I cleared my throat and chose my words carefully. “Um. Okay. Go on.” I raised my eyebrows at Vince, who sighed wearily.
“It gets better,” he said, gesturing at his chin, meaning I had frosting on mine. I wiped my face with their lattice-woven linens. Japanese, sixty bucks, Stephanie had told me when I said they were pretty, which is something Stephanie always does, volunteer a brand name or a price when you pay her a compliment, as though you don’t even know the half of how nice her things are.
Stephanie bowed her head, as if summoning the patience to explain a very advanced concept to very advanced imbeciles. “After the obvious markers—sweet sixteen, you can drive, eighteen, you can vote, twenty-one you can drink, there is a whole chunk of time where you are presumably getting your ducks in order as a young adult. If you’re going to do something exceptional with your life, it takes until twenty-seven to get society to notice. Unless”—she silenced me with a hand before I could object—“you are Brett Courtney, girl wonder of the boutique fitness world.”
“Damn right,” Vince said, topping off my wine.
“Damn right,” I agreed, raising my glass in what turned out to be a solitary toast.
Stephanie waited for me to set my glass on the table before continuing. “So that brings us to the twenty-seven club, of which icons like Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse are members. The club romanticizes the very idea of the young virtuoso, taken from us too soon. Next we have the thirtieth birthday, your dirty thirty, which is an overtly sexy birthday that doesn’t need much explaining. That’s when all the lists start, the thirty under thirty most powerful, most influential, wealthiest, yada, yada. And everyone gets to say, oh my God, she’s only thirty? You don’t believe me now but you’re such a baby at thirty. You are,” she said off my skeptical look. “And then thirty-one is the year women peak in their beauty and then thirty-three is your Jesus year. Your next special birthday after that is thirty-five, when the medical community categorizes your pregnancy as geriatric.”
“I’m sorry,” I sputtered, “a Jesus year?”
Vince tossed his napkin onto his plate. “Talk some sense into her, Brett,” he started, collecting our dirty dishes, “because I’ve tried.”
“Leave it, Vince,” Steph said.
“It’s your birthday, babe.” Vince came around to Steph’s side of the table and kissed the top of her head. “Sit with your friend.”
“I gotta find myself someone who cooks and cleans,” I said, in a blatant attempt to get Stephanie to warm to her own husband, to recognize how much he’d done for her today, to appreciate it. Some days I was Vince’s publicist and some days I was Stephanie’s, depending on who was the one who needed to be pitched to the other more.
“I’m a man of the millennium, Brett!” Vince said from the kitchen, turning on the faucet and running his fingers under the water, waiting for it to warm. “You should come over to our side. We cook and clean and fold your thongs into adorable triangles.”
I emptied the bottle of wine into my glass. “Great! I need more rosé, millennium man!” I drew a knee to my chest and addressed Steph. “Okay, so, Jesus year . . .”
Steph paused long enough for me to stop smiling. “The Jesus year,” Stephanie said, with such reverence I cleared my throat to cover my laugh, “is a year of great historical precedence, given that it’s the age God decided his son had accomplished everything he needed to accomplish on this earth. Your Jesus year is the year you realize it’s now or never. You cash in your 401(k) to open an ice-cream shop in Costa Rica. It’s the last year you’re ever young enough to make a major career change, and it’s the last year anyone can fawn over how young you are if it hits.”
“Steph,” I said, giving in to the urge to laugh, “you’re a New York Times bestselling author with a major Hollywood studio paying you a lot of money to turn your books into movies. You’re on a TV show with two million viewers. You have stairs in your New York City apartment and three Chanel bags—”
“And bae is ridiculously good-looking,” Vince said, appearing tableside with a fresh bottle of rosé, so chilled his thumbs left translucent prints on the fogged bottle.
I made a gesture of support toward Vince. “Who also talks very cool! How much better can you do?”
“I can’t do any better—that’s the point!” She slid a coaster under the rosé bottle and with her Japanese linens mopped its wet ring from the oiled oak table. Vince responded Sorry, as though a verbal exchange had taken place. “I’ve already peaked. Thirty-four is a nothing year. It’s your done year. I’m not getting asked back for next season. No one has survived the show past thirty-four.”
Vince and I shared an incredulous look across the table. But then I actually thought about it. “That’s not true, is it?”
Stephanie readied her fingers to be counted. “Let’s examine the evidence, shall we?” Tapping finger number one, “Allison Greene, season one, thirty-two.” Tapping her middle finger she continued, “Carolyn Ebelbaum, seasons two and three, aged thirty-two. Hayley Peterson, seasons one, two, and three, aged thirty-three.” She set all her counted fingers on the table, as if to rest her case.
I shook my head, refusing to believe any of this was purposeful. “It’s a coincidence. It’s not, like, a height cutoff at an amusement park ride. You don’t have to get off this ride at thirty-four.”
“Well maybe I don’t want to take that chance,” Steph said, folding her dinner napkin into a prim square. “I need to make sure I’m asked back for season four. The last book came and went with a whimper. I can’t go out like that.”
Oh, god. The desperation on her face. It will never not break my heart to remember it.
“Get ready,” Vince said, back in the kitchen now, exfoliating a soaked pan with a Brillo Pad, the sound of steel on iron making my teeth ache.
Her voice smaller than I’d ever heard it, Steph said to me, “Don’t say no until I’m finished, okay?”
Across the room, Vince worked his finger around his ear, as though he were spinning cotton candy onto a yarn, mouthing, Crazy. In that moment, I hated him.
During those weeks I lived with Steph and Vince, my empathy was like a transferable property right, something I leased out, depending on who was shitting harder on whom. I had heard the rumors about Vince before I moved in, of course—everyone had—but I chose to believe Stephanie when she said they were just that, rumors, and that she and Vince were still madly in love. I’ve thought a lot about the difference between believing her and in choosing to believe her, and why I was so gung ho to participate in such an obvious sham, and it must have been because I idolized her. I couldn’t reconcile my fangirl image of her with the clichéd reality that she was just another little wife at home, waiting up for her husband past midnight.