The rain had let up and the slick streets thrummed with lights from cars and jumbled storefronts. Goblins and celebrity hosts and former dictators jostled by in the river air porous with the smells of garbage and fried food and grilled meats. A driver blammed on the horn and fists shook. A squad of taxis loosened and eased away. She launched into the breach after one. A bike flotilla loomed. Bells and curses rang. Easy, Jane said and with a squeeze to the scruff of the neck righted Marilyn onto the sidewalk.
She shook herself off. I am only trying to get you home, she said very slowly. Since you refused his ride.
Marilyn, I stayed because I, unlike a certain someone, wanted to make sure you were okay. Okay? And you don’t have to shout.
I’m not shouting. But if you want me to I will.
They stepped aside to let a dishevelled man pushing a cart of rags pass. Fast-moving figures like wasp-filled jars buzzy with energy approached and vanished behind. Some enchanted evening. The drink, but maybe also labyrinthitis. Or cerebellar tumors like the diagrammed nodules she needed to spiff pronto in the next week for a particularly picky textbook-consortium client—just thinking about the job wearied her to the point of exhaustion so she let Jane grip her hand and tow her through the wait-line at the taqueria counter, past the carts selling pirated handsets and off-off medications, the vegan automat. Near the pocket-library Marilyn managed to loop her arm through Jane’s and halted, halting Jane. The sidewalk continued, though—it appeared to eddy out from under them while Jane appeared to feign ignorance. Above and beyond the nearby bridge the freeway splashed more traffic and, higher still, dragonfly helicopters slalomed among the condo sky-plinths. Barges slid below on the oily river. Anyway, Jane said, with her free hand scooping Marilyn’s curls off her clammy forehead. It’s you and me now.
He was being polite, Marilyn said. Giving us our space. Or do you not even know what polite is?
Smatterings of applause like firecrackers broke out and a group of buskers began to crackle notes that sounded like glaze cracking on a cup. Marilyn, Jane said with a laugh. Are we having a fucking fight?
No we’re not. Wait, I’m sorry. Yes. Yes we are. Fuck yes.
Jane’s arm slackened in Marilyn’s. A falsetto of sirens sang out on a nearby street and she recalled another busy sidewalk, five years ago, just before Jane high-tailed it out of town for thirteen months, lank with misery. Some trouble—pregnant? Hard to hear. Too much noise. Marilyn had coughed and excused herself. You bitch, Jane said after her as Marilyn scurried off. Call me. But Marilyn had work and more work and her Amir-trouble too—Amir the poet-painter, sweetheart of several seemingly serene co-habitation months before he transplanted to the West Coast with a clean-break vengeance of which she hadn’t thought him capable. And before Amir she’d had her Stephen-months. But she’d always had Jane. Right? Jane pregnant? Not possible. And then not possible but somehow cowardly true Marilyn’s not calling. Jane’s counter-silence lasted a month—crazy, impossible—which stretched to seven weeks then the time away that Rand had just questioned her about. Call me, you bitch. But in the end it was Jane who’d called.
The street sirens neared and a security pod whipped past on their PTs. Jane gently unhooked her arm from Marilyn’s. Unsupported, she swayed on her feet. What if Jane had never called? Marilyn’s mind suddenly foamed. Panic flooded her throat.
Wait, she said again. I’m sorry. Really sorry.
Liar, Jane said with some tenderness, and added a conciliatory hip-check. You’re a menace, Marilyn.
A menace all right. Each day during Jane’s absence had increased Marilyn’s paralysis. Six months after their meet-up on the sidewalk it was Jane’s older sister, running into Marilyn in a coffee shop, who’d finally alerted her. Jane in the Pacificas while Marilyn mostly squirrelled away in her hidey hole, in thrall to a mercifully dispassionate precision regarding the articular capsule and sacral nerve. Until Jane initiated the truce. Back from her adventure, her good works, but the same-Jane in that—with the exception of their soon-to-be shared unremarkable Greg—her guys bore names and faces Marilyn rarely troubled herself with except maybe over popcorn before the start of a movie. How’s Colin? What’s up with your Magana? And Jane would only clam.