“I’ll take two of these little hats. I’m all about supporting former sex workers,” CJ said, picking up a red beanie and an orange one. “Their heads are a completely normal size.”
Janey watched as Beau bounced from the backseat of the Tesla, holding the hand of someone behind him in the car and dragging her onto the sidewalk. It was the girl. That beautiful intern. His new muse. Her replacement. She felt the early symptoms of a panic attack, tingling fingers and a gnawing tightness in the back of her throat. It hadn’t bothered her that her ex had gotten a new woman pregnant, but seeing her former business partner and best friend, her gay former business partner and best friend, bringing this giggly little girl to a boot-camp class was enough to reduce her to tears.
CJ handed the salesgirl her credit card and came over to sling her arm around Janey’s waist. “You’re better than he is. You know that. Let’s go. Don’t let him cheat you out of burning like a thousand calories with some reformed terrorists. We took the subway here, for god’s sake. We’re working out with that militia.”
They were the last to walk into the class and forced to stand in the back of the large warehouse, a former sugar refinery that retained a faint scent of burnt confectioner’s powder. Over the next five minutes, two Sri Lankan men in full combat fatigues and with precise British accents carefully explained the plan for the next hour. They would be divided into teams and made to compete against one another in various obstacle courses constructed throughout the old warehouse, which included tasks such as lugging boulders across the room, building stockades with thirty-pound sandbags, dismantling them and rebuilding them on the opposite side of the room, crawling on their stomachs underneath a maze of barbed wire, and scaling a two-story wall.
Beau was practically joined at the hip with his leggy new gal pal. The pair of them wore matching Rick Owens sweatpants and oversized hoodies with the words BE A UNICORN emblazoned on the front. On his head, Beau wore a rainbow-striped headband. They kept poking each other in their slim sides and giggling in each other’s ears. He usually despised public physical fitness. His trainer came to work out with him in his apartment where no one else could witness it. This new girl must have made him come.
“We could go over and say hi. Don’t you think it’s weird for the two of you to avoid each other? You didn’t get a divorce,” CJ said with her trademark practicality about all things that didn’t have to do with her weight or the size of her children’s pants.
But it wasn’t that simple at all. This was like the worst divorce of all time, one Janey hadn’t initiated, hadn’t wanted. When she looked at Beau with this new girl she felt cheated out of the life she thought she should have. It didn’t make any sense. He was a gay man and she was a straight woman. Theirs wasn’t a love story, and yet the pain of the split was as real as if they had been married for twenty years. She kept thinking back to an interview she’d seen ages ago between David Frost and Truman Capote where Truman had argued that true friendship was so much more intimate and deeper than love. At the time Janey hadn’t thought much of it. She’d just been researching something about Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the launch of a dress called the Audrey, but now the quote echoed in her mind.
The Tamil Tigers were wildly polite for former members of one of the world’s most dangerous armies, sprinkling their instructions with the words “please” and “thank you” and “if you would be so kind.” They conducted a lengthy roll call of all thirty guests, forcing the group to hold a steady plank position the entire time. Next up they were told to divide into teams at the start of various obstacles around the room.
“If you could please assemble your four-person team at one of the stations then we shall begin the first drill,” the taller of the Tigers said into a megaphone. Janey and CJ grabbed each other’s hands, the way you did when partnering up on field trips in grade school, and smiled at a pair of similarly aged women standing nearby. The Tigers took the competition seriously, giving each team a color—theirs was pink—and lighting up a giant scoreboard on the back wall. Each team received five points if all four members finished a particular obstacle course before the other team. Despite being one of the older teams in the room, the pink team was weirdly good at walking across a slack line and climbing an agility ladder. Janey looked over at Beau’s team and saw him struggling to stand on a balance beam while carrying a cement block. What did he think about this place? About the Tigers? They’d spent the better part of their entire lives talking about everything, critiquing the world, cataloging everyone else’s dysfunctions. Did the silence between them feel as deafening to Beau as it did to Janey? Would he laugh if she made a joke about all of the hipsters in the room pretending to guard Sri Lanka’s democracy by carrying organic burlap sandbags?
With the hour ticking down to the class’s final minutes, the pink team was in the lead and poised to face the yellow team in one final obstacle. Janey could hear Beau’s high-pitched giggle before she turned to face him. She knew her hair was a mess. She’d caught her ponytail on a length of barbed wire during the last drill and she was drenched in sweat.
“Hey there, Janey-boo,” she heard him say, realizing then that he’d known she was there the entire time. He lowered his voice an octave. “Hello, Chakori.” Beau despised CJ, had always looked at her as competition for Janey’s love, and refused to call her by anything but her given name.
Janey forced herself to smile. “Hi, Beau.”
“It’s good to see you taking care of yourself,” he said in a condescending voice. “I didn’t know you were back in the States.”
Of course with his new officemate next to him, Beau would maintain the charade of her leaving the company, of her fleeing to Europe on a whim.
“You little shit,” CJ spat at him before Janey had the chance to correct Beau’s lie. The Tigers ordered them to line up. This particular course involved carrying a large sandbag through a pit of mud, climbing a wall made of ropes, leaping off onto a trampoline over a trench filled with fire, belly-crawling under dangling live wires, and then conquering a set of monkey bars.
It was the playground from hell, which meant it was the worst kind of hell for Beau, a little boy who couldn’t play sports and sat on the sidelines of the schoolyard for thirteen years. Sure, grown-up Beau was strong and he was scrappy, but Janey was intent on winning this race. Beau was the last in his line, and so Janey hung back.
As CJ sprinted ahead of the leggy muse, Janey turned to Beau.
“You know damn well where I’ve been. How dare you poison our employees against me!” She could feel the hairs on her arms rise as she reprimanded him, and it felt good. To his credit, Beau flinched at her words.