I froze. Lacie had worn this outfit with him just last week. Could I slip up to Church Avenue? Dash to a coffee shop, wander a grocery store, pace through—
He saw me. He stood, waving. The dress was bold. Even from a distance, recognizable. He squinted, and then a light in his face dimmed.
* * *
—
Lunch with Sophie had been a bust. She had chosen a damp, loud, overbright Indian place on West Forty-Ninth frequented by taxi drivers, and her pose of beleaguered patience told me everything I needed to know. This was a favor. A favor, because she liked Lacie, and because she believed in being nice to strangers. But it was easy to imagine the curl of her lip, the roll of her eye, as she explained to her co-workers her lunch plans. This was a chore.
In a spirit of tentative experimentation we picked our way through a handful of topics—writing, literature, Lacie, Brooklyn, New York—but each was like a rocket flare that shot up energetically before falling inert back to earth. At one point her eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that Lacie’s dress?”
I flushed, looking down at my chest, as if I’d forgotten exactly what I was wearing. “She let me borrow it.” I felt like a toddler clomping around in her mother’s heels. And then, gaining confidence: “It’s Dutch Wax.”
I would have launched into all of it—about Asia and Europe and Africa, about borrowing, for God’s sake, and global trade—but Sophie only shrugged and said it looked good on me. From her face I knew she didn’t mean it at all.
There were other problems too. Her lips were too much. Not in the way Isabel’s lips were too much—the warm openness of Sophie’s face did something to mitigate the artifice—but her beauty was too direct. Looking at her was like looking at the sun, not in some clichéd pop-song way, but simply because her beauty was too fully and frankly and unapologetically itself. It made me miss Lacie’s beauty, the wavering, inconstant shimmer of it.
From the subway I walked home slowly, full of odd recriminations. Sophie and her performative busyness bored me. She interested me only when I thought of her as Lacie’s friend, but even that did not give me a feeling of being inside it. What was it, I wondered. New York? A life? Lacie?
No, it was something simpler, stupider: it was just a sense that life was large, that it was exciting, that it mattered. I was hooked on this feeling. I could find it after two glasses of wine, or with a new man, or among the clever ones at the Workshop, late at night in the timeless dark of the Foxhead, where everything was silky black or harshly lit, and everyone was hilariously cruel and nothing ever hurt.
It was why people moved to New York, I supposed, to live inside this feeling, to live as if the movie camera was always upon you and even the most banal frustrations of everyday life achieved elevation because they happened “in New York.” And though I was not immune to that romanticism, I was also thirty, old enough to be suspicious of it, to dimly suspect that feeling like your life mattered merely because you were living in an economically punishing fantasia of a place was dumb, even dangerous: it might stop you from noticing that you were stuck, your life was stuck, you were just a cog in capitalism’s machine—
But then again, I could afford to be suspicious of New York. I didn’t need it to make me feel like I mattered. Lacie did that for me. She always had. The wine and the boys and the cynical writers were only attempts to recapture that first blush, the hot excitement of those afternoons when we were ten and the hours stretched out before us, infinite. I was seeking something, I thought, some sense that I mattered, that we mattered, chasing it in my writing, in the apartment, with Lacie, but not, apparently, with Lacie’s friends.
So, Ian.
I waved bravely back. “Don’t you ever check your phone?” he called, standing and stretching. “Nice dress,” he added, and hit me like a big blond wave with a kiss on the cheek.
I swirled around. “What do you think?”
“It looks good on you.”
The whole length of the elevator ride I couldn’t stop pushing at my hair. My arms felt too long and my cheeks too hot. I rocked back on my heels, I hit him with my shoulder and smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious way. “Lacie usually works until at least six,” I explained, and he grinned wolfishly.
That rattled me, that and the dress. Once inside I stupidly invited him to “have a seat,” even though he already had sunk onto the daybed and started removing from his backpack silver cans of beer. “Do you want to put those in the fridge? Those must have been hard to bike with. Where do you live again? Is it far? I feel like it’s uphill to here from everywhere.”
“I was coming from the studio.” He held a beer out to me and took one for himself. “Yeah, that would be great.”
When I came back from the kitchen he had put his feet up and balanced his beer on his stomach. He seemed rather proud of his belly. Self-consciously, I sank into an armchair with busted springs and cracked my can. I wanted nothing more than to go change, but what would be my excuse? Going into her room, replacing the dress—it would be an admission of guilt. Fishy. I stayed put.
For a while we didn’t talk. Once I tried, “Are you in touch with anyone from the Barn?” and he just shook his head. The air shimmered like oil in a puddle, and Lacie’s two fans blew the same stale air around, trembling the chiffon curtains.
“Rose, Rose, what’s in a rose?” Ian sang to himself in a high, funny voice, and then lapsed into quiet. I looked desperately at the frozen dancer mid-plié on the mantel.
Finally I broke. “So. You just wanted to stop by? You never come over.”
“Yeah, sure.” He looked at me. “I wanted to see you.”
“You’ve been, like, MIA since I moved here.” A barb of bitterness in my voice.
“This fall is nuts. I’m losing my mind getting ready for this show.”
I held his gaze.
“Sorry. I just—” It seemed he was about to say something more. Then, quietly, he added, “I thought it would be good for us to have some space.”
What did he mean? Good for us to have some space? Was there an us? Nothing had ever—but what else could he—“It’s fine,” I told him. “It’s just weird to see you again.”
“Is it nice?”
“Of course it’s nice. It’s just weird. We were close, and then you were gone, and then I find out you’re dating my childhood best friend. It’s weird.”
There came over his face a look that made me think it wasn’t the desire to “reconnect” that had led him to wait for me on the crumbly brick steps outside. It didn’t have anything to do with me. Why was I flattering myself with these thoughts of us? It was Lacie, always Lacie.