He doesn’t let go.
“I need to do this on my own. Please.” I give his hand a measured squeeze, stifling the urge to bend his fingers back until they snap.
Vince sizes up Jesse and Lisa like schoolyard bullies, with a look that says if they try anything, he will be right over there. He lets go of my hand and wanders off. Dumb fuck. Pretty fuck. But so, so dumb.
“I’m just asking for an opportunity to take ownership of what I did,” I appeal to them when it is just the three of us. “Please. Brett’s not here so I can tell you everything that really happened. Do you want to hear about that or do you want to hear whatever vanilla lie Kelly has come up with to protect her sister?”
I know Jesse has heard the whisperings—insulting, frankly—that my fight with Brett was really about the affair we had while she lived with me. Ha. Maybe if she lost thirty pounds. Didn’t seem to bother Vince.
Jesse stares me down, torn. She doesn’t want to see Brett hurt, but she also wants her money shot for the season. She turns to Lisa to recruit her ever-valuable second opinion.
“It could be a powerful moment,” Lisa says, to the complete surprise of nobody. Nothing would make Lisa happier than seeing me lay bare Brett’s lies on camera. She will be thrilled, then, to learn that Brett’s lie is so much worse than what she thinks it is. Just hand over my mic pack, I think, and everyone gets hurt.
Jesse sighs. Her decision is obvious, but she has to act a little bit pained so as not to look like a total turncoat to her very best vagina. She nods at Vince, over my shoulder. “And what is he doing here?”
“I thought we might address the rumors about him and Kelly,” I say. “That could be a powerful moment too, right?”
Lisa snorts, genuinely tickled. “Someone found her ballsack.”
Jesse returns her sunglasses to her face so that I can’t witness the childlike excitement in her eyes. Christmas morning has come early for Jesse Barnes. “Let’s just do it. We’re here. Why not? We don’t have to use it if it doesn’t work.”
As the kids are saying these days—yas, queen.
Everything settled, we wait by the car until Lisa gives us the cue to approach and greet Jesse.
“Oh, Jen!” I smack my idiot head. “Pass me the keys. I left my lip gloss in the cup holder.”
“Your lips look—”
“Pass me the fucking keys, Greenberg!”
Jen does so, begrudgingly, and I dive back into the car, climbing around on all fours and reaching under the seats in a one-woman search party for an unmissing tube of Rouge Pur Couture. I time it perfectly, waiting for Lisa to give us the go-ahead before I shut the door, so that Jen loses her opportunity to ask for her keys back. I am wearing a darling, tropical-printed Mara Hoffman wrap dress with deep pockets—I bought it for today, figuring pockets always come in handy—and I slip the keys inside. So far, everything is going off without a hitch. I do wish Brett could have been here, but just because things don’t go according to plan doesn’t mean they can’t work out for the best. Done is better than perfect is something my editor used to say to me when I needed more time with my manuscript but she wanted it now, so she could publish it now, so that she could make money now. Apparently, it’s a Sheryl Sandberg quote.
Jesse greets Jen first with a hug, commenting on how clammy her skin feels. Are you feeling okay? she asks her. Jen mumbles something about just needing to get in the shade.
Jesse doesn’t go on to hug everyone, but she makes contact in some form. Kelly gets a pat on the tush—groping your underlings is edgy when the groper is a woman!—and Lauren an arm around her shoulder while Jesse whispers something into her ear, probably about her not even noticing she burned off the back of her head because Lauren’s hand flies to her choppy ponytail. Vince and I are the only ones who don’t get any Jesse DNA on us, and I’m glad for it. Turn me away from the lunch table where the cheerleaders and football players feast. Sign your own death sentence.
“Where’s our girl?” Jesse asks. She’s thought for hours that “our girl” “went back to the city,” but we have to have the conversation on camera for the viewer. That’s one thing I won’t miss, having conversations two, three, sometimes four times. Each take was a turn in a maze, leading me further away from myself.
“Brett had some work to take care of back in the city,” Kelly says, making a beeline for the seat next to Jesse on the white picnic bench. The table has been set with natural cut wildflowers and purposefully wrinkled linens. On top of a mound of fresh-caught shrimp, a black fly sits like a king. Jen stares at him, turning green.
“Work?” Jesse is incensed. “I thought this was her bachelorette party. What happened?” She begins to pour wine for everyone, though she is drinking Casamigos on ice. For a long time, I assumed Casamigos was an actual spirit. Having taken a newfound interest in the drink, I’ve recently learned that Casamigos is tequila and that it is George Clooney’s.
I shove my glass in Jesse’s path. “I’d rather have what you’re having,” I tell her, and she sets the wine bottle down and obligingly starts me on my way to tequila-wasted while Kelly chews the inside corner of her mouth, undoubtedly sorting out her story for Jesse. For all Kelly knows, Brett went back to the city because the two of them nearly came to blows last night. She knows nothing of the blood shed on the floor of Lindy’s van.
“It’s such a bummer,” Kelly says, “but our manager at the Flatiron studio had a family emergency and so Brett went back to fill in for her today.”
Jesse peers at Kelly over the brim of her sunglasses, skeptically. “Why wouldn’t you have gone? It was supposed to be her weekend.” She serves me with a look that encourages me to jump in at any time.
I pull back my shoulders and run my tongue over my teeth to be sure I don’t have any gloss on them. My financials are in order, all my money going somewhere that gave me a good, wicked giggle. I wanted to make sure Vince didn’t see a cent, having no idea at the time that he would be able to join us here today. And though I haven’t showered or had a pass by the glam squad’s hand, I wrangled my hair into a pretty braid just before we left. I’m wearing my new dress and I will never be more ready than this. “Kelly doesn’t think Brett should marry Arch and they had a fight about it,” I say. On the other side of the table, Kelly bores a hole between my eyes, furious.
Jesse swivels her head in Kelly’s direction, pretending to be surprised by this information. “How could you not want Brett to marry Arch? Arch is bae goals!” Ugh—bae goals? Tell your twenty-two-year-old assistant to update your cheat sheet of hip young-people sayings, because no one under the age of thirty is saying “bae” anymore, you dumb pterodactyl.
Kelly uses her napkin to dab at a bead of sweat above her lip. “I think the world of Arch. Arch and I have a special connection,” she adds, defensively, in the manner of a raving racist telling you about her many black friends. “I just think that Brett is still young, and that there is no harm in taking a step back and making sure she’s ready for a commitment like marriage.”
I sneak a glance at Vince. His Adam’s apple is moving like a Boomerang video. He knows Kelly’s reservation has nothing to do with Brett being too young. She is twenty-seven years old. Can we stop talking about her like she’s some sort of child bride? “Vince?” I say. “You and Brett had a special connection. And I always love to hear a guy’s take on the silly matters of the heart. What say you? Should Brett marry Arch?” I smile at him, goadingly, showing as many of my movie star teeth as I can.
Vince turns to me in slow motion, seeming, finally, to catch on to what is happening. This is a setup. I came here to shred him. “I like Brett,” he says, woodenly. “But I really don’t know her well enough to say, babe.”
“We should text her,” I suggest, fairly. “Give her a chance to weigh in. We’re sitting around, talking smack about her relationship—are people still saying ‘smack,’ Jesse? I know you’re super jiggy with it.” I reach into my pocket and remove my phone, tapping the green mess
ages icon with my thumb and sending a text to someone, though that someone is not Brett.
Almost immediately, Jesse sits up straighter. The zapped posture of a person whose phone has just mildly electrocuted her left ass cheek.
“You should really get that,” I tell her, in an undertone. I’ve always wanted to say that! You should really get that, like a murderer at the end of a genre novel, right before he confesses to his crimes in Scooby-Doo detail. He. Gosh, how sexist of me to assume that only men can be murderers.
Jesse keeps her eyes on me as she removes her phone from her back pocket and opens the text message. “It’s from you,” she says, unsmiling, but I can tell by the way her finger moves on the screen that she’s opened the file I’ve shared with her, and that she is now watching the GoPro footage I clipped last fall, right before I asked Brett to move out for good.
I thought I had a rat. I would walk into my pantry to find that bags of flour and brown sugar and hot chocolate packets had been tampered with, walk out leaving a trail of powdery footsteps. I had a GoPro that I had forgotten to return to prod last season, and so I set it on the low-light feature and positioned it on a top shelf, turned toward the pantry door, to see for myself. No sense vacating my apartment to have it fumigated if I didn’t have to.
The camera captured a little over three hours of footage before it ran out of space, and so the next day, I dragged my thumb along the slider at the bottom of the screen, keeping an eye out for any small moving shadows hurtling along the foot of the frame.
At the two hour and thirteen minute mark I removed my thumb. There was something, but it wasn’t a filthy, disease-ridden rodent. (Well . . .) It was Brett, slinking into the pantry, poking around, sticking her fingers into the bags of flour and sugar, licking them clean and crudely shoving them right back in. What is she doing? I wondered at first. But then I remembered something I learned at a live taping for a self-care podcast that Brett loved and dragged me to back when we were friends. Self-care—what will well-to-do white women come up with next?
At this taping, I learned that binge eating is a natural reaction to deprivation, and that children whose parents put them on diets and banned sweets from the house sometimes resorted to assembling strange pastes made of raw sugar and flour just to get their fix. It’s a coping mechanism that can follow them into adulthood. Vince and I never really kept sweets in the house. They left a burning sensation on my tongue because of my medication, and Vince was always more of a savory guy (is! I’m getting ahead of myself). That must be what Brett is doing, I realized, watching her scavenge, feeling a blooming sense of compassion remembering what Brett told me about her childhood. How everyone in the family ate a normal-sized dinner off a dinner-sized plate except Brett, who was given a weighed and calorie-totaled portion on a tea saucer. How her mother kept the cookies in a padlocked cabinet and only Kelly was given the code, because she could stop herself at just one or two. And then a second shadow appeared in the doorway and my compassion went up in a combust of flame and fury. I didn’t have a rat. I had two.
“Who else has seen this?” Kelly asks me, quietly, with a single pulse of the green vein in her temple. She’s just watched the clip in question over Jesse’s shoulder.
“What is it?” Lauren asks, weakly, from the far end of the table, like she actually doesn’t want to know.
“Why would you humiliate yourself like this, Steph?” Vince whispers next to me.
“People, people!” I admonish, cheerfully. “One at a time with the questions. Let’s start with you first, love of my life and light of my loins.” I turn to Vince. “I am doing this for equity’s sake. Either we are all punished for aggrandizing our backstories or none of us are. No exceptions. Brett does not get to be spared by virtue of the effect she has on Jesse’s granny panties.”
I face Kelly. “Next! Who else has seen this? I am happy to report, Kelly Courtney, that you are the first. It’s an exclusive! A scoop! A breaking-news bulletin interrupting our regularly scheduled programming!”
I lean around Vince to address Lauren’s question last: What is it? “It’s a homemade movie of Brett getting—”
“I don’t want to hear another word about this,” Jesse says, severely.
It is quiet. Not silent. Not with the rowdy ocean so close below, exchanging shorelines with Nantucket, ninety-eight nautical miles away. It’s so much more than a view. It’s the sound of power, always in your ears. That’s why Jesse spends all her time at this place.
Jesse. The garden-fresh betrayal that first appeared on her face as she watched the video of Brett getting drilled by my husband from behind is already receding, creating an illusion of composure. For a moment there, I actually felt bad for her, this middle-aged woman fleeced by her proudest protégée, like some blue-haired grandma in a nursing home wiring the entirety of her life savings to help a “relative in distress” in Guam. Jesse Barnes has been elder abused.
“Brett,” Vince sneers, defying Jesse’s mandate. “Brett is a fucking bitch and a fucking fat liar.” Cleverness tends to deteriorate the closer you get to the truth—not that Vince ever knew how to turn a phrase.
“Not in my house,” Jesse says, because she can’t permit a man to call a woman fat in her presence, even if she is a fucking bitch and a fucking fat liar.
Vince grips my thigh under the table. “She wanted you to leave me,” he tells me desperately. “She hated that you had somebody and she didn’t. She was always threatened by me.”
I laugh. A cold, annihilating laugh that sends Vince’s hand slithering back between his thighs to check to make sure it’s still there. “Take a look around this table, Vince. You are not a threat. You are a drain on our resources. Your day has dawned. We should preserve your body and mount you in the Museum of Natural History. Unimpeachable Men: The Dinosaurs Among Us.”
Vince’s breath shortens and quickens, audible only on the exhale, like being ceremoniously emasculated in front of a group of millionairesses is a cardiac event. Fun fact: Spell check red-flags the word “millionairesses,” but not “millionaires.” There is no entry for “millionairesses” in the dictionary, which beautifully illustrates my point—the world will only permit one of us to make it. Is it any surprise then that women continue to be so horrible to each other? Supporting your kind is supporting your own fucking mediocrity. It’s unnatural.
Jesse slaps the table to get my attention, with a gentle but commanding thump. “Stephanie,” she says. My full name—uh-oh, Mom is mad. “You have been through a lot over the last few weeks and I am not unsympathetic to that. But I won’t sit here and listen to you drag Brett through the mud with lies and defamation when she isn’t around to defend herself and offer her side of the story.”
“When she isn’t around . . .” I trail off in befuddled helplessness. A story ceases to have “sides” when there is empirical proof of my husband screwing my best friend in my pantry, on my Scalamandre Le Tigre sofa, on my beloved, creaky stairs. You better believe I moved that camera around for the next couple of nights so that I did not have to hear that it was “just a one-time thing” should I ever confront Brett or Vince with what I saw. I don’t know when it started, but I know how. They must have met one of the nights Brett snuck downstairs to stuff her face. How did it start? Did Brett find Vince aglow by the light of a Narcos episode, halfway through an auction-house bottle of Brunello? Did he offer her a glass? Did he sigh sadly and say a distance had grown between us? Did he tell her he wished I could see the good in him, that way she could? Did he laugh and joke, If only you played for my team, Courtney? Did Brett kiss him? Did she think it wouldn’t hurt me, did she think I didn’t love him, did she even think? Did she tell Vince she wasn’t gay, or did she let him believe she was straight only for him? That there was something different about him, something special. Brett always did know how to make ordinary people feel special.
I couldn’t bring myself to confront either one of them. Going into the fourth season, I was still determined t
o hold my marriage together. But once Brett found out I had waged a cold war against her, she must have put two and two together and gotten Steph knows I rode Vince like a SPOKE bike around the first floor of her house and she’s trying to destroy me. And still, she didn’t apologize. Still, she chose to save her own skin over showing an ounce of humiliation or remorse. I do not blame her, but I do hate her.
“We are done here.” Jesse speaks directly to the lens, in effect speaking directly to Marc. “Shut the cameras off.” Marc removes the F55 from his shoulder, slowly, as though setting down a weapon. The assistant cameraman follows suit.
I want to laugh. I want to cry. Why didn’t I control for this? That Jesse wouldn’t do a thing about this? I thought the commander in chief of the queer world would tear into Brett for appropriating her community. I thought the same punitive action that has been taken against me would be taken against her. In all my reveries, I never considered that it would behoove Jesse to protect Brett, not for Brett’s sake, but for her own. If it comes out that Brett conned Jesse so close on the heels of me conning her, Jesse is just another example of why men make better bosses.
The relief that relaxes Kelly’s face would be enough to send me over the edge if I hadn’t already taken the plunge. She gets what Jesse is doing. She knows Brett’s secret will stay a secret. With cloying sympathy, she adds, “I know you have been under an inordinate amount of pressure since we got back from Morocco. With what happened”—she clears her throat cryptically—“there. But it was not your fault. We don’t blame you and we just want to see you get the help you need.”
The help I need? Oh, honey-bunny. Just like your leaky, weak-walled post-baby vagina, only surgical repair could restore me now.
“There should be an age requirement to ride those things,” I say to Kelly.
“But,” Jesse looks around the table, to confirm that everyone has heard what she has heard and that it doesn’t make any sense, “Kweller wasn’t riding.”
“No, I mean like for adults. Seniors. Spatial awareness declines sharply after age thirty-four, or so I’ve heard.”
The Favorite Sister Page 35