Chapter 22: The Final Course
Between Us Girls, By Natalie Drenovac
If you’re new here, read: Chapter 1
Tuesday, October 29
“I cannot believe it,” she says. “You own it! You actually own it.”
Emily’s happiness for other people is total. It erupts from her like a puddle of warm butter. And right now she is half melty butter happiness and half blond hair, which is messily twisted atop her head and secured with a tortoiseshell hairpin. It’s intoxicating to be in its radius.
“We actually own it,” Miranda repeats. She sounds ‘excited’ but her voice is also…tight, flat, forced? Like skin that’s been scrubbed too hard.
We actually own it. Well, as close as you get to owning it before a lot of miniscule check boxes are complete. The paper work is signed, loan approved, and now we’re just waiting for final board approval. After I returned from Giselle’s on the weekend, Miranda and I had discussed it, then discussed it with Dr. Chen, and then discussed it again. Eventually, I had looked her in the eyes, kissed her deeply, and said “Fuck it, let’s go for it. We don’t even know if it will work out but we need to at least try.” Opportunities like this didn’t just come up every day and I could feel it slipping away, the window tightening around my solar plexus while I stewed in indecision until it swallowed itself up.
It happened quickly after that. A few updates over text and then a number. A blinking message on the screen.
David: you in?
It always shocked me how wealthy men spoke. Deals done over single word text messages. Single sentence emails, no punctuation.
We were in.
Now the slow machinations of the powers that be were reviewing our fate.
“He said nothing about it.” Emily laughs as if it’s hilarious her husband seemingly tells her next to nothing of his day to day life. “Not a word.”
Miranda picks up the menu. “David is a miracle worker. It’s an extraordinary price for Tribeca. I’ve never heard anything like it. You genuinely couldn’t replicate it on the open market right now.”
“We should toast.” Emily says, flagging down a waiter, and pointing at the wine list, in a section ironically titled ‘something fizzy’.
Miranda doesn’t look up from the menu. “Tell him how grateful we are. We’ve been wanting to own there since we moved in.”
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?” Emily is still smiling but there’s a twinge around the corner of her eye. She locks eyes with Miranda as she says it, whose face betrays nothing.
“Don’t you have pickleball this week?” Emily’s voice is light, skimming over the surface of itself.
Then her eyes find mine across the table.
“How does it feel?” she asks.
“Strange…” I say. “Good strange.”
She holds my gaze a beat before she repeats it. Rolling the syllables of “good strange” around on her tongue. Her voice trails off, slightly breathy near the end so it’s unclear if it’s a question or a statement or if she’s even speaking to anyone but herself.
I am struck by the different worlds overlapping at once at our table. Miranda and I - our secrets. Emily and I - our secrets. The layers of knowing and unknowing of who held who and when.
“What the fuck is good strange?” Miranda laughs, snapping the menu shut. “Honestly, sometimes I have no idea what you two are talking about.”
The pét-nat arrives, cloudy and cold, and then Slovenian orange after that, amber and tasting of dried apricot and something closer to walnut skin, with the crudo. Yellowfin sliced thin over a ponzu reduced until the citrus has almost caramelised, pickled heat underneath it, frozen horseradish shaved so fine it dissolves on contact. I eat a piece. Then another. Emily puts a piece in her mouth and closes her eyes.
“Sorry,” she says, opening them. “That is dazzling.”
“Don’t apologise,” I say.
Miranda reaches for the wine, rolling her eyes. “Do you mind if we don’t order any more wine? I don’t want to make it a late one.” she says.
“Do you feel okay?” Emily asks.
“Of course, but it’s been a long day and my nervous system is overloaded. I can’t drink like you.” Miranda laughs. A few weeks ago Emily probably would have recoiled at the barb but right now she is leaning forward, elbow on the table, completely unguarded. She is taking forkfuls of lamb shoulder, so tender it’s falling apart into the fermented black garlic sauce underneath it, directly from the platter to her mouth.
“You’re so sensitive.” She says finally. “You just let us know if you need to jump in a cab. No judgement if you need to head home early.”
Miranda smiles with tight lips and starts talking about the apartment again. She pours over her plans for it. Knocking out two walls. A grand renovation. I watch her and remember exactly why I have always said yes to whatever she wanted. This version of her. The one who lives a future that’s pliable and bends to her will.
Under the table Emily’s foot finds mine. Miranda is talking about demolition, the light it would let in. Emily is nodding and asking the right questions in the right voice. Under the table, Miranda reaches for my hand and squeezes it.
I feel the tightening in my solar plexus again.
“Alex?”
Miranda’s voice cuts through the background buzz. Her and Emily are both looking at me. Expectant.
“I couldn’t agree more.” I say. They seem satisfied, returning to the conversation and the lamb shoulder.
I don’t know what I’ve just agreed to.
Emily orders a third bottle of wine and Miranda covers her glass with her hand. The waiter asks if I’m having a glass. I keep eye contact with him and nod, but I can feel her eyes boring into me while I do. A text from Miranda flashes up on my screen.
Miranda: I want to go. You don’t need another glass.
The bottle sits awkwardly warming between us.
“I probably got a little carried away with that.” Emily says, gesturing to it.
“Yeah, well, I did say I didn’t want a late one.” Miranda says pointedly. She is no longer making an attempt to participate in conversation and is sitting on the edge of her seat. The air between us feels thick, like unbrushed teeth.
Finally, Emily gestures to the waiter for the bill.
When it arrives, Miranda insists on picking it up in full. Outside on the pavement, Emily turns and hugs Miranda first, long and warm, and then she turns to me.
Her arms go around my neck and I feel her mouth kiss just below my ear, warm and slow, and her hand presses flat against the small of my back and pulls me in before she steps away.
“Night,” she says.
At home Miranda fills a glass of water at the sink, drinks half, sets it down.
“I didn’t have a good time tonight,” she says. “I want to end this arrangement with Emily. I’m done with it.”
I put my bag down.
“When did you decide this?”
“Tonight confirmed it but I’ve been thinking about it since we left Montauk.”
“You’ve been thinking about it since then?” I look at her. “But we only started up again in Montauk.”
“Yeah and I reflected on whether that was the right thing for us and I decided - no, it’s not.”
“You’ve been thinking about this for weeks and I don’t even get a conversation?”
“We’re having one now.”
“You’re telling me you’ve decided. That’s different.”
“Where are you going with this, Alex?”
“Where was my say?”
“What do you mean? You’re an adult. You have your own voice, your own agency - just like I do. It’s not my job to clear the way for you.”
“You came to me with this idea. Opening our relationship, exploring. I said yes because you wanted it. You’re the one who got Emily involved.
“I’m not denying any of that but now I’ve changed my mind. I’m a little surprised you’re having such a strong reaction and, quite frankly, don’t understand what you’re upset about? Is it that I opened the relationship or that I want to end the experiment?”
“Experiment? Since when is this an experiment? We sat in Dr. Chen’s office and you agreed everyone has equal agency. You said it, more than once.” I look at her. “Dr Chen said we need to be having transparent conversations, with everyone on equal footing.”
“Dr. Chen tells people what they want to hear. That’s the service.” Miranda sets her glass down. “Do you really buy that BS that people we sleep with deserve to have a voice in our marriage?”
“It was your idea to go to her.”
“You’re right - it was. Like everything is my idea because I’m the only one driving any decisions in this relationship. It’s easy to pick holes from the sidelines, but you never have to take responsibility for anything. Dr Chen helped, for a time. But now I’m certain of what I want. Our marriage, with just the two of us. Is that so terrible?”
“What about what I want?”
“Is that not what you want?”
I look at her. “I want to have been part of this decision.”
“You are part of it. Right now. And we could be having an actual conversation if you weren’t throwing a tantrum.”
“It’s not a conversation if you’ve already made the decision.”
“I don’t think Emily is good for us right now,” she pauses, “and I don’t think David is either. There are still a few bits of paperwork to complete but I think we should gently pull back from them socially. We’ll be working on a renovation and it won’t seem odd if I can’t make pickleball every week.”
“David? You said a few hours ago that he was your miracle worker.”
“He kissed me, Alex.”
“You kissed Emily!”
“Exactly! Don’t you think this is an unhealthy dynamic for us to be around? They’re not normal people, Alex. They are deeply unhappy and I don’t want to be like them.”
I can’t justify my ‘tantrum’. I can’t articulate why I’m so upset. I can’t fully express that she is cutting off my legitimate line to what has felt like the crack in the window letting the fresh air circulate.
“I want us to have a beautiful life. I have given you everything. This apartment. Your friends in New York. Your security. I built that, I made those choices. If you turned to me tomorrow and said ‘I don’t want to work anymore’, I would make that happen too. I’ve never once made you feel like you owe me a thing because that’s not what you do when you love someone.” A pause. “I am asking for one thing in return.”
“You’re asking me to cut Emily out of our life.”
“I am asking you to show me that your loyalty lies with me, our life, our marriage. Not Emily, not Carmen, not anyone else. Me.”
“You chose to bring Emily into this marriage.”
“And I’m choosing differently now. People change, what they need changes.” Her eyes hold mine. “I don’t understand why you’re fighting me on this.”
“She’s our friend.”
“She is someone we slept with.” Her voice drops a notch. “I was wrong. It was the wrong thing for us. I’ve watched you with her and now I’m telling you clearly it needs to stop. She was always meant to be someone we played with. That’s all.”
“Don’t say it like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like she’s nothing.”
“It actually really hurts to watch you fight for her like this. She would never do the same for you, you know that. All I have ever asked is that you put us first. And you won’t.”
“You’re talking about a person like she’s something you rented and returned.”
“I’m exhausted.” A pause. “You can keep being angry that I know what I want or you can start thinking about what you actually want from your life.”
“I want to be consulted. You make unilateral decisions. That’s not a marriage.”
“Every decision I have ever made has been for us.” She takes a step forward. “And somehow I’m standing here being made to feel like the problem.”
“You said she was someone we played with.”
“She was.”
“That’s not true and you know it.”
“It was true for me, Alex. I’m starting to realise maybe I don’t know what it was for you.”
I can feel the breath in my body going cold. That I’m on the edge of something I can’t walk back.
Miranda continues, “what I know is that you’ve let this become something it was never supposed to be. And now it’s over.” She looks at me.
“We’re not done.”
“I’m done talking about this.”
“You don’t get to play the victim to a series of events you unfolded. You kissed Carmen in front of everyone at the Hamptons without saying a word to me first” I say. “Was that something you had ‘thought about for awhile’ or did you just decide in the moment and didn’t care if you humiliated your wife? You couldn’t be certain how I would react.”
“Spare me the indignation. You weren’t humiliated. You loved it.”
“You brought Emily into our bed. You wanted to watch. You told me to be something for her because you wanted to sit back and own it. Her desire. Mine.”
“I did it for you, Alex! You had become so fucking tepid at home. I wanted you to feel powerful again and -”
“No, I did it for you because I love you and because I trusted you.”
“I needed to do something. Obviously, I don’t make you feel that way anymore. And you just seemed so…limp.”
“So now she’s just someone we play with and throw away because…it didn’t make you feel good? Or because it didn’t make me act like you had planned?”
“I don’t think it’s a particularly good thing for our marriage if you only want to fuck me when someone else is in the room.”
She crosses her arms and looks at me and then she uncrosses them and her whole manner shifts.
“I know this is hard,” she says. Her voice is softer now. “I know you’ve gotten attached. I should have said something sooner, I could see where it was going.” She takes a step toward me and puts her hand on my face, her thumb moving against my cheekbone. “But we have to look after what we have. That’s all I’m asking.” Her forehead comes to rest against mine. “I love you. I have always loved you. Every choice I’ve made has been because of that.”
“Come to bed,” she says. “We bought a home today. It’s a good day”
I take her hand off my face and hold it for a second and put it down. A good day. I turn that over and can’t find the world where it’s true.
“I’m going to sleep in the spare room,” I say.
She pulls back. Looks at me. “Alex.”
“I just need some space. To think. We can talk about this tomorrow.”
“You don’t need space. You need to stop letting her get into your head.” She hears herself. I don’t say anything. She straightens her spine. “I’m not going to beg you to come to bed.”
“I’m not asking you to”
I walk past her. Down the hall. Past the framed prints she chose. Past the lamp we’d snapped up on a Saturday in the West Village, two years ago, her finger pointing at it before I’d even seen it properly. That one. Certain.
The spare room. I open the door and close it behind me.
A window with the back of the building across. The bed that we talk about offering out a lot but never gets used. “I don’t need my friends seeing me without a bra on at 6am” Miranda would scoff.
I sit on the edge of it.
Through the wall I can hear Miranda moving through her routine. Every step in the right order. The tempo calm. She doesn’t even purposefully slam doors like she does sometimes when she’s mad. Then silence.
I lie down on the bed, in the spare room of the apartment we just bought, in my clothes from the day. It’s cold. The heating hasn’t been switched on in here. The bed smells like a no one belongs to this bed kind of clean. Like a hotel. Temporary. A place that is clean because no one stays there for long.
I feel homesick.
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Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. The characters, events, companies, places, names, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance, whether direct or indirect, to actual persons (living or dead), places, events, or businesses is entirely coincidental and unintended. Where reference is made to real locations or historical events, such references are included solely for the purpose of creating a sense of authenticity. They should not be interpreted as depicting real people, their actions, or their conduct. The author expressly disclaims any and all responsibility for any such interpretations or assumptions.