“You’d better come home early, Ariadne. And don’t even think about asking me to buy another dress. You have a perfectly good dress in your closet that you’ve only worn once.”
I didn’t ask for another dress. I wasn’t going to have it on for long, anyway. I had decided that I was going to give Blake a very special birthday gift, something I’d been saving for what felt like forever.
“Can we get a room here tonight?” I asked.
The party had just started. Blake and I stood inside a reception hall at the Waldorf among lots of men in suits and women in dresses. Blake was sipping a Heineken and his forehead crinkled.
“Why?” he said.
I whispered into his ear, “Because I love you.”
He got it. He smiled. I wanted to kiss him but I couldn’t because Mr. Ellis came by. He took Blake away and led him around the room, smacking his shoulder and tousling his hair, introducing him to people as “my boy Blake” while I sat alone.
I watched them move through the crowd. After a few minutes I saw two familiar faces. I should have expected that Tina and Summer would be here—it seemed as if Mr. Ellis’s guest list included every single person he and Blake knew, and everybody but Rachel and Leigh had accepted.
“Having fun?” Del said, sitting down next to me.
He was in a suit, wearing his pinkie ring, and he smelled of tobacco and cologne. We started talking and he got me feeling the way I had at the Christmas party last year—excited and nervous. I had to stop feeling like that and I had to stop trying to figure out what color his eyes were, because Blake was my boyfriend, Del wasn’t nearly as handsome, and I was going to be his sister-in-law someday.
But Del was seated at table three for dinner, like me. I walked with him to a room with ornate chandeliers and flower arrangements. He sat on my left and Blake sat on my right. Other people joined us—women escorted by men who Blake told me were his father’s partners at the firm—and then Mr. Ellis was there, and suddenly the two seats next to him were filled with Tina and Summer.
“Hi, Ari,” Tina said, waving across the table, her stringy hair brushing the collar of her plain gray dress. I wondered what Summer had told her, what story she’d crafted to explain why I never called anymore. “Look, Summer,” Tina said, smiling and pointing at me the way parents point when they take their kids to the zoo. Look, there’s a giraffe, there’s a bear, there’s an average boring girl. “It’s Ari. Did you see Ari?”
“I saw her,” Summer said, unrolling the silverware in her napkin. She mumbled a greeting across the table that I returned, only because we were in public and I had to be civil.
“Why is she at this table?” I whispered to Blake.
He shrugged. “My father handled the seating arrangements. You don’t mind, do you?”
I shook my head. I pretended not to mind. I ate my salad even though it was made with a kind of lettuce that was more suited to rabbits than humans.
“Who’s that floozy?” Del whispered into my ear.
“She’s not a floozy,” I whispered back. “She’s an ex-friend of mine. She and her mother cater your father’s parties. You’ve met her before, actually—at your club on New Year’s Eve.”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.” He picked up his drink and finished it off. It was his third, but he asked the waiter for another. “My father loves introducing Blake to chicks like her. There are two kinds of women, he always says. The nice ones you marry and the cheap ones you screw. He thinks that guys need a lot of cheap girls before they end up with a nice girl.”
I felt my stomach drop as I realized that Mr. Ellis was more like Mom than I’d ever imagined. Guys need a lot of cheap girls before they end up with a nice girl. There are plenty offish in the sea. You don’t want to get stuck with the first one.
I wished Del hadn’t opened his mouth. Now I was concerned about Mr. Ellis, who was smiling at Summer like she was the most adorable thing in the room. I thought back to the day before I’d found out about the mono, when Blake had had to go to a strip club with his father. How long had Mr. Ellis been introducing cheap girls to Blake? And what did he think about his father’s philosophy?
I tried not to think about it during dinner. I tried to enjoy the melon wrapped in prosciutto, the grilled pork tenderloin with the caramelized apples, and the butternut squash. Blake held my hand beneath the table and when the meal was finished, he slow-danced with me to a Spandau Ballet song. My heartbeat quickened when a cake with HAPPY 21ST BIRTHDAY written on it arrived, because the party was winding down and soon we’d be alone.
“Here’s something for you, son,” Mr. Ellis said while I was eating my cake. He crouched between me and Blake and handed him a wrapped box that Blake opened. There was a gold watch inside. Blake thanked him and Mr. Ellis slapped his cheek. “Just keep making me proud,” he said.
Blake lied to him when the party was over. He said that he was going out with some friends and he wouldn’t be home until late, and then he brought me to a room with a queen-size bed, beige curtains, and a matching carpet covered with rows of brown squares.
“My gift isn’t as nice as this,” I said, stroking his watch.
He left it on a night table. “Your gift is much nicer than this.”
I smiled and started thinking about practical things. “I can’t take the Pill because I have migraines,” I said, because I couldn’t think of a better way to mention the practical things.
“Since when do you get migraines?” he asked.
“Since always. I haven’t had one for a while. But I’m still considered a migraine sufferer,” I said, which he found funny for some reason. He laughed and I kept babbling. “So do you have—you know—”
“Protection?” he said with another laugh.
I nodded and he told me that he’d been carrying protection in his wallet for months. Then we went to the bed, where he slipped off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, and dropped them on the floor. I was still in my dress but not for long. Soon it was next to Blake’s shirt, resting on those neatly lined-up squares. I reached over and turned off the lamp. The only light in the room came from behind the curtains, from the building across the street. I heard car horns honking, voices traveling up twelve floors, and my own breath.
There was enough light to see Blake. He leaned over me and I trembled at the muscles in his arms, the pearly glimmer of his smile. His pants joined the rest of his clothes on the floor and he guided my fingers below the path of hair on his stomach, where he felt long and warm inside my palm, hard but soft, like Patrick’s hands. Then his mouth was all over me and noises came out of my mouth, little panting sounds like the ones I’d made in the Hamptons, but they didn’t embarrass me this time. Nothing did. Nothing seemed dirty or sinful or wrong, even though I was about to break a major Catholic rule. I kept my eyes closed until I heard paper ripping and a snapping noise.
“Don’t be scared,” Blake said.
I felt his weight on me and I was definitely scared. “Wait,” I said. “You didn’t make a promise like you did in the Hamptons.”
I saw a sympathetic smile in the hazy light. “I can’t promise that.”
He kissed my forehead before pressing his groin into mine, and I heard talking in my head—my voice saying that Summer’s tattoo must’ve hurt and her voice saying So does sex the first time you do it, but I didn’t let that stop me.
Summer was right. But I wasn’t going to let it stop me either, and the painful part passed quickly and turned into something fantastic. Blake gripped my hands and held them flat on the bed, his chest rubbing mine as he moved with slow thrusts, while I absorbed every part of him and he took every last inch of me.
“Are you okay?” he whispered.
I nodded, feeling a fiery jolt in the middle of my body that rose to my head. I guessed that Blake was feeling the same thing, because he made those tennis-player-hitting-the-ball noises and tilted his head back. Then I knew that I was much better than okay, and I couldn’t imagine feeling any other way.
nineteen
I hadn’t planned to fall asleep. I’d known I wasn’t going to get home early like Mom wanted—I assumed I might sneak in at one or two and still have time to get some rest before the SAT—but I’d never expected to wake up at the Waldorf with my head on Blake’s stomach. I looked at his rising and falling chest, his slightly parted lips, and the sheet that started at his waist and ended at his feet. The sight of him made me ignore Mom and the SAT.
I kept looking until Blake opened his eyes. He smiled and pushed my hair out of my face, and I thought that Mom had been wrong when she said They’ll tell you anything to get laid and then they just move on to the next victim. I knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
Then I glanced at the digital clock on the night table. It was after seven and the SAT was at nine. I panicked, gathered the sheet around my body, and slid to the edge of the bed.
“What’s the matter?” Blake asked.
“I’m supposed to take the SAT this morning. I’ll be late.”
“You won’t be late,” he said. “I’ll drive you straight there.”
“But I have to go home and change … I can’t show up like this,” I said, reaching down to the carpet to pick up my dress. “I need to take a shower and wash off my makeup, and eat something.… I can’t screw up the SAT. I have to get into Parsons.”
He laughed, grabbed my arm, and pulled me toward him. “Don’t worry so much, Ari. The SAT is no big deal. My father will get you into any school you want. You know that.”
I still wanted to do well on the test. A low score would disappoint me and devastate Mom. I could already hear all the critical, cutting things she’d say if I blew it.
But it was hard to tear myself away from Blake. I stayed in bed with him for a while longer, wrapped in his arms while he kissed the back of my neck and made me feel like I had nothing to worry about anymore, like I wasn’t a four out of ten in the looks department and I wouldn’t die alone and I didn’t have to fight and struggle for everything the way Mom did.
It was eight-thirty when Blake dropped me off at my house. He wanted to come in with me, to second my story that we’d gone dancing at Del’s club and lost track of time, to convince Mom that we hadn’t done anything that wasn’t nice. But I wouldn’t let him because I was afraid of the humiliating things Mom might say, things like You should think with your brain. It’s in your head, Blake. Not in your pants.
I ran to the front steps as Blake drove away, and Mom opened the door when my key touched the lock.
“What the hell is going on here?” she yelled in my face.
I was in the foyer as she slammed the door with a deafening bang that made me flinch. I stood there in my wrinkled dress, feeling like Evelyn in high school, strolling in after one of her late nights with God-knows-who doing God-knows-what.
“We went dancing after the party,” I said. “I lost track of time.”
“Dancing,” Mom said. “Where? On the backseat of Blake’s car?”
“Corvettes don’t have backseats, Mom.”
I regretted that sentence as soon as it came out of my mouth. It sounded snotty. Mom stared at me like I was someone else, like I was a big disappointment, worse than Evelyn. But what Blake and I had done wasn’t wrong, and I couldn’t let her tell me that it was, so I kept on lying. I swore that nothing happened and that I was sorry for staying out late without calling and it would never happen again. Then I felt really guilty because she believed me.
“Wash your face and brush your hair,” she called after me as I raced up the stairs toward my room. But there wasn’t any time for that. I tore off my dress, threw on jeans and a sweatshirt, and rushed outside into a cold day. Mom had already started the car.
I took the SAT at my old school instead of Hollister because Brooklyn residents were allowed to take the test in their own borough. Summer did the same thing. She sat one row away from me and six seats ahead, looking well rested in a white turtleneck and designer jeans while I looked positively mangy. She turned around and glanced at me once, obviously aghast at my messy hair and the black mascara smeared under my eyes. Then she went back to pretending I didn’t exist.
For a moment I wished I could talk to her, that I could tell her what had happened last night. Last night was the kind of thing that a girl wants to share with people like sisters and best friends. But Evelyn and Patrick had driven to Boston with the kids this weekend for a Cagney family reunion, I wouldn’t have discussed it with Leigh even if we had patched things up, because it wouldn’t be nice to discuss sex-related things about her cousin, and of course I couldn’t talk to Summer anymore. So I focused on the test, on the verbal section, the endless analogies.
I was exhausted and my head was killing me. The words on the page blurred together—medicine: illness:: law: anarchy; extort: obtain:: plagiarize: borrow; tenet: theologian—What exactly was a tenet? I’d seen that word when I was taking practice tests, but now I couldn’t remember much of anything.
We took a break before the math part and I watched the back of Summer’s head while I invented my own analogy: real is to fake as love is to limerence, and you had a lot of nerve to tell me that I have a little crush on Blake, Summer. I love him and he loves me and now you can’t say that I barely know him and that I haven’t even slept with him because none of that is true anymore.
I wanted to sleep. I wanted to eat. I wanted to think about Blake and last night. But after the break, I just sat and held my forehead in my hands, reading about Susie, who had to visit towns B and C in any order. There were lines on a diagram, and I was supposed to figure out how many routes she could take, starting from A and returning to A, going through both B and C, not traveling any road twice.
I couldn’t possibly have cared less about Susie or her routes.
Summer, on the other hand, looked like she knew exactly how Susie could go through B and C without traveling any road twice. I stared at her while she breezed through the questions, twirling her hair as she filled in the answers with a pencil. She was done before anyone else, so she closed the exam book, leaned back in her chair, and examined her perfectly manicured nails.
I wanted to grab her pencil and plunge it through her heart. This wasn’t fair. She never even studied. But she’d probably had the sense to go to bed early last night and to eat a healthy breakfast this morning. My stomach was growling and time was running out, and I knew I was bombing the SAT even though I’d aced so many practice tests, while Summer hadn’t taken a single one.
When it was over, I found Mom waiting outside. “I hope you did well,” she said nervously as she drove us back home. “Do you think you did well?”
I stared through the windshield, mustering up the strength to lie. “I think I did okay.”
Mom’s head snapped toward me. “Okay? What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” I said, feeling queasy.
We stopped at a red light and I listened to her wedding ring tap the steering wheel.
“Well,” she said, “if you didn’t score as high as you should have, you can take it again.”
I guessed that made her feel better. I just nodded and kept quiet. My headache was getting worse and my mind was racing with thoughts of last night. I was worried about the test, but I remembered what Blake had said this morning. I told myself that the SAT didn’t matter because Mr. Ellis was going to get me into any school I wanted.
Mr. Ellis wasn’t at home the next weekend when Blake brought me to the penthouse and took me upstairs to his room. I’d never been in there before and it was surprisingly small, with an old shag rug and lots of textbooks scattered across a desk.
His bed was pushed against a wall and his wool blankets scratched my skin while we made love for the second time. We went there every chance we could find, through Thanksgiving decorations coming down and Christmas lights going up. Mr. Ellis was never home. Sometimes we had sex and sometimes Blake repeated what he did in the Hamptons, and I didn’t hide my face in my arm anymore. Then ther
e were other times when all we did was stay in bed for hours with our arms around each other, and it was as nice as everything else.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
It was two days before Christmas and one of those nights when we just kissed and talked while we were wrapped up in woolly blankets. There was snow on the ground outside and the temperature was brutally low, and I loved being in his hideaway of a bedroom, where we were safe from the entire world.
He told me that he didn’t want to go to law school. Spending the summer at Ellis & Hummel had been proof that he couldn’t stand wearing suits and that legal work bored him to tears. But he couldn’t come up with a way to break the news to his father, so he was going to finish college, take the firefighter exam, and tell Mr. Ellis when the time was right.
“You have to do what you want,” I said. “I’ve figured that out lately.”
He smiled, pulling off his clothes and mine. I felt his lips on my skin and his breath on my neck.
“Blake,” I said afterward. “Everything we talked about—the house and the kids and the future—you don’t mind waiting for a few years, right? I mean … until I’m done with college and grad school? Because I want those things … but I won’t be ready for a while.”
“I’d rather have it now. But for you … I’ll wait.” Then he said that he had an early Christmas present for me and he put on a pair of shorts, walked across the room to his desk, and returned to bed holding out a tight fist. He uncurled his fingers to show me a big square ruby attached to a gold chain. “This belonged to my mother,” he said. “I want you to have it.”
His mother. I realized that he loved me even more than I’d thought, because he wouldn’t give such a precious gift to just anyone.
Blake fastened the chain around my neck and got under the blankets with me, where we quickly passed out. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been asleep when I heard a cough—and opened my eyes to find Mr. Ellis standing in the doorway, wearing a suit and an unhappy face.
Other Words for Love Page 20