At eleven the following Sunday night, I called Mitchell and told him that if he came over and we slept together it didn’t have to mean anything.
Brilliant move.
It was two weeks before I heard from him. And over those nights it was like I imagine life must be in a methadone clinic — cold sweats and a soul-shriveling restlessness — but this is nothing new. Everyone in every country of the world has bushwhacked through this. It probably didn’t help that we slept together twice more. I have no explanation other than that both times I believed we were back together, though he explicitly told me (“Are we clear on this, Jen?”) we weren’t. When I left at three and searched for a cab, I did this thing where I dug my fingernails, and one time a pencil, into my arms, the way I would as a little girl when the doctor gave me a shot and I wanted to divert the pain. I saw my reflection once in the wide-angle mirror of my apartment building’s lobby. My hair was squashed and matted and my arms were blotched with little red cuts. I looked like a junkie with shitty aim.
Under the silky light of a storybook moon, the four of us walked back through the cold to the B and B. The proprietress was at her desk when we arrived and she asked us for our breakfast preferences. She handed us sheets of pale green paper with an impressive list of food and beverage selections. I circled grapefruit juice and pancakes, and bacon, and then thought better of it and crossed out the bacon, and then wrote out the word bacon, and then wrote the word Yes next to bacon, so they would know I wanted it. What the fuck. I asked for a pot of coffee — it said a cup or a pot, and I liked the idea of someone brewing a whole pot just for me.
We turned in our lists and then we lingered in front of our room. A dog barked from downstairs. I thought Amanda might ask the men in and I would have gone along with it, but it was better we went our separate ways. The rooms were small and one of us might have felt trapped. We could hear their voices through the walls though we couldn’t make out what they were saying, even when we listened through the water glasses.
At the mountain the next morning I was the lone member of our foursome who had to rent equipment. In the rental shop I began to feel jittery. I was a car ride away from my phone. I saw a couple getting their skis fitted, and it occurred to me that Mitchell might have a new girlfriend by now. And then I thought, What if they’re here? Or What if I run into them?
When I returned outside, Roland was waiting for me. He said Kevin and Amanda hadn’t wanted to wait but that they’d meet up with us at lunch.
“You’ll be bored to tears,” I said.
“I won’t in the slightest,” he said, and then I remembered this was a singles trip. It now felt awkward, the idea of skiing all morning with Roland the racer, who’d start guiding me through my intermediate turns like I was twelve. But there was no other choice really, so I decided to make the best of it.
We began one of those personal résumé conversations, and for the first trip up it went well enough. But on the second ride I drew back, like I was spoken for, which, of course, was absurd. I encouraged him to tell more stories of ski accidents he’d witnessed or heard about. By our third run I was convinced I would die on the mountain — that I would hit a tree, or land on a jagged rock formation, or fall a few thousand yards head over heels until my lifeless body came to rest in a pile of white.
I fell five times before lunch, twice face-first because I’d crossed my tips, and in each instant Roland was there to carry my lost ski to me and say encouraging things like, “You were really feeling it there.”
I couldn’t have been much fun, as I drifted more than once on our chairlift rides into a private theater wherein I was screening a movie of me and Mitchell in Cape May, when we stared at the sky until five and then slept together in our bathing suits on a lounge chair on our hotel room deck, next to a pitcher of daiquiris. We barely moved the whole day and in those hot dreamy hours something in me altered. Mitchell slipped out that evening and didn’t come back for two hours. I remember heading out in my bare feet searching for him down side streets and through shop windows. I had a panic attack, sweats and heart palpitations, until I saw him again two blocks from the hotel in his tight black T-shirt and jeans, carrying two clear plastic boxes with steaks and mashed potatoes from a restaurant. He was perplexed by the sight of me out on the sidewalk, with no shoes, in just a T-shirt and my bikini bottom.
“Where were you going?” he asked.
“I thought you weren’t coming back.”
He stared in disbelief.
“Do you have any idea how twisted that is?” he said.
Toward the top of the lift we saw Amanda and Kevin on the slope below us. Roland yelled out, “Yo, Devil Dog!” and Kevin looked up. I decided to yell “Yo, DeManding!” but Amanda kept carefully carving out her Jacqueline Kennedy turns, for our benefit. Roland pointed to his watch, which meant we’d meet in the lodge. Kevin nodded and then flew across the hill, with his arms gracefully spread out like some sort of snowboarding angel.
That night we planned to hit the heated pool and Jacuzzi at a newly remodeled resort. All the single young professionals would be there and there were supposed to be drinks and a DJ. Amanda, who spent an hour every afternoon at the gym working on her quads and glutes, was excited. I really didn’t feel like getting into a pool with strangers and drinking, and hanging about in a bikini.
I checked my cell phone when I got back: another message from my mother and one from 24-Hour Fitness asking me if I’d dropped my membership.
Amanda was upset that I was going to miss the pool party and she said it would throw off the chemistry of the whole weekend. And wasn’t I interested in Roland?
“He’s about a billion times smarter and handsomer than what’s-his-name.”
She said she really liked this guy Kevin. They’d talked the whole day about his wife’s death, and they’d broken through some barriers. She said he was a pretty remarkable and resilient guy. And I thought there was something pathetic and even ghoulish about using a conversation about a man’s dead wife’s brain aneurysm as a way to get him to like her, though I stayed silent because over the years I’d used my own methods to get people to like me.
I said I was getting dinner alone, and that I might watch a pay-per-view movie on television.
“There are no pay-per-view movies,” she said testily. “It isn’t a Holiday Inn.”
“Then I’ll read,” I said.
“That sounds really fun.”
“If it isn’t, I’ll know where to find you.”
“Oh, come do this with us, Jen. It’s going to be such a blast. It’ll be good for you. You’re not going to have a lot of chances like this.”
I nearly said something very unkind to Amanda, but I knew she just wanted us to be better friends and that I was letting her down.
“Maybe I’ll come by later,” I said.
I went out to a nearby restaurant by myself and ate a bad Cajun chicken sandwich and a Caesar salad with around a half gallon of dressing on it. The TV that hung over the bar played sports, college basketball from some place in the Midwest. Lots of corn-fed white boys. The waiter asked me where I was from and I lied and told him “the Hawaiian Islands.” I have no idea why I said that. And why not Hawaii? Why the Hawaiian Islands? He told another waiter who came by and said he was planning his honeymoon and wanted to know where in Hawaii to go. The Big Island, I said, because I’d heard it was the nicest and he seemed nice and I wanted to give him the best information I had. I tipped my waiter twenty dollars because I’d lied to him. At this rate I was likely to be broke by the time I got to lunch the next day.