to a lawyer. He says we’re safe. Di can’t make us do anything we don’t want to do.”
“You talked to a lawyer?” Eliza said. “When?”
“While you guys were eating your Happy Meals. Let’s go.”
The first thing Jude wanted to do when they were back in New York was eat a bean burrito at San Loco, but Eliza wanted to go by her apartment. Not inside. She just wanted to stand on the street and look up at it. “That way I won’t run into her. It’s like, lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice. Or like being in the eye of the hurricane—we’re safe there.”
“Be careful,” Johnny warned them before they left Rooster’s, after they unloaded all their stuff at his place.
“Aye-aye,” Eliza said, dragging Jude out the door.
“I don’t like the way he talks to you,” Jude said finally as they boarded the uptown 1 train at Times Square. It was the middle of the day on the last Saturday in July, and about 150 degrees in the train car.
“You mean like he’s my dad?”
“I don’t like the way he treats you, either.” The car wasn’t full, but they took seats side by side. “I don’t like the way he thinks he calls all the shots.”
“Now you’re talking about the band.”
“Yeah! We make all these plans together, and then he just cuts the tour short, just like that? Without even talking about it?”
In truth, Jude didn’t mind being back in New York. He was tired of the packing and unpacking, of not knowing where he’d sleep from night to night. Johnny thrived on that—he could sleep anywhere, he’d grown up in motels—but maybe Jude was a homebody after all.
“You’d tell me, right,” Eliza asked, “if Johnny was seeing someone else?”
Jude looked at her sideways. She was wearing the Yankees shirt Les had tie-dyed for her, and the cutoff shorts she rolled down at the waist. His own shirt was like a second skin, and Eliza’s knee and elbow were glancing moistly off of his.
“Who would he be seeing?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you think it’s strange that he keeps coming up with an excuse to come back to New York? That all of a sudden he wants me to see a doctor and find us a place to live?”
“Johnny can’t be seeing anyone. He didn’t even see anyone before he was married. Not since he’s been straight edge, at least.”
“Okay,” Eliza said. “Okay.” She was fanning herself frantically with a newspaper she’d picked up.
“That was always his thing.” Jude reached for a sheet of the newspaper on the seat and crunched it into a baseball. “No one’s allowed to go anywhere near girls, and then you come along, and the rules suddenly change.” He hurled the ball at a window. It fell dully, then tumbleweeded a few feet down the aisle. He’d been carrying around this silent little orb of injustice, and when he’d finally discharged it, it sounded like an accusation. Maybe it was.
Eliza stopped fanning. She said, “The rules haven’t changed that much. He still hasn’t come anywhere near girls. At least this one.”
Jude gave her a long look. The lights flickered above as they bounced along.
“We haven’t consummated. Okay?”
Slowly the train came to a halt. Eliza’s weight bore into him, then caromed off. A few yards away, a guy in sunglasses and a leather jacket—leather in July—looked up at them, or at least Jude thought he did, as though he, too, were surprised by this news.
She hadn’t slept with Johnny. How was it possible to be so weightlessly happy when she, the bearer of this heart-lifting news, looked so miserable? She did not look relieved to have shared this truth with Jude. She looked at him as though he were responsible for her misery. As though he should have had his eyes open. He should have known.
“You haven’t?” was all Jude could say.
“And I find it insulting,” she said, “that you assumed we did.”
“Eliza, you’re married to him.”
“So you think I’d just marry anyone? I’m some helpless girl who needs a guy to take care of her?” The guy in the leather stood to exit the train, and then, apparently changing his mind, sat back down. “You think I’m some indiscriminating slut?”
“No, Eliza.” Jude unsealed his body from hers. “You’re the one who married him. Why did you, then?”
“You didn’t have to come with me, Jude. I mean, thanks, but you know, I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Fine. I won’t babysit you anymore. Sorry for being a friend.”