Текст книги "Luckiest Girl Alive"

Автор книги: Jessica Knoll

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

I nodded apologetically. “There’s an eleven fifty-seven from Bryn Mawr. We can make it if we leave now.” I turned away from the disappointment in his face so he couldn’t see my own. I sometimes wonder if this was the decision that set everything into motion. Or if it would have happened anyway, if, like the nuns at Mt. St. Theresa’s said, God has a plan for all of us and he knows the outcome before we’re even born.

CHAPTER 9

I didn’t lie to Luke. I told him I was going to e-mail Mr. Larson a few days after we returned from Nantucket. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about him, hadn’t been able to stop picturing the two of us shoulder to shoulder in a dim bar, a mixture of concern and lust on his face when I confessed my second dark secret to him: I’m not sure I can go through with this. The way he would kiss me—the restraint he would try to have at first because of his wife. Booth. Elspeth. But then he’d remember, it’s me.

Then the credits of this little fantasy roll. Mr. Larson would never do that with me. I didn’t even really want to do that with him either. I was getting married. This was just cold feet doing the same shuffle they do for every bride. And it’s normal to have cold feet, Mom reminded me when I felt her out, let it drop that maybe I wasn’t as ready to get married as I thought I was. “Guys like Luke don’t come along every day,” she warned. “Don’t mess this up, Tif. You’ll never get anyone as good as him again.”

Mr. Larson’s appeal was that he was there for it all. He saw me at my stray dog lowest and still he stood behind me, did everything he could to help me. He imagined the future I could have before I even wanted it for myself, and he was the one to push me toward it. That’s faith. Growing up, I thought faith was about believing Jesus died for us, and that if I held on to that, I’d get to meet him when I died too. But faith doesn’t mean that to me anymore. Now it means someone seeing something in you that you don’t, and not giving up until you see it too. I want that. I miss that.

“Why do you need it?” Luke argued when I asked for Mr. Larson’s e-mail address. Not suspicious. But not thrilled either.

“What do you mean why?” I spat at him, like I would at an intern who questioned the assignment I’d just given her. What about this don’t you get? “It’s insane that we ran into each other like that. He’s doing the documentary. I want to know if we’re filming at the same time. What he’s going to talk about.” Luke’s face wasn’t giving, so I went for melodramatic. “Everything, Luke. I want to talk to him about everything.”

Luke thumped his arm on the couch and groaned. “He’s my client, Ani. I just don’t want things getting . . . messy . . . like that.”

“You just don’t get it,” I sighed. Walked forlornly into the bedroom and quietly shut the door. When I asked for the e-mail address again the next day, Luke wrote me back with just that and nothing else.

With Mr. Larson’s address in the To field, I channeled my inner Prom Queen and wrote him a sweet, spirited e-mail. “I can’t believe we ran into each other the way we did! Small world, right? I’d love to catch up sometime, I feel like we have so much to talk about.”

I clicked refresh eight times before Mr. Larson’s reply appeared. I opened the e-mail, my cheeks hot with hope.

“How about coffee?” he wrote back. “Would you be comfortable with that?” My eye roll must have burned off the calories in the grapes I’d snuck. Coffee? He was still treating me like his student.

“I believe drinks would make both of us more ‘comfortable,’” I wrote.

“You had that bite even when you were a kid” came his reply, the word “kid” making me bristle. But he agreed.

On the day we were to meet, I wore an oversize leather T-shirt dress and peep-toe booties to work, thinking, This is what someone with “bite” wears in the middle of summer.

“You look fantastic,” LoLo said when she passed me in the hallway. “Did you get Botox in your forehead?”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” I said, and LoLo cackled with laughter the way I knew she would. I thought we were just exchanging pleasantries, but LoLo slowed to a stop and took a few steps backward, beckoning me into a corner. “So that ‘Revenge Porn’ piece of yours is brilliant. Really brilliant.”

I’d lobbied hard for that idea, for six pages in the feature section to report on the women who had been made victims by vindictive ex-boyfriends, on the way privacy and sexual harassment laws hadn’t caught up with technology, so that, technically, there was nothing law enforcement could do to help them.

“Thank you.” I beamed.

“It’s amazing, you really can do anything,” LoLo continued. “But I think it will have more of an impact at the you know what than it will here.” Her eyebrows struggled to go higher on her forehead, then gave up.

I would play. “It’s a timely article. I wouldn’t sit on it for long.”

“Oh, I don’t think we’ll have to.” Her smile revealed a row of coffee-drinker teeth behind a coat of Chanel lipstick.

I matched my expression to hers. “That’s fantastic news.”

LoLo wiggled her darks nails at me. “Ciao.”

It felt like a good omen.

Through the Dionysian fog of the bar, Mr. Larson’s Clydesdale back appeared as if a mirage. I wove through the happy hour release of Theory pencil skirts and bankers with wedding rings in their pockets, heels sounding a chant, “Be real. Be real. Be real.”

I tapped his shoulder. He either had removed his tie or hadn’t worn one that day, and his shirt opened in a little V right at his throat, the small sliver of skin there as shocking as the first time I saw him in jeans. A reminder of all the ways I still didn’t know him. “Sorry!” I lifted one side of my mouth in a contrite smile. “I got stuck at work.” I blew a strand of hair out of my mouth to prove how frazzled I was. I’m so busy but I made time for you.

This was not true, of course. I’d started getting ready in The Women’s Magazine bathroom at approximately 7:20. I’d put on deodorant, brushed my teeth, held mouthwash in my cheeks for so long my eyes watered. Then it was on to the makeup, the pains I took to appear as though I wasn’t wearing much at all. It was 7:41 when I left the office. One minute behind schedule, the schedule I’d determined would place me at the bar in Flatiron at 8:07. “The perfect late to show he doesn’t hang the moon for you,” Nell says.

Mr. Larson’s lips hovered at the edge of his tumbler. “I should make you run laps.” He took a little sip, and I noticed how low his scotch was, realized he was already warm.

The idea of Mr. Larson telling me what to do now, screaming at me to run faster, pick up the pace, don’t phone this in, TifAni, prickled the skin at the nape of my neck. I busied myself settling into the stool next to him. I couldn’t let him see me prickled. Not yet.

I tucked a panel of hair behind my ear. “You know I still do your hill workout at least once a week?”

Mr. Larson sniffed out a little laugh, and even though the skin bunched around his eyes, his face had remained boyish, unfazed by the gray hair at his temples. “Where? The one thing about this city—it’s so flat.”

“I know, nothing can hold a candle to the hill on Mill Creek. I’m in Tribeca, so I have to make do with the Brooklyn Bridge.” I sighed, glibly. We both knew that living in a sleek one-bedroom by the Brooklyn Bridge was superior to living in some threadbare mansion in Bryn Mawr.

The bartender took notice of me and asked me what I wanted with a nod. “Vodka martini,” I said. “Straight up.” That was my glossy editor drink. I don’t crave martinis the way I do, say, an economy-size bag of chocolate-covered pretzels, but when I need a warm blur to descend on me, and fast, it’s my elixir of choice. Sometimes it even tricks me into thinking I’m the kind of tired that will lead to sleep.

“Look at you.” Mr. Larson leaned away to take in everything I’d put together for him. The wicked leather dress, the bar of black diamonds in the ear I had purposely exposed to him. I caught a spark, amusement and approval fusing together in his eyes. It was only a slap shot of a moment, but it was unbearable in a way, like touching a hot stove by accident. The response in your body overwhelming all systems. “I always knew this is who you would be.”

I could have burst, but I clung to deadpan. “A lush?”

“No, this.” He sliced his hands sideways at me. “You’re one of those women that people look at on the street and wonder who they are. What they do.”

My drink slid in front of me and I took a blazing sip. I needed it in case I didn’t stick the landing of what I was going to say next. “What I do is write a lot of blow job tips.”

Mr. Larson looked away. “Come on, Tif.”

The sound of my old name, the disappointment in Mr. Larson’s voice, it was like Dean’s hand across my face all over again. I took another big sip that left my lips slippery with vodka and tried to recover. “Too much from your old student?”

Mr. Larson rolled his glass between his palms. “I hate hearing you cut yourself down like that.”

I dug my elbow into the bar, swiveling on the stool so I could face him and he could see I was entertained by the whole thing. “Oh, I’m not. If I can’t have my journalistic integrity, then at least I can have a sense of humor about it. Believe me, I’m fine.”

Mr. Larson turned his eyes on me, and I could hardly stand the knowing there. “You certainly seem fine. I guess I’m just trying to figure out if you really are.”

The martini hadn’t taken hold yet, and I wasn’t quite ready to get into this. I thought we’d start out slow, a few sexually charged, self-deprecating jokes from me about my job, Mr. Larson seeing through my aw-shucks routine to the ambition, the savvy that I had and his wife lacked. Did I feel that Luke was lacking in some way too? I do, I do, I would say, sadly, maybe spring a few tears to my eyes. He just doesn’t understand. So few people do. A pointed look at Mr. Larson—assuring him he was one of the few.

“Okay, okay,” I laughed. “This documentary thing, it has me out of my mind.”

Mr. Larson matched me with his laugh and I was relieved. “I know what you mean.”

“I’m wary of it,” I said. “But I’m still dying to do it.”

Mr. Larson didn’t appear to understand. “Why would you be wary?”

“Because I don’t know what the bent is. I know what the editing process can do.” I dropped my voice and leaned in closer, like I don’t admit the next thing to very many people, but for Mr. Larson I would make an exception. “I mean, I manipulate the hell out of what I write. I know exactly how I want something to turn out before I even do the research and call up Dr. Hack from the Today show. If what he tells me doesn’t fit, I just ask the question a different way. Or”—I tilted my head, remembering the other option—“I try Dr. Hack from Good Morning America and get him to give me something that will fit.”

“So that’s how that works.” Mr. Larson’s eyes tapered in at the corners, carefully, like he was squinting through the peephole in my entire facade. That direct line he had, it was the spider crack that would eventually make the windshield cave in.

I smirked at myself. “I’m just saying. I can’t hang all my hopes on this.”

Mr. Larson’s shoulder sloped down lower, right by mine. His breath was on fire with Lagavulin. “No, you can’t. But I don’t think you have anything to worry about. I think they’re interested in the story no one’s heard, which is yours. That said”—he leaned away, taking all his peaty heat with him, and it was like I waded into a cool pocket in the ocean—“nothing’s a guarantee. You have to know that no matter what they say about you, all that matters is what you know about yourself here.” He covered his chest with his hand. It was such an earnest, after-school-special thing to say I would have mocked it had it come from anyone else. But it had come from Mr Larson, and I would remember it fondly, repeat it whenever I questioned if I’d made the right decision, for many years to come.

I fiddled with the wet corner of a cocktail napkin. “Mr. Larson, there isn’t much to comfort me there.”

Mr. Larson sighed, like he had just received some really bad news. “Tif, my God. That wrecks me.”

I was furious with myself for the way my face puckered up, wrinkled and hideous. I slapped my hand to my forehead, shielding the carnage.

Mr. Larson hunched down low, got underneath the visor of my hand. “Hey,” he said, “come on. I didn’t mean to upset you.” And then there was the perfect pressure of his hand on my back, a little lower than it needed to be, that feeling between my legs, so desperate I craved a swift end, so delicious I would miss it when it was gone.

I gave him a wobbly smile. Everyone loves a trouper. “I swear I’m not a mess.”

Mr. Larson laughed, and his hand went higher on my back, rubbed encouragingly, fatherly. I cursed myself for playing it wrong again, but I made a mental note too. He likes me broken.

“So what’s the deal?” Mr. Larson asked, removing his hand entirely and straightening up. “You going back there in September to film?”

A logistical question. Not much opportunity to unravel there. “I am. Are you?”

Mr. Larson shifted on his barstool and grimaced. It was too small for someone like him to sit comfortably. “Same.”

The bartender came by and asked if we wanted another. I nodded, eagerly, but Mr. Larson said he was fine. I slunk in a little and tried not to show it. “Is Whitney on board for it?” I exhaled, irritably. “Because Luke isn’t.”

“Luke doesn’t want you to do it?” I could see this bothered Mr. Larson, and I was glad.

“He just felt like it would take me back to a very dark place. And while we’re planning our wedding, no less.”

“Well, he’s concerned about you. I can see that.”

I shook my head, excited for the opportunity to expose the great St. Luke. “He just doesn’t want to deal with me and my silly hysteria. Nothing would make him happier than if I were to never mention Bradley again.”

Mr. Larson traced his finger along the rim of his glass, tenderly, and I could feel him smoothing a Band-Aid over the tear in my face that night in his apartment. Saying, “There,” once it latched tight on to my skin. He spoke into his empty glass. “Moving on doesn’t mean you don’t talk about it. Or hurt about it. It’s always going to hurt, I imagine.” He glanced at me, almost shyly, to see if I agreed, which is a courtesy Luke never pays me. No, Luke just gets up on his soapbox, purports to tell me exactly how I should metabolize that cruel slice of my life. Why do I need to do the documentary? I shouldn’t care so goddamn much about what everyone thinks of me. Easy to say when everyone fucking loves you.

“I don’t mean to speak for you,” Mr. Larson said, “I’m sorry.” His apology made me realize I was scowling.

“No.” I blinked Luke away. “You’re exactly right. Thank you. For saying that. No one ever says stuff like that to me.”

“I’m sure he does his best.” Mr. Larson reached for my hand, and I was so surprised all my limbs stiffened and he had to fight a little to get it, to hold my hand up in the air like a man leading a woman to a dance floor in Victorian times. “He obviously loves you.” He pressed his thumb to the evidence on my finger, twisted the stone just a little, and raised his eyebrows at me.

It was the perfect moment to be bold. “But I want someone to get me.”

Mr. Larson placed my hand on the bar, carefully. I wondered if he had picked up on it, the pulse of every last nerve he had hit. “That’s a two-part deal, Tif. You have to let yourself be got.”

I leaned my head on my hand. Spoke the line I’d rehearsed in my head so many times ever since our meet-cute. “Mr. Larson,” I said, “you really don’t want to call me Ani, do you?”

“Is this your way of asking if you can call me Andrew?” His lip curled into the arch that’s always there whenever I picture him at the front of the classroom. This man really could not be hustled, and I was inflamed with a need for him, as basic and savage as thirst. “Because you can.”

Andrew’s shirt pocket suddenly lit up bright like Iron Man’s heart. He removed his phone, and I caught “Whit” on the screen. The absence of the last three letters of her name read like a betrayal. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m meeting my wife for dinner after this. I didn’t realize the time.”

Well, of fucking course he’s meeting his wife for dinner after this, Ani. What did you think? That the two of you were going to declare your true love for each other at a soulless, charmless wine bar in Flatiron and go and get a hotel room? You’re disgusting.

“I just want to tell you something quickly,” I said, and it dragged Andrew’s eyes away from his phone, at least. “Something I’ve wanted to say for a long time. I’m really sorry. About what happened in Headmaster Mah’s office. How I backed out on you like that.”

“You don’t have to apologize, Tif.”

“Ani” wasn’t going to stick with him, but I didn’t mind it. “I do, though. And I never told you this, but”—I hung my head—“I spoke to Dean on the phone that morning at your place. When you ran out to CVS.”

Andrew sat on that for a moment. “But, how did he know you were at my apartment?”

“He didn’t.” I explained how I called home to tell my parents I was on my way, how I found out Dean was trying to track me down. “I actually thought I could go in to school on Monday and everything would be okay.” I snorted scornfully. “God, I was an idiot.”

“Dean was the idiot.” Andrew placed his phone on the bar top and steadied his eyes on me. “It was all Dean’s fault. Never yours.”

“And I let him get away with it.” I released a disgusted breath. “Because I was scared I wouldn’t be popular anymore if I didn’t. I’m so mad at myself for that.” In college, when rumors swirled that some freshman had been taken advantage of by some lacrosse player, I’d found myself furious with her for not reporting him. Don’t just let them get away with it! I’d wanted to scream, standing next to her in line for the salad bar. But then something about the way she piled the cauliflower florets on top of her salad—no one ever put cauliflower in her salad—swung like a wrecking ball at my heart. Made me wonder if that had been her favorite vegetable as a child, if her mom cooked it especially for her even though her brothers and sisters groaned their hatred for cauliflower. I wanted to reach out and wrap my arms around her from behind, press my face into her soapy-smelling blond hair, say, “I know.”

Because I couldn’t do it either. Mr. Larson had poked his floppy-haired head into Headmaster Mah’s office first thing Monday morning, like we planned, and told him there had been another issue with Dean Barton and also with the new student Liam Ross. I didn’t even make it to homeroom. Mrs. Dern found me in the hallway and said I was needed in Headmaster Mah’s office immediately. I trudged past the Junior and Senior Lounge, through the cafeteria yawning with the few students who relied on it for breakfast, and up the stairs to the administration wing. Mr. Larson was standing in the corner of Mah’s office, politely leaving the one lone seat open for me. I refused to look at him; I could just feel the expectation of his encouraging smile. As I denied everything, the only place I could stand to look was at my Steve Madden clogs, the soles ringed white with rainwater. I wondered if Mom knew how to get that out.

“So you don’t have an incident to report?” Headmaster Mah practically panted, not even bothering to hide his relief. The Bartons had financed the new addition to the cafeteria, after all.

I smiled and said I didn’t. The cut on my face was just barely covered in concealer. Headmaster Mah noticed it and did a poor job of pretending not to.

“What happened?” Mr. Larson demanded in the hallway.

“Can we just let it go?” I pleaded. I didn’t stop walking. I could tell he wanted to put his hand on my arm and stop me, but we both knew he couldn’t. I walked faster, trying to escape his disappointment. It filled up the hallway like cheap cologne.

Now, all these years later, Andrew examined me like you would a new freckle on your chest. When did that appear, exactly? Could it be dangerous? “You need to give yourself some more credit, Tif,” he said. “You were just trying to get through.” Under the smooth bar lights, I could not detect a single flaw in his wide, handsome face. “You made something out of yourself, and you did it honestly. Unlike some people we know.”

I seethed, “Dean,” even though sometimes I think we’re more similar than I’d like to admit.

We sat in a dreamy silence for a few moments, the lights softening all our edges, filling in our holes. I watched, out of the corner of my eye, as the bartender noticed us again. Tried to will him away, but he asked, “Can I get you anything else?”

Andrew reached into his pants pocket. “Just the bill.” My new martini glimmered at me, mockingly.

“Maybe we can get lunch or something?” I tried. “When we’re both in town that weekend.”

Andrew found the card he was looking for and passed it across the bar. He smiled at me. “I’d like that.”

I smiled too. “Thanks for getting this.”

“I’m sorry I can’t stay for another.” Andrew shook his watch free of his sleeve and raised his eyebrows at it. “I’m really pushing it here.”

“It’s cool, I’ll just sit here, drinking alone”—I sighed majestically—“enjoying people staring at me and wondering who I am and what I do.”

Mr. Larson laughed. “So I got a little saccharine. I’m proud of you, Tif.”

The windshield cracked a little deeper.

The bedroom door was shut, a shard of dark running parallel to the floor. Luke must have gone to bed early. I peeled off my leather dress and stood over the AC unit for a few moments.

I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Locked the door and turned off the lights. I left my clothes on the couch and crept into the bedroom in my bra and underwear—I had worn the nice ones. In case.

Luke stirred as I opened a drawer.

“Hi,” he whispered.

“Hi.” I unclasped my bra and let it fall to the floor. Luke used to tell me to just come to bed after I’d done that, but he didn’t anymore. I slipped into boxer shorts and a tank top.

I climbed underneath the covers. The air in the room was arctic and artificial, the window unit growling aggressively in the corner. The lights were off, but everything was visible thanks to the residual lights of the Freedom Tower, the Patrick Batemans cursing off their computers at Goldman Sachs’s sprawling headquarters, and I could see Luke’s eyes were open. You can’t find a pitch-black room in New York, another reason I love it here—the light from the outside world streaming in at all hours, assuring me there is someone awake, someone who could help me if something bad were to happen.

“Did you get what you want?” Luke asked, his voice flat as the running path along the West Side Highway.

I chose my words carefully. “It was good to talk to him.”

Luke rolled over, his back a judgment passed on me. “I’m going to be so glad when this whole thing is over and everything can go back to normal.”

I know the normal Luke misses, I know the Ani he wants to come to bed. It’s the Ani after a night at the Chicken Box, the Nantucket bar famous for its long line of shivering girls in Easter-egg-colored Calypso shift dresses. There is a bartender there, Lezzie. Her name is really Liz, but when you resemble a younger, only slightly thinner Delta Burke, dress in camo, and sport a ring through the fleshy partition of your nostrils, douche bag blue bloods think it’s Louis C.K. levels of comedy genius to nickname you Lezzie.

Luke’s friends’ wives get all twitchy and uncomfortable around Lezzie, but not me. It’s become the running joke in our group—send Ani up to get the drinks, she’ll come back with at least one free Life Is Good (a disgusting combination of raspberry vodka, Sprite, cranberry juice, and Red Bull) because Lezzie loves her. Luke loves her too—inasmuch as she exposes the vast difference between me and the other girls, with their swollen pearl earrings and Patagonia fleeces, pretty but smugly sexless. Luke got the girl who doesn’t squirm in the presence of a tough box muncher, the girl who actually gets a kick out of flirting with her.

“It’s my little Ani Lennox,” Lezzie says whenever she sees me. “How many diets?”

I’ll hold up my fingers to indicate the number of girls who want their Life Is Goods with diet Sprite and light Red Bull, and Lezzie will laugh knowingly and say, “Coming right up.”

While Lezzie assembles the drinks, Luke’s nose will brush the humid clump of my hair, and close to my ear he’ll ask, “Why does she call you Ani Lennox again?”

And I always tilt my head, giving him more of my neck as I say, “Because Annie Lennox is gay. And if I’m gay then she can fuck me.”

By the time Lezzie puts the cocktails on the bar, Luke is hard in his Nantucket red shorts, and I have to strategically walk in front of him as we carry the drinks over to the Booths and Griers and Kinseys.

“Ones with lemons are diet,” I say to the girls, the lie bringing a sadistic smile to my face. Lezzie loves to serve “diet” calorie bombs to high-maintenance bitches in size twenty-six white jeans.

We slurp a few down, enough to take the bite out of the air outside. Nantucket can get down to fifty, even forty degrees when the sun drops out of the sky, even in the fiercest crush of summer. Then we call up a cab and make our way back to the Harrison estate, where there are enough bedrooms to sleep the entire graduating class of Luke’s fraternity. Some people stay up to smoke pot, play beer pong, or microwave odd drunk person food combinations in the kitchen, but not me and Luke. No, we always go right to bed, my dress bunched around my waist before we even mangle the sheets. We decided long ago that I would always wear a dress to the Chicken Box, no matter how cold it is outside. Makes for easy access once we get home.

I’m always fascinated by Luke’s face as he grunts above me, the veins that appear, the way the blood rushes to his cheeks, filling in the spaces between his freckles so that it appears he has none at all. He never tries to make me come on these nights– it’s like he’s decided this ritual is purely for him—but I always do anyway. And that’s because I’m remembering the night, almost two years ago now, when Lezzie followed me into the bathroom and backed me into the wall, her lips surprisingly delicate and nervous on mine. The way she pushed her meaty thigh between my legs as I started to kiss her back, giving me something to press into, a place to dull the ache.

I debated telling Luke about it. Not because it was the right thing to do or any self-righteous bullshit like that, but because I couldn’t decide—would he be turned on? Or disgusted? Finding the freak sweet spot, that’s always been the perennial struggle with Luke.

Ultimately I decided against it. Maybe I would have told if Lezzie looked more like Kate Upton, maybe if she hadn’t chosen to kiss me right around the time I began to spoil like a forgotten carton of milk in the back of the refrigerator.

Still, I’m right there with Luke when he squeezes his eyes shut and howls his final call. I like when a guy stays inside of me after, but Luke shrivels up fast. Rolls on his back and gasps how much he fucking loves me.

I may never fully make my way out of the bourgey pit, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a trophy wife too. I’m just a different kind.