Love and Chaos: A Brooklyn Girls Novel

by Burgess, Gemma

  And I know what you’re thinking. But there’s nothing between me and Sam. Nothing. I swear. It’s purely platonic. There’s no frisson, no spark, none of that bubbly-tingly sexual tension, just a funny insta-friend easy intimacy. You know? It’s like I’ve known him for years, not weeks.

  I’ve never had a platonic male friend before. We never really talk about our personal problems, or our families, or anything like that. We just hang out. I can be myself with him—be relaxed and silly and loud and bitchy—the way I never am with actual boyfriends. It’s incredibly nice. He’s like Pia. But with a penis. And he doesn’t borrow my clothes.

  Right now he’s wearing one of the two fleeces he wears constantly. One is navy, one is dark gray. The gray one looks nice with his eyes. But that’s not the point. They’re fleece. They’re fucking disgusting.

  “You need to buy some new clothes. No one is ever going to date you when you’re wearing a fleece.”

  “This fleece is thermal insulated for optimal warmth!”

  “That is all the more reason not to wear it.”

  “I should have never followed you when you jumped off that yacht.” Sam crunches another M&M. “Should have let the sharks eat you. Lesson learned.” He closes his eyes and nods reverently to himself. “Lesson learned.”

  I laugh until my attention is stolen by a feature in Vogue on the latest Rodarte collection. “God, those girls are amazingly talented,” I comment enviously. “The Rodarte sisters.”

  Sam glances up. “Show me?” I hold up the magazine. “You could do that. Your drawings are better than that, the stuff you make is better than that.”

  I smile at him and shake my head. “How do you know? You haven’t even seen my stuff.”

  “That dress on the doll thingy is nice,” he says. “Sexy.”

  I look at Drakey the Dress Form, still wearing the black vintage silky slip dress. “I didn’t make that. I haven’t touched it.”

  Sam cracks up. “Oh. But still, I’ve seen the stuff you wear, you never look like everybody else. You don’t really believe in yourself, that’s your problem.”

  “Thank you for diagnosing my problem, Doctor Sam.”

  While Sam stretches his long legs out across my bed and grabs the latest issue of New York magazine, I check him out over my Vogue. His hair is growing out of the goody-two-shoes crew cut, and he’s stopped shaving, so his cheeks are all stubbly. He looks scruffier. Older. And kind of sexy.

  “Hey, Sam?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think you should ask Julia out.”

  “No.”

  “One date! Would it kill you?”

  Julia keeps asking, with shy hope in her voice, if Sam ever talks about her. Given my newfound friendship with her, I would really like to make her happy. Anyway, why shouldn’t they date, right? She’s the clean-cut wholesome type, she’s sporty, she’s funny, she frowns a lot. She’s just like him. She even wears fleece sometimes.

  I take another M&M, peering into the bowl. I always eat the yellow ones first, I don’t know why. So I take out five and line them up on my thigh, like little planes ready for takeoff. Then I zoom one up toward my mouth.

  I look up and see Sam looking at me with a little grin on his face.

  “What?” I say.

  “You’re so different from how you … seem on the outside.”

  “You thought I looked like a bitch?” I say, sighing. “I get that a lot. It’s just because I’m thinking about something else. And, you know, it doesn’t tend to be the person in front of me.”

  Sam cracks up again.

  After Reality Bites, we flip channels till Kramer vs. Kramer comes on.

  Sam is thrilled. “The young Meryl Streep. Totally my perfect woman. Icy-cool on the outside, dynamite within.”

  “Oh, God. Seriously? Okay, move over, let’s watch it.”

  Sitting side by side—though Sam’s shoulders are so wide I have to arrange my pillows around him and lean on his arm so that I’m not totally falling off the bed—we watch the movie. I haven’t seen it before, so I have no idea what it’s about, but basically it’s about divorce and families.

  At the very end, just when Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep are getting back in the elevator to tell their little kid that he doesn’t have to leave his home and his daddy, and Dustin tells Meryl she looks terrific, I find myself crying hysterically, tears streaming down my face.

  “Angie?” Sam asks. “Are you okay?”

  I try to talk, to stop crying, but I can’t even breathe. I’m just wailing and hiccuping, snot and tears covering my face, my chest shuddering with misery. I can’t stop, I can’t control myself, and I’m so embarrassed, so I curl up, burying my face in a pillow and hiding in my long hair.

  “Angie, shhh…” Sam strokes my head and makes some slightly awkward mothering sounds, which makes me giggle through my tears. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but … do you want to talk about it?”

  It all chokes out in a rush. “My parents—my parents are divorcing. My mother told me last month, and I haven’t spoken to her since.” I’m crying even harder now. I can hardly get the words out. “And my dad, we’re really close, or we were, anyway, and, he, he hasn’t even called me.”

  “That’s terrible. You must feel like shit.”

  The fact that Sam is agreeing it’s terrible, rather than the proactive hey-girl-high-five-sing-it-sister-you’re-amazing-positive-thinking diatribe I’ve been getting about it from the girls, shocks me out of my incipient hysteria.

  “You are not good at this supportive friend stuff, dude.”

  “Sorry.” Sam frowns, propping his elbow on the pillow next to me, resting his head on his hand. “I just meant, uh, that’s a shitty situation. And you must feel … sad.”

  “I do,” I say, rolling over on the bed to face him. “I feel so sad. I try to ignore it and cover it in other thoughts, you know, but I can’t. And when I think about talking to them about it, especially my dad, I just feel, um, scared.” I exhale, feeling a strange, painful relief, like I’m stretching out parts of me that have been tight forever. “I ignore all my mother’s calls, and my dad hasn’t even tried to get in touch. They don’t want to be a family anymore, they don’t want—they don’t want what we had. Even though what we had wasn’t exactly the fucking Waltons, you know? It wasn’t perfect.”

  Sam nods. I get the strangest feeling he understands exactly what I mean. “Why wasn’t it perfect?”

  “I saw my dad making out with his secretary.” The words are out before I can stop them. I’ve never told anyone about this, ever, not Pia, not anyone. “When I was twelve. Her name was Alyssa. He made me promise not to tell Annabel—that’s my mother—because it would hurt her feelings. I think he broke up with Alyssa, but then I became his alibi.… He’d tell me to tell Annabel that he’d been visiting me at boarding school when he was obviously with other women.”

  “Wow. What an asshole.”

  “He’s not! He’s not, he’s…” I stop, trying to think how to describe my dad. “He’s charming and funny, he dresses immaculately, he knows all about wine and history and the world. He always took my side against Annabel in fights and treated me like I was a grown-up and said I could go out without a curfew. In exchange, I helped him keep his affairs secret.… But maybe he is an asshole. A lying, cheating asshole, who just used me to lie to my mother and get what he wanted.”

  And boom, the tears start again, and with them an ache deep inside that I’d almost forgotten.… Whenever my dad asked me to lie for him, I felt nauseous, with strange blunt pains in my torso, like something was pressing on me, stopping me from breathing properly. It was stress, I guess. What kind of a kid gets stress pains?

  Sam reaches over and grabs a Kleenex for me. “Are you close to your mom? You never wanted to tell her?”

  “I guess I thought I had to keep his secrets.” I’m now getting a strange heady feeling from crying so much. “And she should have guessed. It made me so angry that she
never figured it out! He was so obvious sometimes!”

  Sam frowns. “Maybe she was ignoring it. You can’t tell what’s going on in a marriage from the outside. Even the kids can’t tell.”

  “Maybe.”

  A new thought occurs to me. What if she knew I knew about the affairs and that I never told her? It’s almost the worst idea of all.

  “Was she happy?”

  The idea is so strange that for a moment I just stare at Sam in total surprise. “I don’t know.” How can I never have wondered that before? I try to think. “She wasn’t around much. She just hung out with her rich friends, even though we’re not rich like them. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know I grew up, um, privileged, but we were never crazy rich, and my dad lost a lot of money in investments in the past few years. I always worry about them being broke, isn’t that nuts?” My face is wet with tears, my thoughts zigzagging erratically around my brain, finding everything about my parents that makes me unhappy. “But I bet Annabel still acts like she’s loaded. And I hate that. I hate … that pretension. I hate rich people. They just use people to get what they want.”

  “I know,” Sam whispers. “I hate that, too.”

  Everything is silent for a moment. We’re both laying on our sides on the bed now, heads on pillows, facing each other. Sam is staring at me so intensely, it’s like he can see right into me.

  “So these days, Annabel and I don’t really get along. I mean, we don’t fight, you know, we just don’t … we don’t talk. I haven’t answered her calls in weeks. Oh, and she sent me to boarding school without consulting me about it.”

  “She sent you to boarding school against your will?”

  “No! I mean, it was fine, I sure as hell wanted to get out of the house, you know. Dad was never around, and I was avoiding her because it was so hard to keep those secrets from her, she’s my mother, you know?” Tears threaten to overwhelm me again. “She just didn’t ask me. I had no say over what happened in my life.”

  “That’ll make anyone angry,” Sam says. “Everyone wants control over their destiny.”

  “She sent me to this expensive all-girls school that all her friends’ daughters went to, it was really sporty and outdoorsy and there was only a tiny art faculty. It was totally cliquey. I didn’t fit in. And Pia’s parents sent her to different schools, um, I think my mother convinced them that we’d be a bad influence on each other or something. But I needed her. And I think she needed me, too. I was alone all the time. Even in the middle of a crowded dining hall, I was alone. I was so alone, it was like I could taste it.”

  “Not fitting in somewhere makes you stronger,” says Sam, leaning over to push a strand of hair out of my eyes. It’s stuck to my skin with tears, and it takes him a few tries to get it off. The feeling of his fingertips on my skin is surprisingly lovely.

  “That’s true,” I say. “I became tougher and more independent. I decided that if I was going to be alone, I was gonna look like I enjoyed it. I’m alone because I choose to be, you know? But then sometimes I think I can’t break out of feeling alone, like I’m in a perma-bubble of aloneness.”

  “Don’t you mean loneliness?”

  “No. I don’t feel lonely. I like my own company, most of the time, I like drawing and sewing and being by myself. I just feel … alone. Like I can’t rely on anyone. Like the world and I speak a different language.”

  I sigh deeply, breathing out all my sadness and worry. I’ve never told anyone this stuff. God, talking really does make me feel better. Even better than when I confessed to the girls. Why have I always kept everything to myself?

  As I look into Sam’s eyes, I realize something. Right now, right this exact second, for the first time that I can remember, I don’t feel alone.

  Instead, I feel like I belong right here with Sam. Together.

  Sam gazes at me across the pillows, his gray eyes steady and sure. “Angie, I’m sure your folks are dying to hear from you. Both of them.”

  I want to believe him more than anything. “Would you contact them if you were me?”

  Sam doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m just so sick of their lies, you know?” I say in a tiny voice. “I don’t want to give them the opportunity to lie to me more. It seems sometimes like everyone lies. Everyone lies, and everyone’s got secrets. I hate it.”

  “There’s a difference between secrets and lies, Angie,” says Sam.

  “Is there?” I say. “It seems to me like they’re interchangeable.”

  “Mmm.” Sam doesn’t agree, but he’s too well-mannered to argue.

  “I just, um, I want life to be … simpler.”

  Sam nods slowly. “I completely agree. My life before I took off was complicated. Sometimes I felt like it was overwhelming me. More than I could handle.”

  “Exactly,” I whisper.

  We’re still lying on the pillows; our faces are just inches away from each other.

  For a few seconds, there’s total silence, the only sound our breathing.

  My heart is beating so fast that I’m trembling, and I close my eyes for a few seconds, a fizzy tingle in my stomach.

  Then I open my eyes again. Sam is still staring at me. He’s so close that I can see his individual eyelashes, brown at the roots but white at the tips from sun, the tiny tan-free mark on his nose from wearing sunglasses, the fledgling stubble on his chin. He’s staring at me, too, and it’s making me self-conscious. I don’t know what to do with my lips, I wonder if I have eye snot, if I look stupid, if …

  Then Sam locks eyes with me again.

  We’re going to kiss.

  I know it. I can feel it, that prekiss moment, the tingly tension, that almost unbearably sweet torture of anticipation. I can imagine the feeling of his lips on my lips so strongly it’s like I’m craving the taste and feel and touch and smell of him, like he’s the only thing that will satisfy me right now.

  Sam leans in a tiny fraction, oh, my God, we’re actually going—

  No!

  I jerk my head away and turn over to break the moment while my mind races. No! No. It’s wrong. Sam’s my friend. I can’t fuck up this friendship by giving in to a base impulse that is the reason I’ve never had a male friend longer than two weeks. I only like him as a friend. I’m sure of it. Being friends is safer and easier. Take a deep breath. Yes. Another one. Good.

  This is transitory sexual tension that is inevitable when you put two people of the opposite sex on a bed and give one of them a crisis. Right? Right. Friends. Safe.

  So I get up, go over to my window, open it up, and light a cigarette. For a minute, neither of us says a word.

  “My parents divorced when I was twenty-one,” Sam says finally. “Then my mom decided she wanted to move to New Mexico and live on a ranch, and my dad, uh, he didn’t. Boom. Family over.”

  I’m so surprised Sam is being so open with me, instead of his usual cryptic self, that all I can think to say is: “Where does your dad live?”

  Sam doesn’t answer, or doesn’t hear me. He’s just gazing into space, quiet and serious. “The thing is, it’s just another change. You know? Not an ending, just a change. Everything changes, all the time, you move on, your life changes. You graduate from school, boom, change. Go to college, boom, change. You date, you break up, you move in with your buddies, people get sick and die, change change change. So divorce is just another change in life, which is constantly changing anyway.”

  “But what if you don’t like what life changes into?”

  “Then you do something to make it change again. Life has to change. If it didn’t, then what would be the point? You’d always know what was going to happen next.”

  “That’s pretty good,” I say. “You should be a therapist.”

  “That’s what my therapist says.”

  “You’re in therapy? I thought you didn’t like talking about yourself.”

  “Ha.” He pauses, and then it all comes out in a rush. “I’m not in therapy anymore, I was in therapy, um,
I was kind of angry about the divorce and stuff that happened around that time.… You know. And it was such a fucking waste of time, all that anger, people are just gonna do what they’re gonna do, you know, you can’t change them, not really, you just have to accept them and love them for who they are. I shouldn’t have … Some of the stuff I did, I was kind of a dick. I wish…” He shakes his head, as if to clear it. “Sorry, we’re not talking about me.”

  “We can talk about you if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to. I just want to watch TV and not talk. That’s my prerogative, as a dude.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Ohio. I told you.”

  “Ohio? I kind of thought you were joking about that. You just don’t seem very … Ohio-like.”

  Sam makes a “huh” sound. “I really don’t want to talk about it, Angie.”

  “Too bad, tiger, I do. Is your dad still in Ohio?”

  A long pause. “My dad is dead.”

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “Where’d you go to college?”

  “New England. I dropped out.”

  “What did you study?”

  “That’s all for today.”

  “Talk,” I say, poking him with my toe.

  “Nope.”

  “Talk!” I poke him again.

  “Don’t poke the bear, Angie, or I will tickle you so hard you will yelp.”

  “Tickling is just an excuse for teenage boys to accidentally-on-purpose get some tit,” I say. “And did you just refer to yourself in the third person as ‘the bear’?”

  “Did you just say ‘get some tit’? Wow, you are some lady.”

  I giggle, overwhelmed with relief that the whole sexual-tension thing is over. He doesn’t like me as anything more than a friend. Everything is back to normal.

  “I call it like I see it,” I shrug.

  “Fine. I won’t touch you. Not even if you beg me. Can we just watch the next goddamn movie?”

  He flicks channels until we find another movie. It’s Rear Window, an old Hitchcock movie with Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart. The sexual tension seems to have been broken, and I feel safe getting back on the bed now. We’re just friends. Yes. It’s fine.