The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  I head into the kitchen to pour myself some coffee while I land on a strategy: Be agreeable. “I wouldn’t mind heading back with you after brunch.” I stir steamed almond milk—my only option—into my mug. It immediately clots, forming a puke-textured scum on the surface. I don’t care who or what has had to suffer to provide real milk for my coffee all these years, their sacrifice has been worth it. “Beat the afternoon crush.”

  Vince skims a hand through his hair, slowly, sensually exposing the belly of his bicep and a few underarm sprigs that have escaped the sleeve of his thin white tee. Ugh, it truly is a sight to behold, that hair move, something every girl needs to see before she dies. It makes Vince seem so troubled, so brooding. It makes women willing to do anything to make him smile. Isn’t that the secret sauce of seduction? First the snare of mystery, then the distinctly female instinct to rehabilitate.

  “Stephanie,” Vince says, more patiently than he would if not for Lauren and Kelly’s presence, “I think you should head back now. Just quit while you’re ahead.”

  I curl up in the armchair next to him, bringing my mug to my mouth. Panic is streaking through me—No, no, no, don’t make me go—but I have to remain calm. “We have a scene at Jesse’s today,” I remind him in a forgiving tone, like it is perfectly understandable that he could have forgotten given everything else that’s going on in our world.

  “For Brett’s bachelorette, though, and Brett left.” Lauren rubs out the leftover mascara from underneath one eye. Her dark nails have chipped between last night and this morning.

  “Brett left?” I say, with pretend surprise and genuine disappointment. The surprise is for Lauren, Vince, and Kelly’s benefit. They have no idea how the night ended, of course. But the disappointment is actually real. The plan had always been for Brett to be at Jesse’s house today, but, well, plans change. Successful people are the people who find a way to roll with life’s inevitable setbacks.

  Kelly passes me her phone. Before the sun rose, Brett had texted her, Called a car to take me back to the city. Over this shit. I thought I had smashed the screen of her phone hard enough to destroy it, but turns out, it was still possible to send a text. Kelly wrote back early this morning, asking if she was okay. Thus far, there has been no response.

  “I feel like I saw Brett last night,” Lauren says, not to us, but to herself. As though she is just remembering this herself. She visors her eyes against the sun spilling through the skylight and squints at me for a long moment. “Did you . . . were you with us?”

  I arch an eyebrow at Vince as if to say—I’m the one who needs to quit while I’m ahead? “I think you maybe dreamt that, Laur,” I say.

  Lauren’s gaze drifts over my shoulder. I turn to see what she’s looking at: Jen, balanced on one leg with a foot tucked into her crotch. “I guess so.” Thank goodness for pillheads, and their easy suggestibility.

  Vince gets up abruptly and starts down the hallway, taking that Duane Reade bag with him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m packing you up.”

  “Vince,” I say, but he continues on his way. “Vince!” I yell, sharply, but he doesn’t stop like he used to. I jump up and follow him. Chasing after my estranged husband. Not the look I was going for this morning.

  Vince is tossing my products into my toiletry bag in the downstairs guest bathroom, chucking glass bottles at glass bottles, like he is trying to break them.

  “Vince,” I say, closing the door behind me. “Vince.” I put my hand on his arm. “Please listen to me for a moment.”

  Vince stops with an anguished cry, reaching into the Duane Reade bag and producing a Jimmy Choo shoebox. For Gary, I’d written in black marker across the top before leaving it on my front stoop for—plot twist!—Gary, the photographer from the New York Times who has been staked outside my window for the last few weeks. Not only is Gary from the most reputable publication of the lot, but he’s the one who has so far displayed the highest degree of professionalism. No, he doesn’t work weekends. None of them do. I’m not that big of a story. (That’s about to change!) But he is always there, bright and early on Monday morning, before the rest of the pond scum trickle in for normal business hours. Monday served my purposes better, anyhow. I needed Gary to discover the package and watch the clip in question after I did what I am planning on doing today. If this got out before the brunch at Jesse’s, I don’t know if I’d ever be in the same room with these prostitutes again. The scene today would be canceled. What is on that tape is that much of a bombshell.

  I can tell that Vince has watched the footage by the injured expression on his face. “I saw you leave on the Ring,” he says, referring to the security camera we have for our front door, “and I thought I’d try to get some more clothes out of the house while you were out. But then I found this and—” His voice breaks off, emotionally. How dare he. How dare he be hurt by me.

  “You were going to let this get out?” Vince continues, woefully. “You were going to let my family see that? My mom?”

  I eye the hot curling iron on the sink, which I forgot to unplug last night. Bring up that red-hat-wearing bitch one more time and I’ll—

  “You know,” he goes on, “you were not an innocent bystander in this marriage either, and I’m not going around flapping my mouth about it onstage at Talkhouse. I’m not shilling videos of your affairs to the paparazzi.”

  It’s the most honest thing he’s ever said to me. There is an honest thing to say back, in an iron, don’t fuck with me tone, but it is not time to be honest yet. I have to say whatever it takes to get me to Jesse’s house. I take a deep, fortifying sigh, steeling myself for the industrial load of bullshit about to come out of my mouth. “I know,” I say, making my voice as gravelly as his. It doesn’t take much. After my stage performance last night, my vocal cords are shot through. “You wouldn’t do that to me.” You would just fuck the one person who I thought was safe, and so I told her everything—about feeling so invisible and so unmistakable, about neurotransmitters, about how hard it was to be a daughter to my mother, about what Vince does when I’m not around and how I did it too but only to keep the deep and abiding feelings of inadequacy at bay. I showed that bitch my belly because I thought I never had to worry about losing her. I thought Vince couldn’t be attracted to that and even if he was, it wouldn’t matter because she wasn’t attracted to that.

  “I miss our life together,” Vince whispers, wiping away a crocodile tear. He presses his back against the wall and sinks to the floor of the bathroom, hooking his arms around his shins and dropping his forehead to his knees with a contrite moan.

  Well, of course you miss our life together, you dolt. You are a thirty-two-year-old failed actor living in a brownstone on the Upper East Side with a megababe. You hit the jackpot with me and you fucked it up something fierce.

  Eyes on the prize, Steph. So I lower myself to the floor alongside Vince, slowly, as though I am settling into a hot bath. I rest my head on his shoulder, mostly so he can’t see my face, which is warped with revulsion for him. “I miss our life together too.” I eye the Jimmy Choo box in his lap, the GoPro still inside. How am I going to get that back from him? And who am I going to give it to now?

  Vince lifts his chin, his face full of promise. “Then why are we doing this?”

  I raise a hand for his benefit, I don’t know anymore. “I was angry, Vince. My ego was bruised. I guess I was just trying to hurt you like you hurt me.”

  Vince reaches for my hand, stroking my palm in a gentle motion that makes me want to rip my skin right off. “Do you really want a divorce?”

  I clench my toes and grit my teeth. “I want to make it right. All of it. Us. The book. The show. That’s why I came out here. This scene at Jesse’s—it’s my last chance to redeem myself. I have to go. And you should come too. We can tell everyone we’re calling it off. We’re going to stay together. Prove to everyone that we are stronger than the show.”

  Vince hooks a finger beneath my
chin, the way I did to what’s his name from last night. I learned that move from Vince, come to think of it. How sweet. “I would like that,” he says, right before he leans in and brushes his lips against mine, teasingly, as though to say—this is what you’ve been missing. My hangover makes itself fully known.

  And then—like a very good gold digger, using sex to get what she wants—I do my husband on the bathroom floor, one last time. As I dutifully hump that little jalapeño pepper, I say a prayer that what’s his name gave me crabs, or something really nasty, like syphilis. Not that Vince would have long to suffer.

  There is a funny standoff in the driveway. Jen is adamant that we not take her car to Jesse’s, and I am absolutely adamant that we do. Kelly’s car is a hunk of junk, and not in the intentional, nineties army green Defender way, the car Jesse bought off eBay and drives out here, her dyke hair not blowing in the wind. I need Jen’s emissions-free douche-mobile that goes from zero to sixty in four point two seconds, that starts without having to press a button or put a key into the ignition, but when Vince approaches the passenger-side door, Jen makes a lame excuse.

  “It’s just.” Jen falls silent a moment. “I feel a little dizzy today. From the heat. I really don’t feel up to driving.” She clamps a hand to her forehead, overselling it.

  “I’ll drive,” I volunteer, impatiently. While I was “showering,” I shared the GoPro footage to the app on my phone, then I hid the GoPro in the back of a closet in the guest room. A tasty treat for Jen to find one day! I smell like a party bus after the party and two different men’s loads. Not the aromatic memory I’d like to leave behind, but I couldn’t risk taking the camera with me and having Vince discover it on my person. He hasn’t been able to keep his hands off me since we consummated our “reconciliation.”

  “It handles differently than what you’re used to,” Jen says to me. “We should really take Kelly’s car.”

  “Ummm.” Kelly laughs. “I don’t think we want to do that. My car doesn’t have AC.”

  “I’d rather go in Kelly’s car too,” Lauren says, slowly, staggering into the shade of a tree. The sunlight is relentless this morning, as if furious about its captivity yesterday. I say a little prayer it doesn’t blind the shot. That would be the real tragedy.

  Vince leans onto the hood of Jen’s car, resting his palms on the curve of the trunk. “You look like you could use some AC,” he tells Lauren with a wry, empathetic smile, assuming she’s hurting from the night before. But I’ve seen Lauren hungover before, and this isn’t Lauren hungover. On another day, I’d think harder about why it is she’s acting so weird.

  Lauren is wearing tiny round sunglasses, pushed low on the bridge of her nose, full-throttle nineties nostalgia. Above the thin wire rim of her shades, she stares at Vince’s hands on the trunk of Jen’s car, her lips parted in confusion. “I don’t want to take Jen’s car,” she says, again sounding as though she’s speaking to work out something for herself more than to any of us.

  I toss up my hands—Fine, I can make this work even in Kelly’s car—and lead the charge, planting myself in the middle so as to avoid another tantrum from someone whose legs are too long or whose ego is too inflated to sit in the bitch seat. Lauren gets in to my right and Vince to my left, grumbling, This makes no sense. Jen takes the front-passenger seat next to Kelly. The car smells like chewy, fruit-flavored candy. I look up to see a Strawberries & Crème air freshener dangling from Kelly’s rearview mirror. But of course.

  Kelly sticks the key in the ignition and turns. The engine bears down, wheezing, trying, before giving up with a woman’s cry. Kelly drapes her arm around the back of Jen’s chair and regards us over the brim of her neon blue sunglasses, the kind that everyone was wearing last summer. “Well,” she says solemnly, “she lived a good life.”

  If that’s not God telling me to go for it, it’s Lucifer.

  I could cartwheel to Jen’s car. But just as I’m about to climb into the back, I notice that Jen has stopped in the driveway. She’s examining her hand, holding it up to the sunlight. Something is caught in her Standing Sisters ring. A hair, it looks like, from the way she pinches it between her fingers and pulls—and pulls—flicking her index finger on her thumb, making that panicked face all women make when they find a bug crawling on them and they need to get it off but they don’t want to touch it. She watches the hair float slowly to the ground, her eyelids fluttering, woozily. She stumbles, leaning into the side of the house, swaying a little, then spins and vomits all over the base of the Japanese maple Yvette planted in memory of her late mother. Some of it even gets on the bronze plaque Yvette had made: For Betty “Battle Axe” Greenberg, who would rather die than rest in peace.

  “Jen! Oh my God!” Kelly cries, rushing to her aid. Is Kelly the new Lauren? “Are you okay?”

  Jen straightens enough to wave a hand over her shoulder—shoo, Kelly—before lurching over and retching again. Vince, concerned for the well-being of others as always, turns away, his face crinkling in disgust, like he might be next. For some strange reason, Lauren’s eyes fill with tears, though I doubt even she understands why.

  I watch Jen’s bony back expand and contract, expand and contract, as her equilibrium returns to her. She stands, wiping the side of her hand across her mouth. Is she hungover? Is she sick? Is it contagious? I have that visceral, germaphobe stay away from me reaction, before remembering with a dry chuckle to myself—Someone could stick me with an AIDS-coated needle right now and it wouldn’t matter.

  “Jen,” Kelly says, as Jen heads for her car, “maybe you should stay home and—”

  “I feel better now actually,” she says.

  “At least let someone else drive if you aren’t—”

  “I feel better now!” she cries, sounding fully hysterical as she climbs behind the wheel of the car and slams her door shut. This group is made up exclusively of whack jobs, but the Green Menace has always been the wackiest.

  I’ve been to Jesse’s house only once before, as a guest of Brett’s, who is such a regular you could pick out her preferred lounge chair. Hint: It’s the one with the slightly sunken middle. We drank Casamigos by the pool (I got Jesse’s hydrangeas very drunk) and ate swordfish prepared for us on the grill by Hank, who Jesse refers to as her friend but everyone knows is her Jeeves. The Montauk community was sure Jesse Barnes would demolish the original Techbuilt home when she bought it in 2008, but she ingratiated herself when all she did was remodel the kitchen and add a pool.

  We park in the dirt driveway, next to the white crew van and Jesse’s vintage Land Rover. Jen’s Tesla looks downright villainous on the humble property, the car of a collector come in from Gotham to repossess the land from farmer Ted, blithely unaware he’s sitting on a multimillion-dollar lot. Thanks to the New York Post’s steadfast reporting, I know that a rolling meadow used to separate the end of the drive from the seventy-foot drop to the sea, but that the bluffs have eroded, little by little some years, in honking wet chunks during others. Jesse has had to file an emergency application with the East Hampton Planning Department to have the home moved one hundred feet back from the abyss. Lucky for me it has yet to be granted.

  The crew has moved the picnic table from the shallow end of the pool to the deep, in an attempt to game the sun’s position and mitigate the glare off the water. Marc is covering all of the cameras with beach blankets, keeping them out of direct sunlight so that they’re not too hot to handle. The PAs are setting the table with platters of food and Lisa is halfway through uncorking a dozen wine bottles so that we do not lose a moment to our drinking, which is a production trick to keep the cast from realizing they’ve had too much. The act of stopping to open a new bottle can make you take stock—How many have I had? Might be smart to drink a glass of water. Anything smart is bad, when it comes to production purposes.

  Jesse does her part by reading A Little Life beneath an SPF-coated umbrella—clearly, she has been expecting me. It’s a dexterous insult, I’ll give her that. The same mo
nth The New Yorker called out the subversive brilliance of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, Kirkus likened the third book in my fiction series to a Lifetime movie-of-the-week, right down to the contrived dialogue.

  Jesse notices us and bends the page. Her Bettie Page paleness and black jeans swan in the face of the beach babe aesthetic that rules out here, and I think we are all grateful for it. Imagining Jesse in a swimsuit is like imagining your parents having sex. Her bare feet are embarrassing enough.

  She walks over to meet us, removing her sunglasses in a way that implies I should do the same, so that we can have a proper gal-to-gal chat. I leave my big black Pradas right where they are.

  “I don’t know what you hoped to accomplish by coming here,” Jesse says.

  Lisa sets down the wine opener and joins Jesse at her side, a punky yeah, what she said expression on her thin, jowly face. All that weight loss only to look ten years saggier in her eHarmony profile picture. Being a woman is like the lottery. Yes, some sad sack is destined to win it, but the odds are very against that sad sack being you. No matter, most of us will continue to try, and most of us will continue to hear someone else’s number called, year after year.

  “You know you can’t be here,” Jesse says to me. “We were willing to let you try it last night but you’ve proven yourself to be untrustworthy and honestly, Steph? A little bit unstable. I hope you are getting the support you need for your mental health.”

  From the person who has stomped all over my mental health in steel-toed Dr. Martens. How does she not hear herself?

  Vince slips his hand into mine in an act of courageous spousal support. Even his hand feels like it’s been in another woman’s hand. I turn to him with a brave smile, though I can feel my contempt for him in my fingernails. “Vince?” I ask in a tiny brave voice. “Will you just give me a moment to speak to Jesse and Lisa in private?”