“Well. They were all men, at least.”
He laughed at this, as if she was trying to be adorable, and made it so.
“Everything we do is wrong,” he said. “That’s why all this is here: to remind us. The goal is to be a little less wrong, every year, every day. That’s the miracle.” Then he said he had to go, to the schmoozing for which he was now late. Then he was gone.
The next day he appeared in her office doorway, two foil-wrapped steak sandwiches in hand, eyebrows raised. “Hungry?” And yes, she was.
* * *
Lizzie was sincerely trying not to notice Gwen’s nipple, but Gwen’s nipple was making this impossible. And it wasn’t just the nipple, swollen, red, crusty. It was the ballooning flesh it festooned. It was the feral lips fish-mouthing its moist tip, rooting, hungry. Lizzie was trying to tell Gwen about work, about what it was like being back in Philadelphia, about Wendy Doe, whom Lizzie was doing her best not to like, partly because it seemed detrimental to her scientific objectivity, but mostly because it seemed ill-advised to get attached to someone with the existential version of a terminal condition. Gwen bitched about her mother-in-law. Lizzie politely inquired after Andy, whom she was still doing her best to like. She politely did not inquire after Gwen’s novel, which was presumably still unfinished. The baby sucked, swallowed. Everything felt like small talk. Lizzie told Gwen about the strange quality of her conversations with Benjamin Strauss, the sense of say-anything freedom that usually required late nights, alcohol, absolute dark. Gwen maneuvered baby on boob, pretending to listen.
When the baby was born, and Lizzie was still living three thousand miles away, Gwen had dutifully detailed every shitlike feeling: contractions, of course, but also the panicked boredom, the vaginal tearing, the literal shitting on the delivery table. (“I was married two years before I even let myself shit while Andy was in the next room!” Gwen had said. “Huh,” Lizzie said.) It hurt to pee, Gwen had complained, too bad because she now peed all the time. It hurt to shit, which was similarly easier than ever. (“Suffice to say I’m never going for a run again,” Gwen said, “but if I do, I’m wearing a diaper.”) Gwen wasn’t Lizzie’s first friend to have a baby, but she was Lizzie’s first best friend to have a baby, the first both willing and determined to tell her everything. (“When it’s your turn, you’re going to know so much more than I did,” Gwen had said, and Lizzie didn’t say that the more Gwen told her, the less Lizzie wanted her turn, which in retrospect had marked the beginning of this new phase of their friendship, the phase of Lizzie not saying things.)
Lizzie loved her best friend too much to want her unhappy. Lizzie was glad for her best friend that she’d stopped calling at 3 a.m., crying softly as her baby suckled, wondering in a whisper if she’d made a mistake. She was glad that Gwen was happy, that Gwen loved baby Charlotte, loved motherhood, loved that she could squirt milk from her nipples and suck mucus from her baby’s nostrils. Gwen loved the pattern of freckles on Charlotte’s little baby ass and the spastic fisting of Charlotte’s little baby hands, and of course Gwen loved her baby smell and the way she looked when she slept in her baby bassinet, and the way her baby face lit up when she smiled, now that she smiled, and Lizzie, babied out, was doing her best. She was happy for her best friend. She very much wanted to be happy.
Lizzie and Gwen had bought a joint ad in their high school yearbook, advertising their superior brand of friendship: a large black-and-white photo of their younger selves dressed for Halloween as Bo and Luke Duke, with a caption reading In This Together. This was their identical wrist casts after the Roller Skating Incident of 1979. Their three-day suspension after Jennifer Weinberg had pulled her eyes to slits, told Gwen she smelled like wonton soup, and that her mother said Gwen’s mother probably wanted to kill herself when she had a daughter, and Lizzie smacked her in the face with a floor hockey stick. This was the bat mitzvah circuit, the SATs, Lizzie’s mother leaving and Lizzie’s father dying, Gwen’s mother losing her job and Gwen’s sister losing an eye, college applications, loves requited and un-, virginities disposed of, Gwen’s dreams of a Pulitzer and Lizzie’s plans for a Nobel, the abortion, the date rape, the togetherness of their this unabated by time or distance, indivisible, except that now, whatever Gwen was in, Lizzie was not. All through the whirlwind romance, the fairy-tale wedding, the purchase of the swanky Old City co-op, the pregnancy, the birth, Lizzie had prepared for an envy that never materialized; she hadn’t thought to steel herself against this, the feeling that she’d been replaced—not by Andy, per se, and not by Charlotte, per se, but by GwenAndyCharlotte, an unbreachable unit. The feeling that Gwen, who’d befriended her on the first day of kindergarten, who had shoplifted Lizzie’s first tampons, whose zucchini-based demonstration had coached Lizzie through her first blow job, was leaving her behind.
“So you want to fuck your boss,” Gwen said as she switched the baby to the other breast. Maybe she’d been listening after all.
“I’m in it for his brain,” Lizzie said. “No other part of his anatomy.”
Gwen made a noise suggestive of disbelief.
“It’s like with Mr. Vickner,” Lizzie said, invoking the eighth-grade history teacher with whom they’d both been mildly obsessed. “It’s not like either of us wanted to fuck him.”
Gwen’s smile suggested she was remembering the day she’d gotten overheated, passed out, woke to find herself on the tiled floor, Mr. Vickner peering down at her with concern. He’d rested his palm on her forehead, she’d bragged to Lizzie later. The most, or at least most thrilling, physical contact either of them had yet managed with the opposite sex. “Speak for yourself.”
Lizzie felt herself relaxing, for what might have been the first time since she’d touched down in Philadelphia. There was no need to perform herself for Gwen, no point in trying to choose words carefully when Gwen understood what lay beneath them. All those miles that had separated them, the motherhood that did now—neither could erase their shared history, Lizzie reminded herself. They were family, and the baby didn’t have to change that, any more than the husband did.
“Seriously, though,” she said. “You know I would never.”
“Obviously I know. You would never.”
Lizzie would never. Not just for professional reasons and not just for ethical ones, but because her life was the result of her mother fucking someone else’s husband, because she had witnessed her father deal, daily, with the fact of some other man fucking his wife.
“But there’s nothing wrong with wanting to,” Gwen said. “Or entertaining a poor, undersexed mother with details of your hot-for-teacher fantasy come to life.”
“You and Andy still aren’t…?”
“It’s not like I don’t want to. In theory. But when the moment is upon us, I just…” She shrugged. “It’s hard to explain.”
Lizzie took her free hand, the one not holding the baby in place, and squeezed.
“I missed you,” Gwen said. “Never leave me again.”
“Just to be clear, I’m taking that as an invitation to move in.”