Really, it was the lack of apostrophes that did it for me. Ian was a fastidious texter, in the way of our generation: no abbreviations or emojis, no punctuation omissions, and certainly no typos. He must be upset.
If sunshine in September is always of the piercing, pristine kind, then December clouds are always dull, wrapping the world in dirty cotton. “You’re making that up,” I told him after he had described the Gmail flambé. “I don’t believe you.”
He bit his thumb. “I’m terrified of her. Do you know how much time that must have taken? God!” He swung his arm out toward the duck pond.
Cyclists in Spandex buzzed past like neon centaurs.
“I just—what the fuck? Why the fuck would you tell her? Why would you do something like that?”
“I didn’t do something like that,” I observed. “I did exactly that.”
Two Orthodox families went by, the men talking with their heads close, the women behind, pushing baby strollers and leading children by the hand. A parade of dark human shapes against the pale shimmering lake, the women in wigs, impossibly young, the men ahead, talking Talmud. Women with children, men with ideas. I had wanted to live a life of ideas. I had never wanted to worship a man, hoist his flag, join his parade. Years ago, women had helped Ian make a giant flag and carry it through the park. An “art project.” I had seen the pictures, and thought: At least I’m not one of them. But maybe I was worse.
“I just don’t get why you did that,” he spat out, and I realized he had been seething during my silence. “I thought we were friends.”
He had lines on his face, soft etchings by his eyes, deeper curves by his mouth. When I had first noticed them, we had been fucking, and they had seemed evil, but now they just made me tender. “I was drunk,” I told him gently.
“Drunk is not an answer.”
I tried again: “I was trying to be honest.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Okay, yeah. It’s bullshit. But isn’t it better to have told her? Shouldn’t she know?”
“We could have told her together. We should have told her together. If we were going to tell her, it should have been together.”
“That sounds like a nightmare.”
“It can’t be worse than this. I woke up to the fire department on my front stoop.”
I laughed. Lacie’s gesture seemed funny to me, something her devilish ten-year-old self might have done. Where Ian saw an inferno, a blaze of desperation, I sensed something more mocking. An imitation of heartbreak.
“It’s not funny,” Ian snapped. I had never heard him snap before. “It’s scary. She’s not like that. She’s not the kind of person to do something like that.”
I tried to keep a straight face. “Is she going to get in trouble?”
“No,” he said simply, and something in the sobriety of his tone made me not ask more questions.
“Do you think I should call her?”
“No,” he said, and now it was his lips curling with irony. “I don’t think you should call her. I don’t think she wants to talk to you right now.”
Once I had watched the sea lions sunbathe on the Monterey pier. From a distance they seemed cute, those piles of squeaking mammals waddling on flipper feet, but when I got closer I saw they had jagged wounds ribboned with blood and yellow pus. “Sometimes they fight,” the man I was with had said, and I knew he meant “over mates.” The heaps of sunbathing sea lions didn’t look so sweet anymore: they paid for their terrible desire to live close with chunks of flesh.
My friendship with Lacie was like the body of these sea lions, infected and weak. It occurred to me, strangely for the first time, that this could be the end. It would not be remarkable for Lacie and me never to speak again. It was in fact the expected thing.
The grass where we were walking was frostbitten, the color of chalk. On the horse trail there were mounds of shit, but in the cold, dry air I couldn’t smell them. I couldn’t hide anything from him. He looked directly into my brain as he said, “Lacie told me about the accident.”
I cut a quick glance over but kept walking.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
I thought how I had been smirking, cavalier with whiskey as I’d said, But then I slept with him, so I guess I kind of won. I had been lying, even if everything I had said was literally true.
“She said you crashed into the side of the road. There was no one else around.” He looked at me. “I don’t get it. You just—crashed?”
“I was a new driver,” I finally said.
“Had you been drinking?”
“No. It just happened. No one was hurt. It wasn’t a big deal.”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe you guys never talked about this. Didn’t you ever talk about high school?”
We were by the boarded-up bandshell, shut tight with plywood. “What was the point? It was a long time ago. We were children.”
I flinched as he studied me. “Rose. You scare people, you know that?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Nobody knows what to make of you. Rose? You scare me.”
Morning. Sunlight drifting in pale, watery squares along powder-blue walls. Beyond a black-boxed window, the looping grandeur of the GW, tiny silver cars winking as they slid cityward.
Alyssa and Marcus had an apartment of clean lines. Glossy floors. An Eames chair, a modern sofa of blue-gray, punishingly hard. A sheepskin rug. A brass circle serving as a coffee table. One of those vertical bookshelves, like a scraggly tree, blooming here and there with big art books, some still shrink-wrapped.
When I had gotten in the night before, I had wandered aimlessly through the place, and now I did so again, opening drawers, studying the bookshelves, perusing the refrigerator, Ian’s verdict (You scare me) ringing like a bell in my head.
In the library I learned that Marcus was the author of several serious tomes on diet; it was his measured opinion, I gathered from the jacket copy, that three bloody steaks a day were ideal for human flourishing. Alyssa was an artist: she posed little baby chickens doing New Yorky things in elaborate dioramas, photographs of which decorated the walls. Here yellow chicks in downward dog; there yellow chicks swilling Cosmos; and, in a rather heartbreaking series, at the fertility clinic, draped in blue-and-white checked gowns, and then beneath the sheets with their chickie husbands, clucking about ovulation.
The chicks made me mad. They were so dumb. They were little more than an elaborate diary, apparently: fertility books lay around the apartment, too, and printouts from trips to a Dr. Kaplan-Finke, and a calendar with circled and starred days.