“You only told me because you got caught,” she countered.
He held his fork as if it were a pointer and glanced at the tines. There was a bit of yellow egg there. “But I know we can get past this. I know I can.”
She wanted to say, Well, that’s big of you. But she still hoped she could remain above sarcasm. She wanted only candor in this final breakfast. “I can’t,” she said instead.
“And what does that mean?”
“It means…it means a lot of things. It’s not just about trust, and how that’s gone. I kept hoping you’d grow up or expecting you’d grow up or believing you’d grow up. And that’s crazy on my part. Because you won’t. I used to love that little boy in you. But now that little boy is just a horny teenager who wants his women to be skanky girls gone wild. Beautiful things with eating disorders.”
“Not you. You know how much I respect you.”
“And yet you stare at other women on the street. You really think I don’t notice?”
“I’m a guy. It’s how I’m hardwired. If it bothers you, I’ll stop. I usually only do it when some woman is dressed, I don’t know, provocatively.”
“If it bothers me? Really? It never crossed your mind that I might not want you ogling some other girl’s ass?”
“I’m not perfect, I know that. I’m not my brother, I’m not—”
“I’m not sure that your brother is much better.”
“You would be in the minority thinking that.”
She dropped her spoon onto the white plate with the parfait glass, embarrassed by how much noise it made. “Damn it, Philip, this is not about your sibling issues!”
“I’m sorry.”
She could feel people in the restaurant watching them. She could sense Philip’s fear that she was about to make a scene. She hadn’t wanted to make a scene; she certainly hadn’t planned that she would. But at this point? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that if anything good had come from that appalling debauch at his brother’s, it was this: she had (and the ghoulish irony of the expression was not lost on her) dodged a bullet.
“How dare you say, ‘I can get past it,’ as if that means you’re such a big person or you’re better than me? How dare you! It really doesn’t matter if you can get past it. I can’t,” she said, and she was crying, her voice a little lost in her sniffles, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care at all. She stood and lifted her purse over her shoulder and held out her left hand. Then, with her right, she pulled the engagement ring off her finger and—as he was standing, reaching out to her, imploring her to stop, to think, to not throw away all that they had—she tossed it onto the table. It bounced onto the floor, and Philip fell to his hands and knees—dove, as a matter of fact—after it. As far as she knew, he never followed her out the door or tried to catch her, because she never looked back.
…
Later that morning, Richard reassured his younger brother that Nicole might change her mind in a few weeks or a few months. But he didn’t believe it. He only said she might because he felt he had to say something, and he couldn’t quite read the tone of his brother’s voice on the phone. But the wedding clearly was off. That part of the conversation was brief and, it seemed, almost rote. It was as if Philip had grown accustomed to the news, bad as it was, and in hours had jumped four stages to acceptance. In truth, Richard wasn’t surprised that Nicole was leaving him before they could even get to the altar; Kristin, he surmised, would have done exactly the same thing. Any woman with even a teaspoon of self-respect would. Nevertheless, he felt bad for his brother. It seemed the collateral damage from Friday night was only getting worse for everyone.
“Are you weirded out that all those Russian dudes made bail?” Philip asked him suddenly.
“They didn’t all make bail,” he answered carefully.
“Okay, most. I find it amazing that one was the guy who Spencer used to talk to on the telephone when he was lining up the girls.”
“You do hang with an impressive crowd,” he said. He still hadn’t decided whether to tell Philip what his despicable friend was doing and enlist his help. He guessed this was because he suspected, in the end, he was going to pay the guy off. Maybe after he had written the check or transferred the money he would rat Spencer out. Inform Philip that his friend was a dirtbag. But he kept coming back to the reality that there was no guarantee Spencer wouldn’t keep coming back for more, which was one of the reasons why he hadn’t called his portfolio manager and moved around some money already.
“The guy was just a voice on the line,” Philip was saying. “They never met.”
“Next time, Philip? Tell him to just use Craigslist, okay?”
“Yeah, that’s a deal,” his brother agreed, though Richard would have preferred that Philip had said there wouldn’t be a next time. Then: “Spencer is fucking terrified. He just can’t believe those guys are back on the street.”
“He probably should be terrified.”
“He even got me a little wigged out. But, like, what would the Russians want with us, right?”