How Could She Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Lauren Mechling

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Mechling, Lauren, author.

  Title: How could she : a novel / Lauren Mechling.

  Description: New York, New York : Viking, 2019. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018052453 (print) | LCCN 2018052914 (ebook) |ISBN 9780525559399 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525559382 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Satire. |FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.E29 (ebook) | LCC PS3613.E29 H69 2019 (print) |DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052453

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Rodrigo Corral Studio

  Version_1

  For Ben

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  December 23, 2016

  New York City

  Dear friends near and far,

  After a beautiful eight-year streak, my annual holiday card shame-walks its way back onto the scene as a New Year’s card. Things have been crazier than usual these past few months, and the election certainly didn’t help matters. I’m writing this a few days before Christmas, you’ll have to take my word. I like imagining all of you in the not-too-distant future, holding my message in your hands. The winter-flower watercolors are the individual part. I focused on each of you as I painted yours, so that love had better come through. Goodness knows we all need it more than ever.

  On to the annual report, the one you won’t find in the newspaper. . . . The year got off to a rough start, with my mother’s skiing accident. Once we knew she was going to be able to walk again, it was nice to have an excuse to hang out at my parents’ home, but we were all shaken up for a little while there, and I couldn’t be more grateful to all of you who helped us through it. The phone calls, the overnighted cookies, the amazing Sylvia Plath poem screen-printed onto a pillowcase by a particularly superheroish one of you. Mum loved it all. She’s been diligent about her physical therapy and is determined to get back on the slopes soon. My parents are talking about a trip to Chile next summer.

  After two years of nomadic life, Nick and I finally moved into the town house that Nick’s owned forever but never really dealt with. We left our Chelsea sublet in June, and the renovations went all the way through the fall, so after several months of living on the run (out on the North Fork and a few weeks at Nick’s friend Fernando’s house in Majorca, so don’t think I’m complaining), we’re only starting to settle into our home. It’s funny seeing our furniture mixed up together and trying to get along in the space that has always been starkly, midcenturyishly “his.” My studio is on the top floor, with a ceiling that slopes so low I have to duck my head when I reach over to change the radio station. The window overlooks a courtyard where an old greyhound naps all day long. I have a dog bed for Stanley, so he hangs out up there with me. It’s my new favorite place on earth.

  Nick has been working on a hostel project and a few other things, mostly in Berlin, so when we see each other, it can feel as if we’re on a date (sometimes it’s more like we have dementia—it’s impossible to keep track of anything when somebody is a ghost most of the time!). He’s finally given in to my prodding and gotten back into tennis. After what I will admit was a promiscuous spring, with work in magazines and galleries, I’ve just agreed to the sweetest invitation to participate in a group show about “the cold” at the Brooklyn Public Library. Being Canadian and all, I suspect they want me to contribute a couple of paintings of infinite tundras, but I’m not in a chilly state of mind. I’ve been busy making watercolors of snowflakes and snow cones in all sorts of psychedelic colors. Sort of like the paintings I’m sending you.

  Those of you who live in town, come to the opening on Feb. 14 (yes, I know) and I’ll feed you banana bread and cream or possibly a gingerbread snow castle like the ones I made in grammar school. If you’re in the faraway club, please know I love and miss you dearly, and I’d be honored to save a piece of castle just for you.

  Here’s to a safe and not-too-surreal 2017!

  Love, Sunny

  Geraldine: If you’re planning on visiting nyc anytime soon, come to the opening? I’m sure Gus will be there. xxxxx

  1

  Geraldine considered her grapefruit. To an observer it might have appeared that she was snacking, but anyone who knew her could attest that Geraldine Despont was a considerer. Perched on the window seat in her living room, her back upright against the washed-out January sky, she peeled the skin into careful ribbons and arranged them in a pile beside her. Rotating the heavy pink sphere in her palm, she was suddenly overcome by the grapefruit’s erotic aspect. It was the fruit kingdom’s breast or, she determined with a little squeeze, more likely a buttock. Geraldine contemplated her own backside, which was rosy and muscular, with slight puckering by the thighs. The citrus connection certainly held up.

  Geraldine let loose a snort and flushed, remembering she wasn’t alone this evening. Her roommate, Barrett, was in the den with his girlfriend, Katrina, who took epic showers in Geraldine’s bathroom most mornings and availed herself of other people’s bath products. Ever since Geraldine had taken to keeping her shampoo and cleansing gel in a hunter-green canvas kit that traveled with her to and from the bathroom each day, Barrett felt free to accuse her of not liking Katrina. Liking had nothing to do with it. It was just that she didn’t get Katrina. Her unintended roommate was a twenty-something woman who dressed in rave pants and baby-size T-shirts, as if airing out her navel ring were
more important than avoiding looking like she’d wandered in from the mid-nineties. Barrett, too, was bepierced and no stranger to the Toronto rave scene—God, could there be three uglier words in the English language?—but at least he was serious about his work and in the process of losing his hair. His head now resembled a half-blown-off dandelion, which Geraldine found touching.

  And they had history. Back when Geraldine was assisting the managing editor at Province, Canada’s weekly newsmagazine, Barrett, then in his second year at York University, was an editorial intern. He showed up for work in shiny button-down shirts and, because no one else talked to him, eagerly fetched Geraldine cups of tea and typed up detailed pitches for long-form features—mostly to do with food politics or the changing Canadian city (Jane Jacobs was a big influence). Geraldine had no clue whether his ideas were special, but she was always good for a dose of encouragement. She even invited him to join her for tea a couple of times. Barrett had been terribly respectful of his colleague, never realizing that she was merely a twenty-five-year-old who was planning on going to law school once she dug her way out of student debt. Geraldine did nothing to disabuse her intern of his perception that she was some all-powerful entity, never explicitly telling him that she simply passed his memos on to her boss, Barb McLaughlin. Barrett felt safe in Geraldine’s hands, and who was she to take that away from him?

  There’d been a chance encounter at Kensington Market nearly a decade later, and now here they were, living together in the second-floor apartment of a peeling Victorian. Geraldine was no longer his superior, barely in his industry at this point, but he still viewed her with enough respect not to constantly make her feel like a loser for being on the verge of thirty-seven and renting out the second bedroom of an apartment that wasn’t even her own. She was indefinitely subletting from her old friend Sunny MacLeod, who’d ages ago left town and moved to New York, where she was by all standards, measurable and not, winning the game of life.

  “I’m not eating God-knows-how-old leftovers. They’re stinking up the fridge.” Katrina’s husky voice entered the room before she did. Geraldine wiped her hands on her sweatpants and considered running into her bedroom and shutting the door, but it was too late. Now Katrina was on the couch, one hand fiddling with her limp ponytail, the remote control dangling from the other.

  “Is it okay if Bear and I watch TV before we go out?” Katrina stared through Geraldine, her eyes blue orbs of indifference. She stalled at a promo for a Kids in the Hall marathon, then moved on to HGTV. A man with frost-tipped hair and his Eastern European wife were touring a three-bedroom condo on Vancouver Island. Garth, Geraldine’s boss, had urged her to spend time watching these shows that might inspire new ideas. Garth was editorial director of Blankenship Media, the company that had acquired Province seven years ago, after its longtime owner, the Ricker Family Trust, in a fit of consultant-inflicted financial prudence, had decided to sell rather than fix it. She was a senior editor at Blankenship’s Special Titles, a division responsible for creating cheerful one-off publications tied to holidays or popular movies or Canadian personalities. Geraldine didn’t know anybody who ever purchased these heavy-stock magazines posing as coffee-table books, yet they were a surprisingly profitable business. The Drake special issue kept reprinting, and copies with a limited-edition fold-out poster now fetched nearly eighty dollars on eBay.

  “You in for the night?” Katrina asked.

  “There’s a film screening I’m supposed to go to at eight,” Geraldine said, and when Katrina didn’t follow up with any questions, Geraldine made no mention of its being a science-fiction movie, some of which had been filmed in Toronto.

  “Oh, I thought since you were . . . ,” Katrina said.

  “In my happy pants?” Geraldine was wearing her beloved Kermit-green sweats with interlocking tennis rackets and orange stripes along the seams. When she’d found them in the bottom of a thrift-store bin, they’d reminded her of childhood. Not her childhood specifically, which she’d gone through mostly dressed in cheap princess costumes from Winners, but an alternative version in which she’d cavorted in primary colors with an unbroken family.

  “Hey.” Barrett arrived from the kitchen, cradling a bowl of microwaved popcorn that smelled vaguely vinegary. “Hungry?” he asked Geraldine. “It’s vegan.”

  “Sure, but I’m not vegan,” she said with a slight laugh, and stood up to take a handful.

  “I thought you’d converted for January?” Barrett cocked his head.

  “I did a dairy cleanse,” Geraldine reminded him. “For five days.”

  Barrett settled onto the couch next to his girlfriend. “Want to watch with us?”

  “Sure, for a little bit,” Geraldine said. One of her New Year’s resolutions had been to work at improving her home life. She was over thinking she had a shot at doing anything about her career. There was more room for growth on the home front. Living with harmless weirdos was so much better than cohabiting with a fiancé who thought it was his right to insert himself into any available orifice. Those days were over, thank goodness. Arranging herself on a low-slung armchair by the couch—with limbs as long as Geraldine’s, she was never so much seated as she was arranged—she reached out for a second handful of popcorn and met Katrina’s curious gaze with a warm smile. Such was Geraldine’s determination to make nice.

  Last month Barrett had spent a grand total of zero weekend nights at home, and he’d gone to his parents’ house in Winnipeg for Christmas week. Yet December had been stressful for Geraldine, an endless procession of holiday parties, with their identical oozing baked-brie wheels and inevitable token single man in velvet. Why did they always wear velvet? When Geraldine was among the coupled, she could ignore these predatory bachelors. Her ex-fiancé, Peter Ricker, had brought ruin on her life, yet sometimes she missed having him at her side, if only to carry the conversation at gatherings. Now on her own, Geraldine was expected to show up wearing something sharp and not grumble about the often exorbitant carfare home.

  Even tonight, on this bleak, frostbitten evening, she was expected to be out and about. Geraldine really did not want to go all the way to Richmond Street to watch a movie that undoubtedly would contain not a single joke or snatch of genuine conversation. But Garth had more or less ordered her to go as some sort of an ambassador to the production company, to say hello to whichever bright-eyed assistant would be clutching a tablet at the theater entrance and waiting to cross Geraldine’s name off an electronic list. Devoting the past month of her life to cobbling together a collectors’ issue pegged to the latest release in the franchise had not been enough, Geraldine gathered. She would much rather stay in and read the book she’d bought at the Upper Yonge Street library sale, a paperback of You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Or, more realistically, she’d look up her online horoscope and settle in to near infinite refreshes of her social media feeds. Gus Di Paolo, whom she had slept with on her last trip to New York and who was her very occasional correspondent and possibly the next true love of her life, had been tweeting some weird shit. Perhaps his latest, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” was meant to telegraph that he spent his free time mulling Danish philosophers, but the only conclusion Geraldine could draw was that something sudden and important was up with Gus and his ex, Sarah.

  Geraldine had never met Sarah, but Sunny had filled her in. Sarah and Gus had been together for nearly a decade, and they hadn’t had any problems save for Sarah’s desire to make babies and Gus’s unwillingness to propose. Last summer Sarah had startled everybody in her and Gus’s circle by leaving him for a guy she’d met surfing on Rockaway Beach. Gus, who had crinkly blue eyes and meaty hands that made things that sold for ridiculous sums of money, was crushed. Geraldine had met him a couple of months after that and Sunny had coached her to give him his space in their courtship. “I know how he comes across, but he’s far more sensitive than he appears,” Sunny said.


  On the television the house hunters were wearing hard hats and inspecting a basement. The man was knocking on the beams while his wife expressed her burning desire to build an at-home spinning studio. Geraldine realized she was the only one watching. Barrett and Katrina were exchanging strange glances, and then Katrina was looking at a message on Barrett’s phone. “What’s up?” Geraldine asked. “Everything okay?”

  “Nothing’s up.” Katrina sounded jumpy. “We’re fine.”

  Cupping his hand over his girlfriend’s knee, Barrett slowly turned to Geraldine. “Maybe we should talk,” he said. Geraldine willed her features into a serene expression, as if she could fend off the dread closing in on her. She knew exactly where this was going.

  “Kat and I are thinking about . . . looking at apartments.”

  “Apartments!” Geraldine exclaimed.

  “We’ve seen one,” Katrina said. “But it was way above our price range.”

  “You’ve worked out a budget?” Geraldine said. The room was becoming slightly blurry.

  “Nothing’s definite,” Barrett replied.

  “But you’re moving in together.” Geraldine tried to maintain her composure but couldn’t help gulping. “That’s huge. Wow.” She stopped short of congratulating them; she and Barrett were past insincerities. “I’m going to miss you, buddy.”

  “I know, it’s bittersweet,” Barrett said. “But I don’t want to be keeping a secret from you until the last minute. Last Sunday morning when you asked where we were going, I felt lousy lying.”

  Geraldine recalled talking to the two about the restaurant they were running out to—Ondine East, a Vancouver-based chef’s hot new spot in the Beaches. At the time she’d felt envious, not of their plan but of their enthusiasm for waiting in line to eat brunch, a made-up meal that was entirely unnecessary in a city whose streets went dead at midnight. “You didn’t go to brunch?”

  “We got bagels.” Barrett cleared his throat. “Of course we’ll help you find a replacement when it’s time. I’m not going to leave you with some psycho.”