“Cool,” said Beth, though she didn’t quite want Sadie to intrude upon them just yet. For a moment, they sat in silence, contemplating their coffee. “So,” said Beth quietly, in an effort to hide the urgency with which she needed to hear the end of Will’s story. Why hadn’t he told her any of this? And she, telling him everything. Why had she been so open, so transparent?
“So, right, okay,” began Emily, leaning in toward Beth. “They come to New York and she’s decided she’s married a millionaire, not, like, some grad student living on a fellowship.”
“But why?” asked Beth. “She knew he was a grad student.”
“Because it turned out she was poor. Like really poor. Not, you know, middle-class pretend poor. She was from, like, East Palo Alto. So to her all the Stanford kids seemed rich.”
“They are.”
“Well, yeah.”
“So she burned through all his money,” said Beth stonily. She suddenly had an idea where this was going, though she wished, somehow, that she didn’t, that she’d never mentioned any of it, that she’d kept Will all to herself for a little while longer, that she’d let him tell her all this, in his own way, his own time. She felt, somehow, dirty.
Emily nodded. “Yeah. And then some. She took out all these credit cards in his name. Racked up like a zillion dollars in debt. He couldn’t even make the minimum payments. Had to declare bankruptcy.”
“Oh my God,” whispered Beth. This was more than she’d imagined, and different. “He said she was a slut. I thought she cheated on him.”
“Well.” Emily sighed. “I guess. She did that, too.”
Silently, the waitress slid their food in front of them, Beth’s eggs staring, woozily, up at her. Why had she chosen these lurid, viscous things? She felt an urge to order the waitress, Garbo-style, to take them away, get them out of her sight. Emily, she was dismayed to see, had already tucked into her pale, glossy omelet.
“That looks good,” Beth said dully.
“Egg whites,” she said. “You can have some.”
Beth shook her head, concentrating her attention on her toast, which was thin and spread with a foamy layer of butter. This she could eat, taking small, deliberate, symmetrical bites. How, why, had this woman treated Will so horribly? And yet, how—why—had Will had a child with her?
“It’s crazy, right,” Emily said finally, examining her own slice of toast, “about Sadie and Tal.”
“What?” asked Beth, trying to extract herself from the increasingly furious loop in her brain—shifting restlessly from sympathy to blame—and return herself to Emily.
“After the wedding. They—” Emily smiled.
Beth suddenly understood Emily’s meaning. “Oh my God!” she cried, as a pang shot through her, which she quickly identified as jealousy. Not that she had wanted Tal, other than in the way they all had, vaguely, in college, at one point or another. Though there had been a period, sophomore year, when she and Tal had spent all their time together. The others were all off on their own—Dave dating some annoying girl from Great Neck, Sadie taking too many credits and studying round the clock, Lil frantically in love with a lanky philosophy major—and she and Tal were left with each other. She’d run lights on the student production of True West—he’d played Austin—and they’d walked home together each night from Little Theater, tracing the edge of Tappan Square, sometimes parting ways at Keep, where she shared a room with Lil, sometimes going further to East, where he’d wrangled a grim, cinder-block single, and where they ate pretzels and listened to Bob Mould. She’d even slept on his extra mattress some nights, when she knew Lil and her boyfriend had overtaken their room, and she had wondered, hadn’t she, what would happen if Tal were to kiss her, half expecting him to simply because she was there, half dismayed that he didn’t, if only because it would have proved her desirability, half relieved that they could remain uncomplicated friends. But that time had passed quickly. And the following fall, she and Dave, well, became she and Dave. But she had always thought that she and Tal had an understanding. They were the quiet ones, the good ones. Tal would be wonderful and generous to Sadie. No one, she thought sickly, would ever love her like that. Dave hadn’t, Will wouldn’t.
“I know!” Emily widened her eyes and shook her head. “It’s just weird. Though he’s always wanted her, right?”
Beth nodded. “I can’t believe Sadie didn’t tell me.” Beth suddenly felt the full force of her absence—they had all been living their lives without her, moving forward, falling in love, getting married, while she had largely stayed in place: another college town, another series of papers.
“Yeah.” Emily shrugged. “Apparently, they’re, like, picking out baby names. She hasn’t been home all week.”
“I guess,” said Beth, feeling that she needed to comfort Emily and herself without actually explicitly appearing to do so. There was something that bothered her about this. Everything changing just as she came back. And Sadie, who had always been so stridently alone—so unfettered—attaching herself to someone else, to Tal. But there was something else, something else that seemed faintly wrong, faintly disappointing: this vague feeling that Tal just seemed too easy for Sadie, too uncomplicated. It was not—Beth struggled to untangle her thoughts—that Tal himself wasn’t sufficiently complicated—he was—but that his worship of Sadie seemed destined to outweigh whatever feelings she might have for him. They’d always imagined Sadie with someone strange and mysterious, someone sleek and unfamiliar. “I guess you go to a wedding, it sort of makes you want to get married.”
“Yeah,” agreed Emily. “I wonder if she’s bringing him with her.”
In silence, they contemplated their eggs.
“So, what happened,” Beth finally asked, “to Will’s wife? They had a baby.”
“Right.” Emily speared a mushroom and sniffed it. “You should ask Lil to tell you the whole story. But I guess he left her. Then it turned out she was pregnant. And he went back.”
“But how did he know the baby was his? If he’d left? And if she was cheating on him?”
Emily shook her head and looked at Beth with something akin to pity. “That came later. And the dates worked out. Also, according to Lil, he looks exactly like Will. Have you met him? The kid? What’s his name?”
“Sam,” said Beth, cold with disappointment. “No. I haven’t met him.”
“Well, Lil says he’s great. And the mother is a nightmare. She’s an actress, of course. That’s why she wanted to come to New York. She actually managed to get a manager, which is more than I can say—”
“Is that like an agent?” asked Beth.
Emily shook her head. “Kind of, but not really. It’s a new thing, kind of like a middleman. A manager basically gets you an agent.”
“Oh,” said Beth. “That makes sense.”
Emily sighed. “Actually, it doesn’t. It’s completely stupid.”
“What happened to her?” If she was, somehow, famous now, Beth would not be able to cope.