Hooked (11 page)

“Are you speaking tonight?” I asked Dad, putting my arm through Will’s.

“Naw, no,” Dad grumbled. He waved to an older couple, lowering his head as they walked by. “Harry’s speaking. I don’t do it unless there’s a gun at my head.”

Will smiled appreciatively.

Elizabeth blew in. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she called from across the lobby. “I’ve just had the afternoon from hell. Corky chewed up the Pearsons’ baby ball. I had to stop at Mary Arnold and have one messengered over, of all things.”

“Do us all a favor, Lizzie, lose the yippy little sausage,” Dad said, kissing her on both cheeks.

“Nevah,” she cackled.

Elizabeth was a decorator and had gotten Dad his living room furniture. Big brown leather stuff with buttons, and a couple of stripy-wood end tables that struck me as very him: unadventurously tasteful, directly linked to the great outdoors. He wouldn’t let her do anything else with his apartment. He said she was too expensive.

“How are we all this lovely evening?” she asked, gathering her diaphanous wrap around her, and before anyone could answer, said, “Shall we mingle with the masses?”

Dad put his hand on the small of Elizabeth’s back and guided her to the elevators, alerting me to the fact that Elizabeth’s ass was half the size of mine. The ballroom upstairs was a patchwork of sumptuous black fabric—chiffon, gabardine, taffeta—all swishing around over the gaudy, Saudi-palace carpet. Will and I were the youngest ones there. I hoped we stuck out in only a cool, sexy way.

“Can I get everyone drinks?” Will asked, his voice fading into the din.

“Champagne?” I asked Dad. “C’mon, one glass.”

“One glass,” Dad said. “Lizzie?”

“White wine, please. Emma!” she called to a woman a few heads away. “That wasn’t your show—Diane’s? Where the lights fell down on the stage?”

Emma shook her head solemnly.

“Thank God!” Elizabeth yelled, a little softer but with exaggerated emphasis. “I read that and thought, Oh my God, I hope that wasn’t her show.”

If she’d said “I hope that wasn’t Emma’s show,” instead of “her show,” it would have come out sounding nicer. Elizabeth reminded me of Mom a little, the way you couldn’t always tell whether she was on your side or not.

Will stepped over to the bar a few feet away. I heard him say “Can I get a white wine …” and saw Dad wince. He was always on me to say “May I please have” instead of “Can I get.”

“It’s vulgar, Thea,” he’d say. “The kids who work for me say it all the time too. Their breakfast orders in the morning make my head hurt. ‘Can I get an egg and cheese?’ You all need to be reprogrammed. It’s basic English.” At least I did it too, and people at work. Not just Will.

Will came back with Dad’s seltzer with lime and Elizabeth’s wine, then my champagne and a beer for himself, which he drank out of the bottle. The four of us stood in an awkward huddle.

“Teddy tells me you’re at Columbia,” Elizabeth said to Will.

“Yeah.” Will nodded uncomfortably. I saw Dad look away.

“That’s a wonderful school. My nephew just finished up there.”

Will swigged his beer.

“So who are we sitting with?” I asked, molding my cocktail napkin around the base of my flute. “Work people?”

“Mostly, yes, and some friends of Harry’s,” Dad said.

A woman wearing a polka-dot dress and green glasses was talking near me. “Bruno, my youngest, loves the ladies,” she said, her tall husband nodding in agreement. “He likes to escort them down the steps of his preschool and bid them good afternoon.”

We found our table, close to the stage. Elizabeth put her tiny handbag, shaped like a turtle and covered in rhinestones, next to Dad’s chair, and another couple quickly parked themselves on his other side. The other free seats were across the table, so any further Dad-Will bonding wasn’t in the cards. We spent the night talking to a pale, pudgy Australian guy who worked for Dad. “I love this city,” he kept saying, as though trying to convince himself. “I love the Upper West Side.”

Mostly we snuck out into the atrium for drinks, our first trip right after the salads. We ducked behind a big pillar decorated with fake orange lilies, our buzzes escalating at the same time in a whirling rush.

He leaned toward me and winked. “You are the fairest of them all, milady. Ma’am. Your Honor.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said, fluttering my eyelids. I kissed him, noticing how every angle of his body inspired a crazy-making, lustful lurch inside me. I wanted to step into him. Just get in him and live in there. I leaned against the pillar, cold against my bare back.

“You know, I love you so much,” Will whispered, brushing his lips across mine just like he did when we had sex. Even then I knew that chances were, I loved him more. Will was drunk. It reminded me of when I was younger and Dad had
scrawled the words
I love you more than you can dream
on the back of a picture of me in our living room one night when he was bombed out of his mind. I’d come home from school and found it, next to an ashtray filled with butts, the table sticky with beer from the previous night’s all-nighter. I had crossed it out, making deep, pissed-off Bic-pen indentations into the cardboard. I remember thinking he could only bring himself to love me when he was shit-faced.

Still, I loved hearing Will say he loved me, over and over.

“Will, I have to tell you something,” I said.

“What,” he said, kissing my neck and pulling the chain around my waist.

“I’m still pregnant. I didn’t go through with it, that day I was supposed to. I couldn’t.”

He looked at me and his body seemed to lurch backward in slow motion.

“I didn’t mean to hide it,” I said. “It’s hard for me to explain.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said. I tried to find a trace of something I could recognize, in his eyes, in his expression, but his face reflected back only the worst—that I’d done something very wrong by not telling him.

Someone had made an announcement I didn’t hear and everyone started to file back into the dining room.

“I’m out of here,” Will said. He started for the elevators, then kicked open the fire-exit door and let it slam behind him before I had a chance to call his name.

The tangle of Mom’s belts hung off my desk chair when I woke up the next morning. A couple of them were on the floor. Mom loves her clothes and preserves them fastidiously in her closet like museum pieces. My first thought was actually to get up, roll the belts and put them on my desk before she saw them like that. Then I remembered the previous night and wondered if I could just close my eyes again and have everything end right there. I felt like someone had run a bulldozer over my body and wondered how I was ever going to get out of bed, get clothes on, deal with Mom in the kitchen and get out the door to school. I remembered Dad’s face when I went back into the dining room and told him that Will had gotten sick and that I was going to take him home. He’d sat back and laid his dessert fork down as if he were trying not to wake someone, even though the room was ringing with the sound of silverware through the drone of voices. “Okay,” he’d said flatly, taking a sip from his sweaty water glass, and I could read his thoughts like a news feed running across his face: Here we go again, Thea’s up to her old tricks—she’s drunk and her boyfriend’s drunk and she’s let me down once again. I’ll let her go before she embarrasses me any further.

I told Mom that the party was fun and that Will loved my dress and that I was late for zero period, slathering some peanut butter on a piece of toast I knew I would throw into the junk-mail can in the lobby.

I somehow made it to school, to my spot on the floor in zero-period gym as Mr. Boone paced and talked about muscle recovery.

“When you work a muscle group to its maximum capacity, they need a period of time to reoxygenate,” Mr. Boone said, weaving around us like we were cones on a road.

The reality that I wouldn’t ever again lie in Will’s bed at Columbia and see that Nerf basketball hoop hanging off his door, that I wouldn’t get to touch his hair, flatten it out along the back of his neck, was starting to hit home. I realized I understood what the expression “hot tears” meant. There were so many of them going down my face, I gave up wiping them away. Wiping called attention to them. I didn’t feel like dying. I felt dead already. Will hadn’t abandoned just me, but also the beautiful, mysterious thing growing inside me that we had made together. I remember watching the track team come panting through the big metal doors from their run and having the feeling that the level of pain I was experiencing was way more than I bargained for. It was pain I didn’t know existed. Mr. Boone passed by my spot and looked straight at me for a moment, and it was almost like he knew
why
I was crying, but he did a stand-up job of pretending nothing was wrong. I wondered over and over why I’d done what I’d done and what I was going to do next.

But then later, as I went outside for lunch, there was Will. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk with his arms folded across his chest. It was freezing cold and it reminded me of the first day I met him. He was standing by himself then, too.

“I’m so hungover.” Will smiled, shaking his head. “Staying up all night didn’t help.”

“Do you want to go somewhere?” I asked. I saw Vanessa walking toward us in her maroon down jacket, but she saw my face and turned and went around the corner. I hadn’t even told her yet about the night before.

“Tell me what you were thinking, Thea,” he said.

“I-it was just … avoidance,” I stammered. “I was avoiding it. I thought I’d go back when I was ready.”

“You were scared,” he said.

“I was scared,” I repeated. “I
am
scared.”

“What are you scared of?”

“I’m scared of doing it, I’m scared of not doing it,” I said, looking down at my knapsack slumped at my feet on the curb. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What are you more scared of?”

“Getting an abortion,” I said. “I don’t know why.”

“Shit, Thea,” he said, setting his hands rigidly on his hips. “I wish you’d just told me. You could have told me you were screwed up about it. We could have talked about it. What did you think I’d do?”

“It’s lame, I know,” I said. “It’s like I couldn’t do anything. Except let another day pass. In a weird way, I know it’s pathetic and awful, but I liked that it was getting bigger.”

He looked at me, his good eye boring into mine. “You actually want to go through with this,” he said slowly. “You want to bring a baby into the world. A child.”

I love the sound of your voice, I thought. Your voice is my drug. All I’ll ever need. “It’s you, you know, how could I not?” I said, barely getting the words out. “It’s you.”

More staring. A gust of wind blew our hair up.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I’m thinking, holy shit.” Mr. Plumb, a history teacher, walked up to us, eyeing Will in his big, black down parka.

“Well, if it isn’t …,” Mr. Plumb said, not finishing the sentence.

“Hello, Mr. Plumb.” Will mustered a quick smile.

“The girl’s reeled you back here, eh?” Mr. Plumb smiled, his crazy eyes bulging out of their sockets. “Where you at now?”

“Columbia,” Will answered.

“Very nice, very nice,” Mr. Plumb said, slapping Will on the back. “Well, I’m going to get a slice. Be a good boy, now.”

“I will,” Will muttered.

“All I can think is, Why not,” I said. “Do you know what I mean?”

“No.” He sighed, running his thumb over my palm. “But I can try, I guess.”

“You can’t do it just because you love me,” I said.

“There’s no other reason, Thea, sorry.”

We both turned to stare at the big double doors at the top of the steps, watching as kids streamed into the street, chatty and enervated in the gray midday light. I wondered how close Will was to walking away.

“My parents are going to freak out,” he said quietly.

“What do you think they’ll do?” I asked, not sure what direction he was going in yet.

“Hell if I know.” We looked at each other and hugged, and I imagined us in one of those telling soap-opera hugs, with him frowning behind me without me realizing.

I thanked the bartender for the ginger ale, envisioning the straight, sharp lines across Dad’s forehead. I wondered how he might come between us. What he could say or do to change Will’s mind.

“I
knew
you wouldn’t go through with it,” Vanessa had
said when I’d told her that morning at breakfast that I’d decided to keep the baby. She stirred the streaky cream in her coffee as the words poured out of her. “I don’t know why, but I feel like it’s meant to be this way. I didn’t want to say anything, I know it’ll be tough, but if anyone can do it, you can. You’re a
pioneer
. You make the rules. How did Fiona take it?”

“She’s not speaking to me,” I said, amazed at how Vanessa had so swiftly changed her tune to support mode without blinking an eye.

“Shocker,” Vanessa said, squeezing my hand. “Typical Fiona, so constructive. Don’t let it get to you. She’ll come around.”

Now Will came in and sat at the bar without taking off his coat. “So I told them,” he said, breathing fast. “They’re pissed, but weirdly, I think they get it. Deep down, they’re closet hippies. I told you that. This is normal to them on some level. They want to meet with your parents.” He flagged the bartender and mouthed the word “Heineken” after he’d gotten his attention.

“Okay,” I said. “What else did they say?”

“They said that if it’s what I want, they can’t really stop me. But I know my dad was this close to having a stroke. My future up in smoke, all that.” I tried to read Will’s face, unable to tell if he felt that way too. “But I have to hand it to him. They may have some ulterior thing cooking. I have no idea.”

“Like what?” I asked, feeling sweaty and sick at the prospect of Dad walking into the restaurant at any moment.

“Like hiring our dry cleaner who’s also a hit man to off you?” he said, pulling out his wallet.

“You think?” I asked, folding down my straw.

“I don’t know, I don’t think so, but we can’t be positive.” He smiled tightly and took a big swig of his Heineken. “Just be extra careful.”