The Girls' Guide to Love and Supper Clubs

by Dana Bate

  The acidity in Rachel’s words stings, but not as much as what the words imply. Until now, I considered Rachel my closest friend in Washington—my partner in crime—but, at some point, I became the friend she can tell only certain things, and I didn’t even notice. How could I let that happen? At this point, all of my high school and college friends are spread out around the country, and while dating Adam I let most of my other DC friends drift away. If I lose Rachel’s friendship, then I’ll really be alone. I’ll have nobody.

  Rachel looks up and fixes her eyes earnestly on mine. “Sometimes you make it hard for people to tell you things, Hannah. Like, if I say I’m applying to grad school, you start stressing out about your parents and worrying whether you should apply to grad school, too, and suddenly the conversation is all about you. Again.”

  “But I ask about your blog all the time. And the supper club—we’ve been doing that together. You’re the one who convinced me to start one in the first place.”

  She swirls her finger around the edge of her wineglass. “I guess that’s true.”

  “Listen, I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit of an egomaniac lately, but it really hurts to know you’ve been keeping things from me. Your friendship means a lot to me, and I’d hate to lose that. You’re my best friend in town. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  Rachel glances down at the bar. “I don’t know what I’d do without you either.”

  I sit in silence, clinking the ice around my glass as I tilt it back and forth. I hate girl drama, and I hate that I’ve become a part of it. I hate that I’ve alienated a friend, and I hate that we’re arguing right now without really arguing. I just … I hate this.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve been a bad friend,” I say. “I’ll do better—at least I’ll try. I don’t know what more I can say.”

  Rachel stares down at the bar. “I’m sorry, too. I should have told you about Jackson and graduate school sooner. I just … I didn’t know how to handle Jackson, given your breakup with Adam, and then I went so long without telling you that it seemed awkward to bring it up at all, and then I got mad that you hadn’t asked about me in a while, and then you started freaking out about life, and then …”

  I rest my hand on hers. “I get it.”

  She shakes her head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make a bigger deal of this than it is. I haven’t been a great friend recently either.”

  “No, I’m glad you brought it up. We’re … performing maintenance. Friendship maintenance.”

  She smiles. “Maintenance. I like that.”

  I shake the ice around my glass and swallow the last bit of water, before the bartender comes back and refills the glass to the brim. “So what were you going to say earlier? About a new supper club location?”

  “Oh—right. That’s why I brought up Jackson.” She takes a sip of her wine and then places the glass back on the bar, holding the stem between her first two fingers. “His friend Hugo is an artist—a real free spirit—and he owns an artist’s loft in Northeast that he rents out on the weekends for parties and events. He heard about The Dupont Circle Supper Club, and Jackson said Hugo would be willing to rent the loft out to us for one of our dinners.”

  “Doesn’t renting a loft usually cost thousands of dollars?”

  “He usually charges about a thousand bucks or so, but as a favor he’s willing to rent it to us for four hundred dollars, since he’s Jackson’s friend and knows our situation.”

  “The whole point of next weekend’s dinner is to make money, not spend it.”

  She nods. “I know. But I ran the numbers. His loft has more space than Blake’s house, so we could easily fit thirty-six guests in there, and if we bump up the price to sixty dollars a head, we’ll more than cover the cost of the loft.”

  “Can we take a look?”

  “Hugo said he could leave Jackson a key so that we could swing by to check it out. Maybe we could stop by Monday on our lunch break?”

  “Correction: your lunch break. I no longer have a job, remember?”

  She blushes. “Oh. Right.”

  “But sure, Monday works. Tell Hugo we’re in.”

  “Excellent. What are you thinking in terms of menu?”

  “Probably carnival foods—turkey legs, funnel cake, that kind of thing.”

  Rachel smiles. “Nice. You haven’t lost your touch.” She swirls her glass and glances down at her watch. “Speaking of Jackson, I’m supposed to meet him at Luna Grille for dinner. Any interest in joining us?”

  “Another time,” I say. “Tonight I have to start testing funnel cake recipes. But tell him I look forward to hanging out soon.”

  “Will do.”

  Rachel drinks a little more wine and then gathers her bag and coat off the bar. I rest my hand on her elbow. “We’re okay, right?”

  She smiles. “Yeah. We’re okay.”

  She gives me a hug and invites me to a party later tonight, which I probably won’t attend, but I tell her I’ll try to stop by. Then she walks out the door, leaving me at the bar to sober up over another glass of water before I head home.

  The bartender tops me up with a little more water, and I take a slow sip to soothe the lump forming in my throat, fixing my eyes at the bottom of my glass. All the alcohol has made me embarrassingly emotional—about my tiff with Rachel, about the fact that I told the head of HR to fuck off, about the professional challenges I face—and I don’t want a bunch of strangers to see me cry. I look up from my glass when a guy with a baby face at the far end of the bar starts singing along to the jukebox.

  “Do-on’t stop, believing, oo-ooh oooooh!”

  He wears a button-down shirt with a loosened tie, and three photo IDs dangle around his neck by a thin metal chain. An intern. He pumps his fist in the air as he takes another swig of his Miller Lite and continues thrusting his fist as he howls to the chorus. His eyes are bloodshot, and he has a wet splotch in the middle of his shirt, even bigger than the one on mine. Nearly everyone in the bar is staring at this guy. He is a total train wreck.

  He spots me eyeing him from my perch along the bar and lifts his beer high in the air.

  “Fuck yeah!” he screams, his beer spraying in the air. “Mother fucking Washing-ton!”

  And, in the midst of his drunken yelps, I allow myself a moment of positive introspection. I’m not as pathetic as this loser, I tell myself. I’m not that lame. It’s a low bar, I realize, and one that, while sober, I would probably not consider a bar at all. More like a floor. Or a basement, really. But these are the moments in life that keep us going, the nuggets of self-assurance that make us think maybe things aren’t so bad after all—or, at the very least, they could be worse.

  CHAPTER

  thirty-seven

  Here’s the problem with having drunken epiphanies in which I decide my life isn’t as crappy as it could be: I deny the existence of Murphy’s Law and the fact that its principle of “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” applies to nearly every aspect of my life.

  Because the next day, bright and early on a Saturday morning, I find the following e-mail in my in-box:

  Becca Gorman has sent you a message on Facebook

  RE: Jacob Reaser

  Sorry for the delay in my reply—I’ve been in Cambodia with my sis and have been totally AWOL. But, more to the point … WTF?? JACOB REASER? He’s engaged to my friend Alexis. She’s living in Boston for the year while she finishes her master’s, but they’ve been together for like five years, and they’re getting married in June. He’s always been a little sketchy, but OMG!! You’d better put the kibosh on this ASAP. I do NOT want to be caught in the middle of this. I’m Stateside now, so call me if you get a sec, and we can discuss.

  Murphy’s Law. Story of my life.

  To prevent myself from falling into a state of despondency and self-loathing, I tell myself Becca must be misinformed. In college, she pretended to know everything about everyone and got it wrong half the time. She’d swear so-and-so was gay and so-a
nd-so failed freshman chemistry and so-and-so had sex in the Olin Library stacks, but there was never any evidence to back up these stories, and I learned to take Becca’s declarations with a large grain of salt—something I’d forgotten when I decided to send her a message on Facebook last week. So, to prove her wrong about Jacob, I type “Jacob Reaser + Alexis” into Google and launch a thorough investigation.

  The first site I come across is an entry on WeddingChannel.com. Jacob Reaser and Alexis Herrmann. Wedding date: June 12. Damn.

  Okay, so he’s engaged. Or maybe he was engaged. Or maybe he is miserably engaged and I am his one hope for a happy future.

  I scour Facebook. I pull up more sites on Google. I even read articles both Jacob and Alexis have published to find out a little more about them. In the movies, this might be the part where I fall for Jacob and discover he is, in fact, my soul mate; his fiancée is a total bitch, and if only we could overcome the hurdle of his engagement, we would join together in eternal bliss.

  This is not that story. By all accounts, there is nothing wrong with Alexis whatsoever. Her Facebook profile picture suggests she is a blond-haired beauty on par with Grace Kelly or January Jones, thin and graceful with a delicate smile. Jacob appears in the photo with her, and they both look utterly smitten, broadcasting to the world how in love they are, which I’d find a lot more believable on Jacob’s part if he hadn’t been naked in my bed three weeks ago.

  Not only is Alexis beautiful, but she also seems to be smart and compassionate and driven, at the top of her class as she pursues a master’s degree in social work at Harvard. One of her essays I find online, about educating inner-city youth, actually brings tears—tears—to my eyes, and everything I read about her leads me to believe she is the kind of person I might have befriended in another life.

  But this isn’t another life. This is now, a life in which I had sex with the man she has dated for five years. Five years! And they are getting married, which means Jacob proposed to her. He spent thousands of dollars on an engagement ring, told her he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, went through the whole song and dance. Relationships are complex and thorny, but—call me old-fashioned—you don’t propose to a girl if you don’t want to marry her. Or you break it off when you realize you’ve made a mistake. You don’t have raunchy sex with another woman on her air mattress; you don’t lie to that other woman about not being in a relationship. But that’s exactly what Jacob did. Which means that even if he is “miserably engaged,” he lacks the courage to put an end to it. He is a coward. And I have no time for cowards.

  I do, however, have time to wallow in the sorry state of my personal life. And so, for a solid forty-five minutes, that is exactly what I do.

  My internal monologue eventually becomes too melodramatic even for me, and so I decide I need to get out of the house. Fresh air. Yes, that’s what I need. Also, ice cream.

  Before heading into the great outdoors, I send Jacob a quick text message: “Dinner tonight is off. Good luck with the wedding. Don’t ever call me again.”

  I toss my phone in my purse and throw on an old Cornell sweatshirt, trying to ignore the throbbing sensation in my head. Those martinis last night were such a bad idea. My hair is beyond fixing, full of kinks and knots from a combination of restless sleep and hangover sweat, so I leave it alone and grab my purse and keys and trudge up my front steps, an activity that nearly doubles my heart rate. I choose to blame last night’s martinis for this and not my acute lack of fitness.

  I drag myself to CVS, hating life and pretty much every human being I encounter along the way. What are they all so happy about? Can’t they see the world is full of phonies and assholes? Don’t they know?

  A sign on the CVS freezer tells me they are having a 2-for-1 special on Edy’s ice cream, which is pretty much the best news I’ve heard all week. I buy four quarts: one Cookies ’n Cream, one Mint Chocolate Chip, one Vanilla, and one Caramel Delight, which, incidentally, looks pretty delightful. Four quarts of ice cream. That should get me through the weekend.

  I throw a few bags of peanut-butter-filled pretzels into my basket, and as I do, I see a man and a woman holding hands at the end of the snack aisle.

  “Get a room!” I groan as I shove them out of my way.

  I pay, collect my four bags of snacks, and trudge back to my apartment, where a full day of eating my feelings awaits me. Or that’s what I think until I run into Blake on my way down Church Street.

  “Hey there,” Blake says as he slows his pace and stops in front of me on the sidewalk. He eyes the plastic bags draped up and down my arms like Christmas ornaments. “Uh, so is there anything left at CVS, or did you clean the place out?”

  “Two-for-one on Edy’s,” I say, shrugging, as if this will explain everything.

  “I see.” He studies my hair, which looks considerably worse than his—quite a feat, I might add, considering he doesn’t have much. “So … exciting plans for tonight?”

  “If by exciting you mean blowing through four quarts of ice cream alone, then yes. Yes I do.”

  “Alone? You? No way. I’m sure you’ve had some hot date lined up for weeks.”

  “The only date I had lined up was with a guy who is engaged to his longtime girlfriend. So no. No hot dates for Hannah.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” Blake scratches his chin. “That’s really awful. You deserve better.”

  I sigh. “Whatever. I can’t decide if I’m more bummed about him being a jerk or the fact that I’ll miss out on a helping of steak frites tonight.”

  “Why, where was he going to take you?”

  “Bistro du Coin. Alas. I suppose a few quarts of ice cream will have to do.”

  Blake grins. “Aw, come on, you can’t sit home alone all night.”

  “I’m pretty sure that I can.”

  “Nope. Not gonna let you sit around and feel sorry for yourself. How about this: I’m supposed to meet some friends across the street at Russia House around nine o’clock to celebrate my election victory. Why don’t I rally the troops for a dinner at Bistro du Coin at seven or eight? You can order those steak frites you’ve been dreaming about all week.”

  “Really?” Blake nods, smiling. My stomach flutters. “That sounds … great, actually. You’re sure your friends won’t mind?”

  “Of course they won’t mind,” he says. “They’ll love you. Who wouldn’t love someone who can carry twenty pounds of ice cream on her own?”

  I look down at the bags hanging on my arms, the weight of the ice cream bunching up the sleeves of my sweatshirt so that I look like the Michelin Man. A few months ago, if I were forced to choose between polishing off a quart of Cookies ’n Cream on my own or going to dinner with my landlord, I would not have hesitated in choosing the former. But somewhere along the way, Blake stopped being just a landlord. I don’t know what to call him now—a friend? a confidant? a mentor?—but what I do know is I want to have dinner with him tonight. I don’t want to be alone. And I want those damn steak frites.

  “Okay, count me in,” I say. “But make no mistake—this ice cream will get eaten at some point. That much I promise you.”

  Blake smiles as he pats me gently on the shoulder. “Whatever you say, Stay Puft. Whatever you say.”

  I show up outside Blake’s door at seven-fifteen, stuffed by the mercy of Spanx and God into a stretchy black dress and a pair of pointy heels. Dressed in this way, I’d like to fancy myself a poor man’s Christina Hendricks or Isla Fisher, though I admit that would be a very, very poor man indeed. Homeless, most likely. But it’s a quantum leap from my daily attire, and that’s all that matters. I am far from a girly girl, but there is something about putting on a dress and some makeup that makes me feel a thousand times better. Even if I’m still in a funk over the Jacob debacle, at least I’m trying to snap out of it.

  Blake rips open his door, and his eyes widen in surprise when he sees me. “Wow. Hannah. You look … amazing.”

  I shrug. “When you set the bar at ‘home
less person,’ pretty much anything involving a brush and a little makeup is an improvement.”

  “Oh, please, you never look like a homeless person.” He pauses. “The look earlier today was more like ‘bag lady.’ A slight but important distinction.”

  Blake grabs a brown leather coat off his coat stand and throws it on, zipping it up over his white button-down shirt and olive green sweater vest. Ah, Blake: even his party clothes are a little geeky. Not that I’m one to talk. This is one of the only dresses I own that doesn’t resemble a muumuu.

  We arrive at Bistro du Coin at seven-thirty, and I follow Blake as he pushes through the crowd in search of his friends. He can’t seem to find them, so we push our way to the bar and order some drinks: a glass of red wine for him and a Kir Royale for me. The dining room buzzes with conversation and clanking silverware, staccato notes that bounce off the tile floors and mirrored bar, and as I nurse my drink I notice at least two guys checking me out. One looks like Bilbo Baggins and the other resembles a shar-pei, but nevertheless, their interest indicates Blake’s assessment of my appearance wasn’t entirely off base.

  A few sips into my drink, Blake waves at someone walking past the hostess’s table, a man I immediately recognize as Anoop, the guy dressed as Balloon Boy at Blake’s Halloween party.

  Anoop strolls up to the bar, dressed tonight in a black buttondown shirt and dark jeans, and gives Blake a high five. His eyes briefly shift in my direction, and he does a double take. “Hannah?”

  I smooth the front of my dress. “The one and only.”

  “Wow—I almost didn’t recognize you.”

  Blake smiles. “She cleans up nice, huh?”

  Anoop drags his eyes up and down my tightly bound figure. “I’ll say.”

  Anoop orders a gin and tonic, and we sip our cocktails and rehash last weekend’s Halloween party. Blake and Anoop mention that one of their friends needs help with a holiday party in December, and after last weekend, they both recommended me highly.