Chapter 20
Gen chose the place: a comfortable Chelsea diner with sun-filled windows and red-cushioned seats.
A photo booth in the back stood next to a vintage wooden pinball machine.
Emily, who was early, dropped a quarter into the pinball machine and dragged back the spring pull that shot the ball into the belly of the game. She flipped the wooden levers.
“Hey,” said Gen at Emily’s shoulder. The last ball slid past the levers and down into the machine.
“Where’d you find this place?” Emily kept her voice light. “It’s so old-timey.”
“I’ve been coming here awhile. It’s quiet and no one’s recognized me yet.”
It was unnerving to think about Gen as someone whose level of fame required a break from it.
Emily knew that Gen was being careful about when to meet (brunch hour during the week; the tables weren’t full and several people sat by themselves at the counter), and had assumed it was because Gen had wanted to send the message that this wasn’t a date.
A different reason hadn’t occurred to Emily.
Or additional reason. This still wasn’t a date.
Gen, a little stiff, held herself at a distance.
Shaking hands would have been weird, given their history.
A hug should have been normal, considering that it had been roughly fifteen years since they had dated, but Emily dreaded that it would feel intimate and dreaded that it wouldn’t.
“Want to play a round of pinball?” Gen said.
It’s a mean trick to discover that many years and one solid heart stomping didn’t make you any more immune to the huge dark eyes and low voice of a person who once held you down in the grass and slid inside you until you couldn’t shut up, you had to say everything you were feeling, had to announce the enormous orgasm barreling toward you, had to cry out how much you loved her.
“No,” Emily said. “Let’s order.”
The waitress dropped menus on their table and disappeared.
Gen glanced at the menu and pushed it aside. “I don’t know where to start. We haven’t really talked since freshman year.”
Emily remembered every word of their argument outside Thayer Hall.
Not long after their breakup, she saw a reality show about a skydiver whose parachute didn’t open and he crashed into an empty parking lot but survived because the impact had been evenly distributed throughout his body.
When the show cut to a commercial, she told herself to get over Gen.
Enough already! Look at that skydiver, broken to bits.
He wasn’t complaining. He was grateful to be alive.
Everyone fell in love for the first time.
Everyone experienced heartbreak. What happened to you is nothing new.
Still, seated across from Gen, Emily felt a dull ache to remember that rainy night freshman year, and it was as if, fifteen years ago, she had fallen out of a plane. “We talked at my wedding.”
Gen made an impatient face. “That doesn’t count.”
“I wrote you a letter, after my engagement. You wrote back.” Of all the letters Emily wrote to Gen after their breakup, she had mailed one.
“I don’t want to talk about that letter.”
“Well?” said the waitress, pencil poised over her pad.
Gen ordered two hot dogs with a side of potato chips. Emily ordered waffles with fresh fruit.
“Who’s the boy,” Emily teased Gen, “and who’s the girl?”
“I need protein,” Gen protested.
“I see that.”
“Waffles are nothing but sugar and air.”
“And so delicious.”
The waitress yanked away their menus. After she left, Emily asked Gen, “What did we do? The waitress hates us.”
Gen squinted over Emily’s shoulder. “She’s new. Maybe she’s just settling in. Emily, I like being the boy.”
“I know that. I knew.”
“You did?”
“I liked it.”
“Well,” Gen said after a pause, “you did marry a man.”
“I left him.”
Gen’s gaze dropped to Emily’s left hand, which no longer wore her ring. Emily had also removed the engagement ring from her right hand. Gen said, “When?”
“I moved out about a month ago.”
“Pretty recent. I mean—sorry.”
“It was long overdue.”
“Then…congratulations?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Where are you living now?”
“A studio in the Village. It’s small for three, but it’s fine.”
“Three?”
“Me and the kids.”
“You have kids.”
“Is that surprising?”
“I just didn’t imagine it, when I imagined you.”
“You imagined me?”
“Natural curiosity. Let me guess: a boy and a girl and a summer home in the Hamptons.”
“Upstate.”
“Where are these children?” Gen looked Emily over as though she might be hiding them in her dress pockets.
“At school.” Emily showed a picture of the children on her phone. “Connor is ten and Stella is five.”
“And beautiful, of course. I thought Jack was rich. Like, old money plus new money rich. What’s with the studio?”
“His money is not my money.”
“A good lawyer could fix that.”
“That’s what Jocelyn says.”
“What does Jocelyn think of all this?”
“She’s appalled by the studio.”
“Well, yes.”
“She offered a free spare two-bedroom.”
“Jocelyn is a fucking fairy godmother.”
“I said no.”
Gen wrinkled her brow. “That makes no sense.”
“I don’t like being charity.”
“Do you hate yourself?”
“Come on.”
“I mean it. Do you feel so bad about leaving your husband that you need to punish yourself by living in a tiny, spartan studio when you could have a nice place owned by a friend who’d never miss the rent?”
“No.” Maybe.
“You think any of us makes it without being charity at some point? I’ve been charity. I’ve been charity to you .”
“That’s not true.”
“The peanut butter sandwiches.”
“I didn’t think of it that way.”
“The tutoring.”
“You just wanted to get into my pants.”
“ Hoped, Emily. Hoped.”
“I didn’t do that because I wanted to help you.”
Gen tsk ed in disbelief.
“I did it because I liked you.”
It was quiet enough that Emily heard the whir of the overhead fan.
“I get that it doesn’t feel good to be indebted,” Gen said slowly, “and I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t part of our problem.”
“Our problem?”
“But the fact is that my life wouldn’t be the same without you.
I hated that for a really long time. Now I think that’s how it is for everyone.
Someone gives you the extra push you need at the right moment.
If you believe that you’re the exception to that rule, I’d say, A.
You’re wrong, and B. Do you think you’re better than everyone else? ”
“No.”
“Than me?”
“No.”
“Then give Joss a call. She’ll be thrilled. Otherwise, the studio, it’s—”
“Spartan, yes. Self-punishing, I know.”
“Temporary.”
“Temporary?”
“The sort of place you move into when you’re expecting to return to your marriage.”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“It’s been a month, we’ll see.”
“Hey, fuck you.”
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t know anything about me anymore.”
“I call things as I see them.”
“You don’t know what it took to leave.” Emily heard the quaver in her voice and was horrified.
“Emily. Hey. I’m sorry. Forget it, okay? Everything I said. It’s all my own shit. It has nothing to do with you.”
Was the studio self-sabotage? Emily had left Jack before.
This time, Jack had been surprisingly easygoing; he hadn’t even objected to her keeping the children for nearly the entire month.
Maybe he believed what Gen believed: that it was inevitable that Emily would return.
She resented the idea that other people might know her better than she knew herself.
“I didn’t come here for you to psychoanalyze me. ”
Gen’s question was genuine: “Why did you come?”
“I’m not going back to him. I can’t.”
“Okay,” Gen said softly. “You won’t.”
The waitress slammed their plates onto the table. “Good luck,” the waitress told Emily, and left.
Gen’s hot dogs were burnt and withered in their buns. The potato chips had been crushed into dust. With a spoon, Gen scooped the chip dust and let it sift back down onto her plate, watching incredulously as it poured like grains of sand.
Emily was glad that the arrival of this vengeful meal offered an escape from exposing what a mess she was. “Should you send it back?”
“I’m afraid I’ll get something worse.”
“She said ‘Good luck’ to me. Why ‘Good luck’? Did she overhear our conversation? About my divorce?”
“ Is it a divorce?”
“My food looks fine.”
Gen shook her head. “I’m mystified.”
“She must know who you are. Does she think I’m on your track team? ‘Good luck at the next competition’?”
Gen smiled.
“It’s not a crazy theory,” Emily said.
“I mean, I know you’re a runner, but you’re not a runner .”
“Maybe she is, and you beat her at something?”
“I would recognize her.”
“Maybe you beat someone she cares about.”
“I don’t think this has anything to do with track.”
“Oh,” Emily said, the obvious finally occurring to her.
“Yeah. Maybe it’s that.” Then Gen shook her head. “No, can’t be. She’s been nice to you. Relatively. If this was a homophobic thing, we would have gotten equal treatment.”
“But you look gay.”
“So do you.”
Surprised and pleased, Emily said, “What makes me look gay?”
“Your hands.”
“What about them?”
“Hard to say. That’s the great mystery of the Lesbian Hands. They’re all different, yet every lesbian has them.”
“I’m not a lesbian.”
“True,” Gen said thoughtfully. “Queer Hands, then,” she amended. “You also look gay by association. The waitress must assume we’re together. ‘Good luck’ meant ‘Good luck with her .’ Me.”
Emily flushed. “Here.” Moving quickly to disguise being flustered, she split her food, sliding half onto Gen’s plate. Emily pushed the sad hot dogs over to make room. “Oh God.” Emily spotted some figs on her plate and swiped them onto Gen’s. “Take these, too.”
“Emily, are you a hater of figs?”
“Who puts figs on a waffles and fruit plate?”
“What do you have against the humble fig?” Gen ate one.
“Remember how Florencia was full of facts?”
“I barely met her.”
“She told me something about figs.”
“Am I going to want to unknow this as soon as you tell me?”