In Five Years(13)

“You should do it.”

“Might give me time to actually sculpt or paint again. It has been months.”

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice to achieve your dreams.”

She smiles sideways at me. The coffee comes. I pour some creamer into it, and take a slow, heady sip.

When I look up, she’s still smiling at me. “What?” I ask.

“Nothing. You’re just so . . . ‘sacrifice to achieve your dreams.’ Who talks like that?”

“Business leaders. Heads of companies. CEOs.”

Bella rolls her eyes. “When did you get like this?”

“Do you ever remember my being any different?”

Bella puts her hand to her chin. She looks straight at me. “I don’t know,” she says.

I know what she means, what I never really want to talk about it. Was I different as a child? Before my brother died? Was I spontaneous, carefree? Did I begin to plan my life so that no one would ever show up at my door and throw the whole thing off a cliff? Probably. But there isn’t much to be done about it now. I am who I am.

The waiter circles back to us, and Bella raises her eyebrows at me as if to ask you ready?

“You order,” I say.

She speaks to him entirely in French, pointing out items on the menu and discussing. I love watching her speak French. She’s so natural, so vibrant. She tried to teach me once in our early twenties, but it just didn’t stick. They say that languages come better to people who are right-brained, but I’m not so sure. I think you need a certain looseness, a certain fluidity, to speak another language. To take all the words in your brain and turn them over, one by one, like stones—and find something else scrolled on the underside.

We spent four days together in Paris once. We were twenty-four. Bella was there for the summer, taking an art course and falling in love with a waiter in the Fourteenth. I came to visit. We stayed at her parents’ flat, right on Rue de Rivoli. Bella hated it. “Tourist location,” she told me, although the whole city seemed for the French, and the French alone.

We spent the entire four days on the outskirts. Eating dinner at cafés on the fringes of Montmartre. During the day we wandered in and out of galleries in the Marais. It was a magical trip, made all the more so by the fact that the only time I’d been out of the country was a trip to London with my parents and David and my annual pilgrimage to Turks and Caicos with his parents. This was something else. Foreign, ancient, a different world. And Bella fit right in.

Maybe I should have felt disconnected from her. Here was this girl, my best friend, who fit this faraway place like a hand to a glove. I didn’t, and yet she still she took me with her. She was always taking me with her, wanting me to be a part of her wide, open life. How could I feel anything but lucky?

“To get back to the prior discussion,” Bella says when the waiter is gone. “I think sacrifice is in direct opposition to manifestation. If you want your dreams you should look for abundance, not scarcity.”

I take a sip of coffee. Bella lives in a world I do not understand, populated by phrases and philosophies that apply only to people like her. People, maybe, who do not yet know tragedy. No one who has lost a sibling at twelve can say with a straight face: everything happens for a reason.

“Let’s agree to disagree,” I tell her. “It has been too long since I’ve seen you. I want to be bored senseless hearing all about Jacques.”

She smiles. It sneaks up her cheeks until it’s practically at her ears.

“What?”

“I have something to tell you,” she says. She reaches across the table and takes my hand.

Instantly, I’m flooded with a familiar sensation of pulling, like there’s a tiny string inside of me that only she can find and thread. She’s going to tell me she met someone. She’s falling in love. I know the drill so well I wish we could go through all the steps right here at this table, with our coffee. Intrigue. Obsession. Distaste. Desperation. Apathy.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes. “Come on,” she says. “Am I that trans-parent?”

“Only to me.”

She takes a sip of her sparkling water. “His name is Greg.” She lands hard on the one syllable. “He’s an architect. We met on Bumble.”

I nearly drop my coffee. “You have Bumble?”

“Yes. I know you think I can meet someone buying milk at the deli, but, I don’t know, lately I’ve been wanting something different and nothing has been that interesting in a while.”

I think about Bella’s love life over the last few months. There was the photographer, Steven Mills, but that was last summer, almost a year ago.

“Except Annabelle and Mario,” I say. The collectors she had a brief fling with. A couple.

She bats her eyes at me. “Naturally,” she says.

“So what’s the deal?” I ask.

“It has been like three weeks,” she says. “But Dannie, he’s wonderful. Really wonderful. He’s really nice and smart and—I think you’re really going to like him.”

“Nice and smart,” I repeat. “Greg?”

She nods, and just then our food appears in a cloud of smoke. There are eggs and caviar on crispy French bread, avocado toast, and a plate of delicate crepes dusted with powdered sugar. My mouth waters.