The Myth of You and Me: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  “She fell and knocked out a tooth,” the other girl says. “I’m Suzette. We still have the tooth.”

  “It’s in her pocket,” Sonia says.

  “Why didn’t you go to the emergency room?” I ask.

  “She wouldn’t go without you,” Suzette says. “She insisted we come wake you up.”

  I can tell she’s annoyed by this. As for me, I feel a strange mixture of irritation and pride.

  “That’s right,” Sonia says. “I wouldn’t go without you. So let’s go, Cameronia, Camazon. You can drive.”

  In the waiting room Suzette and I sit on either side of Sonia. Sonia has another tissue pressed to her mouth, blood seeping through it. I hold her free hand while Suzette pats her leg.

  I’ve been hearing about Suzette the last few months, but this is the first time I’ve met her. She’s Sonia’s closest friend in her sorority, but I haven’t taken their friendship any more seriously than I take the sorority. The stories Sonia’s told me—of boring meetings, of vain and malicious girls—have convinced me I was right to refuse when she wanted me to rush with her. When we got to campus, she’d never even heard of rush, but once she knew about it she was obsessed—it was like she was trying out for cheerleading again; she had to know the right routines. We already belonged so thoroughly to the newspaper, I couldn’t understand her desire to belong to something else. And I couldn’t bear the thought of standing in a group of freshman girls, smiling and making small talk about our hometowns, when really all we wanted to say was, Please, like me. Please, like me. Please. Sonia doesn’t take the sorority seriously either—she’s told me all their secrets, the handshake and the songs.

  Now Sonia keeps slumping like she’s going to pass out, and when she does I squeeze her hand to wake her, and whisper, “Show no weakness.” After a while I realize that on the other side of her Suzette is whispering something, too. Maybe she’s singing one of those songs. Maybe she and Sonia have their own motto I don’t know about, a secret Sonia’s kept after all. I listen hard but I can’t hear what Suzette is saying. Sonia nods, yes, yes, when she speaks, and in that nod I see a history I don’t share.

  All at once it strikes me that as well as I know Sonia, I know only one version of her—that all you know of a life are the places where it touches your own. Under the fluorescent lights of the waiting room I’m catching a glimpse of the places where I don’t exist. It’s strange and diminishing, like looking through a telescope at the stars.

  The next day Sonia stays in bed, nursing a hangover and mouth pain. I bring her chocolate pudding, water she sips gingerly through a straw. I ask her so many questions about Suzette she finally says, “Don’t be jealous. I still love you best.”

  “I’m not jealous,” I say, standing up from my perch on the edge of her bed. “I’m just curious.”

  She grins at me, then winces, her hand going to her mouth. “She’s just a normal girl,” she says.

  “What does normal mean?”

  Sonia shrugs. “You know. She’s not that quirky. She likes mainstream movies. Romance. Action-adventure. She’s not into inner turmoil. She’s one of the most practical people I’ve ever met. It’s like, life is a job. She’s a realist.”

  For some reason I feel slightly affronted. I say, “I’m a realist.”

  Sonia laughs. “You’re not a realist,” she says. “You’re a dreamer who doesn’t believe in the dream.”

  18

  Will’s map to Suzette’s apartment was like a treasure map. It began with a bakery in Inman Square, and then a series of rather puzzling dotted lines led to a rectangle labeled park, across from it a large X marking the spot where I’d find Suzette. From the T stop in Central Square, I walked into Inman and found the bakery, and then I stood on the sidewalk and turned the map until everything lined up.

  Oliver’s package looked tattered. The jagged pieces of paper he’d left sticking out were beginning to tear. There wasn’t much I could do about that, other than unwrap the package and start over. I tied the dangling ends of the red yarn into a neat little bow.

  I crossed the street and rang the bell for number 26. A dog barked inside, and then there was a bang as it hit the door. A woman’s voice scolded, “Milton.” I heard heavy footsteps, and then just on the other side of the door her voice saying, “Be good, now.” The dog continued to bark, but for a moment nothing else happened. I supposed Suzette was looking at me through the peephole. Maybe she was trying to remember who I was. Maybe she knew, and was trying to decide whether to let me in.

  Finally the door swung open, and there was Suzette, smiling a welcome. I wouldn’t have recognized her on the street. She was a brunette now, with her hair in a news-anchor bob, and she was enormously pregnant, at that stage when an expectant mother looks less like a person than a monument to womanhood. She was trying, unsuccessfully, to hold back her dog with her foot. The dog, a beagle, whimpered and wagged its tail, anxious to greet me. “Well, hey,” Suzette said. She hadn’t lost her Louisiana drawl. “It’s Cameron.”

  Suzette didn’t know where Sonia was. She confirmed this as we stood on her doorstep, then invited me in anyway, as unfailingly polite as she’d ever been. In college, whenever we ran into each other, she always asked about Owen, my classes, the newspaper, even though I was certain she disliked me as much as I did her. This pretense at interest was one of the reasons she drove me crazy. I’d say to Sonia, “Why does she ask me so many questions?” and Sonia would shrug and say, “Good manners are like a religion to her.”

  At the top of the stairs was a small kitchen with shiny fixtures. Sunlight sparkled on the pots and pans hanging from a ceiling rack. On the counter, a little message board on an easel read I love you, C. Suzette paused, her hand braced on the wall, and took a deep breath before she went into the living room. This room had a wood stove, built-in bookshelves, a glass door opening onto a small deck. Suzette sank back into the oversize couch. I could have sworn the coffee table was identical to Sonia’s. It used to irritate me in college when the two of them went shopping together and came back wearing the same pair of shoes, something narrow and high-heeled that would never be available in the size eleven I wore.

  Being alone with Suzette made Sonia’s absence all the more conspicuous, a ghost in the room. I perched on the edge of a chair across from Suzette and admired the apartment. Suzette told me about the projects she and her husband had done themselves—they’d painted, built the bookshelves, retiled the kitchen floor. Then I asked about her pregnancy—she was having a girl, and yesterday had been her due date. “I’m tired of being pregnant,” she said. “I miss caffeine. And wine. I really miss wine.”

  “I thought you could have a glass a day,” I said.

  “Some people say that. I’m being extra cautious. Besides,” she said with a smile, “it’s so hard to stop at just one.”

  Sonia always said that, when drunk, Suzette told the most hilarious stories, but I’d never heard one. Now she began to chat with me like we were old friends. She was on maternity leave from her job as an architect for a firm that did mostly office buildings, schools, hospitals. “Useful buildings,” she said, with some satisfaction. She described her theories of architecture, and I wondered about the magazines on Sonia’s coffee table. Had Sonia bought them in an effort to share Suzette’s interest? Did she have to work that hard to have something in common with her?

  From her own job, Suzette moved to talking about Sonia’s, and I learned how long she’d been working at the magazine—a year—and heard again how she was the only one who really got along with Avery, the boss, because they were both photographers. Suzette said Sonia kept turning down Avery’s offers to help her get gallery shows.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I just don’t think she’s ready to take the risk,” Suzette said. “She thinks private praise is better than public criticism.”

  “That makes sense.”

  Suzette made a face that suggested she wasn’t so sure. “Nothing ventured, nothi
ng gained,” she said, and I wondered how many times she’d said that to Sonia, how much it frustrated her to have her advice ignored.

  “Maybe it’s because of her mother.” I was conscious of testing her, wondering if she knew how Sonia’s mother belittled her talents, if she’d seen the photographs of Madame Gray. I didn’t know what it meant that all these years later I still wanted to know Sonia better than Suzette did, to lay claim to some little part of her she’d never otherwise shared.

  “Maybe,” Suzette said, her tone and expression as noncommittal as the word. If she knew Sonia’s secrets, she wasn’t going to tell me. I felt uncomfortable, like I’d broken a rule, so I changed the subject and asked about Sonia’s engagement, her fiancé.

  Martin worked for a creative-arts afterschool program for high-school kids. He and Sonia had been dating for nearly five years. He’d proposed to her in the first six months, but she thought it was too soon. Three years later, when she started to want to get married, he was the one dragging his heels. Finally, after months of arguing—“He was doing that typical, why-mess-with-a-good-thing routine,” Suzette said—Sonia broke up with him. Two months later, he showed up at her apartment with a ring.

  I resisted the urge to ask how Suzette coped with all of that inner turmoil. She was the sort of person whose solution for a breakup was ice cream. After Sonia’s father died, Suzette gave her a teddy bear. But Sonia had decided she hated stuffed animals—she found them creepy—so she hid the bear under her bed. If Suzette ever asked where it was, Sonia planned to pretend it had just fallen under there.

  “I’m glad they’re back together,” Suzette said. “She was strange when they were broken up.”

  “Strange how?”

  “She became sort of unreachable. I mean, I hardly saw her, and even when I did she wasn’t all there. You know the way girls are when they get a new boyfriend?”

  “You think she was seeing someone else?”

  Suzette shifted position and grimaced. She rubbed a small circle on her belly. “I don’t know,” she said. “I asked her once, and she said no, but you know that thing she does when her eyes dart back and forth?”

  I nodded. “Why wouldn’t she have told you?”

  “You know how she is.”

  “I don’t know if I do,” I said.

  “She likes to add mystery to her life. She’s the mistress of the pointless secret.”

  “She doesn’t tell you everything?” I cringed, as soon as the question was out of my mouth, at the combination of surprise and judgment in my voice. I sounded as immature as a fifteen-year-old.

  Suzette gave me a rueful smile. “How would I know?”

  I thought of Sonia saying, “I’ve decided to tell you everything,” how I believed she meant not just then but always, how I believed it would always be easy to tell her everything in return. “Did she tell you she wrote to me a couple months ago?”

  Suzette nodded. “Two or three weeks ago we went out for Martin’s birthday, and Sonia got really drunk. I haven’t seen her that drunk since college—remember how she used to upend a bottle of vodka like it was water? Anyway, that’s when she told me. She said you’d never written her back. She said maybe you didn’t really exist, that you’d just been her imaginary friend, but I said no, because I remembered you. She said she might as well have written to Santa Claus. Then she started talking about how you’d never forgive her. She said sometimes she understood that and sometimes she didn’t.”

  I bristled at the thought that there might be criticism in Suzette’s voice. “Did you know what she was talking about?”

  Suzette shook her head. “That’s the first I’d heard of any drama between you. After college she just told me you two fell out of touch. But I assume it had something to do with a boy.”

  “It did,” I said. “What else did she say?”

  “She wanted to know if there were things I’d never forgive her for. I said, sure, there were probably lots of things, and then she wanted to know what. She kept saying, ‘Would you forgive me for being stupid? Would you forgive me for that?’ ” Suzette sighed. “She said, ‘Isn’t there love that could survive anything?’ I said no, probably not. She said yes, there was, that her father had loved her like that.”

  “He did,” I said.

  “She was lucky, then,” Suzette said. For a moment our eyes met and locked. I had a feeling I couldn’t explain, that Suzette and I were more alike than I knew. Then Suzette looked down at her belly, both hands going to it now. “That night she was so drunk Martin had to practically carry her out of there. She kept saying, ‘Forgive me, forgive me,’ as he dragged her out. I don’t know who she was talking to.”

  I could picture this so vividly it was like I had a memory of it, Martin carrying her away while she shouted “Forgive me” at no one in particular. I was surprised by how sad the image made me. “What did you say you wouldn’t forgive her for?”

  “I didn’t. I don’t like hypotheticals.” She toyed with the tassel on a throw pillow. “Actually, I’m angry at her now. We had a fight when she called to say she was going out of town. I lost my temper. She’d promised she’d be here to help with the baby. That’s what friends do.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s why I don’t know where she is,” Suzette said. “I didn’t ask. She said, ‘I’m having a hard time,’ and I said, ‘I’m having a baby,’ and then I hung up on her.”

  “What kind of hard time?”

  “I don’t know,” Suzette said. “Maybe something to do with the guy she was seeing, whoever he was.”

  The guy she was seeing. I had a vision of Will leaving a message on Sonia’s answering machine, saying only, “It’s me.” I thought of him leaning over to plant a kiss on the rise of her breast. “Does she ever talk about Will Barrett?”

  “Her ex? Yeah, she brought him to a party we had like a year ago.”

  I stared at her. It’s okay, I thought. He told you that. “But it wasn’t a date,” I said.

  “I hope not. She was with Martin then.”

  “You don’t think he was the guy?”

  Suzette shook her head. “I doubt it. She said seeing him was really awkward. Why?” The last word disappeared into a gasp. I froze. After a moment she smiled again. “I’m a little uncomfortable,” she said.

  “Can I get you anything?” I said. “Should I boil some water?”

  She laughed. “What’s that boiling water for, anyway? I’ve never understood that.”

  “You’re not going into labor, are you?”

  “No, more’s the pity. The baby’s just moving around. I am so ready to deliver, I can’t even tell you.” She frowned. “I’m just so angry at Sonia for not being here.”

  “Maybe she’ll be back in time.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “And even if she is . . . I mean, if you can’t count on someone to be there when you need them . . . I wonder if we should even be friends anymore.”

  I’d ended my friendship with Sonia by deserting her in the middle of nowhere, my tires kicking up a cloud of dust. Suzette sounded like she’d end hers with a memo. She went on to say that her anger might be the hormones talking, that she’d no doubt feel much less angry at Sonia after the baby was born, or would, at any rate, be too preoccupied to think about it. But as I walked away from Suzette’s apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking about the calm with which she’d suggested bringing their relationship to a close, as though that would erase all the time and affection between them, as a house fire destroys your photographs, leaving you to start over without any record of where you’ve been.

  After we’d been friends for five years, Sonia gave me what she called an anniversary card. On the front she’d drawn our old logo, the C and the S intertwined, and inside she’d written a list. One hundred pounds of chocolate, three thousand Cokes, three cavities, one cross-country drive, thirty trips to the Amarillo mall, one trip to Graceland, thirty-six pairs of sandals, five frat parties, seventy-five late nights at the pa
per, eighty-three prints I would’ve measured wrong, one first kiss, twenty-three viewings of Dirty Dancing, seven hundred and two fights with my mother, eight hundred talks about love, one friend for whom I would write all these numbers down.

  At the time I found it amusing that a person who struggled so with numbers would see a friendship as a kind of math. Now I thought it made sense. I remembered Sonia saying, “Numbers are everywhere,” and I thought that because numbers were difficult for her she was forever aware of their presence. A relationship was a series of additions and subtractions, and maybe she couldn’t understand why I couldn’t forgive her because, while sleeping with Owen was a big minus, the balance remained in her favor.

  But for me a relationship was a story. It was made up of individual moments, of snapshots: I could see Sonia standing on her bed, singing “Climb Every Mountain” at the top of her lungs, or baking a cake at midnight, making the frosting from scratch, the two of us eating the cake with our fingers straight from the pan. I could remember a night, two weeks after I learned about my parents’ separation, when I lay awake in our dorm room, crying so quietly Sonia couldn’t possibly have heard me, but she rose to comfort me anyway. Even in her sleep she knew she was needed. But when I thought of these things, I couldn’t keep the memories discrete, just as when I looked at the old photographs in Oliver’s attic, I’d never been content with the single image each picture contained. I’d always had to imagine what happened next.

  Someone who found my album from the last trip I took with Sonia might look at that final photograph, of Sonia laughing in a beauty mask, and from that image extrapolate a happier tale. But when I looked at it I saw not the laughter but the mask. Once you know the end of the story, every part of the story contains that end, and is only a way of reaching it. Sonia disappearing in the rearview mirror.

  Oliver sprawled out at the bottom of the stairs.