I'm So Happy for You

by Lucinda Rosenfeld

  “And Sara, I can’t wait for you to meet him, too,” Daphne went on. “He’s such a lawyer. He’s always arguing about everything! The two of you are going to love each other.…”

  It seemed to Wendy that for the rest of the evening, Daphne’s conversation was directed at everyone but her. What’s more, Daphne’s body was turned at such an angle that Wendy spent dinner staring at her back.

  Daphne returned from Sag Harbor the following Tuesday, but she remained unavailable to Wendy. Like Maura, Daphne had always been a champion canceler, and the problem seemed to have grown worse since Jonathan had entered the picture. On Thursday, Daphne flaked out of yet another dinner plan with Wendy, again citing a physical malady. (This time it was food poisoning.) Wendy began to wonder if her best friend was purposely avoiding her. In retrospect, she regretted ever having opened her mouth on the subject of the Palestinians the night the four of them had met. Of course, it was equally possible, Wendy told herself, that Daphne was simply preoccupied with her new relationship and ignoring all her friends equally.

  The latter theory seemed less likely after Wendy learned that Daphne and Gretchen had dined together later that same week. But was that detail necessarily so telling? Maybe Daphne had been feeling better. And Wendy didn’t invite Daphne along every time she had dinner with a mutual friend. In any case, there was no way for Wendy to know if Daphne was mad at her or not. Daphne had never been the type to tell you if you did something wrong. She’d just start ignoring you, which always made you feel a hundred times worse.

  Meanwhile, Adam announced he was coming back to Brooklyn the following weekend. And Wendy rejoiced at the news, even though his visit stood to fall during her period.

  She filled the idle hours before his return working on her cooking skills. Armed with James Beard’s Theory and Practice of Good Cooking (1977), which had been left in the apartment by the previous tenants, she made, on successive nights, Braised Pork Hocks, Italian Style; Stuffed Breast of Veal; and Jeanne Owen’s Chili con Carne. (Whoever Jeanne Owen was, her chili tasted like Polly’s dog food. Which either was or wasn’t Jeanne Owen’s fault.)

  In a semicharitable spirit—at some indeterminate point in life, she’d discovered that it made her feel good to be nice to other people—Wendy also brought a bag of groceries to the ancient, never married, retired merchant marine, Barney, who lived alone with his metal furniture, peeling contact paper, Wonder bread, and canned corn in a rent-controlled studio downstairs. (Hoping to “mix things up,” she brought him wheat bread and canned peas.) And then, because no good deed goes unpunished, Barney made her sit down on one of his metal chairs and listen to stories about lovesick sailors threatening to jump overboard over “Orientals” they’d met in the South Pacific while escorting cargo ships of sugar.

  The night before Adam’s arrival, Wendy partook of her favorite shame-inducing activity after smoking and masturbating: scouring reproductive health Web sites and message boards in search of useful tips / old wives’ tales regarding the most expedient way to get pregnant.

  To her disappointment, however, she found no new nuggets of wisdom, having already served Adam coffee before sex, ingested cough syrup to thin her cervical mucus, orgasmed first to favorably alter the pH balance of her vagina, and assumed the bicycle position for twenty minutes after the act. She ended up on a Web site about male infertility, half-convinced that Adam had an obstructed vas deferens thanks to a hernia operation he’d had ten years ago. This would explain why he’d gotten his college girlfriend pregnant but had so far failed to knock up Wendy. She had no proof, of course. But what if Adam knew more than he was letting on? Wendy couldn’t help but think of the contents of his “Screenplay” file. Was it a mere coincidence that her husband was writing a movie about nonfunctioning sperm? Of course, there was always the possibility that something was wrong with Wendy’s own reproductive system. As a general rule, however, she preferred to imagine that the blame lay elsewhere.

  After exhausting the potential of her search words, Wendy found herself Googling Mitchell Kroker. If she didn’t miss his presence in Daphne’s life, she couldn’t help but wonder how he was faring. Did he care that Daphne had left him? Was he drinking heavily? Had he already found a new mistress/girlfriend? Wendy had never thought he’d leave his wife for Daphne. Yet she found it equally impossible to imagine how, after an affair as passionate as she understood his and Daphne’s to have been, he could return to his marriage as if nothing had happened.

  Other than the time that Wendy had accidentally barged in on the two of them in Daphne’s apartment the month before, she’d met Mitch only once. Near the beginning of his and Daphne’s affair, the three of them had met for drinks in the lobby bar of the Four Seasons Hotel in midtown Manhattan. He’d been friendly enough, asking faux-interested questions about Barricade. (“So, is Charlie Kohn still beating around the place—or did he die yet?”) But it had been clear to Wendy from the outset that he’d only been there as a favor to Daphne, and that he couldn’t wait to leave, either out of boredom or because he was terrified he’d run into someone he knew. He’d spent most of the hour drumming his fingertips against the top of their bar table and checking his Rolex. Wendy felt as uncomfortable as she was fascinated by the way he kept looking over at Daphne.

  As if he wanted to climb inside her skin.

  Wendy knew it was creepy and uncouth to imagine your friends having sex with their husbands or lovers. Many times over the past two years, however, she’d allowed herself to picture Mitch and Daphne together. Sometimes, she envisioned him huffing and puffing atop Daphne’s prostrate form, beads of sweat dangling from the undulating lines that ran across his forehead, lines so deep they resembled a seismograph printout after a low-level earthquake. But more often, Wendy pictured Daphne on top, naked and slithering across a transfixed Mitch as a snake traverses a mossy rock. It was the latter image that Wendy found the most erotic, not because she longed for Daphne to slither across her own body, but because she liked to imagine being Daphne. That is, what it must feel like to be possessed of a body like hers (a body that appeared at once breakable and omnipotent), and also to be on the receiving end of the kind of obsessive desire that Mitch clearly had for her.

  After clicking on the first search result, Wendy found herself staring at an “official” portrait and biography of Mitch, courtesy of the television network at which he worked. His face made pink and smooth, his smile rising higher on one side than the other, his arms folded over each other like Yul Brynner’s in The King and I, Daphne’s former lover appeared to be ten years younger than he actually was, far nicer, and made of wax. His biography seemed equally unreal. The last line read, “Mitchell Kroker lives in Georgetown with his wife, Cheryl (weatherperson at CBS affiliate WUSA), and his two children.” Wendy’s search turned up nothing more revealing than that—moreover, no evidence that he and Daphne had ever known each other. And was it possible that Cheryl had never found out, never would? And were other people simply better than Wendy at letting things go?

  Before shutting down her computer for the night, Wendy also Googled Jonathan Sonnenberg. From what she learned, after clocking several years at Schiffer, Wallengberg, Griscom & Steinholz, he’d moved to the organized-crime and terrorism unit of the US Attorney’s Office. True to Wendy’s inquiries at dinner that night, he’d also been involved in several high-profile fraud and money-laundering cases involving the Gambino crime family. For Wendy, however, such factual information paled in interest next to the snapshot she uncovered of Jonathan on spring break in some tropical wonderland, a decade or two before. His chest bare, his shorts Hawaiian, his arms dangling over the shoulders of his fraternity brothers—the Greek letters on their Tshirts identified them as such—he seemed even then to be brimming with self-confidence. Wendy wondered if, late at night, alone and awake in a dark room, Jonathan ever had moments of self-doubt.

  She also wondered what he and Daphne did together in dark rooms. When Wendy envisioned the two of them, sh
e saw Jonathan running his hands through Daphne’s tangled mane and moaning clichéd things like “You’re so fucking beautiful”—while he received expert fellatio. Yet where Wendy had always somehow relished the image of Daphne and Mitch together, she found the one of Daphne and Jonathan vile.

  Adam arrived home in a swirl of luggage and coats and soiled paper bags containing fast food he hadn’t gotten around to finishing on the train. In his absence, Wendy had purchased an Indian bedspread and two velvet pillows to better disguise the Ikea sofa they couldn’t currently afford to replace. Every night before she went to bed, she’d taken to straightening the spread over the cushions and angling the pillows against the sofa’s arms. No sooner had Adam walked in the door, however, than the pillows found their way to the floor and the bedspread pulled away from the sofa, exposing its old, pilled upholstery. Wendy knew she was indulging her “fussy old lady” side, but his carelessness annoyed her. To add to her irritation, Adam seemed as excited—if not more so—to see his dog as he did his wife. Or was she looking for problems because she couldn’t justify the truth, which was that she was mad at him for being away? As Adam stroked Polly’s head, Wendy announced, “To be honest, as much as I love her, it’s been kind of a burden having to walk her every night.”

  “You can’t do me the small favor of looking after her at a time like this?” said Adam, his eyes narrowed to connote disbelief at her selfishness.

  “Sorry,” said Wendy. “It’s just that I haven’t been getting home from the office until close to seven”—it was a slight exaggeration, but still—“and it’s pitch-black outside because of daylight savings being over. And it just doesn’t feel that safe walking around this neighborhood alone at night.” She’d come up with the second argument midsentence, and it struck her as rather ingenious.

  “Not safe with a Doberman pinscher?” said Adam.

  “Not a geriatric Doberman pinscher—no.”

  “So now you have to insult Polly, too?”

  “I’m not insulting Polly—I’m just stating the truth. She’s getting old!”

  “Do you ever think about anyone but yourself?”

  In her relationship with Daphne, Wendy was the giving one, and Daphne the taker. With Adam, it had always been the other way around. “Are you trying to start a fight?” she asked.

  “I thought we were already having one,” he answered.

  The two made up, but only superficially. They took walks, made dinner, and snuggled in bed, but their fight lingered like cigarette smoke on a Shetland sweater.

  On Sunday afternoon, before he left, Adam announced he was taking Polly back up to Newton with him. “We know when we’re not wanted,” he added.

  Wendy didn’t know how to answer. Adam had gotten it all backward, but it was too late to turn him around. The irony was that, watching the two of them drive off in a rental car, with Polly craning her neck over the passenger window, Wendy wondered if she might even miss Adam’s lumbering, fart-happy old dog. She already missed Adam. At the same time, there was a way in which she was relieved to see him leave again.

  Wendy spent the next week working on Barricade’s special anniversary issue on police brutality. (“A Brief History of Pigs” was the title of the opening editorial.)

  Daphne called on the Sunday after the issue went to press. “Are you sitting down?” she asked.

  “I’m actually lying down,” Wendy told her. In fact, she’d gotten in bed early with OK magazine. Jennifer Aniston had apparently stopped eating. Some reality TV star Wendy had never heard of had a really bad cellulite problem. Wendy justified her need to consume mindless trash on the grounds that she didn’t actually purchase it. For example, she’d lifted the copy in her lap from the nail salon at which she’d treated herself to a pedicure the day before. Of course, stealing had moral implications as well. But then, Wendy always made sure to lift the previous week’s issue.

  “Jonathan and I are engaged,” said Daphne.

  “Ohmygod, Daphne, that’s wonderful news!” cried Wendy, whose first reaction was shock—if not at the news itself, then at how quickly it had all happened. Other emotions followed. She was excited to have such incredible gossip at her fingertips. She was sad to think she was losing her oldest friend to a man with whom she was unlikely ever to be close. She was relieved, even thrilled, to think that Daphne’s problems, insofar as they were based on her failure to find sustainable love, had finally been solved—even as she felt irritated that Daphne should think that Wendy cared enough about her life to be at risk for fainting. Also, how could you know you wanted to marry someone after forty-one days in each other’s company? Never mind the fact that it had taken Wendy approximately four minutes to decide that Jonathan Sonnenberg was a complete prick.

  Wendy also couldn’t help but wish that the transformation in Daphne’s personal life had taken longer and been more emotionally wrenching. No one deserved to be that happy that fast. It was as if Daphne had snapped her fingers and fashioned a fairy tale out of a soap opera or, worse, a nightmare. (Now Daphne left messages at one PM, as opposed to one AM, saying things like, “Hi, sweets. We’re heading out to the Hamptons. Just wanted to say hi before we leave. Call any time. Love you. Mwuh” without any trace of relief or regret.) For most people, actions had consequences. For Daphne, life was apparently just a series of independent vignettes. Which meant she’d gotten to live, too—had had torrid affairs and traveled to distant countries and taken illicit drugs in the Mojave Desert with members of the MI5—while Wendy made pasta, watched Law & Order reruns, and never went anywhere. At least that was how she imagined the disparity in their personal histories.

  Daphne went on to explain that the proposal had taken place over dinner at Tavern on the Green, in Central Park, the night before. It was such a clichéd setting for a romantic moment—so corny, too—that, hearing this detail, Wendy’s first instinct was to roll her eyes.

  Her second was to wonder what she’d missed.

  She’d always understood Adam’s aversion to sentiment to be a sign of his intelligence—his coolness, too. But what if it turned out that when the violins played and the candles flickered in a dimly lit dining room, the heart really did swell? Wendy had lived in New York for thirty-five years and had still never set foot in the legendary restaurant. What’s more, Adam hadn’t so much proposed to her as, one evening at home in their old apartment, two days before Wendy’s thirty-first birthday and four years after they’d met, he’d reluctantly agreed to go to city hall the next day. It had been the culmination of a long conversation, instigated by Wendy. As far as she could tell, Adam would have been happy to stay cohabiting forever. She’d finally worn him down with the argument that they were “waiting for the sake of waiting.” Looking back, she supposed that, in effect, she’d asked him to marry her. But were there really any marriages that weren’t precipitated by women? Maybe self-servingly, Wendy had convinced herself that the idea that men proposed to women was among the great myths of Western civilization. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  Now, as Daphne went on about the vintage of the champagne and the color of the ring box, Wendy found herself fighting the urge to blurt out Mitch’s name, if only to remind Daphne that history went back farther than six weeks.

  She didn’t dare. Instead, like the old and dear friend she imagined herself to be, she cooed, “You’re kidding,” and “That’s insane,” and upon hearing that Jonathan had gotten down on one knee—just like in the movies—“Nooooooooooooo—you’re lying” in the appropriate long-drawn-out decrescendo.

  But when she hung up, the taste of acid filled her throat. How odd it was that friends could be the source of so much pleasure and solace, Wendy thought, with their constant assurances that you were all in it together, lamenting lost opportunities, laughing at inside jokes. At the same time, they could devastate you doing nothing more than going about the business of their lives, lives that had no direct bearing on yours. They weren’t family members. You didn’t generally have sex with them. Y
ou didn’t generally work in the same office with them, either. Yet it was impossible not to see your lot in direct relation to theirs—impossible, therefore, not to feel defensive and even devastated when they did things you hadn’t done, or simply did them differently (and now it was too late for you to go back and do them again).

  4.

  AFTER WENDY HUNG up the phone with Daphne, she called Adam. She knew he’d be excited by the news—excited and horrified. She could already hear him going off: “No—tell me it’s not true! Do you think it’s too late to stage an intervention?…”

  “Hey, Pope, what’s up?” he said.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” said Wendy, “but Daphne and Jonathan are getting married.”

  “Yeah, I got an inkling that was going on,” Adam volunteered in a casual voice. “I actually talked to Daphne on the phone yesterday, and she said she had some big news but she wanted to tell you first.”

  “I didn’t know you talked so often,” said Wendy, startled by her husband’s response.

  “We don’t,” he said. “But ’cause of her mother and everything, she’s really knowledgeable about home care and stuff—you know, her mom has someone living with them out in Michigan. So I just thought, if it comes to that with Dad, it would be good to know what the options are.”

  How could Wendy argue with such a noble and selfless pursuit? “Right,” she muttered helplessly.

  “But I agree,” he continued, “the Jonathan news sucks. The guy is a complete schmuck. But what can you do? She loves him, I guess, and she probably wants to get married like every other woman on the planet. You know?”

  Wendy was so shocked to find out that her husband and best friend were in regular contact that she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Is something the matter?” said Adam.

  “What are you talking about?” said Wendy, playing dumb. She prided herself on not being a jealous type. Besides, what was there to be jealous of? Daphne had just gotten engaged to Jonathan. And Daphne and Adam had known each other for as long as Wendy had known him—technically, five minutes longer.