She meant toward Nick. She called me an ungrateful bitch. We were asked to leave.
I pushed through the revolving door as fast as I could. Liv squeezed herself into the next compartment and spilled out onto the front steps right after me. She chased me down them, out into the parking lot. A car pulled out right in front of me. I had to stop. Liv put her hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, okay?” she said. We were both breathing hard. We were both wet.
Nick had been gone six days by this time. Speculation was drifting more toward death, either by murder or by accident. No one had suggested that he might have killed himself; no one could make his personality fit that. But, however it had happened, it didn’t look like he was coming back. I guess that’s a good reason to get hysterical. All of us were kind of hysterical, just set off by different things.
Liv asked me to go with her to Kettle’s Yard. She held my arm, but loosely, squeezing it gently. I said okay.
We went into a gallery full of life-sized photographs of empty walls where famous works of now-stolen art had once been displayed. It was more stunt than art, but effectively mournful. We sat on the floor with our knees tucked up and our backs against the wall. “I’m really sorry,” she said.
“That’s okay. This has been awful for everyone.”
“Do you think he’s dead?”
I just shook my head because I no longer had it in me to say a confident no.
“Why did you call me ungrateful?” I asked.
She sighed. “Because you didn’t want him. He offered you something good, and you didn’t take it.”
I understood her jealousy, but I didn’t have to explain myself to anyone. She could tell I was bristling.
“Okay, I know,” she soothed. “I’m not saying that I have a right to feel that way, just that I do. Okay? I’m just explaining.”
“I know you liked him.”
“Yeah.” And she smiled, like I didn’t really know, not everything.
“What?” I asked.
“I was out with Gina that afternoon. You know Gina?” I shook my head no. But it didn’t matter. “She’d given me a cute sweater she didn’t want anymore, and a pair of earrings. I felt really pretty. I ran into him later. He seemed kind of down. I tried to cheer him up, you know, I was being silly. I pulled him into this staircase party. It was just what he needed. And we ended up dancing a little, I mean it was too crowded to really dance, but there was music and we were standing near each other. I pretty much threw myself at him. Then the porter broke the party up and we went into my room and went at it.”
“Oh,” I said. My mouth was dry. This was agony. This recitation was a form of revenge.
“We didn’t do it all, okay? It was a kind of President Clinton thing.” She smirked, but her hands were shaking. “I’m a virgin, okay? And I’d never done that before either. And I knew he was yours, but I wanted to try.”
“He wasn’t mine,” I said. She said “yours” like this was borrowing a shirt and getting a stain on it. She said “yours” like when she had taken ten pounds from my bag without asking.
“Whatever,” she said. “When everyone else said that you were the girlfriend, what was I supposed to say? That I was, really? Because I didn’t know that. I was waiting to find that out. I knew that what we’d done wasn’t a sure thing, it wasn’t a ‘progression’ in our ‘relationship.’ It was a thing that maybe would make him see me that way, or maybe it wouldn’t. I was waiting to see what it was to him.”
She wiped her face on her sleeve and went on. “I knew I was second choice, okay?” she blurted. “But it wasn’t until yesterday that I found out from the freaking newspaper what had really happened that day. I thought he’d gone upstairs with me because I’m maybe more exciting than you are, or prettier, or more enthusiastic, or more obviously into him.” She took a deep breath, glanced at me to see how I was reacting. “He only let me do it because that was the day you got him all high like a kite but then wouldn’t get him off. I was just … finishing the job. But he wasn’t hard for me, you know?”
She was a mess