In Five Years

by Rebecca Serle

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” Bella says. “I honestly thought you would, too.” She continues while I chew. “I’m not mad, it’s just… you’re always wanting me to be more serious, and be with someone who cares. Like, you never stop talking about that. And he does. And it doesn’t seem to matter to you.”

  “It matters,” I tell her. I do not want to keep talking about this.

  “You have a weird way of showing it.”

  She’s annoyed, her voice edgy, her arms outstretched. I sit back.

  “I know,” I say. I swallow. “I mean, I can see that, that he cares. And I’m happy for you.”

  “You are?” she says.

  “I am,” I say. “He seems like a good guy.”

  “A good guy? Come on, Dannie, that’s pathetic.” She’s petulant, angry. I don’t really blame her. I’m giving her nothing. “I’m really crazy about him,” she says. “I’ve never felt this way before, and I know I’ve said this a lot, and I know you don’t believe me—”

  “I believe you,” I say.

  Bella sticks her elbows on the table and leans forward. All the way. “What is it?” she says. “It’s me, Dannie. You can say anything. You know that. What do you not like about him?”

  All at once my eyes sting up with tears. It is an unusual reaction for me, and I blink, more in surprise than in an effort to stop it. Bella looks so hopeful sitting across from me. Naïve, even. So full of the possibility she purports to feel. And I have a giant secret I cannot tell her. Something profound, terrible, and strange has happened in my life, and she doesn’t get to know.

  “I guess I’ve had you all to myself for a really long time,” I say. “It’s not fair, but the idea of you being with someone for real makes me feel, I don’t know.” I swallow. “Jealous, maybe?”

  She sits back, satisfied. Thank god I came up with something. Bless me for being a lawyer. She buys it. This makes sense to her. She knows I have always wanted the space closest to her, front position, and she has given it to me.

  “But you have David, and it’s fine,” she says.

  “Yeah. It’s just always been that way, so it feels different.”

  She nods.

  “But you’re right,” I say. “It’s dumb. I guess emotions aren’t always rational.”

  Bella laughs. “I genuinely never thought I’d hear you say those words.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “Nothing is going to change, I promise you. Or if it does, it’ll be for the better. You’ll see me even more. You’ll see me so much you’ll be sick of me.”

  “Well then, cheers—I look forward to being sick of you.”

  Bella smiles. We clink glasses. Then she waves a hand back and forth in front of her face. “So you like him, sorta. Maybe. You’re jealous. We’ll leave it there. Okay?”

  I shake my head. “Sure.”

  “But he really is—” she starts, and her voice trails off, her gaze with it. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like I finally get it, you know? What everyone always talks about.”

  “Bella,” I say. “That’s wonderful.”

  Bella wiggles her nose. “What’s new with you?”

  I take a deep breath. I blow some air out through my lips. “David and I got engaged,” I say.

  She picks up her water glass. “Dannie. That’s decades-old news.”

  “Four and a half years.”

  “Right.”

  “No. I mean, we’re going to get married this time. For real. In December.”

  Bella’s eyes widen. Then they flit down to my hand and back up again. “Holy shit. For real?”

  “For real. It’s time. We’re both just so busy and there’s always a reason not to, but I realized there’s a really big reason to do it. So we will.”

  The waiter comes over, and Bella turns to him abruptly. “A bottle of champagne and ten minutes,” she says. He leaves.

  “He’s been asking me to set a date for a long time.”

  “I’m aware,” Bella says. “But you always say no.”

  “It’s not that I say no,” I say. “It’s just that I haven’t said yes.”

  “What changed?”

  I look at her. Bella. My Bella. She looks so radiant, so high on love. How can I tell her that it’s her? That she’s the reason.

  “I guess I just finally know the future I want,” I say.

  She nods. “Did you tell Meryl and Alan?”

  My parents. “We called them. They’re thrilled. They asked if we wanted to do it at The Rittenhouse.”

  “Do you? In Philly? It’s so generic.” Bella wiggles her nose. “I always saw you doing something very Manhattan.”

  “I’m generic, though. You always forget that.”

  She smiles.

  “But no Philly,” I say. “It’s just inconvenient. We’ll see what’s available in the city.”

  The champagne comes, and our glasses are filled. Bella holds hers to mine. “To good men,” she says. “May we know them, may we love them, may we love each other’s.”

  I swallow down some bubbles.

  “I’m starving,” I say. “I’m ordering.”

  Bella lets me. I get a Greek salad, lamb souvlaki, spanakopita, and roasted eggplant with tahini.

  We sink into the food like a bath.

  “Do you remember the first time we came here?” Bella asks me. We rarely make it through a meal without her repurposing some memory. She is so sentimental. Sometimes I think about our old age and it seems intolerable to have to sift through that much history. We have twenty-five years now, and there’s already too much to pull from, too much to make her weepy. Old age is going to be brutal.

  “No,” I say. “It’s a restaurant. We’ve come here a lot.”

  Bella rolls her eyes. “You had just moved down from Columbia, and we were celebrating your job with Clarknell.”

  I shake my head. “We celebrated Clarknell at Daddy-O.” The bar off Seventh we used to frequent at all hours of the night for the first three years we lived in the city.

  “No,” Bella says. “We met Carl and Berg there before we came here, just you and me.”

  She’s right, we did. I remember the tables all had candles on them, and there was a bowl of Jordan almonds by the door. I scooped two handfuls into the pouch in my purse on the way out. They don’t keep them stocked anymore, probably because of customers like me.

  “Maybe we did,” I say.

  Bella shakes her head. “You can never be wrong.”

  “It’s actually part of my job description,” I say. “But I seem to remember a night in late two thousand fourteen.”

  “Way before David,” Bella says.

  “Yeah.”

  “You love him?” she says. It’s a strange thing to ask and it’s not lost on either one of us, this question, and that she’s asked it.

  “I do,” I say. “We want so many of the same things, we have the same plans. It fits, you know?”

  Bella cuts a slice of feta and spears a tomato on top. “So you know what it’s like, then,” she says.

  “What?”

  “To feel like you’ve met your person.”

  Bella holds my gaze, and I feel something sharp prick my stomach from the inside out. It’s like she put the pin there.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry if I was weird with Aaron. I really do like him, and I’ll love him if and whenever you do. Just take it slow,” I say.

  She puts the bite into her mouth and chews. “Impossible,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “But I’m your best friend. I have to say it anyway.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The swamp of July meets us with a heavy, cloying inevitability: the weather is going to get worse before it gets better. We still have to get through August. David asks me to meet him for lunch in Bryant Park one Wednesday toward the end of the month.

  In the summer, Bryant Park sets up café tables around the perimeter and corporates in suits take their lunches ou
tside. David’s office is in the thirties and mine in the fifties, so Forty-Second and Sixth Avenue is our magic midway zone. We rarely meet for lunch, but when we do, it’s usually Bryant Park.

  David is waiting with two Nicoise salads from Pret and my favorite Arnold Palmer from Le Pain Quotidien. Both establishments are in walking distance and have indoor seating so we can eat there in the colder months. We’re not fancy lunch people. I’d be happy with a deli salad for two meals out of three most days. In fact, one of our first dates was to this very park with these very salads. We sat outside even though it was too cold, and when David noticed me shivering, he unwrapped his scarf and put it around me, then he jumped up to get me a hot coffee from the cart on the corner. It was a small gesture, but so indicative of who he was—who he is. He’s always been willing to put my happiness before his comfort.

  I take a car down to meet him, but I’m still drenched when I arrive.

  “It’s a hundred degrees,” I say, folding myself into the seat across from him. My heels are rubbing blisters into the backs of my feet. I need talcum powder and a pedicure, immediately. I can’t remember the last time I stopped to get my nails done.

  “Actually, it’s ninety-six but feels like one oh two,” David says, reading off his phone.

  I blink at him.

  “Sorry,” he says. “But I understand the point.”

  “Why are we outside?” I reach for my drink. It’s miraculously still cold, even though the ice has almost melted entirely.

  “Because we never get any fresh air.”

  “This is hardly fresh,” I say. “Do the summers keep getting worse?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m too hot to even eat.”

  “Good,” he says. “Because the food was a ruse.”

  He drops a calendar book down on the table between us.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a planner,” he says. “Dates, times, numbers. We need to start getting organized about this thing.”

  “The wedding?”

  “Yes,” he says. “The wedding. Unless we start making phone calls, everything is going to be booked. They are already. We’re too tired at night to talk about it, and this is how we got four years down the line.”

  “And a half,” I remind him.

  “Right,” he says. “And a half.”

  He bites his bottom lip and shakes his head at me.

  “We need a human planner,” I say.

  “Yes, but we needed to plan to even get a planner. A lot of the top people book up two years in advance.”

  “I know,” I say. “I know.”

  “I’m not saying this is like, your area,” David says. “But I think we should do it together. I’d like that. If you want.”

  “Of course,” I say. “I’d love that.”

  This is how badly David wants to marry me. He’ll take his lunch hour to look over Brides.

  “No cheesy shit,” he says.

  “I’m offended at the suggestion,” I say.

  “And I don’t think we should have a wedding party,” he says. “Too much work, and I don’t want a bachelor party.”

  Pat’s, in Arizona, didn’t exactly go according to plan. They booked the wrong hotel and ended up getting delayed at the airport for nine and a half hours. Everyone got drunk on beers and Bloody Marys, and David was hungover the rest of the weekend.

  “I’m with you. Bella can hold our rings, or something.”

  “Fine.”

  “And white flowers only.”

  “Works for me.”

  “Heavy cocktail hour, who cares about dinner?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And open bar.”

  “But no shots.”

  David smiles. “No special wedding shot? All right, then.” He flips over his wrist. “Nice progress. I gotta go.”

  “That’s it?” I say. “Planner and run?”

  “You want to have lunch now?”

  I look at my phone. Seven missed calls and thirty-two new emails. “No. I was late when I got here.”

  David stands and hands me my salad. I take it.

  “We’ll get it done,” I tell him.

  “I know we will.”

  I imagine David wearing a sweater and a gold band on his ring finger, opening wine in our kitchen on a cozy winter night. A sense of sustained comfort. The materials of a warm life.

  “I’m happy,” I tell him.

  “I’m glad,” he says. “Because either way, you’re stuck with me.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  It’s now the end of August. Long ago in January, David and I booked a summer share in Amagansett for Labor Day weekend with Bella and our friends Morgan and Ariel.

  Bella and Aaron are still together, and unsurprisingly, Aaron is joining us on this trip, turning the weekend into a triple date, which is fine by me. Historically, Bella and I are on opposite schedules at the beach. She sleeps late and parties late. I wake up at dawn and go for a run, cook us breakfast, and fit in a few hours of work before heading down to the water.

  David rented us a Zipcar, which is proving problematic in transporting us, our luggage, and Morgan, who is meant to be driving with us. Ariel is taking the jitney later after work.

  “This thing looks like it belongs on a Monopoly board,” Morgan says. She’s in her forties, which you’d never know except for the salt-and-pepper hair she sports. She has a baby face, no wrinkles, not even the tiny lines around her eyes. It’s wild. I’ve been sneaking Botox since I was twenty-nine, although David would murder me if he ever found out.

  “They said it fits four.” David is shoving my weekend bag over our suitcase, jamming his shoulder into the trunk and pushing.

  “Four tiny people and their tiny-people purses.”

  I laugh. We haven’t even tried to fit Morgan’s backpack or roller bag in yet.

  Two hours later, we’re on our way in an SUV David rented last minute from Hertz. We leave the Zipcar parked illegally on our street with the promise from a manager of imminent pickup.

  Morgan sits up front with David while I balance my computer on my knees in the back. It’s Thursday, and although this week is sanctioned vacation, there is still work to be done.

  They’re singing along to Lionel Richie. “Endless Love.”

  And I, I want to share all my love, with you. No one else will do.

  “This reminds me,” I yell forward. “We need a list of do-not-plays for the wedding.”

  Morgan turns the music down. “How is planning going?”

  David shrugs. “Cautiously optimistic.”

  “He’s lying,” I say. “We’re totally behind.”

  “How did you guys do it?” David asks.

  Morgan and Ariel were married three years ago in an epic weekend in the Catskills. They rented out this themed inn called The Roxbury, and the whole wedding took place in various structures on a neighboring farm. They brought in everything: tables, chairs, chandeliers. They arranged artful bales of hay to separate the lounge area from the dance floor. There was a cheese-and-whisky bar, and every table had the most gorgeous arrangement of wildflowers you’d ever seen. Photos from their wedding were on The Cut and Vogue online.

  “It was easy,” Morgan says.

  “We’re not on their level, babe,” I say. “Our entire apartment is white.”

  Morgan laughs. “Please. You know it’s what I love to do. We had fun with it.” She fiddles with the dial on the radio. “So Greg is coming?”

  “I think so. Is he?”

  David looks back at me.

  “Yep.”

  “He seems great, right?” Morgan asks.

  “Really nice,” David says. “We’ve only met him, what? Once? It’s been a crazy summer. I can’t believe it’s over.” He glances at me in the rearview.

  “Almost over,” Morgan says.

  I make a noncommittal noise in the backseat.

  “He seems stable, though, like he has a real job and isn’t constantly try
ing to get her to leave the country on her parents’ credit card,” David continues.

  “Not like us zany freeloader artists,” Morgan teases.

  “Hey,” David says. “You’re more successful than any of us.”

  It’s true. Morgan sells out every show she puts on. Her photos go for fifty thousand dollars. She gets more for a twenty-four-hour editorial job than I make in two months.

  “We had a great time with him at dinner a few weeks ago,” Morgan says. “She seems different. I went by the gallery last week, too, and thought so again. Like more grounded or something.”

  “I agree,” I volunteer. “She does.”

  The truth is that since that day in the park, since David and I started talking about the wedding seriously, I’ve thought about my vision less and less. We’re building the right future now, the one that we’ve been working toward. All evidence is on our side that that version will be the one we’re living come December. I’m not worried.

  “Her longest relationship by a mile already,” Morgan says. “You think this one will stick?”

  I hit save on an email draft. “Seems that way.”

  We turn off the main highway, and I close my computer. We’re nearly there.

  The house is the one we’ve rented for this same week the last five summers in a row. It’s in Amagansett, down Beach Road. It’s old. The shingles are falling off and the furniture is mildew-y, and yet it’s perfect because it’s right on the water. There’s nothing separating us from the ocean but a sand dune. I love it. As soon as we pass the Stargazer and turn onto 27, I lower the window to let in the thick, salty air. I immediately start to relax. I love the massive old trees lining the lanes and stretching down to that wide expanse of beach—big sky, big ocean, and air. Room.

  When we pull up to the house it’s already late in the afternoon, and Bella and Aaron are there. She rented a yellow convertible, and it’s parked out front, a chipper greeting. The door to the house is flung open, as if they’ve just arrived, although I know they haven’t. Bella texted me they were there hours ago.

  My first instinct is to be annoyed—how many summers, how many times, have I told her to keep the doors closed so we don’t get bugs? But I check myself. This is our house, after all. Not just mine. And I want all of us to have a nice weekend.