Gwen breaks the silence with a laugh.
“I’m sorry I’m having so much trouble with your name. My mom used to have a patient named Claire. She always had her panic attacks at dinnertime for some reason. The phone would ring right as we were sitting down, and it would be Claire hiding in a bathroom stall at some charity banquet, and my mom would have to talk her down.” She pauses and takes a sip, looking thoughtful. “I hope she’s doing okay.”
“Your mom?”
She laughs, startled. “Her patient. Mom and Dad are fine.”
Of course, they are. What do a physics professor emeritus and a psychoanalyst with family money have to worry about? “They must be delighted about the engagement.”
She’s been fiddling with her napkin, and now she crumples it abruptly. “Gallant died last year.”
“Oh no! I’m so sorry.”
“Well, he was twenty-two years old. A ripe old age for a cat.”
As Gwen launches into the details, I find myself drifting back to the nights I spent in the Whitneys’ guest room with their big black-and-white cat curled up beside me. The alcohol has softened my defenses against the uncomfortable realization that despite my success, there’s some part of me that still longs for Gwen’s house in Wheatsville, where Gwen herself lived only a couple of years. A few words are enough to conjure it all back: the breakfast nook and formal dining room they actually used, the modern rug in the always-neat living room, Gwen slumped on the white sofa looking like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, the TV screen light flickering over her face instead of stained-glass lozenges.
At the same time, there is another part of me that is becoming increasingly aware that all this inane chatter about cats is taking the place of something Gwen very much doesn’t want to talk about, and that I very much do.
Without bothering to wait for a natural pause, I ask, “When’s the wedding?”
Gwen flushes, and then I do, too. I’m not invited. We haven’t drifted apart. Gwen doesn’t want me in her world.
I never belonged there in the first place. But she’s the one who invited me in.
Gwen
2
Gwendolyn Whitney showed up on the bus in the middle of sophomore year, soft ivory beret setting off her long, dark hair, belted camel coat standing out in the sea of ski jackets and buffalo plaid.
Beside me in the seat, Trace cracked a dirty joke. I turned away, leaned my knit cap against the window, and watched my breath fuzz over the outside world.
An hour later, there she was again, sitting a few rows ahead of me in homeroom. “Gwendolyn Whitney?” the teacher said, solving the mystery of how the two of us happened to wind up in the same classroom: Whitney, Woods.
If it weren’t for that shared initial, I might never have known Gwen’s name. Her new Prius was already on order from the dealer, an apology from her parents for moving her away from Manhattan in the middle of the school year; once she turned sixteen and got her license, she’d never set foot on a bus again. Everything would have been different if her name hadn’t been Whitney, if mine hadn’t been Woods.
It seemed my father had left me something, after all.
* * *
Two weeks later, Gwen spotted La Règle du jeu in my unzipped backpack during homeroom.
“Rules of the Game,” she said. It took me a moment to recognize the English title. “Is that Renoir?” She leaned over for a closer look, and the ends of her dark, shiny hair brushed my forearm.
“Uh, yeah,” I said.
“Why did you bring it to school? Is it for a class?”
Nothing I did was for a class. “I’m returning it today,” I said uncomfortably.
“Is it good?”
The question stumped me. Quimby had never asked my opinion on the movies he lent me, and it had never occurred to me that I could have one. The films I liked best—subtitled, black-and-white, thronged with women in opulent gowns and men who wore pistols—were clearly not made for me. Watching them late at night in my closet already felt like a transgression.
But the girl kept looking at me with her unblinking dark brown eyes, and I felt myself blush.
“Um, yeah.” I racked my brain for something else to say. “It’s really good.”
“What is it about?”
Another challenging question. I’d been high as a kite when I watched it after my shift last night, and the black-and-white figures in their warm ocher wash had often looked interchangeable. Anyway, I didn’t watch Quimby’s movies for the plots. I watched them to get lost in their strange, luxurious foreignness, to get a glimpse of that shimmer of something more I’d seen the first time. But I was afraid if I didn’t answer the question, or answered it wrong, Gwen would stop talking to me. And I wanted her to keep talking to me. She shimmered, too.
“There are these people,” I tried. “And they’re all in this house together, and they’re having affairs.” My face burned. With a burst of inspiration, I remembered something that had seemed important: “And they go hunting.”
Pathetic.
“Do you think I could borrow it?”
So quickly and naturally had she moved from wanting to asking that her hand was already reaching for it. It wasn’t a greedy gesture; there was something generous in it, even, a default assumption that giving was as easy for everyone as it must be for her.
I slapped my hand down instinctively, crushing the flap over the video. “The guy who gave it to me probably wouldn’t like me lending it out.”
She frowned, and I instantly regretted it. For a second she had thought we were the same. What I really wanted was to watch the film with her—she was so clearly its rightful audience—but I couldn’t invite her over. I pictured Gwen in her pristine coat walking through the kitchen, past countertops littered with Dollar Tree bags and unwashed dishes, and then pausing to examine the pictures on the living room mantel—toddler-me in a tiara, Mom’s pageant photos, my father cut out of the family shots—while Lily’s TV chefs yammered in the background.
Worst of all, I thought of my mother sizing Gwen up, taking in her ivory beret. Asking me, with a sarcastic smile, how we’d met.
Gwen was looking at me carefully. “What if you came over after school and we watched it at my house? We ride the same bus, right?”
Later, I marveled at her tact, the way she’d clocked my expression and corrected course. At the time, I felt only a rush of pleasure that she’d remembered me from the bus. “Sure,” I said, already thinking of an excuse for Trace and the Kevins. “I’ll see you after school.”
The bell rang. Gwen said au revoir, with a shade of irony. I decided to sign up for French.
* * *
I never went back to Quimby’s. His copy of La Règle du jeu lay on the floor until I accidentally kicked it under the bed.
These days, I watched movies with Gwen on her flat-screen TV. We rented them by mail from a film society in Chicago, and what we couldn’t rent, Gwen found online and bought.
In February she turned sixteen, and after that we drove the Prius into the city almost every weekend for repertory screenings. Gwen was still too nervous to drive alone—she’d taken driver’s ed by correspondence, and what with one Dr. Whitney working overtime at the particle accelerator lab and the other always on the phone with her Manhattan patients, the practice hours had been fudged. Gwen’s anxiety about driving worked in my favor, inuring her parents to my constant presence in their house. My mom certainly didn’t object to seeing less of me.