Chapter Twenty The Confession
Chapter Twenty
The Confession
I went to Molly’s for Christmas, because our parents decided to go cross-country skiing with a couple my father had met in the summer at tennis camp. Maybe I should have been disappointed, but it was a good time to catch up. I usually told Molly about relationship things, and I usually told Molly when I was in the middle of making an enormous mess out of my life. It appeared that now, I might not be speaking to Will or Eliza, and Michael #2 might be making a sneaky exit to avoid getting caught up in my ridiculous life, and who could blame him?
I arrived on their doorstep on Christmas Eve holding a bottle of wine and an overnight bag. Molly took both and set the bag down in the front hall, and I threw my arms around her and said into her ear, “I’m so happy to see you.”
“Me too,” she said. “I’m honestly happy to see anybody who isn’t our flooring guy. My most meaningful relationship at the moment is with our flooring guy. His name is Albert. I think he lives with us now. I won’t be surprised if we wake up tomorrow morning and he’s under the tree.”
I laughed as she led me into the kitchen and poured me a glass of wine. “So,” I said, “I need some therapy first. Tell me about the cutest animal you’ve seen today.”
“I gave a shot to a bunny,” she said. “He felt like the softest bedroom slipper.”
“What was his name?”
“Lucifer.”
“Lucifer? Lucifer the bunny?”
“Yes. They have another one named Dante.”
“How metal.” I took a sip of my drink and looked around her kitchen. It was so cozy here. Maybe I could just move into her house and never leave and never talk to anyone again except to order takeout. It would simplify things considerably.
She leaned back against the counter and studied me. “Cecily, what’s going on with you?”
“Wow,” I said. “A person can’t just stand around in her sister’s kitchen anymore.”
“What’s going on?”
“Well,” I said, “I slept with the waiter.”
Her eyes got wide. “The dog guy?” I nodded. She put her arm around me. “This is a living room conversation,” she said.
It was always easier when I didn’t have to look her in the eye; this was one of the reasons we sometimes went on walks. But this time, she sat me down on her sofa and looked right at me. I gave her the quick rundown of how I went from dog to restaurant to photographs to teaching him about room tone. I ended at, “I don’t know, we sort of…did it in the front hall.”
“With the door open?”
“Molly!”
“What? I’m trying to picture it! You said you opened the door and had sex, so you’re the one who left some things out. I’m not the one who’s confusing.”
“We closed the door,” I said. “Barely.”
“I am…surprised,” she said. “You haven’t done a lot of impulsive things like that, at least not ones I know about. So it was just that one time?”
“It was a couple of times.”
“Good for you,” she said. “I assume.”
“It…was,” I said. “I like him. His sister dropped by for brunch. We ate.”
“That’s…intimate.”
“It was an accident.”
“She accidentally came over for brunch?”
“No, I was accidentally there.”
“Is he nice?”
“He’s great. But I think he hates me now.”
“I doubt it,” she said reflexively.
I told her how Eliza had found us outside his building. “And I told her to stop panicking, and he stormed off, and now I’m pretty sure he’s not talking to me.”
“What did you say exactly?”
“Well,” I said. “That it wasn’t anything. And…that he doesn’t own furniture. I told her it wasn’t real.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s true! It was an observation. It’s neutral.”
“Cecily, come on. I mean, ‘not real’? Yikes.”
“I was just trying to point out that it isn’t a permanent thing. He says himself that he doesn’t accumulate more stuff than he can fit in his car. He doesn’t stay anywhere, he doesn’t commit to anything, and he’s only here until his lease is up. How am I supposed to talk about it?”
“Okay, but you can understand how it would make him feel weird. You can see how, sitting there having just spent the night with you and introduced you to his sister, it would sound like you’re blowing him off.”
“Absolutely not. He’s the one who told his sister we were just friends.”
“I’m not sure that’s the same thing as ‘not real.’?”
“I think he thinks I was judging him, and I wasn’t.”
“Are you positive?”
“Of course I’m positive. I can’t believe you’re even asking me this. I think he’s great. He’s really talented, he’s fun, he’s good at a couple of different jobs. He’s just…not the same kind of person I am. He can come and go and try all kinds of things and pick them up and put them down and it doesn’t even bother him.”
“Ah,” she said. “See, I think we’re getting down to it. It’s not money. I think it would be fine with you if he were totally broke, as long as you knew he was super into something. And you think he’s not, and that’s what bugs you. You think you, as a tireless obsessive, can only be understood by a tireless obsessive. Like a doctor. Not by a guy who just does whatever.”
“I don’t know if it’s that,” I said, even though as soon as she said it, my stomach dropped. My freaking sister, every time.
She took a sip from her glass. “All right.” Why was it always, always like this, where she could say two words to me and I would write an entire interior paragraph about what I knew she was thinking? All right, if you say so. You never listen to me anyway, even though my advice is sound and I’m married, so I am clearly the authority, not to mention I am older, and I am taller, and I own a house.
“Oh my God, the way you say that, I just—”
“Hey, don’t get mad at me,” she said. “I thought this whole thing was a bad idea to begin with. You were the one who wanted to get out there and let somebody else pick people. I told you I thought it was a waste of a perfectly good dog lover you had met on your own. This was your call.”
I didn’t say anything. We just sat.
When we were young, I was the one who talked about boyfriends, about getting married. I watched soaps, I had favorite couples, I loved the idea of love, and I had pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio in my locker. Molly was more serious, not even sure she cared about getting married. Just vet school, thank you very much.
So of course, Molly had met Pete when she was twenty-three. At a friend’s wedding where she was a bridesmaid in a powder-blue sheath dress, Pete was a groomsman in a rented tux. They were seated next to each other among the couple’s cocktail-hour girlfriends and NFL Sunday buddies, although they were neither. They got the same pasta when they went through the buffet line, they got tipsy and ended up deep in conversation while everybody else was on the dance floor, and inevitably, she wound up barefoot at two in the morning, climbing into a taxi next to him with her shoes in her hand. The next day, she texted me, OMG wedding reception hookup, call me. The absolute orderliness of it! She got married at twenty-five, finished school, opened her practice, bought a house, and everything seemed to make sense.
And yet two years after they got married, they’d started having young-couple fights. They’d been separated for three months. I loved Pete like crazy, but all I could do was call her and spend time with her; the separation, like the marriage, was between them in its particulars. She kept telling me she wasn’t holding out on me about any one thing that was wrong, it was just that they hadn’t lived together before they got married, and everything was harder than they thought. They went to counseling, they went on dates, and one day she told me he was coming home. Since then they had seemed entirely happy in that way you know from the outside isn’t the whole truth, but is a kind of truth.
“I feel like you’re sitting there thinking terrible things about me,” I finally said.
“I’m not,” she said. “But if I’m being completely honest, I’m not surprised this is so messy. It goes back to this show, doesn’t it? You got into something you didn’t believe in, and that’s not like you.”
“How was I supposed to say no?” I said. “I was terrified, and I was right. My boss let eight people go two days before Christmas. For all I know, if I didn’t do something, I’d have been in that group, and so would Julie. And I’d end up alone forever, sitting around listening to whatever Justin is doing, wondering where my career went wrong.”
“Justin?” she said. “Where’s that coming from?”
“Nowhere,” I said. “Just, he’s making a new show, he’s going up and up and up, and he’s engaged, and I’m still doing exactly the job I was doing when we were together, you know? I’m going to be ninety years old and I’m going to be picking my way through narration tracks to take out burps. If I turn forty and I haven’t done anything except all this, it’s going to be all over.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “People do exciting things after they turn forty all the time. Julia Child was fifty when she published her first book.”
“You know why everybody knows that?” I said. “Because it isn’t what usually happens.” She reached over and put her arm around me, and I leaned against her a bit. “I don’t want to be forty and be sucking exhaust from my ex-boyfriend’s rising rocket ship.”
“Do rocket ships have exhaust?”
“Massive amounts, yes.”
“I never liked him,” she said. “I couldn’t stand his little—his messenger bag with the little buttons, and the ironic hats, and the way he said everything was ‘so real,’ and I’m sorry, but offering everybody advice about weed is not a personality. I don’t care how many shows he makes, I’m still going to think he’s a dope. And I think you should think so, too.”
They didn’t make them any more loyal than Molly. “Thank you,” I said.
“Does it help?”
“It helps a little.”