The Song Remains the Same

by Allison Winn Scotch

  “Anderson, Nell!” The photographers are calling at us like we are cattle to be herded. A stern-looking publicist, who appears to be about twenty-four and takes her job about a thousand times too seriously, pops up out of nowhere and flares her hand. They’re not talking to the press! She whisks us through the media circus, stopping to pose us in front of the Humane Society banner once we’re through the bulk of the melee.

  “Nell!” Someone catcalls to me from the end of the press line, and Anderson and I turn simultaneously to see Paige Connor furiously waving at us.

  “Don’t take her bait,” Anderson says, refocusing, still smiling for the cameras.

  But it’s too late. This time, I am acting on instinct, trusting my gut. Whatever she wants, whatever she is looking to uncover, let her bring her worst and show it to me. I may not remember much about where I came from, but slowly I am remembering who I am. And I’m not one to let some tabloid reporter beat me in a street fight.

  “Hi, Paige,” I say. “What’s up?”

  In an instant, Anderson is beside me. “You don’t have to talk to her.”

  “Whatever our history is, Anderson,” Paige says, “this actually doesn’t concern you.”

  I look at him, and he shrugs, and I know that they slept together years ago, and he most likely treated her as he has so many other women in the past, and, by god, bless him for proving my theory. Old dog. New tricks. Impossible.

  “You have two minutes,” the publicist snaps at Paige before intently staring at her clipboard and muttering something indistinguishable into her cell phone.

  “As you know, we’ve been covering your story,” Paige says.

  “As I do know, you’ve been covering my story.” I lower my voice to a bass tone, mocking her with her gravitas that—hello! look around you!—is entirely ridiculous for the pomp and circumstance of this event. I can feel the whiskey coasting freely inside of me. Just that one glass has already wormed its way completely through. The backs of my knees throb, my blood pulsing like it’s attempting to launch a mutiny through my skin.

  “Well, as you know, I’ve been covering your story,” she tuts.

  “And as you know, I do know, so can we move on? Or are you looking for an exclusive scoop that you know I know you know.”

  She flushes at this, but her beady, determined eyes stay focused. She reminds me of a character from that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie I watched a few weeks back with Peter: a terminator, lasering her targets, then blam! I giggle at the idea, and turn to share as much with Anderson when Paige pulls me back.

  “I can see that you don’t take the media seriously, though he should have told you otherwise.” She gestures to Anderson, who rolls his eyes and reaches for my elbow, ready to whisk me away and be done with it.

  “I do take some media seriously,” I say. “Jamie Reardon. I take him seriously. He’s proven to be aboveboard, so I take him very seriously.”

  “Ah.” She laughs at this. “Okay. But however you see it, I’m about to break a front-page story. A career-changer. A life-changer. None of this child’s play ‘Randy Andy’ stuff that we’ve been doing on him.”

  “And what is that?” I ask. Anderson steps forward like he needs to protect me, like he can intuit the dismemberment that is about to unfurl. I splay my arm against his gut, hitting his abdomen, warding him off.

  “About your marriage,” she says, checkmating me in a game I probably don’t understand well enough to be playing in the first place. “About your husband and the woman he claimed he loved, and how he never told you the truth but how she told Jamie, and Jamie told me, and now I’m about to tell the world.”

  By the time the limo drops us off at my apartment twenty minutes later, after Anderson made sweaty apologies to the publicists, and after he agreed to a hefty donation from his next paycheck, I have inhaled two more glasses of whiskey—enough, Anderson notes dryly but not unsympathetically, for a person of my weight and tolerance to sink like an anchor. Rory, along with Samantha, who flew in earlier from Hong Kong and looks like she has jousted with jet lag and lost, are waiting in the lobby of my building—on the ride home, Anderson had insisted on calling them. No one speaks as the elevator ascends to the apartment, though I can see the two of them, my sister and my best friend, locking eyes, trying to telepathically assess how best to deal with the grenade explosion.

  “One of you better start talking, and by talking, I mean, like, yesterday,” I say, once the door has slammed shut. Anderson makes himself useful by pouring glasses of merlot.

  From the couch, Samantha starts, then stutters, so Rory waves her hand and says, “Look. We didn’t know how to handle this. No one did. There’s no rule book here.”

  “Is that supposed to be some sort of explanation? Some sort of goddamn screwed-up rationalization as to why you didn’t tell me that my husband was fucking another woman for a year?” Tiny shards of spit fly out of my mouth.

  Paige Connor had unceremoniously dumped the details on me just before Anderson grabbed me by the waist and physically removed me from the premises. She, ever so smugly, rattled off that it hadn’t been a one-off, a one-night stand. That Peter and Ginger had been sleeping together for a good year, and that he left me—for her—to move in with her, to create a life with her, to love her in a way that he didn’t love me. He had told me all of this before I kicked him out the first time. He had told me all of this and still, no one had told me any of it when it really mattered. When I couldn’t know it for myself. He came back two months later, filled to the gills with despair at the absurdity of his decision—that of course he didn’t love her! That he was such a goddamn idiot to love her! That he would do anything to find a way to make me forgive him.

  This is what Ginger had told Jamie, and this is what Jamie had told Paige. In confidence. With the idea that Page Six would run a small teaser, and he would then run the ratings-grabbing interview with Ginger on American Profiles. But even a scoop can be scooped, and Jamie isn’t quite the pro he thought himself to be. Paige trumped even that.

  Twenty minutes later, I don’t even know where to pinpoint my rage: at Jamie, at Rory, at Samantha, at my mother, at Peter. The list is too long to contemplate.

  “It’s not supposed to be a rationalization,” Samantha says quietly now. “We just didn’t know what to do. All of us wanted to give you a second chance, and even if we didn’t like it—didn’t like that Peter got absolved of his behavior—we also didn’t not like it enough to ruin that second chance.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I say.

  “I tried to warn you at the gallery that night,” Rory says, because, of course, she always has a goddamn defense.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I say. Anderson places a glass of wine in the pass-through, and I drink too much, too quickly, my larynx burning as it goes down.

  “I tried to make Peter stay behind, to let Anderson take you home, to, you know, give you some warning that I didn’t approve.”

  “That is your way of letting me know that my husband was cheating on me for a year? By acting like a bitch and bossing people around?” I am yelling now, wishing so very much that I could forget this moment, this part of my life, too. It’s so much easier when it’s all just a whitewash. Also wishing that the newer me could be blunted toward this rage in the first place. But she can’t, she isn’t, and I’m right back to where I started. “Because that’s, like, every day of the week for you, Rory!”

  “Oh, give me a break,” Rory says, and I can’t believe for one moment that she is indignant. “We put up with you like that for years.”

  “Don’t make this about me,” I shriek. If I had it in me, I’d slug her across those perfect cheekbones. “This is about the fact that I have no basis for who I am without you telling me as much. And you didn’t. You didn’t tell me. So what does that say about me? What does that say about you?”

  “It doesn’t say anything about you,” Anderson interjects.

  “Don’t stick your nose w
here it doesn’t belong,” Rory shoots back at him.

  “I’m just trying to help,” he says, not particularly kindly.

  “Look,” Rory shouts. “I told you last time, okay? I was the one who told you. Not Peter. I found out and I came to you, and you never forgave me for it!”

  “That’s ridiculous!” I shout back. “Why wouldn’t I forgive you for that?”

  “Because you kicked him out but he was just waiting to leave,” she says flatly. “Looking for his excuse after a year with Ginger. And then you turned around on me—on me!—and said if I hadn’t told you, he never would have had a foot out the door! Like that makes any sense! Of course by the time he came to his senses and begged for you back, you were so angry with both of us that it didn’t matter anyway. Refused to see it any other way.”

  “Total bullshit!” I say. The old me wouldn’t have absolved him. Or maybe I would have. Maybe I got comfortable making excuses for my dad, and so I found a way to make them for my husband, too. Who knows anymore?

  “I don’t care what the hell you think it is! It was when everything changed—when you started pulling up everything that made sense in your life. And eventually, we weren’t even speaking because of it, so yeah, you better believe that I wasn’t about to rush to you now with this! Screw me once, shame on you, screw me twice”—her voice wavers here, calming—“well, you know the saying.”

  “I don’t actually.”

  “Shame on me,” she says. “Screw me twice and shame on me.”

  “Nelly, listen, we should have told you,” Samantha says, the calm in the storm. “And I can only speak for myself, but I am very, very sorry that we didn’t.”

  “The baby,” I say, finally tempering myself. “Did you both know about the baby and keep that from me, too? That you knew? What I was going to do with it? How I was coping?”

  They shake their heads in tandem.

  “I already told you, back in the hospital—I didn’t know. Like I said, we weren’t speaking,” Rory says.

  “I swear on our friendship that I didn’t know, either,” Samantha echoes.

  Well, that’s just goddamn pathetic, I think. And then realize that I’m thinking this about myself, at how I couldn’t reach out when I needed someone most. That the self-reliance I’d just discovered in the press line wasn’t the problem, wasn’t what I needed. It was just the opposite: letting myself lean when I thought I could hold up okay on my own. That martyrdom was never my deficiency. Vulnerability, well, yes, that one didn’t come easy.

  But rather than acknowledge this revelation, I stomp over to the laptop and press Power. The screen bursts alive, the background image a shot from a vacation I don’t remember with generic-looking palm trees and two strangers squinting into the sun: Peter and me, before, before all of this.

  “What are you doing, Nell?” Anderson says. “Come on, let’s not do this.”

  I wave my hand as if to say shut up, and then click open Peter’s e-mail. My eyes run double from too much whiskey and wine, but not double enough that I can’t scan for intimate details of the yearlong fucking affair in which he chose her. Chose her! He showed up in the hospital and made me want him, made me want his baby, made me force myself to want a life with him again. He told me about Paris, he told me how we fell in love, he told me every goddamn thing about myself when I had nothing else to believe.

  So I did. I believed him. No wonder I never chose vulnerable. Who would?

  On first glance, there is nothing in his e-mail that betrays him—the fingerprints have likely long since been wiped clean, so I slam the laptop shut, scanning the room, looking for invisible evidence.

  “Done? Feel better?” Rory says, and I can’t tell if she’s being empathetic or sarcastic.

  “What is your problem?” I spin around and face her.

  “What is your problem?” she says back. “I was asking, ‘Do you feel better?’ What could you have possibly interpreted from that?”

  “Please, the both of you, stop,” Samantha says. “There are other times to air your issues with each other. This isn’t one of them.”

  “You’re right.” Rory exhales, then chews her lip. “I’m sorry.”

  “For this or for what you just said?”

  “For both, okay? Can’t you just accept an apology and move on? Must you make it harder on everyone, always?”

  “I don’t make it harder on everyone, always!” I reach for the wine too quickly, and it splashes on my waist, seeping into the eggplant dress, camouflaged like it was never there in the first place.

  Rory gives me a steely look, and Samantha just sighs and stares into her lap. Do I? Do I always make it harder for everyone always? No, vulnerability was never my strong suit.

  Eventually, I grow weary of their remorse and don’t want to rehash another second of this mess. I ask them to leave, and Rory does with her chin still high in the air, like she doesn’t have one thing to apologize for, like it might actually slay her to admit real culpability. She and my mother—I almost laugh out loud—cut from the same cloth and all of that. Samantha is more contrite, and hugs me tightly good-bye, her voice cracking under the weight of her guilt—that she didn’t tell me sooner, that she hasn’t done more to guide me wherever it is I need to go.

  “You can’t guide me,” I say, despite the lessons of the hour. “This is my thing to do alone.”

  “Don’t say that,” she pleads. “That’s who you were before. Alone. Independent. Even when you didn’t have to be.”

  “Why were we friends?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry?” She stutters. She is standing in the door frame, perched on the precipice between the hallway and my apartment.

  “If I was such an Ice Queen, why were we friends?”

  Initially, she looks confused, and then her face relaxes.

  “For a lot of reasons,” she says. “Because you were the girl who would tell me to stop one shot before I puked in college. Because you were the girl who drilled me for the LSATs, staying up until we saw the sun rise at that crappy diner on my block with the inedible matzo ball soup, when you knew that I wanted to get into Harvard Law School. Because when I broke my nose skiing in Utah, you not only cleaned up my bloody tissues in the hotel room, but you subsequently talked me out of a nose job.” She touches a bump on the bridge of her nose. “You told me our scars give us character.”

  “I said that?”

  “You did.” She nods. “Which isn’t to say I didn’t make a few calls when we got back to town, but still, I’ve lived with it. I, at least, pretend that this bump makes me more interesting.”

  She smiles now, a sad smile but a smile all the same.

  “You should have told me about Peter,” I say.

  “I know, but let’s not make that everything, okay? Before, maybe you would have never forgiven me.” She hugs me again and pulls back and looks at me, really examines me like she’s seeing me for the first time. “Now, let’s not make this everything.”

  25

  I wake early on Sunday, having slept only two hours and hungover in a way that I suspect I’ve never been before, the remnants of alcohol oozing from and dehydrating my cells. I check my phone to see if Liv has returned my call, but there are only two texts, one from Samantha, apologizing again, and one from Anderson, ensuring that I haven’t offed myself (or trudged to the Berkshires to off Peter) in the wee hours of morning.

  I toss on a hoodie and some sweats and slide out the front door. As I make my way through the quiet streets of the Upper West Side, I can practically feel my intestines churning, like sludge through my digestive tract. My eyes are too puffy, and my hair is a haphazard ratty bun, and to add indignity to my already fairly low indignation, I am forced to slink past the newsstands, all of which plop the Post front and center, the paper screaming with the headline “Forget This!” There is a picture of Ginger and Peter—the fuzziness makes me think it was snapped from a camera phone—their cheeks pressed together, both of them grinning unbearably cheerful
grins, the glow from a TV just above their heads in what looks like a sports bar. And then there I am, too—that sad sack of a picture that People magazine ran way back when: nearly clutching my literal pearls, looking so tightly wound that I imagine half of the Post readers wouldn’t blame Peter for sleeping with Ginger in the first place—the photo that has nothing to do with the new me, even though, if I were to really look closely at both it and who I am now, I might find some ghosts, recognize some of the old shadows left behind.

  Liv is exactly where I knew she would be. I hesitate by the park entrance, watching her sip her coffee, fold over the page of the paper. It feels big, brave, almost too much, to step forward and acknowledge how badly I need her, how badly I need someone. Eventually, I amble toward the gate of the dog run, and as I unlatch it, she looks up, casually at first, then startled to recognize the face coming toward her.

  “Nell!” She stands. “Did you get a dog?”

  “No,” I offer. “But I brought fresh coffee.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. What are you doing here?”

  “I needed to talk to you,” I say. “I left a message at your office.”

  “You really shouldn’t be here. This isn’t appropriate.” She casts about to find Watson, who is over in the corner sniffing some leaves. “We can find some time tomorrow.”

  “Look, please. I’ll never do it again, I promise. I know this is unconventional and that you have all these boundaries…”

  “There for good reason,” she interrupts.

  “I’m sure they’re there for very good reasons,” I say. “But I’m here, and I just need fifteen minutes.” I can see her wavering. “And I did bring fresh coffee.”