Between You and Me (2 page)

Part V

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblence to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

“When Michael Jackson was six he became a superstar and was perhaps the world’s most beloved child. When I was six my mother died. I think he got the shorter end of the stick. I never had a mother, but he never had a childhood.”

—Madonna

Part I
 

“Okay, we’re coming up on our final hill.” Sandra, my instructor, puffs into her microphone, reaching out from her bike to dim the spin room’s lights even further. “I know it’s crazy cold out there, folks.” She takes a jagged breath as she prepares to urge us on. “I know the sun’s not even up yet. But you are. And you’re here. And you’re going to make it—harder. Let’s make it harder! Give me a full turn to the right in . . . five, four, three, two, one . . .
go, go, go!
”

This was a huge mistake.

Reluctantly, I turn the dial and bear down with my heels, trying to shift the work to my hamstrings, trying to pull my focus up—
up
from the sizzling pain in my legs. But it goes to my eyebrows, behind which is a dull throbbing with a pointy wake, like a wine with full top notes and an acidic finish. Fucking bourbon. Fucking Jeff. I tug my towel off the handlebars, swiping my forehead to keep the sweat from stinging my eyes. How many drinks did I even have? One right when I got to the bar. One when he texted he was running late. One when he said he was getting on the subway. And one when I finally decided the subway ate him.

I grab my New York Sports Club water bottle, squeeze another Emergen-C-laced stream into my mouth, my eyes darting to my dark phone tauntingly resting above the resistance dial. Nothing—no word. I thought for sure he’d call around two with some implausible-slash-charming excuse. Or cut straight to leaning on my doorbell.

“And get ready to stand in . . . four, three, two—come on,
up, up, up!
”

I heave myself erect and immediately feel like cayenne pepper’s
been dropped into my airways. I gasp, trying to focus on exhaling to clear the carbon and acid.

“We’re gonna hold it here. Just hold it here. Find the pace, find the rhythm, one, two, one, two.” She exhorts us to speed up. Or maybe just me. Maybe everyone else feels like they’re getting their hair shampooed. I glance around, taking in the expressions of agony and determination.

“I want you to give your all. Don’t hold back!” she shouts at us. “I want you to push yourselves to exhaustion!” As if I’m going home to sleep after this. As if this isn’t just the first in a long series of things I have to accomplish before I can crawl into bed tonight. The quarterly report, the teleconference with the Houston office, the projection spreadsheet, the second teleconference to recap the first. And dammit, finding five minutes to fix the smudge on my thumb because I ran to the bar instead of waiting for the polish to dry. Why didn’t I just buy the bottle at the salon? Whatever. But not whatever if Jeff’s coming tonight. He has to come tonight. Not coming to my party would be—he’s coming. I’ll just move my one o’clock back and grab a polish fix instead of lunch. My Power Bar backs into my throat. Probably expired. Fucking crazy Charlotte and her crazy fucking stale Power Bars. How my roommate can spend half her time carrying around that ratty Tiffany’s catalogue with the corners turned down, plotting her next purchase, and the other half at the dollar store buying translucent toilet paper I will never—I’d much rather use Charmin and eschew shopping in Midtown.

“Okay, guys, almost done. We’ve just got a last hill and then a one-minute sprint to the finish.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. Seriously, I am going to puke expired Power Bar right over the handlebars. My legs are burning, my lungs are burning, my arms are going wobbly, I can’t, I can’t—

“Okay, guys, let’s see some joy!” Sandra adjusts the dial on her iPod. Two beats in, I sense everyone perk up. Kelsey Wade detonates out of the speakers, and heads begin to bob, set mouths murmur lyrics, legs speed up.
“I’m unstoppable, unbreakable, unbendable. When you look at me my heart stops—unmendable.”
I’m not thinking about my throbbing brow or my screaming shins or even Jeff Stone. Around me,
women’s wheels whir as their thought bubbles inflate with ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, ex-bosses . . .

Sandra presses her microphone right to her lips. “What do you have left?” She lets the question hang, looking meaningfully at all of us before screaming, “Don’t hold anything back!” Her voice reverberates over Kelsey’s, echoing the essence of the song. “Give it all!” And we do. I turn the resistance dial farther, digging deep, letting the adrenaline carry me, the lyrics, the beat. “Can you do it?
Can you?
” We don’t know, but we’re trying, we’re trying, we’re trying—

“And . . . done,” Sandra says on the last beat. “Spin out your legs.” She scrolls to Kelsey’s latest ballad, and we all sit back, smile wearily at one another, and chug our water. My silenced phone lights up. Not Jeff. Los Angeles area code.

I guarantee no one else is listening to
this
song and getting a call from
this
number right now.

“Okay, bring your bike to a complete stop, and let’s stretch.”

No sooner does that call go to voicemail than my parents’ number sets the phone vibrating again. I hit ignore.

We finish cooling down, and I unlock my shoes and dismount, grabbing my bottle and towel. I hit play on the second message. “Happy birthday to you,” my mother sings. “Happy birthday, dear Logan . . . ” I can picture her, an inveterate early riser, sitting with her finger poking through the coiled cord of the ancient beige phone she refuses to replace. “Twenty-seven,” she adds after the song. “I cannot believe it. How did you get so old?” She laughs awkwardly. “I’m going to Babies R Us today—Helen’s daughter’s having her third,” she can’t help telling me, and I immediately feel bad. Bad that I’m not currently giving her grandchildren and bad that she can’t be more accepting of the life I’m building, one that will get me there eventually. God—and maybe Jeff—willing. “Anyway, call me when you get some free time.” She always says this. As if my bon-bon window is coming up in a few hours. “Tonight I’m helping out at the church, but I’ll be home by eight if you’re home.” On my birthday? “ ’Bye!”

Sandra notices the contraband phone at my ear and raises an eyebrow before ripping open the Velcro on her shoes. “It’s my birthday,” I explain. “I was using the wishes to keep me going.”

“Happy birthday! How old?”

“I’m heading into my night-cream years.”

She smiles as we both make our way to the door. “You looked fierce today.”

My eyes widen, and I laugh. “Oh, my God, Sandra, I was dy-ing. Dying. Like carry-me-out-on-a-stretcher dying.”

“Well, Wade.” She shrugs. “No one could tell.”

Skipping lunch continues my totally-wrong-call
streak marking this auspicious day. How could I have known that my boss would forget to book a room for the teleconference, leaving our team of financial analysts to meet in the one with the relentless heater, which brings out the carpet’s Christmas-parties-of-yore aroma? That getting out of there for everyone would hinge on my having to prematurely share the spreadsheet I’m generating? Which, after tearing my bag down to the lining, I decided had evaporated, forcing everyone to sit there for an hour while I pulled the numbers out of my ass. An hour that I had fantasized would involve a bubble bath, Florence and the Machine, and leisurely applied four-step eyes, an hour in which I could conjure a little sparkle, a little romance.

Instead, I shove my down-clad hip against our front door in a panic, to find Charlotte lounging on the living-room floor of our lower Second Avenue high-rise apartment. She peruses Bluefly while she waits for her arm hair to lighten beneath smears of cream bleach.

“Anything good?” I ask by way of greeting as I drop my straining bag on the little glass-topped dining table and roll my cramping shoulder.

She readjusts her robe to cover a bit more of the boobs her ex gave her. “I can’t decide if I want this Marc Jacobs hobo. I don’t like the color, but it does have his name on it.”

“What about his face?” I hastily unzip my coat and drop it over the Ikea dining chair that’s starting to tilt aggressively.

“What do you mean?”

I kick off my boots. “A big jpeg of his face silk-screened on the side. Or his armpit from the cologne ad? What about that giant hairy
armpit, and you could paint ‘M.J.’ over it with nail polish? Did you find the screwdriver? We should fix this chair.”

“Why are you home? I was just about to come meet you.”

“I can tell.” I rush past her half-naked figure to my room, the only space in the apartment that was too small to subdivide. I always pictured myself in a brownstone walk-up in the village, a place with character, not a box whose charmlessness I’ve overcompensated for with a proliferation of Pier 1 pillows. “Jeff hasn’t replied to the Evite yet,
but
he checked it at seven,
which
means he was confirming the location, so I need the red dress.” I swipe it from the floor where I dropped it last night in a fit of horny inebriated frustration.

“I don’t understand your relationship with that dress,” she calls.

“Char, any chance you can vacuum while your bleach bleaches?”

“I’m busy.”

I bite my tongue about it being her month to clean, because I don’t have time for yet another Dust Bowl dustup. I unzip my pants and toss them into the spot the dress was keeping warm. “That’s because you’re a blonde.” Since the ex. “You’d look good in a suit made of Swiffers. This dress never fails.”

“It failed last night.”

“No,” I correct her, carefully rolling up my stockings. “He never saw it. The rules set forth by the Intergalactic Alliance for Getting Laid say that his eyeballs
must
connect with the color waves.” I shimmy into it and then peer into the smudged jewelry-box mirror over my dresser to twist up my brown hair. I wonder if it’s age or fatigue that has hollowed my cheekbones, made me look more like my father than I did a year ago, the same wariness to the eyes, although his are the Wade blue. “Never. Fails.” I refresh my blush and smudge some liner, a look my mother endearingly terms
nightwalker
.

“I’m getting the bag.” I hear her pound the laptop definitively. “Oh, Sarah and Lauren texted. They’re both running late, but they promise they’ll
try
to be there,” she says in a way that suggests they really called to lower my expectations. I feel that little twist, that ouch. “Why are we meeting all the way in Midtown again?”

“Because it’s elegant, it’s Gershwin, it’s New York! Charlotte, where are my silk heels?” I call from the bottom of my closet.

“Out here. They’ll get ruined in the salt.”

“Then what are they doing out there?”

“I was going to borrow them.”

I slip-slide on the scuffed parquet to spot them sitting by her room.

“Now what am I going to wear?” she asks petulantly.

“You have a wall of shoeboxes.”

“But I don’t like any of them.”

“I need to drop you on a desert island with the stuff you already own, romantic-comedy-style, so you can go through an adventure with your stuff and come out remembering what you loved about your stuff in the first place.” She just looks at me as if she’d mistakenly pressed the SAP button on the remote. “Okay, well, let’s do the wall this weekend, for real.” I shove my arms into my wool coat that is not in any way warm but won’t make me look as if I’m trying to skip a few steps by wearing my mattress to the bar. “The paint and sandpaper are just sitting in the closet. I don’t think I’ll have to work Saturday. Let’s do it.” I transfer my keys, lip gloss, condoms, and wallet to my clutch. “We can get some wine, order in . . . ”