I Take You (28 page)

“Deficient genes?” Gran says.

“Overactive libido?” Jane suggests.

“Chronic substance abuse?” Ana adds.

“Okay, yes!” I cry. “Yes to all that! But more importantly, I was never given a
strong moral foundation.
Children learn by example. Look at my examples! We’re all a bunch of big, fat liars. It’s got to change. We need a new family commitment to honesty. Henry?” I point at Dad. “You’re on.”

Dad is looking at me with panic, but then something happens. Comprehension dawns. I see him transform from a pleading, helpless, hunted creature into someone resolute, brave. He squares his shoulders and stiffens his upper lip. He turns to his ex-wives.

“I’m sleeping with all of you,” he announces.

Dead silence. They stare back at him, then turn and glance at one another.

“Ana too?” I say.

He gives her a sidelong glance. “I’m afraid so.”

“You’re unbelievable!” I cry. “I suppose this one’s also my fault. You and Ana ran into each other and started talking about the wedding, and—”

“Oh no.” My father chuckles. “Ana and I have been sleeping together for years.”

I gape at him.

“We never really stopped,” Ana adds. Then she turns to Jane. “What about you?”

“It’s only been a few weeks,” Jane replies. “Kat?”

“A couple of months,” Mom says. “Mostly via Skype.”

I stare at them. They really don’t mind? I glance at Dad. He seems as shocked by their attitude as I am.

I turn to Mom. “But you’re in love with him! You’ve been pining away for decades!”

“Oh, honey. That was over a long time ago.”

“It was?” Dad says.

“Of course, Henry.” Mom smiles. “Now I’m just using you for sex.”

More silence. Then there’s a chortle. I’m not sure who from—maybe Ana. A giggle from Mom. Someone guffaws. Soon, all three of them are roaring with laughter, clutching at one another, gasping for breath. Ana is bent over, pounding the table. Mom is wiping the tears from her eyes. Jane is actually emoting.

Dad and I gape at them, astonished. Gran looks disgusted.

“Darlings,” Dad says, “are you truly not upset?”

This sends them into fresh gales of laughter. “Darlings!” they howl. “Darlings!”

I just wanted a nice big family blowout, okay? A huge, screaming fight, wherein I could whip up the rage of all my mother figures as a kind of proxy for my own. Where I could watch somebody else being attacked and punished for his extremely bad behavior.

But this? I have no idea what the hell to think of this.

They finally begin winding down, collecting themselves. I manage to get their attention. “It had to be a surprise at least, right?”

They all look at one another and start giggling.

I turn to Gran. “What about you?”

She sighs wearily. “Nothing surprises me anymore, honey. I’m too fucking old.”

This sets them all off again. Even Gran chuckles. Dad is still flummoxed, but clearly relieved. Eventually I slip out, and they don’t even notice.

I leave the restaurant and call Freddy. I don’t even know what I say to her, but she’s there in ten minutes and whisks me away. At a bar down the block she sits me on a stool and holds my hands and looks into my eyes. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“The wedding’s off,” I say.

She grips my hands tightly. “For real?”

“For real,” I say, stifling a sob. “Really, really for real.”

Freddy gestures to the bartender. “Two Sazeracs, please.” She turns back to me. “I thought you loved him. I thought you worked everything out.”

“I do love him, but … a bunch of things happened.” She hands me a napkin, and I wipe my eyes. “I realized I couldn’t go through with it. It’s a long story. But that’s not why I’m upset. Or, it is, but that’s not all.”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

The bartender brings our drinks. I burst into tears. Freddy wraps her arms around me, and I weep onto her shoulder for a long time. After a while, I straighten up and wipe my eyes again. I tell her everything. She doesn’t believe me. I show her his phone.

She scrolls through the texts. “Will. Of all people.”

“I thought he was the only person who was telling the truth,” I say sadly. “The only one who was being completely honest. I was so wrong.” I said I loved surprises.

I said I wanted hidden shallows.

Did I ever get them.

“He seemed so normal,” Freddy marvels.

“He still does! It was the strangest thing, Freddy. He was sitting there across from me, confessing everything, laying it all out, but he was the same person I knew yesterday. I kept expecting it to be like one of
those big reveals in the movies, you know? Where the guy you thought was the good guy turns out to be the bad guy, and suddenly there are all these subtle changes, like his clothes fit a little better, and his smile is somehow sinister, and he has evil, messed-up hair?”

“He’s got messed-up hair in this picture,” Freddy remarks. She glances at me. “Sorry.”

“Anyway, none of that happened. He was still Will. My Will. But now that I think about it, everything makes sense. Women are always falling all over him. He brushed it off in my company.”

“I never thought he was quite as nerdy as you made him out to be,” Freddy says. She clicks on another text and her eyes widen. “But I had no idea he was like this.”

I look at the screen, then quickly away. How could I have been so blind? There’s something so genuine about Will. It’s what drew me to him, after all. And drew others, too. I think about Diane, going on and on about him Tuesday night. How cool it is that he’s an archaeologist. How he’s so hot, he’s just like—

“Oh my God,” I whisper. “Will really
is
Indiana Jones.”

Freddy clicks on another text. She looks up and nods.

This is unbearable! Will, with all those other women. Even my moms were crazy about him. I thought he was being friendly with my mother on Sunday—all that bullshit about historic renovation? He was
flirting
with her!

The bastard.

So much for my ability to read people. So much for my intuition, my confidence that I always know when someone is lying.

“He slept with Nicole,” I say.

Freddy almost drops the phone. “Sorry,
what
?”

I explain. Freddy is appalled. “That’s so heinous!” she cries. “I mean, Nicole is pretty and everything, but—”

I look up. “You think she’s pretty?”

“Not as pretty as you,” Freddy says quickly.

“Oh, God!” I clutch my head in my hands. “What is
happening
to me!”

“She’s got a lot of goddamn nerve, attacking you for sleeping around,” Freddy observes. “What a c-word.”

I pick up Will’s phone and start scrolling through the texts again. I click on another picture, another beautiful woman. I open his photo album and swipe through it. Girl after girl after pretty, pretty girl. And the texts themselves? Full of long, flirtatious exchanges, assignations, passionate gratitude.

That’s when it hits me.

Will is capable of all this. All this passion and lust and fun. And he did it with other people.

Not with me.

I throw the phone, hard. It flies across the room and smashes into the wall.

“Hey!” says the bartender.

“Sorry! My hand slipped.” I turn to Freddy. “I’m going to find him and cut his dick off.”

“Lily, wait,” Freddy says. “You wanted out of this wedding, remember? All week you’ve been full of doubt. Will has done you a favor.”

Perfectly true. Perfectly reasonable. I start to cry again. She sighs and strokes my hair. She hugs me and tells me that it’s going to be okay. She chastises me and mocks me. She orders ridiculous drinks and distracts me with funny stories about her own disastrous engagements.

She’s in the middle of a good one about Norman when her phone buzzes. “It’s Leta. She wants to know where we are.” She begins to type a response. “I’ll tell her you’re busy with your family.”

“No.” I put a hand on her arm. “Let’s meet her somewhere. Let’s invite everybody.”

“Are you sure you’re in the mood?”

“What else am I going to do?”

“Eat?” she suggests. “Sleep? Get the hell out of town?”

“Can’t!” I sing. “Work tomorrow!” I tell her about my doomed deposition. Then I tell her what happened with Teddy. Then I’m tired of talking, and since she won’t do it, I take out my phone and round up the usual suspects, and soon my third and final bachelorette party begins in earnest. Nobody but Freddy knows anything, so I have to pretend to be happy. I think I do a decent job.

We have a lot to drink. We dance. We go to a strip club. We do a
couple of lines in the bathroom. We watch the male strippers hurling themselves around the stage.

“What is it about balls?” Freddy says, as a stripper wags his package in her face. “What makes them compelling to people like you?”

“I can’t explain it,” I say. “It’s one of the mysteries of life.”

Diane squeezes in between us. “I can explain it,” she says. “It looks like all these women are really into it, right? Really excited? They’re not. They’re in a state of complete psychosexual terror. See Janelle over there?” My friend Janelle is receiving some very personalized attention from one of the dancers. “She can’t look away because at any moment that little g-string could break and a pair of long, waxed testicles could flop into her face and slap her silly.”

“You’re crazy!” I laugh. “She’s having a blast.”

Janelle turns to us.
Help me
, she mouths.

We move on to another bar. And another, and another. We dance and drink, we drink and dance. Our group grows as other friends join us, people who think that this is the first wedding-related event of the weekend, when actually, ha ha, nope. We find a dive bar near the water and drink beer and eat French fries on the patio. We try a drag bar. A lounge with fancy cocktails. At some point, I stop pretending to be happy, and I am happy. Sort of.

Until Nicole walks in with a few other friends from law school.

Freddy sees her and stands up. “I’ll take care of this.”

“Don’t.” I rise slowly. “I want to talk to her.”

Freddy puts a hand on my arm. “What are you going to say?”

I toss my drink back. “By ‘talk to her,’ I mean ‘punch her in the face.’”

“Lillian. Be the bigger person.”

“But I want to be the smaller person.” I take a step forward. “I want to be really really fucking small right now.”

“You’re no good in a brawl.” Freddy is actively holding me back now. “Remember that night in Greenpoint last year?”

“Brooklyn.” I sit down again. “It defeats me every time.”

“Wait here,” she says, and I watch as she marches up to Nicole. With a few brief words, Freddy has her running. After a while I calm down, and I can’t help but reflect. What right do I have to confront Nicole,
anyway? What did she do that I haven’t done, over and over and over again?

We’re in a big, noisy bar on Duval when my phone pings with a text:

—Can we please talk?

I stare at it for a minute. Then I respond:

—no

—I know it was a shock, but you can’t really be angry.

—why dont you text some other girl. you have so many to choose from

—Please, Lily. I’m trying to understand why you’re so upset.

Freddy sits down hard, sloshing her drink. She’s a little tipsy. I show her my phone. “Why am I upset?”

“Because you thought you knew him, and you didn’t,” she says. “Because you were blind. Because your pride is wounded. Because even liars don’t like being lied to, and players don’t like being played. Because—”

“God, Winifred. Enough.”

—i dont know you. you arent the person i thought you were

—Yes I am! This is only one part of me. Like it’s only one part of you.

…

—Lily?

—stop writing to me. youre a scumbag. youre a pickup artist, with that little scrapbook of conquests on your phone and all those stupid texts

—You won’t let me explain.

…

—So your infidelity wasn’t a problem, but mine is? It was okay when I wasn’t enough for you, but not okay when it turns out that you weren’t enough for me?

I stare at the screen. I wasn’t enough for him. There it is, in black and white.

It hurts. God, does it hurt.

Freddy is reading over my shoulder. I glance at her, hoping for some sympathy. Instead she says, “It’s a fair point. You aren’t exactly being consistent.”

She’s right. And I can’t help but think back to my big, rousing speech to Lyle this afternoon. I’ll screw whoever I want to screw, and anybody who judges me for it can go straight to hell. I’m a woman, hear me roar!

Still. This is different.

“Why do I have to be consistent?” I demand. “I’m being honest about how I feel for once. Isn’t that what matters?”

“Of course,” she says. “But—”

“No, I get it,” I say. “What goes around comes around. Karma’s a bitch. I’m being punished for my—”

I stop talking.

“Lily?”

Sins. I’m being punished for my sins.

Ian was right!

“The conspiracy of sexual misery!” I clutch my head. “It’s got me!”

My phone pings again.

—Please keep talking to me.

He wants to talk? Let’s talk.

—nicole, will? NICOLE? are you fucking kidding me?

—3 words for you, Lily. Ian. Javier. Tom.

“Who’s Tom?” Freddy asks.

I toss back another drink and gesture to the bartender. “I think he might mean Tim.”

My phone pings again.

—I’m sorry about Nicole, okay? That was a mistake. I told her on Sunday night that it couldn’t happen again. She didn’t take it well.

I think back to Sunday. Will was so agitated at the last Hemingway bar. And Nicole seemed more hostile than usual after that. Of course.

Freddy goes to the bathroom. I stare at my phone. My anger has disappeared—it seems to come and go in bursts—and now there are a few things I want to know.

—if cheating isnt wrong, why did you hide yours from me?

—I didn’t want to lose you.

—hahaha

—It was a mistake. I should have been honest. But I could tell you were having doubts about getting married. I was afraid of losing you. I’m so in love with you.