The Drifter

by Christine Lennon

  Jessica was laughing so hard she snorted, overestimating how entertained her audience would be by such highbrow hijinks. “The paint threw the whole thing off balance,” she said, to only muffled laughter. “Trust me, it was a catastrophe.”

  Later, when their parents and aunts and uncles went to the hotel bar, Teddy pulled out a couple of fat joints from his suit pocket, and she and Gavin, Teddy, Jessica, and a handful of other friends from New York smoked them under the cover of ancient trees and ran through the vast expanse of dewy grass, tossing a Frisbee across the wide-open lawn, until the light turned from dark gray to deep bluish black.

  It was foolish to stay up so late the night before her own wedding, but Betsy didn’t care. When they were making their way back to the hotel, in the dark, through a little stand of trees, Gavin laced his arm through hers and around her back.

  “Hello, Mrs. Davis,” he said, leaning down to kiss her.

  “You mean, Ms. Young. Or Ms. Davis-Young?”

  “Ms. Elizabeth Davis-Young-Sinjin-Smythe, esquire?”

  “Sounds about right.”

  “What were you thinking about earlier, on the lawn during rehearsal? You seemed worried.”

  “Not worried, exactly. Just, you know.”

  “I think I know,” he said, nodding in an attempt to assure her. “I just wish you would tell me.”

  “Later. We’ll talk about it later.”

  THEY WENT TO bed at 1:00 and she’d been flopping around on the sagging, old mattress for nearly two hours.

  “Gavin,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

  “Hmm,” he grumbled. “Sort of. What’s up?”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “It’s got to be nerves,” he said, putting his hand on her hip and pulling her close. “I’ve got ’em, too. Tomorrow’s a big day. You know you only get married once. Twice? Three times, max.” He leaned in to kiss her neck. Betsy chuckled despite herself. “Any more than that and it’s just embarrassing.”

  “I know. You’re right,” she said. “But I’ve got something to tell you. Actually, I have one thing to tell you, and one thing I need to ask you.”

  “OK,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Should I be worried? You’re not calling this off, are you?”

  “No, no. Of course not.” She paused, debating which would come first, the question or the confession. She led with the latter. “It’s just that I . . . I didn’t have a bachelorette party.”

  Gavin propped himself up on his elbow.

  “Wait . . . what do you mean?” he asked. “When I went to Atlantic City, with Teddy and the guys from work, you did the spa thing, and a dinner with Jess and Shana and those guys, right?”

  “Well, I went to the spa, which was great. But I was alone,” she said.

  “And then?”

  “And then Jess met me for dinner downtown with Courtney and Shana. We had a drink after and I said I was feeling light-headed from the sauna, and I went home.”

  That part was true, mostly. They had a drink, but she wasn’t feeling light-headed, and she sort of went home. First she stopped at the Silver Swan, a dingy German bar in the East 20s, for a bourbon on the rocks. Then she paged Ian on her walk home. He was waiting in front of their building by the time she got there.

  He was thinner than when she first met him, almost gaunt, with deepening hollows under his eyes. It was easy for Betsy to separate from him, to say that the years of itinerant pill popping were harder on him than they were on her, and that the bruised crescents under her own eyes weren’t as obvious.

  “Well if it isn’t the blushing bride,” he said, as she approached their door.

  “Yeah, yeah, very funny.”

  Upstairs, he gave her the pills and they smoked the tiny joint he would roll just for her. By then, Ian had heard most of the things Betsy vowed to tell no one. She felt an odd mix of vulnerability and safety around this virtual stranger who knew all of her secrets, but whom she saw only once a month, or every other week, and only very occasionally, when work or life were particularly rough, on a weekly basis. As far as she knew, he still didn’t even know her real name, or didn’t care to know. That veil of anonymity, and the utter improbability of their social and professional circles intersecting, kept him at a comfortable distance. But his knowing also gave him power.

  That night, instead of moping around the apartment alone, she let her curiosity get the best of her and went out with Ian on his “errands.” They cut a strange, zigzag path through the East Village as he responded to pages. She’d wait for him out in front of a building after he’d been buzzed in through the intercom and disappeared down a dimly lit hallway with his backpack of wonderment in tow. Once he was out of sight, the minutes she spent waiting for him were oddly endless, and what felt like an hour would pass before he’d return. She was left out on the sidewalk, steadying herself against a bike rack, suddenly paranoid about running into someone she knew, though most of the people walking by barely seemed to notice her. New York was being New York. Dogs on leashes sniffed at anemic little trees. Angular women in dark lipstick and wide sunglasses strode by with haughty grace. Old women in housedresses shuffled along the same sidewalks they’d been treading for five decades. The smell of burned hot pretzels and falafel and exhaust and garbage wafted by in small gusts blown by the breeze. She wondered about the people Ian met inside, all of the people that occupied the warren of boxy rooms stacked in neat Tetris columns in building after building, block after block. How many secrets were contained in those rooms? How many had Ian heard? How many people took confession with him, behind that veil of anonymity?

  “So I bet you hear it all,” she said, after the door finally opened again and he was back with her on the sidewalk. Betsy felt herself slur and struggled to get her shit together. “Does everyone confide in you? Is it like a thing people do, pill-head confessions, like an HBO show or something?”

  “Nah, not everyone. But I hear enough,” he said. They meandered down the sidewalk a bit and Betsy could see, for the first time since she met him, that he was thinking, choosing his words carefully.

  “You know, this thing? With the McRae guy you keep talking about? And your dead friend? It’s nothing,” he said. “I mean, it’s something. But everybody’s got something. You didn’t kill her. Technically, you didn’t even let her die. You were just kind of a kid and you were scared and your timing was off. Forgive me for offering some advice. As they say, you’ve got to consider the source. But you’ve got to let that shit go.”

  Betsy wandered ahead a bit, too self-conscious to turn around and look this kid, this punk nickel-and-dime dealer, in the eye. And then he spoke up again.

  “Also, you’re getting married. I hope I get married someday, and if I caught my wife hanging out with somebody like me when she was supposed to be excited about getting married and all of that? I would not be happy. So I’ve got to work. And you should go home. I’ll walk you back.”

  GAVIN WAITED PATIENTLY for her to continue, in the darkness. And then he spoke first.

  “Is this about the pills? About Ian?” he asked. “Because I know that you don’t think I know, but I do.”

  Betsy put her face in her hands.

  “I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Come on, now. I’ve been paying attention. I didn’t know what to say. But I promised myself that if I thought it was getting really out of hand, I would speak up.”

  He didn’t know about the blackouts.

  “I should have bridesmaids! I should have had some terrible bachelorette party with dick-shaped lollipops, or something. But instead, I trailed after a skateboarding drug dealer all night. It’s pathetic.”

  “Maybe a little.” Gavin rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I’m not going to lie to you. But as long as that’s where it ends, we can deal with it. You can kick the pills. It hasn’t affected your work. At least not much, right? I think you’re OK, and I’m OK. We’re OK, right? There’s nothing more is there?”

&n
bsp; Betsy considered fessing up to her sleepovers with strangers, but then thought the better of it. Instead, she went on to the question.

  “No, there’s nothing more,” she said, “but I need to know, the stuff Jay said tonight . . .”

  “Oh God, screw Jay. He was wasted, and he’s always been spoiled, and he knows that you’re smarter than he is and he can’t take it. My parents felt so bad about what he said. They know what you’ve been through.”

  “But is that how people think of me? As dark and uncaring? You’re this sweet, affable guy and I’m the moody one you’re saddled to? Because I feel like if I care even a tiny bit more, I’m going to break. I feel like I care so much about not hurting people that I can’t even move sometimes. And I end up hurting them anyway. And the worst part is that Ginny’s the reason I think I’m afraid to get close to people, and why I think I need to dull this pain, but I’m starting to forget,” she said. “I’m trying to remember her face, her features, the exact shade of her hair, and I can’t. All I have are these ancient pictures, which are starting to fade, too. And it makes me so sad.”

  Gavin reached over to click on the light on the nightstand. He sat up in bed with his hair sticking up in every direction, squinting in the light.

  “I know it’s hard to take me seriously when I’m not wearing a shirt, but you have to listen to me, Betsy, and listen very carefully,” he said. “I have been in love with you since that day on the dock at J.D.’s. You are kind and curious and smart. You are wry and observant and funny as hell. When I watch you look at some work of art that I don’t even try to understand, you concentrate so hard that your face contracts into these weird expressions that I have honestly never seen on another human being. You are braver than you think you are. You work so hard to do better, to be good. You always have. I didn’t know anybody else who was getting on a bike at 5:00 a.m. to go to work when we were in college, only you. Sometimes you struggle to fit in because, I don’t know why, maybe because you take things so seriously? So personally?”

  “Gavin, I . . .”

  “No, wait, let me finish. I am as surprised as the next guy that I met the woman I was going to marry when I was twenty-one years old. And, I admit, things have not been perfect between us every step of the way. But we are supposed to be together. I know we are. That day you lost Ginny, you found me. I wish like hell you could have had both of us, but that’s not how it worked out. And I’m sorry.”

  She reached out and combed his hair with her fingers.

  “I am nervous about so many things. I’m nervous about everything, really. But I am not nervous about you,” Betsy said. “You are the one thing I know I got right.” Gavin rested his head back on the pillow and pulled her close.

  “You know, if you weren’t a little sad about the memories of Ginny fading, that’s what would make me worry.” He moved her hair out of her eyes. “And one thing I know, I really know for sure, is that if Ginny could see you crying about her on the night before your wedding, she’d kick your ass. Hard.”

  “You definitely have a point there,” she said.

  “So let’s just do this, together, like we’ve done all of that other crap, OK? Then when the chaos is over, we’re going to go back to being just fine. Or even better. I can feel it.”

  CHAPTER 18

  THE TOURIST

  February 17, 1998

  Six months into marriage, either the novelty had worn off, or February’s punishing deep freeze had muted her heady newlywed optimism, but life had gone back to business as usual—minus the blackouts—with impressive speed. Then she got the voice mail.

  “Betsy, that’s as clean as that shower is ever going to get,” said Gavin. She had one toothbrush in her mouth, and another old one in her left hand, working at the graying grout under the showerhead. The mine-cut diamond and simple band on her ring finger was coated with a fine dusting of Comet, which would have bothered her eighteen months ago when he first slipped it on her finger, but didn’t anymore. The bathroom wasn’t great. No amount of Comet was going to change that.

  “I know you’re nervous about our houseguest, and she rattled you with that Elizabeth bullshit on her voice mail message,” he said as he crouched down to tie the laces of his boot. “But trust me, she’s not going to inspect the shower grout.”

  “Yeah, right, Caroline would never do that,” she said. Then you don’t know Caroline.

  Betsy had been in New York for seven years before she heard from Caroline. She had called Betsy’s mom to get her phone number, and when she played and replayed Caroline’s voice mail, it became clear that Kathy had informed Caroline of her professional name change.

  “Why hello there, Elizabeth, sophisticated woman in New York. It’s Caroline.” Betsy stood dumbstruck, holding the receiver as the voice registered in her ear. “I’m looking for my friend Betsy. Perhaps you remember her? One time, we wore fake grass skirts and bikinis to a luau-themed fraternity party in January. Of course, you would never do something like that, Elizabeth. If you see Betsy, tell her to give me a call. I’m coming to New York, or The City, as I’m sure you call it now. I’ll be there next Friday.”

  Betsy wrote her number, with a Miami area code, on the palm of her hand and then replayed the message three times. They exchanged a couple more messages and finally connected by email. Caroline’s writing style had always been terse, stingy with details, and in this medium especially, it came off as especially cold. The gist of it was that Caroline was now a real estate agent in Miami, working with her mother.

  Betsy had seen Caroline only once since she left Gainesville, at Teddy’s wedding in 1996. He married Melanie, a serious and quiet sorority sister whom Betsy couldn’t remember, even after she saw her photo. As the best man, Gavin flew down to Palm Beach on Thursday and the plan was for Betsy to meet him there Saturday morning. She claimed that she couldn’t get the time off of work, but the truth was that she was crippled with anxiety about the wedding, knowing how many ghosts would be lurking there, all of those uncomfortable blasts from the past. Betsy bought her ticket using her coworker Shana’s ninety-nine-dollar Delta flight coupon from Amex, and then had a fake I.D. made in some back alley on the Lower East Side with her name on it in case anyone checked, which they didn’t. She didn’t want to spend money she didn’t have on cab fare, so she took a bus to LaGuardia and missed her flight, despite the fact that an airline employee threw her garment bag over his shoulder and sprinted through the airport with her to the gate. She sat waiting for the next flight to Palm Beach International, listening for them to call her alias when they found her a seat. Six hours later, she was changing into a black thrift store cocktail dress in the ladies’ room at the airport. She hailed a cab and made it in time to snag the last remaining place card at the Everglades Club. She ordered a martini, dirty but dry with three olives, at the bar, and wove her way to her seat through the maze of tables just in time to hear Gavin’s speech. She scanned the crowd of four hundred faces in the dimly lit ballroom looking for Caroline. Word had traveled fast about Caroline’s first job out of school as a pharmaceutical sales rep. She’d aced the recruitment process, beating out hundreds of other recent graduates from Southeastern Conference schools like Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana State that churned out pretty, well-spoken girls with big smiles who could sell Lipitor with their eyes closed. It was a coveted job with a decent starting salary, plus commission, in a part of the world where the average resident—median age in Coral Gables, sixty-two—choked down six prescriptions a day.

  “Teddy’s a man of unwavering loyalty,” said Gavin from the stage, with a barely perceptible slur of his words, collar unbuttoned, holding a microphone in front of the twenty-piece big band onstage. “Once he commits to something, whether it’s the sartorial style of the mid-1980s, or the unbearable music of the, ahem, Grateful Dead, if Teddy decides to love something, he will love it a lot, and he will love it forever. So Melanie, you poor thing, it looks like you’re stuck with this guy for life.”

>   A wave of “Awwww”s rippled through the crowd. Betsy felt someone’s breath on the back of her neck and a shock ran down her spine.

  “Isn’t that cuuute,” said a voice in a harsh whisper, just inches from her ear. She knew who it was before she turned around. “He’s like a game show host in training, right? Do you like buying his vowels?”

  “Every day,” Betsy said, cold as ice. She turned to see Caroline crouched beside her seat, wearing a thick pearl choker and a navy silk minidress with tiny cap sleeves. Between the gap in Caroline’s knees—her legs were even thinner than she remembered—Betsy saw the line where the control top of her stockings began. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy had made wearing any kind of tights or pantyhose desperately unchic the year before, and it gave Betsy a quick, competitive pang of delight that Caroline didn’t know this. Betsy smoothed the crepe pencil skirt of her 1960s dress and shifted in the gold bamboo rental chair, which was pressing the stiff, metal zipper uncomfortably against her back. She worried that the fabric still carried the faint scent of thrift store dust and decay. “I thought I might see you here.”

  “You know Melanie was my little sister. I held her hair while she puked off of the balcony at a Chi Phi party. We bonded,” Caroline said, in her signature deadpan. Betsy studied her face in the dim light, noticing the faint lines that framed her mouth like parentheses and a dusting of freckles across her cheeks that she hadn’t noticed before. Her eyes were glazed and hollow. Her smile was frozen.