4. Paul’s Housewarming Party, June 2011
Paul’s face fell as he opened his door and spotted Sarah standing in his doorway.
She was dressed in her favorite silk party shirt under a green corduroy jacket, clutching a bottle of wine, and she did a quick mental calculation of what could be wrong with her appearance that would bring that look to her cousin’s face.
“Where’s Liam?” Paul said at last.
“Oh.” She realized that in the chaos of the last couple of weeks, she had forgotten to update Paul about her relationship status. “Liam and I broke up.”
“Oh, no,” Paul replied, his face falling. “I’m so sorry, Sarah.” He gave her a warm hug, but he seemed distracted as he took the bottle of wine from her, placing her jacket on an overladen coat rack.
Was Paul more of a fan of Liam’s than she’d realized?
Sarah pondered his silence as she followed him into his new ground-floor apartment, taking in the carefully selected decor that must reflect Patricia’s aspirational design sense: posters from the early 1900s for French wines, black and white photographs of Toronto landmarks, a charcoal grey accent wall.
As Sarah glanced around the housewarming party, the source of Paul’s discomfort came into focus: this was a couples party.
Literally everyone except her was part of a couple—and not just a couple, but an elegant, attractive pair, legs crossed towards each other on white sofas as they chatted over brightly colored cocktails.
She felt like she was trapped in a furniture advertisement.
“So what are you doing for a roommate?” Paul asked. “I thought Liam might move in if I got out of the way.” Had Paul thought he was doing her a favor by leaving? It would be ironic if he had been trying to push her stalled relationship out of its stasis. He’d certainly achieved that goal.
“I found someone else to live with,” Sarah said.
“It’s fine. She’s an education student.” Sarah had spent the week interviewing a handful of potential roommates before selecting a quiet young woman named Winnie who was in a teacher-prep program and barely had the courage to ask if she was allowed to put food in the refrigerator.
A shy and self-doubting roommate felt like exactly Sarah’s speed right then.
Sarah kept her smile plastered on as Paul led her past various tableaus of happy coupledom and into the kitchen, where one more couple awaited her like the punchline to a joke: Ren and his wife Paola, carefully arranging fancy cheeses on a large white platter.
Ren smiled at her as he looked up. “Hey!”
“Hey!” Sarah said brightly. “They’ve put you on cheese duty, I see.”
“Unfortunately,” Ren agreed, rearranging some cubes with a knife. “If there’s an art to this I never learned it.”
“The master’s programs in snack arrangement are tough to get into,” Sarah said.
“Very cut-throat. It’s the knives.”
Paola glanced between them. She was even more stunning in person, with large dark eyes and dark hair that artfully curled around her shoulders in long, loose waves. “Well, I had to give him something to do,” she said. “Otherwise, he fidgets.”
“Paola, this is my old friend Sarah,” Ren said, gesturing with his non-knife-wielding hand. “She’s Paul’s cousin, but we knew each other at McGill. And Sarah, this is my lovely wife, Paola. Did your boyfriend come?”
“Liam and I broke up.”
“Oh, no.” Ren’s eyes registered something that passed too quickly for her to track it. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It was long overdue,” Sarah said.
His expression settled into kindness. “Well, it gives you more time to shoot, right?”
She nodded. “I’ll have to do a sad break-up photo series. Abandoned shoes on train tracks.”
“Lonely pigeons in the park,” Ren said.
“Empty plastic bags blowing in the wind.”
Ren chuckled.
“Oh, right,” Paola said. “You’re the photographer.”
“Yes.” Sarah looked between them. “Well, one of them. There may be others.”
Paola snorted. “I don’t doubt it, knowing Ren.”
“Oh…” Sarah struggled for words, unsure how to avoid the landmine that had appeared before her. “I just meant there are a lot of photographers…in the universe.”
Paola’s eyes shifted away from Sarah, a tiny dismissal; she seemed to have decided that Sarah was being boring, evasive, or both.
“Let’s get you one of Trish’s cocktails!” Paul cried with extra jollity. “They are shockingly strong, so brace yourself.”
“Please yes,” Trish said, emerging from the other room to join them. “Paola won’t have any, and I prepared way too much.”
Trish was in a white vest that she was wearing as a shirt and slim white pants, the kind of outfit that would have gotten stained within three minutes at an undergrad party but could remain pristine at a mid-twenties soiree.
She prepared Sarah a martini glass of something bright orange, then twisted a lemon rind on top of it and handed it over, keenly watching for Sarah’s reaction.
Sarah took a reluctant sip. It was overwhelmingly sweet and intense, a more obnoxious cousin of the cosmopolitan. “This is excellent, Trish,” Sarah said, not caring whether it was true.
She pressed herself against the wall as the conversation ping-ponged around her in a non-linear tennis match about rental costs and new cell phones and what constituted charcuterie.
As soon as she found a moment, Sarah slipped away and wandered out the back door into the garden, a deep, narrow space squished between seven-foot concrete walls on either side.
The brick patio was crumbling around the edges but had been forcefully dragged into urban chic by the copious use of tiny lights and potted greenery.
In one corner, a couple were having an intimate chat in the vicinity of a dwarf Japanese maple, and Sarah steered away from them to hide on a bench that was half-concealed behind a stretch of ornamental grasses.
She took a breath, sipping at Trish’s drink cautiously until someone appeared in her periphery: Ian, Paul’s best friend and the taller half of one of the loving couples within.
He saw her and approached with a friendly grin.
“Out here by yourself?”
“Communing with nature.”
They spent the next few minutes gamely talking about gardening, though neither of them had a garden, and how nice it would be to enter the real estate market, though neither of them had the money to buy anything, until he finished his cigarette and she finished her cocktail.
Standing up too rapidly to follow him inside, she discovered that she was, embarrassingly, quite drunk.
She had apparently become a lightweight in her mid-twenties.
Her drinking habits typically involved some red wine a couple of times a week, but that had declined even further now that Paul wasn’t around to have people over and Liam wasn’t there to take her to fancy meals.
In the past two weeks, she had consumed exactly one drink when she went to Anya’s house for a Sunday brunch.
It had seemed too maudlin to drink alone, mourning the break-up that she had asked for.
Now she carefully made her way into the kitchen to find water to sober herself up and found herself in the middle of an intense conversation between Paola and Trish about the toothpaste campaign that Trish had just booked.
“It’s still crazy to me that that’s where the money is,” Paola was saying.
“Well, television and movies, too,” Trish said. “But think about it. During a sports game, millions of people see an advertisement. In television, the viewership is so spread around now that ads reach way more people than TV shows.”
“So unless you’re in a huge movie…”
“And indie films pay nothing,” Trish said forcefully. “Nothing. You might as well be in a play.”
Sarah spoke gently. “I was looking for water?”
“Seltzer is in the fridge,” Trish said. As Sarah attempted to slip past them, Paola stopped her with one fine-boned hand on Sarah’s upper arm.
“Hold on a minute. I am dying to ask you something.”
Sarah paused, deer-in-the-headlights. “Yes?”
“What was Ren actually like in college?” Paola asked. “Did he hook up with tons of women? Because he will neither confirm nor deny.”
Sarah hesitated. “Oh, well…I guess you could say he got a lot of female attention, understandably, but—”
“Why understandably?” Paola’s expression was sharp.
Shit. Sarah was drunk. She was usually more careful than that. “He’s attractive, I guess I meant, but—”
“That’s true,” Trish interrupted. “He could do modeling. I was just telling him this.”
“No, I mean, but he wasn’t…” Sarah searched in the echoing cavern of her drunk brain for the correct words.
“It wasn’t like he was constantly sleeping around.
It was more like he had a few things with different women.
I don’t remember anyone he dated seriously, but there may have been someone.
” There. She felt proud of herself. That was well-stated for a drunk person, surely.
“Not me, of course!” she added quickly, just in case that was Paola’s worry.
“Why not you?”
Paola was a lawyer, Sarah remembered too late, and she was being cross-examined. “Um, well…” Sarah’s bright tone was harder to maintain when the question poked at old wounds, but she did her best. “Well, I suppose we were better as friends. Or I wasn’t hot enough for him,” she added.
Whoops. That last part wasn’t supposed to leave her mouth. She had been scrambling for something that would make Paola realize that Sarah wasn’t a threat, but not that. Paola was staring at her.
“Sarah’s leaving out the part where I hit on her and she turned me down cold,” Ren said, entering the kitchen. So he must have heard everything. Excellent.
“Why did you turn him down?” Paola asked, her eyes back on Sarah.
“Because she thought I was an asshole,” Ren filled in.
“An interesting, well-read asshole,” Sarah added with what she hoped was a light smile.
“Well, some things don’t change,” Paola replied dryly, and Ren walked up to his wife and kissed her on the cheek.