Results May Vary (22 page)

I shoved my worry away and dredged up a smile. I crossed to her and fitted my hands to her slim shoulders. “You're right. I'm sorry I haven't been paying enough attention to you. I've been a crummy sister when you've been absolutely amazing to me. Including this trip. I'm going to be better, I promise.”

She gave me a thin one-sided smile and turned back to the mirror to continue putting her face on. Her body motions had lost their righteous ferocity. “We're serious about each other, you know.”

I cleared my throat awkwardly. “Yeah, that's—that's what he said. When I called to threaten him with bodily injury,” I added, sneaking a glance at her to see if she would crack a smile. She did.

“Construction's starting on the restaurant in March. Soft open at the end of May.”

“Wow,” I said, focusing my attention on sweeping her navy polish smoothly onto my left thumbnail. Important task. That kept my face down. Useful to hide how disorienting I found it to be hearing information about Jonathan from somebody else. Particularly, for god's sake, from her.

“Soooo,” she said, and I looked up. “So, we are going to be moving up to the Hudson Valley by the end of April.”

The “we” dripped off her tongue clumsily, unsteadily, a droplet too loaded with information for one single word. And I couldn't even pretend it didn't splatter all over me.

“Wow,” I said again, letting my surprise give it an extra syllable or two as it rolled around my mouth. “Good for you guys.”

“You're not going to freak out again?”

With an effort, I shrugged.
Who, me?
“I can't pretend it's not going to take a little getting used to, but I'm happy for you both.”

She watched me carefully. I could imagine a hushed phone conversation later, while I slept or danced or barfed up some bad decisions I hadn't even made yet:
Actually, it wasn't too bad. She said she's happy for us. I think she'll come around.

“Anyway,” I said, grinning broadly, “I like you way better than Mariah, that's for sure.”

It was a test, and it was a mean one, and I regretted it as soon as I saw her lips tighten. “I know who Mariah is,” she said quietly. “If you want to play that game. I even remember her from the time. You were sure she was a cokehead in training. Turns out you were right,” she added, with a whisper of a smile.

I carefully capped the nail polish and took a deep breath. “That was shitty of me. Five minutes into my vow to be a better sister.” I turned my face and stared at her, imploring her to understand. “Maybe I should stop trying to be cool here, and just be honest. This is really, really weird for me. I know you guys had your reasons, and I know I've been a little checked out lately, but I
really
wish you had managed to tell me you were dating before it got to ‘We're in love and oh by the way we're moving in together.' It's a huge piece of information to absorb. I'm having trouble”—I swirled the air in front of my face—“absorbing.”

She shifted uncomfortably. “I know. That was my fault. He wanted to tell you a lot sooner, but I knew you would freak out, so I kept dragging my feet.”

I could easily believe it. And, I realized, Jonathan hadn't thrown her under the bus even a little bit when he'd talked to me.
We should have talked to you sooner.
He had her back. They were a team. That “we” again.

“You understand that the reason this is hard for me is not because I want him, right? It was never that way when I was with Adam, and it's still not. I've got the only blastproof panties along the Northeast Corridor.” Well. For the most part, anyway.

She nodded, smiling.

“We will pass over for the moment the fact that your panties are apparently
highly
susceptible,” I said, and she laughed. “I just think…until I get used to this—and I will—can you try to skip the parts where you fill me in on details you know full well I didn't know about Jonathan's life? And I will avoid finding ways to remind you how much longer I've known him. Please try to keep in mind that it's weird for me. 'Cause I'm sorry, but it's weird. It's
weird.
”

“It's not as weird as you think, actually. I've had a crush on him since your wedding. We were just never single at the same time.”

“Since my…for ten years?
Seriously?
” I yelled.

“Yes, Caroline, seriously. God, and you wonder why I didn't tell you.” She flounced her arms over her chest and stared at me crossly.

I threw my hands in the air, surrendering. “Okay. I need a drink before we talk about this any more.”

“Me too,” she muttered. “Go put your boobs in your club-rat dress and let's go to dinner.”

“Jesus, I still can't believe you went and got yourself blasted.”

Ruby's face lit with a grin, and I knew instantly I had made a severe tactical error. My sister loves to share sex stories. Loves it. Ruby tells sex stories the way other people share travel adventures or their kids' softball victories. My usual response to them was to squeal in feigned shock, laugh generously at the punch lines, and privately feel a pang of either jealousy or horror. I had often found myself sending a brief mental bubble of gratitude skyward for my good fortune in marrying a man who'd figured out at age seventeen where my clitoris was and what to do with it. But sex stories involving Jonathan were an appalling prospect, for several reasons.

“No. Stop it. Don't do it, don't you dare,” I said, in an increasingly threatening tone as her grin widened.

“Come on, don't you want to know?” She dipped a chip into our bowl of guacamole and crunched enthusiastically.

I feigned a sudden interest in the dinner menu resting near my arm. “No. I absolutely do not.”

“Not even whether it's good or not?”

“You wouldn't be sitting there with that smug-ass grin on your face if it wasn't pretty good.”

“Oh god, Caroline, it's
so good,
” she groaned, committing gluttonously to the overshare. “I've never had such phenomenal sex in my life. Like, I didn't even know my body could do some of the things he makes it do.”

“Gross,” I moaned, squinting at her from between my fingers. “No more.”

“You're such a prude,” she said. “You should be kicking up your heels, too. Free to frolic after—what—sixteen years with the same guy?”

“Seventeen.”

“Exactly. So, loosen up. We're in Vegas! And I'm an awesome wingwoman. You've got your tits out, so now let's get you laid.”

“Getting laid is definitely not my problem,” I said. And I suspect it's unlikely anyone has ever sounded more prissy when alluding to a highly satisfying sex life. “
Definitely
not,” I repeated, for good measure.

“Oh?” said Ruby, crossing her arms over her chest. “Do go on.”

I clutched my sangria, cheeks flaming. How could I possibly offer up the details of my laughing, luminous sex with Neil for the salacious appraisal of my sister?
He makes me feel like a goddess, when I so desperately need it
was not the kind of comment Ruby was looking for. “Um.”

“Did you get totally crazy? Like, doing it with the lights on?”

You know what? There
was
something. “We've been going to his place on our lunch breaks. A couple of times a week. He lives a few blocks from the museum, and we can be as loud as we want without worrying about his kids hearing.”

“Now you're talking,” said Ruby, looking suitably impressed.

“Yeah,” I said, warming to my topic. “We did it with me sitting on his kitchen island the other day. I always wanted to do that, but Adam was too freaking short.”

Ruby raised her sangria in the air and cheered. “Hip hip hooray! To—what's his name again?”

“Neil,” I said, blushing.

“To Neil, who is not too freaking short.”

I clanked my glass against hers and took a deep drink, buzzing with alcohol and embarrassment and remembered pleasure.

“All right, you don't need to get laid in Vegas, then. But we're gonna take our cute asses to a club and let those boys try.”

You once found my willingness to love you a beautiful and courageous thing. I still think it was.

— Rebecca West to H. G. Wells, March 1913

“Before we go any further,” shouted Ruby, “you need to pick your Vegas name.”

We were standing just inside the entrance of the nightclub portion of TAO, while other newcomers fresh off the queue swirled around us and the thump of the music pounded all the way into my chest. I didn't think I'd set foot inside a nightclub since I went to visit a friend who'd spent a semester in Paris during college, and it seemed like things hadn't changed much. The enormous, high-ceilinged space was crammed with people, all of them holding drinks, talking, laughing, and pushing past one another through the crowd with a “Mind your back” hand on a shoulder.

“My Vegas name?” I bellowed back.

“Yes. You need to choose an alternate identity.”

“Why?”

“Because Vegas.”

“What's yours?”

“Sangria,” she said, grinning.

“Fine, then I'm Michelada,” I said, remembering the bizarre drink she had ordered for her second round at dinner. Only Ruby would go to a Mexican restaurant and order something that tasted like the bastard child of a beer and a Bloody Mary.

“All right, let's go.” And she grabbed me by the elbow and steered me into the crowd.

Ruby had been right about one thing: We had no shortage of suitors. I was self-conscious at first, knowing I was practically glue-factory age compared to most of the women in the club shaking their booties to Pitbull, but the guys kept coming. Since I had spent nearly all of my life since the onset of puberty in an exclusive relationship, I had never had occasion to test these particular waters, but damn—apparently “big boobs, tight dress, pretty enough face” was something of a golden ticket, at least in Vegas. I said as much to Ruby over my third margarita (we were keeping the Mexican theme going), and she shook her head in disgust.

“Wow, and you're supposed to be the smart one? You have got to be quite literally the
last
person alive to figure that out.”

“I mean, I'm not going to do anything, but still. That one guy, Charles? He was pretty hot!”

“Meh…he's cute. I'll take me a Tennessee redhead any day.”

“Are you doing this to torture me, or are you actually this gross right now?”

“I'm bananas in love, and you're a captive audience. The fact that it tortures you is an added bonus.”

I shot a sideways look at her, and couldn't help smiling. She
was
happy—she was sparkling with it, reflecting light and joy in every direction like a human disco ball. In spite of my worries, there was nothing for me to do but step back and let it shine.

At one point, I got a text from Neil:
How's it going? You hit it big at craps yet?

Ruby and I are at a club, using false identities named after Mexican cocktails,
I responded.

Margarita?
he wrote.

I glanced at the half-finished drink in my hand. Clearly we needed to recruit another friend.

OMG!
I wrote.
Huge crazy news. Ruby and Jonathan have not only been secretly dating each other since September, but are apparently IN LOVE. (!!!!!!!)

Wow! Good for them.

And that was all he wrote. Because, of course, he had never even met Ruby or Jonathan. He knew them from my stories, but he'd never met them in person, let alone known them for years, so how could he possibly appreciate what a weird and shocking development this was? He had no context for it. He wasn't really a part of my life. And what's more, he could not have made it more clear that he never would be.

All of a sudden, a wave of missing Adam crashed over me, threatening to capsize me like a tugboat limping through a storm. Adam would get it. He would understand every single nuance of this long, ridiculous day, and he would shit the appropriate cinder block at the Ruby and Jonathan news. He would say, “I
can't believe
they didn't tell you, that is insanity,” and “Yikes, that's gonna be messy. Can you take out some sort of liability insurance?” And then he'd invent some cheesy celebrity couple nickname—Rubathan, probably.

I turned away from Ruby and the guys of the moment and braced my forearms on the bar, panting fast, panicky breaths and staring at the filthy, crushed confetti on the floor while my carefully constructed fantasy of “moving on” collapsed into a sinkhole. It was all wrong, and I should have known it. I didn't
want
to move on. I wanted my marriage back. I wanted my husband back. I wanted everything to be the way it should have been, the way that we had promised it would be, more than ten long years before. I was supposed to make a court filing in less than a month that would end our marriage, and there was nothing I had ever wanted less.

The thing I had forgotten—if I had ever really realized it at all—was that breaking up with Adam didn't only mean removing myself from a source of pain; it meant removing myself from a source of deep-seated joy. It meant actually losing him. Actually being
without
him, every day. Without his arms to welcome me or his laughter to infect me or his faith to bolster me or his understanding to…understand. I wanted all of it, every bit of it, even his petty infractions like stealing the blankets from me in the middle of the night or leaving dishes in the sink or being too lazy to refill the Brita pitcher so I had to do it every single time I wanted a cold drink of water. The thought of being mad at him for something stupid instead of something huge—the ability to yell, “God, you are being
so annoying
right now, will you knock it o
ff?
” and have him stick his tongue out to taunt me—was suddenly the greatest luxury I could imagine.

He had hurt me terribly, and nothing could erase that. But there was so much,
so
immeasurably much, that we had earned during those thousands of days we spent together—I couldn't just walk away from it. There had to be a way to reboot our relationship, to build it in a more deliberate and conscious and mature way than we ever had before, instead of coasting on the momentum of what we'd started seventeen years ago. To nurture it as a growing, organic thing rather than treating it like a time capsule. There had to be a way to fix us.

Ruby's hand was gentle on my shoulder. “Care? You okay? Do you need to sit down?”

“I need to go,” I mumbled. “And I need to call Adam.”

“Whoa,” she said. “No, you do not. That is the margaritas talking. But yeah, let's head on out of here. Gents, it's been a pleasure.” And then my sister hooked me by the arm and led me, first to the coat check and then, through some deserted and off-limits-looking corridors, to the welcome relief of the outside world—even if that world was a night still throbbing with headlights and neon.

“I think I better let you dry out a bit before we go home,” sighed Ruby.

“That is entirely unnecessary,” I said, but she speared me with a look. Damn it. I was doing it again.

“Bullshit,” she said. “And anyway, I've got the munchies. I saw a Denny's near here when we were coming in.”

“Jonathan would disown you,” I grumbled.

“Jonathan is learning that he can't cure me of my junk food thing. Come on, Michelada, let's march.”

With a cunning deepened by intoxication, I waited patiently for the moment I could get my call in to Adam. This was primarily achieved by not mentioning it again to Ruby, though she eyed me suspiciously as we tucked into our food: hers a stack of pancakes, and mine some sort of scrambled egg sandwich.

“How are you feeling?” she said, shoving her last hunk of pancake into the lake of maple-flavored corn syrup she'd made on one side of her plate. “A little better?”

“I was never feeling bad in the first place. This was completely your idea.”

“True,” she said, then chewed peacefully for a few moments. “Okay, I'm gonna hit the potty before we leave. You will please give me your phone.”

“What?” I squeaked.

She put her fork down and turned her palm up, fingers waving. “Hand it over. I didn't forget the part where you said you wanted to call Adam, and I'm not letting you screw up all the progress you've made at letting go of him. The last thing you should do is call him while you're drunk and sappy. Gimme.”

“I'm not going to call him.”

“Cool, then you'll have no problem giving me your phone, just so you don't slip and fall and accidentally dial his number.”

I scowled at her, and she scowled right back.
Damn it.
Ruby could be a stubborn little shit when she wanted to be.

Sighing, I handed her the phone. She was probably right that I shouldn't call when I'd been drinking. It could wait until tomorrow.

But then, as she scooted out from the booth and took off for the bathroom—her slinky dress and stilettos garnering a few confused stares even in a Denny's located on the Las Vegas strip—I noticed something she'd forgotten. Which was that her own phone, rather than nestled inside her bag where she obviously thought it was, sat forgotten on the table next to her.

I grabbed it and punched in her birthday—no go. Damn it. Ruby's password had been her birthday for as long as I'd been scolding her to pick something less obvious; why the hell had she picked
right now
to finally change it? And what the hell would she have changed it to? She didn't have a pet, or an anniversary—

But I knew what she was obsessed with. J-B-J-B. No. J-B-R-F.
No
. Damn it, Ruby!

Then, in a flash, I remembered what I'd seen on this very same phone, what felt like three days ago by now. T-E-N-N, and boom, there I was: in.

Not surprisingly, considering it was some ungodly o'clock on the East Coast, it took him a long time to answer. I had to let it go to voicemail once. Then, finally, his voice, stumbling from sleep:

“Ruby? Why are you calling me, is Caroline okay? Tell me what's wrong, right now.”

“It's me,” I said, awash with tenderness at the naked terror in his voice.

He let out a long, gasping sigh. “Jesus Christ, it's five o'clock in the morning. You scared the living shit out of me. For a second I thought my dad had another heart attack, and then when I saw it was Ruby—”

“I'm sorry,” I whispered. This was it: the moment where I could start pouring out every drop of longing, telling him how much I missed him and wanted him to come home. He would come up with a way to fix us.

“Is everything all right? Where are you?”

“I am at Denny's.”

“Denny's. Is that so. What are you doing at Denny's?”

“Eating…a…wait, what was it called? Moons Over My Hammy.”

“Sounds nutritious. Where is this Denny's?”

“In Las Vegas, Nevada.”

“Vegas? Why are you in Vegas?”

“Liberation,” I said. “Furtherance of personal goals.”

“You're furthering your personal goals in Vegas.”

“It was Ruby's idea,” I said. “Oh. By the way, Ruby and Jonathan are dating.”

“Wha-a-a-t?” he said, his laughter trembling over the word. “That is…
ridiculous.
She's going to drive him nuts in ten seconds.”

I didn't like the way he automatically assumed Ruby would be the problem. It wasn't on the list of responses I'd imagined he would give to this piece of news. “They're four months into it. They love each other.”

“God help us,” he muttered. “That won't be fun to be in the middle of when it melts down. So,” he said, and I could imagine him sitting up in our bed, knees bent, getting ready for a story. “What goals are you pursuing in Vegas?”

“Ruby told me it was time I got my tits out.”

“Interesting. That sounds like something I'd like to see. So did you?”

“Yes. But
everybody
has their tits out here. And the skirts…their skirts barely cover their ass cheeks. I was on the dance floor at this club, and I looked up at the mezzanine where the girls were waiting for the bathroom, and I could see alllllll of their underwear. Blue thong, red thong, pink thong. Pretty sure I even saw straight-up labia. Not that that would interest you,” I said. Swerving around to it at last.

“Sweaty club-rat vagina? No. Not appetizing.”

“What about mine?” I whispered.

He hissed his breath through his teeth. “Caro…”

“I felt so stupid,” I said, voice shivering with tears. “Putting on this stupid dress to make drunk guys look at me. When my own husband doesn't want to fuck me anymore.”

“Caro, no.” There was a rustling sound; probably him rearranging his position in bed. He had this way of focusing his body toward me when I was upset with him, to let me know he was paying attention. “Honey, that's not true.”

“Don't lie to me. You already lied too much.”

“That's not a lie. I know the words probably don't mean much, but it's not a lie. I screwed everything up, but I've never stopped wanting you. Just like I've never stopped loving you.”

“Then why?” I said. “Why wasn't love enough to stop you from making that decision? I called you in the middle of the night from this stupid Denny's because I want to try again. I want you to come home and be my husband and spend the rest of your life with me, like you were supposed to. I can forgive you for concealing yourself as long as you promise to be truthful from now on. But you have to answer this one thing: Why were you willing to hurt me, if you love me so much?”

He was silent for a long time. “There's just something about him and me. I don't know how to explain it to you. Except it's like what I said, the first time you asked me. I felt this…pull, and I followed it, even though I shouldn't have.”