I listen to him plod to the front door with heavy footsteps—oh, the inconvenience of having to answer the door in the middle of a Top Gear rerun. There is low murmuring that I strain to make out but cannot. “Who is it?” I shout, batting away my makeup artist’s hand. If it’s anyone with a camera, I’ll lock myself in the bathroom. They’re not allowed to follow you into the bathroom. The bathroom is like the U.N.—generally accepted as off-limits, even in wartime.
Whoever was at the door is now on the stairs. I spring out of my seat just as Jen appears in the doorway with a pinched look on her small face. “It’s Greenberg!” Vince announces, on a delay. “And she’s wearing a flannel Snuggie!”
Jen and I are facing each other in a way that feels like we are squaring off. Her enduring scowl morphs into something worse as she takes in my face. It’s the expression of a person who has just walked in on her boss going to the bathroom—mortified, pitying. Jason, my makeup artist, has only just finished “prepping” my face. Which means that my skin is bare, blotchy, and greasy with various serums and primers. I’m without my fake eyelashes, which means I’m without eyelashes entirely. In my twenties, I had my eyelash extensions replaced monthly at a small second-floor salon in Herald Square, until one day, the technician turned me away, declaring: There’s none left. She refused to continue our treatments until I allowed my real eyelashes to grow back, no matter how much I offered to pay her. That was six years ago, and I’m still waiting.
Jen is not wearing a flannel Snuggie exactly, but rather a deep red and green plaid pajama set in silk. To a guy, it’s a flannel Snuggie. To Jen Greenberg, this is stepping up her game. I suppress a sigh. I have no patience for people who refuse to help themselves. I don’t care how cool the Fug Girls say she looks, she must know that she’s not going to win back that guy—or girl—dressed like a little boy on Christmas Eve.
“Sorry,” Jen says, twisting her Standing Sisters ring around her index finger. She’s fidgety; nervous for some reason. “Didn’t mean to barge in on you like this, but I need to talk to you before we go and I didn’t want to put this in a text.” We learned from Hayley to keep our digital footprints clean and our face-to-faces dirty.
“Ohhh.” Vince leans against the doorframe, licking his heart-shaped lips. “Scandal at the sorority house?”
Jason snorts because my husband is hot.
“Vince,” I say sweetly, “will you go downstairs and get us something to drink?”
Vince clasps his hands behind his back. “Red or white, ma chéri?”
“Water,” I say, at the same time Jen does white. She grins wide, not because it’s funny, but because she doesn’t want to show up to Lauren’s party and film with purple teeth when she prefers to sell herself as a garden-fed teetotaler.
“I’ve got a trick for that,” Jason says, smearing my face with foundation.
“Actually,” I change my mind, “I’ll take a . . . white . . . too.” Why not? My ongoing battle with depression (Why do they say “battle” when it’s always a massacre?) has been at a cease-fire long enough that there is no reason to continue slandering an innocent glass of wine in my mind. And not to borrow a problematic line of thinking from Lauren Fun, but tonight is a special occasion. It’s the first group event of the season, a banner evening, and Brett won’t be there. I just received word from my publisher that I am the first female author to hold four consecutive spots on the New York Times bestseller list. In just a few weeks, I’m flying to L.A. to have dinner with the Oscar-Nominated Female Director. I should celebrate when there are things to celebrate.
Vince turns from a waiter to a soldier with an official salute. At least he’s inconsistent. “Hup-two-three-four,” he chants, as he descends the stairs to complete his assignment.
“I don’t know how you live with that,” Jen says, in a shocking moment of insubordination. She pushes aside a pile of coffee table books from an ottoman and takes a seat without being asked.
“I do.” Jason flutters his eyelashes, and I decide it’s time to give Jason a raise.
“You’d have some competition,” I tell him, trying not to move my mouth as he paints it nude. Smoky eye tonight. Neutral lip. “The gays love Vince.”
Jen emits a doubting laugh, drawing her knees to her chest. Jen is always rearranging limbs, fixing herself into impossible entanglements, as if to say, Look at me! I’m such an unconventional free spirit that I can’t even sit normally! I dare you to find one photograph of Jen Greenberg on the Internet where she isn’t wound like a five-year-old in need of a bathroom. “Do you want to hear this or not?” she asks. “It’s about Brett.”
I’m dying to hear it. My rib cage feels like it’s suffocating my stomach, but I don’t want Jen to know that Brett still holds that power over me. “Who?” I quip. Jason snickers.
“You know she hired my ex to do her hair this season,” Jason says, slipping a folded tissue between my lips. “Blot.”
“She’s such a scam artist,” I seethe as Jason crumples the stamp of my kiss. Brett took great pride in anointing herself the air-dried one of seasons past.
“She’s engaged,” Jen blurts out, made impatient by my attempt to prove that whatever news there is about Brett, it can’t be worth begging to hear it.
Jason speaks with his powder brush, thinking I’m still in the mood to kid around, “That bitch is even thirstier than I thought.”
Brett is engaged? The last eight months flash before my eyes. Brett and me in the lingerie department at Bloomingdale’s, because she had just moved back in and I couldn’t believe she was still wearing that moth-eaten XL Dartmouth T-shirt to bed. Rihanna had taken a class at her studio. Vogue had profiled her. Time for a grown-up pair of pajamas.
Brett, accompanying me to a colposcopy at my gynocologist’s office, because my body hadn’t cleared HPV on its own and they needed to make sure I hadn’t contracted a cancerous strain of the STD. I was sick with nerves, and Brett actually managed to sweet-talk the receptionist, and then the nurse, and finally the doctor herself, into allowing her to stay in the room with me while I underwent the excruciatingly uncomfortable procedure. She clutched my sweaty, cold hand while the doctor scraped tissue from my cervix, cracking jokes about how you weren’t cool unless you had HPV. Women who have HPV are the women who have lived.
Brett and me, rewatching the first season of the show in my bed, hands in the same bowl of Skinny Pop, marveling at what apple-cheeked babies we had been just three years ago, how soft-spoken we all were. We must have just been nervous, Brett theorized, and I had agreed, but now I think differently. I think we were all just softer then.
The timehop of our friendship has caused the saliva on my tongue to thin and sour. I feel ill. I feel as though I might cry. I am painfully aware that I am sitting here with a greasy face and fewer lashes than a four-month-old fetus, that the person I loved the most in my life turned out to be a stranger, and a cruel one at that, that people are starting to openly question how I live with the annoying man downstairs. I swallow and try, desperately, to sound jaded and impersonal. “So none of us would film with her and she knew she needed a storyline.” I nod. “Got it.”
Jen shrugs, flatly. What a shoddy imitation of a friend—of Brett—she turned out to be. “According to Yvette, it’s not staged. They’re soul mates.” Her voice is a gauzy impression of her mother’s.
“Right.” My laugh is rough. Brett wants to be married about as much as I want a child: which is a lot if a TV crew is willing to capture it. “I’m surprised I’m hearing it from you and not Page Six.”
“Yvette says she’s waiting until they tell Arch’s parents before they go public.”
“And yet,” I say, rottenly, “Yvette knows. And now you. And me.” I give Jen a long look, allowing the facts to speak for themselves. “How long have they even been together?”
“Long enough,” Jen says, folding her heel into her plaid crotch. I’m suddenly furious with her for what she’s chosen to wear to Lauren’s sleepover-themed party. That is the sexiest you could come up with? I want to jeer. No wonder there are cobwebs growing between your legs.
“Not really,” I say, lightly. I will not let Jen see that this news has gutted me. “Like three months.”