refilled his glass and put a palm on his forearm, summoning my most earnest, empathetic face. “I’m really, really sorry about Edie and Lloyd,” I said.
“Yeah, it was bad.” I waited for him to go on. “And I found out in the worst way possible.”
He froze long enough that I murmured, “You can tell me.”
He stared at my fingers, then slowly turned over his wrist. He slid his elbow back a few inches until our palms touched; my whole arm lit up and I willed myself to focus.
“We were sorta having some trouble anyway,” he said, “fighting all the time and trying to fix it in the stupidest way possible. And she decided to stay at her parents’ place because they were out of town. I was going to go over and surprise her, bring flowers, right? I mean…I was really into her.” I nodded him on. “I called her as I was walking over from the subway, pretending I was still in Bushwick, and she picked up and sounded normal, said she was watching a movie or whatever. Then the doorman let me upstairs and I got to their door, and for some crazy reason it wasn’t locked and I followed the noise to the bedroom, and…yeah, you can’t fucking unsee that.”
I remembered research discussed in my human sexuality class in college, how for a woman learning a partner’s deeply in love with someone else is the most painful thing imaginable, but for a man, sexual infidelity—another person’s body where his once was—is impossibly hurtful. Infuriating. Crazy-making.
“Wow, I’m so sorry,” I said. Then: “How on earth did you keep living together after that?”
“It was pretty idiotic in retrospect,” he said. “They saw me storm out, and she stayed at her parents’ for a few days, calling me nonstop to cry and apologize and say how important I was to her.” He shrugged. “I felt bad. And I still loved her. And she had so much shitty stuff going on with her parents and school and everything. So I guess it felt like breaking up but not kicking her out was, like, the adultest thing to do.”
Slowly, slowly, our fingers were moving until they interlocked. He had such nice hands, strong fingers with neat fingernails.
“Why didn’t you move out?” I asked.
He stared. “It was my apartment,” he said simply, like it was obvious that a king couldn’t be cast from his castle. What’s the word? Abdicate.
“What was it like living together after that?”
“Oh, fine. Obviously sort of uncomfortable, but fine.”
Except for the repressed rage, the kind that came out in front of a camcorder the night of Edie’s murder.
“So you forgave her? That’s amazing. I don’t know if I could have done that.”
He shrugged.
“I guess I’m, like, extra-obsessed because I don’t remember her last night very well.” I stared at the purple ring beneath my wineglass, a stenciled splotch.
“You were pretty wasted, right?”
I nodded. “For a long time I really hated myself for it,” I said softly, adding a tremor. I willed my eyes to fill up with tears again, and slowly, they obliged. “Here was this pivotal night and I wasn’t there for her, I wasn’t…It was like I wasn’t there.”
I peeked up at him: He had that wild male look in his eyes, the expression men get when a woman is crying and they’ll lop off their own hand with a scythe if it’ll make the female freak-out stop.
“It was…Lindsay, you know you didn’t miss anything. It was just a normal night, until it was…I mean, the most horrible night imaginable.”
I pulled my fingers out from his and ran my knuckles against my tears. “I don’t even remember being at the concert with you guys,” I went on. False: I could see and hear and feel it now, a memory richer than real life. “I don’t even know what we talked about or how everything went down. And I couldn’t ask anyone because I’d seem like a crazy person, trying to make it about me.”
“Lindsay. You know it’s…you shouldn’t feel that way.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t planning to bring any of this up,” I lied. “I guess I’ve just had this…this preoccupation lately of wanting to piece together what happened. Where everybody was, what we were all doing, when we—when I—last saw her. That way I could…well, I’d know, and I could stop wondering.”
He rubbed his eyes with his fists. “Shit, Lindsay. You really want to know?”
I nodded.
“It’s exactly what you already know. Edie was avoiding us.