One Good Friend Deserves Another (24 page)

S
o, basically, I met the Ghost of Christmas Future at a speed-dating event,” Marta said, “and everything she predicted came true.”

Marta braced her elbows against the splintered gunwales of the wooden rowboat and slumped at the stern. She scanned the shores of the Adirondack lake as Wendy pulled the oars to propel them farther away from the Wainwright family cabin. Marta felt like she’d lost about six pounds in confession and gained ten more in public failure. But it felt good to finally share the whole story. Her life was madness. Every time she came up with a hopeful new plan, fate swept in and knocked it right over.

She was tired of doing this alone.

“Girl, you have a pair of melon-size
cojones.
” Wendy checked over her shoulder, aiming the bow of the boat to the center of the lake. “In that situation, I would have excused myself to the ladies’ room and clawed my way out a dirty broken window.”

“Rat me out.” Marta ran her fingers through her hair, tangled from driving two hundred miles with an open window. “The whole coven will be here tonight. I need an intervention.”

“It’s my bachelorette party.” Wendy pulled the oars hard. “I’ve got other plans.”

“I’ve broken two rules at least. I didn’t wait six months after Carlos, and I went after an ex.”

“No can do. We’ve reached our official summer intervention quota.”

Marta trailed her fingers in the water. “You know, my
abuela
used to warn me to stop casting off my boyfriends like old socks. She said one day I’d wake up, and I’d be—”

“Sockless?”

“Alone.”

“You’ve got me and Kelly and Dhara and a hundred and fifty-two close relatives, at last count. You should be screaming for privacy.”

“Wendy, you have to admit that I’m heading down a path that leads to Stouffer’s single servings and an excess of goldfish.”

“I like frozen dinners.”

“Wendy.”

“Is this some sort of Roman Catholic thing? A need to confess, pay penance, be absolved?”

Marta flicked her wet fingers at her. “Two thousand years of tradition,
chica.
It works.”

“Yeah, but I’m no priest. And right now, I’m the last person you should be asking for romantic advice.”

Marta disagreed. Wendy was the
best
person to ask for advice. Marta had ducked out of work on a Friday just to arrive here before any other bachelorette party guests. But as she watched Wendy spin one oar straight and then dip it back in the water, Marta suddenly noticed how thin her friend looked in a fitted T-back top and bike pants. Wendy’s shoulders looked bony, her hips angular. Wendy’s throat corded with each pull of the oars.

Poor girl. That wedding was really taking a toll. Marta hoped Wendy’s mother would back off a bit, give Wendy some breathing space. But before Marta could make a joking comment about General Bitsy, Wendy stopped rowing.

“Marta, I want you to do something for me.” Wendy twisted the oars and laid the blades inside the boat. “Turn around, put your feet up, and lay your head on this seat.”

“What?”

“Trust me.” She patted the wooden bench. “I’ll lie next to you. It’ll be snug, but we’ll fit.”

Marta gripped the edges of the boat. She hadn’t been too keen about going out on the lake in this rickety dinghy, but she’d arrived at the cabin just as Wendy was about to take a solo row around the lake. It would have been rude to demur. “Don’t you think you should row? So we know where we’re going?”

“You came here for advice, right?”

She nodded with some reluctance.

“Well, my advice right now is to shut up and hit the deck.”

Marta lay down upon the hard boards, suppressing a sigh. What she really craved for the weekend were mudpacks, Swedish massages, and an IV of pomegranate Cosmos. But if this little trip out on the lake was any indicator, it looked like Wendy was going to turn this party into one of those granola-eating, bike-riding, weird communing-with-nature sort of weekends.

Above the gunwales, all Marta could see was wide-open sky. She braced the heels of her sneakers against the bow. “Tell me that there are no waterfalls nearby.”

Wendy scuttled down, then swiveled to lie down beside her. “It’s a little mountain lake fed by little mountain creeks.”

“No nearby white-water rivers? No weird currents that are going to grip the bottom and send us swirling?”

“The most dangerous things around here are the black flies, and the season has passed.” Wendy pulled her ponytail from under her head and sent it dangling over the edge of the seat. “Relax. Look at the clouds. And tell me once again why you decided to go speed-dating.”

Marta flexed her feet, trying to take comfort in the solidity of the wood beneath her flats. “Do you remember what Kelly said about probabilities at the hospital that day? It hurt my brain while she was talking, but later, thinking about it, I realized that some of it actually made sense. I’m never going to find an appropriate single guy unless I start looking for one, and at that point, it’s just a numbers game—the more guys I meet, the more likely it will be that I’ll find someone good.”

“Listen to you. It’s like you’re picking fruit off a conveyor belt.”

“Actually, yes.”

“It also means you’ll likely reject a perfectly fine one because of a few superficial bruises.”

Marta grew warm, thinking of how she’d criticized all the men who’d passed by her table, making instant judgments, instant rejections.

“I just don’t think you can
summon
Mr. Right,” Wendy said, “any more than you can ignore him once he shows up.”

“I did a damn good job ignoring Tito though, didn’t I?”

Marta absorbed for the thousandth time the pinch of that ugly truth. She blinked up at the sky to stop the prickling at the back of her throat. The sky was blue, so blue, and scuttled with little white clouds. Beneath the weathered boards of the boat, she could hear the gurgle of the lake water. The whole dinghy rocked gently. It should be comforting, like snoozing on a hammock strung between two trees.

It wasn’t.

“Listen,” Marta said, stretching her palm against the side to establish some sense of equilibrium. “You know I’ve never really had a problem finding a guy. The real problem is what happens after I’ve found him.” The boat bobbed more vigorously, as if it were caught in a wake. “I always thought attraction led to great sex led to a relationship led to love, right? But no, that’s not how it works. Not for me anyway. Something happens after the sex and before the love. Are you sure we’re safe floating around like this?”

“Relax, Marta.”

“I mean, I’m perfectly okay with sitting back up.”

“Relationships,” Wendy reminded her. “You were giving me the lowdown on relationships à la Sanchez.”

Marta strained to hear the sound of a motor, but heard nothing but birdsong and the burble of water. She took a deep breath. She was with a Wainwright, whose distant ancestors probably played lacrosse with the Iroquois and thus had a pact with the local Native American lake deity.

“For me,” Marta said, “a relationship has always been about attraction and then great sex and then
really
great sex. But except for Tito, who is, like, the most patient man on the planet, none of those guys ever hung around after the initial rush of excitement. And, honestly, here’s the scary part: until Carlos dumped me, I really didn’t mind letting them go.”

“Okay, I’m about to say something you’re not going to like. Are you going to swear at me in Spanish?”

“Possibly.”

“Then I’ll pretend I just don’t understand the curses you taught me in Aruba.” Wendy flattened her sneakers against the bow. “Marta, you’re treating your reluctant singlehood like it’s an IPO. A project to strategize, to be tackled, managed, bullet-pointed, and marked by discrete little steps to success.”

“No kidding.” Marta felt a little sheepish. Even now, her fingers itched for a legal pad and the comfort of a pen, but when Wendy had urged her onto the boat, Marta had left her briefcase behind, unwilling to risk the Italian leather. “That’s just a coping device. It’s the way I always tackle problems.”

“Hey, do you manage our relationship like that?”

“Of course not. Oh, for goodness sake, I’m not blind. I know relationships are messy. You guys are up in my face all the time but I love you anyway. I
get
that. I know that to really know someone, it takes time, and you have to take the good with the bad. But I gave Carlos sixteen months. Sixteen months, Wendy, and still it didn’t progress.”

“That’s because you were concentrating all your fierce Sanchez energies achieving Life Plan bullet-point sixteen.”

“Yeah. Making
partner
.”

The old tingling abated before it really started.

“The problem,” Wendy said, “is that
husband
was bullet-point seventeen. Poor Tito was fighting all the way back at twelve.”

“What you and the girls persist in ignoring is that until now, that plan has worked.”

“Who’s to say you wouldn’t have gotten here if you hadn’t been following it in the first place?”

“That’s
ignoratio elenchi
, counselor, an illogical conclusion to an unrelated argument.” Marta gripped the gunwale as the boat rocked. “That’s it. We’re going to knock into something, I just know it, and this boat of yours is going to shatter into toothpick-size splinters, and I’m going to have to put my feet on the wormy bottom.”

Marta began to haul herself up but Wendy grabbed her arm.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” Wendy’s eyes were suspiciously bright. “Just drifting along, not knowing where you’re going?”

“It’s making me dizzy.” She wished there were a towrope tied to the dock. Or an anchor, at least, dug into the lake mud. The fact that they were floating like a big cork was unsettling. “I’m starting to feel nauseous.”

“It scares the hell out of me too.”

The comment was so odd that Marta stopped worrying about the boat long enough to take a fresh look at her friend. She noticed the shadows under Wendy’s cheekbones, the twitchy look on her face.

“Hey.” Marta reached out to touch Wendy’s arm, shocked at how close the bones felt beneath the skin. “Are you okay?”

“Drift, Marta.” Wendy put her hand over Marta’s. “Just for a little while.”

“Please tell me that’s not your advice.”

“Whatever I say wouldn’t matter anyway.”

“Yes, it would! I came here in search of words of wisdom and some concrete suggestions. You know, like something about the importance of compromise or an online Web site for exotic aphrodisiacs.”

“It’s not fun watching a friend in pain. I really wish I could make a difference.” Wendy shrugged against the boards. “You, me, Kelly, and Dhara, we try to help each other. Sometimes we try
too
hard. But I think when it comes to this—to men, to relationships—we’re all deaf to one another’s advice.”

“I’m not deaf.”

“But if I sit here and tell you that ever since that weekend—and all the difficult months after—that you’ve had some serious issues with emotional intimacy, you’re going to disagree with me, right?”

Marta sputtered. She wanted to argue that Wendy was wrong. She wanted to tell her that what happened that weekend had absolutely no bearing on her later relationships with men. But truth had a way of cutting through bullshit, and she flinched at the wound.

“Listen,” Wendy said. “I’ll always be here when you want to talk. I can take you out for mojitos when a relationship tanks. I can bring you tea while you’re sobbing in your room. But when it comes to making the big risky decisions…well, you know this better than all of us, Marta. We’ve got to figure out our
own
hearts.”

“Not all of us.”

“Yes, all of us.”

“No. You’re a seven-year survivor. You got it right. That’s why I pulled an all-nighter finishing papers so I could make it here before anyone else. I need to talk to a pro. You and Parker,
chica
—you’re the golden couple.”

Wendy went very still. The boat bobbed more vigorously. Wendy turned her face back to the sky. A breeze picked up and skittered the dinghy across the surface, and, watching Wendy’s pained expression, Marta became aware of another shift, a far deeper one, a sliding sense of vertigo.

“There’s something I have to tell you, Marta. I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.”