Maybe I should have felt disconnected from her. Here was this girl, my best friend, who fit this faraway place like a hand to a glove. I didn’t, and yet she still she took me with her. She was always taking me with her, wanting me to be a part of her wide, open life. How could I feel anything but lucky?
“To get back to the prior discussion,” Bella says when the waiter is gone. “I think sacrifice is in direct opposition to manifestation. If you want your dreams you should look for abundance, not scarcity.”
I take a sip of coffee. Bella lives in a world I do not understand, populated by phrases and philosophies that apply only to people like her. People, maybe, who do not yet know tragedy. No one who has lost a sibling at twelve can say with a straight face: everything happens for a reason.
“Let’s agree to disagree,” I tell her. “It has been too long since I’ve seen you. I want to be bored senseless hearing all about Jacques.”
She smiles. It sneaks up her cheeks until it’s practically at her ears.
“What?”
“I have something to tell you,” she says. She reaches across the table and takes my hand.
Instantly, I’m flooded with a familiar sensation of pulling, like there’s a tiny string inside of me that only she can find and thread. She’s going to tell me she met someone. She’s falling in love. I know the drill so well I wish we could go through all the steps right here at this table, with our coffee. Intrigue. Obsession. Distaste. Desperation. Apathy.
“What’s his name?” I ask.
She rolls her eyes. “Come on,” she says. “Am I that transparent?”
“Only to me.”
She takes a sip of her sparkling water. “His name is Greg.” She lands hard on the one syllable. “He’s an architect. We met on Bumble.”
I nearly drop my coffee. “You have Bumble?”
“Yes. I know you think I can meet someone buying milk at the deli, but, I don’t know, lately I’ve been wanting something different and nothing has been that interesting in a while.”
I think about Bella’s love life over the last few months. There was the photographer, Steven Mills, but that was last summer, almost a year ago.
“Except Annabelle and Mario,” I say. The collectors she had a brief fling with. A couple.
She bats her eyes at me. “Naturally,” she says.
“So what’s the deal?” I ask.
“It has been like three weeks,” she says. “But Dannie, he’s wonderful. Really wonderful. He’s really nice and smart and — I think you’re really going to like him.”
“Nice and smart,” I repeat. “Greg?”
She nods, and just then our food appears in a cloud of smoke. There are eggs and caviar on crispy French bread, avocado toast, and a plate of delicate crepes dusted with powdered sugar. My mouth waters.
“More coffee?” Our waiter asks.
I nod.
“Yum,” I say. “This is perfect.” I immediately cut into the avocado toast. The poached egg on top oozes out yolk, and I scoop a segment onto my plate. I make a vaguely pornographic noise through a mouthful.
Bella watches me and laughs. “You’re so deprived,” she says.
I throw her a disgruntled look as I make my way to the crepes. “I have a job.”
“Yes, how is that going?” She tilts her head to the side.
“It’s great,” I say. I want to add some of us have to work for a living, but I don’t. I learned a long time ago there is a difference with Bella, and our relationship, between judgmental and unkind. I try not to stray over the line. “I think it’s going to be another year, and then partner.”
Bella does a little shimmy in her chair. Her sweater slips from where it sits on her shoulders and I’m met with a slice of collarbone. Bella has always had a zaftig figure, glorious in its curvature, but she looks slimmer to me today. Once, during the month of Isaac, she lost twelve pounds.
Greg. I already have a bad feeling.
“I think we should all go to dinner,” Bella says.
“Who?”
She gives me a look. “Greg,” she says. She sucks her bottom lip in, lets it pop back out. Her blue eyes find mine. “Dannie, I’m telling you, you don’t have to believe me, but this one is different. It feels different.”
“They always do.”
She narrows her eyes at me and I can tell I’ve crossed it. I sigh. I can never quite say no to her. “Okay,” I say. “Dinner. Pick any Saturday two weeks from now and it’s yours.”
I watch Bella as she loads up her plate — first eggs, then a crepe — and feel my stomach start to relax as she eats with gusto. The sky changes from rain to clouds to sunshine. When we leave the streets are almost entirely dry.
Chapter Seven
“What happened to the blue shirt?”
David comes out of our bedroom in a black button-down and dark jeans. We’re already running late. We’re supposed to be at Rubirosa in SoHo in ten minutes and it will take us at least twenty to get downtown. Bella may always be late, but I still like beating her places. It’s how we’ve always done things. Brunch was enough change for one week.
“You don’t like this?” David hunches down and surveys himself in the mirror above the sofa.
“It’s fine. I just thought you were wearing the blue one.”
He heads back into the bedroom, and I check my lipstick in the same mirror. I’m wearing a black sleeveless turtleneck and a blue silk skirt with heels. The weather says sixty-seven degrees, low of sixty-three, and I’m trying to decide whether to bring a jacket.
He comes back in, buttoning the blue one. “Happy?”
“Very,” I say. “Will you call a car?”
David busies himself with his phone, and I check to make sure I have our keys, my cell phone, and Bella’s gold-beaded bracelet. I borrowed it six months ago and never gave it back.
“Two minutes.”
When we get to the restaurant, Bella is standing outside. My first instinct is confusion — she beat me, again. My second is that it’s already over with Greg and we’re going to be having dinner alone. This has happened twice before (Gallery Daniel and, I think, Bartender Daniel). I feel a wave of irritation, followed by one of sympathy and inevitability. Here we go again. Always the same thing.
I get out of the car first. “I’m sorry,” I start, just as the restaurant door opens and out onto the pavement walks Greg. Except he’s not Greg. He’s Aaron.
Aaron.
Aaron, whose face and name have been running in my head, on a loop, for the last four and a half years. The center of so many questions and daydreams and forced replays made manifest on the sidewalk now.
It wasn’t a dream. Of course it wasn’t. He’s standing here now, and there is no one else he could be. Not a man I’ve spotted at the movies, not an associate I once traded work jabs with. Not someone I shared a plane ride seated next to. He is only the man from the apartment.
I reel back. I do not know whether to scream or run. Instead, I’m cemented. My feet have merged with the pavement. The answer: my best friend’s boyfriend.
“Babe, this is my best friend, Dannie. Dannie, this is Greg!” She snuggles into him, her arms looping around his shoulder.
“Hey,” he says. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
He picks up my hand to shake it. I search his face for any sign of recognition, but, of course, I come up empty. Whatever has happened between us… hasn’t yet.