Frenemies (5 page)

“You will pay for this,” Georgia promised her, quietly.

Helen, of course, just waved her hand in the air, in the direction of two men who appeared, from across the room, to actually
be
Abbott and Costello. Or maybe that was the hysteria, taking over my sight.

“Robert and Jerry, get over here!” she cried out. “I have two single girls you
must
meet! They’re absolutely
gagging
for dates!”

chapter five

I
t took me until my third bathroom break on Monday morning to even think about getting over it.

It
being Helen, mostly, with a generous side helping of fury for Henry to go along with it.

Henry I was furious with because he was always
right there
to make me feel worse. Only Henry would think letting someone in so that she could personally witness her boyfriend cheating was the right thing to do. Only Henry would call that
helping
, the jerk.

Helen, on the other hand, was a more complicated problem. Screaming that we needed dates had been plain old nasty, and had necessitated evasive maneuvers on Georgia’s and my part, but was, in the end, just annoying. I’d spent the entire weekend stewing less about that and more about her unexpected intervention technique. At first, I’d just been stunned. And a little bit—okay, a lot—hurt. But then it had occurred to me that she was deliberately playing a game. If I could just figure out her goal, I too could play the game, and she’d better watch out because I was all kinds of competitive when I wanted to be.

I was just having some trouble figuring out
why
she’d chosen to drag me off into a private room so she could spout
obviously crazy
nonsense right to my face. She couldn’t possibly believe that she was motivated by concern for me. So what was she up to?

When I returned to my desk, I amused myself by thinking up revenge scenarios, but then decided to go in a completely different direction and deal with my rage productively. I decided to act like an adult and not play any
girl games.
(Not that I gave any credence whatsoever to anything Henry said.)

And what was more adult than having a rational discussion about one’s problems with one’s peers?

“I’m not sure I will ever be able to talk about Helen,
that bitch
, but I definitely can’t talk about it today,” Georgia snarled. “This is because I am about to board a plane to some godawful town with a name I swear to you is deliberately unpronounceable, in the company of Chris Starling.”

“Married, balding, lecherous Chris Starling?”

“The very one. Although it turns out he’s
separated.
Somehow, his telling me this didn’t present the green light I think he hoped for.”

“You have fun out there,” I said, rather wanly.

She made a noise that could only be described as a growl, and hung up. I told myself the pounding in my temples had more to do with what sounded like African tribal chants floating down from Minerva’s quarters—and if arias had given way to tribal chants, I might as well buy myself a month’s supply of Excedrin at once—than with any urges toward homicide.

I thought about calling Amy Lee, but that would mean coming up with excuses to make it past the formidable Beatrice, the receptionist/hygienist in the dental practice Amy Lee and Oscar shared, who didn’t believe in personal phone calls during the workday. I was exhausted by the very idea, and Beatrice, I knew, would pounce on any hint of weakness.

I made a few gestures toward actual work, and then spent the rest of my day with my earplugs in (I’d bought them during Minerva’s particularly trying Scottish-bagpipe phase and couldn’t imagine how I’d managed without them), Googling people I held grudges against.

For example: the name Henry Farland, it turned out, was etched on a large selection of gravestones in the greater Amherst area, every one of which had been photo-shopped online by some industrious amateur genealogist. None of those long-buried relatives, however, had been discovered to be the incarnation of evil during their lives, at least not so far as I could tell from the blurry headstones.

I found myself brooding ever so slightly on my way home from work that night, as I pretended to read my book on the T. I could see my reflection in the foggy glass of the windows of the Green Line car, and tried to remove the frown that seemed permanently lodged on my face with a few deep, cleansing breaths. It didn’t work.

Girl games.
What an obnoxious phrase. There had been something in the way Henry had said it that—days later—made me feel immature and a little bit sullen.

The fact of the matter was, I felt I was neither immature
nor
sullen. I was twenty-nine, and soon to be free of the madness of my twenties altogether. I was practically in my thirties already, and once I was I would
exude
calm. I would be an adult. At last.

Not that there was anything
wrong
with the madness, I thought when I got off the T at the Hynes Convention Center/ICA stop. I headed toward home through the prematurely dark Boston night, crossing Mass Ave to march down Boylston—after all, who wasn’t a little melodramatic when they were in their twenties? Being unapologetically histrionic was, as far as I could tell, the entire
point
of being in your twenties. Just about everyone I knew who’d crossed the Great Divide into their thirties talked about their twenties like they’d escaped the gulag of drama simply by celebrating their thirtieth birthday. My birthday was January second and I
couldn’t wait.

For some reason, I thought, looking down the street to where the Victory Gardens began and the public allotments spread out along the Muddy River, Henry Farland had been placed on this earth to challenge my claims to impending adulthood. If I concentrated hard enough, I was sure I could blame him for the Janis Joplin tragedy, too, even if he hadn’t actually been there. Around Henry, I behaved like the overwrought twentysomething I wanted to leave behind, forever one emotion away from hurling a cocktail across a room or bursting into inappropriately public tears. But the key difference was that I was
not
, in fact, that twentysomething for very much longer. I could
choose
not to behave like her. After all, I couldn’t change Henry. I could only change my
reaction
to Henry. And once I became the Zen goddess of social situations, I could shove my enlightenment directly down his smug—

I literally stopped in my tracks when I saw the figure outside my building—unmistakable even from this distance.

Although—happily—faced in the opposite direction, so that I could admire her delicate, pretty profile.

Helen.

One of the major benefits of living in the same apartment throughout my histrionic twenties was that I had been forced to develop numerous strategies for the avoidance of unwanted guests over the years. So while the horror of Helen’s appearance outside my door was extreme, and I planned to rant about it at length when I was safely inside my apartment, alone, and could make the necessary phone calls, she didn’t stand a chance.

I banked to the right before she turned and saw me, and then froze for a moment or so, convinced that God hated me and that at any second I’d hear Helen calling my name. But there was only the blare of road rage from the passing commuters and the far-off sound of a dog barking in the Fens. I made my way along the narrow alley between my building and the neighboring one, around the back to the freezing-cold and architecturally sketchy fire escape. As the smells of fried dinners and excess garlic wafted all around me, complete with the soothing, homey sounds of electric guitar music from the fourth floor (Berklee College of Music students) and the loud argument from the second floor (newlyweds, the rumor was), I hauled myself up to my third-floor windowsill. Rung by frigid, wobbly rung.

Another thing I learned in the madness of my twenties: don’t look down.

Once outside my apartment, I wrestled with one of the two ancient, heavy windows that offered me a stellar view of the chipped brick building across the way and stained concrete “patio” below. I knew from experience that if I could jiggle the left window long enough and in exactly the right way, I could get the lock to fall open, allowing me to crawl through it into the corner of my bedroom where I kept the pile of not-quite-dirty-enough-to-merit-the-use-of-my-laundry-quarters clothes. Sometimes they were on top of an old leather chair Amy Lee and I had found on the street during college, sometimes they beat the chair into submission.

I jiggled, and then I jiggled some more. I’d forgotten how long it took, and how loud it was. Not to mention how cold and dark it was outside on the fire escape. The last time I’d done this, I’d been basking in the warmth of entirely too many White Russians—the reason Georgia and I gained about fifteen pounds the year we were obsessed with them—and might even have been humming a merry tune. I was rather unfortunately sober tonight, however. I sent a fresh batch of hatred Helen’s way, and scowled at the window. This close, I also noticed that it was in serious need of Windex.

There was a cough from behind me and I froze—convinced that somehow Helen had chased me back around the building and, who knew, maybe even up the rickety fire-escape ladder. She was a wily one. But when I sneaked a look around, there was only my next-door neighbor, leaning out his window to glare at me from behind huge tortoise-rimmed glasses. It wasn’t that he was unattrac-tive—it was just hard to tell where he could be hiding his hotness behind that bright blue robe and the wild wisps of hair not quite covering his head.

In any event, the message I was receiving was this: my next-door neighbor did not approve of me.

Which was fine. He’d moved in months before and I’d barely seen him. I didn’t even know his name.

“Oh,” I said. As if it was perfectly normal to find me hanging about on the fire escape. “Hi! Don’t call the police or anything. I actually live here, I just—”

“I know you live here,” he snapped at me. “Augusta Curtis, apartment 309. I’m well acquainted with your habits.”

“That’s me!” I agreed with a broad, fake smile.
Freak-azoid stalker
, I thought. The guy looked older than me, and as my friends liked to point out to me, only freaks and weirdos chose to spend their adulthood in a dump like my apartment building. “Although I prefer ‘Gus,’ actually—”

“Well,
Gus
, I’ve been meaning to talk with you about the level of ambient noise for some time. Since I moved in five months ago I’ve kept a journal of noise violations.” His brows collided over the top of his eyeglasses as he intensified that glare he had trained on me.

Amy Lee had been somewhat excited for me when he moved in, I remembered then, because he wasn’t the usual college kid (the only sort of person who normally rented in the building) and she figured
bookish-looking
meant
smart and interesting.
Then he’d started pounding on the wall during movie nights, and she’d declared him an enemy of the state. We called him Irritating Irwin. I had never been interested enough to investigate his mailbox to find out his real name.

“Okay,” I said, fake smile in place. “Well, you know, it’s kind of cold out here and I really—”

“I have the journal right here,” Irwin said, whipping out a black-and-white notebook and flipping it open. From where I stood, I could see incredibly small, shockingly tiny letters stretched to fill the entire page.

He had to be kidding.

“June 25. Laughter in hallway at 11:56 p.m. June 26. Coughing in bedroom at 2:33 a.m. June 29—”

He wasn’t kidding.

I turned my attention back to my window, rattling the damned thing with increased desperation. Irwin had one of those nasal voices that was really more like a whine, and for the love of all that was holy, he was still droning on about the first week of July.

I gave the stubborn window one last, mighty shove and—thank the heavens!—it fell open.

“Freezing cold!” I singsonged at Irwin. “Hypothermia, must run!”

I heaved the window open and hurled myself through it, more or less belly flopping on my pile of clothes and bodysurfing my way to an undignified heap on my bedroom floor.

Moments after this, my ace watchdog, Linus, skittered into the room and barked a combined alarm and greeting.

Behind me, I could hear Irwin’s nasal whine. I had the horrifying thought that he might just stand there at the window all night, regaling the entire building with a minute-by-minute re-creation of my every movement during the past few months.

Out in the living room, I heard my old-school answering machine click on.

“Hi, you’ve reached Gus. Please leave a message.”
My disembodied, oddly robotic voice floated through the room, sounding far more cheerful than I felt. I shoved Linus off of me and began struggling to my feet.

“Hi, Gus,” came Helen’s sad, sad voice. “It’s me again. I guess … I guess I’m going to give up now. Um. I still think we should, you know, talk.”

Click.

What does she mean, “again”?
I wondered.

I staggered over to the machine as it blinked and reset, and had to take a moment to believe what I was seeing.

Ten new messages.

Ten.

I stood there for a moment, feeling almost dizzy. I wasn’t Miss Popular, but neither was I a troll beneath a bridge. Telemarketers didn’t leave messages, of course. But even if Georgia, Amy Lee, my mother,
and
my sister all called me in the same evening (which was highly unlikely) that still left six. Six messages that would be quite enough to frighten me, and that was without the personal appearance at the front door.

It was official. Helen was stalking me.

chapter six

W
hen Georgia sauntered into the glitzy, primarily gold lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel two weeks later, she was looking particularly fabulous. We had an engagement party to attend and she had her glorious hair swept up into one of those impossible hair creations that I was eternally baffled by. She was showcasing the entire length of her ridiculously long legs beneath the simple and elegant shift dress she wore, which looked to rival the cost of the shoes on her feet. Christian Louboutin, if I wasn’t mistaken. (And I was never mistaken about shoes.)

Why was I so interested in Georgia’s outfit? A valid question.

While she was dressed for an elegant affair, I was dressed for the prom. The prom circa 1985, that was. I was sporting a royal blue taffeta gown complete with puffy cap sleeves and matching royal blue
pumps
—which, attention shoe manufacturers, was there an uglier word?—as well as a matching royal blue clutch. It was one of the least attractive ensembles I owned. In it, I looked like a royal blueberry.

The engagement party invitation had specified formalwear. And what, Georgia and I had asked each other, was more formal than an old bridemaid’s dress?

“You know perfectly well that you’re supposed to be in this dress,” I snapped at Georgia when she came to a stop in front of me. “I don’t think I’m speaking to you. Maybe not ever again.”

“This is the thing,” Georgia said, settling herself beside me on the plush settee. If she was impressed by my threat, she failed to show it. “When I wear that dress, people flip out and start calling me a giant Smurfette—”

“Exactly one person called you a giant Smurfette, and he was wasted the
single time
you ever wore this dress,” I interrupted. “And how is that any worse than rolling around looking like a royal blueberry?”

“I feel bad,” Georgia confessed, meeting my eyes. “But not bad enough to change.”

“This was your idea!” I shrieked at her, completely forgetting where we were.

My own voice, in a screech like a fishwife (as my mother used to say, not that she had ever explained—to my satisfaction—what a fishwife
was
, other than loud) at top volume, reminded me.

Georgia and I assumed meek smiles and fell quiet, as, all around us, the opulence of the Park Plaza registered its disapproval. The Park Plaza Hotel was not the sort of place where screeching was tolerated. It was swanky, historic, and filled with impressive flower arrangements. Tourists clumped together and gazed about in awe, while businessmen oozed expense-account nonchalance and headed for the bar.

“Did you just make that noise?” Amy Lee demanded, striding up to stand in front of us. “My ears are still ringing.”

“It was some girl,” Georgia lied vaguely, waving her hand in the approximate direction of the elevators.

Amy Lee glanced over and then looked back at me. She frowned. She was suitably attired in the same black dress she trotted out to every single semiformal and/or formal occasion she’d attended since sophomore year in college. The only things she ever changed were her accessories. She claimed she’d learned this trick from Coco Chanel, and when she made that claim she liked to make it sound as if she’d learned it from Coco
personally
, instead of reading the same selection of quotations in fashion magazines everyone else had.

“What the hell are you wearing, Gus?” she asked. “Is that
taffeta
?”

“Oh,” I said blandly. “Why? You don’t like it?”

Next to me, I saw Georgia hide a smile behind her hand.

“It’s hideous,” Amy Lee said flatly.

“You always claimed we could wear them again,” I told her sweetly, “and check it out, you were right!”

There was an extended silence, as Amy Lee took a long, hard look at the atrocity she’d foisted upon her closest friends, all in the name of her Day of Love.

“Doesn’t look so good outside the wedding madness, does it?” Georgia asked in an arch tone.

“Once again,” Amy Lee said, “I saved you from the chartreuse chiffon my mother fell in love with. How come no one remembers that?”

“You have a picture of your special day on your wall, Amy Lee, in which you and Oscar seem to be beaming amid a sea of blueberries,” I pointed out. “A sea of puffy, taffeta blueberries. I have to spend eternity as one of those blueberries.”

“What sucks for you,” Amy Lee retorted, “is that you are just a lone blueberry tonight. Bet this was a whole lot funnier when you were getting dressed, wasn’t it?”

I glared at Georgia, who had the grace to look slightly ashamed. In truth, it was difficult to maintain my righteous indignation when I knew I looked like a righteously indignant
blueberry.

Then I looked back at Amy Lee and shrugged. “That’s pretty much the story of my life,” I told her.

“If it helps,” she said then, “I never liked those dresses as much as I pretended to.”

Some hours later, I was taking a break from the blueberry fun at the table we’d been assigned with a selection of other BU graduates who were also friends with the Happy Couple. Everyone I knew was off dancing, while I took the opportunity to wonder why, exactly, I always found it necessary to take things just that extra bit too far. It was amusing to stand in one’s own apartment, imagining the reaction a best friend might have when one turned up to a formal event kitted out in the dress she’d foisted upon her bridesmaids. So amusing, in fact, that I’d told myself I
didn’t care at all
that Nate and Helen would be present to see me in said bridesmaid dress, and that my wearing it
knowing
they would see me looking absurd was a
power move.
It was proving far less amusing, and not at all empowering, however, to parade around a party all decked out as a blueberry. Because all of my friends might have known why I was dressed up like a refugee from an eighties movie, but the rest of Chloe and Sam’s extended family thought I was just a pathetic creature with an unusual and/or alarming fondness for royal blue taffeta.

I stared across the crowded banquet room toward the main table and located Georgia easily enough. She was right where I’d left her: flirting shamelessly with a very hot consultant who worked with the groom-to-be. His name was Justin or Jordan or something like that, and he had
ambitious corporate shark
tattooed all over his excellently maintained body.

“That’s an accident waiting to happen,” Amy Lee said with a sigh, sitting next to me and also looking at Georgia.

“I’ll collect the chocolate and the Aimee Mann CDs,” I agreed. “You work on the speech.”

“I’ve been telling her to look for a different type of guy for the past ten years!” Amy Lee protested.

“Which is why the speech needs work.”

We sat there for a moment. I tried to send positive thoughts Georgia’s way, on the off chance Jonah or Jesse (or whoever) was just a lamb in shark’s clothing. But it was unlikely. As a rule of thumb, if Georgia was attracted to him, the guy had to be a jackass. Witness Henry, the ultimate case in point.

“I have to say, I was looking for a little more excitement,” Amy Lee said. “If I have to put on formalwear, there should at least be something to gossip about.” She shook her head when I nodded over at Georgia. “I can’t bring myself to gossip about something we both know we’ll end up dealing with when it all goes horribly wrong.”

“I agree. I expected someone to be swinging from a chandelier, or falling down drunk on the dance floor,” I complained, looking around at the sedate gathering. People laughed and sipped drinks on all sides, looking as perfectly well-behaved and about as likely to throw down and get rowdy as a Junior League convention.

“Henry was panting all over some stick figure with boobs,” Amy Lee threw out there. “But I guess that’s not exactly interesting or new, is it?”

“He is Satan, after all,” I agreed, without the slightest pang of guilt. The other pang, I ignored. Fostering my friends’ dislike of my enemies was a responsibility I took seriously. There was no time for inconvenient pangs. I sighed. “This party is way too … civilized.”

Usually when a group of such size was convened by a member of our wider group, you could count on scandal and intrigue. Someone was always kissing drastically above or below their station, and at a different engagement party last winter someone had actually spiked the punch.

“The night is young,” Amy Lee said, sounding hopeful. She looked around. “I have to get some mandatory mingling in. Oscar thinks we need to expand our practice.” She grinned at me. “I’m assuming you’re not that interested in trolling for patients with me?”

“You’re assuming right,” I agreed. I made a shooing motion with my hand. “Go schmooze.”

“Oscar’s much better at it than I am,” Amy Lee said, getting to her feet and smoothing her dress. “He makes people
want
to come get a root canal. But strangely, he thinks we both have a responsibility to our livelihood.”

“Men are so crazy!” I commiserated, shaking my head. We grinned at each other.

“What are you going to do? Sit here, feeling blue?” She cracked herself up with that one. I ignored it.

“I’m avoiding my stalker,” I told her primly.

“Which we need to talk about.”

“After you drum up business,” I said, and shooed her away again, for good this time.

So far, I’d been doing a pretty good job of avoiding both Nate and Helen, both of whom I could see from across the room. (Helen, as it happened, was not wearing a gown that made her look like a gargantuan blueberry. She’d opted for a somewhat more flattering silver dress.) The fact that Nate’s eyes lit up when he saw me as if he’d never ripped my heart from my chest led me to conclude that he had no idea his girlfriend had called me not just eight times that night (yes, eight—and the other two were hang-ups, so draw your own conclusions), but a number of other times throughout the past two weeks.

Here’s what I’d pieced together from various answering machine messages and a few cell phone voice mails: Helen wanted to talk. She wanted to talk to me so badly, in fact, that she didn’t mind coming over all
Fatal Attraction
to do it. I knew Helen well enough to know that normally, her self-absorption prevented her from wanting to talk to anyone else. Much less
needing to talk
, as she’d repeatedly claimed. She could sit for hours and just sort of stare off into space, doing nothing. Not reading a book. Not daydreaming. Not thinking about anything. Just sitting there. It used to drive me up the wall when I would look up from my reading to find her
just sitting
, like an android someone turned off and left propped up on the cot across the room.

This was not someone who
needed to talk
to anyone, about anything. Which meant she had to have a reason.

I’d had some time to wonder what that reason might be, and I’d narrowed it down to two possible motivations. Either a) she was plain old batshit crazy or b) she felt guilty for her behavior. And the phrase “her behavior” could, in this case, encompass anything and everything, from flirting shamelessly with Nate at the Labor Day party with her boobs pressed up against his arm, to the actual theft of Nate to her intervention-speak at Henry’s house. She was guilty of so many sins, really, that it was impossible to pick
just one
she might feel guilty about.

If our interaction at Henry’s house had been a preview, however, I was planning to miss the show, thanks. I didn’t want to talk to Helen—I wanted to scream at her, and possibly resort to fisticuffs. Being all delicate and waifish wouldn’t help her if I went all Courtney Love on her ass.

The previous weekend there had been an unexpected gap in my social calendar, which had meant I got to spend the entirety of the weekend lounging around my apartment, catching up on my TiVo and meaning to clean. It had been nice to spend some time
not
contending with my failed relationships and the problem of Henry. It had been even nicer
not
making an ass of myself all around Boston. It was like a deep breath of a weekend.

And now that it was November, the holiday season was in full swing. I had one party or another to attend every single weekend for the remainder of the year, up to and including a huge New Year’s eve bash a friend of ours was throwing out on the Cape.

On the one hand, it was exciting to have a vital and energetic social schedule. On the other hand, I was going to have to deal with the post-traumatic stress of my breakup with Nate at almost every single one of those parties, and by
post-traumatic stress
I meant not just my emotions but Helen.

I was exhausted just thinking about it. I certainly didn’t need to discuss it with the person who caused it all.

Across the room, Helen let out one of her donkey laughs and then looked up. Our eyes met. Hers narrowed, and I felt a flush of panic.

Realizing that sitting still made me a big royal blue target, I jumped to my feet and headed out of the banquet room. I was looking around at the grandeur, should anyone ask—which meant, obviously, that I was hiding. I had exhausted the lobby after a few turns around the perimeter, had eyed every piece of Boston and/or Red Sox paraphernalia in the gift shop, and was resigning myself to reentering the party when the elevator directly in front of me opened.

Inside, Henry pushed a skinny brunette away from his body and looked up. Our eyes met.

The fact that he was evil made him hotter than the sum of his actual body parts, I thought in that brief, searing moment, like Sark on
Alias.
And maybe he wouldn’t even be
quite
so evil if he weren’t
quite
so delectable.

I would have to think about that. Later.

“Hello, Gus,” Henry said. It was the
way
he said my name that I objected to, I thought. As if it meant something else entirely in his language.

He stepped from the elevator, tugging the leggy brunette in his wake.
She
looked lazy and postcoital, not that you could tell that anything had gone on from the state of her sleek blowout, which remained perfect. Henry looked the way he always did: gorgeous. And, when looking at me, also secretly amused.