Friends from Home

by Lauryn Chamberlain

• • •

  Once we had pulled together a big enough group, everyone met up at Josh’s West Village studio, cramming into the all-stainless-steel kitchen to take their turn at shots from an ice-covered Belvedere bottle. Like college, but with sleeker appliances and pricier spirits.

  “So, your friend Ritchie . . . what’s her deal?” Mark’s friend Dan whispered in my ear as we drank, fiddling with the top of his pastel-colored button-down with one hand and pointing tipsily at Ritchie with the other.

  “Ask her yourself,” I responded, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. I didn’t actively dislike any of Mark’s friends, but in groups they always came off to me as juvenile—financiers who would drop excessive amounts of money on bottle service and still not be able to work up the nerve to hold an in-depth conversation with a woman until they were wasted. Dan held up his hands and backed away, a “who pissed her off?” expression on his face.

  Ritchie and Dana and I moved into the living room to finish a last drink before the two-block walk to the club on Fourteenth Street.

  “Mark’s friends are idiots,” Dana said in a matter-of-fact tone. “But, damn it, Josh is hot.”

  “Go for it, then. We’re only young once.”

  “Does Mark have any friends who aren’t . . . I don’t know, frat dudes?” Ritchie asked, wrinkling her nose as Dan walked into the room and shotgunned a beer in our sightline, clearly for her benefit.

  I wondered what Michelle and Jake did with their “couple friends” on Saturday nights. She once mentioned that they had game nights with Sylvie and her husband—a fate that seemed even less appealing than going to a nightclub filled with underage Instagram models. Surely there had to be a middle ground between playing Scrabble in your pajamas and dancing on tables to Diplo.

  “He has a few older friends he’s close with who are married, actually,” I told her. “They just never go out anymore.”

  I hated the stereotype that couples got seriously involved or got married and just stopped seeing their friends; existing in that bubble struck me as both boring and exhausting. Part of that must have been what Mark and I were subconsciously fighting against.

  “Lame,” Dana yelled. “Unless they also work a hundred hours a week, and then they’re forgiven. Wait, I think I’m drunk.”

  “Then I think it’s time to go.” I pulled her to her feet.

  * * *

  • • •

  The club had the same energy as the apartment preparty, but with both the volume and the temperature completely amped up. The dark room throbbed not just with the bass, but with a tangible humidity seemingly made up of the stickiness of spilled drinks, fragmented drunken conversations, sweat, and the pungent Drakkar Noir cologne of the man at the neighboring table. It hung so heavy in the air I thought I could taste it. Dana, Ritchie, and I stuck to the far side of the table, where things smelled marginally better, attempting to dance standing on the banquette seat until our heels got the better of us. Mark and friends mixed drinks and passed their bottles around, until Dan finally got up the nerve to come over and talk to Ritchie again.

  “So,” he yelled over the pounding electric beat. “What do you do?”

  Ritchie drunkenly held a finger up to his mouth, shushing him. Then she threw her arms over his shoulders. He grinned and they started to dance. Dana and I exchanged a look, and she shook her head, laughing. Seeing that Ritchie and Dan had paired off, Mark swapped places with Josh and slid his arm around my waist. It was a nice gesture, but the club remained too sweaty for it to actually feel pleasant.

  “Hey, hot stuff.” He kissed my ear.

  “Hey yourself. Having fun?”

  “Hell yeah. Just not as much as those two.” He jabbed a finger in the direction of Ritchie and Dan, who were now making out.

  “Classic.” I checked my phone—1:52 a.m. I had been ready to leave for a full hour. “You okay with getting out of here kind of soon?”

  Disappointment flashed over Mark’s face for an instant, but then he squeezed me tighter. “Actually, yeah. I can think of something I’d rather do than drink more with these fools.” He winked at me.

  I had something I would rather do than drink more, too: sleep. I wanted to sleep off the weekend and bury my conversation with Michelle somewhere in the past that would make me stop thinking about it. I also wanted to take a shower, but I forced myself to smile back at Mark because I did want him, too. “Then let’s get out of here.” I grabbed his hand.

  When we got home, I ran up the stairs barefoot with my heels in my hand. Inside the apartment, we collapsed on the bed. Mark pressed his nose and forehead drunkenly against mine.

  “I missed you this weekend. And I missed this . . . ,” he trailed off, pulling away to lift my shirt over my head. My bra followed, and I felt the cool air on my skin more strongly than his lips kissing down my chest. I had missed him. But after the long night at the club, my body was stubbornly refusing to respond, and I stared across the room at the dresser and then the mirror above it, watching us.

  My thoughts drifted in the space of the few moments that Mark was kissing me in a teasing way, attempting to whip me into a state of frenzy to match his own. Sometimes I loved this, and sometimes I very definitely did not.

  The first time we slept together was that first drunken night at BBar, when the successive strawberry margaritas tipped me over the edge and had me ripping apart his button-down and climbing on top of him with an enthusiasm that surprised me. It didn’t surprise me because the experience was new to me—far from it—but because I hadn’t felt any passion for him at all prior to that moment. Not earlier in the night at the bar, and not even when we arrived back at his apartment. He was very attractive, but I was not attracted to him, that crucial and elusive distinction. But there, in the blurred darkness of his apartment, so grown up contrasted with my own sublet with roommates, I felt an intensity I couldn’t have predicted. Some of it had to do with him, the night of dancing, his whispers in my ear that made me wonder if maybe he could be right for me after all. But a lot of it, if I am honest, was about a feeling that I had something to prove.

  What was it exactly? A need to show myself that I was over the men (boys, really) who came before him? The desire to prove that I could build a life far from who I had been, far from college, even farther from the tiny town that had once known everything about me? Was there something about him in particular that would help me on the journey to who I wanted to become? Or maybe he was just a vehicle for asserting myself, attractive because he had been the person interested in me at that crucial moment. It may have been any of those reasons or all of them, but once the (quite good) sex had finished, I felt such an unusual sense of accomplishment. But then, because things are always complicated, he leaned over and nuzzled my ear as he had earlier in the night, so clearly happy, and I felt that first small tinge of something else, too. Real feeling.

  Sex still felt like it was about something to prove, I realized, though that something had drastically changed shape over time. Nowadays, it seemed like it was one part for pleasure and one part to show myself (ourselves?) that everything was still fun, light, exciting, that nothing was missing. It was that way from time to time with all longer-term couples, wasn’t it? Yes, I decided. However miraculous or ordinary a relationship’s beginnings, we all seem to end up in about the same place. A regression to the mean, of sorts, I told myself, though it bears noting that I barely passed statistics freshman year.

  “Babe? You with me? You okay?” Mark paused and looked up.

  I was not. “Mm-hm. Sorry, I’m a little drunk. Just in my head, that’s all.” I felt lost in my head a lot lately.

  He nodded. “Is this about seeing your mom?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Michelle?”

  “I’m done talking about all of that right now,” I said, but in that moment the fact that he cared at all made the difference. “
Do-over? Start again?”

  “Yes,” he said, kissing me again. “And no talking necessary.”

  I kissed him back and relaxed into the promise.

  CHAPTER 13

  I hadn’t been behind the wheel of a car in years, I realized, watching the trees fly past as we sped up the Merritt Parkway. It seemed strange now that half of my adolescence had taken place in cars, Michelle whipping her convertible around the sharp edges of winding back roads with me riding shotgun, or me making out with Trent Worthington in his pickup truck out by the dead end of his street. Now, if I got in a car at all, it was to send e-mails from the back seat of an Uber on the way to a meeting or to sit beside Mark on the way to visit his family, like now. Mark had rented a car and we were on our way up to his parents’ house in Connecticut.

  Mark’s family had been the easy choice for Thanksgiving, even though I wondered about what signal I was sending by spending the holidays with him. When he graciously offered, knowing I would be staying in New York anyway, I accepted. I had spent more than enough time and money flying down south already, and my mom had been easily placated when I told her I would see her at Christmas and again at the wedding. Even when I had lived at home, our Thanksgivings had amounted to picking up a rotisserie chicken and watching Hallmark movies on TV until I inevitably went over to Michelle’s for a second dinner. We were not a family of many traditions.

  As Mark turned off the highway, the roads narrowed and the houses came into view. The now-bare trees stood sentry at the end of every driveway, which were long enough to be streets of their own. When I was growing up, Michelle’s Victorian-style house was the biggest I had ever seen, but it wouldn’t stand out in Mark’s Greenwich neighborhood. We pulled up in front of the white colonial and found three cars in the drive, meaning that Mark’s brother and his wife had already arrived.

  “Get ready to hear a lot about Boston,” Mark warned me as we walked up the steps to the front door. “Chris and Viv have been there for five months now and they have a lot of feelings about it.”

  Mark’s brother had defied the Wharton family tradition and ended up at Harvard Business School. It was hard for me to envision this situation causing a family controversy, but apparently it had. Viv had relocated from Philadelphia with him, and apparently Boston had been an adjustment.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” the Greenwoods chorused as we swung open the door. I noticed that they were dressed up in the New England hybrid style of holiday and business casual—skirts and cashmere cardigans. The effect looked neither as formal as holidays at Michelle’s nor as casual as my mom and me eating turkey sandwiches in our sweats; I was glad I had asked Mark what to wear. My camel-colored crewneck sweater and midi-skirt blended in well. His mom hugged me and led me into the kitchen by the hand right away, warm and friendly, as Mark and Chris fell in behind us and immediately started talking about Chris’ Harvard classes.

  I sidled up next to his mom at the stove, and she asked me about my work and if any interesting books had come across my desk lately. She told me she had recently read a new book by Jojo Moyes and asked me if I had read it. It had been a popular book club pick for the last year or so, but I hadn’t read it. Since my tastes outside work often ran more toward nonfiction, I asked her if she had heard about Stray, the last memoir I had finished. She hadn’t, which effectively stalled the books conversation, though she didn’t seem to mind. Mark’s dad came up behind us and broke the silence, playfully aiming to steal a taste of the gravy. Everyone seemed sweet in a Norman Rockwell–esque way, complete with the fireplace and the black Lab sleeping on the floor. I didn’t know if I felt quite in step with Mark’s family, but I liked them and appreciated their particular brand of familial comfort. Anyway, I was used to being the adopted member of someone else’s family.

  I watched Mark’s mom weave her way around Viv, leaning over her shoulder to add a pinch of pepper to the gravy or stir the green beans, the two of them moving in tandem like dance partners. They had an easy familiarity, the sort of thing that takes years—if not decades—to quietly develop. I wondered if I might ever feel that with anyone new ever again; thinking about the years of confidences, compromises, and adjustments that went into that sort of belonging seemed both enviable and exhausting.

  I watched the back of Gloria’s head as she continued bustling around the kitchen. Her blond hair was cut into a severe and chic bob, all Anna Wintour, rather than the gravity-defying dos favored by most of the older women I knew in Alabama. But otherwise, from behind, she and Marcia might have been twins: They shared that same stature—and the same gait, which somehow managed to be spritely and authoritative at the same time. These women walked with declarative purpose, even when the only place they had to be was in front of a stove.

  My mom wore her hair long and usually loose, and Michelle and Marcia were the ones who taught me how to tease my hair when they realized that I had no idea how to style anything other than a ponytail. I pictured the two of them then in the sprawling country kitchen of the Davis house, where they probably were at that exact moment, preparing their own Thanksgiving dinner. The house would smell like pecan pie, and Michelle’s cousins would be playing increasingly rowdy games of touch football on the lawn, and Marcia would holler her classic line, “Y’all better get in here and help,” to anyone unlucky or inexperienced enough to wander near the entrance to the kitchen. I preferred pumpkin pie to pecan and I hated being forced into the ritual of touch football, but I still wished for a split second that I could be back in Langham after all. Which home was more mine? Did I belong in either?

  I thought that maybe I should step into the other room and call Michelle, or at least send a text, but something stopped me. Instead, I left my phone in my pocket and just went to stand next to Gloria at the stove as the gravy bubbled in front of us.

  “Almost ready.” She smiled at me. “And, Jules, we’re so glad you could make it this year.”

  “Me, too,” I said, and I felt fairly confident that I meant it.

  * * *

  • • •

  After dinner, we sat in front of the fire, Mark’s parents on the sofa, Chris and Viv in the adjoining settee, and Mark and me on the thick Oriental rug that stretched in front of the fireplace, a flannel blanket wrapped around our shoulders. We had one mug of spiked hot chocolate that we kept passing between us, taking too-hot sips and whispering to each other, and for one spark of a moment I forgot all the minutiae of the day, and I just smiled.

  “I like being home with you,” Mark said quietly.

  I turned toward him, accidently knocking his head with mine. “Sorry.” I giggled, the schnapps from the hot chocolate suddenly warm in my veins. “I like being here, too.”

  Mark said something quickly, too quietly for me to understand.

  “What?”

  “I, uh”—he took another quick sip, then looked back at me— “I said, move in with me. Sorry, I meant it as a question. Would you maybe want to move in? With me? When your lease is up.”

  I inhaled sharply. “Wow,” I whispered, shocked. “Wow.”

  “Good wow or bad wow?”

  I didn’t know. Move in together? I had no idea Mark thought we were there yet. All I kept at his apartment was a pair of pajama shorts and a toothbrush.

  Michelle accused me of lying when I told her I didn’t really think about “the future” with Mark after more than a year together, but it was the truth; I wanted things to be the way they were now. Of course I thought about how nice it would be to finally leave the tiny corner of the East Williamsburg apartment, but I wanted to leave it on my own terms, to move into a nicer place because I had gotten a raise, or actually sold a piece of writing. I thought about the magnitude of what he was asking, what it might change for us. If he really did go to business school, would he expect me to move for him like Viv had done for Chris? I tried to imagine Mark making coffee for us every morning, to envision what it wou
ld be like to open the door and see him sitting on the sofa when I came home from a long day at work. Could I picture it? I stared into the roaring fire, trying to recapture the way I had felt just moments before, but the spell had been broken.

  “Can we talk about it when we get home?” I asked quietly after a long pause. “It’s great; it’s wonderful. It’s just, you know, uh, a lot to process.” Way to be eloquent.

  “Sure,” he said, planting a kiss on top of my head. “Don’t worry, I was just thinking out loud.”

  I felt a wave of nausea rising, but I said nothing, just leaned back against his shoulder as the fire started to crackle and collapse in on itself. “I think I’m just tired,” I told him. “I’m ready to go to bed whenever you are.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We hadn’t said anything more about the idea of moving in together by the time Mark flew back to Omaha on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I appreciated that he seemed to be giving me time to figure out what I wanted, or maybe it simply meant that his broach of the topic meant a desire, a whim said out loud in the heat of a lovely moment, and not a mandate. That didn’t leave me any closer to knowing what I wanted. Why did I suddenly seem to not be in possession of any desires at all?

  It wasn’t that I didn’t ever want to live with Mark, necessarily. I just felt a complete absence of any kind of urge to. And believe me, I knew what it felt like to need to do something. When I moved to New York with sixteen hundred dollars, I did it because I felt breathless and compelled, like someone had tied a rope around my neck and pulled me all two-hundred-plus miles from Ithaca. The move wasn’t a choice. It was a fact, like something that had always been a part of me and I had somehow misplaced it. When I stumbled across it again, I felt nothing but the purest recognition, and I had been in pursuit of that feeling ever since.

  But instead of doing any kind of work to interrogate my relationship, or to think about how I could channel my desire toward my writing or my work, I did what any member of my generation would do: I started scrolling through Instagram.