"Okay. It sucks. It's hideous."
"Come on. Look at it! Tell me your honest opinion!" I was feeling frantic, wishing that Claire were with me. She'd find something to criticize. Sneakers. Hair. Something.
Marcus thrust his hands in his pockets and glanced over at Rachel. "She looks the same to me."
I shook my head. "No. They both look better than usual," I said. "What is it? Is it just that some time has passed?"
Then, just as Dex sat down beside Rachel, it hit me. Dex was tanned. Even Rachel didn't have her usual white glow. The realization slashed through my heart. They had gone to Hawaii together! I gasped. "Omigod. They're tan. She went on my trip to Hawaii! She went on my honeymoon! Omigod. Omigod. I'm going to confront them!" You hear people say that rage can be blinding, and I learned at that moment that it was true. My vision became blurry as I took one step toward them.
Marcus grabbed my arm. "Darce—do not go over there. Let's just leave. Now."
"He told me he was going to eat those tickets! How dare she go on my honeymoon!" I was crying. A couple standing near our bookcase bunker looked at me, then over at Dex and Rachel.
"You told me he offered them to you," Marcus said.
"That is totally beside the point! I wouldn't have taken you to Hawaii!"
Marcus raised his eyebrows as if to consider this. "Yeah—that is kind of fucked up," he conceded. "You have a point."
"She went on my honeymoon! What kind of a psycho bitch goes on her friend's honeymoon?" My voice was louder now.
"I'm leaving. Now." He took the stairs, two at a time, and as I turned to follow him, I got one more sickening visual: Dex leaning down to kiss Rachel. On her lips. Tan, happy, smitten, kissing couch consumers.
My eyes filled with tears as I rushed down the stairs, past Marcus, past the barware, out the door to Madison Avenue.
"I know, honey," Marcus said, when he caught up to me. For the first time, he seemed to have genuine empathy for my ordeal. "This has gotta be hard for you."
His kindness made me sob harder. "I can't believe she'd go to Hawaii," I said, hyperventilating. "What kind of person does that? I hate her! I want her to die!"
"You don't mean that," Marcus said.
"Fine. Maybe not death. But I want her to get a bad case of cystic acne that Accutane won't cure," I said, thinking that incurable acne would actually be worse than death.
Marcus put his arm around me as we jaywalked across Sixtieth Street, narrowly escaping a delivery guy on a bike. "Just forget about them, Darce. What does it matter what they do?"
"It matters!" I sobbed, thinking that there was no way around it: Dex and Rachel were a couple. I couldn't pretend otherwise. A wave of buyer's remorse washed over me. For the first time, I started to wonder if I should have stayed with Dex—if only to keep this from happening with Rachel. When my affair with Marcus began, the grass seemed so much greener with him. But after watching my former fiance furniture-shop, Dexter's pastures seemed blissfully bucolic.
Marcus hailed a cab, and then helped me inside. I cried the whole way down Park Avenue, picturing Rachel and Dex in all of the scenes that I had studied from our honeymoon brochures: the two of them in a Jacuzzi sipping champagne… at a luau grinning over a roasted pig amid native dancers twirling flames… frolicking in turquoise water… having sex under a coconut tree.
I remembered saying to Dex that we were a better-looking couple than any of the featured honeymooners in those brochures. Dex had laughed and asked me how I got to be so modest.
"Can we go to Hawaii on our honeymoon?" I asked Marcus when we arrived back at his apartment.
"Whatever you want," he said, sprawling on his bed. He motioned for me to join him.
"We should go somewhere even more exotic," I said. "Dex picked Hawaii, and if you ask me, Hawaii is a trite choice."
"Yeah," he said, wearing his "I want sex" expression. "Everyone goes to Hawaii. Now c'mere."
"Where will we go, then?" I asked Marcus as I reluctantly lay down next to him.
"Turkey. Greece. Bali. Fiji. Wherever you want." You promise?
"Yeah," he said, pulling me on top of him.
"And can we get a new, big apartment?" I asked, looking around at his stark white walls, his overflowing closet, and his hulking stereo equipment belching wires all over the scratched parquet floors, "Sure."
I smiled a sad but hopeful smile.
"But in the meantime," he said, "I know how to make you feel better."
"Just one sec," I said, as I picked up the cordless phone next to his bed.
Marcus sighed and gave me an exasperated look. "Who are you calling? Don't you call them!"
"I'm not calling them. I'm over them," I lied. "I'm calling Crate and Barrel. I want that table."