Friends Like Us

by Lauren Fox

  “I mean, really,” I say. “The spaghetti was awful. The worst!” Ben lets out an exasperated sigh, like the parent of a recalcitrant toddler. Is his shirt on inside out?

  “We should take cooking classes after the wedding, honey,” Jane murmurs. “We both suck.”

  “Yeah.” Ben has found a spot on the wall above my head to focus on.

  He won’t tell her, at least not tonight.

  Right here, on this couch, we took each other’s clothes off; his hands lingered on my waist, and he laughed and said, “Twelve years. You really know how to play hard to get.”

  He won’t tell her. He gets so much mileage out of being loyal Ben, unassuming and steadfast and true, but he just cheated on the woman he’s supposed to marry in two weeks. How long will he keep our secret just to preserve the image, this idea of himself?

  I stare at him, even though he won’t look back. He’s still massaging Jane, his hands moving over her broad shoulders, her upper arms, pressing and squeezing, and right here, right now, I give myself over to it, to the whole sordid, complicated mess; to this new, imperfect man; to the inevitable breaking of all of our hearts. Jane’s, yes: shattered. But Ben’s, too. And mine. Love can be ruthless.

  Will they say good night to me like it’s any other night, walk into Jane’s room, and fall into bed? I wrap my arms around myself. A part of the far wall has begun to warp in the heat of this long summer, the white paint turning brownish. The kitchen faucet drips.

  “God, I am so glad to be home,” Jane says with a little contented shudder, and, in our dingy, warm living room that still smells of pasta, I know exactly what she means. She wriggles and adjusts herself in the chair, her whole grateful, deluded body at the mercy of Ben’s moving hands.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Ben stops cleaning the bathroom mirror for a second and stares at his reflection in the blurred, streaky glass. He’s been wiping the mirror with a rag for five minutes, but the glass just keeps getting dirtier and dirtier. “Remind me,” he says. “Who is Al?”

  I’m on my knees, swishing the toilet brush around in the bowl. “A friend,” I say, neglecting the part about how he’s Jane’s friend, too; how he was hers first. “A friend who throws excellent parties.” The pretty blue toilet water looks like the ocean, but the New! Spring Fresh Scent! is making me nauseous. I’ve never noticed this before, how cleaning is the act of replacing grime with chemicals.

  “Oh, look,” Ben says, a little bit dazed. “I’ve been using Murphy Oil to clean the mirror. That’s … probably … not right.…”

  “I think we should get some ventilation in here.”

  Ben nods, exhales a small laugh. He reaches over me, heaves open the window, and the cool fall air floods in. I lean toward him and kiss his sweaty arm, a move that manages to feel simultaneously natural, premeditated, and horribly awkward all at once. Sometimes, even three months in, it still feels like someone died.

  For four days after we slept together, the clouds gathered. Ben barely spoke to me. He slept in Jane’s bed and he acted like Jane’s fiancé, and I couldn’t help but wonder. So I couldn’t look at him—although I did think about him; I thought about him more in those four days than I had in twelve years: he had taken up residence just under my sternum, where it hurt to breathe. And sometimes, during those four days, it struck me that this was Ben, Ben I’d had sex with, Ben I’d gone cuckoo over, and I laughed when I shouldn’t have: while I was brushing my teeth, while I was helping a customer at the shop. Even to my own ears I sounded weird.

  I sat at the kitchen table with my soft pencils and sketched for hours. I was working on a series of drawings of our apartment, wide sweeps of the rooms and details—corners and radiators and half-open windows, a blanket thrown over a chair, a crooked rug, a doorknob. My brain didn’t yet grasp what my fingers knew: I was trying to preserve what we had destroyed.

  We both overcompensated with Jane. Ben touched her constantly, one hand somewhere on her body at all times, as if she were a helium balloon that would float away without him tethering her to the earth. I was attentive but rattled, falling all over myself, tripping over my shoelaces, arms flailing: sitcom Willa. And Jane was just on edge, like a rat in a cage who senses that the storm is about to hit.

  “Fuck! I spilled my juice again!”

  “Let me clean that up for you.” I was already half out of my chair.

  She opened her mouth in surprise. “Okay, wait a minute. Is something wrong?”

  I froze, unprepared. “What? No!”

  She reached across the table and touched her hand to my forehead. “Are you ill?”

  “Ha!” I said, and I moved quickly away from her, got the sponge, and squeezed it out.

  She grabbed it from me. “ ‘Let me clean that up for you’? I don’t believe I have ever heard those words come out of your mouth.” She set the sponge on the orange puddle and watched the juice soak in. “Well, not in that order. Maybe a version of those words. Like maybe, ‘Let you clean that up for me.’ Or ‘Clean that up! Me let for you!’ ”

  “Ha,” I said again. Ben wandered into the kitchen, scratching his face. He glanced at me and made his way straight to Jane, sat down next to her, and draped his arm around her neck.

  “Morning.” He ran his tongue over his teeth and then kissed her cheek.

  “Here, want some juice?” she asked. She handed him the saturated sponge.

  “Ha!” he said.

  Jane got up and padded across the kitchen, her bare feet long and white and thwapping against the linoleum like flippers. She had on just a green sports bra and a pair of Ben’s boxers. Ben was wearing only gray shorts; I was in a long T-shirt. It was hot again. We were all skin.

  “You two have suddenly become, like, really poor conversationalists.” Jane poured three cups of coffee. In one, she dumped the last of a carton of half-and-half and four teaspoons of sugar, then handed it to me.

  “Thanks.” I stared, entranced, as the white cream swirled into the coffee.

  “It’s the heat,” Ben said, rubbing his face again, up and down, a scritchy, sandpaper sound.

  Or it’s that we slept together.

  “Willa,” Jane said, “do you have to work today?” I shook my head. “Because I don’t have a dress for my own wedding, which, as you may recall, is in eleven days. And I just don’t think I’m going to feel comfortable getting married in the buff.” She hugged her arms across her chest and smiled broadly, held it there, a snapshot of herself.

  “Yeah … okay,” I said softly, wrapping my hands around my mug. “I guess we could go shopping.” I thought about the day, just the two of us. That one looks pretty! Ben and I had sex! Let’s go get salads!

  She took a long sip of her coffee, then set the white cup down on the counter. She had given Ben and me the nice mugs and taken the small chipped one for herself. “Oh, don’t make me beg!” she said, raking her fingers through her hair. “I hate shopping as much as you do!”

  “No, we can go! I want to go. Please, let me go dress shopping with you!”

  She laughed. “And you, my tall friend, you need something pretty, too. You’re not going to my wedding in shorts and flip-flops.”

  “Definitely not,” I said, “because those shorts are dirty, and you promised to do my laundry.”

  “That’ll never happen,” she said, and slurped her coffee. In spite of Jane’s passionate love of cleaning, she hated to do laundry. Ben washed her clothes, and sometimes mine, too. He had a knack for getting the whites white.

  Things felt ordinary for a moment. Music, heavy on the bass, boomed up from our downstairs neighbors’ apartment. I looked at my friends. If I squinted, I might be able to convince myself that everything was okay, that we could remain suspended in this limbo forever, insects in amber.

  “What are you going to do today, babe?” Jane laid a hand casually on Ben’s shoulder and kissed the top of his head. It was an intimate gesture, stunning in its normalcy. When she found out what had happene
d, she would never do that again. My heart took wing, a soaring black bird of prey, a vulture.

  Ben’s shoulders slumped under the weight of it all. He looked at me, and I nodded. “Janey, can you sit down?” he said.

  “Why?”

  “We need to talk about something.” He pressed his index fingers to his temples for a second.

  “Uh-oh, you’ve decided to invite your crazy aunt Betty after all?” She rinsed the orange-juice-soaked sponge in the sink. “You’re dead set on having a parade of monkeys lead the processional?”

  He looked at her tenderly, and because I knew what was coming next, and because I was so accustomed to empathizing with Jane, I felt a surprising flash of rage at him. He was about to dismantle her. But so was I. “Honey, can you …” he pointed to the chair between us.

  Jane looked at Ben, and then at me, and her eyes grew wide, and she slid into the chair, her long body loose. “Gulp,” she said. “This can’t be good.”

  Sitting on the kitchen floor, rag in hand, I swipe at a smudge of dirt an arm’s length away. I’ve cleaned myself into a corner. The entire floor in front of me is wet and gleaming, and I’m trapped, back to the wall, on the only dry part of the linoleum. I see that I should have started here and worked my way out, but a belated understanding of the tricks of the trade doesn’t help me now. “I didn’t think I wanted to wear a costume,” I say. “I thought we would just go in our regular clothes. But now that seems kind of pretentious, weirdly, like we’re too cool for Halloween costumes, and I think I want to dress up!”

  Ben stands in the doorway. “The party is in an hour, right?” I nod. “I think, if you want to go in costume, we need to make use of the tools at hand.” He sets his spray bottle of generic shower cleaner down. “I’m done, by the way.” His brown hair is wet with sweat and curling up at the ends. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “I mean, Christ!”

  One thing you get used to when your roommate is cheerfully compulsive is a clean apartment. Also you get used to: the way she mumbles to herself and then laughs, as if she’s telling herself an excellent joke; how she rarely closes the bathroom door all the way; how she weeps during movies that aren’t even that sad; the way she hums while she eats; the exact way she calls for you when she needs you to kill a spider, half name, half scream: Willl-AAAH!

  The day Jane left, Ben and I held each other on the floor, and he said, “Is it okay if I tell you I’m going to miss her?” The first time I went to the grocery store without her, I walked down the cleaning supplies aisle, and I thought about how we joked about inventing a bathroom cleaner just so we could call it Muck-Off! and I almost cried, right there in aisle 8.

  “For example,” Ben continues now, pulling the mop out from behind the kitchen door. “We can just pop the head off this sucker, affix it to your body, and then you, with your hair, are a mop!”

  “Funny.” I pretend-squirt him with my bottle of floor polish. He might have said the same thing to Jane. For all I know, this was one of their jokes.

  “Well, I’m going as me, but showered.” He peels off his shirt and turns toward the bathroom.

  “Wait!” I say as he heads down the hallway. “I’m trapped here! Come rescue me!”

  “Oh, poor Will,” he says, mock serious. “You’ll just have to rescue yourself.”

  “Okay.” Jane rested her arms on the kitchen table, extended her legs past the sides of her chair. Her bare foot bumped into mine. “What is it?” No matter what she was imagining, I thought, it was not as bad as what we were about to say. “What could make you both look so distraught? Just tell me.”

  Ben looked her straight in the eye. “I am so, so sorry,” he said. She took a sharp breath. “Willa and I …” He reached for Jane’s hand. “We, um …” He looked down. He was losing his resolve.

  “Janey,” I said. I had the weird feeling I used to get sometimes when I was little, lying awake in my bed: that my arms and legs were growing enormous, while the rest of me, my head, my torso, was shrinking. I glanced at the clock. It was 9:38.

  “Willa and I, we, the other night, we …” He shook his head as if to clear it and made an odd, snuffling noise. A shaft of weak light slanted in through the kitchen window. “We slept together.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said quickly, knowing it wouldn’t mean anything, hoping that she would remember, someday, when she pieced together the shards of this conversation, that at least I had said it. My mind flashed to the morning my dad moved out, to my mom’s explanation: It’s not as if you didn’t see this coming. But of course, no. I hadn’t.

  Jane yanked her hand from Ben’s like it was diseased, but she stayed where she was at the table, between us. The music from downstairs had stopped, but now it started up again, a low drumbeat and then a wailing guitar solo. “This is not funny,” she said softly, almost a whisper. “This is really not funny, you guys.”

  Once in a while it was surreal, being with my old friend after we’d so drastically changed the terms of our attachment. Sometimes the unwelcome image of high-school-Ben would come to me; we would be kissing, sheets crumpled at the edge of the bed, his lovely body entwined with mine, and from nowhere my brain would offer up the memory of my short, round, eminently dorky pal sitting on his desk in Ms. Barnum’s classroom, talking to her about an upcoming issue of the magazine, his shirt missing a button, his stumpy legs swinging against the chair. Soon those images stopped coming, though; he stopped being the strange amalgam of teenage-Ben and adult-Ben, and, somehow, when I wasn’t expecting it, he magically became himself.

  In the beginning, we killed our guilt and sadness, squelched all the confusion and regret with sex. And it worked for a while. I wanted him with my whole body—thighs, tongue, elbows, toes: parts I didn’t know were capable of wanting.

  When we were away from each other, I drifted into reveries about what kinds of new, creative ways we might fit together. Could that leg go there? Oh, maybe if his hand went here. We would find out. I was always, always ready to drop everything and fall into bed with him—or fall onto the couch again, or the floor. All he had to do was look at me.

  And anyway, I didn’t have much else going on. My schedule was clear.

  “It feels strange to wake up in the apartment, but in your bed,” he said, running his hand over my stomach.

  “I can imagine.” We had agreed to tell each other everything we were thinking and feeling, a strategy I was already regretting. He leaned over and kissed me. I squeezed my eyes shut. I wished I had woken up before he had, to sneak out and brush my teeth. His lips pressed against mine. I could feel that he was smiling. But I missed Jane. I missed Seth. I may have even missed my parents, although not the parents I had now, nor the ones who’d been drifting in and out of my life since college, but possibly the parents I’d had when I was ten, the ones who picked Seth and me up from school one day at lunchtime and took us to a matinee, just for the hell of it. I flung my arms around Ben and arched my neck toward his mouth. Hello, hello, come in. You are always welcome here.

  We formed a third being to replace her, a thing made out of sex and euphoria and constant surprise. I was like a three-year-old on an airplane playing games: endlessly delighted that every time I peeked out from behind my hands, Ben was still there. Well, maybe I could have been more careful with my heart. But we had crushed Jane’s, and so that’s how we got through those first weeks without her. That’s what we did.

  We tiptoe through the front door of Al’s apartment, two scared mice. The living room is warm and bright and loud and packed with people, which, come to think of it, is the only way I’ve ever seen it. Maybe Al’s apartment only exists if there’s a party going on, like Brigadoon with a keg.

  “Well, here we are.” Ben looks down at his shoes. “Can we go now?”

  “Remember that party we went to in high school?” We had, in fact, been to only one party in high school—a pregraduation senior class bash thrown by Jake Pizorkski, whose parents owned Pizorkski’s Sausages a
nd Fine Meats. We arrived early at Jake’s house—a glass-walled, seventeen-room compound with a long, lit path that sloped down to the lake, a mansion known locally as Liverwurst Manor. We were the first people there. Jake didn’t know who we were, although he pretended to. “Um, so, you guys psyched about college and stuff? Gonna have a great summer?”

  “Oh, gee!” Ben said. He was so short back then that he had to crane his neck to meet my frantic eyes. “This is so embarrassing, Jake, but we have another soirée to attend this evening!” Jake handed us each a cellophane-wrapped variety pack of minisausages at the door and politely thanked us for coming, as if we were good friends of his parents.

  “I think I still have some of that turkey jerky,” Ben says now, grabbing my hand and squeezing.

  “Well, we’re staying for at least fifteen minutes this time.” I squeeze back. We’re at our best like this, two misfits shoring each other up against the terrifying swell of normal human interaction. We both know that it’s a better thing to face your fears bravely, to talk to an acquaintance at a party, to sit down next to a stranger and smile, but even in high school we’d been content to rely on each other, and so we had never even tried.

  Al lists toward us, clearly already a little bit drunk. He hands me a big plastic cup of his famous neon blue-green potion. “Heyyyy,” he says, engulfing me in a hug. It’s only been four months since we last saw each other, at Amy and Rafael’s wedding in June, but he hugs me like it’s been years. “Happy Halloween! Where’s your twin?”

  I smile and take a sip of my drink. I thought that, when a tornado touches down in a small town, people heard about it. “Huh,” I say, over the din. “I don’t know!”

  Ben pulls me into the room and leans toward my ear. “Do you think Jane could show up here?” he hisses.

  “I don’t know. Probably not. Maybe.” I offer him my cup. The thought has, of course, occurred to me.

  That morning in August, after we told her, Jane pushed back from the table and walked slowly into her room. She kept her spine straight, her posture dignified, but she couldn’t stifle the choked sob that escaped her throat. Ben and I sat, silent, immobile. We heard objects moving around, hangers jangling together, zippers unzipping. After about ten minutes, she walked out the front door, carrying two suitcases and a fat backpack. She didn’t even turn around. She didn’t yell or scream or shriek that she despised us. She just left. A few days later, I got an e-mail from her, requesting that we leave the apartment the following Saturday so that she could retrieve her things. Saturday! It would have been her wedding day. She included in the e-mail a list of objects that belonged to her—the blender; the chair with the stuffing poking out; the coffeemaker, of course—and a few things she wanted that we’d bought together. “I will leave a check for you for half the value of those items,” she wrote, formal as a contract.