Frenemies(26)

I just had time to twist my hair back and throw on a pair of jeans and a sweater that I would normally wear only to work but looked like the sort of thing I imagined Naomi Watts might lounge about in on a rustic weekend. I applied a strategic layer of cover-up to approximate the flush of health. I was arranging my magazines into piles—with the more intellectual ones on top, of course, and the weeks of US Weekly hidden below—when my buzzer went off.

As Linus reacted with his usual hysteria, I had a moment to consider just not letting her in. She couldn’t actually make me open the door to her, after all.

Maybe I wanted to talk to her more than I wanted to admit to myself. I pressed the DOOR button.

Helen swept into my apartment moments later looking like an advertisement for Banana Republic’s snazzy winter line. Those who were naturally slim, after all, looked adorable in puffy white winter coats with bulky scarves. It was the rest of us who looked blown up to five times our natural size, as if we were auditioning for the role of the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man’s girlfriend, not that I’d wanted to wear that coat. I tried not to hold it against her, but failed.

Once inside, Helen patted the very top of Linus’s head in a manner that indicated that a) she didn’t like dogs, b) she specifically didn’t like my dog, c) she suspected Linus might attack her, and d) she would very much like to wash her hands. If it was calculated to get under my skin, it worked.

I watched Helen take in my apartment and tried to imagine the place through her eyes. The same rescued furniture and posters on the wall—although I had actually framed all the posters a few summers ago, after deciding that I could probably upgrade my walls from frat boy chic to something a bit more in line with what I felt my tastes ought to be. I’d only gotten as far as early dorm room, I noticed, having been sidetracked by laziness. Aside from the posters, wherever there was room, there were books. Stacks and stacks of books. Books crammed into mismatched shelves and towers of books up to the ceiling. I liked my books.

I was a sucker for libraries and book collections of any kind, in fact. Give me shelves piled high with books and I was set for days at a time. My favorite private library was the gorgeous little den in Henry’s house, the one I’d spent some quality time in while Nate crashed out in front of ESPN. Henry’s library, of course, was probably for show. No self-respecting member of the New England elite would dream of living in a home without an ostentatious display of intellect. But that didn’t mean Henry had read any of the books himself. Nor did it detract from the gorgeous chocolate leather couches arrayed around the fireplace.

My apartment, needless to say, was not on par with Henry’s house.

“Wow,” Helen said after a moment, pursing her lips slightly and nodding to herself as she settled on the edge of my couch, her back perfectly straight. “I can’t remember the last time I was over here, and it looks exactly the same. Didn’t we have that Picasso poster on the wall at BU?”

She might as well have said, You are still eighteen years old and a fool. My taking Nate was no more than you deserved.

Maybe because what she might as well have said was echoing in my ears, it cleared my head of embarrassment and led me straight into my anger. My deep, cleansing, articulate anger.

“Why are you here?” I demanded without preamble. “Why do you keep calling me, and chasing me into bathrooms, and appearing at my door? Are you stalking me?”

That knocked the little holier-than-thou smile off her face.

“Of course I’m not stalking you!”

“And yet here you are.” I opened my hands wide. “Why won’t you leave me alone?”

“I wanted to clear the air,” Helen said. She let out an affronted sound. “That was all. Trust you to take a nice gesture and turn it into something awful.”

“Which nice gesture is this, now?” I pretended not to understand. “The one when you were running around behind my back with Nate? Or the face-sucking that I walked in on?”

Helen crossed her arms beneath her chest and visibly bit back what I’d bet would have been a nasty comment. We looked at each other, while Linus rolled around on the floor between us, joyful and completely oblivious to the tension.

“You know, I understand that you’re upset,” Helen said coolly. “But I wasn’t dating you. I didn’t cheat on you.”

I opened my mouth, and then shut it again.

Much as it hurt me to admit it, Helen had a point.

I just wanted Nate back. I wanted explanations and apologies from Helen. It turned out that she was the one I was really mad at.

On a philosophical level, I found this appalling. Way back in my college days, I’d concluded that there was nothing more pathetic and wrongheaded than a woman who opted to reserve her ire for the Other Woman. Not her misbehaving partner, who was the one doing the betraying, but the Other Woman, who had presumably never made any promises to the woman, or anyway, none like the ones the partner had made. We used to sit and watch daytime television on Amy Lee’s crappy little set, rolling our eyes at all the betrayed girlfriends who catapulted themselves up and over the cheating body of their man to pummel the woman he’d cheated with. What was that all about, we demanded, waving fistfuls of SnackWells in the air. What does she have to do with the primary relationship? She was just a symptom. He was the problem.

And yet, all these years later, there I was doing the same old tired thing. I hardly knew what to make of myself.