“I miss our life together,” Vince whispers, wiping away a crocodile tear. He presses his back against the wall and sinks to the floor of the bathroom, hooking his arms around his shins and dropping his forehead to his knees with a contrite moan.
Well, of course you miss our life together, you dolt. You are a thirty-two-year-old failed actor living in a brownstone on the Upper East Side with a megababe. You hit the jackpot with me and you fucked it up something fierce.
Eyes on the prize, Steph. So I lower myself to the floor alongside Vince, slowly, as though I am settling into a hot bath. I rest my head on his shoulder, mostly so he can’t see my face, which is warped with revulsion for him. “I miss our life together too.” I eye the Jimmy Choo box in his lap, the GoPro still inside. How am I going to get that back from him? And who am I going to give it to now?
Vince lifts his chin, his face full of promise. “Then why are we doing this?”
I raise a hand for his benefit, I don’t know anymore. “I was angry, Vince. My ego was bruised. I guess I was just trying to hurt you like you hurt me.”
Vince reaches for my hand, stroking my palm in a gentle motion that makes me want to rip my skin right off. “Do you really want a divorce?”
I clench my toes and grit my teeth. “I want to make it right. All of it. Us. The book. The show. That’s why I came out here. This scene at Jesse’s—it’s my last chance to redeem myself. I have to go. And you should come too. We can tell everyone we’re calling it off. We’re going to stay together. Prove to everyone that we are stronger than the show.”
Vince hooks a finger beneath my chin, the way I did to what’s his name from last night. I learned that move from Vince, come to think of it. How sweet. “I would like that,” he says, right before he leans in and brushes his lips against mine, teasingly, as though to say—this is what you’ve been missing. My hangover makes itself fully known.
And then—like a very good gold digger, using sex to get what she wants—I do my husband on the bathroom floor, one last time. As I dutifully hump that little jalape?o pepper, I say a prayer that what’s his name gave me crabs, or something really nasty, like syphilis. Not that Vince would have long to suffer.
There is a funny standoff in the driveway. Jen is adamant that we not take her car to Jesse’s, and I am absolutely adamant that we do. Kelly’s car is a hunk of junk, and not in the intentional, nineties army green Defender way, the car Jesse bought off eBay and drives out here, her dyke hair not blowing in the wind. I need Jen’s emissions-free douche-mobile that goes from zero to sixty in four point two seconds, that starts without having to press a button or put a key into the ignition, but when Vince approaches the passenger-side door, Jen makes a lame excuse.
“It’s just.” Jen falls silent a moment. “I feel a little dizzy today. From the heat. I really don’t feel up to driving.” She clamps a hand to her forehead, overselling it.
“I’ll drive,” I volunteer, impatiently. While I was “showering,” I shared the GoPro footage to the app on my phone, then I hid the GoPro in the back of a closet in the guest room. A tasty treat for Jen to find one day! I smell like a party bus after the party and two different men’s loads. Not the aromatic memory I’d like to leave behind, but I couldn’t risk taking the camera with me and having Vince discover it on my person. He hasn’t been able to keep his hands off me since we consummated our “reconciliation.”
“It handles differently than what you’re used to,” Jen says to me. “We should really take Kelly’s car.”
“Ummm.” Kelly laughs. “I don’t think we want to do that. My car doesn’t have AC.”
“I’d rather go in Kelly’s car too,” Lauren says, slowly, staggering into the shade of a tree. The sunlight is relentless this morning, as if furious about its captivity yesterday. I say a little prayer it doesn’t blind the shot. That would be the real tragedy.
Vince leans onto the hood of Jen’s car, resting his palms on the curve of the trunk. “You look like you could use some AC,” he tells Lauren with a wry, empathetic smile, assuming she’s hurting from the night before. But I’ve seen Lauren hungover before, and this isn’t Lauren hungover. On another day, I’d think harder about why it is she’s acting so weird.
Lauren is wearing tiny round sunglasses, pushed low on the bridge of her nose, full-throttle nineties nostalgia. Above the thin wire rim of her shades, she stares at Vince’s hands on the trunk of Jen’s car, her lips parted in confusion. “I don’t want to take Jen’s car,” she says, again sounding as though she’s speaking to work out something for herself more than to any of us.
I toss up my hands—Fine, I can make this work even in Kelly’s car—and lead the charge, planting myself in the middle so as to avoid another tantrum from someone whose legs are too long or whose ego is too inflated to sit in the bitch seat. Lauren gets in to my right and Vince to my left, grumbling, This makes no sense. Jen takes the front-passenger seat next to Kelly. The car smells like chewy, fruit-flavored candy. I look up to see a Strawberries & Crème air freshener dangling from Kelly’s rearview mirror. But of course.
Kelly sticks the key in the ignition and turns. The engine bears down, wheezing, trying, before giving up with a woman’s cry. Kelly drapes her arm around the back of Jen’s chair and regards us over the brim of her neon blue sunglasses, the kind that everyone was wearing last summer. “Well,” she says solemnly, “she lived a good life.”
If that’s not God telling me to go for it, it’s Lucifer.
I could cartwheel to Jen’s car. But just as I’m about to climb into the back, I notice that Jen has stopped in the driveway. She’s examining her hand, holding it up to the sunlight. Something is caught in her Standing Sisters ring. A hair, it looks like, from the way she pinches it between her fingers and pulls—and pulls—flicking her index finger on her thumb, making that panicked face all women make when they find a bug crawling on them and they need to get it off but they don’t want to touch it. She watches the hair float slowly to the ground, her eyelids fluttering, woozily. She stumbles, leaning into the side of the house, swaying a little, then spins and vomits all over the base of the Japanese maple Yvette planted in memory of her late mother. Some of it even gets on the bronze plaque Yvette had made: For Betty “Battle Axe” Greenberg, who would rather die than rest in peace.
“Jen! Oh my God!” Kelly cries, rushing to her aid. Is Kelly the new Lauren? “Are you okay?”
Jen straightens enough to wave a hand over her shoulder—shoo, Kelly—before lurching over and retching again. Vince, concerned for the well-being of others as always, turns away, his face crinkling in disgust, like he might be next. For some strange reason, Lauren’s eyes fill with tears, though I doubt even she understands why.
I watch Jen’s bony back expand and contract, expand and contract, as her equilibrium returns to her. She stands, wiping the side of her hand across her mouth. Is she hungover? Is she sick? Is it contagious? I have that visceral, germaphobe stay away from me reaction, before remembering with a dry chuckle to myself—Someone could stick me with an AIDS-coated needle right now and it wouldn’t matter.
“Jen,” Kelly says, as Jen heads for her car, “maybe you should stay home and—”
“I feel better now actually,” she says.
“At least let someone else drive if you aren’t—”
“I feel better now!” she cries, sounding fully hysterical as she climbs behind the wheel of the car and slams her door shut. This group is made up exclusively of whack jobs, but the Green Menace has always been the wackiest.