THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Close
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Close, Jennifer.
The smart one : a novel / Jennifer Close. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi Book”—T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96232-4
1. Single women—New York—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. 3. Adult children living with parents—Fiction.
4. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.L68S63 2013
813’.6—dc22 2012018662
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Front-of-jacket photograph © Mimi Haddon/Digital Vision/Getty Images
Jacket design by Abby Weintraub
v3.1
For Tim,
My favorite one
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Three
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Reading Group Guide
Other Books by This Author
CHAPTER 1
From inside her apartment, Claire could hear the neighbor kids in the hall. They were running from one end to the other, the way they sometimes did, kicking a ball or playing tag, or just running for running’s sake. They had their dog with them too, a big, sad golden retriever named Ditka, who always looked confused, like he couldn’t understand why or how he’d ended up living in an apartment in New York.
Claire muted the TV and listened to see if the kids were going to stay out there for a while, or if they were just waiting for their parents to take them somewhere. She hoped it was the second option. It was Saturday morning, which meant they had hours ahead of them. Having them out there made her feel trapped in her own apartment. Just because she was sitting on the couch in sweatpants and had no plans to leave didn’t make the feeling go away. She could sense their presence on the other side of the wall, so close to her. She could see the shadow of Ditka’s nose as he sniffed at the bottom of the door. They were invading her space, what little of it she had. And it was interfering with her plan to be a hermit for the whole three-day weekend, something she was getting better and better at.
Last week, she was crossing Broadway and a man crossing the other way looked her in the eyes, pointed to her face, and said, “I want to fuck you.” On the street, she’d blushed and walked away quickly. But when she got home she realized two things: The first was that the comment had pleased her. Claire was pretty, but it hadn’t always been that way. She was the kind of girl who grew into her looks, who suffered through an awkward stage of braces, unfortunate haircuts, and overalls in her teen years. Now, when men called out to her, “Hey, Princess. Looking good, beautiful,” she was grateful. She would duck her head and pretend to be embarrassed or insulted, but if they called out, “Smile, pretty girl,” she always obliged.
The second thing she realized was that the man on the street was the first person to talk directly to her in almost three days. She didn’t know whether to be impressed with herself or very disturbed. She chose a mix of the two.
THE KIDS IN THE HALLWAY were getting louder, and Claire turned up the volume on the TV, hoping that their parents would come out soon and tell them to come inside or at least quiet down. The kids’ names were Maddie and Jack, and they were somewhere in the nine-to-eleven age range. Jack was older, and starting to get that shoulder hunch that preteen boys get, like the whole world was so embarrassing, he couldn’t even stand up straight. Maddie was the kind of kid who believed adults found her adorable, shouting out things like “Purple is a mix of red and blue” in the elevator for Claire’s benefit and then smiling and looking down at her shoes, as if she were shy. They both had dirty-blond hair and buckteeth, and Maddie would find out soon enough that she wasn’t adorable or charming, so Claire always smiled at her.
She and Doug used to call them the Hamburger Helpers, because every night the smell of ground beef and onions came wafting out of their apartment. Sometimes Claire wanted to call the kids into her place to give them something to eat, anything that wasn’t meat and onions in a pan. It used to be a running joke—whenever they’d smell the ground beef cooking, Doug would say, “Is it tacos for dinner?” and Claire would answer, “Nope, just some good old-fashioned Beefy Mac.”
Together, she and Doug talked endlessly about the family. They wondered what possessed the Hamburger Helpers to raise a family in an average New York City apartment. Every Sunday they watched as the dad took the subway with Maddie and Jack to Fairway, watched the three of them return carrying loads of groceries, struggle onto the elevator, and go up to their apartment. Wouldn’t they have been better off in the suburbs? Wouldn’t things have been easier?
Claire and Doug laughed when Jack failed his spelling test and they heard the fight through the wall, heard Jack say, “Fuck spelling,” to his parents. They agreed that it was only going to get worse over at the Hamburger Helpers’ as Maddie and Jack hit puberty and hormones crawled all over their tiny apartment. They pitied the family and what was in store for them.
Now Claire realized the family was probably pitying her—that is, if they’d even noticed that Doug had moved out. Either way, they seemed to be getting a lot more annoying.
WHEN DOUG AND CLAIRE CALLED OFF their engagement, her friend Katherine had said, “In some ways, it’s worse than a divorce.” It was Claire’s first night out since the whole thing happened, and she and Katherine were at a wine bar near her apartment. “I guess it’s because it ended before it even started, so it’s like someone dying young.”
“Great,” Claire said.
Katherine wasn’t listening. “Or maybe it’s because by the time people get divorced, they’re usually like really sick of each other, and have done bad things and are ready to move on. With you guys, no one saw this coming.”
Claire figured this had to be the strangest response she would get. Katherine, a friend from high school, was so perpetually messed up that you got used to it after a while. Her first week in New York, she’d watched a thirty-two-year-old woman leap off the subway platform at Twenty-third and Park, killing herself as she got hit by the number 6 train. Katherine had skipped work for two weeks, leaving her apartment only to purchase a small white Maltese for eight hundred dollars from the pet store on the corner with her parents’ credit card. Things since then had been touch and go. Claire could forgive her strange reply. Surely everyone else would know how to be more appropriate.
&nbs
p; But Claire was wrong. Apparently no one knew how to react to her news. Her two friends at work, Becca and Molly, decided that their mission would be to cheer Claire up by telling her all of the bizarre love stories they knew. Sometimes the point was clear (“My mom was engaged before she met my dad, you know!”) and sometimes it wasn’t, like the time Molly told her about her sister who worked as a nanny and ended up running off and marrying the father of her babysitting charges, leaving his first wife in their dust. “Isn’t that romantic?” Molly asked. No, Claire wanted to say, that’s not romantic, it’s adultery. But she stayed silent and smiled.
Becca and Molly had been nice coworkers to have. They were all around the same age, all enjoyed getting an occasional drink after work to complain about the office, and were happy to have lunch together. She had always liked them. Until now. One afternoon in her office, as Molly told her about all of the friends she had who were getting divorced, Claire said, “Well, at least I won’t have to be Claire Winklepleck. Now there’s a silver lining.”
Molly stared at her for a moment, and then said quietly, like she didn’t want to upset Claire, “So many women don’t take their husband’s name anymore. You wouldn’t have had to do that if it made you uncomfortable.”
“Right,” Claire answered. “Right.”
She’d decided that day that Becca and Molly had to go. It was really for the best. She began to avoid them. Whenever she saw them coming toward her office around lunchtime, she’d pick up the phone and call her voice mail, so that when they popped their heads in, she could roll her eyes and point to the phone, then wave them along, as if to say, “Don’t wait for me, this could take forever, just go, go on!”
MADDIE AND JACK WERE NOW screeching and laughing in the hallway, the kind of laughing that often turned into hysterical crying, when one kid hit another and the game quickly went south. She waited for that to happen, but they quieted a little bit and resumed their game, some sort of crummy hallway soccer, she assumed. She hoped that they’d be out of there by the time she wanted to order dinner, because she didn’t want to have to wave to them and say hello, have to pet the dog and smile as she accepted her food.
She probably shouldn’t even be ordering out, considering her money situation, but what difference did twenty more dollars on her credit card really make at this point? The credit card balance was so high, so unbelievable, that she was able to ignore it most of the time, to pretend that there was no way she’d spent that much in the past six months. It just wasn’t possible.
Her phone rang again, but she didn’t bother to look at it. Her mom had been calling every day (a few times a day, actually) trying to persuade Claire to come to the shore with the family. “It’s important to me,” her mom said, over and over. If Claire had been anyone else, she could have told her mom the truth, that she didn’t want to go and sit with her family for a week at the beach, that it would make her already pathetic life seem worse. But she wouldn’t do that, because no matter how old she got, she still hated hurting Weezy’s feelings, and the times that she did left her feeling so guilty she couldn’t sleep. But for now, she let the phone ring. She had stuff to do, like looking at her bank accounts online hoping something had changed, and watching TV.
Claire sighed and switched the channel. She could always make something for dinner. There was a box of macaroni and cheese in the cupboard and that would be fine, she realized. Yes, if Maddie and Jack were still out there when she wanted to eat, she’d just make that. Calmed by the fact that she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone today, she pulled a blanket over her and settled down on the couch to watch an old eighties movie. She figured watching people go to the prom would be soothing.
CLAIRE FIRST MET DOUG AT a Super Bowl party of a friend of a friend on the Upper West Side. They’d sat next to each other on the couch and watched the game, eating guacamole and laughing at the commercials. Anytime Claire needed a beer, Doug stood up, took her empty bottle, and returned with a full one. At the end of the night, she was happy to give him her number when he asked.
“Doug Winklepleck?” her best friend, Lainie, had said. “That’s an unfortunate name.” Claire agreed, but continued to date him.
After they’d dated each other for a few weeks, Doug said, “I would like to be exclusive with you, if that’s what you want as well.” It sounded like a business proposal, but Claire was happy to agree. Doug was straightforward, and Claire appreciated that. He had a thin face, and a nose that was almost too big, but not quite. He was handsome in his own way. He was a systems developer for a fund of funds, a job title that meant nothing to Claire and that she never quite fully understood. He had his ties on a rotating schedule and contributed the maximum amount to his 401(k). He was, by all accounts, admirable.
On one of their early dates, Doug took Claire to see the elephants arrive in Manhattan for the circus. They were marched through the Queens Midtown Tunnel at midnight and Doug told her it was something she had to see. “I can’t believe you’ve lived here for five years and you’ve never seen them,” he said. “That won’t do.”
They went to a bar on Third Avenue that had a jukebox, long wooden tables, and smelled like yeast and bleach. They played darts and shared a plate of buffalo wings, which was a tricky thing to eat on an early date. And when it was time, they rushed out to the street to wait for the arrival.
Claire stood there, leaning against Doug, buzzed from the beers and the strangeness of the night. She shivered and watched the big, sad elephants march into Manhattan. They were wrinkled and dusty and magnificent. She wanted to cry for them, wanted to run up and touch their rough skin with her hand, to place her palms flat against their hides. It was all she could do to stay put in her place. She drew in a deep breath and said, “Oh.”
“See?” Doug whispered into her hair. “I told you. It’s something to see.”
And right then, Claire felt like Doug was the right choice, the person she’d been waiting for, and anytime she started to think otherwise, she’d close her eyes and whisper, “Remember the elephants,” until the feeling went away.
THEY MOVED IN TOGETHER NINE MONTHS after they met, and then, about a year after that, Doug proposed. The ring was dull, silver, and thick, with a vine etched all around it. Along the vine were tiny dots of diamonds. Claire hated it. “I knew you wouldn’t want a big, showy ring,” Doug said. She’d just nodded and looked down at her hand. Of course she wanted a big ring. She’d always wanted a big diamond, even if she knew she was supposed to say it didn’t matter.
And the thing that bugged her, the thing that really drove her crazy, was that Doug had never asked her. If he had, he would have known. She suspected that he surprised her with this one so he wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money, which was even more annoying, because he made a good amount of money—a lot of money by anyone’s standards. It wasn’t like she could look at the ring and think, Well, this is all he could afford, but I know he loves me. It wasn’t. He could have bought her something spectacular, but he decided to be practical. And who wanted practical for an engagement ring?
They were engaged for four months. Claire tried to remember where the shift happened, when things started to fall apart, but she could never quite figure it out. There were no screaming fights, no cheating, no admission of an Internet porn addiction or a hidden drug problem. They just simply began to crack.
Almost every conversation they had led them to a disagreement. Had it always been this way? Claire didn’t think so, but maybe it had and they’d just never noticed. Maybe now that they were facing the rest of their lives together, everything seemed bigger and more important.
“You only want two kids?” Claire said one day. Doug nodded. He’d said this before, but she’d always thought he was flexible.
“Two is a good number,” he said. “Two is affordable.”
“What if one of them dies?” Claire asked. “Then you only have one left.”
“Why would you say something like that?” He looked away. “What’s
wrong with you?”
When Claire wanted to go out to dinner three nights in a row, Doug said they shouldn’t, to save money. When Doug talked about moving to Long Island, Claire told him he was out of his mind. When Claire watched reality TV, especially the singing competition show that Doug hated, he told her she was contributing to the downfall of American culture. When Doug wore his BlackBerry strapped to his hip in a holster, Claire told him he was a nerd. It went on like this, until most nights were spent in separate rooms of the apartment, watching different TV shows.
“You’re always so mad at me,” Doug said, more than once. “It’s like whatever I do disappoints you.”
“That’s not true,” Claire said. But she wasn’t sure.
Then one night, after an argument about whether they should order Thai food or sushi that ended with Doug calling Claire overdramatic and Claire calling Doug controlling, he had sighed. “What’s going on with us?”
“It’s just Thai food,” Claire said. But it was too late.
“Something’s wrong. This isn’t right.”
“You can get the crab wontons,” she said. Doug shook his head.
Claire stayed in the apartment and Doug moved out, saying that he would pay his part of the rent for two more months while she looked for a new place. It all happened quickly. There were two nights of talking and fighting, of Claire crying on the couch, and Doug crying a little bit too, and then it was settled and he was moving out and Claire still hadn’t told anyone what had happened.
The Monday after Doug left, Claire got dressed, took the subway to work, and was standing in her boss’s office talking about a grant proposal when she started crying. Crying! Like she was seven years old. It had been mortifying to stand there and try to hold back her tears, and even more so to have her boss jump up and close the door to her office, then guide Claire to a chair to ask her what was wrong.
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