Pug Hill - Alison Pace [21]
On the top step of the outdoor steps of my brownstone, I stop for a minute and look down again at The New School catalog in my hand. I angle the cover toward me just to see it better, just to remind myself that this is real, that this is what I am going to do. It is, I tell myself, tightening my grip on the catalog, tightening my resolve. Sometimes, I tell myself firmly, people just really need to confront their issues.
My cell phone beeps twice as if in agreement with the fact that sometimes people really do need to confront their issues. Also, it does that when I have a text message. With my free hand, I fish my cell phone out of my bag. I push the button for text messages.
@ regency hotel having many cocktails. You should come. C U soon??—E.
I look at the E for longer than I look at the rest of it. I try to imagine how different I would feel if the E in my message, in my night, in my life, stood for Elliot instead of Evan. In the cell phone of my mind, I start typing, in all capital letters, the letters that I wish came after E.
L.L.I.
I stop there, pretending that Elliot and I have skipped ahead, to some parallel future in some parallel reality, where I don’t have a boyfriend and he doesn’t have a girlfriend, and also, doesn’t ignore me. Some future in which we call each other pet names. I’m not quite sure yet what his name for me would be, but my name for him, I’m sure of it, would be Elli. I stop typing there also because there is a small, sensible part of me that stands off to the side, reminding me that pretending Evan’s text message is from Elliot is more than a little fucked up. But I try not to think too much about how fucked up it is. Because while, yes, people really do need to confront their issues, I don’t necessarily think they need to confront them all at once.
chapter eight
Just Like Jean-Paul Belmondo, Albeit Briefly
As I set my keys down, in their proper spot on the mantle, I notice out of the corner of my eye that the answering machine is blinking. No, I think, it really can’t be. And that, pretty much, is not a good thing to think when you see a blinking light and think it is a message from your boyfriend. I hit play.
“It’s Kara, just calling to say hi. Um, we’re going out tonight, so give a call or send an e tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you next Saturday. Chloe says hi, too.” Kara is my foil-to-Pamela friend, and also my best friend. Having a friend like Kara, who’s as wonderful and caring a friend as she is, makes it, I think, okay to also have a friend like Pamela—a friend who while also good, says judgmental things to you, that you of course take to heart, for fear that her insistence on not taking them back could mean that in them there is some kernel of truth. And so to prove her wrong, you mess up your life. And yes, I know that perhaps I’m taking that tangent a bit far.
And I like Pamela a lot, too, really I do, just not as much as Kara. I think that’s okay, I think when it comes to your friends, it’s just natural to have a favorite. I’m not a person with tons and tons of friends. I think the upkeep, the social whirlwind that surely would be involved in maintaining many, many friends, in the way of someone like Evan, is, to put it nicely, not in my nature; to put it less than nicely, it is really quite beyond me. But given that I do have two very close friends, and they are on the opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of what types of friends they are, I feel sometimes that these two, my two, are so representative of the very different kinds of friendships a woman can have, that in essence it’s really like having many more.
I look at the calendar on my desk: there, written in red is Kara’s daughter Chloe’s second birthday party next Saturday. Evan’s not coming with me. Evan has a general rule about not attending baby parties. His logic being that if you go to one, you have to go to all of them so as not to offend,