Friends Like Us (17 page)

At the table next to ours, two girls hug each other and squeal. Declan pours wine for us, then, as soon as anyone has taken a few sips, he pours more.

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” Ben asks. They’ve only just met each other.

He winks. “You bet I am, baby.” They’re hitting it off, the two of them, and Jane is relaxing into the evening. Not me. I have to plant my palms on my thighs to stop my legs from bouncing under the table.

“What was it like, growing up in Ireland?” Ben asks, and Declan launches into a story from his scrappy Dublin childhood: how he and his friend Johnny used to steal underwear from the neighbors’ clotheslines and switch them around, so that tiny old Mrs. McCormack ended up with beer-bellied Jack Fahey’s graying skivvies. We all laugh, loud yelps that ricochet off cars and buildings.

“My daddy was a poor milkman,” he says, shaking his head sadly, “and me ma raised fourteen wee ones in a two-room shack.”

“Your father is an architect,” I remind him, “and your mother is an ophthalmologist. And you’re an only child.”

He slaps his forehead as if he’s just remembering this. “So, you two,” he says, tipping his wineglass toward Ben and Jane. “How long have you been the happy couple?”

Ben pushes back in his chair a couple of inches, the wrought-iron legs screeching against the sidewalk. “My uncle Walleye used to say, ‘Aunt Rose and I have been married for five wonderful years.’ ” He hooks his fingers into the holes in the table. “This was when they’d been married for almost fifty. We always thought he was kidding. Then one morning last year, Aunt Rose told him she’d put a week’s worth of meatloaf in the freezer and that she’d filed for divorce.”

Jane claps her hand over her mouth. Her fingernails are painted all different colors, red for her thumb, orange and yellow and green and blue for her fingers, a jaunty synthetic rainbow.

“That is a lovely romantic story,” Declan says.

“That’s a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie,” I offer.

Jane moves her hand from her mouth. “You have an uncle Walleye?”

“His real name is Walter,” Ben says, “and he also does have a wonky eye.” He nods, as if that’s the point of the whole thing.

“The next generation,” I say, “is going to tell their stories about Great-aunt Brittany and Grandma Ashley.”

“And Grandpa Jaden,” Jane says, running her hand up and down Ben’s arm, her fingertips fluttering like small flags.

“Remember old lady Tiffany, from down the block?” Ben stares at Jane’s moving hand and grins. “She died an old maid.”

“Six months, by the way,” Jane says suddenly to Declan, emphasizing the number like it, too, was
fifty years,
or as if she’s surprised by it herself. “We’ve been together for
six months.
”

“So it’s serious, then?” Declan asks. The combination of his age—he’s five years older than we are—and his former position as my boss gives him a tinge of experience, the aura of someone who knows things.

“Well,” Jane says, “last week, after some discussion, we agreed on the names of our future children. Ella for a girl, Sam for a boy.”

Ben holds up one finger. “Sam and Ella.”

Jane giggles. “So it’s back to the drawing board on that one!” She leans over, pulls Ben’s face toward hers, and kisses him.

Are all of our jokes and conversations just the scaffolding for our physical desires? Are we just rabbits with well-developed frontal lobes? Three days ago Jane was wetly kissing Dougie in a smoky bar in Marcy. Now here she is with Ben, fingertips to skin, mouth to mouth, laughing about the names of their unborn children.

“Imagine yelling that on the playground,” Ben says.

“Or in a crowded restaurant,” Jane adds. “Look out! Samand-Ella!”

The table rattles, and I realize it’s me, my left leg bouncing again, banging against the edge. It’s too much, their treacly happiness, the warm gluey syrup of it filling my lungs. I feel as if I might be catapulted out of my chair, like a machine, spring-loaded and wound up. “Ha,” I say, under my breath, tracing my finger around the rim of my glass. “Sam and Ella.” I think about the prediction Seth made, months ago, that Ben and Jane’s relationship would become serious and that I would be left behind. For the first time I understand that I am living in the midst of something that I might lose.

Under the table, Declan lowers his hand onto my thigh and squeezes.

Declan pays the check, refusing money from the rest of us, smiling at me. I glance away, suddenly shy. As we make our way back to the apartment, my head is full of cotton. I have the buzzy, fuzzy, not unpleasant sense that I’m barely touching the ground—that we’re moving forward more than just physically. We’re on a conveyor belt to the future! Or maybe it’s the wine. On the narrow sidewalk, I hook my arm through Ben’s. Behind us, Declan and Jane are chatting.

“… since college,” she says. I strain to hold the thread of their conversation while maintaining my loopy focus on Ben. “… nobody in the world like Willa. But you already know that.” She’s my advocate, my best friend and protector.
You hurt Willa, you’ll be sleeping with the fishes!

“So, what can you tell me about Marcy?” Ben is saying to me. He’s grown more subdued as the night has worn on. “Jane hasn’t given me much.”

“She’s a great girl,” Declan says. My back is to them, but I’m picturing his long fingers, his confident smile,
oh, yes.

“Well,” I say to Ben, “you know.” He doesn’t; that’s the problem. “Her dad acts like he’s just, I don’t know, misplaced a sock or something. Like, oops, where did my bank account go? Her mom is self-medicating with massive doses of retail therapy. It was a lot to take in. Jane … wasn’t quite herself.”

I could choose this moment, right now, to pull closer to Ben, to whisper in his ear,
Here’s what I can tell you about Marcy: Jane kissed her old boyfriend.
But maybe it’s true that Jane just wasn’t herself. Maybe her family crisis turned her into someone else and then threw that other girl, the unJane, temporarily into Dougie’s beefy arms. How can I blame Jane for the ill-advised actions of the unJane?

I feel the sudden, complicated relief of someone who has just convinced herself via the logic of tipsy reasoning. I tilt my head back to catch the breeze. It’s delicious to be outside, to not be sweaty and enervated. My body belongs to me again. I could climb a mountain! But we’re in Milwaukee. Yes, Jane kissed Dougie. But it’s not always obvious, what’s right. I turn my hazy thoughts back to Declan.

“I like my apartment in Chicago, but, sure, it’s never really felt like home,” he says, behind me. Well. I’ll take that to mean that he’s home
now
, with me, because of course that’s what a nostalgic Irish immigrant who briefly dated me three years ago would mean. Have I forgotten something important? I shake off the strong feeling that I have; I let myself be propelled by my ambitious lust.

Ben presses his arm against mine. “I’m just trying to understand everything,” he says, turning to me, his brown eyes watery and serious as a basset hound’s. “So, thanks.”

When we walk into the apartment, the air is still warm and muggy, in spite of the cool breeze outside. The wood floors are sticky with humidity, the furniture disconcertingly damp.

“That was fun!” Jane says. “Really fun!” She flips her hair with both hands and looks at each of us for confirmation. It
was
fun! Was it
fun
?

Declan nods gamely. “Yep,” he says, after a minute. “Sure was fun!” We’re standing in a clump in the middle of our living room, Jane and Ben and Declan and I and our new friend, awkward conversation.

“What a fun night!” Jane says again. The word is beginning to sound strange and foreign to me, like a kind of exotic stew or a great beast of the African plains.
Fuhn? Pfunn?
Ben is newly fascinated with a bit of string on his sleeve: in the time it’s taken us to walk home, he’s gone from subdued to sullen. Jane is ramped up and tipsy, unaware that the mood has shifted. She tickles Ben’s ribs. She seems not to notice that he has stopped laughing. I close my eyes against an awful flash of insight: that unless I snatch the reins right now, my life is going to be a series of random decisions and diminishing returns, door after door slamming shut in front of me, a narrow hallway of yeses and noes.
Enough of this,
I think, or maybe I actually say it; I’m too tipsy to be sure. I grab Declan’s hand and pull him into my room. This is our slow seduction.

I place my hand on his chest and push Declan down onto the bed the way they do on the TV shows Fran watches, about morally ambiguous lawyers who argue ripped-from-headlines cases and then have hot sex with each other. In seduction, I’ll have to take my cues from prime-time television; I don’t quite know what I’m doing.

I climb on top of Declan. He looks up at me, one eyebrow raised. “I’ll be honest, Will, I wasn’t expecting this.”

I kiss him to prevent him from discussing it in any more detail, the unlikely chain of events that has brought us here. He tastes like wine and cigarettes. I could slow things down right now, just like this, with the taste of ashtray on my tongue. But I want him. And also, once I commit to a project, I like to see it through.

His body is solid underneath mine; we fit together, Declan and I, two warm, breathing mammals, arms to arms, chest to chest. We kiss some more and roll around on the bed, and after a while I feel I should let it be known that I’m enjoying myself. So I let out a soft moan and then, just in case he hasn’t heard, a much louder one.

Declan stops what he’s doing, which is something strange to my belly button. “Are you all right?”

“Absolutely!” I say. The word strikes me, suddenly, as the unsexiest word in the English language.
Absolutely!
It’s a word for motivational speakers and preschool teachers.
Can my four-step confidence-boosting program change your life overnight? Absolutely! Boys and girls, these are absolutely the best hand-turkeys I’ve ever seen!
I laugh a little, then cover it with more ambiguous moaning. I sound like a dying lamb or a seal reuniting with an old pal.

A few weeks ago, Jane sent me an e-mail (she was in her bedroom and I was in mine).
Can you teach me how to talk dirty?
she wrote.

Mud!
I wrote back.
Motor oil!

Seriously.

Why do you think I know?
I typed.

You have more experience than I do. You’re more slutty.

Let’s roll around in a pile of sewage, baby.

Seriously,
she wrote again.
I would like to know what it entails.

Entrails!
I wrote back.

Jillian said you’re supposed to, like, describe what you want.
Jillian was a girl we knew in college who worked part-time at Hooters. She had a worldly quality about her.
Like, “Take me from behind,” or whatever.

This was the point in the e-mail exchange when I started screaming, and then Jane and I convened in the kitchen and tore into a bag of chocolate chips. For the rest of the night, one of us would say, “Take me from behind, or whatever,” and we would double over, laughing, the mysteries of talking dirty unsolved.

But here in bed with Declan, our bodies smashing together like a sandwich, alternating layers of desire and embarrassment, I’m wondering if maybe guys
do
find it incredibly hot,
Take me from behind, or whatever,
the “or whatever” tacked on not as an admission of cluelessness, but as an invitation to unimaginable kinkiness.

Declan whispers something that I don’t quite catch. I remind myself that I want to be here with him; I’ve wanted it for three years. I think about Jane and Ben and wonder where they are. Declan shifts his attention from my belly button to my right knee.

I take a deep breath. “That drives me crazy!” I say.

He stops, looks up at me, his eyes squinty and intent. “Oh! Sorry!”

“No, no! In a good way.” I pat his head, and then immediately regret it.

He nods and returns with great focus to my leg, his fingers stroking and squeezing, a lusty orthopedist. I lean back and consider the night we’ve had—how, since Marcy, Ben and Jane have begun to seem to me a single, warped entity, a creature at odds with itself. Ben and Jane. I want them to know something, to understand … I’m not sure what. I take a deep breath. “Oh, that’s so good!” I say, like I’m calling to someone in another room, as if I’m eating a hot-fudge sundae someone made for me in the kitchen. “Yes! Yes!” I sit up and pull Declan toward me; he’s on his knees, smiling and familiar. I have a twinge of guilt for this mild subterfuge, but it’s all in the service of a greater good. “Yes!” I say again, and then the thesaurus in my mind slams shut, and I resign myself to more moaning.

And then, and then, he pulls me on top of him again, his arms around me, our rhythm improving, and suddenly I’m deep in it, in the sweetness of another body; it all takes a turn for the better, like a movie that gets off to a slow start but picks up toward the middle, and all the awkwardness that came before was just an unimportant prelude to this: the two of us. Lost. Absolutely.

And so. Here we are, resting together in the graveyard of my dignity. Declan is naked from the waist down, his long toes curling off the edge of the mattress; from the waist up, he’s wearing a white T-shirt, a big black wristwatch, and a pie-eating grin. My purple sheet and green down comforter lie like wrapping paper on the floor.

“You are … surprisingly expressive, Willa,” he says. He shakes his head, smiling, runs one hand up and down his stubbly face, and pulls me close. I nestle into the soft cotton of his shirt, breathe in the musky smell of him: lavender-scented laundry detergent and sex.

“So tired,” I mumble, which would be true if the prickliness rising from my spine to my neck were the woozy hum of fatigue instead of the hot cringe of embarrassment. I squeeze my eyes shut.

“Mmm,” he says. “Me fluhhh.”

I wait awhile, silent and still, listening to the shallow whisper of his breathing. It grows slower and more even, and it doesn’t take long before it’s safe for me to lift his heavy arm from my body and roll away. I sit up and swing my legs off the edge of the bed, tap my heels gently against the mattress, and examine my hands, disembodied and ghostly in the whitish moon glow of the room. I glance over at Declan. His mouth hangs open slightly; everything about him is long and pale and slack. He looks more like he’s switched off than asleep now, except for his penis, odd little accessory, friendly lapdog curled in repose.
You’re welcome.
In the half-light, it winks at me.