By the end of freshman year I could pull those same khakis on and off without ever even unbuttoning them. I still wasn’t thin thin, wouldn’t lose another ten pounds until after college, but college standards were less rigid than New York ones. Sometime in March, a teasingly warm day, I was walking to class in a trashy tank top. The sun was like a hot hand christening my head as I passed Matt Cody, an ice hockey player who’d humped Nell’s thigh so hard his penis had left a red welt on her skin that clung on, ripening in shades of purple and blue and green, for nearly a week. He stopped dead in his tracks, marveled at the way the light exploded in my hair and eyes, and actually gasped, “Wow.”
But I had to be careful. College was my first go at reinvention, and I couldn’t compromise it by getting a reputation again. Nell told me I was the sluttiest tease she ever met; I made out a lot, got topless a lot, but that was as far as I’d go unless the guy was my boyfriend. And I even learned how to make that happen thanks to Nell and what she called her Hemingway theory. Hemingway used to write an ending to his novel only to delete it, asserting that it made the story stronger because the reader would always be able to intuit the ghost of that final, incorporeal passage. When you like a guy, Nell reasoned, you need to immediately find another guy, the guy you always catch staring at you in Modern American Classics maybe, the one with too much gel in his hair, bad jeans. Smile at him finally, let him ask you out, drink weak whiskey in his dorm room while he waxes poetic about Dave Eggers, Phoenix whining in the background. Dodge his kiss or don’t, and keep doing it until the guy you really like gets a whiff of him—that other guy sniffing around you. He’ll smell it on you, his pupils dilating like a shark inhaling a tendril of blood in the water.
After I graduated, I came across Luke again, at another party in the city. The timing couldn’t have been more serendipitous because I had a boyfriend, and, Christ, that asshole’s scent could saturate a football stadium. He was this immensely polarizing descendant of a Mayflower family, whom I kept around because he was the only guy who wasn’t afraid to do to me what I asked him to do to me in bed. Slap me across the face? “Just let me know if this isn’t hard enough,” he’d whispered, before winding up and backhanding me so hard the nerves in my skull crackled neon and the dark blurred and twisted, a black blanket wringing above my eyes, over and over, until I came with a grotesque groan. Luke would have been appalled if I ever asked him to do something like that to me, but I was willing to trade that pulsating need to be savaged, whether a result of nature or one of nurture I could never figure out, for a last name like his, one I’d kill to put a Mrs. in front of. When I finally broke up with my boyfriend “for” Luke, the sudden freedom allotted us—to go out to dinner together and go home together like a real couple—was intoxicating. Carried us fast and far like a riptide, and we moved in together after a year. Luke knows I went to Wesleyan, obviously. Always comments on how funny it is that we never crossed paths all those times he came to visit.
“This is the Emile, in rose water.” The salesgirl pulled the dress off the hanger and swung it around in front of her body, holding up the skirt and pinching the material between her thumb and index finger. “You can see it has a little bit of a sheen.”
I glanced at Nell. Nell, still “a head-turner” (Mom’s word) even after all these years. She’ll never need to get married to feel good about herself, the way the rest of us have to. She used to work in finance, was one of two girls on the floor, the guys swiveling in their seats to catch a glimpse of Banker Barbie as she strode past. At the Christmas party two years ago, one of her meathead co-workers—married, with children, of course—picked her up, threw her over his shoulder so that her dress flipped up and exposed her elegant ass, then ran around the room making monkey noises while everyone whooped and hollered.
“Why monkey noises?” I’d asked.
“I guess that was his impression of Tarzan?” Nell’s shoulders poked up into her ears. “He wasn’t the smartest.”
She sued the company for an undisclosed sum, and now she sleeps until 9:00 every morning, follows up a spin class with yoga, and snatches the brunch bill off the table before any of us can get to it.
One side of Nell’s mouth pinched. “I’m going to look naked in that color.”
“We’ll have spray tans,” Moni reminded her. The light streaming in from the window pointed at a monstrous pimple on her cheek, smothered in too-pink concealer. She was really stressed over this whole me-getting-married-before-her thing.
“Midnight is a very flattering shade.” A Cartier Love bracelet slid loose from the salesgirl’s sleeve as she returned the rose water to the rack and presented its navy cousin with a flourish. She was a natural blonde, probably made blonder by a mere one or two trips to Marie Robinson a year.
“Do people ever mix colors?” I asked.
“All the time.” She went in for the clincher. “Georgina Bloomberg was in here the other week for a friend, and that’s exactly what they’re doing.” She pulled a third option, a hideous shade of eggplant, and added, “It can be very chic when done right. How many bridesmaids are you having again?”
There were seven. All from Wesleyan and all of them living in New York but the two who went the DC route. Nine groomsmen for Luke, all of them Hamilton grads with the exception of his older brother, Garret, who graduated magna cum laude from Duke. All of them in the city too. I once commented to Luke how sad it was that we both came here so thoroughly insulated with friends that we never really got to experience New York. All the weirdos roaming here, all the wild, mythical nights waiting for us, we didn’t need them, so we never sought them out. Luke told me it’s amazing how I always find a way to turn a positive into a negative.
Nell and Moni went into the back room to show me just how chic rose water and midnight can look together, and I dug around in my purse for my phone. I held it out in front of me at chin height while I scrolled through my Twitter and Instagram feeds. Our beauty director had recently filmed a segment for the Today show to warn viewers about the real dangers of smart phone addiction: Breakouts in the Cell Phone Zone, and Early Onset Turkey Neck, from all that looking down to see who had just gotten her butt kicked and her soul cleansed @SoulCycle.
Spencer had followed me on Instagram after we met. I didn’t recognize any of the people in the filtered haze of her pictures, but I did notice a comment, asking if she would be attending the Friends of the Five event, taking place in a sad pub located next to a Starbucks in Villanova, PA. A part of me fantasized about what it would be like to go: to show up in simple cashmere, that emerald cockroach attached to my finger, Luke at my side, emanating so much unabashed confidence that through some sort of osmosis, I’d bear it too. The place I had worked so hard to fit into that was now beneath me. All those losers who never left the Main Line, who lived in apartments that probably had carpeting. God. There would be a whisper through the crowd, half of them outraged, half of them impressed, their “Did you see who is here? She’s got balls” meaning a different thing to each of them. Maybe there would be the guy who still believed I owed him a fuck, after all these years. The event was months away. If I hit my goal weight by then, maybe.
I switched from Instagram to e-mail right as Nell glided out of the dressing room, rose water draped over her picnic bench of a body, the exposed back revealing nothing but skin and spine.