I straightened. She wasn’t a very good angry person. Her fluttery hands and high, agitated voice belonged to a bad actor from a community theater troupe. “Oh, yeah. Okay, sure.” I kept my voice casual.
“All of it. From September too.”
September had sort of floated from my mind. Lacie had been so cavalier this fall, so quick to forgive my debt when I had lost my SAT students. Though I had never paid her back, I had forgotten to think about it as a gift; it just seemed like we were both enjoying the pile of gold her grandmother had left behind.
Also, my credit cards were maxed out. I didn’t have eighteen hundred dollars lying around; I didn’t even have a job. “Okay, yeah, for sure.” I bobbed my head. “I can totally get that to you. It just might take me a minute, but I totally can. It’s just that, um, I lost my job.”
“What?”
“I lost my job. I got fired, actually.”
“You got fired?” Lacie began to laugh hysterically.
“Yeah, I got fired.” Every time I said it aloud it hurt more.
Still laughing, Lacie staggered back to the couch and collapsed. Head on hands, shoulders shaking, she moaned, “Oh my God, oh my God.” From the table, Anna and Dylan swiveled their legs to me, their eyes lasering Now what did you do?
“Lace?” I stood over her. “Are you laughing or crying? I can’t tell.” She continued to convulse. “Oh God. I’m really sorry.”
Anna coughed.
“How could you,” Lacie sobbed. “How could you.”
Dylan stood. “We can go. We can totally go.”
“You’re fine,” I told her. “I’m about to go.”
“Yeah, but”—Dylan cast a glance back at Anna—“maybe we shouldn’t be here.”
“You’re fine,” I snapped, and they stepped back. “Lace?” Again I reached out my hand, but she was projecting a force field I couldn’t penetrate. “I’m really sorry. It was really stupid.” Now I sounded like the bad actor, tinny and hysterical. I fought a terrible urge to smile. The women were watching. My almost-friends, my near New York life: even now they were receding. It was okay. I’d move back home. Home was nice. “I think, ever since moving here, I’ve just been—I mean. All our history. I haven’t been dealing with—”
“You were living in my house,” she exploded, and the women rose and drifted toward the door.
“We’re going out for a walk,” Anna said.
“We’ll be nearby,” Dylan said.
“We love you, Lacie,” Anna added, and as one, they slid on their coats and slipped out the door.
With her friends gone, the apartment seemed darker. Smaller. Lacie straightened up. “I never want to see you again.”
“Okay.”
“If you come by the house again, for any reason, I will take out a restraining order.”
“Totally,” I agreed.
“I read your stupid fucking novel. I feel bad for you, I really do. You’re actually just a pathetic, small person.”
So it had been an old draft. Somewhere deep inside me, a small nub of confidence budded. To read my stuff, to talk like that, she must still want to wound me. We weren’t done yet. And the inferno she had built on Ian’s stoop, what was that but a way, too, of keeping the story going?
She wiped her eyes. “By the way. It’s really fucked up you never told me what it was about.”
“Well, I wasn’t telling anyone.”
“But you were writing about me while living in this house. You were like a spy. It’s so creepy.”
“I wasn’t spying on you,” I started, but my words sounded empty, even to me. Who was a writer, anyway, but a voyeur? “And I wasn’t telling anyone what the novel was about. Ian just happened to guess. He’s so curious about you.” And then, a nasty flash of inspiration: “Maybe if you were a more open person, he wouldn’t have come to me begging for dirt.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault you guys fucked?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“How long was it going on?”
I crossed my arms. I was still standing over her, but I couldn’t bring myself to sit. She was like a wild animal. “Not long,” I mumbled.
“How long was it going on? I’m such an idiot. You were always out late, but I never asked, I just figured, She’s a private person….”
“You’re the private person. Ian is mystified by you.”
Her elbows slid around her thighs as the heels of her hands worked her face. With slow, tentative movements, I lowered myself onto the far corner of the daybed, keeping an embroidered tangerine pillow between us.
When she looked up, the pressure of her palms had left red clouds around her eyes. “It’s just like…who are you? You move into my apartment, wear my clothes—yeah, I noticed that my stuff kept moving around—write about me, write as if you are me, steal my boyfriend…what is it, Rose? You take and take.”
It hadn’t felt like taking. It had felt like a way to be close to her.
“I don’t get it. I literally don’t get it. You’ve got this, like, vampiric relationship to my life, but when I offer you something genuine, like friendship, you don’t take it, you can’t even see it.”
The heat turned on. That old familiar gurgle of pipes, followed by clanking, as if a little man in our radiator were banging away with his hammer, banging away at my heart. “You’re right.” I found myself whispering. “I’m sorry.”
She straightened. “I think you should go.”
What could I do? By saying sorry I had ended our game. All that remained was a reversal: the retrieval of my coat, the slow, careful winding of scarf around neck. Lacie wouldn’t look at me; she wouldn’t speak to me, except to remind me, again, that she needed the rent.
With a heave I shouldered the green duffel and stepped over the threshold. I turned back, to say one last thing, one final whatever, and found that her face had screwed even further into damage and rage. “So, what?” She gestured at my bag. “Back to his place now? Just, you got all your stuff, go running back to Ian?”
I dropped the duffel, and my gut dropped with it. “What? No.” Then my heart began to swell. She had just told me everything I needed to know.
When I got home that night I wrote an email:
Dear Ervin,