Never Have I Ever(78)

As if my wish had power, the phone began jangling again.

Roux ignored it. She got up, bed creaking, and walked away. The phone kept on ringing away above me, on the bed. Her feet disappeared from my sight. I could hear her rustling around near the dresser. I’d checked those drawers. They were full of her gym clothes.

Finally the ringing stopped.

I found myself staring at the pair of athletic shoes closest to my face. They were bright blue, and the soles had an odd stacked look to them. Some kind of fancy support system? They were Balenciaga. I could see the designer’s name running sideways above the edge of the sole. Her running shoes probably cost more than our mortgage payment, yet right now she was walking her bare feet across this filthy carpet. We could both be getting all kinds of diseases from it. I could feel the disk of wetness like a crawling on my shoulder, as if it were made entirely out of live bacteria. The rental dust bunnies tickled my nose.

The ringing started again. It had to be Tate. Who else could be so pushy and persistent?

The third ring cut off in the middle.

“Oh, for Christ sake, Panda, just pay the rent,” Roux said, but with little rancor. Her voice was coming from the foot of the bed.

Panda? It had to be Panda Grier. Roux couldn’t possibly know another. She said something to Roux, so agitated that I could faintly hear her. I couldn’t make out the words, though. It sounded like a distraught duck, quacking.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Roux said, sounding bored more than anything, repeating it until the quacking stopped. “I can’t meet you. You’ve made me late for the gym already.”

This upset the duck even more, but it was a relief to me. No lawyer was currently inbound. Roux would pull on yoga pants and leave. I could finish my search, get the hell out.

“Fine. I’m putting you on speaker, though, so I can dress.” I heard a soft thump as the tossed phone landed back on the bed.

“Are you alone?” Panda Grier asked.

“Yep,” Roux called back. The shirt she’d been wearing landed on the floor.

“I’m not recording this,” Panda said.

“I believe you,” Roux said. She wasn’t as careful with Panda as she was with me. Maybe because Panda didn’t sound like she was playing. She sounded weepy and earnest.

“I’m not going to say anything I shouldn’t say, okay? So please do not hang up. I just have to make something clear,” Panda said.

Roux came back to the bed again, picking up the phone, I thought.

“Can you make it clear while I pee? I’m late, and your ‘special lady’ has already filled my quota for bullshit this week. I practically had to blow her just to borrow her low-rent pool.”

“Tate is not . . . Don’t be gross. . . . Don’t . . .” Panda sputtered, sounding near tears. The furious kind. I got that. Roux could be so enraging.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that Roux didn’t talk to Panda like she talked to me. For Panda there was no avidity, no interest. She could have been talking to the pest-control guy. I felt a sour curl of something, almost pleasure. I had more money than Panda, but I didn’t think that was the only reason. The respect that Roux showed me felt too grudging to be faked.

I was also relieved to hear that Tate had been her usual pain-in-the-ass self about the pool. Roux must not have any serious leverage; she’d had to ask Tate for a straight-up favor. Either Phillip was faithful or Roux had been too busy blackmailing Panda and me to dig into the story Tate had told about the kiss.

The bathroom door shut, leaving me alone with whatever kind of lice this carpet had.

I found myself staring once again at the blue sneakers. I felt drawn to them for some reason. I could hardly look away. Then it clicked together in my head with a snap so audible I was surprised Roux didn’t hear it. I hadn’t seen anything like sneakers in the closet. And Roux was going to the gym. When she got out of the bathroom, she would bend down to pick out a pair, and there we would be. Eye to eye.

The toilet flushed.

I rolled out from under as fast as I could and went scrambling on all fours across the room, into the closet with the dive gear. I slipped past her BCD and some hanging wet suits of varied thicknesses, stepping over a mesh gear bag to wedge myself into the corner. I could see through the slats as Roux came padding back out of the bathroom, naked except for a tiny pair of silky panties, carrying the phone. Panda was still talking, and Roux put her back on speaker in midsentence so she could set the phone down on the dresser.

“—my husband is not gay,” Panda said. Her voice was a vehement whisper.

“Sure,” Roux said, in that enraging way she had.

I stood quiet in the closet, blinking. A thousand things about Panda and her marriage made a thousand kinds of instant sense.

“He finished the program,” Panda said, shrill and insistent. “We both did.”

“Sure. And those programs super, super work,” Roux said, earnest to the point of parody.

Too many things were happening. My shoulder still felt wet. I brushed at it, and when I did, my fingers touched something that made me jump. A used condom that had been stuck to my back plopped softly to the floor.

I almost screamed. I felt my gorge rising. I swallowed hard, easing away from it, disgusted inside and out. I was sharing space with a used condom, and I now knew things about Panda that I did not want to know, things that made me sad and so very sorry for her. I needed everything to stop so I could bathe in bleach and have a quiet nervous breakdown, but Panda was still talking.