for a month of Sundays after Ben and I broke up. Somehow, there was nothing so bad that pancakes couldn’t make it better. We haven’t had one in a couple of years, though, and I’d almost forgotten about the tradition. But this seems like an excellent time to resurrect it.
“Let me just go in the bathroom and brush my hair,” Mel says, “and then we’ll go to Halo.”
Halo is a local spot that features a prix fixe brunch with unlimited coffee, which both Mel and I could use. They’re usually crowded, but it’s early enough when Mel and I walk in that there’s only one person, a tall dark-haired girl, standing by the doorway waiting to be seated. And then I stop short when I realize who it is.
Natalie.
She’s facing away, and hasn’t seen us. I grab Mel’s arm and pull her back outside. “We have to leave. We have to go somewhere else.”
“Why?”
“Nat’s here. I really can’t deal with her right now.”
“I know she is,” Mel says. “I called her.”
“You what?”
“I called her before, when I went in the bathroom. She didn’t want to come, but I told her she had to. She’s your best friend, and it’s time for you guys to make up.” Mel grabs my arm and forcibly pulls me back inside the restaurant. “Come on.”
– 27 –
THE FIRST FEW minutes are excruciatingly awkward. I stare at the tablecloth and rip my napkin into a pile of tiny shreds, while Nat tosses her hair and makes eyes at all the men seated in the vicinity of our table, and Mel attempts to bridge the gap and engage us both in conversation.
“So, Lucy broke up with Lewis,” Mel says.
“Lewis broke up with Lucy,” I mutter.
“Good,” Nat says airily. “He was no good for her anyhow.”
“And Lucy’s really sad about it,” Mel continues.
“I don’t know why,” Nat says.
“And she really needs her friends right now.”
“Well, maybe she should have thought of that before she decided I wasn’t her friend anymore,” Nat says.
“I didn’t decide!—” I burst out, and then I stop myself. People at nearby tables are staring at us. “Look, Mel. I appreciate the effort, but I really don’t want to do this. I’m really . . . tired, and . . . I don’t know, upset, and I just want to go home and go to bed.” I push my chair back, get up, and begin threading my way through the tables towards the door.
A hand on my shoulder stops me. I turn, expecting to see Mel, but it’s Nat. “Luce, I’m sorry,” she says. “Come sit down. Let’s talk.”
“I don’t want to talk, I just want to go home.”
“Don’t go home,” she says. I hesitate, looking back and forth between Nat and the door. “I know I haven’t been a perfect friend, but I want to make it right. Please.”
Reluctantly I follow her back to the table. “Okay,” she says, “here’s the deal. The reason I got so mad about what you said . . . is you were right. I really liked your brother, and it freaked me out. A lot. So I went and kissed somebody else, and now . . .” She looks down, then back up at us. “Now I can’t stop thinking about him.”
Mel and I lean forward eagerly. “Really?” I ask her. “Have you told him?”
She bites her lip. “No. I tried to call, but he didn’t answer.”
“I’ll tell him!” I tell her. “I’ll call him right now and tell him!”
“No!” she says. “Don’t. I—”
“You what? You’re scared?”
“Well, yeah,” she says, “but that’s not it. I want to tell him myself.”
“How about I’ll call him, and then you can tell him.”
Mel raises her eyebrows. “Does anybody else feel like we’re back in college?”
“College? I feel like we’re back in seventh grade,” Nat says. All of us laugh, and for that moment, I don’t care where we are—I’m just glad everything is okay between us again.
“Let me call him right now,” I tell her.
“Right now? I’m nervous!” She takes a
big gulp of coffee.
“Too bad. I’m doing it before you change your mind.”
“I’m not going to change my mind!” she protests.
“I’m kidding. I think.” I take my cell phone out of my purse and scroll through the contacts until I find my brother’s number.
“Hey, Luce.” Jim’s voice on the other end of the line sounds heavy.
“Hey. You sound tired. Did I wake you up?”
“No, just couldn’t really sleep last night.”
“Well. I, um—I have somebody here who wants to talk to you.”
I hand the phone to Nat. “Hi,” she says, biting her lip, and then quickly, “No, wait! I have something I have to tell you.” She takes a deep breath. “Okay. I like you. I like you a lot. And I know I screwed up before, but it’s just because I like you more than I’ve liked anybody . . . I don’t know, maybe ever, and it scared me, and I’m hoping that maybe you’ll give me another chance.”
Mel and I watch with bated breath as Nat listens to whatever Jim is saying on the other end of the phone. “I know,” she says after a moment, and then “I know,” again. And then, after a long pause, she smiles. “Okay,” she says. “I can do that. Yeah. I’ll call you tonight, and we can talk about the details.”
She hangs up the phone, and announces, “I’m going to Kansas.”
“You’re moving?” Mel sounds horrified.
“No!” Nat exclaims. “God, no.”
“Kansas is not that bad!” I protest, laughing.
“I’m sure it’s lovely,” Nat says, “but I’m just going for the weekend. He asked me to come out and visit. So I will, and we’ll see how it goes.”
“Yay!” Mel squeals, and I lean over to give Nat a hug.
“This is so exciting!” I tell her. “You guys would have the cutest babies!”
“Whoa!” Nat exclaims. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“You mean you don’t picture what kind of babies you’d have whenever you meet a guy you like?”
