Only one guy was hot, a famous player everyone called George Clooney though he wasn’t George Clooney; he just looked like him. He had a girlfriend, Nelda, an eighties punk rock star, also a serious poker player who might win or lose thirty grand in one game and come back the next night.
The shoot had a lot of problems, and by the end it was clear that it had cost a fortune and likely couldn’t be used. The idea was cool, but all the guys except George Clooney made the clothes look like garbage. It was embarrassing and expensive. It cost poor Pam her job.
After the shoot, I asked George Clooney and Nelda out for a drink. A drink on Dennis Nylon, just to apologize for how badly the day had gone. I was doing what I could, trying (unsuccessfully) to salvage the situation for Pam.
George Clooney and Nelda didn’t want to go, especially when they found out that Dennis Nylon wouldn’t be joining us. But they couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough. There was a nice tequila bar nearby, which I knew my way around, and pretty soon George Clooney and Nelda were telling me about poker.
I wish I could remember the things they said because all the little tricks and techniques would be so helpful in daily life. What I remember is this:
There is always one person in a high-stakes game whom the others call “the fish.” And by the end of the game, the fish will have lost all his money.
George Clooney said, “If you don’t know who the fish is, chances are good that you are the fish.”
Stephanie was the fish. Under no other circumstances would I have become friends with someone who had been blogging about how she wanted to reach out to like-minded moms.
At that first conversation, I talked about my job. Stephanie talked about her blog. I said I was eager to read it. That completed the circle for Stephanie. We weren’t friends just because we had kids. We had minds and careers. We worked. We admired each other’s professional life.
I knew that she had been widowed by a horrible accident. You couldn’t live in our town without having heard about it. But it was better to pretend not to know, to wait for her to tell me.
The blog was what clinched it. The banality, those nerdy posts about being the perfect mom and reaching out to other moms, helping other moms, and maybe once in a while stepping back so you can reflect on the culture’s efforts to turn you and the other moms into baby-making childcare machines with no life or identity of your own. Surprise, moms! It’s already happened!
The blog was reassuring. I could leave my husband and son with Stephanie without being afraid that they would fall for her bullshit. Hilarious.
The joke is on me, as they say.
We all wish for what we don’t have. Stephanie envied my career at Dennis Nylon, though she would never admit it. All I wanted—or thought I wanted—was to stay home with Nicky. With lots of money, in some gorgeous place. And without having to work. I wanted to risk getting caught—and not get caught. I’d deal with boredom later. If I got restless, Nicky and I could always figure it out.
Stephanie was deluding herself if she thought she could do my job. With her constant blabbing about Miles, she wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at Dennis Nylon. No one there wanted to hear about kids. At first no one had families, either because they were gay, or if they were straight, because they were young and scared. Then the gay couples began having more kids than the straight scared ones. Occasionally someone at work would ask me how Nicky was, but not often, and Dennis didn’t want to hear about Nicky. At all.
On paper we were child friendly. But that didn’t mean friendly friendly. I didn’t have Nicky when Dennis hired me. I’m not sure he would have hired me if I’d had a kid. Every time I mentioned Nicky’s name, Dennis shut down, and I changed the subject to what Dennis was thinking of doing for his next collection. Dennis gets his power from being a genius and switching his attention on and off like a faucet.
If I needed someone to take care of Nicky when it was time to disappear, there was no one I could hire that would be as good as a Captain Mom. You can’t pay for childcare like that. Who could have predicted that Stephanie would interpret her duties to include sleeping with my husband?
Really, I should have known. At first I thought that Stephanie’s blog was just harmless, tree-hugging bullshit. But after I got to know her, it was interesting to observe the gap between the woman she pretended to be in her blog and the person she was. Reading the blog, you’d think she was the picture of respectability, the best and most honest mom who ever lived, when in fact she was a woman who had had a long passionate affair with her half brother and who may have been responsible for her husband’s suicide.
I chose to see what I wanted to see. I should have taken her lies as a warning.
Of course she didn’t tell me all her secrets right away. But she always hinted that there was something a little extra, something dark in her history that was maybe a bit kinky, something that would hold my interest if my attention chanced to stray from the fascinating question of how the boys were liking their teacher, and her efforts to get Miles to eat vegetarian.
Her secrets were her capital. In the beginning, our conversations were like a guessing game. She would hint at these secrets, and I would have to manipulate her into telling me what they were. Or at least what they were about. It was all fake. She wanted to tell me. She couldn’t wait.
I knew how her husband and brother died, but I pretended not to. And it was such a sad story that I cried. Real tears. That meant a lot to her, because she’d thought I was reticent, even chilly, though I had been trying my best, working overtime to seem cozy and warm.
After we’d cried together, she said how great it was to have a friend, a best friend, like we did when we were teenagers.
It was hard for me to respond. Not that it mattered. She was so sure that she knew who I was and how I felt about her, she was never curious about the truth.
Stephanie was weak but pushy and forceful in her weakness. She willed us to be best friends forever. As if we were teenage girls. She studied me: my clothes, my style. How I talked to Nicky. It’s flattering when someone wants to be you, even if it gives you the creeps. Single White Female is one of the scariest films ever made.
Sean and I reminded ourselves: It was all about Nicky.
I didn’t want a best friend. I wanted a character witness and a temporary caretaker for my son.
Stephanie poured her heart out to me. I could have been a priest or a reverend or a rabbi or her therapist. It’s hard to know what to say when your son’s best friend’s mom tells you that she had an affair with her half brother. An affair that lasted from when she met him at eighteen to not long before he was killed—and that may have caused her husband to kill himself and his wife’s lover. His brother-in-law.
“Wow,” was all I could say.
“Wow indeed,” Stephanie said.
What did I have to trade her, secret for secret? Isn’t that how a friendship is supposed to work? I complained about Sean and how stressful it was to visit his mom in the UK. I told her what a fabulous lover he was. I complained about how hard I worked. I complained about Sean thinking he was smarter than me and not giving me credit for how much I did. All of which was true, but I couldn’t tell her the big secret, which was that all this—every conversation, every after-school glass of white wine and greasy burger and game of miniature golf—was part of a plan that Sean and I had put in motion.
I’m not sure she ever listened. She needed to talk, to hint that there was more, something else she had to tell me, something darker that she was holding back. The carrot at the end of the stick of my fake friendship with Stephanie.
She picked a strange place to tell me that last big secret, which, to tell the truth, I already intuited, and I’d been expecting.