by Emily Giffin
“Charing Cross Station,” he said. “We’re off to cover some basics, including the National Gallery. I know you aren’t a big fan of museums, but tough. It’s a must. You’re going to see some Turners, Seurats, and Botticellis whether you like it or not.”
“I like it,” I said, meaning it. “Please enlighten me.”
So that afternoon, we hit some more London highlights. We lingered by Nelson’s Column, in the middle of Trafalgar Square amid all the people and pigeons, as I got a lesson about Lord Horatio Nelson’s naval victory over the French. (Ethan was astonished when I admitted that I had no idea that the French and British were ever at odds.) We visited Ethan’s favorite church, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, which he said was famous for its social activism. Then we had another tea break in the Café-in-the-Crypt, located in the basement of the church. Afterward, we made our way over to the National Gallery. Ethan showed me a smattering of his favorite works, and I have to admit, I enjoyed myself. His commentary made the paintings almost interesting. It was as if I were seeing things through his eyes, noticing details of color and shape that otherwise would have been lost on me.
We returned home just after dark, and prepared our untraditional Thanksgiving dinner of salmon, asparagus, and couscous. After we ate, I crawled in bed next to Ethan and thanked him for my tour of London.
He rolled over to face me and gave me a strange, serious look. “You’re welcome, Darcy.”
“It was my best Thanksgiving ever,” I said, surprised to feel my heart beating faster. Our eyes remained locked, and my thoughts returned to that moment on the park bench. I wondered if Ethan occasionally felt a vague attraction to me too. If he did right now.
But as he turned away abruptly, leaning up to switch off his lamp, and repositioning himself farther away from me, I told myself that I was being crazy. It was likely just my pregnancy hormones making me imagine things.
After several minutes, Ethan said quietly, his voice muffled against his pillow, “I had a nice time, too, Darce.”
I smiled to myself. It may not have been Ethan’s best Thanksgiving ever, but I was pretty sure that the day would buy me some more weeks in London. He wasn’t going to send me packing just yet.
Twenty
One morning the following week I told Ethan I was desperate for a night out on the town and a little social interaction. I insisted that he take me somewhere other than his pub and introduce me to his friends.
“After all,” I said, “a pregnant girl shouldn’t be forced to go to a bar alone, should she?”
“I suppose not,” he said, and then reluctantly promised that he’d invite a few people out to dinner on Saturday night.
“Let’s go somewhere fabulous!”
“I don’t generally do fabulous. Would you settle for a slightly upscale gastropub?” he asked, as he gathered up his cigarettes and lighter and headed outside for a smoke.
I wasn’t a big fan of pubs, gastro or otherwise, but I’d take what I could get, so I lightheartedly called after him, “Whatever you want. Just invite your coolest friends. Preferably male!”
So on Saturday night, I got all decked out in my favorite Seven jeans (which I could still button right under my belly), an ivory silk brocade coat, a new pair of Moschino leather pumps, and the perfect tourmaline drop earrings.
“How do I look?” I asked.
He gave me a cursory glance and said, “Nice.”
“Can you tell I’m pregnant?” I asked, following him into the hall outside his flat. “Or does this jacket sort of hide my stomach?”
He looked at me again. “I don’t know. I know you’re pregnant, so I see it, I guess. Why? Are you trying to hide it?”
“Well, naturally,” I said. “I don’t want to scare off all the eligible men before they get to know me.”
I caught Ethan rolling his eyes before he ran to the corner to hail a passing cab. I took my time catching up to him, deciding to let his eye-roll slide. Instead I told him that he looked very nice too. “I really like your Levi’s,” I said.
“Thanks. They’re so old.”
I nodded and then said, “Guys fall into two camps, you know.”
“How’s that?” he asked with a bemused expression.
“Those who wear good jeans and those who don’t…. And it’s not about the brand per se. It’s more about the fit, the wash, the length. All those subtleties. And you, my friend, have the art of the blue jean mastered.” I kissed my thumb and index finger and made an okay sign in the air.
Ethan laughed and ran the back of his hand along his forehead. “I was worried.”
I smiled, squeezed his thigh, and said, “This is fun…Where are we going again?”
“The Admiral Codrington. In Chelsea.”
I was worried when I heard the stodgy name of the restaurant, but there was an excellent vibe when we walked inside. It was nothing like Ethan’s nasty local pub. The bar area was packed with a smartly dressed, professional crowd, and I instantly spotted two prospects, one leaning on the bar, smoking, the other telling a story. I smiled at the guy talking. He winked at me, still talking to his smoking friend. The smoking friend then turned to see who was winkworthy, spotted me, and raised his eyebrows as if to second his friend’s judgment. I gave him a smile too. Equal opportunity for all Brits.
“Either one of those guys your friend Martin?” I asked, pointing at the cute pair.
“No,” Ethan said, giving them a quick look. “My friends are out of their teens.”
“Those guys are not teenagers!” I said, but upon second glance, I saw that they were probably in their early twenties. That is one of the problems with getting older. There is a distinct lag time between how you see others and how you view yourself. I still thought of myself as looking about twenty-four. “So,” I asked Ethan, “where are Martin and Phoebe?”
“Probably seated already,” Ethan said, glancing at his watch. “We’re late.”
Ethan hated being late, and I could tell he was annoyed that I had taken a bit too long getting ready for our outing. As we made our way to the back of the restaurant, I remembered one night in the tenth grade, just after Ethan got his driver’s license, when he took Rachel, Annalise, and me for his inaugural spin to the movie theater. Like tonight, I guess I had taken a bit too long primping, so the whole way to the theater, Ethan kept ranting, saying things like, “By God, Darcy, we better not be stuck seeing some inane chick flick because everything else is sold out!” Finally, I had had enough of his verbal abuse and told him to stop the car immediately and let me out, never mind that we were cruising down Ogden Avenue, a busy street with very little shoulder. Rachel and Annalise tried to smooth things over from the back seat, but Ethan and I were both too fired up. Then, in our escalating battle, Ethan ran a red light, nearly smashing into a minivan. The driver looked like a prim, well-coiffed soccer mom, but that didn’t stop her from leaning on her horn with one hand and flipping Ethan the bird with the other just as a cop pulled Ethan over to issue him his first ticket. Despite the incident, we still made it to the theater in time to see Ethan’s first choice of movies, but he brought the night up often anyway, saying that it was “emblematic of my inconsiderate nature.”
I remembered the night with a mixture of nostalgia and sheepishness as Ethan spotted his friends. “That’s Martin and Phoebe,” he said, pointing to his two closest friends in London. My heart sank as I studied them because, to be frank, I judge books by their covers, and neither of them was impressive. Martin was a thin, balding guy, with a prominent Adam’s apple. He was wearing a lackluster corduroy jacket with dark patches at the elbow, and cuffed jeans (which, incidentally, placed him in the bad-jean camp). Phoebe was a large, ruddy woman with man hands and hair like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (before she becomes refined).
My face must have registered disappointment because Ethan made a disgusted sound, shook his head, and walked past me toward his unpolished pals. I followed him, smiling brightly, deciding to make the most of the eveni
ng. Maybe one of them had a hot, single brother.
“Martin, Phoebe, this is Darcy,” Ethan said when we reached the table.
“Darcy. Pleasure,” Martin said, standing slightly to shake my hand. I tried not to look at his Adam’s apple as I gave him a demure smile and said, “Likewise” in the Jackie O, finishing-school voice I had mastered from Claire.
Meanwhile, Phoebe’s face was frozen into a knowing little smirk that made me instantly, and intensely, dislike her.
“Darcy. We’ve heard so much about you,” she said, her voice loaded with sarcasm and innuendo.
My mind raced. What had Ethan told them that would cause Phoebe to smirk? I considered the possibilities: Pregnant and alone? No. That didn’t warrant a smirk, especially from a hulking woman with orange hair whose best hope of offspring sat in a Petri dish at a sperm bank. Mooching roommate? No. I hadn’t been in the country long enough to achieve that status. Besides, I was still (barely) self-sufficient. Shallow New Yorker? Perhaps that was it, but I wasn’t about to feel ashamed for being well-groomed and wearing fine clothes.
Then it hit me. Phoebe was smirking about Rachel and Dex. Ethan must have told them the whole story. Sure enough, as I talked about how much I was enjoying my visit to London, Phoebe’s smile evolved into a full-on jackal grin, and I became convinced that she was amused by my plight, amused that my former best friend was shagging my former fiancé.
“What’s so funny here? Am I missing something?” I finally asked, glancing around the table.
Martin muttered that nothing was funny. Ethan shrugged, looking flustered and guilty. Phoebe hid her smile with her pint of frothy Guinness, a fitting drink for a beast of a woman. At least I don’t have fat sausage limbs. At least I’m pretty and not wearing a nappy puce turtleneck. How could she not see that I had it all over her? As I watched Phoebe guffaw at her own bad jokes and order pint after pint to wash down her pork chops covered with thick, oniony sauce, I marveled at her abundance of misplaced confidence. To make my displeasure known to Ethan, I remained mostly silent.
Then, as we waited for our bill, Phoebe confirmed my hunch as she turned to me and slurred, “I met your friend Rachel a few months back. She was lovely.”
I inhaled sharply and held her gaze, struggling to remain calm. “Oh, you met Rachel? That is lovely…. Ethan didn’t mention that.” I glared at Ethan as he flinched, recrossed his arms, and averted his eyes to a nearby raucous table.
“Yeah,” he said. “Martin and Phoebe met Rachel when she visited me…”
My heart pounded with indignation, and I could feel my face tighten and contort in an attempt not to cry. How dare Ethan bring me out with these people after introducing Rachel to them—and not give me any warning? And worse, from the way Phoebe was acting, I just knew that Rachel had had feelings for Dex during her visit to London, and that she had shared her thoughts with Ethan and his friends. Before tonight, I was sure that Rachel had not confessed much to Ethan. At least not anything too incriminating. I had assumed this because when we were kids Rachel once told me that she didn’t divulge anything embarrassing or controversial even in her own diary because she feared an early demise from a fluke accident—something undignified like dropping her hair dryer in the bathtub or choking on a hot dog. And upon her death, she couldn’t bear the thought of her parents reading an entry that might make them think less of her. “But you’d be dead,” I remember saying to her. “Even worse,” she’d say. “Because if I were dead, I wouldn’t be able to change my parents’ opinion of me. That would be their final impression.”
So, because of Rachel’s heretofore unflagging morality, coupled with her anxiety over what people might think of her character, I had assumed that if she had had feelings for Dex prior to our breakup, she surely hadn’t shared them with anyone. I think I also wanted to believe that Ethan, although closer to Rachel, was my friend, too, and that he therefore wasn’t holding out on me in any significant way. It was sickening to realize that not only did he likely know much more than he had let on—but that total strangers in London knew everything too. I felt like a fool—and feeling foolish is one of the all-time worst emotions. Suddenly I was burning up, fanning at my face with my small Chanel purse, panicking that perhaps Rachel and Dex had hooked up even before the day I caught them together.
In an attempt to ferret out the truth, I looked Phoebe straight in the eye and asked in a volume way louder than necessary, even in a noisy restaurant filled with a bunch of drunken Brits, “When you met my friend Rachel, did she happen to mention that she wanted to fuck my fiancé? Or had she already fucked him at that point?”
Martin looked pained as he intently studied our bill. Ethan shook his head. Phoebe let out a gleeful chortle.
“I’m glad that somebody here is amused,” I said, standing angrily from the table. My heel caught on the edge of my chair, causing it to crash to the ground. Everyone—including the two cute twenty-something guys who were now joined by two cute twenty-something girls—turned to stare, looking embarrassed for me. I fumbled in my purse for money, realizing that I had left my wallet on the floor next to my air mattress. This was unfortunate, because it would have been a way stronger statement to throw down a wad of bills before exiting. Instead I had to mumble to Ethan that I’d pay him back later. Then I stomped off, wondering if I could find my way home, and how much my feet were going to ache walking all that way in my new shoes. As I spilled onto the dark street, I realized that I had no idea where I was. I walked in one direction, then turned in the other, and was hugely relieved when Ethan appeared from the door of the restaurant.
“Darcy, just wait here. I have to pay our part of the bill,” he said, as if he were the one who had the right to be annoyed.
“You owe me an apology!” I shouted.
“Just wait here. I’ll be right back. Okay?”
I crossed my arms, glared at him, and said fine, I’d wait. As if I had much of a choice. A minute later Ethan was back on the street, his lips set in an angry line. He hailed us a cab and opened the door roughly. How dare he be mad at me! I was the wronged party here. My instinct was to unleash, but I bit my lip, literally, waiting for him to talk first. He said nothing for several minutes and then spoke in a wry tone. “So you and Phoebe got along brilliantly.”
“She’s such a miserable cow, Ethan!”
“Calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” I shouted. “How dare you bring me out with them when they know everything about me! You should have told me they had already met Rachel! I can’t believe you all had a good laugh at my expense! I thought you were my friend!”
“I am your friend,” he said.
“Then tell me what you told them, Ethan! And while you’re at it, tell me everything you know about Dex and Rachel!”
His neck muscles twitched. “We’ll talk about it at home, okay?”
“No. We’ll talk about it now!” I shouted, but Ethan looked resolute, and I was afraid of pressing my luck. I wanted the truth too much to jeopardize pissing him off. It took all of my resolve, but I managed to keep my mouth shut the rest of the way home.
When Ethan and I arrived back at his flat, he disappeared to his bedroom, possibly to call Rachel and seek permission to divulge her dirty little secrets. I paced in the living room, wondering what he was going to tell me. How bad the truth was. After a few minutes, he returned to the living room and began rummaging through his CDs. I took off my jacket and heels and sat cross-legged on the floor, keeping my face placid, as I waited for the truth. The whole truth. Ethan calmly selected a Coldplay CD, turned the volume higher than I thought appropriate, and sank into his couch. He gave me a steely gaze. “Okay. Look,” he said over the music. “I’m really tired of this shit, Darcy. I am really, really sick of it.”
“So am I,” I said, reaching over to turn down his stereo.
He held up his hand as if to warn me that interrupting was not an option.
“So we’re going to discuss this tonight
and then never again, okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “That’s all I wanted in the first place.”
“Okay. When Rachel came here to visit me, she told me that she…that she had feelings for Dex.”
“I knew it!” I said, pointing at him.
“Are you going to listen or not?”
I swallowed hard and nodded.
“And she had been having those feelings for some time, but not that long a time.”
“How long?”
“A few weeks…maybe a few months.”
“A few months?” I shouted.
He gave me a look of warning, as if he were poised to exit the conversation.
“Sorry. Go on.”
“I don’t have much else to say.”
“When did they first hook up?” I asked, petrified of the answer, but needing to know just how big a fool I had been.
He paused and then said that he didn’t know.
“I can tell you’re lying,” I said. “I know you know!”
“What I do know is this,” Ethan said, dodging the question. “Rachel didn’t want to feel the way she did. She was in agony over the whole thing. She had every intention of going back to New York after her visit here and being your maid of honor. She was prepared to move on, force herself to get over Dex, and be your friend. Which is more than most people would do in her shoes.”
My heart pounded in my ears. I was fixated on one thing. One fact. “Give me a date, Ethan. When did they first hook up?”
He crossed his arms and exhaled loudly.
“Was it before or after Rachel’s birthday?” I asked. I honestly don’t know what made me pick that date. Perhaps because Rachel’s birthday is in late May, always coinciding with the start of summer. I could have just as easily said Memorial Day. But I didn’t. I said, “Rachel’s birthday,” and by the look on Ethan’s face, I knew I had hit the jackpot. My mind raced back to the night, how I had thrown a surprise party for her. Suddenly, I remembered with horror how Dex hadn’t come home until nearly seven in the morning. How he had said he was with Marcus. And how Marcus had backed him up. They had all lied to me! My fiancé had spent the night with my best friend! Months before I had ever cheated on him!