Chapter 2
As the party swelled around her, Natalie could admit that Angus had not done a terrible job. The inside of the bar felt less soulless than the other restaurants Nat had been to in this area. People milled around in party dresses and nice pants—some of Gabby’s coworkers, their friends from college, Angus’s business school classmates. No parents in sight, thank God, although there was Gabby’s sister, Melinda, who was always difficult to pin down, the flighty older daughter to Gabby’s steady younger. Kudos to Angus for getting her to show up. The lighting was dim but not dark, the soundtrack of Justin Timberlake and Miley Cyrus thumped pleasantly underneath everyone’s conversations, and, in a nice change from the establishments Natalie tended to frequent, the floor wasn’t sticky.
Natalie nudged Gabby and pointed to a low table over in the corner. “That little guy is calling your name.”
Angus came running over, skidding to a stop in front of them. “Milady,” he said to Gabby, doffing an imaginary hat for some reason, then throwing out his arm to indicate the rest of the room. “Your party awaits!”
“Baby, this is incredible,” she said, and he put his arms around her, her stiletto heels making the two of them the same height (five feet six inches).
“You look…wow, you’re stunning,” he said, going moony at the sight of her boobs but even moonier at the sight of her face. Then he blinked and registered Natalie’s presence. “Oh, hi!”
Already, people in the crowd were angling for Gabby’s attention. Angus gave her a little push forward. “Go and greet your adoring public!”
Angus and Natalie both looked after Gabby as she disappeared into the throng, then turned to each other. Angus had an uncharacteristically nervous strain to his smile as he cast about for a conversation topic, his hair a messy mass of dark blond curls. Ah, screw it. Natalie could make an effort.
“How’s life?” she asked.
“Busy. I’ve been advising my father on growth strategy, on top of all the responsibilities of business school.” Natalie had heard that the biggest responsibility of business school was getting drunk at networking events, but she gave Angus a serious nod anyway. Angus went on. “I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but my father owns a furniture empire.” (He’d mentioned it every time they’d hung out.)
“I’ve seen the billboards,” Natalie said. “?‘The Futon King of New Jersey,’ right?”
“That’s him!”
When Natalie had first heard Angus’s name (Angus Stoat the Third!), she’d imagined that he was stuffy old money, the kind of guy who’d grown up in a country club, a golf ball in one hand. But when she met him, he felt more like someone who was trying to sneak into the club, pretending he belonged. Gabby had told her the story of his upbringing: his father’s family was old money, but Angus’s dad had fallen hard for a woman who could’ve been an extra on Jersey Shore. The senior Stoats disapproved and cut Angus II out of both the family banking business and the will, assuming that would send this gold-digging harlot away. But the marriage had gone on to be remarkably successful, and to spite his family, Angus’s father had founded a furniture chain that was now the place to go for all your futon needs.
“You angling to wear the futon crown yourself someday?” Natalie asked.
“Oh, no, no. The boardroom is more for me than the furniture floor. Not that I’m insulting the family business! There are no better futons around, anyone would be lucky to—”
Then Angus turned his head and caught sight of someone. His sentence cut off abruptly, turning into an actual squeal of glee. “You’re here!” he called as a tall man with a lock of dark hair falling over his forehead approached.
Most guys their age were firmly guys to Natalie. She and her friends were in a strange liminal moment: not boys and girls anymore, not yet men and women. But something about this person—the serious set of his thick eyebrows, maybe, or his clean-shaven face, or the black-frame glasses he wore along with a navy button-down and khakis—screamed “GROWN-UP!” A sort of old-fashioned grown-up too, from a time when men still combed their hair.
“I wasn’t sure, with your flight home,” Angus was saying, pounding the man on his chest, attempting to put him into a headlock, which the man accepted with patience and a hint of a smile even as Angus ruffled his neat hair into a mess. “I know how you love to get to the airport three hours early.”
“For this,” the man said, “I decided to risk cutting it a little closer.”
Angus let out a happy bellow, then squatted down, wrapped his arms around the man’s waist, and attempted to lift him up like a pro wrestler. “All right,” the man said, ducking his head so that Angus did not accidentally thrust him through the ceiling.
With a big huff of breath, Angus released the man, who stood back up to a bit of a slouch. “Natalie, meet Rob Kapinsky. Current linguistics PhD student, future professor, heartbreaker of the West Coast—”
“That part is not true,” Rob Kapinsky said.
“Well, that’s only because you’re spending too much time in the basement of the library, and the ladies don’t know that you exist!” Angus stepped back, narrowing his eyes at Rob. “Have you been getting out of the library? You’re a little…what’s that word for when you’re all pale and weak-looking?”
“Wan,” Natalie offered. “Feeble. Anemic.”
“Yes!” Angus pointed triumphant finger guns in her direction.
“I am none of those things,” Rob said. “I see the sun for at least fifteen minutes each day.”
“Anyways,” Angus said, “this man is also my best friend in the entire world.” Rob reached out a hand and politely shook Natalie’s as Angus continued, “Except for Gabby.”
“Have I been replaced already?” Rob asked, his eyebrow arching up, his voice pleasantly rough. Distracted by Angus, he’d looked away from Nat but forgotten to let go of her hand. They were stuck in something that was part handshake, part hand-holding for a moment, until Natalie loosened her grip (even though Rob’s grasp was warm), and he looked down in surprise and perhaps a bit of embarrassment.
“Buddy.” Angus reached up to take Rob by the shoulders. “Never.” He shot a glance at Gabby in the crowd. “Well, maybe. She is much prettier than you are, I’m afraid.”
“Ouch,” Rob said.
“You could compete,” Nat said to Rob, “if only you weren’t so anemic.”
He half laughed in surprise, his serious face momentarily transforming.
“Oh, they’re here! I should…” Angus began, catching sight of someone across the room. “Nat, entertain him while I’m gone?” Angus bustled off into the crowd, leaving the two of them alone by the bar, suddenly responsible for each other.
“A drink?” Nat asked after a beat of awkward silence, and Rob nodded. They turned to the bar and ordered.
As they waited, he cleared his throat. “Angus gave my entire biography, but I’m sorry, who are you?”
“I’m Gabby’s Rob. Her best friend.”
“Ah. I always thought my doppelganger would be taller.”
“I’m still holding out hope for a growth spurt. Drinking lots of milk, stretching, but there’s only so much a person can do.”
“We’ll have to settle for being doppelgangers in every aspect except height.”
“And that I could never live on the West Coast. East Coaster through and through.”
“But at least you’re also studying to be a linguistics professor,” he said, deadpan.
“I have to admit that I don’t quite understand what linguistics is.”
“Well,” he said, “have you heard of words?”
She smiled. “Yes, I know it’s something about the science of them. But that makes me picture you in a lab coat peering at a petri dish containing a long and complicated word, and that can’t be correct.”
“No, that’s exactly what I do all day.” He squinted his eyes and did a winding motion with one hand while making a circle with the other. “That’s a word, all right. Next dish.”
She copied his motion. “What is this? You are…using a magnifying glass while also going fishing?”
“It’s a microscope.”
“Of course. How could I not see it?”
“I thought it was very clear.” He shook his head. “Actually, linguistics was my second choice for a career path.”
“Oh?” she asked sympathetically as she took a sip of her drink.
His expression was solemn. “Sadly, the mime academy wouldn’t take me.”
At that, she snorted so hard that the whiskey in her mouth shot up somewhere into her brain. He did not seem, at first glance, like a man who could be particularly silly, more like a man who devoted himself to thinking about important problems in the world. She looked more closely at him. The corner of his mouth had turned up, as if he were pleased and almost surprised at how fully he’d made her laugh. Then he cleared his throat and went on.
“But to your question, linguistics is the study of how we form speech, where different words come from, et cetera. Language is fundamental to our social interactions, and those interactions can seem mysterious or unpredictable, but linguistics reveals that they all follow a pattern. There’s an order to everything—” He caught himself. “And now I will stop, since normal people do not need to spend hours discussing words.”
“Yeah, I could take them or leave them,” she said, then flashed him a grin. “I’m a writer, by the way. Or, well, learning how to be one.”
His spine straightened. “Which MFA program are you in?”
“I’m not.”
“Ah.” For a brief second, a doubtful look flashed across his face before he turned back to the bar and took a sip of his whiskey soda.
“What?” Natalie asked.
“Nothing.” He looked down at his drink, turning the liquid around in the glass. “What kind of writing—”
“Try not to let your head explode, but I’m not planning to attend a graduate program.”
A huff of breath escaped him—was that…a scoff?—before he said, neutrally, “To each their own.”
Natalie folded her arms across her chest, thrusting her head up. “Go ahead, say it. Tell me why I’m making a big mistake.”
“I don’t necessarily think you are.”
“Yes, you do. So, go on.”
His expression darkened. “If you insist. Academia helps other people take you seriously, but it also helps you take yourself seriously.”
“Did you get that from an admissions pamphlet?”
“No, my father. He’s a professor.” He shook his head, then went on. “Grad school proves that you want to do the rigorous work of your future profession.”
“Sure, maybe I’m lazy,” Nat said, a fire starting up behind her eyes even as she kept her tone level. “Or maybe I decided that I couldn’t take on more student loans for a program that wouldn’t guarantee me a steady job at the end.” He began to say something, but she continued, unable to stop now even if she’d wanted to. “So instead of being ‘rigorous,’ I’m just juggling four part-time jobs while working my way through every book on writing that I can find at the library, attempting to befriend other writers so we can trade pages, submitting to literary journals, and attending every free author talk that I can cram into my schedule.”
She stopped and caught her breath. Around them, people laughed and flirted. Rob looked at her with a steady expression. She didn’t normally let herself get so worked up. That, or people didn’t normally stay to hear it.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Yes, actually,” she said, throwing her shoulders back. “Sometimes these author talks have free wine, so I’m saving on my liquor budget.”
The tension stretched out between them, brittle and tight. And then he said, “I hardly ever get free wine in my PhD program.”
“Whew.” Nat shook her head. “Did I get overly defensive?”
There was a small smile on his face now. “Only as much as I got overly didactic.” He stopped for a moment, as if trying to articulate something in his mind. “Sometimes when you’re in the middle of it, it’s easy to forget that academia is not the center of the universe.”
“Same thing with writing! It requires so much of you that you have to convince yourself it’s the only thing you could love in order to keep going.”
“I don’t know that I have to convince myself,” he began.
“You came out of the womb loving academia and have never wavered since?”
“Hm,” he said, a look of concentration on his face. Natalie couldn’t help leaning forward as she waited to hear what he’d say next. Brushing her hair back behind her ears, she realized that her palms were clammy for some reason. “The womb bit is not entirely inaccurate.”
At parties, Natalie often found it difficult to stay put in a conversation. She didn’t like this aspect of herself. But there was always somebody else to talk to, someone who could end up changing the course of your life. Another guy to flirt with when you were single, or somebody who could have a connection in the literary world. So she flitted away the moment a conversation got awkward, a master of the excuse. (I’m just going to get another drink! I have to pee! I think I see my long-lost friend in the shadows!) Somehow, though, talking to this strange, reserved man, with his dry wit and serious eyes, she wanted to stick around and figure out how he worked. He gave as good as he got, all without breaking into a sweat or a smile (mostly). She could tell he was an academic—he had that look, as if he was working out a problem in his mind. Studying her. Truly taking in her words instead of just thinking of the next thing to say to make himself seem impressive, like so many other men did. (And like she did herself so much of the time.) A voice in the back of her mind told her that she should flit away, but she ignored it. Because something about the way he was studying her made her want to give him all the relevant information. It was only fair.
“I did apply to Iowa,” she admitted. “My senior year of college. It’s the Holy Grail, so I figured, why not at least try?”
“Ah. But I take it…?”
“Rejected. Which sucked, of course. You must have felt a similar way with the mime academy.” Now it was his turn to choke on his drink, and the corners of her own mouth turned up in satisfaction. “Rejection can happen to anyone, though. Iowa is incredibly competitive. But maybe…” She leaned forward. She didn’t often say this part when people asked her about grad school. “Maybe part of me worried that, if I applied more widely, I still wouldn’t get in anywhere. That my work would be too girly, not serious enough, not the kind of writing that an MFA program would be looking for. I can dismiss one rejection. But ten? If that happened, I don’t know if I’d be able to make myself pursue it anyway. I’d feel…like an idiot.”
“Well, I haven’t read your writing. So I can’t tell you that they’d be the idiots for not accepting you.”
Natalie waited a beat. “That’s it? There’s not a more encouraging end to the sentence?”
“Er, no.”
She couldn’t help herself. A laugh bubbled out.
“But—” He scratched at his temple. “Why do you want to write?”
She thought a moment, because the answer to that seemed too big to distill. A swirling tornado of reason upon reason, sweeping up everything in its path. “I think it has to do with recognition,” she finally said.
“Prizes and such?” He looked a little disappointed.
“No, not that,” she said quickly, though of course she wanted prizes and such. “I mean…there have been moments when I’ve read something in a book that feels like it was written just for me. Like the author reached inside my brain, took all the thoughts I didn’t know how to express, and put them into a perfect paragraph. And in those moments, I’ve felt so utterly connected to a person I didn’t know that it made me think, ‘Yes, the world can be hard, and people can be awful to each other. But there is also such beauty in the fact that we can recognize each other like that.’?” She fiddled with her straw. “I want to be able to give that feeling to other people.”
“Well then,” he said. “Screw any MFA program that wouldn’t want to give you the chance.”
In the dim lighting of the bar, she thought she could see a flush on his cheeks. So many people, when she told them she was a writer, fell into one of two categories. They talked down to her—You? Little girl, you think you have things to say?—or they blew smoke up her ass, telling her they were sure she was incredible without having read a lick of her work. Rob, though…He might have looked like a snob, but he took her as she was.
Rob opened his mouth to go on, and her heart began to thump, like she was nervous to hear what he was going to say, though that was ridiculous. She barely knew him. He wasn’t an expert in her field. Still, her heartbeat grew louder in her ears.
But suddenly Angus was pushing through the center of the crowd, a drink in his hand, banging a knife against the glass. “Attention! Attention, all!” The ding of cutlery on glass turned to a shattering sound, Angus accidentally cleaving the top of the cup off onto the ground, where the glass splintered. “Oops, would somebody mind—?” A waiter bustled forward and began cleaning as Angus took a step to the side. Typical Angus, a privileged bull in a china shop. “Would Gabby come on up here?” Gabby waved at everyone from the sidelines. “No, no, come up!”
Gabby raised an eyebrow but acquiesced. “Hey, everyone, thanks for coming out tonight,” she said as Angus gazed at her with a slightly dazed expression, a bead of sweat rolling down his forehead. She leaned into him with a nervous smile. “I’m not supposed to give a speech, am I?”
“No, don’t worry. But I want to say a few words to the crowd.” Angus cleared his throat. “For those who don’t know, I met Gabby a year ago, when I convinced my dad to take a meeting at the ad agency where she works. Not that our commercials weren’t already great—” Nat had seen a few of them. They starred Angus’s father, speaking to the camera from the furniture floor while Angus’s mother “relaxed” on a futon in a leopard-print dress. Angus’s parents were not exactly thespians.
“But now that I’m an NYU business school man, I thought it was time to shake things up,” Angus went on. “Gabby’s junior at her agency, but they gave her a piece of the pitch anyway. And as soon as she delivered it, it was obvious why. She was so prepared, a go-getter who made everyone around her better.” Angus turned to Gabby. “I don’t know if you know this, but that night, I told my parents I’d met the woman of my dreams.”
“You did not,” Gabby said, putting her hand over her heart.
Meanwhile, Gabby had told Natalie that she’d “give him a chance” even though he was “a bit of an odd duck.” Gabby had always liked odd ducks, though, and ugly dogs and mean old cats. When they went hiking once, she’d become fascinated by a bulbous toad in their path and spent a full five minutes trying to coax it onto her hand. Nat had once joked that Gabby would probably try to befriend a subway rat someday, and Gabby had shaken her head. “That’s a bridge too far even for me.” Then she had paused. “Then again, Ratatouille.”
Now, Angus wiped his forehead and turned back to the crowd.
“We’re here to celebrate your birthday tonight, Gabby, and I’m sorry to hog the spotlight. But there was just one thing I wanted to do.”
The a capella performance.Natalie looked around for Angus’s fellow business bros, bursting through the crowd to start step-touching while a white man beatboxed, as threatened in Angus’s email invite.
But instead, Angus reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box, and Gabby’s mouth dropped right along with Nat’s stomach.