“Yeah, that looks pretty lame,” he would say. “But maybe we should go check it out, have a drink, like we’re performing a kind of social experiment?”
Her love for Gavin was resolute, but her curiosity also ran deep and, like many people who paired off young, Betsy had an itch to explore, or at least observe, her options from a semisafe distance. Her evenings on the town without him would start innocently enough, with cheap happy-hour outings with the few colleagues with whom she’d forged some awkward friendships. She would tell people she was shy, and in return they would offer a sympathetic nod, with patronizing pursed lips and sad eyes, that suggested they understood that she was out of her depth, struggling to keep up. It surprised her how no one could tell that she wasn’t actually an introvert, just an imposter using social anxiety as an excuse to stay away. She danced around making actual friends, but would pull back when she felt them get too close. Once in a while, she gave into Jessica’s badgering her to go out for drinks, and would join her and a few colleagues, including a fastidious young guy named Nathan from Chicago, who was a walking, talking decorative arts catalogue, and Shana, who looked like a Parisian waif, with a jet-black pixie cut, until she opened her mouth and let Port Washington, New York, fall out with her accent. Even though Jessica’s parents had the right zip code in Greenwich, they did not have the usual bankroll that accompanies it, so on the rare occasion when she had to pay for her own drinks her taste was more Pabst Blue Ribbon than Chateauneuf-du-Pape. They would venture well south of 57th Street to some of Betsy’s favorite dives, and she would play nice for an hour, a couple of rounds of drinks, and then inevitably she would wander out alone. That would lead to confessional conversations with strangers (mostly male), which sometimes led to a bump of coke in a graffiti-covered bathroom, and then, to her continued horror, more than a few nights when she didn’t make it home. She worried that the slept-at-a-friend’s-place excuse wouldn’t hold with Gavin much longer. And the guilt she felt for her behavior, that she would betray the one person whom she felt she could trust, was crushing. When Betsy tried to rationalize it, she’d say it was a reaction to her life, which was becoming more sterile and predictable than she’d expected. It wasn’t just about the culture that surrounded her, the grungy, smeared lipstick, don’t-give-a-shit atmosphere of New York in the mid-1990s. She still felt the stinging urge to live dangerously, to creep right along the knife’s edge between her real life, the one in which she appeared to be thriving, had a respectable job, and a happy, committed relationship, and the life of punishment she thought she deserved. Betsy wondered how long she could beat the odds and stay out of harm’s way when she was blackout drunk and alone in the city, or how long it would take before the world discovered she was a fraud.
No matter how hard she tried to shed her former life, to live in the present without the uncomfortable burdens of the past, she couldn’t. It would inch its way back in like morning fog, and then she’d try to burn it off, by getting wasted with strangers and dabbling in drugs. With the right combination of whiskey or tequila or bourbon and Percocet or Vicodin, or whatever her “guy,” the reedy, nameless punk with a backpack full of any chemical distractions said was an adequate standin, she could forget. And that night, she pushed it too far, and ended up on a futon covered with plaid flannel sheets.
When she got to 6th Avenue, she noticed a handful of stragglers leaving the Limelight at dawn. One woman in a filthy vintage slip and a molting stole was walking slowly along the side of the club, which was a converted church, dragging her fingers along its stone facade. Betsy noticed her slow, muddy movements and realized that she must be a heroin addict, about the same age she was. She thought, on paper, at least, how they were slightly different expressions of the same being: early twenties, white, female, damaged beyond repair by some unseeable evil. She paused on the sidewalk to watch her, wondering how alike their stories were.
“What are you looking at?” the woman slurred, shaking the scuffed metallic sandals in her hand at Betsy angrily.
“It’s fox, isn’t it?” said Betsy. “Your stole. I’ve seen plenty of fur in the last few years, and I’m guessing it’s fox.”
“What are you even talking about?” said the woman, struggling to bring her eyes up to meet Betsy’s, though her gaze stopped at her collarbone. “Bitch.”
The Courtney Love impersonators, the women who wore shredded vintage slips and over-the-knee stockings, smeared eyeliner, and tiaras, had either moved on to shrunken T-shirts, L’Oréal Rum Raisin lipstick, and schoolgirl skirts, or were too out of their minds to notice that the rest of the style-savvy world had left this moment behind. This one in the thrift store stole—in August—was one of the leftovers.