Pineapple Street(47)
Nobody at the office ever asked Georgiana’s weekend plans or even commented on a new sweater. They were friendly, but they weren’t her friends. It was mind-boggling in some ways. She had grown up in Brooklyn, in this very neighborhood, and yet the men and women in her office barely resembled those she knew in her real life. While her parents played golf, her coworkers did yoga. While her parents and their friends vacationed in Florida, her coworkers vacationed in Ecuador and Costa Rica. It was BMW versus Subaru, Whole Foods versus farmers market, shiny wingtips versus Birkenstocks with socks. There was one woman named Sharon, who worked on the first floor. Sharon had short gray hair—not fashionable icy gray but the yellowish gray of the unkempt; she wore linen that always seemed to be wrinkled and creased around her waist and armpits; and she was frequently coming up and giving people unsolicited back rubs. Georgiana knew she was a nice person, and yet she found herself waiting with vague horror for Sharon to finish rubbing her shoulders and move on to someone else. There was another woman, Mary, who had a glossy blond bob and always smelled of French perfume but exclusively wore clothing she had bought in Nepal—silk harem pants with a dropped crotch and embroidered tops. She wore a pin on her jacket that said free tibet and had a small plastic Buddha with a cell phone on her desk. There were men with long, gray ponytails and small John Lennon glasses. There were women Georgiana’s age with pierced septums and astrological tattoos. Georgiana would no sooner get a tattoo than shave her head.
While it would be easy to attribute her lack of work friends to cultural difference, it was also because of Brady. How could she entertain a real friendship when her entire work life was a charade, the exact place she needed to be most careful, the nexus of her and Brady’s terrible secret? Ever since the conference in D.C. she felt that Meg on the grant-writing team was trying to befriend her. When Meg saw her at the lunch table, she sat next to her; they chatted amiably about Meg’s deadlines, about Meg’s schedule, about Meg’s upcoming trip to Pakistan. Typically, only project managers were on-site, but they were competing for a massive new ten-year grant in women’s health from USAID, so Meg was going along to get a leg up on the proposal. It would be her first time in-country, her first time in the Middle East, a huge step for her career. It did not go unnoticed by Georgiana that they only talked about Meg at these lunches, but in some ways that made the friendship easier. Georgiana didn’t have to squirm when discussing her weekend plans (“Oh, I plan to have sex four times and eat Thai food naked with our colleague, Brady, remember him?”). Georgiana knew that her relationship with Brady was creating little barriers between her and her other friends too. Lena and Kristin thought she’d broken up with him when she found out about his wife. She lied when she was spending Saturday nights with him, claiming that she was helping babysit Poppy and Hatcher, that she was tired, that she was not in the mood to go out. They worried she was depressed and tried to talk her into joining them, but she closed them out and silenced her phone. Lying to Darley was logistically easier, since Darley was too busy with her kids to beg her to go to any parties on weekends, but the shame she felt knowing how much Darley would disapprove made her preemptively annoyed at her sister. Just because Darley was lucky enough to have met the love of her life in business school didn’t mean it was that simple for the rest of the world. It was easy to feel high and mighty about the sanctity of marriage when you’d never fallen deeply and painfully in love with the wrong person.
When Georgiana found out Brady was going on the Pakistan trip, she was irritated. “Weren’t you just gone?” she asked with a vague whine in her voice.
“I haven’t been on a project in months. It’s the best part of the job—getting out in the field.”
“How long do you think you’ll be there?”
“Probably a month?”
“This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” Georgiana pouted.
“Then count yourself lucky.” Brady kissed her on the nose. “Put WhatsApp on your phone and we can talk all the time.”
The weekend before Brady left, they barely got out of bed. They laughed and joked that they were sex camels, storing up all the sex they could in their humps before Brady went off to the desert. On Sunday when Georgiana came out of the shower, Brady guiltily hid something behind his back.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m writing you notes,” he admitted. “I’m going to hide them all around your apartment so that you find them while I’m away. Now either close your eyes or go back into the bathroom.”
Georgiana grinned and retreated to the bathroom to comb her hair in front of the mirror, listening to Brady move around her living room, lifting pillows and opening and closing drawers. That night after he left, she found one in the pantry, taped to the bread, that said, “You have nice buns.”
* * *
—
Four days after Georgiana kissed Brady goodbye, the company founder called an all hands meeting in the second-floor dining room. When Georgiana walked in, she could immediately tell something terrible had happened. People looked stricken, confused. Sharon, the receptionist, was clutching a tissue and wiping her nose as tears leaked down from behind her glasses. Somehow, Georgiana knew. It was about Brady. She could feel it whoosh through her, a cold pain that shot down her arms, shot through her stomach. The founder’s voice cracked as he spoke, a sob caught in his throat. He told them that Meg from grant writing, a project manager named Divya, and Brady had boarded a flight from Lahore in the east of Pakistan, bound for Karachi. The pilot reported technical difficulties, and the plane turned to go back to Lahore. Thirty-five miles outside the city the plane crashed. There were no survivors.