The Almost Archer Sisters (27 page)

“Do you do a lot of Internet dating, Georgia?”

“Oh. No. I don’t. You?”

“Ahhh, no. Can’t say I have. I find it all too easy to misrepresent oneself.”

“I can imagine,” I muttered, taking a sudden and superkeen interest in the specials insert. But the words were playing wacky tricks with my eyes.
Veal ravioli
was becoming
real vile liar. Beet salad
looked a lot like
silly bitch. Poached tilapia
became
pathetic twit. Marinated flank steak
reminded me that I was
married
with two kids
while
grilled radicchio
told me that this was
totally ridiculous
.

“You know, I don’t even know what half of this stuff is,” I said, shrugging, trying to sound charming, but coming off exactly like Beth’s hick replacement. I knew there was a chance this could begin as badly as it was likely to end, but I wasn’t prepared to haggle over my feelings about it. Traitorous tears seemed to sting the corners of my eyes, and my mind desperately tried to locate the part of my brain that controlled the ducts. Close. Shut them now. Batten down the hatches, or hatten down the batches. What the hell am I doing? I thought. I have a husband, albeit a cruddy one, and two young boys who needed their mother at home, not wandering New York in an expensive dress, sitting across from a snooty lawyer who likely thought my ass too fat to merit further investigation into my personality, if indeed he imagined I had one.

“So. Let me see. You speak Italian, Georgia. Maybe you can tell me what some of these items on the menu mean,” Marcus said.

He knew. I didn’t know exactly what he knew, but I knew he knew something. I froze with a kind of hiker’s terror, when stumbling upon a bored bear in the woods.

“Would you excuse me for a second,” I said, standing up. Marcus casually pointed out the general direction of the washrooms, and I left him sitting at the table. And if he wasn’t gone when I returned, he’d leave in an acid hurry after I told him the truth of things. Because I was going to. I was going to pee and pray and tell him everything.

I negotiated around the Beth clones lining their lips in the mirror and talking to each other about the Marcus clones waiting for them at the bar upstairs.

“He needs it for work. I understand that. But why he brings his fucking BlackBerry to dinner is what I don’t get.”

“He’s addicted to that fucking thing. It’s the same as any drug,”
another one said. “Those things are turning people into human rats. Send, send, send. Receive, receive, receive. Gimme, gimme, gimme. More, more, more.”

“You know what I hate? I can be sitting right next to him and he can be typing something to someone he’s
fucking
and I wouldn’t even know it. He could be all,
It’s work, it’s a work thing
. And I wouldn’t even know it. It’s not like email. I can check his email. But that thing …” A cell phone went off and the girl talk tone shifted immediately into professional barking.

“Hi. It’s okay. [pause] Click on Gemfile. On the desktop. [pause] What does it say? No. Yeah. That one. Read me the third clause. [pause] Yeah, but we were talking aggregates. [long pause] I don’t care what his client says. Just—you know what? We don’t have to deal with this right now. [pause] Make sure you put it in rough billing. Yup. First thing. Okay. Bye.”

“Fucking hell,” one of them said.

“Can’t even have a fucking bite to eat,” came the reply.

I listened with growing sadness. Boy talk and work talk. Beth talk. I wanted to yell over the stall that I wanted a career too, once. I wanted clients and appointments. I wanted a different kind of busy than being a mother. I wanted to fill out forms and make decisions. I wanted things to talk about too, bosses and wages and hours and commutes. I wanted other people’s stories to be my airplane small talk, not my own. No wonder I invented a woman with attributes so foreign to me that pretending to be her required a completely different language. I just wanted a night off, a bit of time away from being Peachy Archer Laliberté, to try on a bit of being more like Beth. But while Beth seemed to find a kind of pride in mastering what it was like to be me, I couldn’t pull off the art of being Beth. I was so much myself and so suited to the task of being me, I wearied of resisting it anymore. I didn’t even bother to wash my hands before heading back to the table.

I was not at all surprised to find that me and my newfound
truth, the one I felt ready to burst with, would now be dining alone. Marcus’s side of the table was empty. Vanity is a strange thing when it finds you among strangers. Why should I care what people in the restaurant thought about the empty chair across from me? Blame it on being the mother of two young sons, but I instinctively bent to look under the tablecloth.

“No fair! You said you were going to count to twenty!”

It was Marcus holding two sweaty wine glasses.

“Oh, I wasn’t—I—frankly, I thought you’d left,” I said.

“No. I would never—I just went to the bar to get you a drink. I think our waitress was abducted. Hope white’s okay.”

He seemed hurt by my comment, my final cue to end the charade. This whole thing was meant to hurt Beth, but now I was doing damage to someone whose only crime was to rid himself of a damaged woman.

“Marcus. Listen. My name’s not Georgia,” I said. “Well, it is Georgia. But I don’t speak Italian. I speak only English, even though I’m Canadian. I mean, I should know more French, I guess, but I don’t. And I didn’t go to a fancy school. And I don’t live in Brooklyn. In fact, I’m only visiting for the weekend. And there’s more, but it doesn’t matter now. All I want to do is to apologize for all of this,” I said, sweeping my hand to indicate I had included the entire room, and perhaps the block and city too. “And then I’m going to leave. How much do I owe you for the wine.”

He rested his chin on a fist, his eyes misty from thinking.

“I figured something was up,” he said.

“What was your first clue?”

“Probably when you said ‘eh.’”

“It was never meant to hurt you, or to make you feel bad. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. This whole thing was between me and my—who—God—I can imagine how creepy this all—so ‘eh,’ huh? I hardly ever say ‘eh.’”

The word now dangled in the air like a gaudy bauble.

“Yes, ‘eh,’” he said. His hand mostly covered his mouth, so I couldn’t tell if he was angry or bemused.

“I apologize. Really I do. And um, so … why don’t you just tell me how much I owe you for the wine and then I will get lost, okay?”

“A hundred and fifty dollars,” he said, leaning back in his chair. I nearly spit the sip I had just taken into my mouth back into the glass. Between the dress and the wine, I had blown the family “extras” budget for the entire year.

“Holy shit!”

He started to laugh.

“You
are
naïve. Wow,” he said. His insult sounded more like a compliment, but I wasn’t trying to be cute. If the dress could cost half of Beau’s weekly paycheck, why wouldn’t I believe a glass of wine would cost as much as Jake’s soccer registration?

“Well, I’m glad you find it amusing,” I said with kindness. “But you’ve earned the right to make jokes at my expense. I don’t blame you. But I will pay for my wine at the bar and then I will get the hell out of here. Goodbye. It was nice meeting you. Sorry it couldn’t be under less criminal circumstances.”

“Wait! Wait, wait, wait,” he yelled, trapping one of my hands under one of his and winding down his giggles. A few faces turned to face us. “I have a confession to make too, Georgia, or, Peachy. Um,
Nadia
called me. You know Nadia? Your
sister’s
friend. Your sister
Beth
? That would be my ex-girlfriend, and, it would seem, your little Internet partner in crime.”

“I think I know who you mean,” I said, scanning the room for the exit. Do all Americans have guns? I wondered. Can they carry guns on their person, or was that just in Westerns?

“Seems your lovely sister,
Beth
, told Kate what you two had been up to, and, of course, Kate told Nadia this afternoon. Because Kate can’t keep anything to herself. And, well,
Nadia
, being crazy about you, apparently, wasn’t impressed. She said she tried to call
you but your phone was off. But Nadia being Nadia didn’t want to see you do anything stupid. In fact, she asked me
not
to come, but, as you can imagine, I was pretty angry about you and your sister’s sick little stunt. And, frankly, also pretty intrigued to meet someone related to Miss Beth Ann Archer. Especially a sister. Especially someone with a name like Peachy.”

I stared at the white tablecloth, replaying my entrance in my head. Nadia knew too? I felt devastated by that because I loved Nadia, and I didn’t want Nadia to think I was anything like Beth. My sadness was slowly replaced by anger. Beth had done it again, however inadvertently. By telling Kate, she had robbed me of the opportunity of getting her back. Even if revenge was an option I might never have exercised, its possibility was comforting.

“But wait, there’s more!” Marcus said. “Any minute now, Kate is going to
coincidentally
find herself here. In case I don’t show up. So she can take you by the hand and bring you home. Or in case I
do
show up, and turn into a raging asshole, which I have delayed by opting for the white wine,” he said, draining his drink and smacking it on the table. “’Cause when I got here, I planned on ordering the red. Red wine leaves awful stains. Then I thought throwing a drink on you would be very ungentlemanly of me. And I am nothing if not a gentleman. Then you had to show up in
that
dress, and I didn’t have the heart. It’s a hell of a dress.”

I blinked. Tears had been alerted and were on standby.

“Okay. I better go. Again, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any harm. I just—you know what I wanted?” I said, blessed laughter busting through the absurdity. “I just wanted to go on a goddamn date. Do you realize I’ve never been on one? I didn’t either until very, very recently. But that’s not really your concern. So I’ll just go now. Again, I apologize from the bottom of my shitty heart. I really do.”

I stood up and inched away from the table. Marcus stood up too, and I braced for a possible white wine shower after all. But as
afraid as I was of his ire, I was more afraid of Kate’s yammering. The standby army of tears allowed a few watery soldiers through. I felt them running down my cheeks. The thought that came to me was one I used to comfort the boys: I only had to go to sleep and wake up one more time and all this would be over.

“Wait. Don’t turn around. If you want to avoid Kate, who I
think
I see coming into the bar—”

“Fuck.”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin and threw it on the table. He used a hand to nudge me to the back of the restaurant toward the kitchen. I’m not sure why I let him shove me past the bustling wait staff, past tall pots of boiling water and the stunned-looking dishwashers, and the cooks manning grills the size of desks, mildly scolding us that we weren’t supposed to be back there, asking, hey, where you going?
Home
, I wanted to scream.
I am going home where I belong. Because I don’t belong here. I belong to two boys who I should be tucking in at this moment, and to a Texan hairdresser happily stranded in a world so opposite to the one I’m visiting, if I emerged from the restaurant suddenly speaking in tongues, it wouldn’t surprise me. And though my husband may have thrown himself down a dark marital well, the paper we signed says I still belonged to him, too
.

Marcus hauled open a vaultlike door, and we found ourselves gasping for air in a cool Manhattan alley, his demeanor suggesting that he still planned to beat me to death up against the sweaty bricks.

“Thank you, Marcus. And again. I am sorry. Now if you could just show me where to get a cab, you will never see me again.”

“What if I said no?”

“Well, then … I … I can find one,” I said, slowly backing away from him, making my way toward the street.

“Hold up!” he yelled. I froze. I had no Mace, no gun, and no idea it would be this easy for a madman to overcome me. “What I mean is, you said you wanted to go on a date, so let me
take
you on
a fucking date.” And with that he grabbed my hand and pulled me fast down the alley toward the lights of a busy street.

W
HAT
I
REMEMBER
most about my first real date was the money; Marcus rained money on everyone who came near us, talked to us, drove us, fed us, opened and shut doors for us, who brought us drinks and took the empty glasses away from us. Money to the cabs we hopped into and out of. Money to the man at the door of a dark club we ducked into for a drink, sitting at a bar lit from below in a way that made my face look moody and intelligent in the mirror across from us. He gave money to the woman who brought us tiny scallops stabbed with metal sticks. To the man who dropped two pink drinks in front of our arms, and to the lady who later brought us two fancy coffees bundled in napkins and sprinkled with chocolate. Then more money to another driver who took us to a different part of the city where Marcus ordered food so foreign to me (Soft-shell crabs! Foie gras! Ceviche!) it was a supreme act of trust just to stuff my face. Then money to the ice-cream guy, money to the homeless kid, money to a person selling books on a towel after I cooed over a hard copy of
Little Women
, a book Beth and I both loved and one I lamented that the boys would never read because of its feminine title. And I let him, because there was nothing else for my face to do but to eat and drink and listen to Marcus talk about things I never knew about Beth; why he loved her, why he didn’t, and why, in the end, he ended things the way he did.

Their relationship was hatched in the heady space between nine-to-five power flirting and last call at happy hour at the pub below the building in which Beth housed her company. When she hired Marcus to do the season’s contracts, he knew she might be trouble. But he thought it might be the sexy kind of trouble
that sometimes resulted in vertical sex in the hallways, followed by those long bashful brunches where you pretend you’re reading the newspaper but you’re really just planning your next move, “You know what I mean, Peachy?”