Friends and Strangers - J. Courtney Sullivan Page 0,132
familiar, so comfortable, that Sam wished they could be alone, up in the den after a Sunday dinner, Elisabeth explaining whatever was going on with Andrew, Sam telling her about Clive.
Smooshed into Andrew and Elisabeth’s back seat, subject to their timing and on their terms, Clive seemed diminished. He could not keep still. He kept making a noise with his tongue. He tapped his fingers on his knees. He was used to being the one in charge on a road trip. In England, Sam never knew what route they were taking or how far it was. She was his passenger. They both liked it that way.
Now Clive kept asking questions about the car that Andrew didn’t know the answers to, and then positing his own ideas.
“What kind of horsepower does this thing have?” Clive said.
“Two hundred, maybe?” Andrew said. “Three hundred?”
“One eighty-five, I reckon,” Clive said.
Fifty miles from home, they pulled over at a rest stop so Sam and Elisabeth could pee.
Gil was asleep.
“I’ll stay in the car with him,” Andrew whispered.
“Me too,” Clive said.
Sam wondered if Andrew found this annoying; if he was hoping for a few minutes alone.
She and Elisabeth went inside. They walked past the crowds lining up for Chipotle and Sbarro and Subway, all of which sounded delicious right now. Sam wanted dinner, but no one else was hungry, and she didn’t want to be the only one eating.
Elisabeth started talking about the Central Park Zoo. She said she could never decide whether it was delightful or depressing.
“On the one hand, how incredible is it that you can see a polar bear in the middle of Manhattan?” she said. “On the other, that poor polar bear. He doesn’t belong there.”
They went into two stalls, right next to each other.
Sam paused and waited to see if Elisabeth was a stall-to-stall talker. She herself always let the other woman decide. She assumed Elisabeth would stop talking and resume their conversation at the sink, which proved accurate.
“Is everything going well with you and Clive?” Elisabeth said as they washed their hands.
Something about the way she said it made Sam uneasy. As if Elisabeth expected the answer to be no.
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“You had a good time?”
“We did.”
She considered mentioning how the conversation had been harder than she might have liked, or that Maddie had invited her to move in. But either thing felt like an admission she wasn’t ready to make.
Instead Sam said, “I wish we’d gone to the Guggenheim.”
She took in their reflection in the mirror.
Elisabeth always looked put together, even now, traveling in jeans and sneakers.
Sam looked rumpled. The arms of her plain striped shirt were wrinkled. Her hair was everywhere.
She noticed, with annoyance, her chubby cheeks. Baby fat, her mother would say. Elisabeth’s were almost concave, a wonderful hollowness about them that Sam coveted. Clive had said he didn’t think Elisabeth was that good looking, but Sam found her appearance endlessly appealing. Her big smile. Her elegant, protruding collarbones. Even the lines at the corners of her eyes that resembled the darting rays in a child’s drawing of the sun.
* * *
—
Back at the dorm, they came upon Isabella and Shannon sitting on Isabella’s bed with their laptops.
“How was the weekend?” Isabella said.
“Fun!” Sam said.
“Glorious,” Clive said.
“We’re gonna go to a late-night showing of the new Ben Affleck movie,” Shannon said. “Buying tickets now. You two should come.”
“I’m not overly interested in scripted films anymore,” Clive said, before Sam could respond. “They’re mostly rubbish, aren’t they? You reach an age where that sort of thing stops being interesting.”
He turned to Sam. “I’ll only pay to go to the cinema if it’s a really good documentary at the Barbican or something.”
Isabella and Shannon both looked at him, and then down at their computers, without answering.
“We’d better leave you guys alone,” Isabella said a few moments later.
“You don’t have to,” Sam said.
But they fled across the hall to Shannon’s room anyway, and shut the door.
When she and Clive planned this trip, Ramona and her girlfriend hadn’t broken up yet. Now that they had, Ramona was back to sleeping in her own bed, which meant Isabella would be on the floor. Everyone was sacrificing for Sam’s benefit, and for Clive’s. She wished he wouldn’t default to snobby and arrogant whenever he felt uncomfortable.
Sam heard her friends laughing across the hall. So often while in their company, she had wished she was in London, with Clive. But now Clive was here and she wanted to be with them.