Friends Like Us Read online

  His jacket makes a shushing sound as he leans toward me. He reaches his hand around the back of my head, cradling it like a baby. His mouth meets mine, and for one perfect second I’m in laser-sharp focus, I’m the culmination of Ben’s drawn-out affection, I’m the fine point on it, and I close my eyes.

  And then our teeth bang together. And Ben laughs, a moist, nervous exhalation right into my mouth, and I’m leaning across a gear shift kissing my old friend, which, as it turns out, is sort of like kissing my grandmother, although to be fair I’ve never actually felt her tongue on mine, but there’s something similar about it, close and earthbound and familiar. But it’s Ben! So I soldier on, praying for transformation, bracing my suddenly heavy body so that I don’t collapse onto him, and I am struck by the sensation of a kiss in a way I never have been before, that it is two people trying to eat each other, one hot mouth inside the other. Then again, his lips are soft, his hand in my hair reassuring.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Ben says, when we’re finished.

  “Please.” His face is still next to mine. There is a stray eyelash on his cheek.

  “Did you eat pretzels today?”

  “What kind of a question is that?” I ask.

  “You taste … pretzel-y.” The rogue strand of hair has fallen in front of my eye. Ben gently places it back behind my ear.

  “Is that what you ask the girl you’ve just kissed after pining for her for twelve years?”

  “I didn’t pine for you.” He laughs. His breath is warm, close. “Okay, maybe I, you know, thought about you from time to time, but no, no pining.”

  “You pined!”

  “Just tell me if you had pretzels, and we can move on.” He shifts in his seat, his jacket rustling again, like wings.

  “No,” I say. “But I had a raw onion for lunch.”

  “Ah, that’s it.”

  “And some garlic bread, and clam chowder.”

  “Oh, Wendy,” Ben says, shaking his head and smiling. He reaches for the vent blowing on us and tips it away. Neither of us says anything for a minute, our silence punctuated by the hiss of the heater, the wind, the tinny plink of icy snow. The kiss, so clear to me just a moment ago as a misguided expression of sympathy, an intimate mistake, is beginning to transmute into a confused longing. I glance at Ben for a reading on the situation, but his brow is just slightly furrowed, his expression opaque. He pushes his hand through his hair. “So, that, uh, what we just did,” he starts.

  “It was …”

  “… weird.”

  “Yes!” I say. “I mean, I’m really, really glad—”

  He holds up both hands in front of himself, palms out, like a crossing guard. “Can we … do you think we could not talk about it?”

  I’m staring at his strange face, a place I used to know. “Uh-huh.”

  “Ever again,” he adds.

  My body is still awkwardly inclined toward Ben. I lean back quickly, readjust myself. “I didn’t really have a raw onion and clam chowder for lunch,” I say.

  Ben nods. “I could go for some soup.”

  I imagine him at our small, round kitchen table, Ben and me and Jane, the three of us, slurping big bowls of the matzo ball soup that Jane and I sometimes pick up from Nate’s Deli on Pinefield. “You should come over sometime,” I say. “You could meet my roommate.”

  Ben smiles at me and then looks down and mumbles something else about soup, or possibly he says that the evening has been super. “I’d like that,” he says. “A lot.” And maybe the heat in the car has finally kicked in, but for the first time all evening, I’m warm.

  Chapter Three

  My eyes popped open at seven-thirty this morning, and I stared at the ceiling for forty-five minutes, considering everything with a mixture of relief and regret—half expecting Ben to call, the way he used to when we were in high school, early, filling me in on our plans for the day (The Reptile Festival! The Mustard Museum!). I know last night happened—I told Jane all about it when I got home—but maybe, in the ensuing hours, it has somehow transformed into a kind of dreamy symbolism, the closing of the book of my friendship with Ben instead of the opening of a new chapter. I wonder how long I’ll let myself think about him. I’m not that kind of girl.

  Jane left early for a housecleaning job. So I’m alone, sitting at the kitchen table with a half-eaten bagel and a glass of orange juice and my notebook. Before I moved back to Milwaukee, I interned for six months at Crowley, Donovan, an ad agency in Evanston run by two scruffy, displaced Irish guys who swore constantly, as if their use of the word “fucking” as verb, adverb, and adjective could disguise the fact that they worked fourteen-hour days and drove Saabs. They throw me an assignment now and then, little projects they can’t be arsed to do, and they pay me slightly more than waitressing would, and less than almost anything else. Right now I’m brainstorming names for a new eyeliner for Vérité, a very small makeup and skin care company that is constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. “Is it you, or is it Vérité?” That’s their slogan. “If it’s overdue, it must be Vérité,” is how Michael and Declan refer to them.

  I jot a few ideas down on my growing list. This product line is targeted at the young woman in her mid- to late-twenties … She’s single, adrift, not yet comfortable in her own skin. She goes out to clubs and bars looking for excitement and thrills but what she really wants, what she yearns for, is a place to call home.

  We thought it’d be perfect for you, sweetheart, Declan e-mailed me last week. Fuck off! I wrote back, which meant Thanks, I’ll take it.

  Luminate. Luminesce, I try gamely. In the world of cosmetics, nonword variations of “luminous” are always good, as is anything vaguely European; add -ique to any word, and you’ve got a product. Luminique? But then there’s the danger that your lipstick will sound like a porn star. Food is always a good fallback plan, since apparently women sublimate. Anything with “apricot” or “pear” will generally sell well. (But not banana; we sublimate more subtly than that.) Wordplay in limited quantities can be “fun.” Eye-dentity, I write, but it sounds a little toothy. Eye-dealism. Surpr-eyes! Eye-can’t-believe-it’s-not-butter. Eye suck!

  The doorbell buzzes, a welcome surprise. Jane is the poetic spark that ignites my brainstorming sessions; a word from her, a casual suggestion, can be enough to put an end to hours of fruitless ruminating. A few weeks ago, I was working on a tagline for Arrow, a brand of decaffeinated instant coffee favored by octogenarians, and all I could come up with were vague allusions to impending death. (“Arrow Instant. Because you haven’t got a minute to waste!”) Jane breezed in, glanced over my shoulder, and said, “My grandma used to drink that. She called it her morning cup of joe.” And suddenly I understood that nostalgia along with references to dying would sell better than death alone. Morbidity plus sentimentality equals hope! Michael and Declan said “Arrow. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” was my best fucking work yet.

  Jane rings again. I pad over to the door and buzz her in. “It’s a good thing you’re pretty,” I call out down the echoey hallway. For someone with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, my roommate forgets her keys a lot.

  “Thanks!” A voice that is decidedly not Jane’s reverberates back, and it’s Ben who ambles toward me down the long corridor, a white paper bag in one hand, a big, goofy smile on his face.

  My breath catches in a gasp; for a second the whole inhale/exhale system that has always worked so well balks at the sight of him. My day crashes open, bright and unexpected. “Ben!” I yelp.

  “Willa!” He stops at the door, gives me a little poke. “You look nice,” he says, still grinning.

  I glance down at myself and realize I’m still in my monkey pajamas, which are now dusted with bagel crumbs and, I notice, newly spotted with orange juice. “See?” I say. “That’s what phones are for.”

  “For removing orange juice stains from monkey pajamas?”

  “For calling first so people can look presentable when their friends come over.”r />
  Ben shrugs, then hands me the bag, which is full of baked goods—muffins, doughnuts, scones. I pull one out, a long, sugar-dusted cookie. “Remember?” he says, and I do, a long-ago morning at Baywood Bakery involving a man who didn’t speak English, and the word “ladyfingers,” repeated over and over in increasing volume, accompanied by much useless hand waggling and, at one point, the grabbing of an actual, unsuspecting lady’s fingers, until Ben and I, in line behind the man, were doubled over; and then, when it was our turn at the counter, Ben, with an innocent gaze and an improvised Russian accent, ordering bear claws. This is like finding twenty dollars in the pocket of my winter coat on the first cold day of the year, like discovering my favorite, long-lost necklace behind the dresser. This is the shorthand, finally, of a long friendship. I bite into the ladyfinger and recognize its sugary density, along with a slight cardboardy staleness that I choose to ignore, because I know a peace offering when I taste one.

  When my parents finally split up, toward the end of high school, mostly I was relieved. Their divorce was a quiet détente after three long years of volcanic arguing and festering ill will. But what made sense during the day grew leaden and confusing as the sun went down, and for months I lay awake every night, counting my own shallow breaths, trying to soothe myself to sleep by conjuring up situations in which it would be impossible for my parents not to admit that they still loved each other. (Most of these dramas involved me, weak and pale on my deathbed, rasping judgment as my weeping mother and father finally came together in their shared regret. Too late … too late!) In the end it was Ben—not my parents, definitely not Seth—who saw through the flimsy shell I built around myself, only Ben who didn’t flinch when I broke down crying over Hallmark commercials, who didn’t freak out when I abruptly turned from myself into a snapping turtle. It was Ben who brought the Rocky Road when he came over to study, Ben who stayed on the phone with me until I fell asleep, Ben who drove me to the DMV three times until I passed my driver’s test. If this was all motivated in part by a crush he was secretly nursing, it doesn’t change our history.

  I offer him half of the ladyfinger, and we stand in the doorway for a while, chewing, before I remember to invite him in.

  “So,” he says, settling himself on the sofa and looking around the neat, spare living room. “How’d you do on that math test?”

  “Huh?” I’m standing at the kitchen counter, pulling plates and napkins down from the cupboard. The coffeemaker gurgles. I turn to Ben, confused, a crackle of irritation sparking through me. He’s as twitchy and inscrutable as ever. Math test? “What?”

  “Well, I thought we’d pick up where we left off.” He glances down at the doughnut in his hand as if it has just appeared there, as if it’s some kind of strange, tiny puppy that has just hopped into his palm. He considered how to handle this moment, I realize. He tried out different versions of what to say to me, here in my apartment, how to appear casual and unstudied and charming and easy, and now that his joke has fallen flat and the air between us has gone still, and without the last decade as ballast, we’re losing heft, starting to drift.

  I walk over and plop down next to him, reach for his doughnut. “I skipped that test and got high in the parking lot,” I say, and I take a huge bite of the doughnut, lick my fingers. “Do you have a job?” I ask. “An apartment? A girlfriend?” I ask the last question out of courtesy; something tells me the answer is no.

  “Did I not mention that I’ve been married and divorced three times?”

  “You did not,” I say.

  “Yes! And I have, um, twins. Four-year-old twin, uh … boys.”

  “Really!”

  “Yes, and from different mothers!”

  “Interesting. What are their names.”

  Ben grins, looks quickly around the room. “The twins. Their names.” His gaze settles on the bookshelf. “Um … Biff.” He shrugs again, a habit he seems to have picked up over the last seven years, the slouchy, unassuming gesture of someone who doesn’t understand the high-voltage power of his good looks. He’s still smiling. “Biff and, you know … Happy. We call him Hap.”

  I stand up and walk back into the kitchen, which is really part of the living room, which is more or less the same thing as the dining room. I hold up a mug; Ben nods. “Biff and Hap! Hmmm, I bet they’re a handful,” I say as I pour Ben a cup of coffee and bring it to him. “I bet they require a lot of attention.”

  “Attention must be paid,” he says, and winks, an exaggerated facial contortion, a sort of this-is-not-a-wink wink. So much of our friendship in high school involved plucking out memorable lines from the literature of our AP English class and quoting them back to each other as punch lines, the inside jokes of the supremely nerdy. I’m surprised by how much this game still comforts me, how easily I can slip back into our script.

  “I’m going to get dressed. I look forward to hearing more about your three ex-wives.” With his free hand, Ben salutes me.

  I wonder how long we’ll be able to keep this up, this skimming, gliding dance we’re doing. In my room, I rummage in the closet for my best jeans and find them on the floor, pull them on with the blue sweater that Jane admired the other day.

  I rub ChapStick on my lips and drag my fingers through my hair in a futile attempt to create a flowing mane out of a Brillo Pad. I try to catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window next to my bed, but all I can see are the bare arms of a silver maple brushing against the side of the building. Two squirrels dash madly along the branches in hot pursuit of one another. Squirrels are at the top of the list of things that scare me, even before bats with rabies. It’s the way they live among us. You never know if they’re going to change their minds. I sketch them sometimes and imagine their secret lives, the way they probably plot against us but then get distracted by acorns.

  I look up, past the tree, at the only square of sky visible from anywhere in this apartment, and there’s the moon, too, even though it’s the middle of the day, a blurry smudge in the bright blue sky, faint but unmistakable. Maybe I’ll walk back out into the living room and tell Ben, gently, to go home; maybe this is the part where I explain to him that unrequited love is one thing, but to leave a friendship comatose for seven years is to give it up for dead.

  When I emerge, Ben is staring into his mug of coffee, his face serious.

  “Ben?”

  “You know I am not a fan of sincerity,” he says. There’s a small rip just below the left knee of his jeans, and he worries it, plays at the fraying denim. “So I’m going to say this quickly.”

  I think about the way those squirrels chased each other, switching places at what looked like a predetermined moment, so that the chaser suddenly became the chasee. We are the squirrels!

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I say. My voice is, unexpectedly, squeaky.

  “No, but, of course I do.”

  “Is it about the twins? Is there a problem with the twins? Are they Siamese?” Just two minutes ago, all I wanted was something real between us, something quiet and true, and now I can’t shut up about the twins. I twist my hair nervously.

  He sighs. “Yes, they are Siamese twins. Now please let me talk. I shouldn’t have cut you out of my life. You know me … or, you knew me, and you know that I didn’t really have a handle on … well, I wasn’t sure how to … be an adult …”

  “But we weren’t.” I want to sit down, but suddenly every available chair seems wrong. The armchair? Too close. A kitchen chair? Too far away. I grip my hands behind my back and list a little bit, like a sailboat.

  “Willa, I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?”

  “Yes,” I say, with a big bright smile, but it’s all just too much—Ben, here, full of regret, the two of us, trying to salvage what we’ve lost. Seven years is too long; we’ll try and we’ll fail. And worse, I know with the tense clarity of a patient on the receiving end of a needle that this will hurt. “Yes!” I say again, my hands still tightly clasped behind my back.

  An
d then there’s a jingling sound that takes us both by surprise, a key in the lock and the whoosh of the door, and Jane. She’s turned toward the coatrack, so she doesn’t notice us at first; she shrugs off her winter jacket, revealing a tight purple T-shirt underneath and gray sweatpants, her hair up in a loose bun, tendrils curling around her face: an angel of grime. She drops her bucket of cleaning supplies onto the floor, kicks off her shoes, and sighs and says, “Fuck,” the sound of her exhaustion intimate.

  And I am frozen in place, standing in the middle of the living room between Ben, sitting, and Jane at the door, and who do I think I am? But I’m holding my breath, and I’m suddenly certain, like a magician or a mental patient, that I’m the one who’ll turn it all around.

  With a quick glance to the side, she sees Ben and me.

  “Honey, you’re home,” I say.

  She straightens and smiles, wipes her forehead with the back of her hand and says, again, “The fuck?” only this time it comes out throaty and cheerful.

  “Not in front of the company,” I stage-whisper.

  Ben stands up and we both walk over to her; he holds out his hand to Jane, who takes it and looks at me.

  “Ben! Jane!” I shout their names like I’m directing movers: This chair here, next to the piano. I recognize the volume of my voice but can’t seem to control it.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane says. “I don’t usually meet people this way.”

  “What way?” Ben asks.

  “Um, sweaty from a cleaning job and reeking of Pledge?”

  “I thought I smelled something lemony fresh.”

  Yellow rubber gloves poke out of the pocket of her sweatpants. “Willa has told me a lot about you,” she says.