Remy #2
I of course knew about this brownstone and her move already.
Just like I knew Lin spends her mornings running over the Brooklyn Bridge and has had brunch twice at a place called the Rabbit Hole.
She documents it all on her Instagram stories, but I guess she doesn’t check who watches them.
They’re quickly uploaded, unedited, romantic images and videos of skylines at sunset, big bowls of steaming food, foliage-adorned houses, drinks at dimly lit bars, and…
new faces. I also already know she’s made friends from work: a woman called Michaela and two men, Gray and Tom.
I dislike these perfectly nice people intensely.
“We were out last night at this restaurant that just opened,” Lin continues.
“They pop up every minute here. We need to have a separate conversation about the food, ugh, it’s just mwah , chef’s kiss, you’d be obsessed—anyway, wait until you meet Michaela, you’ll love her.
She moved here from Berlin around the same time I did, and these two guys Tom and Gray have been showing us around, but Mikki?
The stories this woman could tell you! Skydiving in Santa Barbara, swimming with dolphins in Cancun, hot-air ballooning in Cappadocia!
You know when you meet people and you think, if you’ve been living, what have I been doing?
And with all the crazy hours we work it seems like it isn’t possible, but she makes it possible.
Gray’s the same, but more low-key, making fresh pasta with someone’s nonna in Tuscany, wine tasting across Bordeaux, sleeper trains through Europe… ”
I listen to Lin with a smile on my face until I remember she can’t see me, and I let the mask slip.
It’s not her fault; she has no idea that she’s breaking my heart.
My best friend has new friends and there’s not much I can offer her in terms of viable competition.
I can’t offer proximity, thrilling new stories about new places; I can’t offer that rush of excitement or promise of future adventure.
All I can offer are stories about solo pottery classes and failed writing attempts, both of which she already knows about since our group chat is quickly becoming a one-woman show.
Eventually, Lin pauses for breath and asks, “So, what have you and Nova been up to?”
It’s a reasonable question, but an almost impossible one for me to answer.
“She’s good…” I try. “I think she is, anyway. She’s back with David, so…”
“Eugh, that dickhead.” Lin sniffs. “He’s like diarrhea, takes a while to get him out of her system. She didn’t tell me about that, but she’ll come round, again. You know Nova. You can’t talk her out of things; you’ve just got to be there for her when the shit hits the fan.”
“I know, and I will be.”
I walk into the bookshop so Lin can hear the background noise. I tell her I’ll have to call her back because I’m at an author thing. When I press the end call button, I marvel at how, before today, not once in our decades-long friendship have I ever been desperate to get off the phone with Lin.
Ink@84 is a small but welcoming space with a rectangular table running down the middle, piled high with books, with all the surrounding walls following suit.
At the back is a cozy alcove, filled with rows of chairs, where the author Esther will be in conversation about her third book with one of the shop’s booksellers.
“Are you Remy Baidoo?”
I turn to a Black woman, maybe my age, with a pierced septum and a rose-red jumper. “Yes, I am,” I answer, trying to place her even though I’m convinced we’ve never met.
“Cool. I’m Piper.” I shake the hand she offers me. “I loved your book so much. Seriously, it was one of my top reads last year; I haven’t stopped recommending it.”
A genuine smile spreads across my face. Events in spaces filled with books serve as a reminder of how much is out there to consume, and out of that overwhelming literary sea where the tide never ceases, there is someone who picked up mine.
“Any word on your second?”
I tune back in to Piper and blink.
There’s a balance I’ve been trying to perfect since becoming an author, and that’s the balance between being professional and being honest. Piper is a stranger but one with a kind face; can I tell her that book two is a struggle; that I have no ideas, no plotline, or even an attempt at a first draft?
That while I should be at home attempting to create something, anything , I’m at an author’s talk, not even to support an incredible talent, but to see if I can make a new friend in the process?
And since we’re on the topic, would you, Piper Unknown-Surname, like to be my friend?
“It’s in the works,” I respond with what I hope translates to a knowing smile. “I’ve still got a few These Four Friends obligations to fulfill so can’t get as much writing done as I’d like.” It’s a half-truth so I only feel half-guilty.
It’s just too difficult to explain the full truth.
Melissa loves to read, and she loved TFF so much that she’d start random conversations with people on the train about it.
Lin reads too many dense contracts at work to find reading actual books enjoyable, but she preordered five copies and then bought another five on publication day before pushing them into the hands of her male colleagues saying, “If you want to learn about what women go through, what they’re thinking, and how to behave accordingly, read books written by women.
” Nova read it just to highlight “her” parts and show everyone her name in the acknowledgments; she probably and unknowingly did more to spread the word about my book than Melissa and Lin combined.
But because I’ve been writing with the intention of getting published for years, they all think it comes naturally to me.
The misconception is that I can put pen to paper or finger to keyboard and produce a book.
I did it before, right? So just do it again! But that’s the equivalent of—
“Remy?”
“Sorry, Piper! What were you saying?”
She smiles and it’s a very easy one. “I just wondered if you’d like to grab coffee some time?”
How did I miss that? “Really?”
“Yeah! I’m having trouble getting my first manuscript taken seriously by an agent, so it would be great to pick your brain and maybe get some feedback on it?”
“Oh. You want me to read your work?”
“Yeah.” Piper digs her phone out from her pocket. “I could email it over to you, and then when you’ve had a chance to read it, we can meet up and discuss?”
Before I can think of a polite way to say: Authors are not editors and you shouldn’t trust them to be, a woman with a cherubic face, pink braids, and a red-and-black bomber jacket walks up to us.
“We still got fifteen minutes until this thing starts,” she says to Piper.
“Wanna get something to drink next door then come back?” She smiles politely at me but then nudges Piper before walking toward the exit.
Piper follows, throwing, “I’ll DM you!” over her shoulder.
I stand in the same spot. That is not where I saw the conversation heading.
I look around the milling crowd of about fifty people, most of whom are gathered around the table carrying cups of wine.
The author, Esther, is a woman in her late forties and so the demographic of tonight’s event skews in that age range. Are there many mixed-age friendships these days? Or, by the time you’re forty, do you already have enough people in your life to keep up with?
Has anyone written a book about an intergenerational friendship?
I’m not thinking of one with a drastic difference, maybe a ten-year gap?
Twenty at most. How could I make that work?
Where did they meet and how did they become friends?
Do they bring their friendship groups together?
Or maybe they’re just two lonely people—the older one has always been that way, and the other is suddenly having to learn to do the same… ?
“Hello. Remy, is it?”
I turn to my left and there’s Esther, tall with red lips and micro locs, smiling widely.
“Yes, hi, it’s so nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” she says, kissing me on both cheeks.
She gestures to the woman standing beside her.
“This is my friend Audrey. I’m so glad you could make it.
You know, I loved These Four Friends .” She gently pats her chest, right above her heart.
“There’s just something so wonderful and universal about the friendship group a person cultivates in their younger years.
Irreplaceable.” She nudges Audrey, who smiles in return. “Thirty-four years and counting.”
I clear my throat. “Thirty-four years? That is… that’s incredible.”
Esther waves my statement away. “Give yourself another decade,” she says, “and you’ll be saying the same thing.”
My eyes prickle and I excuse myself to use the bathroom. I lock myself in a cubicle and sit on the closed lid.
Thirty-four years and counting . What’s making my eyes sting and my chest feel tight is the looming possibility that Melissa, Lin, Nova, and I may have officially stopped counting.
I flush the toilet in case someone else is in here. I wash my hands, dry them, and apply hand cream taken from my bag. I look in the full-length mirror and pull at my jeans, attempting to stretch the gap between my navel and jeans button, noticing that they cling to me tighter than they used to.
That’s not surprising. While my restaurant visits have drastically reduced by at least one hundred percent, my need to fill the time with food has grown exponentially, and the loneliness combined with the stress of writing blocks and avoiding my agent means I need to keep busy somehow.
I exit the bathroom, thinking only of the tightness of my jeans, and promptly bump shoulders with someone; not only does my phone slip from my hand and skid across the floor, but red wine ends up splashed onto my white shirt.
“Fuck, I’m so sorry!”
“It was both our fault,” someone says calmly. “I wasn’t watching where I was going either.”
I finally look at the woman who picks up my phone and hands it to me.
She has her hair stretched down her back and dark-pink blush matching her eyelids and lips.
Like me, she’s wearing a white T-shirt and fitted jeans, but with a jumper draped across the crook of her arm.
There’s something about her that strikes me as familiar.
“Sorry, do I know you?” I ask her.
“No.”
I’m momentarily thrown by how quickly and assuredly she answered, as if it’s possible to clearly remember every single person she’s ever interacted with.
She looks down at my shirt. “Your top is ruined. Let me reimburse you, and here, you can have my jumper as well.”
“What? No, really, it’s fine.”
“Your shirt is stained, Remy.” She puts her empty cup down and marches me back into the bathroom. “You can’t walk around with a spreading red stain on your chest.”
“How do you know my name?”
“You’re the author of These Four Friends , aren’t you?” she says. “We also went to the same secondary school.”
“But when I asked if I knew you, you said no.”
She frowns. “Because you don’t.” She holds out her jumper. “Take it.”
I head back into the cubicle to change, and when I pull the sweater over my head, a burst of floral scent escapes from the fabric. I exit and say, “Thank you…”
“Simone,” she says. “You’re welcome.”
We both look at one another, and I notice a thin gold ring on her middle finger catching the light.
When we hear the feedback of a microphone, she nods and turns away.
I spend the majority of Esther’s talk sneaking looks at Simone on the other side of the aisle, one row ahead.
I think about saying something to her once the talk is over, weighing the possible benefits of befriending someone I have a shared experience with. We wouldn’t have to start from the absolute beginning; we could talk about school, at the very least.
“As usual, this has been a wonderfully insightful and informative talk. Thank you for your time, Esther, and all of you for coming.”
As we all clap, I shuffle in my seat. When the applause dies down, Simone immediately stands. I bite the bullet and intercept her.
“Hi, again.”
“Hello, Remy. You can keep my jumper, of course.”
“Thanks.”
She moves again but I stop her. I take a deep breath. “Do you want to get dinner, if you’re hungry? We can… catch up and stuff.”
Simone pauses and I worry she might think I’m coming on to her, but then I watch her eyes change—they become softer and almost dewy. Then it’s as if she remembers something, and she shakes her head.
“It’s best we don’t,” she finally says.
In my mind, where a fear of both failure and confrontation peacefully coexist, there are only two possible answers to my offer of dinner:
“Yes, I’d love to!” (degrees of excitement may vary); we agree on a time and date then and there.
“Sure!” (again, degrees of enthusiasm may vary); we exchange some kind of contact information which I will later discover is fake or that I’ve been blocked/ghosted and will never hear from the other person again.
But the fact that Simone went with the unimaginable (yet secretly commendable) third option?
“No thank you,” i.e., honesty.
Well, it leaves me standing in front of her, speechless. Simone takes this opportunity to add, “But thank you for asking.” She considers me (and maybe even my offer) one last time before she slings her bag over her shoulder and walks out of the bookshop.