Chapter 31 930 PM Nina
Nina poured some Sancerre into her glass, realized that there was only a splash or two left in the bottle, and decided she might as well top herself off. A few drops dribbled over her thumb and she brought it to her mouth, licking them away.
“So are we going to get this party started again, or what?” she said, and looked around the living room.
Mia’s boyfriend was playing around on his phone, and Theo was sitting on the arm of one of the couches, where he was talking to Adam and Rami.
No one acknowledged that she had spoken.
For a moment she wondered if she actually had, or if she’d simply imagined the words coming out of her mouth.
She saw Mia and Marco standing near a window.
He had one shoulder leaning against the wall, and she was absently running a hand along the sill, like she was checking for dust. Marco leaned forward an inch and said something that Nina couldn’t hear, and Mia laughed, dropping her chin so her hair fell in her face.
Nina sipped from her wine. She thought, I trust that I am likable and worthy of forming meaningful relationships, and walked over to them.
“Hey, guys,” she said.
Mia tucked her hair behind her ear. She glanced at Nina and then at Marco, and already Nina felt a familiar twinge, right at the back of her jaw.
“Oh, hi, Nina,” Marco said.
“What’s the scoop?”
“The scoop?”
“Like, what’s going on?”
“Um, not much? We were just talking.”
“Cool, cool. What about?”
“Nothing, really.”
Slowly Mia lifted both her eyebrows. She ran her fingers along the windowsill and shared another glance with Marco.
As naturally as she could, Nina smiled, and a moment later she felt her left cheek start to tremble.
It was slight, barely noticeable, though she soon became fixated on it, so much so that the feeling overwhelmed her and she became convinced that Mia was staring at her, wondering why her face was trembling like she had some sort of muscular disorder.
I am worthy of connection, she told herself again.
My unique qualities make me valuable and interesting to others.
“You guys did so good during the game,” she said. “No, seriously, it was like the best I’ve ever seen and I play a ton of Celebrity.”
“Thanks.”
“Did you practice when you were together?”
“Did we practice playing Celebrity?”
It was a dumb thing to say—she knew it was a dumb thing to say, but it was already out there, buzzing around, and there was no way for her to take it back. Her cheek was still trembling.
She said, “Ha, I’m just saying that would have been super weird.”
“It would have been very weird.”
For an excruciatingly long time no one spoke.
The swimming pool glowed outside and Nina heard footsteps directly above her.
Seeing her reflection in the window, she noticed that her hair was a little out of whack, so she reached up to fix it, smoothing down strands that had flown away and repositioning it on her shoulders.
She couldn’t seem to get it right, so for the next minute she fussed, picking at her hair, her necklace, her caftan, all of which struck her as suddenly and irrevocably wrong.
Earlier today she had spent more than an hour picking out what to wear, and nearly as long getting ready.
This was after she had seen Richie’s picture on Instagram, which had prompted her to spend yet another hour wondering whether she should send him a direct message, asking if she could come over for dinner.
She had been in bed, over at her house in Sagaponack.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The night before she had stayed up late watching How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and then Failure to Launch, all while eating duck ravioli, which she’d ordered takeout from Almond over in Bridgehampton.
When she saw the picture on Richie’s grid, she’d propped herself on a pillow, then used two fingers to zoom in; behind her, two framed drawings of Ruth Bader Ginsburg wearing boxing gloves hung on her bedroom wall.
Adam Parker was there, along with Sasha and Theo Wingate and some dark-haired guy Nina didn’t know.
Richie had written a caption—it said, somehow survived another trip around the sun, which Nina thought was really sweet.
Moving her fingers across the screen, she zoomed in on the house behind them and realized that she knew exactly where it was: she had seen it on one of her weekend drives.
Without thinking, Nina liked the picture, which suddenly made her feel like a loser, so she immediately unliked it; but then that made her feel even weirder, and she began to worry that Richie had seen that she both liked it and unliked it, so she double-tapped the phone’s screen, liking it again. She decided to FaceTime her mother.
“Oh, baby, just ask him!” her mother said.
She was standing in the kitchen of the house where Nina had grown up, in Milburn, New Jersey.
Sunlight streamed onto the granite countertops, and behind her, on the island at the center of the room, Nina saw a bowl filled with bright-yellow lemons.
Her mother always had bowls of fruit artfully placed around the kitchen.
Apples in the fall, oranges in the winter—she said it helped give the space a little life.
Nina had always liked that. She had her own bowl of apricots downstairs.
“But, Mom, I don’t know what to say.”
“Be natural about it! Say something like, ‘Hey, dude! I’m in town! How about I swing by with a bottle of something?’ ”
“I don’t think I should say ‘dude.’ ”
“That’s fine.”
“And I think he’s an alcoholic? Like, he goes to AA? So maybe I shouldn’t offer to bring a bottle?”
“How about you make those brownies you made for me for my birthday, then? The ones with the applesauce?”
“I guess I could do that.”
“All it takes is asking, sweetie. Remember, you are worthy of—”
“I know, I know.”
Nina’s mother’s name was Carol Guzman, née Cummings.
She had long, full hair that she kept dyed to a honey blond, and which fell down her shoulders in gentle waves.
For two years in a row she had been the president of Tri Delta at Ohio State University; she was a lead volunteer on Milburn Township’s recreation commission; and, along with Kathy McManus, she had won the doubles competition of the ladies’ Fourth of July tennis invitational at the Canoe Brook Country Club three years in a row.
Next to her bed she kept a cute tear-away calendar that had a new daily affirmation on each page.
Last year she’d gotten Nina one of her own, and now Nina kept it next to her bed too.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Carol asked.
“That he’ll say no? Or that he reads it and doesn’t even respond?”
“Big whoop!” Carol laughed and flipped her hand, like she was swatting down a fly. “Then you can just invite some friends over to have a barbecue of your own!”
Nina smiled, even though she felt like she was going to cry. She and Carol both knew that there were no friends she could invite over, because if there were, Nina wouldn’t have FaceTimed Carol in the first place.
She couldn’t understand what made her so repellent.
She considered herself to be reasonably smart, she was very good at her job, and now that she had money she always put effort into wearing cute outfits.
But when she was around people in social settings, she lost all sight of those things and felt instead a sort of crippling anxiety, this insufferable need to impress and be liked by them that she couldn’t seem to quash.
She heard herself say ridiculous things, and immediately afterward would see herself through everyone else’s eyes.
She was a try-hard and a loser—the sort of person that people talked about as soon as she left the room, and whose jokes always killed the momentum of a group text.
Things weren’t supposed to be this way. She was supposed to be like her mother, someone whose life was overloaded with love and who felt burdened by too many dinner invitations.
She was supposed to have someone to confide in, and instead she was thirty-five and alone.
On her phone’s screen, Nina watched Carol open the refrigerator and take out a pink can of LaCroix.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” she said. “You’re going to message him right now, while I’m on the phone with you.”
“Mom—”
“No ifs, ands, or buts, missy. Do it.”
Nina sighed. Tapping the screen, she minimized the window with her mother’s face, then returned to Instagram, where she opened up a new direct message to Richie Fournier.
“I’m going to say, ‘Hey! HBD! I’m out east too. Any plans for dinner?’ ”
Carol opened her LaCroix. “I think that’s great, sweetie. Really perfect.”
“Or should I just, like, invite myself?”
“Sure!” Carol smiled. Nina could tell she was losing interest. “I think either way works. The trick is to be yourself!”
At this, Nina frowned: being herself had always been the problem.
But then with a deep breath, she wrote a message to Richie, saying that it would be nice to see him, and that she would love to swing by the house.
She read it back to herself a few times, changed some periods to exclamation points, and clicked send.
For the next five minutes, as her mother talked about Kathy McManus’s backhand, Nina stared at her message.
When she saw that Richie had read it, her heart began to beat faster, and when she saw that he was typing a response, she nearly vomited.
She was starting to type “it’s totally fine if no!
” when his response came though, telling Nina that she was more than welcome to join for dinner.
Her mouth was dry, though now a pleasant lightness filled her chest. Then her phone chimed again—she saw that Richie had sent another message: It’ll be nice to see you!
When Nina read it, the lightness extended all the way to her toes.