I push the power window button up and down, up and down until I catch the driver glaring at me in the rearview mirror and stop. “Not that much—I’ve always worked mainly with men,” I say.
“Ah,” says Chatty Ellen Franklin, like this one statement has profound meaning. “But you have girlfriends? We see the same kind of judgment and competition in friendships, as well.”
“I can see where you’re coming from,” I say in the most noncommittal way. I could explain how I’ve alienated my best girlfriend by mocking her Wonderful Friends, how I want to quash my assistant like a pesky bug because she’s got this great Life of Style. I could explain my deep-seated loathing of Parrot Girl and how the only call I want to return is Esther’s—if she calls—and why I’m wearing a dead woman’s dress. I could try to explain but I don’t, of course, because I can’t explain it at all.
Chatty Ellen Franklin is dropped off first at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel with her bags and her life with its limitless options. I tell her I’ll call the same way a guy does after a drunken one-night stand and so-so sex. I think about my vegetable list and resolve to be nicer to Eva and to call Gen after I’ve sucked back a bottle of wine and when I know Ted won’t be home.
I’m not sure whether I should knock. But then I think, it’s my place and that would be kind of ridiculous. There’s music playing so I know Eva’s there. I turn my key and tiptoe inside, which is as ridiculous as knocking.
There’s no one in the kitchen or the living room, but I can see one of Eva’s vintage sweaters tossed over the back of a chair and an open bottle of sparkling water on the coffee table. It’s a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon but the shades are drawn and the windows shut. The door to the guest room is closed. I hear Eva talking but can’t make out what she’s saying. She must be on the phone. I pull up the shades and open the windows. I pour myself a glass of sparkling water and take a seat on the sofa. As I shuffle through a stack of mail I hear Eva giggle. I collect the magazines and newspaper sections that are strewn around the room and arrange them in a pile and I hear Eva moan. I’m about to rush into the guest room to make sure she hasn’t hurt herself when she moans again, louder this time, and lets loose a string of demands to fuck her, fuck her harder, fuck her cunt.
I stand in the middle of the living room, unmoving. Eva said cunt. I notice a pair of men’s shoes beside my peacock-feather-print wing chair and an expensive-looking briefcase that’s not dissimilar to an old-fashioned doctor’s bag and that’s when I know that Eva’s in my guest room moaning and demanding that Ted fuck her cunt with his mushroom-head dick.
I can’t leave. But I don’t want to stay. I want to hijack Eva’s car and bolt out to Pointe-Claire and get Gen and Olivier and drive them to a safe house that serves Cobb salads and has a round-the-clock spa, a place where suburban women go when they discover that their husbands are cheating on them with fake redheads who are all golly-gee and manners on the surface, but are in fact more fuck my cunt. But I don’t leave. I stand, paralyzed, thinking that someone should publish an etiquette book that’s actually useful, one that would tell people like me what to do in situations like this.
Ted walks out of the guest room and things are suddenly much worse. He doesn’t see me and he’s not wearing any pants. I don’t want to look but I do—his mushroom-head cock swings as he makes his way to the bathroom. And he’s humming. It’s all too much. As my ass thuds into my peacock-print wing chair, Ted yelps, startled. It could be a scene in a movie if I hadn’t opened the shades and the hiss of air being pushed out of the chair cushion wasn’t audible. Plus I should be smoking and from where I’m sitting I can’t reach my cigarettes.
“Sara!”
“Hey, Ted.” I don’t turn to face him. One look at that mushroom-head cock today was enough. I remember that when I was a child and I asked my mother how, if a woman had boy and girl twin babies, the mother could tell which was which. My mother said that the boy twin would have a ding-dong between his legs and the girl twin wouldn’t. The Hipster Twins from the Snap store in Toronto pop into my head, naked and identical except for the flaccid, pasty ding-dong between the Boy Twin’s legs. My chest heaves. I feel sick.
“Sara, I—”
I hold a hand above my head. “Don’t.”
“Shit!” It’s Eva, standing in the guest room doorway. She’s wearing my black silk robe, the one that matches the lace-trimmed chemise. Eva’s too short to be wearing it and it drags on the floor.
“Hello, Eva.” I say this slowly. I motion them over to the sofa. “Come, sit.” I stand as they sit. When I stick my arm out toward them to grab my cigarettes they both jerk back. It’s a movie, maybe a sitcom. No, definitely a movie of the week, a cautionary tale with Gen cast as the wronged wife, the woman in peril. The cast will be culled exclusively from actors who starred on nineties’ teenage soaps.
“Please, Sara, don’t tell Gen. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Ted is holding my favorite throw pillow over his mushroom-head cock and now I’m going to have to burn it. “Please, Sara. It didn’t mean anything.”
Eva glares at Ted. “Since it didn’t mean anything it won’t matter if Gen finds out.” She’s practically spitting.
“That’s not what I mean, Eva, come on.” Ted turns to me. “It just happened.” He looks like he’s going to cry. He should cry. In the movie of the week he would cry.
I take a deep drag and wave my cigarette at them as I blow smoke rings. “You should go.” They look at each other. “Both of you.”
Ted starts to protest and Eva talks over him. They jockey for position, raise their voices to be heard and all I hear is noise. They each want the chance to explain but I tell them to leave. I have a headache and I need a drink.
I may have cut my time in Toronto short but as far as I’m concerned I’m still on vacation and can’t be expected in the office until Thursday. That should give Ted enough time to deal with Eva and tell Gen or not and figure out that it’s best if he never brings it up to me again.
My first instinct is to tell Gen. She’d want to know. Or maybe not. I want her to know but I don’t want to be the one to tell her. Maybe she already knows, maybe they have an arrangement, though that’s unlikely considering Gen’s view on my arrangement with Jack. I’ve slept with married men whose wives didn’t know and no one got hurt, except on occasion me if it went on for too long and I started to believe that I loved him and he loved me and that somehow someday we would be together. Gen slept with a married guy once, I’m sure she told me this in the early intense days of our friendship when if Gen wasn’t with Ted she was with me, drinking wine and spilling all of the secrets she didn’t tell Ted. And Eva—maybe it was just once, maybe she made a mistake. But, no, Eva said cunt and that tells me this was not a one-time thing.
I rewind the past month, try to recall every time I was with Ted and Eva together at the office, at lunch, Trend Mecca Bootcamp Weekend. Oh, God. Bootcamp weekend. Oh my God. Ted was there—he was never there before. I left early. Oh my God. I took Eva to their house for Olivier’s birthday. I aided and abetted. I was drunk and stupid and it didn’t occur to me that anyone other than Gen—and even this I find endlessly appalling—would want to fuck Ted and his mushroom-head dick. It’s not that he’s bad-looking or dumb or boring, but he’s Ted. And I am an unwitting accomplice, an accessory after the fact. But it’s not my fault, it’s none of my business, I can’t get involved.
“Oh, my. That is a sticky one, dear,” says Esther when I tell her about Ted and Eva and Gen and how I thought about telling Gen but decided I should stay out of it.
We’re walking to a bar Esther knows near her place. After Ted and Eva left I called Esther and suggested a drink. Walking to have a drink is much healthier than pouring a bottle of wine down my throat alone, at home, with the telephone in dangerously close proximity. My cell phone is still dead and the voice-mail box on my home phone is full. I erased none of the angry messages from Gen or Ted or the panicked ones from Eva or the ones from D
iane who used to work at Snap wanting to know if I could be a judge on the TV show she produces called Stylemaker. I will erase none of these messages so no one can leave a new one.
Esther doesn’t move very fast and I’m finding it hard to keep my pace slow to match hers. We stop at a corner and wait for the red light to change even though there’s no traffic coming in any direction. There’s a boarded-up shop—Esther says it used to be a tailor’s shop—that’s postered and graffittied with a giant For Sale sign that looks like it’s weathered more than one winter. Someone has spray-painted Satin Rules in red block letters on a slab of plywood that’s been nailed over one of the building’s windows.
“Oh, dear,” Esther says, noticing this.
“I think they meant Satan rules,” I say.
“Either way, the message is quite effective.”
At this I laugh. “Indeed.”
The bar is in the next block beside a small bookstore-cum-café called Connections. A sign indicates that part-time help is wanted and that healing stones are sold inside. The main display, however, is a tower of books, its author’s photo smiling out at us fifty-fold. It’s Chatty Ellen Franklin and her book, The Infinite Woman. In smaller type below the title it reads Because Life Is All About Options and there’s a tiny trademark sign beside the slogan in the upper right-hand corner.
“I met her.” I point at the display.
“She looks very nice,” Esther says.
“She wants to interview me for her next book about successful women entrepreneurs.”
“That’s fantastic! We’ll have to order a glass of champagne to celebrate!”
“I haven’t said I’d do it or anything.”
“Don’t be silly, Sara. Now, come on, we’re almost there.”
I should have worn something else. The men at the bar are in jackets, the women all wear dresses or skirts. I’m wearing my grubby 501s and a T-shirt silk screened with a snake smoking a cigarette. Everyone looks like they’ve come from church. I wish I was wearing one of Lila’s dresses, but I was unsure of whether wearing her clothes around her best friend would be too weird. But she was the one who gave them to me in the first place, though it’s unclear if I should give anything back. This collides with the Ted-Gen-Eva-cunt dilemma in my head and I decide to order an overpriced bottle of champagne to celebrate my successful entrepreneur status rather than a couple of piddly extra-overpriced single glasses.
The bar itself is not especially distinctive, but it’s elegant and old with dark woods, candlelight and purplish-burgundy velvet banquettes the color of Esther’s hair. The bar is called George’s and according to Esther it’s run by the original George’s son, George, who greets us personally and takes our order for champagne.
“And what are you ladies celebrating this evening?” George Jr. asks.
“Sara here is going to be in a book about successful women entrepreneurs,” Esther says.
I blush and rip a strip off a cocktail napkin. “We’ll see. Nothing’s confirmed.”
“What kind of successful woman entrepreneur are you?” I look up briefly. George Jr. is smiling down at me. He’s holding a pitcher of ice water. He’s cute and looks vaguely familiar. I rip another strip off the napkin.
“Sara is one of the owners of that lively little magazine Snap and the stores, too. And she does a lot of consulting,” Esther answers for me again.
“It’s a lot of fun,” I say. I am an idiot with a bulbous soft head because that’s not what I mean at all. What I meant to say is that I loathe my job, it’s inane and boring and I’m not even good at it anymore and my business partner is cheating on his wife with my assistant, who will bewitch you with her quaint suburban ways and her golly-gee manners and then steal your pages and your non–last name and demand that you fuck her cunt. I rip another strip from the napkin then crumple it up.
George Jr. snaps his fingers. “You’re that girl who does the DOs and DON’Ts.”
“That’s me.” I look up at him. His smile has disappeared.
“I was a one of your victims,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“A DON’T. I was one of your DON’Ts.”
“No!” Esther chimes in. “I don’t believe it.”
I don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to remember, but then I do. I remember having him sign the release. He was wearing a black suit with white socks. It was a few years ago. I was doing a DOs and DON’Ts dedicated entirely to hosiery. I wish more than anything else I had that bottle of champagne in front of me so I could swill it back in continuous gulps until the chill and the bubbles locked my head in a spinning brain-freeze that with any luck would obliterate the memory of every DON’T.
“Sorry about that,” I say. I am really, truly, sorry.
“Oh, it’s all in fun, George,” Esther says.
“I know,” George says. “It’s silly.”
It’s silly.
“But I never wore white socks with a dark suit again.” He manages a weak smile. “I’ll send Carol over with your champagne—good luck with your successful entrepreneur interview.”
“Thanks.” He turns to go. “Just a sec.” I root through my bag to find the Polaroid I didn’t bother returning to the Hipster Twins. “Would you mind taking my picture?”
George eyes me warily. “Is this a joke?”
“No joke. Please?”
“Okay.” George takes the camera. “Say cheese.” I don’t smile. The flash goes off. I may have blinked. The spiffily dressed customers turn to look. There’s nothing to see.
George hands me the camera back. “Thanks.”
“No problem.”
Esther wants to talk about my trip to Toronto and how wonderfully romantic my time with Jack must have been. I want to talk about Lila and her magazines, but mostly about her notebooks and if I might be able to take a look at more of them, if there are any. Neither of us brings up George Jr. and he doesn’t return to our table.
I tell Esther about the artners dinner and toss in a tidbit about Jack buying me piles of frilly expensive lingerie at that store in Yorkville. I mention that I reconnected with a dear old friend and checked in on the Snap store. I tell her I made a casserole from a recipe in one of Lila’s notebooks but leave out the part about how I ate it alone, in microwaved chunks, for four days and Jack didn’t try it once.
“That casserole was always a favorite of Lila’s—served it every second week. For all her flights of fancy and her closets full of dresses, she could be quite practical—and frugal. I’ve never met a woman who could squeeze so much style from a penny. I’ll have to give you the rest of the notebooks.”
“Are you sure?” I hope I don’t sound too eager. “I could just borrow them if you want them back.”
“Don’t be silly.”
It’s silly. What I do is silly. George Jr.’s words still ring in my head.
Esther lifts the champagne bottle from the standing ice bucket beside the table. I reach across to help her but she shoos my hand away, insisting on pouring the drinks herself. The veins in her hands bulge and I look the other way.
The champagne has me craving scotch, or at least a giant goblet of wine, but Esther doesn’t offer and I’m too self-conscious to ask. We’re back at her place and she’s pulling several volumes of Lila’s notebooks from a shelf in her bedroom. She hands me six. “I don’t want to give you everything at once because then you won’t have to come and visit,” she says in the flippant voice people only use when they’re trying to cover their sadness.
“I’d visit anyway,” I say and I mean it. I pat Esther’s shoulder. I can feel a bone jutting under her sweater set. I quickly snap my hand away and hope Esther doesn’t notice. I wish I hadn’t left the black vintage gloves Eva found for me at the bar the day of Lila’s funeral.
I tell Esther I’ll find a taxi. It’s still light outside and I walk down the street, past Satin Rules. I’m lugging another of Lila’s bags—an oversize black leather tote—filled with six of her n
otebooks. I stop in front of Connections bookstore-café and, fueled by champagne, I go in and buy a copy of Chatty Ellen Franklin’s book, The Infinite Woman. The clerk rings through the purchase and I steel myself for a raised eyebrow or mocking look. But instead the clerk smiles, puts the book in a paper bag stamped with the store’s logo and tells me to have a pleasant evening.
Outside, I attempt to shove the Connections bag into Lila’s tote, but it won’t easily fit, so I open it wide as I walk and try to make space.
“Dirty magazine?”
“Huh?” I look up and it’s George Jr. standing outside his bar. He points to the Connections bag I’m desperately trying to push inside Lila’s tote. “Just a book.”
“Here.” George Jr. grabs the Connections bag from me. I want to grab it back, tell him I’m only shopping at Connections and buying Chatty Ellen Franklin’s book as a gift for a friend, as part of a joke, for something I’m doing for Snap. “Hold it open,” he says, gesturing toward the tote. I manage to separate two of the notebooks and George Jr. wedges the Connections bag between them.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“Hey, look. I’m really sorry about the DON’T thing.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not and I am really sorry.”
George Jr. smiles, sincerely I think, and rolls his eyes. “It’s silly.”
It’s silly, it’s silly, it’s so very, very silly. Maybe that’s what I should tell Chatty Ellen Franklin when she interviews me if she interviews me. Everything I do, it’s all so silly, silly, silly.
I stop at the depanneur near my apartment and pick up a bottle of cheap French red. I ignore my phone and my computer and crack open one of Lila’s notebooks. This one is older than the others I’ve seen but only by months, maybe a year; in several of the photos she wears the black dress with the jagged neckline. I skim through before scrutinizing the details. There are formal photos, of her and a man. There are letters from a man written in black ink addressed to Darling and signed With Love. A strip of photographs slips out onto my lap, the glue that secured it to the page long, dry and brittle. It’s Lila and a man—but not the man in the formal photographs—heads pushed together, pulling faces in a photo booth.
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