The Smart One and the Pretty One (25 page)

“You’d have heard it ring, wouldn’t you?”

“Not necessarily,” he said, slipping it back in the pocket. “I was pretty distracted.”

“I’m pretty distracting,” she said with an exaggerated leer.

“Yes, you are.” He dropped the jacket on the back of the sofa and looked at her. “Aw, you put on pants. I liked you without them.”

“You put
yours
on.”

“Still.” He spotted his missing sock a foot or so away and picked it up before sitting down on the sofa. He pulled it on, then patted the space next to him. “Come sit.”

“What now?”

“I’m sleepy.” He closed his eyes. “Can we just sit here quietly for a few minutes?”

“Sure,” she said, and they did. She rested her head on his shoulder and he put his hand on her knee and they stayed like that for a while. It was nice, Lauren thought. Almost as nice as the sex had been. She peered up at Daniel’s profile. With his hair a little messed up and his eyes closed, he looked much more vulnerable and open than usual. She liked this softer version of Daniel. She liked him a lot.

They must have both dozed off because it was a couple of hours later when she became aware of feeling cramped and uncomfortable and wanting to stretch out. She squirmed out from under his arm and draped herself the long way across the sofa, putting her feet on his lap. She felt him shift under her, and when she opened her eyes, he was awake and watching her, his gaze unreadable in the dim light of the one lamp left on.

“You okay?” she said. “Want to lie down?”

“No.” He passed his hand over his forehead. “I need a drink of water.”

“In the kitchen.” She curled up her legs so he was no longer pinned in place. “Glasses are in the cabinet.”

He stood up and she lay there quietly while he was gone, listening contentedly to the sounds of his rustling around the kitchen.

When he came back over to her, she moved her legs to make room for him again, but he didn’t sit. She opened her eyes. He was standing there, looking down at her.

“Everything okay?” she said.

“Not really.”

She propped herself up on her elbows. “What’s wrong?” She thought suddenly that maybe the condom had broken and felt a shudder of panic.
Calm down
, she thought.
That’s why the morning-after pill was invented.

“The thing is,” Daniel said, “I shouldn’t have done this.”

“What?” she said, confused. “You mean the sex?”

“I didn’t mean to. I had too much to drink. I wasn’t thinking.”

Suddenly wide awake, Lauren slowly sat up and planted her feet on the floor. “Wow. Nothing a woman likes to hear after sex more than a guy’s regrets.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her voice grew sharper. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself. What’s the problem exactly?”

He rocked back a bit on his heels. “The problem exactly,” he repeated absently. “The problem exactly.” Then, with a sudden clarity, like he had just woken up: “The problem exactly is named Elizabeth and she’s in New York right now in my apartment.”

“Elizabeth.” Lauren took a pillow and held it across her chest with the sense she’d be needing a shield. “Give me a clue. Wife, daughter, dog, housekeeper?”

“We’re not married yet,” he said, and his flat tone took away any hope she might have had that he was joking. “But we live together. We’ve been living together for two years now.”

“I see,” Lauren said, and did. A lot of things made sense that hadn’t before. “And yet somehow she never came up in conversation?”

“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. “I should have—”

“All those discussions about your life back in New York,” Lauren said. “Like what you did at night after work and what you ate for dinner—but you never mentioned a live-in companion?”

He stared at the floor. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you about her.”

“Maybe because you wanted to screw me?”

“I didn’t want to,” he said. “I mean, that wasn’t what I—” He stopped again.

“You looked like you wanted to,” she said. She felt queasy, like she could throw up at any moment. “Maybe it was the way you had an orgasm inside of me. Did I misread that?”

“Shh,” he said.

“Don’t shush me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m trying to explain.”

“You’re doing a great job,” Lauren said. “You asshole.”

“Yeah, okay.” He almost seemed relieved to have her swear at him. “We were only ever going to be friends,” he said. “You and me. That was the idea. Cancer buddies. Both at the hospital because of our moms. It was nice having someone to hang out with there.”

“I know,” she said. “I thought so too. And if you had just
told me
you had a girlfriend—”

“I don’t know why I didn’t.”

“You keep saying that. Isn’t the answer obvious?” She gestured down at the sofa where just a couple of hours earlier they had been pawing at each other.

He said, almost sadly, “You think I meant to do this all along.”

That was too obvious to even respond to. “No wonder you called me a one-night stand.”

“I don’t think I actually said that.”

She put her head in her hands. “God, I’m an idiot!”

“I’m sorry, Lauren,” he said. “I know you think I’m an ass-hole.
I
think I’m an asshole. People aren’t supposed to act like this. And I don’t normally. I’ve never cheated on a girlfriend before, ever.” He opened and closed his hands around nothing. “But my life’s been so fucked up since my mother got sick. I don’t know where I’m living, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Neither life seems real, not the one back in New York or the one here. I spend my days in a black hole, watching my mother get sicker in front of my eyes without being able to do anything about it, and sometimes I think I’m going crazy.”

Lauren didn’t say anything. Did he expect a free pass to be a total creep just because his mother had cancer?

“But I shouldn’t have,” he said after a moment of silence.

Her agreement came out as an angry exhale. She raised her head to glare at him. “You going to tell her? E-liz-a-beth?” She enunciated the name with exaggerated deference.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got to decide what the fairest thing is for her.”

“Yeah,” Lauren said. “You wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt
her
.”

“I swear I never meant to hurt you—”

“Oh, I believe you,” Lauren said. “I’m sure you would have loved to have screwed me and not hurt me at all. That would have made everything easier for you.”

He was silent again for a moment. Then he said, “I should go back home. My brother’s not used to taking care of my mother.”

“Go ahead,” she said. “Nothing keeping you here.”

He turned away, then stopped and turned back. “I don’t know if I should even say this,” he said. “Whatever I say feels like a betrayal to
someone
. But I didn’t do this because I was looking to get myself off. I’ve kind of been falling in love with you in spite of myself. Wanting to spend time with you even though I knew it was risky and I shouldn’t. And if this were really my life—if I didn’t have a real life back in New York—I’d happily stay in love with you.”

“That doesn’t mean
anything
,” she said.

He stood there silently.

“You were leaving,” Lauren said after waiting a moment. “Don’t forget your shoes.”

He nodded, crammed his feet quickly into his shoes, picked up his jacket, and left the apartment with a last quiet “Good-bye.”

Lauren let out a strangled and muffled scream of anger, but it didn’t make her feel better. She slid down on the sofa until she was curled in a knot and played feverishly with the string that tied the waist of her sweatpants, pulling the ragged ends through her fingers over and over again, blinking her eyes against the hot, painful pressure she felt right behind them that wasn’t tears but something angrier and more self-loathing than tears. After a few minutes of that, she stretched out into a lying position on the sofa and tried to will herself asleep but couldn’t. She sat up again and suddenly the living room felt empty and lonely and sad and she didn’t want to be in there anymore. She didn’t want to be the kind of adult woman who lived in someone else’s living room because she couldn’t pay her own rent and who slept with other women’s boyfriends. But that’s exactly what she was.

She padded to the door of the bedroom on bare feet and went inside.

Ava was sleeping in the middle of the double bed, her dark hair tousled and sticking in patches to her cheeks and closed eyes.

“Ava?” Lauren whispered.

Ava stirred and made a little questioning noise and then was still again.

“Ava?” she said, a little more loudly. “Can I sleep in here with you?”

“Wha’?” Her voice was heavy with sleep. “Why? Wha’s wrong?”

“I spilled something on the sofa,” Lauren said. “Please?”

“God, you’re a spaz,” Ava said in that same thick, slurred voice. She slid over to make room and turned on her side so her back was to the empty side of the bed. “Go to sleep—don’ bother me.”

“Okay,” Lauren said and slid in under the covers next to her sister. She lay on her back, staring up into the darkness. Then she whispered, “Can I say just one thing?”

Ava’s voice was muffled by the pillow. “No.”

“Even if it’s that I’m sorry?”

Ava heaved a dramatic sigh and turned back toward her, her eyes still closed. “What are you sorry for?”

“Always telling you what to do when it comes to guys. Acting like I know so much when I don’t know any more than you do. Less, probably.”

“Did something go wrong tonight?”

Lauren wanted to tell her but hesitated, trying to figure out how much to say and what
not
to say, scared to let Ava know she had been stupid enough to sleep with a guy who was already taken—the signs had been there if she had bothered to look for them—but also desperate for solace. After a few minutes of struggling to find the right words, she became aware of the regular sound of Ava’s deep, measured breaths and realized her sister had already fallen back to sleep.

But Lauren didn’t go to sleep for a long time after that. She lay there wishing she had never bought the shirt she had stained that night or the shoes that would probably just lie there on the bedroom floor for days that would turn into weeks, waiting to trip her up just when she was beginning to forget about them.

Chapter 14

O
n Sunday morning, they drove to the house, and Ava went upstairs to find their parents while Lauren carried into the kitchen the fruit and juice they’d brought.

As Ava came up the stairs onto the landing, she heard her parents talking. She was struck by the unusually querulous tone of her mother’s voice and by the equally unfamiliar soothing and patient sound of her father’s. It all felt wrong and a little fascinating, and Ava paused outside the partially open bedroom door to hear more before going in.

“—sounds disgusting,” her mother was saying.

“You need to eat something.” Jimmy’s voice.

“I’ll throw it up.”

“You might not. You’re past the worst of it for this week. You haven’t thrown up on a Sunday yet.”

“Force me to eat an egg and today will be my first time.”

“At least drink something. I don’t want you to get de-hydrated.”

“Why not? What’s the worst that happens? You take me to the hospital and they put me on an IV? I spend half my time on an IV now—what difference will a few more hours and a few more holes make?”

“I could make you some hot tea. Or mix some juice with bubbly water. How does that sound to you? A cranberry juice spritzer?”

Her mother: “Will you just drop it? I don’t want anything.”

Ava drew closer to the door, waiting for the explosion from her father, who
always
exploded the second someone crossed or offended him in any way, which was why the girls in the family had learned to tiptoe carefully around him except on the rare occasions when they were fully armored and geared up for battle.

But all Jimmy said was “Just think about it. You need energy. We’ve got company coming.”

“I don’t know why I said yes to that. I wish I hadn’t.”

Ava peered around the door and saw them at that moment, her mother’s face twisted and petulant as she plucked at the bedsheet pulled up around her waist, her father’s craggy features drawn with concern. He reached his hand out as if to pat her on the shoulder, but Nancy swatted it away with a noise of irritation. He folded his arms resignedly across his chest and said, “You’ll get a burst of energy. You’ll see. The girls always cheer you up.”

“But Lana Markowitz? What was I thinking?”

“I don’t know,” said Jimmy, with a touch more of his usual asperity. “What
were
you thinking?”

“Thanks,” Nancy said. “That’s really helpful.” She turned her shoulders away from him. As she shifted, she spotted Ava through the slightly open door. “Ava? What are you doing out there?”

“Eavesdropping,” Ava said, coming into the room.

“Well, at least you’re honest. I mean, in a deceitful, listening-at-doors kind of way.” She said it jokingly, though, and sounded like her normal self again. So she saved up most of her anger and frustration for her husband, Ava thought. The girls only got to see the good patient.

It wasn’t how she thought about her parents and their relationship at all. Her mother had always been the soother, her father the bomb that could go off at any moment. But here he was being gentle and here she was being difficult.

Jimmy said, “When did you get here? I didn’t hear the front door.”

“About five minutes ago. Lauren’s putting out the food.” She rested her hand on her mother’s foot, which lay under the dark green wool blanket that covered her from hip to toe. “You want us to cancel this brunch, Mom? We can easily call and catch them before they get here. They’ll understand.”

“No, it’s fine,” Nancy said. “Really. I’m looking forward to it. I just like to complain so everyone feels sorry for me and I look noble for just doing what I was going to do in the first place.” She held her hand out and Ava took it. “But it is hard,” her mother said, gently swinging their linked hands, “to see an old friend when you look and feel awful. How am I supposed to impress her by how magnificently I’ve aged?”