“It’s so hot out there,” she says when she arrives. She’s wearing a white brocade-and-lace dress from Zimmermann and gold lace-up sandals. Her hair is up in a topknot, some loose strands dangling down her neck.
“It’s a swamp. Summer always happens so suddenly.” I lean over the table and kiss her on the cheek. I’ve sweated through my silk shirt and pencil skirt. I own basically no summer clothes. Luckily the air conditioning is on full blast in here.
“How was the weekend?” she asks. “Did you sleep at all?”
I smile. “No.”
She shakes her head. “You loved it.”
“Maybe.” I scoop some beans onto her plate. I have to know: “Did you guys hear anything more about the apartment?”
She looks at me and frowns, and then her face dawns recognition. “Oh, right! There’s this other one I think I want. It’s this totally savage place in Meatpacking. I honestly didn’t know they had anything like that left there. Everything is so generic now.”
“You don’t like the Dumbo loft?”
She shrugs. “I’m just not sure I want to live there. There’s only one grocery store, and it must be freezing in the winter. All of those wide streets that close to the water.? It seems kind of isolated.”
“It’s close to every train,” I say. “And the view is spectacular. There’s so much light, Bella. I can see you painting there.”
Bella squints at me. “What’s going on? You hated that place. You told me I shouldn’t even consider it.”
I wave her off. She’s right, though. What am I doing? The words keep tumbling out, like I have no control over them. “I don’t know,” I say. “What do I know? I’ve lived within ten blocks for the last decade.”
Bella leans forward. Her face splits into a sly smile. “You love that place.”
It’s raw space, but I have to admit it’s beautiful. Somehow industrial and energetic and peaceful, all at once.
“No,” I say. Firm. Definitive. “It’s a pile of plywood. I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”
Bella crosses her arms. “You love it,” she says.
I don’t know why I can’t just condemn it. Tell her she’s right — it’s freezing and too far and absurd — then drop it. I should be thrilled that she has forgotten about it. I want her to forget about it. I want that apartment to disappear into the atmosphere. So far I’m doing a good job at preventing that fateful hour. If the apartment disappears, so does what happened there.
“No, it’s true,” I say. “Dumbo is far. And Aaron said it would need a ton of work.” The last part is a little bit of a lie.
Bella opens her mouth to say something but closes it again.
“So things are good with you guys?” I venture.
Bella sighs. “He said you had a nice time at the apartment. Like maybe you liked him a little better? He said you seemed friendly, which is entirely out of character.”
“Hey.”
“You’re many things,” Bella says. “But friendly never really comes to mind.”
I have a flash of Bella and me, newly minted New Yorkers, in line for some ludicrously expensive club in the Meatpacking District. Bella had lent me one of her dresses, something short and bright, and it was cold, although I don’t remember the season — late fall, early winter? We were without coats, as we usually were in the years surrounding twenty.
In this slice of memory, Bella is flirting with the door guy, a club promoter named Scoot or Hinds, some sound not word, someone who liked when hot girls showed up, liked when Bella did. She’s telling him she just has a few more friends she wants to bring in.
“They like you?” he asks.
“No one is,” Bella says. She shakes her hair off her neck.
“Her?” Scoot points to me. He’s less than impressed, this I can tell. Being Bella’s friend has always felt a little bit like standing in her shadow. It used to make me insecure, maybe it still does, but over time we found our things., our shared ground, our complimenting balance. Standing in front of that club maybe we hadn’t, yet.
Bella leans forward and whispers something into Scoot’s ear. I don’t hear, but I can imagine what it is: She’s a princess, you know. She’s royalty. Fifth in line to the Dutch throne. A Vanderbilt.
It used to embarrass me that Bella had to do this. It embarrasses me that night in Meatpacking, too. But I never tell her. Her proximity is my gift; my silence is hers. I make her life smooth and solid. She makes mine bright and dazzling. This seems fair. A good trade.
“Come on in, ladies,” Scoot says. We do. We enter Twitch or Slice or Markd. Whatever it was called, it’s gone now. We dance. Men buy us drinks. I feel pretty in her dress, although it is a little too short on me, a little loose in the chest. It hugs in the wrong spots.
At a certain point, two men come up to hit on us. I am not interested. I have a boyfriend. He’s in law school at Brown. We’ve been together for eight months. I’m faithful to him. I think, maybe, I’ll marry him, but it is a passing thought.
Everywhere we go Bella flirts. She does not like that I don’t. She thinks I am withholding, that I do not know how to have a good time. She’s right, but only sometimes. This form of fun does not come naturally to me, and therefore feels impossible to engage in. I am constantly trying to learn the rules, only to realize that the people who win don’t seem to follow any.
One of the men makes a comment. Everyone laughs. I roll my eyes.
“You’re so friendly,” he says. It sticks.
At the restaurant now, I scoop a fava bean onto a small piece of crisp bread. It’s hot, and the garlic pops in my mouth.
“Morgan and Ariel met Greg on Saturday,” Bella says. “They loved him.”
Morgan and Ariel are a couple Bella met through the gallery scene four-ish years ago. Since then, they’ve become more David’s and my friends than Bella’s — mostly because we’re better at making dinner reservations and staying in the country. Morgan is a photographer who does popular cityscapes and had a coffee table book called On High come out last year to much fanfare. Ariel works in private equity.
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Bella says. “I honestly thought you would, too.” She continues while I chew. “I’m not mad it’s just… you’re always wanting me to be more serious, and be with someone who cares. Like you never stop talking about that. And he does. And it doesn’t seem to matter to you.”
“It matters,” I tell her. I do not want to keep talking about this.
“You have a weird way of showing it.”
She’s annoyed, her voice edgy, her arms outstretched. I sit back.
“I know,” I say. I swallow. “I mean, I can see that, that he cares. And I’m happy for you.”
“You are?” she says.
“I am,” I say. “He seems like a good guy.”
“A good guy? Come on, Dannie, that’s pathetic.” She’s petulant, angry. I don’t really blame her. I’m giving her nothing. “I’m really crazy about him,” she says. “I’ve never felt this way before, and I know I’ve said this a lot, and I know you don’t believe me—”
“I believe you,” I say.
Bella sticks her elbows on the table and leans forward. All the way. “What is it?” she says. “It’s me, Dannie. You can say anything. You know that. What do you not like about him?”
All at once my eyes sting up with tears. It is an unusual reaction for me, and I blink, more in surprise than in an effort to stop it. Bella looks so hopeful sitting across from me. Naïve, even. So full of the possibility she purports to feel. And I have a giant secret I cannot tell her. Something profound, terrible, and strange has happened in my life, and she doesn’t get to know.