How Could She Read online

  “I’d come help you with your suitcase, but I don’t want us to get locked out,” Rachel said. She was standing in the doorway, a slippered foot holding the heavy metal door ajar. She was as pretty as ever, with her heart-shaped face and smudgy blue eyes that always looked as if she’d rubbed a little sunscreen into them by mistake.

  Geraldine set down her suitcase and shook the snow off her insulated duck boots.

  “Your hair looks good. Did you cut it?” Rachel asked.

  Geraldine felt her eyes crinkle. “Not in months.”

  “I’m glad you’re back,” Rachel said, taking Geraldine in for a hug. “We can actually hang out this time.”

  “New dress?” Geraldine said once they were inside.

  “You mean my potato sack? I can barely squeeze into any of my pants. I should just bring them all to the swap. You’re coming, right?”

  Geraldine made a confused face. “Swap?”

  “Sorry, I thought I forwarded you the invite. It’s on Saturday. I have a ton of crap you can donate.”

  Rachel’s apartment felt cluttered, but maybe that was just a side effect of having a child in New York. All of Geraldine’s parent friends in Toronto lived in houses with hockey-rink-size basements and pantries stocked with enough fruit squeezie packs to last through several years. Geraldine saw that the door to Cleo’s room was shut, so she set down her bags in the living room.

  “Can I get you something?” Rachel stood over the dining table, which doubled as her office, and attended to her laptop. It was open to a Word document, a couple of Gchat windows blinking in the background. Geraldine knew Rachel down to her number of sexual partners and struggles with getting off Nicorette yet had no idea about the people she talked to during the day. “Seltzer? Wine?”

  “I’m fine, really.” Geraldine shook her head and took in the chaos. Sunny had told her she was welcome to use her guest room but had quickly slipped out of touch. Sunny had been preparing for her show tonight and was clearly too busy to keep up with email or remember her promises. It was still nice of her to offer in the first place. Sunny hadn’t done anything that magnanimous in a long time. Geraldine sighed and said, “Why don’t you finish whatever you were doing and I’ll shower?”

  “No, no, please talk to me. I’ve been writing all day. Yolanda was here looking after Cleo.” It took Geraldine a second to remember that Yolanda was Rachel’s hard-to-handle mother-in-law. She wasn’t even Matt’s birth mother, but Geraldine had witnessed her spend the entirety of his and Rachel’s wedding in operatic tears.

  Geraldine struggled for an anecdote that would entertain Rachel. This chapter of their friendship, with Geraldine a frequent overnight guest and Rachel a bed-and-breakfast matron, was relatively fresh. There had been a time in her not-too-distant past when Geraldine’s visits to the city meant staying at the Gramercy Park Hotel, with Peter. She hadn’t seen much of Rachel in those days. Rachel and Matt had lived in Hell’s Kitchen then, but Rachel did not get along with Peter. The one time the two couples had met for a drink, Rachel had brought up Peter’s unwillingness to move to New York, which Geraldine had always said she wanted to do. “If you’re going to hold her hostage in Toronto, you should at least make an honest woman out of her,” Rachel had said. It was almost funny, Geraldine thought, that it wasn’t until Peter had asked her to marry him that her life had imploded. When Peter pulled out of the deal, Geraldine moved out of the apartment she shared with him and lived like a student again, using other people’s secondhand furniture and eating frozen cod sticks. It had changed her in other ways she didn’t like to admit, even to herself. She was more prone to emotional injury now, tuned in to a radio frequency she’d once had the luxury of skipping over.

  “So are you excited for your big interview tomorrow?” Rachel said.

  “It’s not an interview,” Geraldine said. “It’s a meeting.”

  “And that attention to detail is going to get you the gig.” Rachel raised her eyebrows. “I have a good feeling. The bureau chief must not ask a lot of people to come in from other countries.”

  “Well, it’s not like he paid for my ticket,” Geraldine said in a bashful tone. “Barb is arranging the visit. I told her I was coming in anyway, for tonight’s thing.”

  “Ah, the thing. What is it again?” Rachel asked, innocently enough, before turning away to gather the parts of Geraldine’s bed.

  Geraldine stiffened and calculated her response. She’d already told Rachel that Sunny was having an opening, and she knew this wasn’t the sort of information Rachel would forget. Geraldine knew that Rachel couldn’t remember the plot of the show she’d streamed the previous night, but about Sunny she’d recall the name of the town in Vermont where she and Nick had rented out a farm for a couple dozen of their closest friends three Christmases ago. Sometimes the enmity between Rachel and Sunny felt so electric that Geraldine found herself jealous. Their mutual dislike for each other seemed to have grown in the years since they’d both moved to New York, which made little sense to Geraldine. They barely ever saw each other, even though their regular paychecks came from the same source. In her meaner moments, Geraldine thought of her two friends’ relationship as akin to that of a chambermaid and a VIP guest at a grand hotel.

  Though Rachel occasionally implied as much, Geraldine did not actively keep Sunny and Rachel away from each other. No, they had done that to themselves, by simply sliding too far apart on the ladder of life to ever be friends. Sunny never acknowledged Rachel’s existence to Geraldine, but Rachel was always full of questions and loaded pauses. Geraldine kept her Sunny references to a minimum, omitting far more than she reported.

  “Sunny has an opening this evening, and since I’m in town, I thought I should go and say hi,” Geraldine said.

  “Where is it?” Rachel pulled at the hair band on her wrist.

  “I forget, some space,” Geraldine lied. She felt a flash of guilt. Clearly Rachel wanted to come. How bad would it be to show up with her host, rather than by herself? But Sunny wouldn’t like that, Geraldine thought uncharitably. And neither would Geraldine. “I’d totally bring you, but I’m not sure if it’s some of us just meeting there and going to dinner, and that might be—”

  “Oh, no, I can’t go anywhere tonight. Or ever.” Rachel smiled and motioned toward the room that used to be her office. “It’s not that bad. Tanya stayed late last week so Matt and I could have a ‘date night.’” She made air quotes with her fingers. “Six to nine. Your assignations don’t start till mine are over, right?”

  “Oh, whatever,” Geraldine said, trying not to feel hurt by Rachel’s implication that Geraldine never met up with men at a proper time and was some sort of night prowler. “You and Matt have this perfect marriage. He rented a fricking castle for your birthday. And here I am pining for a guy who can barely respond to my text messages.”

  “It was a cabin,” Rachel said. “What’s going on with Gus anyway?” Rachel looked at Geraldine with heightened interest. Ever since she’d stopped having romantic dramas of her own, she lived for hearing about other people’s love lives. Rachel had been twenty-nine when she met Matt—or technically when Rachel’s family went out to Di Fara Pizza and her father started talking baseball with a couple of fellow Chowhounds at the next table.

  Geraldine rarely had anything to offer up during these interrogations. Though she did sometimes experiment with dating apps, if only just to have a story to share with Rachel and her other married friends, she couldn’t imagine completely going through with it and having sex with a stranger—let alone an overeager one she’d met on the Internet. Men liked the look of her, so that was never her problem. She needed to meet people organically, the way she’d gotten to know Peter. This was the only way her crushes could build up, over dozens of nights of lying in bed by herself and obsessing over the outline of somebody she’d met in passing. Rachel was no use in helping Geraldine meet people. “I wish I
could think of anybody,” she’d say, even though Matt commuted to a neurology lab at Columbia University filled with men, and her brother, Jesse, worked out of a Red Hook studio shared by carpenters, set builders, and comic-book artists.

  “You didn’t see Gus last time, right?” Rachel pressed.

  Geraldine shook her head. “He was in L.A. for a wedding,” she said. “He might be there tonight. He told me he’d try.”

  “Try?” Rachel rolled her eyes. “You’re the one who came all the way from Canada. He can be there.” Her gaze drifted to the nursery door. Fussing noises were coming from the other side. “You’ll get to see Cleo before you go,” Rachel said brightly as she stood up and walked toward the source of the cries. It took Geraldine a second to remember she was expected to dig the present she’d brought for Cleo out of her bag and follow behind.

  * * *

  • • •

  Geraldine arrived at the Brooklyn Public Library an hour after the sun had dropped out of sight. The air was cool but not cold, and the snow was softening to slush. She watched middle-aged people carefully make their way up the steps and kids hunched under the weight of their backpacks stream out of the library’s revolving door. An aroma of ham sandwiches and pencil erasers filled the main hall.

  She rode up on the escalator and stared over the balcony, down at the people waiting in line to return books, realizing suddenly that she felt self-conscious in her new designer outfit. Sunny’s openings only very occasionally took place in proper art galleries. More often they were in back rooms in private clubs and restaurants that didn’t exist unless you knew to ask for them. But of course that made the choice of this venue even more frustratingly brilliant.

  Everything fell into place when Geraldine opened the door to the Hijuelos Room. It had already started to fill up with people making chitchat that bounced musically off the drawings and paintings of various styles lining the walls. The works bearing Sunny’s artistic fingerprint, all thick brushstrokes and bruisy shadows, put the other pieces to shame. Sunny was across the room, holding a glass of white wine beside her complicated updo and aiming her smile at a man whose mouth was moving at nervous speed. There was nothing quite so sweet as having Sunny’s full attention.

  Geraldine threaded her way through the crowd, discerning notes of apricot and black pepper in the mingled perfumes. She spotted Christian, the rakish Icelandic yogurt impresario she’d been introduced to and had spent some time flirting with at a previous art opening—not Sunny’s but a member of her circle’s. Several of Sunny’s ex-boyfriends from her first few years in the city stood in a cluster around Servane Klein, Sunny’s first roommate in New York. The daughter of a famous gallerist, Servane was gorgeous as well as tall and big-hipped, which gave her an ageless quality that worked in her favor. Whatever Sunny had paid to live in Servane’s loft on Lafayette Street had been worth it. All the young as well as not-so-young somebodies in the New York art world used to filter through their apartment. Sunny had been in the city for barely a year when Servane and a few friends set up a gallery on the Lower East Side. She included a quartet of Sunny’s paintings in their opening show.

  Geraldine realized she was staring and steered herself to the left. She saw Jeremy Cleeve and changed course yet again. She wasn’t in the mood. Jeremy had originally been a friend of Rachel’s husband, Matt. He owed his presence at the party to Geraldine, but he was such a comer that she was sure he no longer remembered that, or cared. Jeremy had created a company that helped baby boomers digitize their photo archives, which had made him ridiculously rich. Now he did something with microfinance and socks. He had snaggly teeth and was always offering to give Geraldine rides home. At the bar she took a single almond and fixed herself a glass of white wine. When she looked at the room again, Jeremy was gone.

  Something jutted into Geraldine’s hip. “Congratulations,” came a deep voice. She looked up and saw the yogurt maker, his teeth and lips purple with drink. “Last time I saw you, you told me you were going to move here,” he said.

  “It’s still in progress,” Geraldine said, and saw his face fall. “I’m here for an interview, with the CBC.” The yogurt maker looked at Geraldine with a blank expression. “The BBC of Canada,” she clarified, and he gave a high laugh. “Though you’re welcome to streamline the process and hire me yourself and give me a visa.”

  “I would just marry him.” A new voice entered the conversation. It belonged to Benny Tait, one of Sunny’s exes. He was a self-appointed intellectual, with wire-rim glasses and curly brown hair that was starting to recede. “You could be the dairy queen.”

  Geraldine forced a smile and scanned the room. As far as she could tell, Gus hadn’t bothered to come. Probably for the best. She needed to focus on tomorrow. And for the time being, she was sandwiched by two cute guys from Sunny’s world who seemed to be alternately vying for her attention and working together to ignore her. She felt her status as entourage member acutely. Geraldine thought back to the early days, when she and Sunny were more or less on a par with each other. There was even a period, however fleeting, when Sunny reported to Province’s tempestuous creative director, Françoise, and the scales tipped in Geraldine’s favor. The Sunday after Geraldine’s official promotion, Sunny sneaked into Geraldine’s new office and installed a towering rubber tree and a congratulatory carton of Vernors diet ginger ale. Geraldine now glanced across the room at Sunny, who was talking to the same man as before, her smile barely tolerant as she plotted her next move.

  Geraldine directed her attention back to the men, who were comparing tasting notes on the mince pies Sunny had baked and arranged around a ziggurat of colorful vintage wooden blocks. There was a competitive edge to their banter. The guys Geraldine knew in Toronto also did this. When exactly had men decided they would rather joust over food than sports?

  She was preparing to express her opinion when something at the other end of the room made her breath go shallow. Gus peeled off a black overcoat and slowly hung it on the coatrack without bothering to survey the scene. There was a steadiness to Gus that extended to all actions he performed. Even when he’d pushed Geraldine’s body onto his bed and ministered to her, his excitement had manifested only as an air of intense concentration. Flat against his duvet, Geraldine had joked about her Silly Putty–colored bra, which she’d nicknamed her “Pilly Slutty,” but he’d ignored her and run his hand beneath the undergarment. Geraldine’s insides fluttered as she remembered the ticklish feeling of his breath against her thigh. At the time she was officially happy, yet she’d been too nervous to enjoy it. Afterward, when she was still on her back, Gus reached for his phone and ordered an Uber. It wasn’t until the car was on Rachel’s block that Geraldine realized he hadn’t even asked how long she’d be in town.

  Geraldine slunk away from Benny and Christian and spent the next hour circling the room, making sure that Gus would witness her having more people to talk to than she could possibly accommodate. Luckily, she’d been to enough Sunny gatherings to know nearly everybody, and Sunny’s friends were always happy to ask questions about life in Canada. Sunny was from Canada, so that made it interesting. Geraldine obliged, saying what they wanted to hear, which D-list movie stars had been rotating through the temporary apartment she could see into from her bathroom window, and how everyone in her odd little city was obsessed with a new gourmet store where you could point at ingredients through a window and design your own “hand-ground” chip dip.

  At last she found her way to the woman of the hour. Sunny raised her arms in the air like a sorceress before taking Geraldine in for a hug. “Sweetie! Why aren’t you staying with me?”

  Geraldine was speechless.

  “We got a new guest bureau and everything,” Sunny went on. “Promise me you will next time.”

  “It’s a date,” Geraldine said in confusion. She had barely congratulated Sunny on the show when Gus joined them. Geraldine couldn’t help noticing he’d wait
ed to come say hello until she was talking to Sunny. Standing this close to Gus, Geraldine was reminded that he was just a human being. Chocolate-colored dog hair clung to his shirtsleeves, and he was a full two or three inches shorter than Geraldine—even tonight, when she’d worn fur-lined snow boots that had barely any lift at all.

  “Can everyone come closer together?” A mousy woman with an oversize black camera crouched in front of the three of them. Sunny barely moved, and the other two drifted in to bookend her.

  “I’ll catch you both later,” Sunny said after the library photographer had wandered off. “I should probably go save Nick.” Geraldine knew this wasn’t true—Nick never stayed in place at cocktail parties long enough to necessitate any rescuing.

  Gus shuffled his feet as he and Geraldine exchanged glances. “I wasn’t sure if I’d see you here,” he said.

  Her laugh came out sounding a little deranged. “But I told you I was coming,” she said.

  He squinted, looked sheepish. “Are you staying with Sunny?”

  “I was . . . I was supposed to,” she sputtered. “I have a job interview tomorrow.”

  “That’s exciting,” he said, without looking remotely excited or asking who it was with. “I mean, is it?”

  “I hope so. As long as I don’t mess it up. I haven’t had one in a while.”

  “Let me know how it goes.” Gus’s eyes lingered on Geraldine’s face, and she understood a beat too late that he was gearing up to say good-bye. The party was winding down; a line was forming by the coatrack.

  “Hey,” she said, a desperate edge to her voice. “Are you going to the drinks thing?”

  “Where is it?”

  Something lifted within her. “I don’t know—I can ask Sunny?”

  “Nah.” Gus shook his head and looked down. “I’m supposed to meet someone in the city, actually.” He didn’t need to say any more. Another woman was written all over his face. Geraldine’s heart snapped. “I’m probably not going to stay for long,” she said, managing her tone into neutral. “It’s just that I promised Sunny.”