The Big Rewind (17 page)

D
olly's was one of those tacky brunch places daddies take the daughters from their second families when they're trying to play like they live for having tea parties, as if that will somehow make up for ditching the starter kit they see every third weekend back in Brewster. It was all pink and lacy and it wasn't the Vicodin that made me want to retch when I walked in. I sat at a table near the back, away from the two women who looked over at their three sticky kids, only to tell them to stop interrupting their conversation about the latest pseudo-bondage novel they were both reading. I ordered a French lavender latte that took ten minutes to show up and came complete with a corgi face drawn in the foam. How fucking precious.

A girl in clear heels and a faux-vintage fur coat came in. She looked out of place even for Brooklyn, like Carrie Bradshaw on a five-dollar blow-job budget. She paused midstrut, as though she was waiting for every guy in the place to loll out his tongue like it was a red carpet. Except there were no guys to be had, and the women couldn't have cared less.

“What did you expect?” I asked when she dropped her black vinyl purse on the table. “Straight men don't brunch, but stick around; they'll all be in with family number two this afternoon. Where's the wallet?”

She smiled seductively. “What are you, his wife?” she teased. “You jealous? Wanted to see what he was getting on the side?” She stretched out one long, enviable leg and ran a well-manicured hand from her knee to her crotch. The women at the other table hissed in whispers. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but I'm sure it wasn't nice.

“Not his wife,” I replied. “Not even his girlfriend. Just the kind of pal who picks a guy up from the emergency room after half his face has been busted—two cracked ribs, burst blood vessels in his left eye, mouth looks like hell. He's knocked out on Vicodin on my couch right now.”

She rolled her lips into a nasty pout. “He got what he deserved,” she said, all the honey drained out of her voice. “That's what he gets for objectifying women.”

“That's pretty big talk coming from the girl in the G-string,” I retorted.

“So you're saying I deserve to be treated like a sex object because of how I dress?”

I laughed for a good hard minute while she glared at me with kohl-rimmed eyes. “You are joking, right?” I asked, leaning in. “Sweetheart, you make a living taking your clothes off for money and you get mad when men look at you like a girl who's taking her clothes off for money? What, Daddy didn't love you enough to buy you ballet lessons?”

“I'm working on a PhD in womyn's studies.” I could hear her pronounce the Y and tried not to roll my eyes.

“And stripping your way through college,” I finished. “Got any other clichés you'd like to work out?”

She took out her tablet and I wondered which poor sap she'd ripped that off of. “Please, keep talking,” she said. “I'd love to interview you on how you can pretend to be a feminist while justifying the patriarchy.”

“No,” I said, jamming my finger in her face. “You don't get to pretend you're a better feminist than me because you're up in some ivory grad-thesis tower. You're a stripper. That's fine. But
your silicone tits and your waxed snatch sell a glossy version of sex no real woman could ever achieve, so you do
not
get to treat me like I'm some sort of baby-incubating housewife.” Gloria sure as fuck didn't act like this. Where the hell did Cinderella get off?

“Men like your friend Sid think it's okay to treat women like a piece of meat,” she said. “So I show men like him the power a real woman has. I make them pay and I make them pay
hard
.”

“Well, aren't you just an angel of true fucking justice,” I snapped, my face getting hot and papery. “What the hell were you expecting him to do? Slip you a twenty and tell you that you're better than this? Ever think that maybe,
just maybe,
he respected your choice to take your clothes off for cash?”

“Why are you defending him?” she asked, tapping her screen with a manicure that didn't have a single chip missing. I doubted she'd done any of the hard work last night.

“Because he loved you,” I said, proud that the words didn't burn a chemical hole through my throat. “He didn't see you as an object. He saw you as a person, a person he fell in love with. He came in and saw you
where you worked
because that's what men in love do. And you rolled him because you're a hateful little bitch. You had some hulking hunk of steroids—that's the patriarchy, by the way—kick his ass because you're a sniveling coward. So give me his wallet—and his phone—right now, or I'll call the cops.” I pulled out my own phone to show her I wasn't fucking around.

“I'll say he tried to rape me.”

“Of course you would,” I snarled. “And it's skanks like you who make those cockwad men's rights activists on Reddit drool.” I poised my hand over the dial button, hoping she couldn't see how hard I was shaking. “Hand them over. Now.”

She dug through her purse and slapped the phone on the table. A moment later came the wallet. I gathered both of them up and stood. “She'll take the tab whenever she's ready,” I told the waitress. To Cinderella, I added, “Hope it doesn't cut into next semester's textbook fund.”

T
HERE WERE FIVE
missed calls from Gloria on Sid's phone. I dialed her as I walked back to the apartment, my stomach jumpy and hollow from adrenaline and rage. She sounded frantic when she picked up.

“Sid?” she asked. “Sid, are you all right?”

“It's Jett,” I said, correcting her. “What's going on?”

“Is Sid okay?” she demanded. “I saw him go into the back room with Cinderella and Tommy followed. I know what happens back there, I know what Tommy does, but normally it's to guys who kinda have it coming. But Sid didn't deserve that. They hurt him really bad, Jett. I waited with him until the ambulance arrived and haven't been back to Fairy Tales since. Told my boss I twisted my ankle.”

“You saved his life,” I said. “I can't thank you enough.”

The line went silent for a moment. “Look, I like Cinderella,” she began slowly, “and sometimes I agree with her—some of the guys who come in are scum—but not Sid. Sid was a sweetheart.” I heard the click of a cigarette lighter in the background. “That's the difference between me and her—I like my job. I like the guys like Sid.” I pictured her at her kitchen table, smoking nervously, her own hands shaking as hard as mine. “And sure, you get guys like Terry in there, but most of them are pretty chill. I got a guy who comes in there and sketches us. Says it's cheaper than an art class. Who knows, maybe I'm hanging in a gallery somewhere. I'm art!” She giggled for a moment before her voice got hard again.

“Cinderella thinks this is a game,” she continued. “She's got a trust fund; this is all research for her. This is a living for me. This is how I pay the rent on this shithole.” She paused, presumably to take a drag. “She didn't have to do that to Sid. Some douche like Terry, sure, but not Sid. I hope her fucking tits fall off.” She paused again and I could almost taste her cigarette smoke through the phone. “You know how she paid for her boob job? With a fucking university grant. For feminist studies. Some fucking feminist, right?”

I didn't want to get into a conversation on feminist theory when my bloody best friend was home alone. “I need you to do me a solid,” I said. “For Sid.”

“Name it, honey.”

“I need you to turn her in,” I said. “You said so yourself, she's bad for your business. Call the cops and rat her flat ass out.”

“I don't know,” she said. “I'm not a snitch. Besides, I'm scared as fuck of Tommy.”

“So turn on him,” I said. “Please, Gloria. Sid won't say a word against her. He told the cops he didn't know anything. But Tommy, he's good for it. Let's at least get him. I just don't want to see anyone else get hurt.”

Gloria sighed. “She does have a pretty flat ass,” she said. “Maybe she can get some big ol' butt implants with the next grant. Sure, I'll do it. Maybe they'll send in some cute undercover and I can give him a freebie.” I heard her take another drag. “Does Sid need anything? Or do you still have some leftovers?”

“Can I make a confession?” I asked. “The pills we bought from you, they weren't for us. I didn't fall down the subway stairs. We had to trade it to Terry so we could use his car.”

“Figures—don't worry, I won't hold it against you if you don't make a habit out of it.”

“No way,” I said. “Fuck Terry.”

“Exactly,” she said. “Fuck that guy. But don't worry, Jett, I'll take care of what I can here, and you tell Sid to come up and see me sometime—in Chinatown. You can come too. I know a good dim sum place, the dirty kind where everything's cheap and delicious. My treat. I'll be making the good money when that twat is spreading her legs in some mobbed-up Russian nudie joint.”

“Sounds like a good time,” I said. “I'll pass the word along to Sid.”

I
HAD ONE
final mission before I could go home to Sid. With his eyes as busted up as they were, he wouldn't be putting in his
contacts any time soon, and without his glasses, he'd have a hell of a time finding his way back to his apartment to
get
his specs. Of course, this meant I had to face Terry at one
P.M
. on a Sunday afternoon. It might as well have been seven
A.M.
for the schedule Sid said he kept.

Terry's place was over in Park Slope—because of course it was. His dad had been a real estate tycoon and Terry had what seemed like a bottomless trust fund to snort, not to mention an apartment that Sid described as having more square footage than the house he'd grown up in. Why he'd taken in a roommate was beyond us; he certainly didn't need help making rent, but Sid said it was more than likely Terry was just looking for someone to bum drugs off of. By the time he'd realized Sid wasn't into his scene, he had already taken too much of a liking to him to kick him out. After all, the party girls Sid turned down needed to sleep with someone.

The doorman barely glanced at me, but the look he managed to give was filled with the contempt of a man who's spent his entire career mopping up the sick of all-hours guests. I let him. He'd earned it. On floor six I edged the key into the lock, hoping I could get in and get out without having to explain anything to Terry.

I've seen back alleys cleaner than Terry's living room. There were empty bottles and clothes everywhere. There was a broken mirror dangling off the coffee table, dusted with the remnants of last night's nose candy. I was glad I'd worn my Docs; the fear of stepping on a razor blade or a needle was very, very real.

A girl with makeup that Lady Gaga would have rejected as too outlandish stumbled out of the bathroom with one yellow shoe on. “Fucking cocksucker,” she said, her face pointed toward me but her eyes a million miles elsewhere. “What, are you another one of Terry's fucking whores? Fuck that shit, I'm leaving. I'm not into whatever sick twisted shit he brought you here for. Where's my fucking shoe?”

I pointed to her other shoe on a cigarette-burned Anthropolo
gie ottoman, tipped on its side like a derailed train. She picked it up and jammed it on while I slipped into Sid's room and grabbed his glasses off his dresser. I started to bag up some clothes, but before I could put together even a single outfit, the girl screamed, “Hey, Terry, your fucking girlfriend's here!”

I froze, pressing myself against a wall as though I could blend into the wallpaper. I heard a door open and heavy footsteps. “There's no one fucking here!” Terry bellowed.

“She's probably hiding under your fucking bed!” she shrieked.

The two of them exchanged another streak of hurt words that culminated in one door slamming, then another. I counted to ten, peered into the empty living room and, when I was sure it was safe to duck out, ran like the place was timed to blow.

S
id was awake when I got back, staring slack-jawed at a rerun of
Let's Make a Deal
with Baldrick curled up next to him. “Where have you been?” he asked, eyes unable to focus, his words measured and paced.

I placed his glasses and his keys on the coffee table next to the still-folded note I'd left him. I tossed his wallet and his phone down on the couch. “Cards are all still in there—she didn't have time to use them. Cash is gone, but I suspect it's where it would have ended up anyways.”

“Hope she bought something nice,” he said sarcastically, clicking off the TV like the remote was made of lead. “How did you get this?”

“We met for brunch.” I poured myself the last cup of coffee and sat down next to him. “She probably thought she could blackmail me, but I got the drop on her. Gloria called; she was worried about you. We talked for a bit. I kind of dig her.”

“What did you two have to talk about?” he snarled.

“About what a sweetheart you are.”

His eyes shifted to the side and his mouth pulled into a hard line. “About what a sucker I am,” he repeated.

“Maybe,” I said. I wanted to put my arms around him, hold
him tight against all the sordid ugliness of the world. “But you're my sucker.”

He eyed me queerly, as though trying to smile. He lifted his hand to the back of my neck and pulled me in close, kissing me with swollen lips. He shifted back against the arm of the sofa and I braced myself, not wanting to land on his busted ribs. He arched his body into mine and put his arms around me, pulling me in close. If any of it pained him, he didn't let on.

My cheek was wet and I tasted copper. I looked down to see a smear of blood on Sid's mouth. “Shit,” he said, sitting up and reaching for a tissue. “Sorry.” He pressed it against his busted lip.

“It's all right,” I said, disappointed. I hadn't been expecting the kiss, but I'd be kidding myself if I said I hadn't been hoping for it, a knight's reward for a completed quest. I was giddy and aching for more; I changed the subject before I attacked him again. “Want a grilled cheese?”

“That sounds great,” he replied, his voice hoarse with what sounded like regret.

I
'M SURE THE
pills helped, but Sid couldn't stop laughing when I told him about my adventure in his apartment. I left out the part about my meeting with Cinderella and Gloria's scheme to catch her. He hadn't wanted to admit it was Cinderella last night, so all I could hope was that she had quietly been busted and everything would go back to normal.

We didn't talk much as we watched
The Commish
and ate potato-leek soup from the deli up the street, but I kept hoping he'd lean in for another kiss. I made up the couch for him, not wanting to make him feel awkward by inviting him into my bed. I didn't want to take the risk that he'd decline with the same forced politeness he used when turning down coke at Terry's parties.

But even after he popped another Vicodin and said good night, I lay awake in my own darkness, staring up into the night's
abyss. I couldn't stop thinking about the bittersweet perfection of that kiss. Except for the blood, it wasn't too unlike my first kiss with Catch, the silent prelude, the electric distance between our mouths. We had been lying on the grass in the campus nature preserve, staring up at the cold stars as he prattled on about yet another girl who'd broken his heart. And then he turned to me, and I turned to him, and the next thing I knew, our bodies were tangled tight to each other. After that, we didn't kiss again for another three months, another girl for him, a short-lived relationship for me, and then the inevitable absence that led us back to each other. And then for a year it was just us, until Amanda came along and ruined everything.

After about an hour, I got up, turned on the light, and got out the Boyfriend Box. My eyes burned hot as I held Catch's letters, hands trembling as I opened one of the envelopes postmarked from Ireland, his senior semester abroad. He wrote in green ink about whiskey, about the beautiful countryside, and at last he wrote,
For all the fun I'm having here, part of me is counting down the days until I come home to you. The sheep are great, but they keep baaing over the TV, and my real best friend would know that I hate that.

Those three months had been like a prison sentence and his letters were my only moments of release. I'd written to him every week, filling the envelopes with magazine clippings and photos, postcards with song lyrics written on the back. I wondered if he still had all of them in a box of his own, stashed in an attic or a basement or the bedroom at his parents' house.

The postmark on the letter was just two years before the final showdown, the fateful night when I watched him leave with her and never come back. In two years we'd go from being friends to confidants to something resembling lovers, and then, finally, to bitter adversaries, each mortally wounded by the other's inability to figure out what the fuck we were feeling.

And then suddenly Sid was there. I hadn't heard him get up. “What are you doing?” he asked, sitting down next to me.

I didn't want to tell him about Catch. I hadn't told anyone about him; even college friends like Reese only knew that we weren't friends anymore, with none of the details. If I told anyone, I rationalized, I could be blamed, or worse, they might side with him and I would lose one more friend to this terrible war of love. Even if I'd wanted to confess it all to Sid, Catch's name would have stuck in my throat like dry bread, choking me to death.

“Just thinking about old boyfriends,” I lied, holding up a tape Ryan had made me. “George put so much love and thought into those mixes he made KitKat, and this one is just kind of standard. I mean, he put Third Eye Blind's “Jumper” on there. Who puts a suicide song on a mix CD?”

He shrugged. “The late nineties were a confusing time,” he said, reaching over and taking the tape out of my hand. “But that's not who you're thinking about tonight, is it?”

He had me there. “How do you know?”

He picked up a postcard from where I'd let it fall by my side and for a terrifying moment I panicked, thinking he would read it aloud and demand an explanation. Instead, he handed it back to me, Guinness logo facing up. “Because no man who would have broken your heart like this would have made you a tape,” he said. “CD, maybe, but no one outside of Williamsburg has made a mix tape since 1998 at the absolute latest.”

“Except George Parker Lennox,” I said, pointing to the tape on my dresser.

“Except George Parker Lennox,” he said in agreement. “But my point is, as long as I've known you, Jett, you've carried around some kinda hurt that could only have happened recently. You're always looking over your shoulder like you're running from something, holding your heart in a lock box you don't seem to have the key to.”

“You got me,” I said. I put the postcard in the box and sucked in a long, slow breath. “This guy, Catch, my best friend through the end of college and into grad school. I can't get into it tonight; it's too complicated and I'd probably have to draw you a diagram.
But no matter how I tell it, the end is the same. He's gone because I didn't mean enough for him to stick around.” It wasn't even that simple, it wasn't even that kind. Catch had the ability to love me better than any man I'd known and damage me just the same. The night he walked out, a coldness had settled into my soul, a chill I could never escape.

The chill was there until Sid put his arms around me. Sid understood everything as though by instinct, like our souls were such precise photocopies that we'd forgotten which one of us was the original. I began to feel warmth in the piece of my heart that I'd long given up for dead. And for a moment, I forgot about Catch.

Even with a face like a raw steak, Sid still had a proud beauty to him. His eyes got a glazed, feral distance as the pills kicked in. I remembered that look from the nights Catch would drink that last glass of wine and brush my mouth with his fingertips while I held my breath, resisting the urge to take one in my teeth, taste him on the tip of my tongue. Sometimes he'd tell me he adored me, stopping just short of saying
love
until one night the dreaded word spilled out of him.
A drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts,
he'd said, breath fragrant with wine, mouth just inches from mine. It wasn't the first—or the last—time he'd said it, but that moment is frozen in time, crystalline, so easily shattered that I never dared to touch it, worried it would break and the two of us would just go back to being normal, terrified of how we made each other feel.

Sid took my chin between his fingers and my breath caught hard in my chest. He turned my face to his and kissed me. I could still taste the mint of his toothpaste.

“I have so much to tell you,” he whispered, mouth against mine. “But you wouldn't believe me if I told you tonight.”