“Wait . . . what do you mean?” he asked. “When I went to Atlantic City, with Teddy and the guys from work, you did the spa thing, and a dinner with Jess and Shana and those guys, right?”
“Well, I went to the spa, which was great. But I was alone,” she said.
“And then?”
“And then Jess met me for dinner downtown with Courtney and Shana. We had a drink after and I said I was feeling light-headed from the sauna, and I went home.”
That part was true, mostly. They had a drink, but she wasn’t feeling light-headed, and she sort of went home. First she stopped at the Silver Swan, a dingy German bar in the East 20s, for a bourbon on the rocks. Then she paged Ian on her walk home. He was waiting in front of their building by the time she got there.
He was thinner than when she first met him, almost gaunt, with deepening hollows under his eyes. It was easy for Betsy to separate from him, to say that the years of itinerant pill popping were harder on him than they were on her, and that the bruised crescents under her own eyes weren’t as obvious.
“Well if it isn’t the blushing bride,” he said, as she approached their door.
“Yeah, yeah, very funny.”
Upstairs, he gave her the pills and they smoked the tiny joint he would roll just for her. By then, Ian had heard most of the things Betsy vowed to tell no one. She felt an odd mix of vulnerability and safety around this virtual stranger who knew all of her secrets, but whom she saw only once a month, or every other week, and only very occasionally, when work or life were particularly rough, on a weekly basis. As far as she knew, he still didn’t even know her real name, or didn’t care to know. That veil of anonymity, and the utter improbability of their social and professional circles intersecting, kept him at a comfortable distance. But his knowing also gave him power.
That night, instead of moping around the apartment alone, she let her curiosity get the best of her and went out with Ian on his “errands.” They cut a strange, zigzag path through the East Village as he responded to pages. She’d wait for him out in front of a building after he’d been buzzed in through the intercom and disappeared down a dimly lit hallway with his backpack of wonderment in tow. Once he was out of sight, the minutes she spent waiting for him were oddly endless, and what felt like an hour would pass before he’d return. She was left out on the sidewalk, steadying herself against a bike rack, suddenly paranoid about running into someone she knew, though most of the people walking by barely seemed to notice her. New York was being New York. Dogs on leashes sniffed at anemic little trees. Angular women in dark lipstick and wide sunglasses strode by with haughty grace. Old women in housedresses shuffled along the same sidewalks they’d been treading for five decades. The smell of burned hot pretzels and falafel and exhaust and garbage wafted by in small gusts blown by the breeze. She wondered about the people Ian met inside, all of the people that occupied the warren of boxy rooms stacked in neat Tetris columns in building after building, block after block. How many secrets were contained in those rooms? How many had Ian heard? How many people took confession with him, behind that veil of anonymity?
“So I bet you hear it all,” she said, after the door finally opened again and he was back with her on the sidewalk. Betsy felt herself slur and struggled to get her shit together. “Does everyone confide in you? Is it like a thing people do, pill-head confessions, like an HBO show or something?”
“Nah, not everyone. But I hear enough,” he said. They meandered down the sidewalk a bit and Betsy could see, for the first time since she met him, that he was thinking, choosing his words carefully.
“You know, this thing? With the McRae guy you keep talking about? And your dead friend? It’s nothing,” he said. “I mean, it’s something. But everybody’s got something. You didn’t kill her. Technically, you didn’t even let her die. You were just kind of a kid and you were scared and your timing was off. Forgive me for offering some advice. As they say, you’ve got to consider the source. But you’ve got to let that shit go.”
Betsy wandered ahead a bit, too self-conscious to turn around and look this kid, this punk nickel-and-dime dealer, in the eye. And then he spoke up again.
“Also, you’re getting married. I hope I get married someday, and if I caught my wife hanging out with somebody like me when she was supposed to be excited about getting married and all of that? I would not be happy. So I’ve got to work. And you should go home. I’ll walk you back.”
GAVIN WAITED PATIENTLY for her to continue, in the darkness. And then he spoke first.
“Is this about the pills? About Ian?” he asked. “Because I know that you don’t think I know, but I do.”
Betsy put her face in her hands.
“I’m so embarrassed.”
“Come on, now. I’ve been paying attention. I didn’t know what to say. But I promised myself that if I thought it was getting really out of hand, I would speak up.”