“How did you know?”
“You heard me say your name and ignored me. You were so cool. Chilly. I hated that.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that you looked so happy with her. And I felt so—so…” I struggle to find the right word. “Well, obsolete, used.”
“You are not obsolete, Rachel. You are all I think about. I couldn’t sleep last night. Couldn’t work today. You are anything but obsolete.” His voice has lowered to a whisper, and we have assumed the position of slow-dancers, my arms around his neck. “And you must know that I’m not using you,” he says into my ear. I feel the goose bumps rising.
“I know,” I say into his shoulder. “But it’s just so weird. Watching you with her. I don’t think I should go to the Hamptons with you both again.”
“I’m so sorry,” he says again. “I know. I just wanted to spend time with you.”
We kiss once. It is a soft, closed-mouth kiss, our lips barely touching. There is no connotation of lust or sex or passion. It is the other side of a love affair, the part I like the best.
We move over to my bed. He sits on the edge, and I am cross-legged beside him.
“I just want you to know,” he says, staring intently into my eyes, “that I would never do this if I didn’t deeply care for you.”
“I know,” I say.
“And I’m…you know…taking this whole thing very seriously.”
“Let’s not talk about it until the Fourth,” I say quickly. “That was the deal.”
“Are you sure? Because we can talk about it now if you want.”
“I’m sure. Positive.”
And I am positive. I am afraid of any leads he might give me about our future. I can’t bear the thought of losing him, but have yet to consider what it would be like to lose Darcy. To have done something so huge and all-encompassing and wrong and final to my best friend.
He tells me that it scares him how much I mean to him, do I know how much I mean to him?
I nod. I know.
He kisses me again, more intensely this time. Then I experience my first truly unbelievable make-up sex.
The next morning Hillary visits me on the way to her office. She asks me how my date went. I tell her it was great. She plops down in one of my guest chairs, placing her bottle of Poland Spring water and her sesame bagel on my desk. She leans back and slams my door with her elbow. Her face is all business.
It turns out that Marcus did indeed opt for the no-name Italian restaurant in his neighborhood. The same no-name Italian restaurant that for whatever reason also struck Hillary’s fancy last night. A city of millions, and Marcus and Hillary were seated two tables apart, over identical plates of ravioli on a random Monday night. Welcome to Manhattan, a smaller island than you’d ever think.
“The only thing you didn’t lie to me about,” Hillary says, shaking her finger at me, “is that Marcus was, in fact, on a date. Just not with your lying ass—although the girl resembled you in the mouth and chin region.”
“Are you mad?”
“Not mad, no.”
“What then?”
“Well, for one, I’m shocked. I didn’t think you were capable of such deceit.” She looks impressed by this revelation. “But I’m also hurt that you feel you can’t confide in me. I like to think of myself as your best friend—not some figurehead, a throwback from your high school days—your present-day best friend. Which brings me to my next point…” she says knowingly. She waits for me to fill the silence.
I look at my stapler, then my keyboard, and then my stapler again.
Although I have pictured getting busted many times, it is always Darcy doing the busting. Because after all, if you’re going to let your mind wander, go for the worst scenario, not some intermediate level of doom. It’s like worrying about your boyfriend getting into a drunk driving accident—you don’t think about him hitting a mailbox and splitting his lip. You picture lilies beside an open casket.
So I’ve had images of Darcy catching us. Not caught-in-bed-naked-in-the-act kind of busted—that is too far-fetched, particularly in a doorman building—but something more subtle. Darcy stops by unexpectedly, and José sends her up without buzzing me first (mental note to self: tell him never to do that). I answer the door assuming it is only the Chinese delivery guy bringing cartons of wonton soup and egg rolls to Dex and me, as we are understandably famished from our escapades (mental note to self, number two: always look through the peephole first). And there she stands, her big eyes taking it all in. Speechless in her horror. She flees the scene. Dex dashes into the hall in his gingham boxers, bellowing her name, like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Next scene: Darcy amid cardboard boxes packing her CDs with the ever-supportive Claire offering her Kleenexes at every turn. At least Dex would get all the Springsteen albums, even Greetings From Asbury Park, which someone had given Darcy as a gift. Most of the books would stay, too, as Darcy brought few books into the union. Just a few glossy coffee table numbers.
I read once—ironically, in one of Darcy’s magazines—that you should engage in this visualization exercise when you’re having an affair, that you should imagine getting caught and the grim aftermath. These images should snap you back to reality, get you thinking straight, make you realize what it is you’d be losing. Of course, the article presupposed a lust-driven affair, and the article was not directed at the unattached person in the triangle, but rather the participant in the committed relationship. Then again, the article also assumed that the third party was not the maid of honor in the upcoming wedding of the other two persons. Clearly our circumstances do not fit your typical adulterous mold.
In any event, I don’t know exactly how I’d feel if Darcy busted us and my friendship with her ended. I can’t really get there mentally. The fact is, Darcy is one hundred percent clueless, and she and Dex are still very much engaged. And likely, it will stay that way; they will get married and she will never discover the truth about our affair.
Hillary is a different story.
“Well?” she asks.
“Well, what?”
“Who were you really seeing last night? Who really sent you those?” She points at my roses.
“Someone else.”
“No shit.”
I swallow.
“Okay, look, I wasn’t born yesterday. You get in a fight with Dex at the Talkhouse, you both clam up when I arrive on the scene. Then you leave the Hamptons early the next day, all down in the dumps, with false claims of imminent deadlines—I know your work schedule, Rach, and you had nothing due yesterday. And then these flowers arrive.” She points at my roses, still in full bloom. “You name Marcus, whom you basically ignored over the weekend. Which is odd, even if you did decide to play it low-key. Then you tell me you have a date with Marcus, and I see him out sans you—with another woman!” She finishes her catalog of evidence with a jubilant smile.
“Was she cute?” I ask.
“The woman?”
“Yeah. Marcus’s date.”
“Actually, yes, she was quite attractive. As if you care.”
She is right—I don’t.
“Now quit stalling and address my point,” she says.
“What point is that?”
“Rachel!”
“It certainly does look bad,” I say, still reluctant to confess.
“Rachel. Who do you think I’m going to tell? I’m your friend. Not Darcy’s. Hell, I don’t even like her that much…”
I pick up my tape dispenser, pull out two inches of tape, and hold it between my index finger and thumb. For some reason, this is a harder confession than the one to Ethan. Maybe because it is face-to-face. Maybe because her past has not been as dicey as Ethan’s.
“Okay.” Hillary tries again. “Let me say the words for you, and you can just nod your head.” Her voice is like that of a mother to a child.
I nervously play with the tape, wrapping it around my thumb. She is about to spell it all out, and I have two c
hoices—admit or deny. An admission might be a huge relief. A denial will have to be accompanied by a suitably indignant expression and a barrage of “How could you think that? Are you crazy?” et cetera. I am in no mood for that charade.
“Dex is cheating on Darcy,” she says. “With you.”
Drum roll.
I raise my chin and return her gaze. Then I nod the smallest of nods, my head barely moving.
“I knew it!”
I consider telling her that I don’t want to talk about it, but in truth, I do want to talk about it. I want her to tell me that I’m not a terrible person. I want her to expound upon her earlier statement that I would be better suited to him than Darcy. And most of all, I just want to talk about Dex.
“When did this all start?”
“The night of my party.”
She stares at the ceiling for a second and nods as if everything makes sense now. “Okay, start from the beginning. Leave nothing out.” She settles into her chair and tears off a piece of her bagel.
“The first time I slept with him was an accident.”
“The first time? You’ve slept with him? Multiple times?”
I give her a look.
“Sorry, go on. I just can’t believe this!”
“Okay. So yes, the night of my party, we were the last two out…we went for drinks, one thing led to another, and we slept together back at my apartment. It was an accident. I mean, we were both drunk. I was, anyway.”
“Oh, I remember. You were a little bit out of it that night.”
“Yeah. I was. But, interestingly, Dex says he wasn’t that drunk.” This detail not only shifts the responsibility his way, but simultaneously makes the genesis of the affair more meaningful.
“So he, what, took advantage of you?”
“No! I didn’t mean to imply that…I knew what I was doing.”
“Okay.” She motions for me to go on.
I tell her about waking up the following morning, Darcy’s frantic messages, our panic, and Dexter using Marcus as his alibi. “So that’s it,” I say.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it’? Clearly not.” She gives my roses a purposeful glance.
“I mean, that was it for a while. We both felt regretful and—”
“How regretful?”
“Regretful, Hillary! Obviously!” To myself, I recall that first day, and my complete lack of penitence. “So that was it. In my mind, it was over.”
“But not in his, right?”
I choose my words carefully and tell her about his Monday call to me and the things he said. And then everything that happened in the Hamptons. And about our first sober kiss. The turning-point kiss. Sleeping with him for the real first time.
She takes another big bite of her bagel. “So is this—what? A purely physical thing? Or do you really like him?”
“I really like him,” I say.
She digests this. “So is he going to break off the engagement?”
“We haven’t talked about it.”
“How can you not talk about it? Wait—was that what you were fighting about in the Talkhouse?”
I tell her that we weren’t exactly fighting, but that I was upset about him having sex with Darcy. Hence the roses.
“Okay. So if he’s sorry for sleeping with his fiancée, that sounds like he’s headed in the direction of breaking up with her, right?”
“I don’t know. We really haven’t discussed it yet.”
She looks confused. “When are you going to?”
“We said we’d talk about it around July Fourth.”
“Why then?”
“Arbitrary. I don’t know.”
She takes a swig of water. “Well, you do think he’s going to dump her, right?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I want that.”
She gives me a nonplussed look.
“You are forgetting an important piece of this whole thing, Hillary. Darcy is my longtime, lifelong friend. And I am her maid of honor.”
She rolls her eyes. “Details.”
“You just don’t like her.”
“She’s not my favorite person in the world, but Darcy is not the point.”
“She’s a major point, in my opinion. She’s my friend. And besides, even if she weren’t, even if she were a random woman, don’t you think I would have to confront the bad karma aspects of this?”
I wonder why I am arguing against myself.
She straightens in her chair and speaks slowly. “The world is not that black-and-white, Rachel. There are no moral absolutes. If you were sleeping with Dex for the sheer thrill of it all, then maybe I’d worry about your karma. But you have feelings for him. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”
I try to memorize her speech. No moral absolutes. That is good stuff.
“If the tables were turned,” she continues, “Darcy would do the same thing in a heartbeat.”
“You think?” I ask, considering this.
“Don’t you?”
“Maybe you’re right,” I say. Darcy does, after all, have quite a history of taking. I give, she takes. That’s the way it has always been.
Until now.
Hillary smiles and nods. “I say go for it.”
More or less what Ethan said. That’s two votes for me, zero for Darcy.
“I’m going to keep seeing him as much as I can. We’ll see what happens,” I say, realizing that just “seeing what happens” is my version of “going for it.”
Twelve
Darcy and I are flying home to Indianapolis for Annalise’s baby shower, and I am stuck in the dreaded middle seat. Darcy was assigned the middle, but of course she wangled her way into my window seat, saying that if she can’t look out the window she gets airsick. I wanted to tell her that this principle of car travel does not apply in a plane, but I didn’t bother, just surrendered to her demand. In the past I would have done so mindlessly, but now I feel resentful. I think of Ethan and Hillary and their recent statements about Darcy. She is selfish, plain and simple. And this is the truth, regardless of my feelings for Dex.
A forty-something man with a crew cut has the aisle seat to my left. He has glued the entire length and width of his right forearm to our shared armrest, elbow to fingertip. He drinks and turns the pages of his magazine with his left hand so as not to lose ground.
The pilot announces that the skies are clear and we will be landing ahead of schedule. Darcy announces that she is bored. She is the only person I know, over the age of twelve, who says with great regularity that she is bored.
I glance up from my book. “Did you already read your Martha Stewart wedding issue?”
“Cover to cover. There’s nothing new in there. And by the way, you’re the one who should be reading it. There’s an article on favors—you promised you would help me think of an original idea for favors,” she says, as she adjusts her seat the whole way back and then up again.
“How about matchbooks?”
“You said original!” Darcy crosses her arms. “Everybody does matchbooks! That’s just a given. I need a proper favor, in addition to matches.”
“What does Martha suggest?” I ask, marking my place in my novel with my thumb.
“I dunno, hard stuff to make. Labor-intensive stuff.” She looks at me plaintively. “You have to help! You know I’m no good at crafts.”
“Neither am I.”
“You’re better than I am!”
I turn back to my book, pretending to be engrossed.
She sighs and chews her Juicy Fruit more vigorously. And when that doesn’t work, she hits the spine of my book. “Raa-chel!”
“Okay! Okay!”
She smiles, unabashed, like a child who doesn’t care that she’s made her mother miserable, only that she got what she wanted. “So you think we should do something with d?”
“D?” I ask, playing dumb.
“You know, a d…for Dex and Darcy. Or is that cheesy?”
“Cheesy,” I say, which would h
ave been my answer even before the D and R days.
“Okay—then what?” She checks the number of fat grams in her snack mix before casting it into the seat-back pocket in front of her.
“Well, you have your sugared almonds in netting tied with pastel ribbons…or mints in a tin with your wedding date,” I say as I exert slight pressure with my left elbow, trying to wedge it in a tiny crevice on my armrest. In my peripheral vision, I see Crew Cut flex his bicep in resistance. “Then you have permanent keepsakes like Christmas tree ornaments…”
“Can’t. We have too many Jewish guests—and honestly, I think some people who celebrate Kwanza,” she interrupts, proud of her diverse guest list.
“Okay. But you get the point. That genre. Permanent keepsakes: ornaments, homemade CDs with your favorite songs.”
She becomes perky. “I like the CD idea! But wouldn’t that be expensive?”
I give her a look that says, yeah, but you’re worth it. She eats it up. “But what’s another few hundred dollars in the scheme of things, right?” she asks.
I’m sure her parents would love this statement. “Right,” I patronize.
“So we could have, like, The Darcy and Dex Soundtrack and put our all-time favorite songs on it,” she says.
I wince.
“Are you sure it’s not cheesy? Tell me the truth.”
“No, I like it. I like it.” I want to change the subject but worry that this will spark a discussion of my maid-of-honor shortcomings. So instead I strike a thoughtful pose and tell her that although the CDs would be time intensive and expensive, they would make a lovely, special favor. Then I ask her if Dex would like the idea.
She looks at me as if to say, who cares what Dex wants? Grooms don’t matter. “Okay. Now help me think of some songs.”
I hear Shania Twain singing “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?” Or maybe Diana Ross belting out “Stop! In the Name of Love!” No, all wrong, I think. Both songs cast Darcy in the role of noble victim.
“I can’t think of one song. My mind’s a blank. Help me think,” Darcy says, her pen poised over her napkin. “Maybe something by Prince? Van Halen?”