“Let’s call your cousin Peg in London!” Sara had shouted, leaping from the hot tub and hardly pausing to wrap herself in a towel before rushing to find a phone.
“It’s only eight there,” George had said.
“Call her, call her, callllllll her!” Sara had screeched happily. While George hunted down his phone, she continued to make erratic squeaking noises.
“I don’t have her new number,” George concluded after investigating his contacts list.
Sara grabbed the phone and began flipping through, looking for people to call. “Do you ever clean this thing out? You still have your RA’s number from freshman year.” Then she clapped. “Jacob! Let’s tell Jacob!”
She was inside the hotel again before George could catch up to her. There they found Jacob wearing nothing but couch cushions.
“Wake him up!” Sara insisted. “He’s your friend.”
“You’ve known him practically as long as I have!”
“But you knew him first,” she insisted. “So technically he’s your friend.”
George thought about this. “Does that mean I get to tell Irene too?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s a girl. It’s completely different.”
“Completely different according to who?”
“Polite society,” she insisted. “And it’s ‘according to whom.’”
George looked dubiously downward at their naked, snoring friend and begrudgingly poked him in the shoulder. Sara had to hand it to him — Jacob seemed neither polite nor social as he made a half-snarl and shifted, exposing one gigantic pale buttock. She sighed and gave Jacob a hearty slap on the back of the head. When this succeeded in opening just one of the boy’s bleary eyes, she looked at him squarely and said, “George has something to tell you.”
The bloodshot pupil had swiveled in its socket toward George, who stammered at it, “We’re… um. We’re engaged!”
There’d been a short silence, and then, in a growl from deep beneath a throw pillow, Jacob had said, “Engaged in what exactly?”
“To be married, you ass!” Sara shouted happily, bouncing on the couch beside him.
Jacob snorted, closed his eye, and said, “Does this mean Sara’ll finally stop being a puritan priss and move into your place?”
“Obviously,” George said, just as Sara said, “George’s place?”
They paused, each sure the other was joking.
“Who’s moving in with who?” George had asked.
“With whom,” Jacob and Sara both corrected him at once.
That matter had still not been settled. And Jacob hadn’t been the last to ask. Her parents had asked almost immediately, as had his. It was ridiculous that George imagined she could move into his place. It was hardly big enough for even one person to move around in. Granted it was on Riverside, in a beautiful prewar building, a stone’s throw from the park and close to Zabar’s. And of course it was insanely cheap, which was why George had remained in this prison cell, with its single sad window that wasn’t wide enough for an air conditioner. And people never believed her when she said this, but his shower was inside his kitchen! The toilet, then, was in another room the size of a coat closet, with no sink. But the worst thing by far was that his bed folded up into the wall. Yes. George Murphy, her soon-to-be husband, slept on a Murphy bed.
Sara’s apartment, all the way across the island on York Avenue, was vastly superior. The railroad style wasn’t all that convenient for living with Karen, a former coworker whose boyfriend, Troy, now spent every night and most of every weekend there. But it would be perfect for her and George, if Karen could be convinced it was high time she moved out to Westchester, where she and Troy both worked now anyway.
The waiter was circling Sara like a shark now, trying to get her to give up the table. He was new and didn’t know that she was there practically all the time. He kept asking if perhaps she’d like to wait at the bar until her friend arrived. Sara pretended to take important calls from the office when he approached, her thoughts flitting to The Death of Eurydice. Some artsy friends of Irene’s were in it and had given them all tickets. But now Irene was saying she was too busy, and George couldn’t make it, and Jacob flat-out said he could make it if he’d wanted to but didn’t want to. Rude. Well, William had already written back to say he’d be delighted to come, and Sara could hardly wait to see him. She hoped he might inject a bit of civility into the group.
Sara came out of her reverie to find the waiter hovering again. She coughed and ordered another coffee, though she was jittery enough from the first two cups. It was strange being there alone. Since they’d come to the city, this had been where they’d all gathered by default for brunches, lunch breaks, and late-night bull sessions. They’d last been there a week ago, though actually — no, they hadn’t all been there. Jacob hadn’t been able to make it. And it had been trouble, as it always was, when one of them was missing. Whenever all of them were anywhere together — picnics down at the Battery, visits to see a new exhibit of Edwardian Court costumes at the Met, an investigatory meal at a new restaurant — no one said a cross word. If anyone did (most often Jacob), it was seen as genuinely good-natured… However, whenever someone was missing, that person almost instantly became the subject of speculation, criticism, and suspicion. It was as if the person’s absence left a hole in their mutual fabric, and the others couldn’t help but pull at the fraying threads around the hole, as if to say Something ought to be here. How has this happened?
Just last week they’d been right here in Bistro 19, without Jacob, because he was out on a date with a new boy. Isn’t he still secretly dating his boss? Irene wanted to know, even though his arrangement with the boss had been open from the get-go and they all knew it. Then George had started calling the new boy “Siddhartha,” because Jacob had mentioned that he lived this, like, monastic lifestyle, though not for religious reasons but just because he was sort of OCD about clutter and — here was the worst part — were they ready? They’d met at a coffee shop when Jacob had seen him finish reading a copy of Angela’s Ashes, get up, wipe down his table, clear his cup, and then throw the book in the trash can.
Irene couldn’t believe it. What George wanted to know was, had Jacob seen the Siddhartha guy’s place yet, and was it, like, completely spotless? Sara hadn’t been able to help herself from asking if Siddhartha had seen Jacob’s place yet, and Irene and George had almost lost it. None of them, not once in six years, had seen Jacob’s apartment. It was somewhere way up in East Harlem, and as far as they could tell, he never stayed there. Either he slept with a current or past boyfriend, or he stayed up in Stamford with his boss and took the train in as if nothing were at all strange. But it was strange. For one thing, he wouldn’t tell any of them where the apartment actually was. Sara thought it was because he’d bitten off more than he could chew in terms of the neighborhood, all blustery and believing that he could fit right in, only to find, as she’d explicitly told him a hundred times, that he didn’t feel safe, but of course he couldn’t admit that, and kept renewing the lease just to make the point.
She checked her phone again. Still no message from Irene. She texted Jacob to see if he’d heard from her. She texted Irene a question mark. She texted George a smiley face and admitted to herself, then and there, that of course she’d move in with him in a heartbeat — even into that tiny closet-toilet apartment. She’d live with him in a refrigerator box, in a nursery rhyme shoe, a teepee, an igloo, or a fortress made of couch cushions. Let the doubters doubt. Let the future be unsure. In a city of eight million, they’d always be two, together, and that was the beginning and the end of it. Then, just as she was about to get up and head back to the office, Irene rushed into the restaurant, her hands up high in breathless apology.