Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [65]
As a character, the woman in the painting was the beautiful daughter of a powerful goddess; as a model, she was merely a pretty, married woman. In both, a marriage held her captive.
12
It snowed the night of the Happy Birthday Publication Party. We piled coats by the doorway until they formed a formidable barricade on the stairs. People arrived pink from the cold, then flushed red in the warmth. The air was heady from the singed oil of jalapeños and the breathing of wine. Zoë had outdone herself in the kitchen. We had spicy pot stickers and vegetable kabobs and pitas spread with fresh hummus. Everett brought music. A very pregnant Valerie brought cake.
Amber and Lynn, Jillian’s housemates, brought a pervading sense of Jillian’s presence.
“You remember Amber?” Eli asked. She had been to the apartment to see him several times so it was more than a little unnecessary that I set down the drink I was pouring to offer a handshake.
She accepted, quickly looking me up and down. Her appraisal made me self-conscious of the efforts I’d taken that night. I was wearing blush and had carefully chosen a tighter than usual sweater. I’d taken similar care in not touching my hair. It billowed on my shoulders in haphazard curls. Amber’s hair was neatly gelled in place, a shiny implacable helmet.
Eli took her coat—a formidable ankle-length red velvet—but she remained planted at my side.
“You know you don’t look at all thirty,” was the first thing she said to me. “You don’t have a light, do you?” was the second.
I gestured to the matches we kept in a jam jar beside the stove. She kept her cigarettes in a hot pink handbag. I didn’t have the courage to tell her not to light one in the apartment.
“So you guys are pretty good to let Eli stay here like this.” She cupped the palm of her hand around the flame, waiting for the cigarette to light.
“We don’t mind having him around.”
“I know, right.” She was watching him. “He’s adorable.”
Amber wore a black dress with cobweb-patterned lace sleeves. While she told me at length about Jillian and Eli and the minutiae of their seemingly complicated love life, I wondered if her arms didn’t itch terribly. In the seventh grade I’d been accosted every morning on the school bus by a Larissa Spregg, who invited herself to sit with me and then spent the fifteen-minute ride to school detailing how she’d spent the previous night debating whether or not to kill herself. She knew I was a Christian and confessed to me in the hopes I would entertain her by attempting to witness. I spent all of junior high and high school desperately uncomfortable around people who dressed Goth.
“Do you think they’re pretty serious?” I asked when she stopped talking long enough to light a second cigarette.
“Jillian doesn’t do relationships that aren’t serious. She’s one of those woman who was just born for serial monogamy.”
I turned the oxymoron serial monogamy over in my mind, adding it to the brief list of things I knew about Jillian.
“Unfortunately for her, she’s like a magnet for the desperate and the loser,” Amber said. “Eli’s the first guy she’s had in a while who treats her right. She’s been in relationships—serious ones—since she was in like the sixth grade, but she never realizes how much it weighs on her, the problems, the resolutions, the constant need to give and take. It’s existential for her; she gets like really large with it when it’s actually really—” she tapped the ash of her cigarette into a plastic cup left on the counter—“micro,” she finished with satisfaction.
Jillian deserved a good man. She had issues with men, mostly with her father, issues that had spawned new problems, bulimia for one. She and Eli both planned to move to New York when she returned.
My head ached. I found it difficult to focus on a thing Amber was saying. In the living room someone accidentally broke a glass on the hardwood floor. At the sound of the splintering glass, I gratefully begged off to help clean up the mess. I did my best to avoid Amber the rest of the night, but she