“Hi,” she said. “You can finish this. I’m stuffed.”
I sat down opposite her, and she pushed the pale orange-flecked cafeteria tray over to me. On it was half a cheese danish and a yogurt left untouched. We had always been like this. She ordered too much, and I ate what was left.
“Where were you yesterday?” she asked. “I called your number half a dozen times. I even called the Bat Phone twice.”
“At my mother’s,” I said.
“I had a feeling. How is she?”
“Can we not talk about it?”
“Coffee?”
I smiled at her.
Natalie stood with her cup. The cafeteria cops never stopped us when we walked backward through the line and got a refill. We were tacitly granted the same privileges as the teachers.
I wolfed down the half-eaten danish and peeled back the foil on the top of the yogurt. By the time Natalie returned, I was halfway done with my secondhand meal. The coffee-hot, watery, weak-obliterated what was left of my appetite.
“What’s with you?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You seem sort of nerved-out somehow. Is it Clair?”
I thought of deflecting mechanisms. I could have commented that not everyone ends the night with half a bottle of wine and a sleeping pill or that not everyone was secretly fucking a construction worker from Downingtown… but I didn’t. I would tell as much of the truth as I could.
“Jake showed up,” I said.
It was as if she’d heard a gun go off. She slapped both her hands down on the table and leaned in toward me.
“What?”
“You know how I told you he used to wake me when the girls were sleeping? With pebbles from the neighbor’s geranium pots?”
“Yes, yes.”
“He woke me up this morning at about five a.m. He was standing inside the fence of my backyard, tossing rocks. We spent the morning together.”
“Helen,” she said, “it is now my opinion that you are not acting nerved-out enough! What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How’s Hamish?”
“Since when do you care? How’s Jake?”
And so I told Natalie that he currently lived in Santa Barbara on the estate of a software mogul whom he had never met. That he was doing some sort of installation there. That he had a female dog-sitter for his dogs, Milo and Grace, and that he planned to travel to Portland soon to see Emily and the children. I realized, as I said the few things I knew, that I didn’t know very much.
“But why did he come to see you?”
It rang in my head: I never wanted the divorce.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said. I held the cup of hot coffee in my hands and pretended I was warming them up. When Natalie looked at me, a certain lifelong look that said “You’re not telling me the whole story,” I could feel the shakes start where my elbows met the table. A second later, I had spilled the full and scalding cup.
Natalie stood up from the booth. The coffee had gotten on the sleeve of her dress, but most lay pooling on the table or seeping into my jeans. I did not move. I felt the hot water burning my thighs. It felt right to me. I saw the clock across the room. It was 9:55.
“Time to go to class,” I said. I heard it in my voice. It was suddenly flat. I had always told Natalie everything, and now, within twenty-four hours, I had done more, I saw, than it might be possible to repair between even the oldest of friends.
Briefly I thought about what it would be like if I asked Natalie to come with me somewhere, to go away together, move to another city, maybe open the clothing store she had always dreamed of. She was adjusting her dress and daubing off the coffee from where it had splashed onto the outside of her purse. “Remember riding bikes together?” I wanted to ask. “Remember that nerdy guy who lived on your corner and had a bell on his handlebars? How he used to ring it all the time?” I thought of having seen Mr. Forrest that morning. And suddenly saw Mrs. Castle talking to the police, her arms arching in the air as she spoke. Had I seen that? Or had she been calmly talking to them? Were they taking notes? Or just listening to her talk? I tried to remember the number of police cars that had been there. Two on my mother’s side of the street and one around the corner. The coroner’s van and the ambulance that had pulled up to Mrs. Leverton’s. I could call the hospital to find out what was wrong with her, but Jake wouldn’t approve of that. It would tip my hand.
“He’s really gotten to you,” I heard Natalie say.
I looked up at her. My vision was fuzzy around the edges, and her voice suddenly seemed a long way off.
“Well, it’s time to go get nude,” she said. She was reaching for my hand. We had said this phrase to each other for fifteen years.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m leading you, woman,” she said, “and we are going to sit down after this and talk men. I’ve got some news of my own.”
This helped. It made me feel good that Natalie planned to tell me about the contractor. It was what I used-that still-to-come confidence of my friend-to make my legs work and stand up.
We walked from the student union, down the sloping asphalt pathway that led from it to what was commonly called the Art Hut. I had never understood this nickname because, more than anything else, the building itself looked like a failed attempt at an industrial office complex. One that had never gotten past the first two floors and then had been cruelly sheared off and roofed with a patchwork of composite and tar. Inside, however, were the huts. Dark, warm corners in the large studios, where many of the art adjuncts would spend the night, as the conditions in the art building were often better than the places they rented in the surrounding neighborhoods-especially as winter came on. In the Art Hut, you could crank up the heat, and the bill went to the university. As we were walking through the doors and up the three stairs to the first-floor hallway, I thought that maybe I would come and live in the art building. Surely there had to be a blanketed warren to spare. What I hadn’t quite put together yet was that I was already churning. Half of my mind had now begun to plan an escape.
I saw Natalie retreat with a wave into Room 230-the Warm Room. I thought it was unfair that Natalie so often lucked out and got assigned to it, and had wondered if there was a silent favoritism shown toward my friend on the part of the room assigners at the start of every semester. I could see why. Neither Gerald, the other model, nor I brought muffins or wine over to the administrative offices. We never put Halloween pencils, with erasers shaped like counts or pumpkins or ghosts, in the secretary’s mailbox.
Gerald, I suddenly thought, was someone I did not want to see. He had lost his mother in a fire the previous year. She had gone to bed and left a cigarette lit, and the next thing Gerald knew he was falling to the floor and gasping for air. He barely got out alive, and his mother, they said, was dead from the smoke before she burned. Since then, when I ran into him, he would say, “My mother died,” in the middle of talking about the weather or about what poses we were doing for various classes. Natalie had always thought he was a little dim-witted, and this new habit seemed finally to have confirmed it, but as I walked down the hall to my own classroom, all I could think of was his genius. How did the firemen know it was her cigarette left burning on the bedside table?