It was late afternoon by this time, but she’d opened up Empirical’s offices for us at seven a.m.
“No, that’s all right,” I reassured her. “I was just looking for a little escape myself.”
“Keep me company, then,” Mrs. Whitney said, patting the plastic chair beside her. “We can catch up on all the gossip.”
I’d filled her in on my grandchild and outlined the progress of the show when I’d arranged to use the office as a location. But I didn’t think that was the kind of gossip she was interested in.
“Hugo Fielding seems very nice,” she said. “Very admiring of you.”
“He’s very admiring of Stella,” I said.
Things did seem different between the two of them here than they had been in LA. Not only physically closer, but freer, it seemed, which made perfect sense. Here they could do whatever they pleased.
“I wouldn’t be concerned about that,” Mrs. Whitney said.
“Really?” I said, surprised. “Why do you say that?”
“There’s something artificial about it,” she said. “It hits one almost like a bad smell.”
Had I just not gotten close enough to detect it? They certainly smelled pretty warm and cozy every time I’d been near them.
“Maybe I’m just disappointed that the lovely Sutton Foster didn’t get to play the part,” continued Mrs. Whitney. “Did I tell you she wrote me?”
“Sutton Foster wrote you? No!”
“A lovely handwritten note on the most beautiful stationery. She told me how much she loved the book and admired me as a character and a woman. We met for tea at The Carlyle before one of her shows. You know she plays often at the Café Carlyle.”
“Right across from Bemelmans,” I said.
“She would have made a lovely Alice,” said Mrs. Whitney.
“What might have been,” I said.
“Well, I’ve got a wonderful new friend out of it,” said Mrs. Whitney. “We’ll have to all get together one day.”
That idea thrilled me more than even the prospect of first meeting Hugo. I was about to press Mrs. Whitney to make a date when I noticed how tired she looked around the eyes. She’d already shot her scenes; she didn’t need to be here any longer. We could talk about our celebrity friends another time.
“Unless Kelsey still needs you for something, you can go home if you want,” I told her.
“I have to stay here to lock up.”
“Kelsey and I can do that,” I said.
She looked at me in surprise.
“We did it together plenty of times,” I reminded her.
She laughed. “That’s true. So much has changed, I’d forgotten that you two practically ran the place at one time.”
“We always knew you were there to save us if we screwed up.”
“I have the feeling you’ll do just fine without me this time.”
I noticed for the first time, as she left the office, how much frailer she looked, thin and small. Rather than the boss I’d always seen as all-powerful, she seemed almost like a child now. I wanted to protect her, but at the same time, I wished she’d come back and keep protecting me.
* * *
At the end of the day, as we were packing up to leave, I got a text from Hugo.
Drink?
I looked up. He was standing across the room. He smiled and shrugged.
I shook my head no and went back to packing.
My phone chimed again.
Late dinner?
Too tired, I typed.
The three dots danced on the screen for a moment. I looked over, but he was staring at his phone, typing, deleting, typing, deleting.
I slipped my phone in my back pocket and went back to packing. I wanted to leave the place in perfect shape for Mrs. Whitney, as if we’d never been there. And I didn’t want to get together with Hugo until I’d had a chance to judge for myself whether the rumors I’d heard about him and Stella were true.
Then suddenly he was in front of me.
“Are you angry?” he said.
“No, why would I be angry?”
“It seems like you’re avoiding me.”
Part of me wanted to confront him, to ask him point-blank if he was with Stella, so I would know what was what and where I stood. Where he stood. But he could say anything. What mattered was what he did.
“Just busy,” I said.
“You’re from New York, right?” he said. “I was hoping you could show me around.”
“I’d love to,” I said. “But everything’s so crazy right now. Maybe you and Stella can go exploring together.”
“Ha!” he said. “The only thing Stella likes to do is shop.”
“What do you want to do?”
“If I’m on my own, I’d say go to the theater,” he said. “My dream has always been to be on Broadway.”
“Really?” I said, surprised and amused. “Like, singing and dancing?”
“No, I see myself in some tragic drama like Long Day’s Journey or Death of a Salesman.”
“So why haven’t you done that?” I said.
He shrugged. “Nobody asked me. I guess no one thought my work in My Other Honeymoon demonstrated that I had the emotional depth to rip my heart out onstage in front of a live audience.”
“And do you?” I said, half-teasing.
“Nobody is in a better position to judge that than you,” he said.
“Me?” I said. “Why me?”
“You’re the one I’ve been ripping my heart out in front of,” he said.
He looked hard at me then, as if asking me to reassure him that there was something emotional between us, that the connection had been real.
“I’m sure you’d be great at theater,” I told him. “You should pursue that after we wrap.”
It may not have been a marriage proposal, nor was it a total fuck you, but it was the best I could offer at that moment.
“I wish I could,” he said, “but Stella wants me to commit to this indie she’s putting together based on the life of her surf instructor, Tane. Have you met him? Anyway, that shoot starts in Hawaii right after we wrap.”
“That will be nice for you and Stella,” I said coolly.
I wrapped one of the books on the table in packing paper, knowing full well that it wasn’t going anywhere, that it belonged right there on the table.
“I know Stella can be a pain,” he said, “but we’ve known each other a long time and I really love her.”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” I said.
“She can be ridiculous, but she listens to reason. She agreed in the end to come out here and do this your way.”
“I heard that was thanks to you.”
“I had something to do with it,” he admitted.
“You two seem very close,” I said.
“We are close! That’s why we wanted to work together. We’re the best of friends.”
He kept standing there with a big boyish grin on his face. Did he not know what I was getting at? Was he telling me something in a veiled way that I failed to understand? Fuck veiled. My year-long masquerade to the contrary, veiled was so not my style.
“I heard there’s more than that between you and Stella,” I found myself saying.
“What do you mean?”
“I heard you two were having an affair.”
I stopped all my fussing around and looked at him directly then. I wanted to stare him in the eye and judge whether he was telling me the truth.
“Liza, I swear to you that Stella and I are not having an affair,” Hugo said, looking straight at me, in the voice I trusted.
I felt so much better. For about ten seconds. Until I realized I was not sure whether I believed him. Why was the truth always so much more elusive and complicated than it was supposed to be?
nineteen
When I saw Josh’s name on my phone, I nearly didn’t pick up. But I hadn’t picked up the last three times he called, and I felt too guilty to blow him off again. I could ple
ad work and baby and all-around life craziness, but the truth was that I was scared to see him again. I couldn’t handle the push-pull of our inevitable attraction, coupled with my conviction that we were never ever getting back together.
“Hey,” I answered, already formulating my apologies and excuses.
“I broke up with Zen,” he blurted.
“Oh no, Josh. What happened?”
“It just… I think if you’re going to get married, you shouldn’t have any doubts, right?” he said.
With David, I’d been flooded with doubts, but dismissed every one of them. It was normal to be jittery, I’d told myself. We’d work out our problems over time. I’d been quaking so hard on my father’s arm as he walked me down the aisle that he’d leaned over and said in my ear, “You don’t have to do this.”
I’d often wished I could go back and lift myself right out of the picture at that wedding, except then I wouldn’t have Caitlin. And having her had been worth everything else.
“You’re right,” I said. “You shouldn’t be questioning whether you want to do it.”
“I never had doubts about you,” he said.
“Except whether you should marry someone you couldn’t have kids with.”
“You’re the one who had doubts about that.”
I hadn’t had doubts. I was sure I wanted to marry him, and then when he told me he wanted kids after all, I was sure I didn’t.
“You know, you’ve been feeling unsure about this relationship with Zen ever since we started talking again,” I said. “Maybe it’s time for you to let it go.”
Kelsey, who had been in the shower, walked into the living room of our corporate flat.
“Time for who to let what go?” she said, rubbing a towel over her wet hair.
Josh, I mouthed.
“Hi, Josh!” she sang out, and then continued on her way into her bedroom at the far end of the hall.
“Kelsey and I had a good talk,” Josh said.
Josh had agreed there could be a character in the show based on the Josh character in the book, as long as Josh the character bore no resemblance to Josh the person, apart from their very common first name. Kelsey and I agreed we could live with that and figured that since the pilot script was already written, we’d work out the character of new Josh if we actually went to series. We could base that character on Kelsey’s ideal man instead of mine.
“Yeah, I’m glad we worked that out.”
After resisting the idea for so long, even Stella was suddenly enthusiastic about the new re-envisioned Josh. She joked that maybe he could be like her surf instructor Tane, though Tane was unwittingly already the model for the character Mrs. Whitney was going to run away with as well as the subject of Stella’s biopic. He was apparently a very inspiring guy.
“Listen, Liza, can we get together?” Josh said. “I really need a friend right now.”
You know when you really want to say no but you also know you can’t? This was one of those times for me. I did not want to be the one to comfort him after his breakup. I also did not want to change back out of my pajamas. But Josh was one of the people I cared the most about in the world. He must really need to talk to me if he picked up the phone and called me when I hadn’t been returning his messages. The idea of turning him down made me feel like too big a shit.
So I agreed, and then sat there paralyzed on the couch, staring at the floor and dreading the hours ahead. I was still sitting there when Kelsey walked back into the living room, fastening a large pearl earring in one ear. She was dressed in her New York evening uniform of short black skirt, high-heeled black sandals, and silky black shirt.
“What’s with all the black?” I asked her.
“It’s my sophisticated New York look,” she said happily. “I think it’s working: Guys like me better here.”
“Are you going out on a date?” I asked.
“No, I’m going to try out this new app that helps you hook up with people in your immediate vicinity,” Kelsey said.
“Like, you and the guy on the other end of the bar connect by app and have sex in the bathroom?”
“How did having sex in the bathroom get to be a thing?” Kelsey said. “I mean, a cab, a restaurant booth maybe…”
“A restaurant booth?” I gasped.
“But public bathroom. That’s just dirty, and not in a good way.”
“Want to try out the app at the Jane? I told Josh I’d meet him there. He broke up with Zen.”
“This is your moment,” Kelsey said.
“I don’t want it to be. Will you come along with me as a favor?” I asked her. “It will help establish that he and I are in the friend zone.”
* * *
Josh was already sitting at the bar, nursing some kind of strong-looking cocktail, when we arrived. He looked as handsome as ever, perched there all alone. When we all used to come to this place, it was always packed, but tonight the bar stools on either side of Josh were free.
Josh lit up when he caught sight of me across the room, then frowned when he spotted Kelsey, then smiled again when he realized it was Kelsey.
“Hello, stranger.” Kelsey gave Josh a big hug.
Josh and Kelsey had been friendly apart from me, but they had also maintained a respectful distance. Kelsey claimed that Girl Code required that female friends not get too close, physically or emotionally, to each other’s boyfriends, even the exes.
“Hey, I think this is where I met you for the very first time,” Josh told her.
Kelsey looked quizzical. “Really? I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, you were with that really straight dude you used to date, a banker or a hedge fund manager or something.”
“Thad.”
“Poor Thad,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Josh. “I heard about what happened. It was awful.”
“That kind of thing shouldn’t happen to anybody,” Kelsey said. “But that doesn’t take away from the fact that he was a jerk.”
“Okay, yes, thank you. He was a jerk, especially to Liza. I think she brought me along the first night for protection.”
“Protection?” Kelsey said, casting a little smile and a wry glance toward me. You haven’t changed much, she seemed to be saying.
“Thad was always suspicious about my age,” I said. “I thought if he saw my young boyfriend, he’d believe I was young.”
“I do remember thinking you were hot,” Kelsey told Josh.
“I’m not feeling so hot tonight,” he said.
Josh was usually a beer drinker—or a weed smoker—but we supplemented the Old-Fashioned he’d been nursing with three shots of whiskey, lined up on the bar.
“I know this probably doesn’t help right now,” I said, “but it hurts even when it’s the right thing to do.”
“I did love her,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “But you can love somebody and still decide you can’t be together.”
I wondered if he understood that I was talking about him and me.
“What if I never meet anybody else?” he said.
“Are you kidding?” said Kelsey. “I’ve got this new app that could probably find you ten women in this very bar tonight who would have your baby.”
“Tinder?” said Josh.
Kelsey gave him a pitying look.
“Poor boy is stuck back in 2017,” Kelsey said.
The two of them bent their heads over Kelsey’s app, which seemed as effective as cocktail wieners on a fishing line. Only a few minutes in, Kelsey was trading messages with a man at the far end of the bar.
“Okay, Julian,” she said. “I’m going in. Josh, there’s a whole wonderful world of baby-ready women out there dying to meet you. Liza, I’ll see you on the set early tomorrow morning.”
And then she left us alone.
* * *
Josh wasn’t the only one feeling a buzz by the time we left the Jane. I gave him a hug goodbye on the sidewalk, trying not to hold it too long.
“Cal
l me tomorrow and let me know how you’re doing,” I said.
I turned to walk away but he said, “I’ll walk you.”
“It’s okay; I’m fine,” I said.
Even when you’re alone late at night in New York, you’re surrounded by hundreds of people.
“Can I please walk you?” he said.
I held back for another minute, and then I caved. I thought of Mrs. Whitney saying that this was it, now is all we have, and I thought this was it with Josh. I’d had him like this all the time for a long time, and then I didn’t have him at all, and now for this one moment I had him again. Let it happen, I told myself. See what you feel.
We were walking right next to each other, so close we could feel each other’s heat, but I edged closer and slipped my arm through his. I caught a strong scent of Old Spice, the deodorant he’d first started using in junior high. He held up the fact that he still used it as a testament to his sense of loyalty and devotion.
We walked companionably through the streets of the Village and Chelsea as we had so many times before. It felt eerily as if it were three years ago, and we were together, and in love, and nothing had ever come between us. I was living my current life instead of analyzing my old life or trying to create my new life. Infinite bliss, according to Buddha: I wanted what I had.
In front of my building, he kissed me. I responded as if it were a basic goodnight kiss at first, keeping myself in check, but I found myself melting into the kiss, into him. And feeling this turned on by him was such a precariously small step from falling back in love with him.
“I love you,” he murmured.
Which made me melt further.
Until I imagined tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning, we’d get up, tickled by what had happened, abashed, intrigued, excited, afraid, ecstatic. Our morning routine would be cozy and comfortable, like a favorite old sweater you find in the back of your closet and wear everywhere until you realize it’s got holes all over it.
“You can’t love me,” I said.
Even though, of course, I loved him too.
“I will always love you,” he murmured.
But feeling did not have to lead to action. It did not have to mean that you changed your life.
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