With Friends Like These: A Novel (35 page)

“I’m flattered,” I said, and was equally flummoxed. “When do you need my answer?”

He moved the folder toward me like a gift, and his body moved ever so slightly in the same direction. “Now would be good.”

“How about after the weekend?” It was Wednesday.

“Friday.”

“Friday.”

“But I’m willing to toast your decision now. Another round,” he said to
the server. “Please.” When it arrived, he raised his glass. “To a brilliant association with Talia Fisher-Wells.”

After we clinked our crystal, we moved on to discuss restaurants in Santa Monica, and I was aware that Winters’ glance returned more than once to my legs. Then again, I was the woman who for this occasion had shortened this skirt, finishing the hem last night. I looked at my men’s Timex, a distant cousin many times removed of Winters’ timepiece. I was late. I downed the remaining wine in two swallows. After an awkward moment—was he going to reach to embrace me?—I took the folder. We shook hands.

I’d been offered a job, a great job. I should be giddy, trying to decide whom to call first—Tom or my parents, then Jules or Quincy. Why was Mean Maxine cackling so loudly I couldn’t think?

  
Quincy

For the past forty-eight hours I’d wept with such ferocity you’d have thought I’d been peeling sacks of onions. As the light faded and the apartment became increasingly chilly—the landlord stinted on the heat—I burrowed under a blanket, Fanny by my side. In the late afternoon I lit a candle and found myself wishing I knew how to pray. I wanted to be thankful, to see the clichéd glass as half full, but I was in no condition for happiness. Not yet. I had learned to expect the worst.

When Jake came home, he wanted to talk. I placed my finger on his lips to quiet him. “Later,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow.” What was there to say?

Between dreamless naps my only solace had been reading. The day before, I’d been a mistress to a horny, hirsute British king. That day I was in Mumbai, immersed in Parsi culture, steady in escape, when Maizie penetrated my sanctuary via the curdled tone of her assistant. “Hold for Ms. May,” the woman commanded when I picked up the phone.

I’d finished writing
Crazy Maizie
a week earlier. I’d begun her life story when the public met her, a frilly JonBenét whose mother’s taste in
kids’ clothes led to leopard, sad on any little girl, truly unfortunate on one so freckled. We frothed through puberty. Seemingly overnight, Maizie had been blessed by DNA deities—hetero males, evidently—who’d transmogrified her into a babe. Then we rocked on to the present, when Maizie counted Grammys the way others do eggs in the fridge. I had the three-hundred-page manuscript bound so loose sheets wouldn’t fly into the sea at whatever beachfront resort Maizie was secreting herself in while recovering from liposuction. After I dispatched the oeuvre, I’d managed to suppress the memory that I’d ever written it.

I told Maizie’s assistant I would hold. Since I was already floating in an existential haze, I wouldn’t have noticed if I’d been left hanging there for one minute or thirty. But soon enough, Maizie shrieked, “Hey, you really nailed me in this book, Q.” She was not a young woman known for her Zen-like restraint, though our professional arrangement precluded me from asking her to use her inside voice, and it offended me that she had co-opted the name only Jake uses, but I’d had to let that go. “The scenes with my old lady? Genius.”

Mama May was a viper. The scenes had written themselves, especially when April May chugged the Hatorade and ranted about Maizie on
The View
. All I’d had to do was take notes.

“But the parts about my men?” That would include a trifecta of managers who had cheerfully exploited her since she was thirteen. “You’ve left out the best stuff.”

“I had to. We’ve gone over Libel 101, remember?”

“I don’t care how you fix it. Just heat it up.”

The remaining half of my fee was due upon Maizie’s acceptance of the manuscript. We needed this money, which Jake had been asking about just the other night. To scrape together a down payment for the apartment, we’d lost interest that would have accrued on the large sum we’d withdrawn from our mutual fund, plus there was money down the drain for the lawyers and various applications. Every time I thought about the dollar tally of our rejection topping off its psychic cost, I wanted to strangle Jules and Arthur all over again.

“Let’s go over what you have in mind.” I was ready to activate the taping mechanism in my phone.

“I’m out of here in ten minutes—how’s Friday morning at eleven?” It would need to be okay. She owned me.

“Sure. Call you. Bye.”

“Don’t hang up so fast,” she said, and laughed. “Sometimes I think you hate me.”

The truth was that Maizie was a guileless creature. It’s me I often despise, for getting a master’s in nineteenth-century English literature and sweating out a thesis on
Middlemarch
only to allow myself to land at the bottom of the literary food chain, rubbing up against online “content” providers.

“My friend gave me tickets for his show tonight, but I can’t use them—I thought you and the hubby could.”

“Thanks, but I’m sorry. I can’t use the tickets … the hubby is traveling.” He wasn’t—Jake was in his office, calling me six times a day. But I didn’t see us going to any concerts in the near future.

“Take someone else. Don’t you have girlfriends?”

Interesting question. We used to hang out together—Talia, Chloe, Jules, me. That had gotten harder after three of us married and all of us scattered, yet there’d been a time when I could persuade Jules, at least, to drop everything and go anywhere. She was unflinchingly faithful, consistently amusing. I missed her laughter and company, not for the first time.

Talia also used to be an excellent companion, though I’d stopped asking her to join me when, time after time, she’d say she needed to be with Henry. Tom did the early shift, she’d explain, and their deal was that in the evenings, he got to swim or bike or shoot hoops at the Y.

That left Chloe. For her, child care has never been an issue, it’s—this is a direct quote—the “big life.” Her evenings are a glut of catered parties she both gives and attends, charity benefits, culture vulture venues—the theater, the ballet, the opera—and casual dinners at restaurants Jake and
I reserve for milestone celebrations. I suspect that she equates last-minute with last-ditch and that she looks down on my infinitely smaller existence.

“Are you there?” It was Maizie, wailing again.

“Sorry, the connection faded out there for a minute,” I lied, sort of.

“Whatever,” she said. “I won’t take no for an answer. I’ll have my assistant call with the details.” She hung up.

I replaced the phone and walked to my closet. Under the beach towels, behind the heating pad and sewing kit, I’d stashed a decade-old picture of me with Jules, Chloe, and Talia, our faces plump with anticipation. The image was from one of our Sunday dinners, taken by a rare guest, because we liked reserving those evenings for ourselves, Jules treating us to four-cheese lasagna or a pot of her nonna’s meatballs and gravy, Talia trying to bake like her mother. We were gathered around the long oak table in the rambling apartment blocks from here that I wished I’d never given up and could live in now, filled with kids.

All of us own a copy of this photograph, enlarged and framed in ornate silver, a Christmas gift from Chloe. Until recently I’d displayed mine on my dresser. I wondered if the others had also tucked theirs away.

Were these women still my friends? Asking the question made me feel crusty with spite, stiff with the rigor mortis of resentment.

On the Discovery Channel, I once saw monkeys perfectly content to do tricks for cucumber slices until the day one lucky primate started being rewarded with sweet green grapes, the simian equivalent of Godiva. The rest of the sorority—I’m positive these monkeys were female—came down with an epic case of rivalry. They wouldn’t perform their tricks until they, too, got grapes.

Had I, Quincy Blue, become a grapeless monkey, envy eating my life from the inside out? When I considered each of the women to whom I’d once felt close, the creeping distress was almost nauseating.

Most of the seven deadlies come with an up side. Lust? Orgasm! Go for gluttony—you’ve enjoyed stuffing your face. Sloth? Your dishes pile up as
you sniff through a movie marathon, sustained by candy bars whose wrappers litter your floor. Wrath feels euphoric while you’re telling your boss to fuck himself. Pride is a state Americans go out of their way to cultivate, and greed may mean you have a pile of money, at least on paper. But with envy you simply feel slimy, each pang shrinking you smaller.

I stared at the photo and realized that an ugly part of me begrudged Chloe and Talia their uneventful pregnancies. I coveted their healthy sons and the fully rounded sense of family each had come by as if it were a government entitlement, and while I didn’t wish Talia and Chloe ill, I couldn’t be in their presence right now, forced to fake happiness. Maybe it would be different if this pregnancy stuck.
If
. I wanted my baby. I missed the babies who would never be.

With Jules, it’s different. I’ve never envied her. I’ve admired her. Yet as long as I’m looking at myself with full frontal honestly, I have to admit that arrogance—and married-lady hubris tossed in her single direction—has salted the stew. Perhaps Jules has sensed my contempt. She is nothing if not perceptive. Had she hornswoggled Jake and me out of that apartment because she sensed my condescension? Because she envied us?

No excuse, I told myself. If Jules’ life hit a few speed bumps—let’s say she lost her winning Mega-Millions lottery ticket when she brought a coat to the dry cleaner—I would take pleasure, a minor compensation I have surely earned.

I returned the photograph to its cave and myself to my novel about Mumbai, but I’d lost the thread of the story. I tried to nap, but sleep defied me, knowing I pitied myself more than I pitied Jules. I had to be in some way responsible for not allowing two of my babies to live. That was the place to which I kept returning.
I’ve failed
. I reached for the phone and dialed Jake, the only human to whom I dared reveal myself.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” he said. Too often now, this was his greeting. “You’ve got to phone your doctor,” he said after I’d told him. “Maybe she can give you something to calm you down.”

I knew she wouldn’t, though she’d remind me about the grief counselor
I’d never called. “Am I a horrible person?” I asked, wiping tears from my face. “Is this why—”

Jake cut me off. “Nothing’s your fault. Don’t do this to yourself. It just happened. Miscarriage is Mother Nature’s way of correcting a mistake.”

One more woman with whom I had a bone to pick.

  
Talia