The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  Pity the reader adding NARS Orgasm to her shopping cart, thinking it would give her a face like Margaret’s. Lainey clicked the link herself, toggled to swatches of still brighter shades. She could paint her whole face in neon pink and mica gold and she wouldn’t light up as bright as Margaret in the video. She wanted to watch it again, but her cubicle was around the corner from the bathroom, and 10:00 A.M. was prime bathroom time. Poop time. She tried not to notice how long her colleagues stayed in the bathroom, but the tedium of her job, glorified data entry at a Broadway ticket broker’s office, made it difficult not to look for any distraction. She pinched her own cheeks and took a slug of the coffee that had gone cold on her desk.

  “Oh, my God, Lainey, your friend was on The Late Show last night! So fun!” Molly, her most cheerful coworker, appeared beside Lainey’s desk with her ever-present, head-size Starbucks cup.

  “What?” Lainey would have heard about this, surely, from Margaret herself, who had told them that she and Mac had been asked to appear on a few local Kentucky news programs, and even one national morning show. But she said the idea made her too nervous, and besides, Mac’s grandmother thought it tacky, and his mother wanted to hold out for a better show—all this conveyed via the planners, now seemingly employed indefinitely to manage the postwedding flurry of attention.

  That someone could say no to being on television astounded the rest, who realized they’d grown up thinking of it as a goal even if their respective ambitions had nothing to do with entertainment.

  “Really?” Lainey asked Molly. How could Margaret keep this from them? “Oh, I fell asleep so early last night, I haven’t had a chance—”

  “Let’s queue it up, girl!” Molly rolled over a desk chair and navigated to the clip.

  The host played the infamous video, and the country star’s drunken monologue was made still funnier by his good-natured laughter and endearing blush as he watched himself.

  On one cut to Margaret’s face, the host said, “Who is she? She should be on stage!”

  “No shi—no crud, right?”

  The host laughed, head back, mouth flung open, like crud for shit was the best joke he’d heard all year. The superstar hopped up from his seat, emulated the style of the leap he’d taken in the video, and took to the stage, grabbed the microphone and dipped it low, said, “This song goes out to all y’all newlyweds watching from home, but especially you Mac, and you, Margaret,” he looked right at the camera, “belle of the ball, for your goodwill and neighborliness when a gnarly old drunk crashed your wedding.”

  The star appeared enormous again on screen, and Lainey marveled, as he crooned about blue jeans, at how perfectly his own fit, how the stones on his belt buckle seemed to twinkle with the beat. The wedding video projected behind him, silent now as he sang. When the rap verse began, the country star looked as if he would go for it, but then the rapper himself appeared from offstage and took over, and the studio audience audibly went bonkers. And there was Margaret’s face again, laughing now, and beaming, and Lainey, as always, couldn’t look away.

  Lainey and Adam didn’t appear, but you could see Ji Sun’s date, Evan, at one point, dancing like a maniac, and a bit of Alice’s strong arm, squeezing Margaret’s shoulder. The only evidence of Mac was his ear.

  Molly shimmied behind Lainey. “I love this song.”

  As the final chorus swelled, Lainey felt rise in her a familiar surge of something like fury. She had to make a change. She had to quit her job, focus on writing, do something. She couldn’t sit here in this stale, gray room, her cubicle walls closing in on her while her best friends sparkled on television, became doctors, traveled the world.

  “Wow,” Lainey said. “That’s awesome.” She hadn’t minimized the window with the blush compacts, so she gestured at a stack of meaningless papers on her desk. “Well, I should probably get back to work.”

  “Right, me too,” Molly said, singing all the way back to her desk, “In those jeaaaaans, in my dreeeeams.”

  Lainey opened the group chat window she and her roommates maintained and typed out: Alice, wtf, your arm was on national television last night. Can I have your autograph???

  Haven’t watched yet—what are we talking about? Ji Sun was in Berlin, but was the easiest to catch online.

  Oh, it’s the video, it isn’t me! Margaret wrote a few moments later, and the still-typing ellipses appeared. But yeah, pretty hysterical!!!!! She added the little plop-shaped blushing smiley face.

  Alice wouldn’t respond until hours later, when she wrote, Damn, he is wearing those jeans. Can I get his number, M?

  * * *

  • • •

  After work, Lainey met Adam for a drink at the Bavarian bier haus between their two offices and broke up with him for the nth time. She and Adam shared an oversized soft pretzel, buttery and warm. She’d felt cruelty well up in her all afternoon, edging out ambition, and knew it would come out here, taste of mustard on her tongue, everyone in the bar loud and laughing, probably celebrating engagements or promotions or other capitalist milestones that Lainey both disdained and desired.

  “I need to get in touch with myself, with my ambition. I feel like I’ve been putting too much into this, into us.”

  Adam gave a weary sigh, brushed salt from the corners of his lips. “But things have been going so well. Lainey, I thought we—I thought we’d get married.”

  “Married?” Lainey gulped, stopped herself from laughing—not at the absurdity of the idea, but at the fact that, had he asked her just before she broke up with him, she might have said yes. How could she feel so warm and behave so coldly? She didn’t know what she was doing, or why. “We’re twenty-four!”

  “Not, like, tomorrow,” he said, his eyes the same rusty amber color as his beer in the light.

  “Oh, God, I don’t even know if I want to get married, Adam. Ever.”

  Here he crumpled some. She’d said this before, but he didn’t believe it, she knew.

  “Is this, you find this stifling?” He gestured at their table, at his own body, broad shoulders and one of his soft blue sweaters.

  She had the urge to touch him. She had just been feeling so full and so satisfied, something like content, coming in from the sludge of the city to this cozy spot, where they’d lucked into a table and gotten served right away. They loved and supported one another. They gave each other space to grow and become.

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “Is this about dating other people . . . or girls?” That Lainey sometimes dated women seemed both a point of pride and confusion for Adam, who’d been dumped enough times by her now that he feared himself, rather than women, to be the phase.

  “Not just that, but I guess that’s part of it,” Lainey said. “Don’t you think we’re too young to be, like, monogamous? Don’t you think it’s nuts that Margaret and Mac are already married?”

  “I mean, they’re young, but . . . no, I don’t think it’s, like, insane that they got married. They’re not teenagers.” He touched his new iPhone, out on the table since he was too nervous to keep it in his messenger bag. “Lainey, I don’t know how many more times I can go through this with you.”

  Him saying this felt perilous and thrilling. She could answer with love or rage; they came from the same place.

  “Maybe this is the last time,” she said, and waited for him to answer, Because you’ll come back to me, and you’ll stay. He’d said these exact words before; she’d memorized them. He would wait.

  “Yeah,” he said, “maybe it is.”

  The yeah, how readily he’d said it, how casual it sounded, tossed off like it was meaningless—she felt something go out from under her, and the free fall, there it was, that feeling she’d sought. Anything could happen, everything was still open to her, still possible. But when he stood to go, collected his precious phone, tucked money under a pint glass, and stooped to kiss her fo
rehead like she was his wayward charge, she felt his shadow close around her. He left and the room grew more red but less warm, neon where there’d been candlelight, steam on the windows like smoke, everyone around her too loud and too hungry.

  “Are you leaving?” a girl with foundation spackled on her face asked. She smelled like cotton candy and vinegar, and Lainey thought she might be sick. “We’d, like, die for this table.”

  “Be my guest,” Lainey said, and stood to go. She paused as she pulled on her coat, considered what would happen if she asked instead for them to join her, paid for a round and listened to them complain about their ex-boyfriends, let some banker bros buy them ceramic boot steins, made her same old joke about managing to date a hedge fund manager while steadfastly refusing to learn what hedge funds even were, and gotten tanked enough to go home with one of them, sink down into the mediocre life that waited for her, jaws wide, at the bottom of whatever pit she was so intent to dive down into now.

  Chapter 25

  Alice got engaged next, to Kushi, on the night that Barack Obama won the 2008 election. Alice and Kushi watched the returns with some of her classmates and his fellow residents at the Back Bay apartment of one of the attendings from the hospital where they both worked. When CNN called it for Obama, Alice watched through her own tears as Kushi, whose observable emotions had so far run from riotous happiness to bemused frustration, wept. He was Canadian, the son of Pakistani immigrants, and couldn’t vote. But he’d gone to undergrad in Chicago, and been on the Obama train early, with an enthusiasm that, along with the charisma of Michelle Obama, had won Alice fully to Obama by the primaries, in spite of her girlhood dream to vote for—to become, really—Hillary Clinton.

  The others were cheering, toasting with tequila shots, while Kushi, still seated, shook beside her. She put her arms around him, brought him close, felt tears from his face make her own cheeks wet. When she remembered this night in the future, it would be this moment that rose above all the others—how they drew near in the overwhelm, how she gave shelter—even the elation that preceded it, the surprise that followed, and the immense rush that came from feeling like America the beautiful, the one in the songs and stories, was possible; hope was real; and humans were good.

  They sent sprees of exclamation points by text, called their parents and other friends, collected their signs and sweatshirts—emblazoned with that sunrise O, and silkscreened with Obama’s upturned, optimistic face—and then ran outside, joined the crowd in their impromptu parade to Copley Square.

  Where had all this confetti come from? All these flags? Lainey had once observed that New York City was itself like a theater, always at the ready with any set and all the costumes, character actors for days, and Alice thought of this now as Boston, so dour in comparison, managed to send forth countless balloons from its own hidden trap doors, and the confetti that covered the sidewalk continued to rain down, the night sky a riot of red, white, blue, and gold.

  “American Girl” began blasting from a boom box, and Alice shook her hips, did her finger-waggle shimmy invitation to Kushi to come dance with her.

  “Alice, wait,” Kushi said, and pulled on her hand. He bent low and she thought he was tying one of what she teased were his schoolboy sneakers, decrepit New Balances with ratty laces that were forever coming loose. But he looked up at her with a kind of beseeching wonder that made everything around her recede. She could remember having had this sensation only once before, where she could hear the record scratch in her own life, where the rest of the world blurred and she became one of only two.

  “This is one of the greatest nights of my life—of American history! But also of my life. And I want you beside me for all the future greatest days, too. And the worst ones. All the days. All the joys. You saying yes is the only thing that could make this the best day of my life. Will you marry me?” He was screaming, she realized, to be heard above the crowd, and tears were pouring from her face in a way that made it difficult to see him, or the circle that had formed around him, their friends and also strangers who chanted and cheered, some with hands folded, hopeful—already stuffed with it, hope, but still, always, Americans, hungry for more.

  “Yes,” she whispered, and then shouted. “Yes! Yes, Kushi, fuck, of course!”

  How had he come up with these lines, and when? How was someone so brilliant saying something so beautiful to her? What had she done to deserve a night like this, a life like this? He took her in his arms and they went into the crowd, where they danced and sang and were swallowed in the chaos of a joy that was all anticipation, all promise, all future forward, all confetti dust and hope and light light light light light

  Chapter 26

  Three months later, the four were all together at a studio in Brooklyn to learn the mehndi dance they would perform at Alice’s wedding. The ceremony was still six months away, but Ji Sun was in town, and the lesson replaced the meal they tried to share at least once a month.

  Lainey was the best dancer of the bunch, and had learned the moves with ease. Ji Sun was graceful if labored, and Alice was competent if uninspired. But Margaret was like a giraffe foal, managing to land on her bum more than once, long limbs splayed out. She compensated for her lack of coordination with enthusiasm and her same old beauty, but Alice could tell the teacher was growing impatient. She’d had them break for twenty, and the four sat on the floor now with their waters, looking at one another in the mirror.

  “Did you all take ballet growing up?” Margaret asked, eyes on Lainey’s messy bun, hair dyed bright battery-acid yellow. Margaret was dressed like an extra in an eighties movie about ballerinas: grayish-purple leotard, pale pink tights, cream leg warmers. “I always wanted to, but we didn’t have—well, we didn’t really have the money, but we also didn’t have a dance studio in town anyway, so . . .” She looked down. “I wish we’d done a choreographed dance at our wedding!” She smiled brightly.

  This was their cue to say how Margaret had had the best wedding, why would she change a thing, her wedding was a dream, etc., but Alice had grown tired of this. She was sick even of planning her own wedding, which, were she in charge, would be at City Hall on a weekday afternoon when neither she nor Kushi were on call the next day, so they could gorge on happy-hour oysters and champagne after.

  “It’s just another thing to coordinate,” Alice said. “I’d rather not have to deal with it.”

  Anything you said about your own wedding, Alice had learned, was taken by anyone who’d ever had a wedding or thought she might, as judgment or insult. She’d thought Margaret, whose wedding was famous, for chrissakes, would be immune to this, but here she was, scowling in her ballerina bun.

  “I basically gave Kushi’s mother carte blanche,” Alice said.

  “Your mom, she doesn’t mind?” Lainey asked.

  “What do you think?” Alice rolled her eyes. “I think she got her fix with Eleanor’s wedding anyway.”

  Kushi had said his mother would keel over if they got married in a courthouse, disown him if they eloped. He was an only child, after his sister died of leukemia when she was eleven and Kushi was eight. Kushi couldn’t remember a time before he’d wanted to be a doctor, and he still felt some guilt that he’d decided on radiation oncology as his specialty rather than pediatric oncology, as originally planned. But the ped-onk rotation had nearly destroyed him, he told Alice. He’d come home every night and dreamed of his sister, and the dreams reached into his days.

  “She was . . . haunting me,” he said. “I would see her, in the halls at the hospital. Really see her. Not, like, sleep-deprived delusions, Alice. She was there. And she would just stare at me, and shake her head really slowly if I tried to go near. But now I think that maybe she was protecting me. From having to get hardened to all that.” Radiation oncology was close enough, anyway, and Kushi was already head resident, on track for his choice of fellowships the following year.

  When Alice first met him,
she was struck by an immediate, unprecedented desire to have his children. Not to marry him, but to make a person with him, to be and create his family. This longing was so precise and insistent that she felt it physically, a full-body discomfort that radiated up from her pelvis and made rounds with him the worst she’d ever experienced.

  “Honestly, I did think maybe you were in over your head,” he’d told her, once they were together and she could give the reason for how clumsy and quiet she’d been. When he’d seen her on rounds with another resident, he’d stood in the door, mouth open, stunned by how bright she was, and how eager.

  “No one’s ever made me quite so incompetent before,” she told him later, in bed, and he laughed at this, gestured at his naked, satiated body, said she was stupid competent, and she said he was stupid competent, too, and this became the way they talked about satisfying one another in bed.

  “Is Kushi a good dancer, Alice?” Ji Sun asked. The others had been to a classmate’s wedding with Alice and Kushi, but Ji Sun hadn’t been able to attend.

  “Very good,” Alice said, and raised her eyebrows. “Ugh, he’s goood. And let’s just say . . . it translates.” She closed her eyes and gave herself a little private smile.