THEY CALLED IT A “RUMP SLAP.” ACTUALLY, THEY CALLED IT NOTHING for a long time, didn’t even acknowledge that such a thing existed between them, even though they all knew that it did. Then one day, Cat said something about a soccer player Pen had a date with that night, and Pen jumped up out of the hideous armchair Cat had bought at a fire sale (“lung-pink” Pen had declared when she’d seen it), pointed at Cat, and shouted, “Rump slap!”
Later, Pen would say that it hadn’t been the soccer player but the Tri Delt who had asked Will to her spring formal that had provoked the comment that provoked the birth of “rump slap,” but Will knew it was the soccer player. He remembered the soccer player’s name and exactly what Cat had said about him, which was, “Trent Bly’s legs are so exquisitely dreamy that I don’t even notice the front teeth thing anymore.”
“What front teeth thing?” Pen had asked.
“I’m sure it’s not his fault,” demurred Cat.
“What’s not his fault?”
“It probably has to do with the way they’re shaped or the way they’re set or something.”
“Elucidate.”
“I’m sure he brushes. Of course, he does.”
“Cat.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“Cat!”
And Cat had sighed and done the thing she did to indicate resignation that was half-shrug, half-Charleston shimmy, pointed to her front teeth, and said, “Food.”
“Food? In his teeth?” said Pen.
“Always.”
“I never noticed that.”
“He sat next to me in psych last semester.” Again, she pointed to the place where her two front teeth met. “Spinach. Bread. Lunch meat. Just the teensiest bit. But every day. Without fail.”
Will laughed, and that’s when Pen jumped up and said it: “Rump slap!”
She was referring, it turned out, to the Old West practice of hanging a man by setting him on a horse under a tree, dangling a noose (possibly a lasso knotted noose-fashion, possibly an ordinary rope, if there was a difference; Pen didn’t know; none of them knew for sure) from a tree branch, looping it around the man’s neck, and then slapping the horse’s rump to make the horse run out from under the man, causing his neck to snap like kindling.
“Although I’m not sure why I think this happened in the Old West. Maybe it only happened in westerns,” mused Pen.
“Do you watch westerns?” asked Will. “Because I’ve never watched you watch a western.”
“You’ve never mentioned watching them,” added Cat. “In all the time I’ve known you, not one mention.”
“So maybe it only happens in novels about the Old West. I don’t know which ones. I don’t even know if I’ve ever read that kind of novel, but I must have,” said Pen.
“Doubtful,” said Cat. “You really aren’t the type.”
Pen groaned with impatience. The source of the rump-slap scenario wasn’t the point. Historical accuracy wasn’t the point. The point was the no-going-back comment, the irretrievable, irreversible, eternally damning remark, the one that broke the relationship’s neck, sometimes even before the relationship had a neck.
“Trent Bly could cure cancer, negotiate peace in the Middle East, and reunite the Beatles, and he’d still be the guy with food between his teeth,” Pen said.
“Perpetually,” Cat added. “Food between his teeth perpetually.”
“See?”
“I do see,” said Cat thoughtfully. “I wonder if I rump slapped Trent on purpose. I guess I might have. I’d rather have you stay home and play with me than go on dates with Mr. Food Teeth.”
“Like that thing Pen said about the Tri Delt who asked me to her formal,” said Will. “Eliza.”
Pen winced, blushing.
“Ha!” shouted Cat, clapping her hands. “Eliza of the constantly erect nipples!”
“Rump slap,” said Will.
“I just worried that maybe she had, you know, circulation issues. Or trouble maintaining a normal body temperature, like a condition or something,” explained Pen. “And I thought she could benefit from a different kind of bra.”
“Pen was only thinking of Eliza’s needs, Will,” said Cat.
“Too bad she never told Eliza about her concerns directly,” said Will. “Since, last time I checked, and I do check, she was still walking around with her high beams on.”
“I should have told her,” said Pen, a smile teasing around the corners of her mouth. “I was actually going to, but then I thought that having constantly erect nipples wasn’t something a person could do and not notice. I mean, you’d notice at some point, right? Even if no one ever pointed them out to you, you’d at least see them in photographs and know.”
“Oh, she knew,” said Cat, nodding. “She definitely knew.”
“You really didn’t want to go to that formal, anyway,” Pen reminded Will. “Remember?”
“I guess I remember that.”
Pen turned down the corners of her mouth and sighed. “I shouldn’t have said it.”
None of them should have said, ever, what they said about each other’s dates, boyfriends, girlfriends, or potential dates, boyfriends, and girlfriends, but that never stopped them.
Now, sitting at the hotel bar with Kirsty, Will remembered her rump-slap moment. It wasn’t the scarf; the scarf was not insurmountable. You could still date a girl who believed you had orange eyes. It was the kind of thing that you could spin as a charming idiosyncrasy, that best men joked about in wedding toasts, not that Will ever considered marrying Kirsty or even, really, going away with her for the weekend, something he remembered her pushing for more than once.
What snapped the neck of the Will/Kirsty alliance was the voice-lowering habit, habit being the noun Will, Pen, and Cat had finally agreed upon, even though Cat swore that it was so euphemistic as to be nearly worthless. Will disagreed, although he did admit that, while the Will/Kirsty neck had been unusually flimsy, the voice-lowering habit would have spelled doom for even the strongest, most promising neck on the planet.
Apparently, the habit had staying power, too, because less than an hour into Will and Kirsty’s conversation over drinks, there it was.
Until that moment, things had been going well. The funniness Kirsty had exhibited back at Alumni Hall turned out to be part of a bigger-picture change, which was that somewhere along the line (she had moved from the wealthy suburb of Atlanta in which she’d grown up to Atlanta itself, had been married briefly to a guy who owned “of all things!” a vegetarian restaurant, and had ditched law school after a year to become a buyer for a shoe boutique), Kirsty had acquired an edge. She swore; she had only recently quit smoking; she liked art house films “in moderation.” In addition, her debutante flirtatiousness of old had grown feline and sinuous: she laughed with her head thrown back; she trailed her hand up and down her own bare leg as she spoke; she narrowed her eyes like Lauren Bacall.
At the bar, she insisted on buying Will’s beer.
“I’m just so glad you decided to start drinking,” she said, giving his hand a congratulatory pat. “In college, you were Mr. Club Soda with Lime, which was, to be honest, a little boring.”
“You’re getting me mixed up with someone else. I was Mr. Ginger Ale,” corrected Will. “Way more exciting.”
Most people who had known him well enough to know about his mom had figured that she was the reason for his teetotaling ways. But somehow Will had never worried about becoming an alcoholic, had intuitively understood that he was not one, and luckily for him, seemed, in fact, to have dodged that particular genetic bullet. What he had worried about—and only Pen and Cat had recognized this—was messing with what little control he had over his temper. If he could beat the living shit out of an oak tree (or a frat boy) sober, what havoc might he wreak drunk? By now, he had figured out enough about managing his anger so that he wasn’t Mr. Ginger Ale anymore, but he still didn’t trust himself to have more than a couple of drinks.
In the light of the ho
tel bar, Kirsty was soft-edged and golden. Will was bad at noticing this kind of thing, but he could swear that her hair was blonder than it used to be. Less goldenrod, more canary, he thought, and smiled to himself. Pen and Cat spent years making gloating, gleeful fun of him for almost only ever dating blondes.
“It’s inspiring,” Pen had told him dryly, “the way you’re dating your way through the whole yellow section of the Crayola box.”
“Better than the whole purple section,” he’d answered.
“I don’t know about that,” snapped Pen. “I can definitely picture a future between you and a woman with purple mountains’ majesty hair.”
Only once, after a few drinks, had Cat said, “You’re dating blond girls because they are markedly un-us. If you dated girls who were more obviously Cat-and-Pen-like, the possibility would exist that you could at some point be interested in dating one or both of us, which, of course, would mean…”—she’d paused dramatically—“Total. Friendship. Apocalypse.”
Even though that had been everyone’s cue to laughingly agree or disagree, for several beats too long, nobody had. Nobody had met each other’s eyes or said a word, and Will was torn between urgently wanting and urgently not wanting to know what the other two were thinking.
Will didn’t know if it was the beer or the mellow light or the new and edgier Kirsty, but he found himself relaxing, the tangle of anticipation that had been knotting inside him for weeks loosening enough so that when Kirsty asked, “So who are you meeting later?” Will said, “Cat.”
When Kirsty found out that Will hadn’t seen or spoken to Cat and Pen for years, her eyes (cerulean? cornflower?) widened, and she said, “I’m stunned,” and then, “Actually, I’m not that stunned.”
“Why?”
“It’s hard to imagine you guys maintaining that level of…”—she paused—“intimacy forever,” she said. “But it’s also hard to imagine you being normal adult friends.”
Will didn’t say anything.
“Oh, come on,” said Kirsty. “Dinner parties? Exchanging the occasional e-mail? Cookouts with your significant others? Significant others, period?”
She was right, of course, but he didn’t feel like telling her that.
“Why did you break up? What was the inciting incident?” There was a challenge in her voice.
Will thought about not telling her or about making something up, but what would be the point? He shrugged and said, “Cat wanted to get married.”
“Ha! Go on.”
“We were a pretty self-contained entity, I guess. And I guess we could be a little hard on people who weren’t part of that entity.”
“On outsiders, you mean.”
“I guess.”
“No kidding!” Kirsty laughed. “I don’t think clubs that exclusive are even legal! I think they’re in violation of the Bill of Rights!”
“You could sue,” suggested Will, smiling.
“I haven’t ruled it out.”
“Cat wanted to give her relationship a real shot, she said. So she broke off our friendship and moved away with her fiancé.”
“What about you and Pen?”
“Without Cat around, we couldn’t figure out how to stay friends.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you couldn’t,” said Kirsty, laying on the sarcasm.
Will didn’t know what she meant and didn’t want to know, so he ignored this and, thoughtfully, popped a couple of peanuts. “I don’t think we meant to be exclusive. The three of us just knew each other in a way that made it hard to know other people very well.”
Kirsty narrowed her eyes. “Biblically? Did you know each other in the biblical sense?”
Will laughed. “I just talked to my friend Gray the other day. He asked the same thing in those exact words.”
“Gray who was in that band?”
“Yes.”
“The one who dated the”—and then Kirsty did it, did what she had done not only once but twice in a single conversation with him, Cat, and Pen over ten years ago: lowered her voice to a whisper and said—“black girl?”
Rump. Slap. Snap.
I’LL FIND YOU THERE IS WHAT CAT HAD WRITTEN IN HER E-MAIL, BUT after assessing the reunion demographic as it was represented inside the giant white party tent stretched over a good quarter of the university’s central green lawn, Will figured that discerning one tall, lean, brown-haired thirty-two-year-old man wearing a navy jacket and khaki pants in that crowd would be a lot like finding the real Will in a house of mirrors.
So Will spent the first thirty minutes of the cocktail party looking for Cat. Actually, he spent the first thirty minutes trying to look for Cat while also trying to remain invisible to any person there who might know him, especially Kirsty. It was hard. For one thing, although Cat, small, dark, dressed like a flock of butterflies (assuming she still looked the way she used to look, which Will did assume), would stand out in that crowd, the fact remained that she didn’t literally stand out in any crowd because Cat standing was not a lot taller than most people sitting. Avoiding Kirsty was equally tough since every third woman there could have been her.
After spending a half-hour skirting the edges of the party, dodging blondes, and attempting unobtrusive, chest-level crowd scanning, Will felt too stupid to continue—and too hungry. He threw caution to the wind and cut a straight and reckless path through the crowd to the food table.
Plate loaded, a ham biscuit halfway to his mouth, he turned around and saw her, no more than twenty feet away in a dark blue dress: bare arms, straight back, smooth hair, clavicles like open wings, and Will didn’t need to see her face to know her: Pen.
He had tried not to think about what it would be like to actually see her, but on the few occasions that he had slipped up and imagined it, he had gotten it all wrong. He wasn’t numb or frozen or panicked; he didn’t feel like he had been punched in the stomach or was having a minor heart attack. Right then, Will wasn’t searching for a word for his reaction, or doing anything except looking at Pen, but later, he would recognize what he felt as wonder, the kind of baffled awe you would feel if a statue in your house came alive or if the music playing on your iPod in the next room turned out to be an orchestra.
He wasn’t ready for her to see him see her, yet, and knew he would have to look away, at least briefly, but for one attenuated moment, he took her in. She was looking to the side, searching through the crowd the way he’d been doing a couple of minutes before, and he saw an earring dangling, the long tendons in her neck, her jaw’s clean swoop, and when she moved, shifting the white Chinet plate from one hand to the other, looping her hair behind her ear, Will saw that she still moved the way she always had, with a fluid, all-of-a-piece grace that was unexpected in a person so lacking in softness, so sinewy and sharp-jointed.
As Will stood watching Pen, just before he turned away, his initial astonishment shifted into something quieter. Soon, she will see me; we’ll sit someplace and talk, he thought. He felt like a kid who falls asleep on a long car trip, wakes up, and looks out the window to find that he’s in a new place, or home, and that it’s morning.
CHAPTER NINE
IN THE MOMENTS BEFORE SHE TURNED AND SAW WILL (AND IT was more a shifting of the gaze than an actual turn, a movement the slightness of which would strike her as remarkable, even breathtaking, later), Pen had begun to get angry. Actually, before she had begun to get angry, she had begun to get sad because this party, like all parties, reminded her of her father.
Pen realized that not everyone would understand this because her father had not, in any obvious way, been a life-of-the-party kind of man. He didn’t dance outside of his own living room, would hold the same scotch on the rocks until it went the color of weak lemonade, and was much more likely to be the (often underdressed) guy talking to one other person in a corner of the room for hours than the one in the center, telling stories, making everyone laugh. “A glower, not a sparkler” is how Pen’s mother described him. But once Pen had asked Jamie if parties reminded hi
m of their dad, and he had said instantly, “Yeah. Because Dad believed in parties,” and Pen had hugged Jamie right then and there because that was it exactly. For their father, any place full of people talking to one another over food and drink qualified as hallowed ground.
Pen had stood under the peaked, snow-white sky of the tent, in the middle of the brightness and noise, with the wide-open, breathing spring night just outside, thinking about her dad and had felt the old sadness plodding toward her on its big, square feet. Oh no, she thought, nope, not here, are you kidding, and, as fast as she could, she had whirled away from it and chosen anger instead.
Once she had decided to fume, it was easy to start because it was so like Cat, so exactly like her to decide to meet Pen again, after so many years, at an enormous party, in front of an audience of strangers and, worse, non-strangers. And it was so like Pen to go along with the idea, to do things Cat’s way, instead of suggesting an alternate plan. Even as she thought these thoughts, getting angrier and angrier, Pen realized that they had little basis in fact. Although Cat had always loved parties, she had a firm sense of appropriateness and privacy, especially other people’s privacy, and though Pen had been occasionally happy to indulge Cat’s flights of fancy, she had never gone along unquestioningly when it came to something really important. In fact, it was the very abruptness and oddness of Cat’s request that had caused Pen’s uncharacteristic compliance, caused her to send an e-mail saying nothing but I’ll be there. Still, however makeshift, the anger felt good, coursing through her like a stiff drink and sending the sadness, shoulders hunched, clomp, clomp, clomping away.
I could be home, Pen growled silently. I could be in my apartment, right this second, with Augusta. It had hurt to leave Augusta. It always hurt. Even the usual monthly weekend good-byes set a hard sadness thrumming inside Pen’s chest every single time, and this month, there had been more than one good-bye.
Augusta had been okay this time, though, which wasn’t necessarily to be expected. She didn’t balk often at being left at Patrick’s, but when she did, it was invariably high and excruciating drama. Last time it happened had been awful: Augusta wrapping herself around Pen, python-fashion, wailing like a blizzard, Patrick’s face crossed with sorrow, Tanya feigning applause in Pen’s direction, saying, “Nice. Very nice.”