Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  His lips brushed my forehead, then my cheek. I shivered, closing my eyes. I kept my legs pressed tightly together as he caressed me, whispering in my ear, swirling his fingertips against my breasts and my belly. “Imagine that we are in the water,” he whispered, twining his fingers in the tangle of my pubic hair. I felt my hips lifting, as if they were borne upward on a wave, my thighs locked and trembling as he bent his head over my breasts. It hurt a little bit when he slid inside of me, but I didn’t bleed, and Vijay didn’t seem to notice my sudden, shocked inhalation, or that I’d started to cry, from the pain of it and from the joy that was just as intense, the feeling of being fused with someone else, being entirely connected, of not being alone anymore.

  I thought of him when I woke up in the morning. At night, I’d remember something he’d said, the way he’d wrapped his hand around mine, showing me how to touch him. I was giddy, giggly, girlish, lighter than air. For the first time in my life, I found myself forgetting to eat. When we were together, I would take in every detail of how he looked and moved, of what he said, and replay them at my leisure when I was alone and he was with Chitra. I let myself imagine a life together, the two of us coming back from the pool to my house, eating lunch together in the kitchen, walking together in the cool of a summer’s evening.

  Vijay had never lied to me or led me on, never once suggested that such things were possible. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that grew into certainty every time we swam that he was falling in love with me, that he would leave his wife for me, that we would have a life together.

  If this was going to happen, I knew that some changes were in order. My house would look shabby and small compared to the eight-bedroom mansion that he and Chitra had bought twelve years before (how did the lovelorn manage before the Internet? I’d wondered as I’d looked up street maps and the purchase price and, eventually, downloaded satellite pictures of his house on Google Earth). I considered the rooms in which I’d spent almost my entire life and saw all the ways they were wanting: the linoleum that was thin and graying, the carpet worn down to the fibrous backing in spots, the dingy paint and scratched-up toilet bowl, the scraggly rhododendron beside the front door.

  I started slowly, with a pile of renovation magazines: Kitchen & Bath, Cottage Style, Metropolitan Home, and Country Living, figuring that I’d pick from the best of all worlds. After a few weeks’ consideration, I ordered new tile for the kitchen floor, big hand-glazed squares imported from Mexico, the color of butterscotch, and a tiled backsplash in a pattern of azure and gold and plum.

  Every day I fixed something, bought something, did some small bit of rearranging, imagining with each change Vijay’s reaction to coming home to such a sweet, cozy little place. (He’d complained to me often about the extravagant size of his current home, the trophy house Chitra had pushed for, with the two-story foyer and the his-and-hers bathrooms, and rooms Vijay claimed he didn’t even understand. “A mudroom? Are we pigs?”)

  Outside my little house, the landscapers I hired planted rosebushes and morning glory and trumpet vines that bloomed profusely and twined around new wrought-iron railings and the latticed frame I’d built around the front door. Working from a picture I’d seen in a magazine, I hung new shutters in dove-gray and had the house painted a warm, soft white the catalogue called buttermilk. I pulled up the worn old carpet and had the oak floors underneath refinished, and I painted the walls in shades named after foods I no longer ate: bisque and cream, vanilla and honey. I drew up plans to redo the kitchen, combining the dining room and living room into one big “great room,” with one of the new flat-screen TVs anchoring one wall, new couches and a red-and-gold wool rug. Bigger windows, sliding doors, a brand-new master bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub big enough for two, a shower that converted to a steam stall… nothing was too grand for me to imagine, and to imagine sharing with Vijay.

  Besides, I could afford it. The house was paid for; disability paid for Jon’s room at the Crossroads. The only expenses I had were health insurance and my car payments, and there’d been years when I hadn’t bought much besides groceries and the occasional new bra or cotton panties or socks. The small savings account my parents had left me for going to college and caring for Jon had been quietly increasing in a money-market fund, and I’d added to it every time I got paid, holding on to just what I’d need to pay my bills, socking the rest away. I’d never been acquisitive, never traveled, never wanted fancy cars or clothes (even if they’d fit me)… but now it felt as if I couldn’t get rid of the money fast enough. Sometimes I imagined it whispering to me at night: Spend me, spend me, spend me.

  So I pored over my plans and painted walls and ripped up carpet and tilled a patch out back for a garden. On Saturday afternoons, I took the free classes at the local home-improvement store and learned how to strip paint from furniture, how to install a new sink and hang wallpaper (I felt such a pang at that, remembering the pink-and-green stripes that Val had yearned for, hearing her voice in my head: All I wanted was a nice pretty room with pink and green. A nice pretty room like Addie has). I suffered through blisters and splinters and hot-glue-gun burns, throwing out my back, ripping out a fingernail, not minding any of it as I imagined Vijay’s delight.

  I finished my bedroom first, splurging on a king-size mattress and a headboard, because Vijay had once told me how he loved to read in bed once the day was done. I tossed the percale sheets that dated from my parents’ marriage and replaced them with the most sumptuous, silky-soft, outrageously expensive Egyptian cotton I could find. I ordered a fringed cashmere throw that spilled over the foot of the bed like a pool of caramel, and set up a wooden table against one wall that I stocked with a coffeepot, a grinder, and a little refrigerator underneath for juices and cream. I pictured the two of us in bed on a lazy Sunday morning, swapping sections of the newspaper before we got out of bed and went swimming.

  I wasn’t his first. Vijay had told me that early on, one rainy morning when we lingered at the juice bar, waiting for the skies to clear before attempting the dash to our cars. “Over the years, I have had friends,” he said. “Friends?” I’d repeated. And he’d shrugged, cocking his head at me in a gesture that made it easy to imagine the little boy he’d once been, stuffing his pockets with sweets, then turning his charming smile on whatever woman caught him. His friends were nurses, a psychologist who worked down the hall, one of his son’s teachers. There was a mutual understanding about these adventures, he explained: he was looking for companionship, not to leave his marriage.

  “And your friends?” I asked. “What were they looking for?”

  He lifted his shoulders again. “Who can say?”

  “That would be you,” I said. “The one who was there.”

  He smiled at me, touching my cheek. “Funny girl.” He paused, thinking. “Perhaps they wanted excitement. Something new.”

  “A treat.”

  His eyes crinkled in the corners when he smiled at me. “A treat. I like that.”

  I knew without asking that all of his “friends” had been white. I could guess that they’d see him as exotic, with his accent and his dark skin, and even his arranged marriage. He would have been a kind of diversion, something new on the menu—strange spices, a different taste, a rich dessert they could savor but wouldn’t want every night. I guessed that none of them had ever fallen in love with him: these were probably experienced women, sophisticated ladies who’d made places for themselves in the world, who’d never been stuck at home, or behind the edge of a table at a diner, or anywhere at all.

  It was snowing the first time he came to my house. We’d been swimming and had our drinks, and then Vijay had asked if I wanted to go with him—to the hotel, I assumed; this was where we’d gone each time we’d been together. “Come home with me,” I said.

  “Addie,” he said, and I could tell from his tone, from his eyes, that he was getting ready to deliver a speech that he’d given before, one that would tell me not to get my hopes up, one that would let me dow
n easy.

  “Please,” I said. I could hear the rawness in my voice, and I made myself pause and start over. “Please,” I said softly. “I’d just like you to see where I live. It would mean a lot to me.”

  He shrugged, that sheepish, charming shrug, and held my car door open for me, then got into his own car and followed me home to Pleasant Ridge. I could imagine his lips tightening as he turned down my street—its jumble of forty-year-old ranch houses and smallish lawns must have been a shock after his palatial neighborhood—but once we were through my front door, it was just the way I’d imagined it: the house warm and snug, scented with the green chili I’d been simmering since the night before. Vijay made his way along the newly finished floors, exclaiming over each little touch: the vibrant tiles in the kitchen, a bouquet of roses I’d set in a ceramic vase I’d painted myself, the sumptuousness of the bedroom, how soft things were, how sweet, how warm.

  At some point after we’d made love, I lay beside him, half asleep, and watched as he collected his cell phone from the table next to the bed, the one I’d painted with half a dozen coats of cherry-colored lacquer. Icy rain pattered on the ceiling. I listened as Vijay spread his hand against my belly and made excuses to his wife.

  After that, he came over every Wednesday afternoon, once we were done swimming, and sometimes on Saturdays. I’d installed a pair of bedside lamps with bubble-glass shades, tinted pale-green and turquoise, that cast the room in a cool underwater glow. I would keep my eyes open for as long as I could—I was still so shy of my own body that it was almost painful to look at it—but always I would open my eyes and watch his face at the moment of orgasm. He would squeeze his eyes shut, press his lips tightly together, and I would feel him shudder against me and think, I made him feel this way; I did this to him.

  Afterward, he’d roll toward me. He’d kiss my ear and my neck, pulling the sheets out of my clenched fists, easing them down my body. “You see, Addie? You’re lovely. Lovely,” he would say, sliding his fingers against me in a steady rhythm that sped up gradually and made me arch my back and, finally, curl against him, panting and spent.

  He had never lied to me. But still, I let myself hope. One afternoon in July, with sunshine pouring gold through the skylight, I said, “Do you ever think that we could be…” I let my voice trail off, hoping he’d start where I’d stopped.

  Instead, he sat up and swung his legs off the edge of the bed. “Addie,” he said. “I have always been honest with you.”

  I felt like I had swallowed a stone. I closed my eyes, dreading what was coming, unable to prepare myself for it, to thicken my skin or harden my heart for the blow. I wasn’t like his other ladies. I had no defenses.

  “I am sorry, my dear,” he said in his accented speech. “But you must know that I will never leave my wife. And I think…” This time, his voice trailed off. “Perhaps it would be best if we were to spend some time apart.”

  “You don’t want to see me anymore?” I asked, hating the pathetic way I sounded but unable to keep from asking.

  “Of course we will see each other,” he said, pulling on his underwear (white cotton boxers that looked as if they’d been ironed. For the first time, I wondered by whom). “We will swim.”

  I felt numb, ill, miserable, lost. But I made myself move, get to my feet, pull my robe around me, walk him to the door. I said that I understood. I told him I would be all right, that I had enjoyed him. “My treat,” I’d said, and I even managed a smile. None of the things I said were true. I didn’t understand: If we were happy together, and if he was unhappy in his marriage, why not end the marriage and be with me? I wouldn’t be all right: I would be lonely again, trying to fill all of those empty hours and empty rooms with something, an unnamed and unknown something, because I didn’t have food to do the trick anymore. I’d be even worse off than I’d been before, because now I knew exactly what I was missing: the feel of the water moving over my body, the warmth of his body beside mine in a car or on a couch; his crooked teeth, his charming, head-cocked grin, his thick fingers moving against me.

  “Addie,” he said at the door, with his hands on my shoulders. “Do not look so sad. All is well. You will find someone.”

  I bent my head, then raised it, staring at his face, his liquid brown eyes, his crooked teeth, trying to memorize it, because I knew I would never see it again. I would never find anyone else. I didn’t see how I could put myself through it: the lift and plummet of hope and rejection. I didn’t have a thick skin, I didn’t have the practice or the skills. I wasn’t strong.

  “I understand,” I made myself say. “But could you do one thing for me? Just one thing first?”

  Vijay frowned when I told him what it was. “It is not possible,” he said curtly (and in that curtness, in his tensed shoulders and stiffened neck, I imagined that I was seeing a part of him that Chitra was privy to on a daily basis, a part that his “friends” never imagined).

  “Please,” I said. “I won’t bother you, and I won’t ask for anything else. I just want this one thing.”

  So on the Friday night before Labor Day weekend, in a little town between Milwaukee and Chicago, Vijay Kapoor took Addie Downs to the fair. The bright colored lights of the midway that blazed against the indigo sky. The air was scented with fried dough and grilled sausage, and the moon hung heavy and orange as a pumpkin. He paid twenty dollars for a roll of tickets, bought me a lemonade, and, after six tries, won me a teddy bear at a game using high-powered water guns to inflate balloons.

  We played Skee-Ball. We pitched Ping-Pong balls into goldfish bowls, and slid dimes across a scarred sheet of Plexiglas, trying to get them to land on our lucky numbers. We rode the rickety Ferris wheel (a man with vacant eyes and tattooed hands slammed the metal safety bar down across our carriage, and I wondered what he’d say if I’d told him that a year ago that bar wouldn’t have closed at all). Vijay wouldn’t look at me, but he did take my hand as our car rose to the top of the wheel and hung there, rocking, suspended in the sky. “Buy a flower for the pretty lady?” asked a woman with an armful of roses, and Vijay did.

  Outside the fortune-teller’s patched tent, a pack of laughing teenagers passed by. One of the girls had the same pink teddy bear that I did. She swung it loosely by one of its arms. Her jeans dipped low enough to show the pink elastic edge of her panties, and as she ran by, laughing, I felt enormous, and ancient, and exquisitely out of place.

  I left my bear sitting on a bench. I sat quietly with my hands in my lap as Vijay’s big car purred along the highway. When he pulled into my driveway, I said, “Thank you for a lovely evening,” the way I’d imagined saying when I was a teenager, coming home from the dates I never had.

  His face looked troubled in the glow from the dashboard. “Addie,” he said, “are you sure you’ll be all right?”

  “I am sure,” I said. “Sure I’m sure. I’m fine.”

  “You are crying,” he observed, and ran his finger along my cheek to prove it.

  “I’m fine. Thank you again,” I said, and hurried out of the car. For a minute, I thought he’d come after me, racing across the lawn and up the steps and saying, Addie, I have been a fool. Don’t leave me. Never leave me. When I turned, I could see him in the car, behind the wheel, but couldn’t make out his expression. I unlocked the door and walked inside, and after a minute, his car slid out of the driveway. He flashed his lights, blipped the horn once. I barely slept that night, sitting up with the telephone, which, of course, didn’t ring. On Monday morning I went to the pool as usual. “Where’s your friend?” asked the tangerine, waiting to hand me a towel from behind the check-in desk.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I guessed that Vijay had found another pool. After that night in my driveway, I never saw him again.

  FORTY-ONE

  “Oh, no,” said Greg Levitson. “No, no, no.” He was shaking his big bald head back and forth in time with his nos. It was Sunday morning at the TD Bank branch in downtown Pleasant Ridge, and it looked as if everyo
ne who wasn’t in church or at the mall was waiting in line for the tellers.

  “Take you ten seconds,” Jordan wheedled.

  Greg Levitson stopped shaking his head and glared at Jordan. “I could lose my job.”

  “Sure you could,” Jordan said. “You could also lose your job if certain other facts came to light.”

  Greg pursed his lips, closed his eyes, and exhaled a stream of stale coffee breath in Jordan’s direction. “You’re blackmailing me?”

  “I’m doing no such thing.”

  “This is unfair.”

  “Nobody said life was fair,” said Jordan. He crossed his legs, ate a candy cane, and stared up at the ceiling as if he had all the time in the world.

  Greg Levitson had been in Jordan’s class in high school. Back then Greg had been a slope-shouldered, pink-faced boy with a sunken chest and wide, almost womanish hips, whose brown hair was starting to recede by senior year. He’d gone to Pennsylvania for college, had put in a few obligatory years in the big city (in his case, Philadelphia) before returning to Pleas-ant Ridge with a wife and baby in tow. Greg’s and Jordan’s paths would cross occasionally—they’d nod “hellos” in the supermarket, exchange “how’ve you beens” at the Exxon station, and that might have been the end of it, except one night Jordan had pulled over a blue Chevrolet doing seventy-five in a fifty-five zone, and found his former classmate trembling behind the wheel.

  “Please,” Greg had whispered after handing his license and registration through the window. “Please don’t make me get out of the car.”

  Jordan looked down and saw that Greg Levitson was wearing a dark-blue gown that left one of his meaty pink shoulders bare, high-heeled shoes and sheer black hose. His cheeks were rouged, and his fingernails were fire-engine red.

  “You know the speed limit, right?” Jordan asked.

  Greg’s chins were quivering as he spoke. “It was a dare,” he said in a raspy voice. “I don’t do this normally.”