Bad Habits

by Amy Gentry

  Just then the bartender finally turned around, and, desperate enough to abandon my server-honed bar manners, I waved my twenty like a flag. “There must be some mistake. I didn’t take your job. I’m Margaret’s research assistant, not Bethany’s.” The bartender made her way toward me. I hoisted myself forward with reckless disregard for the slippery patch on the bar, ordered a pitcher of the special, and sank back into my seat, relieved.

  Bird, however, was frowning. “That’s not right. That can’t be right.”

  “Well, maybe not,” I said with a trace of bitterness. “But it’s true. She gave the job to someone else.”

  “Who?”

  I pointed across the bar. “See the ascot?”

  Bird visibly paled. “Him? He got the job?”

  “She says he lights up the room, or something.” The pitcher, thankfully, was making its way toward me. In a moment I would be free. “Honestly, Connor’s my friend and he’s a great guy, so no hard feelings.”

  “He’s not even her type. You’re her type.”

  “So, you’ve said.”

  Bird was obviously even drunker than I’d thought. His voice had risen to a treble, his rheumy eyes threatened to overflow, and he almost slipped off his barstool twisting around to get a better look at Connor. “But I read his essay. He has no promise.”

  “Okay.” I wrapped my hands around the pitcher handle with one hand, the glass with the other. The bartender held up the twenty inquiringly, and I shook my head, no change, eager to escape the Bird and get back to my cozy booth. She smiled, the waving of the bill forgiven.

  I started to walk away, and then I turned back for a moment.

  “Hey, Bird,” I said, a little nervous. “You’re a Joyner Fellow, right?”

  He didn’t even look at me.

  “Where did you study? And what was your project?”

  “No promise at all,” he muttered.

  Cracked. I walked away, noting with irritation that the soles of my boots were now permanently stickied. Wherever I walked, the floor under me would feel dirty for the rest of the night.

  * * *

  I arrived home that evening, mildly tipsy and utterly elated, to find Gwen curled up on the sofa watching a rerun of Project Runway.

  “Where were you?” I cried, forgetting that I was avoiding her. “We won! We actually won!”

  Gwen smiled sleepily. “Really? Congratulations.”

  “It was looking bad at first,” I buzzed. “Connor had pop music covered, and Aggressively Bland Matt knows sports. Morgan is a political junkie, and Letty knows a little bit about everything. But I wasn’t, you know, bringing much to the table. We could have used you on ‘New York, New York.’ Where were you, anyway?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “But then there was an Oscars category and one about horses, and—​you know Lily’s obsessed with horses, right? I’ve seen so many documentaries about them I cleaned out the category.”

  “Congratulations,” Gwen said again. “I would have sucked at that one.”

  “I know!” I was almost hugging myself. After winning at trivia, I had gotten more good news: a message from Lily’s doctor, confirming that the visit had happened as my mom described and apologizing for having billed the insurance incorrectly. A reimbursement check was on its way, and though I knew that could mean months, the relief was palpable. I still couldn’t get through to the Social Security office, but it seemed less important now that I knew my mom was being honest about one thing, at least.

  Overflowing with generosity, I pulled three twenties out of my pocket. “This is your share of the winnings, by the way.”

  “Keep it.”

  “You were there all season. You can buy me a drink sometime.”

  “No really, keep it. I flaked on the team,” Gwen said. “You were their pinch hitter.”

  “That hardly seems fair.” But I pocketed the money anyway, too fizzy for pride. “Thanks.”

  “I’ve been home all afternoon.”

  In my frictionless mood, I accepted the lie and sat down beside Gwen on the sofa. On-screen, Nina García was wrinkling her nose, and the contestants on the runway cowered. “Enjoying sobriety?”

  “I got a lot of work done. I did some laundry.” She made a face. “So, no.”

  “I got a job today. I’m Margaret’s new research assistant.”

  “On top of Bethany?”

  The phrasing amused me, but then nothing felt very serious right now. “She hired Connor instead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” It was, right now at least. “Connor said she’s already texted him four times in the middle of the night. Once to come over and set her coffeemaker, so it’d go off at the right time in the morning.”

  “Guess you dodged a bullet.”

  “Yeah.”

  We watched Michael Kors snark at someone.

  “Never lost two jobs in one week before.” I laughed ruefully.

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I’ve got the thing with Margaret,” I said, hurrying us past the danger zone. “Anyway, it’s probably for the best, not having an off-campus job. I feel like I’ve been missing out on all the fun parts of the Program—​don’t look at me like that, you know there are a few. I’ve just been working and studying and studying and working.”

  “It feels like you’ve been gone more than you’ve been here,” Gwen agreed. “It gets kind of lonely. Maybe that’s why I’ve been going out so much.”

  “Everyone’s just so nice.” Still glowing from the congratulatory hugs at the end of the night, I really felt that way.

  She frowned. “Some of them. But I get tired of the intellectual brinkmanship, you know? Everything has to be about winning. Even Trivia Night.”

  “Yeah.” Fleetingly, I wondered whether people were trying harder to impress Gwen than they were to impress me. The thought upset me, and I pushed it into the same box where I kept the fact that I still didn’t have a Joyner project and was drunk on a Wednesday night instead of working on it. “Well, winning’s nice, once in a while.”

  “Hey, do you want to watch a movie? I’m sick of this.”

  It was still early, despite the midwinter darkness outside. “Sure. What do you want to watch?”

  “Something comforting.”

  I picked up the remote and clicked through menus. “How about Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast?”

  “How about Disney’s Beauty and the Beast?”

  “I see the level of comfort we’re after,” I said. “What about a compromise: Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility.”

  “Make it Branagh’s Much Ado and we have a deal.”

  We settled in to watch the bawdy, joyful, sun-drenched film with its twinned pairs of lovers, one perfectly matched but callow and youthful, one mature and lasting, but too well-versed in each other’s flaws for love to be unmixed with hate. In my expansive mood, I wondered which of the characters I’d play. Not Hero, of course. Gwen was the Hero of any story. Maybe Beatrice, older and wiser and long since disillusioned. We laughed at the comedy and made fun of Keanu’s bad British accent and cried during Beatrice’s speech, and by the time Hero declared, “I am a maid,” solving everything, all I could think of was how good it felt to be next to Gwen again.

  It was only later that night, when I woke up stone-cold sober and couldn’t go back to sleep for an hour, that it occurred to me that in the play, Hero was innocent. Gwen was not. And it wasn’t Beatrice I resembled, but the bastard, Don John. I was fatherless, too.

  December 30, 2021, 2:01 a.m.

  SkyLoft Hotel, Los Angeles

  I knock on Gwen’s hotel room door, and it opens more quickly than I’m expecting. Gwen hovers in the doorframe in her robe, not opening it all the way. Her hair is slightly rumpled, her face flushed, and I can see that she hasn’t been asleep. I imagine her turning the room upside down, searching for the little circle of diamonds in my pocket. When she sees me, her right hand flies to her naked ring finger.
>
  I pull the ring out of my pocket. “Looking for this?”

  “Oh my god, thank you so much!” She laughs nervously, rubbing the bare finger as if it’s been injured. “I looked everywhere. I was so worried I’d lost it.” She stretches out her right hand toward me, a little white star of longing.

  A curious impulse keeps me from handing it over right away. I hold it up by the band and turn it slowly in the light, watching the facets flash in the dull hallway. “I’m so sorry I didn’t find it earlier. I overindulged at the bar.”

  “So did I,” Gwen said quickly. “Otherwise I would never have taken it off, obviously.”

  “I didn’t even realize I had it until a few minutes ago.”

  “It sometimes gets a little heavy after a long day.”

  “I’m just glad I didn’t send these pants to get cleaned.”

  “Yes, me too.”

  Gwen looks at me, and we both look at her outstretched hand. She opens the door a fraction of an inch wider, leans a bit further forward. I can see from her eyes that she’s alarmed, and wonder, for a moment, why. Then I realize, as she must have already, that I’m still holding her ring and have no intention of surrendering it anytime soon.

  We stare at each other awkwardly. Her hand drops back down to her side. I have her now, and we both know it. As long as I have the ring, I can ask her anything. I open my mouth.

  “Why didn’t you invite me to the wedding?”

  It’s not at all what I intended to say, in part because I already know the answer. We’re not friends anymore, not really. The accident dashed our rafts apart, permanently. But something in me must not know it, because the fear of being left behind by Gwen pokes at a cold, hard hollow at my core that seems to have existed long before our friendship, and I still cannot shake the secret belief that whatever she’s doing is the best and rightest and truest thing. Living in New York, leaving New York, going to grad school, leaving grad school. Marrying a famous director. Having children or not having children. It’s all perfect when Gwen does it—​and all wrong when I do it. We were supposed to be more than wives and mothers, weren’t we? But what does more look like? Me in leather pants, giving head to some Žižek wannabe after a talk? Nothing I do will ever be perfect.

  Now that’s something I can imagine crying about in a bar.

  But I know I didn’t, because Gwen’s face, her guilt struggling with horror at the unbelievable gaucherie of my question, tells me that it’s the first time she’s heard it. Also, that it’s the right question to ask.

  I double down. “I know we haven’t been close lately. But seeing you tonight reminded me . . .” I trail off. We were best friends, I almost say, but stop myself just in time. Instead, I pocket the ring again and fold my arms in front of my chest.

  “I know.” She sounds pained. “It all feels like such a long time ago. I wasn’t expecting to relive it all tonight.”

  So, we did talk about the past. But which past? The one where we picnicked in the forest preserve and watched movies late into the night? Or the Program, with its long silences punctuated by disaster?

  What did I tell her about the farmhouse?

  Gwen is watching me closely.

  I search for a way to frame the question without implicating myself. “So, that’s why I wasn’t invited? What we talked about earlier?”

  “No! God, no. I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “What, then?”

  She hedges. “Look, we hardly invited anyone from the States. It’s not easy to get to.”

  “How are the other guests getting there? Charter flight?”

  She looks down at her feet, and I know I’ve hit it on the head. “It’s mostly just family.”

  Family. When the Whitneys invited me to spend Christmas with them in Paris, all expenses paid, my mother didn’t say a word to stop me. She just relapsed. I had imagined singing carols to Lily over Skype that Christmas morning; instead I cooked ramen and bundled her into three sweaters when the heat went out.

  I go straight for the jugular, while she’s still upset over the charter.

  “I bet dress shopping with your mom was fun. What’d you end up with—​Valentino? Erdem?”

  She suddenly turns fierce. “I don’t owe you an explanation, Mac. You haven’t been great at keeping up either, since—​well, since I left.” She lifts her chin. “I thought maybe you had decided I wasn’t good enough for you anymore.”

  “That’s a laugh. Admit it—​you never walk away from anything unless you think you’re too good for it.”

  She gasps, her hand flying to her throat. “How can you say that, after everything that happened?”

  “After what, exactly?”

  I hold my breath. If she knows, now is when she’ll say it.

  She goes silent. Then she seems to gather herself, reach inside for strength. She levels her gaze at my pocket. “Please just give me my ring so we can both go to bed.”

  “I want to talk.”

  “Do you really think what we need is a heart-to-heart?”

  “We did when it was you asking.”

  She folds her arms across her chest.

  I soften my tone, the vocal equivalent of the coaxing hand she placed on my arm earlier tonight. “Gwen, please. We haven’t seen each other in years. I happen to run into you right before you head off to Europe to get married. It’s not just the wedding. I think we both know we’re not likely to see each other again, after tonight.”

  She sighs, but I can see her shoulders lowering, her defensive posture going slack.

  “It’s two a.m. Where would we even go?”

  “Anywhere. Wander around the hotel, pretend it’s the Riverwalk.”

  I give the nostalgia a few seconds to set in, and then sigh in faux resignation as I reach for my pocket.

  “Wait.” She hesitates, still blocking the doorway. “Hang on, I just need to get my room key.”

  I nod. As she turns toward her room, releasing the hotel door, I shove my foot in the crack for a moment and peer through the doorway into her hotel room.

  The bedclothes haven’t been turned down. She’s barely been in her room at all.

  She steps into the hallway and lets the door close behind her, and I see that what I thought was a robe is actually a long cardigan wrap over clothes that are flowy, but still chic. Even her loungewear outclasses me.

  “You’ve changed,” I observe.

  “We both have.”

  “I meant your outfit.” While she recovers, I add, “It looks comfortable.”

  She gestures dismissively. “Plainclothes.”

  “What, like a cop?”

  She blinks and laughs, as I understand a moment too late. “Airplane clothes. Early flight, remember?” She yawns. “Do you want to go down to the bar again? They might still be open.”

  “I’m done drinking for the night.”

  “There’s a lounge area near the elevators.”

  “Fine.” We start to head in that direction.

  Gwen yawns again, closing her eyes and covering her stretched-out mouth delicately with one hand. “How did we ever stay up so late, Mac?” Then she opens her eyes. “I mean Claire. Sorry I keep forgetting. Claire, Claire, Claire. Clarion call. Clair de lune.”

  “Claire’s Boutique.” Junky little cards with three pairs of earrings stuck through them for $5.99. In high school, I would sometimes pretend I’d dropped something and do a quick sweep of the floor underneath the racks. I always found at least one lone earring on the floor. Mismatched them to look like it was on purpose.

  “Why’d you change your name, anyway? I liked Mac.”

  “And I liked Gwen,” I say quietly.

  “Friends lose touch,” she says, a little desperately. “They meet again when life brings them back together—”

  “Usually when one of them gets married.”

  She sighs. “Well, then I’d say we’re right on schedule, wouldn’t you? Come on. Something’s on your mind. Go ahead and ask. Is it ab
out Andreas?”

  “You said he was ‘deeply private’; I didn’t want to pry.” I tamp down my sarcasm, thankful to have found a topic we evidently didn’t discuss at the bar. The main thing right now is to get her talking.

  “I swear, the details aren’t that interesting. We met last winter, skiing in—​ Ugh, you don’t want to hear this.” She throws me a sidelong glance. “ ‘Skiing in Aspen with my parents.’ I know how it sounds.” She flashes with irritation, then immediately softens. “I’m sorry. I’m on edge. Honestly, it’s this wedding. It’s not really important to Andreas and me. We won’t feel any different afterward.”

  “Then why do it?”

  “Mostly for my parents.”

  I try, and fail, to imagine it.

  “You know how they are. They don’t pressure me—​or at least, they don’t try to. They only want the best for me. But they’re just so generous. Too generous. I don’t think it occurs to them there’s anything in the world they can’t give me. And it makes them so happy, I just . . . let them.” Hearing herself makes her squirm, but she continues staring down at the ground, stubbornly refusing to look at me. “At first it was going to be just family. But then they started talking about how much money they’re saving doing it there, and I knew it was all over. My dad decided to use the excuse to improve the grounds, and my mom had the guest quarters renovated and expanded, and suddenly everyone in the world was invited for a weeklong vacation in Tuscany.”

  She really sounds a little miserable as she says it, but not quite enough not to catch herself on the last part. She looks up at me. “When I say, ‘everyone’, I mean their friends, not mine. Hardly anyone I know is going to be there.”

  “Is Connor going?”

  She blushes bright pink.

  “Wow.” Connor’s not on social media, though years ago I heard he’s teaching at a private school somewhere in upstate New York. In my mind, he’s somewhere safe, far away from anyone who could hurt him. Including me. “I didn’t know you were in touch.”