Throw Like A Girl (32 page)

The boyfriend was driving too fast, steering viciously in and out of the passing lanes. I remember thinking that maybe it was a New York thing, the way you were supposed to drive here. Janey said, “How about we go to Louie's? That's Italian, is that OK? Because then we can go right down the street to this other place that is completely amazing. You sit in these alcoves and there are these phones on the tables and you can call up the other tables. Or what about tandoori? Babe, what's that tandoori place?”

“Tandoori sucks.”

“It does not. You like it.”

“Says who.”

He was still driving like he was mad at us, or trying to scare us, leaning over the steering wheel and forcing the little car into terrifying, narrow spaces between thundering trucks. Janey didn't say anything about his driving. Either she was used to it or she was trying to avoid one more fight. “Oh come on,” she said. “We were there three weeks ago and it was great. You thought it was great.”

“It was shit.” He punched the gas and the car shimmied and whined in such a way as to suggest metal fatigue, and I thought I probably didn't want tandoori, whatever that was.

“You ate everything on your plate.”

“No I didn't.”

“Fine. You didn't.” Janey and I shared a glance in the rearview mirror. I knew she was embarrassed, and I was embarrassed for her. You always wanted to show a man off, and here he was being a total jackass.

What's-his-name gave the steering wheel another spin that made me brace myself against the door. “Like Indians know anything about food anyway. They're all starving.”

“Please. That's just ignorant.”

“Maybe you should keep your stupid opinions to yourself.”

“Hey,” I said. “Don't drive so fast.”

He gave me an evil look, but he did slow down, and they let the argument drop. We were coming into the city then. I saw enormous blocks of apartment buildings, some kind of projects, looming up on all sides, surrounded by metal fencing and narrow, waste-filled lots. I felt dizzy-sick at the sight of those huge, ugly buildings, each window representing a human soul trapped in this glooming world. New York, on my first viewing, looked a great deal like some apocryphal, science-fiction version of itself. I never got oriented, never got my mind around New York, either on that trip or any other. It's stayed oversized and outlandish to me in a way that other cities have not. Janey's town, not my own.

We went to Louie's, a mom-and-pop place where you walked back to the kitchen to see what was cooking on the stove, and we drank a great deal of wine, and What's-his-name improved slightly, at least to the point of offering some conversation about his plans for promoting music festivals. Janey told me later he was hypoglycemic, he got irritable when his blood sugar dropped. And he did get more cheerful as the meal progressed. He even made a joke or two that I laughed at. He was fondling Janey under the table and she seemed to like it, she'd let it drop that the sex was “amazing.”

Janey talked about her newest job (she kept moving from one little magazine or broadsheet to another) and how crazy it got sometimes, everybody going off in all directions and arguing and never enough time or money. But it was great too, she said, it was
great
, the wine making her babble, to be in on something new, something that was inventing itself as it went along, she couldn't explain it but she loved it. And maybe she was happy then, right then, for however long it lasted, right at the beginning of everything. I couldn't have told you what ideas or aesthetics were served by those publications. They were like Janey's new boots, in that their function was mostly to call attention to themselves.

“So how's school?” Janey asked, finally, when we'd run out of anything else to talk about. She had an encouraging smile that I didn't like.

“Oh, you know. It's school.”

“Well, do you like it?”

“It's not that bad.” I didn't want to talk about it. After all it was only school, the same dull thing we'd already done, and nothing in it made for bragging.

When I didn't say anything else, she said to the boyfriend, “Gail was always the smart one.”

“Yeah?” He was rummaging around in Janey's stocking tops. I give him this much credit: he didn't pretend to care about my vaunted intellect. It wasn't too long ago that I'd been notable for more exciting reasons, and I resented losing that.

“So do something else instead,” Janey said. “Go somewhere you really want to go. Don't waste your time on something you aren't excited about.”

“I didn't say I wasn't.” I was getting contrary and irritated, unable to explain. It was childish of me not to have more to say for myself, not to defend the choices I'd made and genuinely wanted. I felt I had nothing she could envy, and there was always between us a need to be envied, a burr that rubbed us when we got too close.

“Oh come on,” Janey sighed. “You could write. Go somewhere and write about it. Hey!” She brightened. “The magazine could publish it.”

What's-his-name leaned across the table to address me confidentially. “They don't pay dick.”

I said, “How about you don't worry about me, OK? I'm going to get my degree, and then I'm going to get a job. It'll be all right.”

“Jeez,” Janey said. “Don't bite my head off. If you're fine with it, then I'm fine.”

What's-his-name said, “You know who pays real money?
Rolling Stone
. If you can get a foot in that door.”

The visit got better after that. It was simply our first time trying to bridge the gap of our separating lives, and we let everything matter too much.

My last night in New York we went to see a band they were both excited about, and we took a cab, a real extravagance. As usual I had no idea where we were going, and neither did anyone else, including the cab driver, and I guess it was low blood sugar time again, because What's-his-name started arguing, first with the driver, and then with Janey about whether she'd gotten the address right.

“We'll find it,” Janey said. “Just hold your horses.”

“Hold what horses? Why do you say crap like that? It's simpleminded.”

“God,” Janey said.

The cab driver said, “We can drive around all night if you want, but it's gonna cost.”

“Hold your horses,” said What's-his-name. “No, keep looking. Giddyap.”

“That's it,” said Janey. “Really.”

The bad boyfriend. We've all had them, we keep trying to prove some point with them. If we're lucky, they go away on their own.

It ended with the cab dumping us out blocks and blocks from anything recognizable, an ugly neighborhood of industrial buildings and broken, icy sidewalks. What's-his-name stomped on ahead of us. It was the thing he was best at.

“Asshole!” Janey shouted at him. “Wait for us!”

Of course he didn't, but he didn't try to lose us either. The whole point was to let us witness his silent tantrum.

Janey was the one who picked up the first small stone and heaved it at him. It skipped off to one side. Her second try fell short too. We ran a few steps so as to get in better range, and by now I was kicking up chunks of sidewalk and taking aim at him too, and he couldn't ignore us any longer when we hit him, pretty hard, once between his shoulder blades and then beneath his ear.

He yelped and turned around. “Just keep it up, bitch!”

“Yeah? Yeah? What're you gonna do, huh, did you even pay for your part of the cab? Do you ever do anything you talk about doing?”

Janey clutched at me when he took a step toward us, and I hoped something worse was going to happen so I could punch him out. But Janey had him figured right; he only curled up his hands and yelled, “You're crazy, you know that? Besides, you throw like a girl!”

It was supposed to be some killing insult but it only made us screech with laughter, and pick up more rocks, and throw them whatever limp-wristed, elbows-up, sissy-pitch way we felt like, and eventually he took himself off and Janey and I found another cab.

When I was back home, she called to tell me he'd moved his stuff out of her place, and we had some long phone talks, the kind we hadn't been able to have many of when I'd been there, with What's-his-name hanging around. She said, “He was like having the flu. You forget what it's like to be well.”

“Good riddance,” I said. “Adios. So long, it's been good to know you.”

“Why do I always end up with the jerks?”

“There's a lot of them out there.”

“You're so much smarter than me. I don't see you with a jerk.”

“That's because I'm alone,” I said.

A little more than a year later, she married him. None of us wanted to believe it. She didn't tell me herself, someone else had to call me with the news. That hurt my feelings, but of course, she knew what I'd say. They'd gotten married at City Hall, no ceremony, no reception. The antiwedding.

We hadn't talked very much in that year, the way a friendship can go slack. Still, she should have told me. I didn't call to offer congratulations, just sent a card. Maybe we can't help who we fall in love with, and then we come up with the reasons for it afterward, but I didn't want to hear how she'd found new, retroactive virtues in him, or how I'd misunderstood their unique and intimate bonding. It depressed me, the way women could keep hanging on to the same bad idea.

Janey didn't write back, and I went on with my own life (graduation, job, new city), and along the way I met the man who well and truly broke my heart. He loved me until it was inconvenient for him to do so, and then, full of soft regrets, he took his leave. I tried to call Janey then, but I got What's-his-
name's voice on the answering machine and hung up. Once again it was somebody else who told me that they were either separated or divorced, it wasn't clear, and What's-his-name had either stolen a lot of Janey's money or simply gone through it, and she'd left New York and gone back to the disapproving mother. A marriage that didn't count.

Time passed and passed and passed. You're supposed to say the years flew by without your noticing but that's not true; I felt their shape and weight at every step. I thought of Janey whenever I thought of my younger self, and marveled at how distant they both seemed.

When I turned thirty-five, I got a birthday card from Janey. She said she'd lived in different places out west, I'd heard that, and then she'd spent some time in Florida. She'd worked different jobs, “or not worked,” in media, in PR, always trying to put something together, never getting very far, and now she was back in New York, “the scene of the crime”:

It was another year before we actually saw each other. I had some business in New York, a convention, and we arranged to meet in the bar of my hotel. She hadn't offered to let me stay with her, and I hadn't asked. Another friend who'd seen Janey issued a warning. “There's something going on with alcohol. And some messy behavior, the kind you read about in AIDS statistics. Trust me, you'll want to get a hotel room.”

When I met Janey at the hotel bar, the first thing I said was “You're not fat.”

“I'm round. Well-rounded. Been around the block a few times. You look good. Like a gun moll in the witness protection program.”

We had some drinks. The cancer was still five years away. Janey wasn't fat, exactly, but she'd filled out, and there was the beginning of a roll under her chin. Her skin, that fair, fragile, redhead's skin, was loosening, as if a potter had pulled and stretched wet clay. She smoked, that was something new, and she drank enough for me to notice. She wasn't taking care of herself very well. The vivid hair still caught your eye, but she'd clipped it back without much style. She wore a black sweater and pants, good clothes but untidy and stretched at the cuffs and dangling loose threads. She hunched and shifted on the bar stool, a small person making herself smaller. From time to time she looked around the bar, squinting through smoke, as if she might know someone else there. Part of this was nerves, though I didn't realize it until later. She would still have been pretty except for her careless lack of vanity.

We talked about work for a while. She'd started a new job and she said, vaguely, that she hoped this one would “stick.” We talked about our friends from the old days, who was doing what. Janey asked if I was in love or anything and I said no. That I'd gotten too critical, and if I found one thing I didn't like about a man, imperfect teeth, say, or if his car had a Ross Perot bumper sticker, I crossed him off right away. I was talking lightly. I wasn't ready to make real confidences to this strange little person who had once been my friend.