“What’s the Ivy?” I asked.
“God, as if I could love you girls more. Please never learn the answer to that.”
“No, seriously,” I said. “What is it?”
“It’s not even anything great. It’s just a restaurant where people go to get their pictures in the magazines that you girls seem to love so much.”
I could see the other girls notice how much he sounded like someone’s dad with that last part: that you girls seem to love so much.
There were things Sam Decker didn’t know, and couldn’t explain to us.
“So couldn’t you just not throw your kids’ birthday parties at the Ivy?” I asked, partly to make it seem like I knew the answer to his problem to make up for the fact that I didn’t know what the Ivy was. “Throw them in the backyard, or every year you make it a tradition that you go to Anchorage for their birthdays. I don’t know. It just feels like you have more control over these things than you’re making it sound like.”
Maybe I just hoped.
“Yeah, but the thing is, I’m pretty sure Abby would want to have them there.”
“I mean, don’t all kids rebel from their parents at some point? Don’t they always eventually find some fault in the way their parents did things?” Lindsey asked. “Your kids can spend freshman year of college talking about how horrible all those birthday parties at the Ivy were and about how they’re going to be a carpenter or a math professor.”
“Yeah,” said Nina. “Angst is hot. They’d probably get laid a lot.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never went to college.”
“Yeah, us either,” said Lindsey. And we all raised our glasses.
• • •
Abby Madison canceled the European leg of the Existential Madame publicity tour when she got the call. She did it right away—the news was announced almost simultaneously with news of Sam Decker’s death—like she didn’t even have to think about it, which seemed, to us, to mean something. We felt guilty. It was something we would have told him, just hours ago, if we had known. Instead of snickering every time her name and face flashed on the screen of his phone the way we did all night, confirming for him, I’m sure, how absurd she was. How ridiculous it was to the three girls he was with, this concept of conducting a failing love affair across continents. Girls who had never left Florida.
Despite the frequency with which her name crossed people’s lips, on television, and in bars and into cell phone mouthpieces across the world, she eluded everyone for weeks after he died. The dozens of photographers camped outside her house had failed to capture a single picture of her. This only made his L.A. memorial service, which would be televised on E! and VH1 and even, in part, on some of the news channels, that much more newsworthy, because we knew she couldn’t skip it. It was a full month after he had died, and so many people were expected to come that it had to be held in the L.A. Coliseum.
She was already on the stage when the service began, next to his mother and the siblings we felt like we knew, and a head shot of Decker big enough for everyone in the crowd to see, an early one that made him look young. Some humane producer had agreed that they didn’t have to walk onto the stage, red-carpet-style, putting even more focus on them, making the whole thing even more of a circus. So they were already onstage when the cameras started rolling. She was sitting so still, staring so robotically straight ahead, that at first we thought maybe there was AV trouble, and the picture was frozen. She wore giant black Jackie O glasses, and by wearing them she took her place as another symbol of glamorous tragedy. The beautiful wife the more beautiful widow. She was even better than those who had gone before her, though, because she was the Hollywood version, and everyone knew that was bigger and shinier, with higher stakes and a bigger budget. The black lace dress she wore was tasteful, conservative—the fashion blogs and glossy mags respectfully, demurely praised her for it for months after—but it didn’t hide her figure, and her legendary curves called to mind the chemistry that must have laid between her and Decker, so much stronger, like everything else, posthumously.
We didn’t recognize her from the girl in the bar—the desperate, needy one whose calls and texts punctuated our night.
About thirteen minutes in, just after the second speaker took the lectern to the right of her seat, she did something we never expected her to do. Something Jackie O, who stayed behind the veil, never did. Right in the middle of a C-list costar talking about how big Decker’s heart had been, she took her sunglasses off to fish something out of her eye, and changed everything. With that one gesture, a light downturn of the wrist, her grief morphed from the most coveted fashion accessory in America to a violent, deforming scar. The kind that looks like it hurts long after it actually does. Her grief had aged her—she looked haggard—but also made her small, vulnerable, like too much clapping after each set of remarks about Decker could have blown her over. It had been a month. We’d have thought she’d have it together enough to wear makeup by then. Without it she looked, suddenly, like a person. A sad one. She was only five years older than us.
That moment she showed us her eyes was like the moment the album you’re listening to across a long, scenic road trip, or while watching the sun set into the Gulf of Mexico, cuts out. And you see, suddenly, how dependent, how wrapped up in the music whatever you’re marveling at was, and how different it is without it. Not worse, maybe, but something else entirely, with entirely different forces at work. Something that will break your heart in an entirely different place.
We were not the only ones to notice Abby Madison’s decision to take off her sunglasses. The already hushed, precious air became more sacred still. The collective breath the stadium held was so noticeable that the speaker stopped talking. And it felt like, for all the online blog tributes and all the slideshows of Decker’s career, that unplanned moment of silence was the truest, most pure acknowledgment of what had been lost. Even if it lasted only a handful of seconds.
When she showed us her eyes, we saw them: the secrets Decker had been talking about. And it made everything he had told us that night feel that much more true. Her eyes confirmed that that night had really happened. That it wasn’t just a dream we’d all had at the same time. It brought us right back to that table in a bar we used to go to, and reminded us that we had lost something, too.
She did not acknowledge the interruption she had caused but to put her glasses back on and nod, so imperceptibly that some people argued against its having been given, this permission to commence whatever small consolation and pretty words people had planned. Permission not only to continue, but to keep the words pretty, and focus on the glamour of his career and the drama of his exit, instead of the black, ugly absence that stood after he finished making it. That was the burden she would bear so that we did not have to—it was a burden only someone who loved him could bear. One of therapy bills and panic attacks, and feeling alone in rooms full of people you had known for years. Of having lost some central joy in getting to do the job you had beaten millions of other starry-eyed girls to get to do, sacrificing, along the way, other joys, like summer camp and sleepovers and prom. Of sitting in America’s most expensive and exclusive restaurants, across from men most women would have murdered their husbands to sit across from, drowning in the noise of all the ways in which they would never measure up. It was a burden, the beleaguered, barely there, this-is-all-I-can-manage nod made clear, that no stadium could hold.
• • •
I had my own reasons for hating Lila Tucker, not least because she let me pedal away that day. I wanted her to know how mad I was, and how lucky she was. How lucky we all were to have a friend like Nina Scarfio. I wanted her not to take for granted the things she seemed to be that day. I wanted her to find a way to make it up to us. I expected weepy phone calls and small gifts left in unexpected places. Surely the daughter of the Crayola Unbreakable could find a creative way to say I’m sorry. I
would have forgiven her if she asked to be. But after that day I didn’t hear from her. I had to wonder if this was the opportunity she had been waiting for all along.
Lindsey and I still saw each other, of course, but life without Nina was like living one long, continuous Monday morning, or the first day back at school after a long holiday break. There was a lot of watching movies we’d already seen in dark rooms without talking. We were more polite with each other than we had been, and left each other’s houses earlier. I felt tired more than anything, and I could tell from her glassy eyes and sluggish gait that Lindsey felt it, too. It felt like we were waiting for something, and when Nina came back we realized we had been.
It was during that year that Nina was away and we suddenly didn’t know Lila anymore that I met Jay. By the fall of Lila’s second year at the day school I had been seeing him for a few weeks, and had already grown tired of him. According to both the movies we had watched at the sleepovers we no longer had and all the unsolicited advice on males that Nina was always giving even though she’d never had a proper boyfriend, there were certain things you avoided doing in the early stages of a courtship. Bored as I was, I had decided to do them all, just to watch him squirm. I had come just short of complaining about the explosive diarrhea I had had the night before or leaving a used tampon in the toilet in my attempts to alienate him and humiliate us both.
It was Halloween the night I decided to cut him loose. Or force him to cut me loose, really. It was the first Halloween that I didn’t dress up for. Even the year before, when Lila and Nina had stood us up for our costume-making session, we had thrown something together at the last minute. We were the four corners of the country—Florida, Hawaii, Washington, and Maine. We just dressed like the people who live there do—flannel for Seattle, a lei for Hawaii, fisherman sweaters for Maine. Nina got to be Florida, of course.
That year, I had eyed the slutty nurse and bunny and maid costumes at the ninety-nine-cent store, but I couldn’t think of anything sadder than a girl with no friends treading on the appeal of a body not quite finished yet. Sitting in Jay’s backyard, I could hear the whoops of trick-or-treaters, and wondered how many brand-name candy bars they were getting, and if they were fun-sized or full. I decided to tell him everything. If I couldn’t scare him away, clearly the extent of my friends’ depravity would. And the fact that I didn’t even care. That I maybe even thought it was funny.
He didn’t say anything when I finished. I didn’t realize I was crying until I brushed a strand of hair out of my face and it came back wet. I waited for him to ask me questions—whatever happened to the little girl; if the dog died right away or suffered—but he didn’t have any. All he said was, “That’s really fucked up.” Simply, like it was just the fact that it was. He didn’t offer any words of comfort, or try to assure me that everything would be okay. In a world where people who loved each other the way Nina and Lila clearly had could lose each other so young, before they even went anywhere or made any real decisions about the way their lives would go, there wasn’t a lot to say. And the only thing to do was not try to make it right, but to go to movies where Sam Decker made sure that justice was served and that all ended well. That all the girls got in trouble for drowning the little girl and her dog or none of them did. Or maybe he stepped in before it had the chance to happen at all.
In the silence that settled after Jay made his declaration—the smartest thing I’d ever heard him say—all this seemed implicitly clear in a way it hadn’t before.
I remember it smelled like laundry, because our lawn chairs were right next to the pipe that released the steam from the dryer in the basement. When I look back on it, I remember seeing my breath when I spoke, but I probably couldn’t. It is rarely that cold in Florida. It was a chilly day, not cold, but cool enough that you had to wear an outer layer when the sun started to set. It was unseasonable weather, and I took it as another sign that everything would always be wrong—a little off—from then on. When I think about it now, it occurs to me that I was finally getting a taste of what the weather might be somewhere else at the exact moment I was committing myself to the boy who made it unlikely I ever would. Because that was the moment that I decided that there were worse things than ceasing my commitment to torturing this nice boy who seemed to have a preternatural acceptance of the hard truths the rest of us were only starting to understand.
Five
Sal shuffled back over to our table for the third time that night, showing us even more attention than he normally did, even though we knew by then that we were one of his favorite groups of regulars. He had clearly just pulled up his considerable slacks, which were always slumped just above his butt crack, or just under his rather womanly pectorals, because his giant belt buckle led the way like a figurehead at the bow of a ship.
Decker’s face was so boyish in its happiness, spotting his new friend, that I suddenly wanted to hug him for reasons totally divorced from the length of his IMDb profile.
“More trivia, my man? What do you have for me this time?”
Sal shook his head somberly. “I wish, my man, but no. We have business to deal with.”
We had never heard Sal call anyone “my man” before.
“Okay, fine,” said Nina, “he’s on more than just The New Mickey Mouse Club, but you already have your picture.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Sal, “and right now I don’t care. How do you girls know those girls over there?”
We knew who he was talking about before he looked over at the corner that Lila et al. were huddled in. They smiled back at us with irritated, smug half-smiles. I knew Nina wanted to throw a bottle at their heads even more than I did.
“Why?” Nina asked. She studied Sal’s face like she might find the answer there, too angry to just wait for it.
“They told me you girls trashed the bathroom and I went in there and it was a mess. Wet toilet paper everywhere. A phone number written on the stall with permanent ink. And I told them I been talking to you girls all night. You haven’t gone to the bathroom once.”
“Have we really not?” Lindsey asked, genuinely amazed. “That can’t be good for you.”
Sal gave her a warning look.
“Then they told me they wanted to buy you girls drinks, but that they wanted me to bring them over there first. They wanted to write a note to go with them. I told them I’d deliver the message for them and they said forget it.”
“Cunts,” said Nina.
“Hey, man,” said Sal. “I don’t want no trouble. I told them to leave you girls alone. That you’re nice girls. I told them if they keep it up they’re gonna have to leave.”
“Yeah!” I said.
“Kick ’em out!” said Lindsey at the same time.
Nina was too busy slaughtering them with her eyes to join in the campaign.
“Hey,” said Sal, snapping to get her attention back on him. She dutifully complied.
“I mean it. No more of these antics.”
“We didn’t even do anything!” Nina said. “Like you said. We’ve been here the whole time.”
Sal gave her a Yeah, right look that we wouldn’t have thought he had in him, not having any kids.
“Listen,” he said. “They’re only two booths away from where Bobby’s sleeping. If you won’t do it for me, do it for him. For all of us. Those girls have never seen Bobby fresh off a nap. They have no idea what they’d be in for.”
Bobby was not a morning person.
“I’m going to smoke this cigar,” he said, holding it up. “When I come back, everything’s gonna be good.”
“Of course,” said Lindsey.
“Jesus,” said Nina. “Way to hold your ground.”
Lindsey only shrugged, knowing she wasn’t actually the one Nina was mad at.
“Okay, c’mon, what’s the deal?” Decker asked as Sal walked away. “It’s more tha
n just that one thing. The lizard or whatever. Do you routinely battle with them over guys? Like, are they coming after me next? Am I going to be taken hostage?”
The fact that they might not be coming after him was too rich to not laugh at, especially given the fact that there was no standard, by this point, by which we were not entirely, hopelessly, dry-mouth-in-the-morning plastered.
“Uh, yeah, that’s totally it,” said Lindsey, breaking into slaphappy, I-can’t-remember-what-we’re-laughing-about laughter. The kind that isn’t really reliant on the joke, but feels good in and of itself. He joined in, even though he had no idea what was funny in the first place.
“Or you,” he said, actually pointing at me even though I was less than a foot away from him and eye contact would’ve done it—he was even more shitfaced than us. “What’s-his-face? Jay? Did you steal him from them?”
The idea of Jay in any sort of verbal exchange with Lila or Carine or the patterns sent Nina and Lindsey into another round of hysterics, the source of which Decker was once again mercifully clueless.
“And what about that girl?” he said, nodding at Lila. “Those other girls look pissed, but she’s like the mom or something. She has the look of a lady in church, she just needs a bonnet.”
She did look Sunday-service placid, but not in a doting or reverential way. She looked bored. Like, middle-of-the-homily bored. It was like the rest of us were playing a game—guessing how many marbles or pieces of candy were in a jar, and she already knew the answer but couldn’t say, and she was half tired of waiting for us to catch up with her, and half amused at how far off our answers were. I wondered what it was she thought she knew that we didn’t, certain that she couldn’t have been more wrong.
“I mean, maybe she’s a little overdressed,” I said, “but I wouldn’t call her a church lady.”
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