The Smart One (21 page)

The first time that she came back late from Lainie’s, Weezy started to say something about coming home at a regular hour, and wanting to know where Claire was. While she talked, Claire just stood and stared at her and finally said, “Mom, I’m almost thirty. This isn’t going to work.”

Weezy let out a little laugh then, and looked just a touch embarrassed, as if she’d actually forgotten how old Claire was. “I guess it’s hard to get used to you living here as an adult,” she said. But then she made Claire promise that she would still just leave a message so that they knew where she was. Claire was too tired to protest, so she agreed. “Just Twitter me,” Weezy said, by which she meant send a text.

They ate dinner together every night, and Martha talked about her new job, Will talked about his students, Weezy asked Martha about nursing, and Claire tried to figure out how she’d ended up there. After a week of the same routine, Claire felt like she was right back in high school. Or jail.

The other thing about living at home (which Claire had forgotten) was that all of a sudden, she was expected to be so many places, to attend so many random things—Lainie’s niece’s baptism, lunch with Weezy’s cousins, dinner with Will’s professor friends. When she tried to back out of anything, they would all just shake their heads. “You’re here,” they’d say, as if that explained it. As if her presence back in the state of Pennsylvania required her to participate in everything.

She even got roped into going to a wake for the father of an old high school friend. “I haven’t seen Kelly in, like, six years,” she said, but Lainie wouldn’t hear of it.

“You have to go,” she said. “It’s Kelly’s dad.”

And just like that, Claire was in the car with Lainie and Martha (who’d taken a math class with Kelly in high school) and they all stood in line at the wake, which was incredibly crowded, and then talked to Kelly’s mom, who looked really drugged up, hugged Kelly, and then stood and looked at the dead body at the front of the room.

“Doesn’t he look great?” Kelly’s mom said.

No, he didn’t look great. He looked dead. Kelly’s mom grabbed Claire’s hand, although Claire was pretty sure that she didn’t know who she was. Lainie, meanwhile, was nodding and telling stories and saying gracious things, like she was an expert at wakes now.

Claire hated wakes. It was a bizarre tradition to stand around and look at a corpse. And so, as soon as she could, Claire excused herself and walked outside and around the corner of the building, where she almost ran right into Fran Angelo, leaning against the wall, his head tilted back and his eyes closed as he smoked a cigarette.

For a second, Claire wondered what he was doing there. Was everyone in town required to go to this thing? Then she remembered that he was related to Kelly somehow, a cousin or a second cousin or something like that.

“Hey,” Claire said. He opened his eyes, but didn’t look all that surprised to see her, like he’d been waiting for someone to come find him. He smiled at her and she looked at the ground.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Not much. Just, you know.” Claire motioned toward the wall of
the funeral home, like that explained everything. She shifted from one leg to the other, hating that he made her feel like she was fifteen again.

“I haven’t gone in yet,” Fran said. “I hate wakes.”

“Me too. I was just thinking the exact same thing.”

“Do you want a cigarette?” He shook the pack and held it out to her.

“I don’t really smoke anymore,” she said. “But sure.” She didn’t bother to explain that she’d never really smoked in the first place, except when she was drunk and sometimes in college if she was bored. But now seemed like an appropriate time to smoke, and so she took one out of the pack and leaned forward to let Fran light it. She remembered parties in high school, clumps of teenagers standing around a backyard, smoking and looking bored. She inhaled and felt dizzy almost immediately. Fran smoked Reds, which seemed like a serious, old-man cigarette. He would probably smoke for the rest of his life.

“I was going to call you to hang out,” Fran said, “but then I realized I never got your number the other day.”

“Oh really?” Claire said. She sounded like an idiot. A teenage idiot.

“Yeah, we should get together.” He reached into his pocket, pulled his phone out and handed it to Claire.

“So, should I put my number in?” she asked. He nodded and she typed herself into Fran Angelo’s phone.

“I should probably go in, I guess.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back, aiming his face at the sky. Claire remembered him in high school, how he was always tilting his face up like that to drop Visine into his eyes, like he was stoned or wanted people to think he was.

“Okay,” Claire said. “I’ll see you.”

Fran opened his eyes and looked at her. “I’ll call you,” he said. He walked back toward the front door of the funeral home, and left Claire standing there, holding her still-burning cigarette.

Lainie came out of the funeral home as Fran was going in. Claire walked around the corner of the building and called out to Lainie.

“Hey,” Lainie said. “I wasn’t sure where you went. Are you smoking?”

“Not really,” Claire said. She dropped the cigarette on the ground. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah. We just have to wait for Martha.”

“What’s she doing in there? Making plans to go to the burial with the family?”

“She’s just saying good-bye to a couple people. What were you doing out here anyway?”

“Nothing. I just didn’t want to be in there anymore. I hate wakes.”

“I don’t think anyone really likes them,” Lainie said.

“Martha,” Claire said. “I think Martha likes them.”

FRAN CALLED CLAIRE TWO DAYS LATER
and invited her over. She’d lost her breath for a second when she heard his voice on the phone, and it was hard to recover and answer him when he said simply, “Want to hang out?”

“Sure,” Claire said. And then, “Sorry, I’m out of breath. I just got back from a run.”

“Cool,” Fran said.

Fran was living in the basement of his parents’ house. It looked just as she’d imagined it would. There were two old red-plaid couches that were scratchy when you sat on them, a banged-up coffee table, wall-to-wall brown carpeting, and a queen-sized bed in the corner. There was a small bathroom down there with a stand-up shower, a tiny refrigerator (the kind that kids keep in their dorm room), and a flimsy-looking desk with the oldest computer Claire had ever seen on it. In an adjoining room were the washer and dryer, and every so often, a whiff of dryer-sheet–smelling air would come drifting out, which was always surprising and pleasant.

“Here it is,” Fran said when she walked down there. “My new place.”

“It’s nice,” Claire said. She knew that since she was living in her parents’ house at the moment, she didn’t have a lot of room to judge, but it seemed worse that Fran was in the basement. Like it was more permanent or something.

Claire’s friend Natalie had a brother who had lived in the basement for as long as she could remember. He was eight years older than they were, and by the time they were in high school, he was a permanent
fixture in the basement of the Martin house. He smoked pot down there, and he and his parents seemed to have an agreement—as long as he sprayed air freshener and pretended that he wasn’t smoking, his parents would pretend that they didn’t notice the smell of weed drifting up to the kitchen.

When they were freshmen in high school, they were all in love with Dan Martin. They’d giggle when he came upstairs and talked to them, kept their makeup on when they slept over, just in case he was around. As they got older, they sometimes went down to the basement with him to hang out, and by the end of high school, they sometimes drank beers down there or even smoked a joint.

But by the time they graduated from college, Dan no longer seemed cute or even a little bit appealing. He was thirty then, and even though he was thin everywhere else, he had a gut that hung over his pants. They never went down to the basement to see him anymore, and when he came upstairs they didn’t giggle. He transformed into Natalie’s creepy older brother, who was sort of a perv, and everyone seemed to forget that they used to worship him. Even Natalie started rolling her eyes at him, calling him a loser, blaming her parents for letting him live there. “What a waste of life,” she used to say. “What a complete waste of a person.”

Claire sincerely hoped that Fran would not live in the basement forever, but as she looked around she heard Weezy saying, “It’s a trend, an epidemic.”

Fran told Claire that he’d let Liz keep their apartment, which was a loft on the edge of a trendy new neighborhood. “I didn’t want to stay there anyway,” he said. “She picked out all the furniture and decorated it. I didn’t want that place. It was full of fake posters and dream catchers.”

He got them both beers and they sat on the couch with the TV on, but they didn’t watch anything. Instead, he told her about Liz, who was a waitress and an artist who made jewelry that she sold at street fairs and some small boutiques.

“She thinks she’s going to make it,” Fran said. “She stays up half the night baking beads in a kiln that’s in the middle of the fucking
apartment, thinking that she’s really going to make it.” He took a sip of beer and sniffed. “I mean, her stuff’s good, don’t get me wrong. But how many people actually make it big designing jewelry, you know?”

“Probably not a lot,” Claire said.

“Yeah, exactly. I used to tell her I wanted the kiln out of there, and she’d freak, like me saying that I didn’t want a huge fire pit in the middle of our apartment was single-handedly killing her career. Like, because I didn’t want to live in a fire death trap, I wasn’t supporting her.”

Claire laughed, and he smiled at her. He got them each another beer, and they set the empty ones right on the coffee table in front of them.

“Doug used to sleep with his BlackBerry. And I don’t mean he had it by the side of the bed. He had it
in
the bed, right next to him, sometimes on the pillow like it was a little pet. No matter what time it went off, he’d read it and respond. Like he was so important that he couldn’t even wait a second, like someone would die if he didn’t answer them right away.”

Fran nodded like he understood. He was just as confident as he’d been in high school, which surprised her. She thought maybe time or the breakup would have taken something off of him, but it hadn’t. After their second beer, he got them each another, and when he sat back down, he put his hand on her upper thigh, just letting it rest there right next to the crotch of her jeans.

He didn’t move his hand, just started moving his fingers, drumming them. Then he started moving his thumb in circles on the top part of her thigh, and rubbed his fingers on her inner thigh, his pinky just sometimes brushing against her, lightly, until she couldn’t sit still.

He kept talking while he did this—about his job, his old apartment, what he missed about the neighborhood—just kept circling his fingers, as though he had no idea what he was doing, until she couldn’t listen to him anymore, and when he leaned over to kiss her, she turned to face him, straddling one of his thighs, moving back and forth, grinding against him, both of them making appreciative noises as they moved.

Later, as they lay in bed and sniffed the dryer-sheet air, Fran laughed. “What?” Claire asked.

“I’m just surprised, that’s all,” he said.

“Surprised at what?” She rolled away from him and sat up, holding the sheets in front of her and feeling very, very naked.

“At this. You were always so quiet in high school.”

“I wasn’t quiet,” Claire said.

“Well, you didn’t talk to me.” He stretched his arms above him.

“I talked to you. We hooked up, remember?” She felt like digging her nails into his arm until it hurt.

“I remember,” he said. “Don’t get so worked up.”

“I’m not worked up.”

“Okay,” he said. He put his face next to her and started to kiss her, then pulled her on top of him. He still tasted like tobacco and cinnamon gum, but his face felt different now. He had stubble that seemed harder, more grown up. As they kissed, she was aware of all of this, and still had time to think,
This is a dumb move
.

LAINIE AND BRIAN HAD SEX
freshman year of high school, and when Lainie told her about it, Claire tried to listen, but she was so far away from it, so far from that actually happening to her, that it didn’t make much sense. It was like somebody telling you about a safari that they went on; you understood why they were excited, but you couldn’t actually imagine a giraffe coming up and licking your hand, and so you just nodded and smiled.

After that happened, Lainie joined the Group of Girls Who Have Sex With Their Boyfriends. It was like a club. Claire never totally understood how they all identified one another, but somehow girls from all different groups of friends would smile knowingly at each other during the health portion of gym class, nod at each other in the hallways. Sometimes, Claire would walk into the bathroom at school and find Lainie whispering with Margie Schuller and Tracy King, two girls they weren’t even friends with, and she knew without asking what the three of them were talking about.

When Claire finally had sex, her junior year in college, she didn’t tell Lainie right away. She didn’t want Lainie to welcome her into the club, like she was the president, like she owned sex because she’d done it first.

And even now, as she told Lainie about Fran, it was strangely uncomfortable. Claire just blurted it out, knowing that Lainie would be hurt if she didn’t tell her.

“You’re sleeping with Fran?” Lainie asked her.

“Not sleeping,” Claire explained. “Slept. Once.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I’m telling you right now. What did you want me to do? Call you from his bed?”

“I can’t believe this.”

“I sort of can’t either.”

“I do not see you guys together,” Lainie said.

“Yeah, I know, right?” Claire was offended, but tried not to show it.

“So, do you think you’ll see him again?”