The bends.

Hang January. The new year’s bells have always rung for me in September. It’s a month of change, of promise, of new clothes and new faces, slithering out of one skin into the next. Even now, with the school doors firmly shut behind my back and locked tight, September is where I scrape a line in the earth marking the new year from the old.

Who will I be this time? The determined student, always a given back then, but with some new filligree etched upon my surface as the seasons slide from one to another. Perhaps this year with bangs, or, I’ll paint my nails every week and be the nail polish girl. One year a backpack, the next a satchel; last year it was Rimbaud but this year it’ll be Baudelaire, all the way down. Fresh identities to shrug over my shoulders for size like brand-new sweaters, until I outgrow them and pack them away in a cedar chest. Just in case.

September still feels heavy with possibility, drooping with all the selves I could be. A writer again, that’s the one I’m trying on right now after shucking it off years before for the serious business of being A Wife. I wasn’t sure it would fit me, this self, not after years thinking my body and brain had grown unsuited to its folds and pleats, its cuffs and and collar. But I’d stashed it carefully between layers of tissue so that when I shook it out, the writer-self had kept its shape, even as I had not kept my own. Maybe a few holes in it, small tears where the moths of time had gnawed at its beauty, but easily mended with a little work, a little wear.

This summer I pulled it over my head and hey presto! The writer-self feels a little itchy at times, and I bulge at its seams in ways I didn’t before. But it suits me; I’m growing back into it. When I’ve modelled it for others — when I’ve dared to show my limbs thrust in its arms for those I love, for those whose praise means most — I’ve dazzled. Who knew I could look like this again?

Josh did. That’s what his wife Sara told me.

I didn’t budge on turning down that invite to Jeremy Moynihan’s party in June, mind you. Josh’s praise didn’t drizzle in my ears over Blue Moons and barbecue from Handy Market while we watched his daughters play Marco Polo in the pool. Everyone asked after me, according to Jenn, who’d happily hauled her ass to Porter Ranch, a place she’s described to me as “only useful if you have to go to a Wal-Mart for some dumbass reason.”

“Caitlin told everyone it was Al’s fault you didn’t come,” Jenn told me later that evening. “That he’s got ‘mental man flu,’ as she put it, and you’re working on making him less miserable because, and I quote, ‘you know Saint Mel, never met a guy she thought she couldn’t fix.'”

I groaned and tipped another measure of Shiraz in my glass. While insulting, Cait’s analysis was also accurate.

Shaking out her short braids, Jenn touched her hand to her chest. “Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. But really, you missed out.”

“What, on watching Alex pound too many beers and try to beat the shit out of the first guy who broke my heart?”

Jenn blinked. “Sometimes I wonder if you traded in one basket case husband for another. Is there a restocking fee if you send this one back after a year?”

OMG, her first text message had read earlier that day when it popped up on my phone’s print-smudged screen. You will NOT believe who is here.

After a minute, an image came through, blurry at first until the signal was strong enough to bring it into sharper view. Two men in sunglasses, one dark-haired, one light, touching red Solo cups in cheers, cracking brilliant smiles for the camera. On his hip the blond balanced a screaming, scarlet-faced baby trying to tug off the sunhat June requires for Valley kids. Both men were dressed in the dad-wear of the “I’m still cool” thirtysomething set — worn-in khakis and old band t-shirts, The Postal Service on the light-haired, heavier-set man, Swell Maps for the man with the brown hair. That guy knew he was cooler, you could tell, not only from the t-shirt.

holy shit, I finally tapped out in response. What else was I to say? I couldn’t deny I knew the man grinning next to Mack; Josh Brookes doesn’t exactly hide his light under a bushel. He’s been everywhere this summer, teasing Early Bloom which Hachette had decided to go ahead with, “Summer Green” or no. Each time I doomscrolled through my phone’s newsfeed or clicked my way through the Guardian or Teen Vogue, his face met mine, sometimes with a wry grin, sometimes sharp-planed in profile in moody natural light. When I’d flicked through a copy of GQ at a magazine stand, there he lounged on page 57, barechested in red trunks and floating in an deep azure pool, his tanned arms linked behind his damp head.

“Joshua L. Brookes goes forward by looking back,” the copy read, white letters on that dark blue water. I slapped the magazine closed so firmly the girl standing next to me reading that month’s Dazed & Confused jumped back about a foot.

I know right??? Jenn wrote back. You sure you don’t want to confront your past??? LOL

From the study, I heard Alex’s voice rising above the breathy hum of the air conditioner. “Miranda, how many fucking times do Charlie and I have to tell you? It’s Will’s life and who he chooses to sleep with is his own sodding business!”

Pretty sure, I typed, but I really wasn’t. Alex isn’t feeling himself.

Is there anything I need to know?

My finger hesitated over the keyboard for one beat, two beats, three and four. Alex’s raving only continued, his voice straining and breaking at times.

“You’re not my mother and you are not my wife! Stay the bloody hell out of my own relationship, too, unless you want me gone, Ran. I will. Don’t think I won’t.” I caught Alex’s dark eye through the gap between the door and its sill before he gently pushed it shut.

No. ❤ But I could use some Jenn time.

Of course. 9 PM. Buzz yourself in.

“Anyone-but-Alex” time would have suited me quite nicely, but Jenn had the benefit of being a five minute walk from the mire in my home slowly drowning me.

Ever since Will had introduced the elusive Ms. K as his girlfriend to Miranda right before lockdown, there had been a toxic storm of trouble rolling its clouds over their friendship. He’d been coy with us all about Kathryn at Jamie’s wedding, holding back her last name, showing us a picture of a pretty brunette with a freshly-scrubbed face and calling her “someone in the arts, nothing big.” In 2019, that was still true.

Miranda had huffed and puffed, demanding to know her full name, her education, where she lived in London, how she’d met Will in the first place, given that Will’s idea of “the arts” is watching Gladiator. I don’t think Miranda would have stopped there though, even if Will had coughed up the potted biography; she was probably after an endoscopy and a full psychiatric evaluation.

Kathryn Endicott — to give Ms. K her full name — is someone in the arts, no lie there. She’s also one quarter of BISHPls, a band even Julian had heard of (primarly through Kayla, but still). Slightly twee electroclash-lite, banged out by four leggy young women who favored tight black trousers and chain mail halter tops. I’d first heard of them in what Al calls a “Shock Shock Horror Horror” piece in the Daily Mail:

Whatever Shall One’s Parents Think? Electrostunnahs BISHPls Outed as AristoBRATS

Well, even girls with minor titles who went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College like to get their ya-yas out on Top of the Pops, it seems, and with their parents’ blessings. Lady Endicott, Kathryn’s mum, is responsible for costumes and the fan club. Life is different now for the under 25’s.

And that age is the source of Miranda’s grousings. “Too young! It’s predatory,” she’d groused to Al and me after she’d finally cowed Will into dîner à trois to unveil his new girlfriend to the other most important woman in his life.

“Will isn’t like that,” Alex pushed back.

“I’m not talking about William. That girl will devour him and I’ll have to pick up the pieces.”

Two years, two albums, one single that topped a million downloads and a North American tour waiting in the wings for the pandemic to spin itself to an end, Kathryn Endicott and William Prater are sickeningly, putrifyingly in love. And Miranda is having none of it, very vocally, to any of us who’ll listen. Most of us won’t anymore, except Alex, who’ll still heel like a good boy when she calls, even if he barks and whines in protest.

The morning of Jeremy’s party, she’d woken us both with the incessant warble of an incoming Hangouts video call on Alex’s phone. I’ve come to the conclusion that she’s perfectly aware of the time difference, but perfectly indifferent to it. We both ignored it, knowing full well it would just ring again in an hour. And again. We’d already heard the news of the Prater-Endicott engagement, and neither of fancied discussing the topic with her. At least not until after coffee and some carnal embrace.

By nine that evening, the pyrotechnics of a classic Miranda-Alex showdown were long completed, but the sour mood hung low in the air. Though the door to his study was firmly shut, Alex’s baroque profanities had echoed in the living room and bounced off the walls of the kitchen. Who knows what our neighbors must have thought, but I’d gathered enough to know that Miranda had veered hard into one of her regular “are you taking care of yourself, darling?” interrogations by the end.

I’d barely seen him since five, when he’d slunk into the kitchen to snatch a beer from the fridge. I started to say something about dinner, but was shut down by a snarl and a firm stomp back to the retreat of his study.

Let him rot, Miranda’s voice rang in my head. He’s a master at snapping at the hands of those who love him most.

Knocking on the door to let him know I’d be out for a while was useless; when I’d peeked in two hours before with a plate of leftover enchiladas, his blood red noise cancelling earphones were blasting Mogwai straight into his head. I left the plate without even asking for a kiss. He certainly wasn’t offering one.

Jenn had no such problems hearing my knock; her apartment door flew open as soon as my knuckles rapped once on the steel grey paint. She threw her arms out for a hug, but quickly drew them beneath her chest.

“What is wrong with you?” she bellowed. “You look like shit. Do you have COVID? You better not have COVID.”

“No, not that I know of,” I mumbled, and followed her inside.

When she’d moved into this building seven years before, it had been a blank white slate, dreary eggshell walls and faux-walnut flooring. It hadn’t even been lived in before; every surface squeaked with newness. Its freshness terrified me. What if I stained the pristine farmhouse sink with red wine? Or dropped a lipstick on the bathroom grout? Even though I kept all my homes scrupulously clean (okay, sometimes it was Rianne who had wielded the mop, not me), I preferred them a little lived-in, a little more human. Where I could feel the spirit of the house winding its way through the rooms, reminding me that I was not the first woman who’d laughed and sobbed between its walls.

Not Jenn. “How can you not love a place you can stamp yourself all over and claim as your own? No one’s bare ass has sat on that toilet seat, no kid has puked on that counter, no dog has pissed on the dining room floor. This place is M-I-N-E mine.”

And so she’d made it, painting the loathsome ecru a calm blue in the reception rooms, deep forest green in her bedroom, peach in the study. Last month she took delivery of an absolutely ludicrous faux-Majolica gas range and hood, along with a sturdy fridge that matched precisely. Who knew Dolce & Gabbana made appliances? I suppose some people like to whack down a cool twenty-five g’s on three pieces of kitchen gear, but that person is not me.

In the dining room, she’d clustered six vintage chairs, dusty blue velvet on slim gold legs, around a dense-grained mangowood table. Down its center ran a long stretch of carmine silk, with peacock feathers picked out in fine gold thread. Most importantly, for me this evening at least, was the carafe of wine placed at the head of the table, dark cherry red in the low light of the room.

“Candlelight? Pour moi?” I asked, settling into the seat nearest the plain crystal decanter. “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me.”

“Mm, no,” Jenn said, fussing with the Stilton on the cheeseboard until it lined up with a creamy slab of Camembert to her satisfaction. “If I’d wanted you, I could have had you years before, when you weren’t so old.”

I blew her a raspberry. “In your dreams. Anyway, I’m not your type. You like them tall and obedient. And male.”

Jenn laughed and reached over her shoulder with the stereo remote. “Yeah, male helps. Speaking of, which one of your beaux do you want to start with tonight?”

Behind her, small red and amber lights on the amplifier began to glow and the misty, grinding beats of Chastity Belt’s “Black Sail” drifted softly through the room.

We were small, the singer moaned. We were so small.

In broad strokes, I sketched Alex’s current slough of despond, the mire thick with his growing, begruding acceptance that Fenn will always have a piece of Julian’s heart.

Giving me the floor, Jenn munched her way through a handful of dried apricots and several crackers smeared with Roquefort without interruption. When at last I paused for a sip of wine, she cleared her throat. “Hm,” she said at last, but would not meet my eye. “You are asking for advice, right?”

The rim of my wine glass sang like a bell as I traced its line with my finger. “I don’t know. This… this is so old, Jenn. I feel like I was just an interlude in Julian’s life, while he figured out a way to be with the girl he really wanted.”

“I thought this was only Al’s problem,” Jenn threw back. “This is the same goddamn problem all three of you have been living in for how many years now? Fifteen? Twenty?”

“Fifteen. Sixteen in September,” I piped.

Jenn rolled her eyes and topped up her glass. “Face it. You and Al are both still gaga about Julian. Utterly in love with him. Time to stop.”

“Hey!” The shame of truth has nasty little teeth, and it bit hard.

“What would happen if — and just picture it — if you just let Jules do whatever the fuck he wants? Make his own mistakes. Have some fun. Maybe even spawn. You haven’t been married to him for a few years now. He doesn’t even pay you support anymore.”

“But what about Fenn?” I whined.

Jenn shook her head, letting out a slow sigh. “Alex is not his sister. He may not always know that, but I’m sure she does. That woman takes what she wants, and she wants Julian. She may want him forever. Alex needs to find peace in that. He is in therapy, right?”

“We’ve… discussed it.”

Jenn’s laugh was rueful. “You’re fucking kidding me. That boy should have been in therapy a long time before you met him.”

She wasn’t wrong. Between his strange, isolated childhood, his father’s alcoholism and suicide, being thrust into the role as Family Savior while he was still in school, and a general family history of recklessness and fecklessness, that Alex had made it to the stately age of thirty-six without time in a padded room spoke more to his sense of duty than his ability to withstand his psychic ills.

“Try getting a British man to go to therapy,” I muttered, helping myself to a small slice of Roquefort. “It’s a good way to end up there yourself.”

“If you aren’t already there. Which you are.”

The cheese was crumbly and salty, and zinged brashly enough in my mouth that I coughed into my arm. “Fair point,” I said at last, after I’d hacked up half a lung.

At my elbow, Jenn drummed her tapered fingers on the dark red runner. “You’re not here to talk about Alex, are you?”

In that moment, I straddled a line between disclosure and continued disguise, and I did not know which side I preferred when it came to Josh. In Jenn, I would have a confidante, a woman trained to strap secrets to her body. At a word, I could keep the past in seclusion, yet present her with my pain to be dissected, peered upon, diagnosed. Confirmed. I know there is delicate business of Jen and Mack’s she has tucked in her sleeves, something about their first marriage that is unflattering to one of them, perhaps both. Jenn certainly won’t speak of it, whatever it is.

But at my heart I am a creature who stuffs her secrets in every spare cranny of her soul, under literal floorboards, and in the cramped four corners of a bank’s safety deposit box. Unpeeling my skin, granting admission even to my closest friends is unnatural, awkward, untrue to the very Mel-ness of me.

“Of course I am,” I protested, taking another sip of wine. “If you have advice on how we can, as you put it, stop being gaga about Julian, I’m open.”

Jenn pushed an almond in her mouth and lowered her eyebrows. “You’re a terrible liar these days. You used to be a lot better. Now, what’s going on with you and Josh?”

She threw down a gauntlet without realizing she even had one in her hand. At school, the better of my teachers knew exactly how to force me that extra inch towards near perfection: tell me I wasn’t capable of coming out on top. I know better, dum-dum, my mind’s voice would chide, I can nail this to the ground and you won’t see how hard it was. Like one of those gymnasts who bookends dazzling mid-air spins with a solid grip on the parallel bars, all you could see was my grace and skill. Nailed it, again.

“Josh?” I swirled the wine in the bowl of my glass and watched the candlelight refract ruby red and the Wedgwood blue of her walls. “Nothing much. He’s been in the rearview mirror so long.”

I’m still an excellent liar when I need to be.

“Really.” Jenn’s voice was flat and unimpressed. “He made it sound like you guys were friends again. Or friendly.”

“Friendly is a stretch,” I replied. “I spoke to him a bit at the end of last year. I got the impression he has writer’s block. I couldn’t help him.”

Jenn riffled through the small bowl of nuts for a few pecans and popped one in her mouth. “He said you have some story that the two of you wrote together, ‘Green’ or something like that. And that he’d been asking for it for years but you wouldn’t hand it over.”

“He gave it to me before he went away to college, but I burned it when he, you know,” I confessed. This is some fine bullshit, I assured myself, very in character. “I can’t quite bring myself to tell him. I suppose I don’t want to disappoint him.”

Jenn chewed slowly, watching me for some tell but I would not bend, not even for her. “You might want to put him out of his misery. His wife said he gets really sad about it sometimes, that there’s some part of himself he wants to share with her and it’s just out of reach.”

Some part, I thought. How about all the parts, Josh?

“And she — her name is Sara,” Jenn continued, “said that she would love to meet you. You’d like her. I mean, Josh clearly has a type.”

“Strawberry blondes?” As if I didn’t already know the exact shade of Sara Brookes’ honey gold hair from stalking her Instagram.

“Ha ha. No, smart and self-deprecating writers. That’s what Josh called you, you know. A writer. Why aren’t you writing anymore?”

“Maybe I am,” I said, picking over the nut dish for a pecan. “Just a couple scribbles here and there. Jules kind of sucked it all out of me for a while.”

“Now that’s an understatement,” Jenn laughed. “But you should still tell Josh what happened. I get it, you’re still mad at him for cheating on you. But at least he had the balls to tell you. At least he gave you a choice.”

Jenn had that all wrong. Josh has never given me a choice.

***

Joshua K. Brookes should be given another award to match the literary baubles he’s collected over the years: The Man Most Likely to Get Mel to Break. Even Julian cannot best him in this regard — Jules’ near constant refrain during our marriage was that I would not be who he needed me to be. Like several men I’ve loved, or nearly-loved, Julian claimed to desire me precisely for who I was, every gram of me superlative, only to want to push me into a tidy case of his own creation.

Why can’t you relax?, it was at the beginning with Jules, all solicitous concern, genuine enough, at the anxiety that wound me as tight as fishing wire on a reel. And then, you could live in England, if you only tried a bit harder. Or, smiling is part of the deal at these business dinners, darling, do give it a shot. My politics were wrong, my friends even worse, and my mother and sister were beyond the pale.

But I knew I could meet Julian with resistance, and while I would bend and twist my limbs and brain into positions that suited him better than they ever did me, I would not snap. Some part of Julian still loved how my mind looped and spun differently from his. That’s not to say he liked all he observed in me, that he cherished the spiky, intransigient princess as much as the devoted, amiable partner he more often expected. No. He tried to buff those spikes away, but time and again they sprouted through my hide, as much as I wanted to hide them, too. Perhaps he accepted the worst over time because the best of me met most of his desires.

When Jules was working up the nerve to ask me out, he hesitated only because he thought I was out of his league. “Prolly the only time I ever heard him say that about a girl,” Alex has since told me. “We’d sit around in the flat and he’d try to come up with some scheme to ask you out that didn’t end in a complete cock-up. I encouraged the more ludicrous ones, of course. I hoped he’d try something bonkers.”

“Really?”

“I thought I could seed bad ideas, on the reasoning that the by the time he showed himself to be an utter prat I could figure out how to be the bloke you really wanted. So I made him watch ‘Say Anything’ with Will and me. I even loaned him my boombox and told him to wear one of my old man’s macs.”

“You’re awful!” I cackled. We were lying naked, top to toe, on the too-short Murphy bed in my little Berkeley A-frame, and I kicked him in the arm.

“I don’t deny it. But he wasn’t going to play Peter Gabriel. No, I had something far better.” Alex rubbed his hands; there was an antic gleam to his brown eyes.

I snatched the duvet to my chest and sat upright in the darkness. “Is it bad?”

Alex drummed his long fingers on his bare chest and stared at the moon through the sloping skylight. “Just tell me what you’d have done if he’d appeared beneath your window blasting Ronan Keating’s ‘You Say It Best When You Say Nothing At All’?”

Julian’s plaintive stare and quavering bottom lip loomed in my mind’s eye, made even more ridiculous by the truly atrocious coat Al would have had him wear. I snickered when he snorted, and soon we were both gasping for air.

“He’d have done it, too, if that fucking boombox hadn’t munched on the cassette,” he said to me straightfaced, and soon we were in hysterics again.

And it was like that at first, with Julian convinced I needed no mending at my seams. With Josh? No. I came to him broken, in sore need of discipline, so what would a little more breaking on the wheel of love do to me?

Once he’d sussed me out as a poster on his “Daily Themes” forum, I quit. Quit posting on the forum, quit writing the themes, quit listening to the podcast. Well, mostly quit listening. I’ll admit I wanted to hear any mention he might make of me, or The Girl, of any mark I was still scratching in his life. In a story or the banter he shared with his guests, I didn’t care. I wanted my absence noted.

He’d done it before, in one of the first episodes, reading in his dark treacle voice a three hundred word confession of the early morning we spent on Mussel Shoals beach after his prom. He’d felt like Jacob wrestling the angel, struggling to place his obligation to leave for college behind his love for me. “Love’s bright sting has faded to a dusty pang,” he said, “but memory fastens her small hand in mine, our eyes fixed on the dawn.”

I’ve listened to that episode more than once and let his words bathe me in sweetness. Three hundred words wasn’t enough to recount that evening and night, but he captured the dawn and all the nearly-dom and almost-ness of that hour on the beach.

“What if August doesn’t have to be an end?” he asked, pulling the soft grey blanket around us tighter. “What if I stayed with you?”

We’d picked our way barefoot and silently between the beach houses when darkest plum still filled the sky, the blanket draped over my shoulders like a homespun stole. In Josh’s pockets were two bags of M&Ms from the Shell station in Ventura and a condom I’d had the misfortune of watching my dad press in his hand earlier, “just in case.” I was woozy from the hour and the pure liquor of adolescent hunger for what next, balanced on the brink of the great something I knew was bound to happen if I unfurled one more petal to the world.

Sea damp leached through the whispery green chiffon of my first formal gown and I leaned into Josh’s warmth like a lamb to its mother’s side. Deepest violet streaked the lowest edge of the horizon, nudging the night into day. “You have to go.”

Josh clenched his toes into the wet sand, flexed and gripped, flexed and gripped. “I can still defer. I… I called admissions this week. I’d give up my deposit but –“

“No!” I broke in, loud enough that he stopped my mouth with his large hand, a move I knew too well. You say too much, princess.

His dark head swung over his shoulder to the houses that sheltered the beach from the access road before he dropped his hand. “Shhhhh, not so loud,” he hushed, teasing one of the tendrils framing my face around his finger. “So I forfeit the deposit. Five hundred bucks. So what? I can pay it.”

Anxiety’s walls began to crowd my vision, closing off the path I’d started plotting, my path of escape. I’d be a point three thousand miles away, a long distance for a boy to concentrate. There’d be nightly calls, for certain, for a while. More tales from the tongue of Scheherazade. But if one night I did not answer, there would be no punishment I could not later stop with a press of the red “End Call” button. I would take him on my own terms, when I wanted and how much, and no more. No more.

I ducked my head against the dark wool of his jacket and pulled the blanket closer. A thin line of deep scarlet blossomed at the far edge of the sea; the briny fug of the ocean surged on the stiff wind. “I promise you,” I whispered, “I won’t be far behind.”

Beneath my ear his heart echoed, the chambers and valves thumping out the beat of his life. One seagull soared and squalled as the peach and ochre of the new day began to reach over the sea, gently, gently, the softest stretch.

“I hurt,” he said, and pressed a kiss on the crown of my head. The words pulsed through me as he spoke. “I hurt so much.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.” Josh stroked my shoulder absently. “Except when I’m with you. My missing piece.”

Typical Josh — my only meaning was as his complement, his completion, the missing piece that made him greater, even as I dissolved myself. In college, I was introduced to Carlyle’s concept of the Great Man, the colossus astride the world, directing history through genius and grit. As if one man — and it is always a man — could order events to his preference, place his lessers where they serve destiny best. An accident of history that women did not figure as more than helpers and wives and mothers in their lives and the larger world, but look at us now!

Yes, look at us now. Josh would have been my Great Man — and there are so many in literature, too, and their wives and lovers object lessons in humiliation and sorrow. Lovely Catherine Dickens, blamed for having too many babies when it was Charles’ fault for dipping his wick in her time and again after he was fed up with feeding more mouths. Hemingway’s women, all those wives who must have found him terrific, scary fun at first. Queenly Claire Bloom, treated like shit on the sole of the masterful Philip Roth. And many more models for me to mold my own form in tribute, clever women that were a missing piece of their Great Men. Until the piece no longer fit.

I suppose Josh might have mislaid me over time. He would have found another piece that jammed the wild spin in his brain enough to allow him the peace to write, some girl who was less unruly, prepared to let every trace of her ego dissolve in him. Sara Cosgrove had glided her lovely self inside him, a single sheaf of poems the only remnant of whoever she was before she pushed through the door of that Tribeca bar to find her Great Man looking for a step to vault over his writer’s block.

What would it have been like to have let him drop my hand carelessly instead of snatching it away myself? Would I have followed him to Yale, or made it work from Providence? I might have rattled in the tin can of an Amtrak car hugging the Connecticut shoreline every weekend — I never would have expected him to make the journey that often. I could have rolled into the red brick and cool cream stone of Union Station, passing through the metal-lined tunnels and up the escalator to find him padding restlessly from wall to wall until he wrapped me in his greedy embrace. Over the years, each thin ribbon of me would grow more frayed as he pulled the fibers free to weave into his work.

I think Josh wonders, too. My missed calls are a testament to his curiosity, the voicemails traces of the unfinished puzzle I remain to him.

“Hey,” the one in late June began, a little breathless, like he’d been out for a jog and I’d skittered across his conscious thought. “I saw Caitlin, Jen and Jenn yesterday, you probably heard. Amazing luck bumping into Cait after all this time. You were on everyone’s lips. They all love you so much. Wish I could have seen you, too. Call me.”

I didn’t. Nor did I flip through my contacts for his number — he’s listed as “Burbank Plumber” — to return a call on the Fourth of July. “Independence Day. Do you remember our first one? I do. Pulled up in your parents’ driveway and I was a step outside my car when you steamed out your front door and into my arms. You were so happy in that white sundress. I slipped my hand under the bodice as we rounded that tight corner on the 2 and you held it there so I could feel your heart. You said it beat for me and you, oh, you were the most beautiful girl I ever knew. Call me.”

I did not.

Two calls in August. One I discount — clearly a butt or pocket dial, the sounds of a Saturday shopping trip en famille trickling in my ear. A small girl asked for animal crackers, Mommy always let her have animal crackers, followed by Josh’s dark and sticky voice: No, Claudia.

The second was undoubtedly meant for me. “I was going to let this slide, Melissa. When it was just about me I could almost ignore it.” (What a lie.) “Sara told me you turned her down again and she doesn’t understand why. You know the others are going. I’m asking you to reconsider. Reconsider and understand that your spite is hurting my wife. If you think I’m still in love with you, trying to get you closer to take you back, think again. I know you know how to be a good girl. Call me.”

I did not.

If the stories were true, Sara’s book club did sound precisely the type of fun I’d clamber to get invited to, in the before times or now. Cait had gone first, speed re-reading most of Emma so she’d be able to keep up with July’s conversation. When she proposed a post-club debrief and drinks at a patio bar on the Promenade, I pretended to be talked into it.

“I thought book clubs were all drunk mommies and ‘read along with Reese Witherspoon’ but holy shit,” Cait told me the day after she walked up the slim stone stairs to the Brookeses’ flame orange door.

“So no one was drunk?” Personally, I was already on my way to getting blotto on strawberry daiquiris. Mediocre rum slushies seemed a perfect accompaniment to sucking up details of the girl who replaced me.

“I entered a salon. I mean, as much as you can set up a Georgian salon in a mid-century modern house. She rented velvet chaise longues and the place was lit with blazing candelabras with actual candles stuck in them, and we ate little cucumber sandwiches and strawberry tarts and stinky cheese and those Bath Oliver crackers you love, Mel, and oh my GOD. You should have seen her.”

The frozen rum rushed over my tongue. “Who?”

Cait plucked a mint leaf from her mojito and chucked it at my foreheard. When I ducked, it noiselessly landed on the linen jacket of the bald man sitting behind me. “Don’t be an asshole. Sara was in, like, full on Regency costume. She designed it herself and it was amazing.”

A chunk of unblended strawberry caught in my straw and I tapped it viciously against the side of my highball. “That sounds really affected, if you ask me.”

“I wasn’t asking you, I was telling you. And you know? You’re right. It sounds really affected but in person… nah. It was just super cool. Her dress was like… what do you call it when the waist is up really high?” Cait made a slashing gesture beneath her breasts, then pushed them up with both palms when she caught sight of a teenage boy gawking. “Want some?” she yelled before he nearly tripped on his shoelaces.

“An Empire waist,” I said, trying to catch the eye of the cocktail waitress. Christ, I needed six daiquiris to deal with this, but just another one would do to start.

“Yeah, that. Gold satin with her hair pulled back and a few curls on either side of her face. A couple other readers were also done up, but they looked like they’d typed in ‘Jane Austen costume’ on Amazon and clicked ‘Buy It Now.'”

I flagged down the waitress like I was waving for emergency medical assistance, which in a way I was. “I’m sticking with ‘affected.’ If I get a pitcher of these daiquiris, will you have one?”

Cait ploughed on. “And get this — she does this every month.”

“She dresses like a cut-rate Lizzy Bennet?”

Another mint leaf sailed in an arc across the wonky wooden table. This one reached my cheek, as intended.

“Don’t be a bitch.” Cait peeled the wet leaf from my face and tucked it back in her drink. “She does a full theme, but low key. She decorates a little, makes a signature cocktail, but costumes are optional. Like, they read Tender Is the Night and she did a Roaring Twenties party, and when they read Wolf Hall it was all Tudor, Henry the Eighth stuff. She went as Katherine Parr.”

The one who survived — fitting. When the pitcher of daiquiris arrived, I filled my glass over the brim.

Cheerfully oblivious to the frozen mess I was sloshing over the table, Cait continued with the zeal of a brand new initiate, like she’d discovered the joys of knowing Jesus, or maybe veganism. “And when they did Mrs. Dalloway –“

“Let me guess, Sara put rocks in her cardigan pockets and walked into the swimming pool?” I fluttered my lashes.

Cait’s mouth tugged down at the corners like a trout. “I am allowed to make new friends.”

Neither Jen nor Jenn adhered to my distaste for what sounded like overweening amateur theatrics and high pretense by way of multiple Pinterest boards. Over at the Mackenzies’ new bungalow in Culver City, Alex and Mack took turns cradling Ethan while they heatedly discussed the relative merits of rifle calibres while Jen and I flicked through her costume ideas for the August event.

“It’s The Scarlet Pimpernel this month,” Jen said, pushing her dark bob behind her left ear. “Can you help me come up with something to wear? I kind of slept through the French Revolution in high school.”

“Seems silly for a book club,” I mumbled, flicking through Jen’s “August Inspo” moodboard. “Do you really want to drive to Granada Hills in a corset?”

“It’s a salon, not a book club. And I already wear a corset.” Jen raised her arms high and swivelled her torso like a wine bottle opener. “Kim K does these great waist trainers for moms to get their figures back.”

It would be mean to point out Jen never had much of a figure, which is why Jenn, Cait and I agreed never to mention it years ago. “Cait said most people don’t wear a costume.”

Jen shrugged and pushed her aviator sunglasses up the bridge of her nose. “Maybe I want to feel special for a couple hours. Like a hot bitch, and not just a mom.”

By this point, Alex knew about the book cl — sorry, salon. Hiding it would have led to another “no secrets” scolding, and getting Cait to shut up about anything she’s passionate for is a lost cause. (I admit she was right about Breaking Bad, but she was totally off about Welcome to Plathville.) Instead, I took a deep breath and told my husband that there was a better than zero percent chance that Josh Brookes’ wife would be inviting me soon to a dress-up party with books and mid-range chardonnay. Because I’m a loving, indulgent partner, I let him stomp the length of our living room while he raved about medieval torture and cock-chopping-off. Perched on the arm of the blue velvet loveseat, I watched while he slashed at an invisible monster with his arm, pausing occasionally to collect his thoughts for a new punishment to be inflicted.

“Are you done?” I asked after he collapsed beside me on the loveseat. “Because I’m not going. And please don’t destroy that pillow. I like it.”

Alex gnashed out a sulky apology and released the pillow he’d been wringing as if it were Josh’s neck. “I know you, sweetest.” He poked an accustaory finger into my thigh. “You’re too fucking nice to everyone, even when they don’t deserve it. Especially when they don’t deserve it. You don’t know this woman from Adam. You’re not going.”

I reached over and ruffled his dark curls. “How cute, it thinks it can give me orders. But if you’d listened to me, you’d know I’m not going.”

“Hmph.” When I looked down Al’s face was twisted into a scowl. “I am not an ‘it.’ I am a ‘he.'”

I turned down the secondhand invite to powder my hair and affix a star-shaped beauty patch on my left temple. No loss, really, as it ran up against a looming class deadline and Alex’s departure for nearly a month in the UK. Perfectly reasonable excuses, though I’d soon run out of them. My only regret is that I do like reciting that bit of doggerel from The Scarlet Pimpernel about the Frenchies seeking him here, there and everywhere. But it’s been so long since I read the book that I can’t remember if it appears only in the movie. It’s the sort of detail someone like Sara would be sure to catch, and correct with simpering condescension.

If my traitor friends are to be believed, August’s salon was a candy-colored coup.

“Like a unicorn ate a box of pastel crayons and barfed them all over the place,” Caitlin panted over techno pounding in the background. As far as I can tell, Cait’s taking a breather from writing up her thesis to focus on mostly working out to YouTube videos, interspersing her sessions with a few bong hits for “motivation.” With Jeremy’s wedding around the corner, she’s trying again to funnel her strong body into a bridesmaid’s dress. Unlike the one I made her wear over a decade ago, this one doesn’t have the benefit of a corset back.

“What do unicorns have to do with the French Revolution?” I asked over speakerphone while I continued to unpack the suitcase I’d hauled to my parents’ house for a three-week stay. With Alex back in the UK to settle Lucy in her new home in Hampstead and at her (very expensive) new school, a brief sojourn chez de Mornay seemed in order. I’d been received with the pomp fitting a visiting minor noble, the violet comforter on the bed turned down by unseen hands while I was in the shower. The guilty parent even left an After Eight for good measure.

“Nothing. They’re far more medieval France. I’m talking color scheme. The living room was very Versailles by way of Sofia Coppola. Like, she’d hung the walls with these papier-mâché picture frames she and her girls had made, sprayed ’em gold and stuck blown-up prints of old paintings in them. And there were all these little bon-bons to nibble on and champagne, and chamber music playing. Sara looked completely the part, too.”

A vision of Sara, her silky brown hair powdered to a light fawn and teased high enough for a small replica of a schooner to sail in its splendor, pricked my side. “This thing?” I could imagine her saying with a breezy titter while she smoothed her hands over a wide-hipped skirt and tightly-laced bodice she whipped up out of some old brocade odds and ends she’d have plucked from a remnant bin at Jo-Ann Fabrics. I bet she asked Josh to pull tighter and tighter until her waist disappeared.

The hand clenching my treasured bottle of Oribe Gold Lust hair oil gripped tight enough for the top to pop off. “That’s nice,” I said, fumbling under Rachel’s old dresser for the errant cap. “She does know that the aristocrats didn’t come out too well at the end of the Revolution, right?”

Caitlin shut off the techno with a sigh. “No shit. That’s why she went as Marianne, with one of those red Phrygian bonnets and everything.”

“Everything? What, with her boobs hanging out of her top?” I couldn’t resist a dig.

“Don’t be a dick,” Cait scolded. “It was fun. You’d love it if you could get over yourself.”

Jenn and Jen kept up the steady drumbeat a la française over dinner on the El Coyote patio the following week. Nominally, this was to celebrate Jenn wrapping up divorce proceedings for a couple who had decided that they would rather commit simultaneous ritual suicide than cede to the other the 1992 Ford Probe they’d driven together across the country twenty years ago.

“He gives up the four bed in Beverlywood like it’s no biggie,” Jenn said through a mouthful of tortilla chips. “But this thing held together with bondo? No way, brah. The thing stinks of mouse pee but the heart wants what it wants.”

“I let Mack have the Le Creuset when we broke up,” Jen offered, digging into the guacamole with a chip. “I really regretted it about twenty minutes after I agreed. I mean, what was Mack going to do with it?”

“Precisely,” Jenn agreed, reaching across the table for the salt shaker and dumping half of its contents on the tortilla chips. “We all know who he wanted to keep them for. I bet Kayla squealed the first time she walked in that kitchen and saw you had two grand in cookware just there for the taking.”

“That’s not nice,” Jen mumbled as she rose from the table with a slight wobble.

Jenn rolled her eyes at Jen’s back as she stumbled from the patio to the ladies’ indoors. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I might think that was a flounce.”

Among the many, many mysteries of Jen Fujima, a woman who relishes keeping her inner life fully interred and unindexed, is her deep sympathy for those who should least receive it. While I perform kindness to the selfish (my sister), foolish (Fenn) and foul (Jules, who for good measure is also amply selfish and foolish), a performance is what it is and where it ends often enough. Jen is not me. I know I wouldn’t defend to the death whoever Julian was shagging during our last few miserable years, even if he did come home from those evenings in considerably better moods.

“But let’s not talk about her.” Jenn batted her long eyelashes at me while a white-jacketed waiter placed sizzling steel platters of fajitas in front of us both. “Let’s talk about you.”

I’d been passing a hot corn tortilla from palm to palm to cool it down, but I paused. “I’m not very interesting at the moment.”

“Really.” A tendril of steam curled and drifted in front of her tawny face, partially obscuring her smirk.

“Not really at all. Here, have one of my shrimp.” I speared a particularly plump one and dropped it on her plate. Dammit, Jen, where are you?

Jenn ignored my “nothing to see here” offering. “I’ve been thinking, Mel,” she drawled, draping a tortilla with thin slices of peppers and chicken. “I’ve been thinking a lot about why you won’t meet Sara.”

As the child of a lawyer, I am amply familiar with cross-examination over the dinner table. Jenn’s technique is a little more sly than my dad’s delivery, though, and I can’t tug on her heartstrings as strongly with my big green eyes.

“I hope you haven’t thought a lot about it. I don’t like her husband and I’d rather not see where he lives, thanks.” Not bad — it’s even true. I gave myself a mental high five.

With a loud clatter, Jenn tumbled back into the orange vinyl chair next to me. Even with a fresh slick of coral lipstick, she couldn’t hide the light sway to her posture. “Mmm, they brought my tacosh,” she slurred.

“How did she get so drunk?” I stage-whispered to Jenn, but she only shrugged.

“What’re you talking abou’?” Jen tried to push a carnitas taco in her mouth but managed to drag it through her lipstick before it met its intended target.

“Why Mel won’t come to Sara’s salons.” Jenn stabbed repeatedly at a pepper that wouldn’t slide on her fork.

“Yeah, Mel. No need to be shuch a… a… child.” Jen reached over to peel a slightly burnt onion off my plate.

Jenn raised a forkful of chicken with a flourish. “Fair point.”

“How exactly am I being a child?”

“Fifteen years since you dumped Josh and you’re still angry with him?” Jenn ripped one of her tortillas in half and scooped up a few more slippery, recalcitrant peppers. “You guys were kids and he fucked up. You should hear him talk about how much regret he has for hurting you.”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass,” I sneered. The red “EXIT” sign leading back into the restaurant glowed like a tempting invitation.

Jen squeezed more lime in her frozen margarita and stirred it with the handle of her fork. “And you’re married anyway and Alexsh is shohhhh great. Hic!“

“What does Alex have to do with any of this?” I demanded, but Jen was seized by uncontrollable hiccups.

“Take three quick sips of your water,” Jenn ordered Jen with the crisp snap of an impatient third grade teacher. “Now! Water. Not your margarita. What I think she was trying to say is that you look, well, you look a little –“

“Jealoush! Hic!” Jen sipped greedily from her water glass.

“Jealous?” The raucous table of six to my left conspicuously stopped talking at my roar, and I lowered my voice. “Jealous? I’m not jealous of her. And I’m not required to forgive him. Not back then, not now, not in twenty years.”

“You forgave Alex when he went back to his ex for a week,” Jenn pointed out; Jen nodded in agreement.

“Different,” I mumbled. A brisk dash through the parking lot onto well-lit Beverly Boulevard might also do the trick. “We were sort of on a break.”

“You were always ‘sort of on a break’ back then.” Jenn formed little scare quotes in my face before she walked over and slapped Jen on the back, hoping to scare the hiccups out of her. “And disgustingly in love with each other. You should have walked away for good but no, not Saint Mel.”

“Saint Mel,” Jen gushed with a syrupy, crooked smile. “Oooh, my hiccups are gone!”

Though Jenn tried to pry free a response from me with her frigid sliver of a stare, I ignored her in favor of the now-cold lump of Spanish rice on my plate.

It was different with Josh, can’t you just trust me?

In the car back to Culver City, a nearly-sober and alcohol-flushed Jen wanted to talk about how she’d promised herself one night, just one night where she wouldn’t have to be Mommy, when she could forget about shit-filled diapers and chafed nipples and a husband who means well but can’t understand why she needs a nanny when she works from home.

“He doesn’t get it. Ethan is a full-time job,” she groused as we rolled through the dark streets of Mid-City, the fetid reek of the nearby tar pits leaking through the car’s air vents. Only a few solitary dog walkers and cigarette smokers were out this time of night, a reminder that Los Angeles is The City That Always Likes Some Sleep, Thank You Very Much.

I flicked my turn signal on and gently turned the corner onto Wilshire. Though it would take us out of the way, I always enjoy rolling through Beverly Hills late at night. After all the yummy mummies and Instagram wannabes and looky-loos have loped away, the city’s nearly dead until the sidewalk cafes open again for business. The silence is made louder by the blazing lights in every empty storefront.

As a kid, I used to imagine being rich enough to walk into Gucci or Tiffany’s and buy whatever the hell I wanted, not that I really wanted anything from either. (Fred Segal, a little further east, was another matter altogether.) Now that I can scoop up armfuls of Maison Goyard totes and the softest cashmere loungewear at Loro Piano, all courtesy of the Cranford cash sloshing about in my bank accounts, I rarely want to. Julian insisted on discreet label whoredom, of course — it’s not enough to have the cash, darling — but now there’s no firm reminders to keep up appearances. Alex likes me best in whatever I’m wearing, or nothing.

On the passenger window, Jen tapped a slow beat in time with the radio and kept her bleary eyes on the brightly-lit plate glass windows as I snaked Dad’s old biodiesel around the corner from Wilshire up Canon, past Mastro’s where Julian had first asked a very young me if I’d consider moving to London, just for a trial run, “to see if we suit, Mel, before I bring my suit, as it were.”

I’d tittered over my glass of Chateau Pichon-Longueville like I thought it the most clever bon mot. I knew it was not.

“Mel,” she said softly as the car idled at the corner of Canon and Brighton. “Whatever it is about Josh, I won’t tell Jenn. Or Cait.”

I bit the inside of my cheek sharply, hoping my child’s trick of self-directed pain might lessen the sting of what, no, who I sensed bristling just outside my line of vision.

“If it’s not jealousy,” she continued as the car lurched into gear, “what is it?”

You are safe here, Little Melissa, safe safe safe. I slid the car into an empty spot outside of Cartier, where a jeweler’s hand had whisked the winking gems from the windows hours before, leaving only the bare, bisque-colored mannequin necks on display in warm chairoscuro.

“Tell me about Sara,” I said, pushing the stem of the car’s shifter into park. I didn’t dare look at Jen, not yet. I didn’t trust myself not to tell Jen everything, or too little.

My very first, very best friend needs no word to understand when I have strung yellow caution tape that she should not duck beneath. “Well, I’ve only met her three times,” she said, more one to the Cartier window than me.

“Three?”

Jen’s head turned so quickly towards me her ponytail swished across my cheek. “Ye-es. The picnic, the salon, and then she asked me to bring Ethan over for a fitting.”

“For what?” An image of fat young Ethan trussed up as an infant Shakespeare for September’s salon drifted unbidden before me.

“She offered to knit him a sweater, which I tried to refuse. I think she just wanted an excuse to have someone over for lunch.”

“What, papier-mâché ormolu isn’t on the menu for next month?”

Jen said nothing for a while. A red and white paramedic van sped past us in a clamor, the first glimpse other humans knew this corner had not slipped into another dimension. “She’s sad, Mel. Lonely.”

A snarky put-down would have been easy, sure. Sympathy is hard, a knottier riddle when the object seems so much more deserving than you want to admit. Silence is a better option, for me at least, when the poles of dismissal and indulgence both have tricky snares clustered at their base.

“And very, very smart. Not as smart as you, of course,” Jen added in a rush. “Not that it’s a contest. But she reminded me a lot of you, when you were married to Julian.”

“What, in love with her husband’s best friend?” Ah, there you are snarkmonster, a little more socially acceptable when you’re turning your fangs on me.

“Frustrated. Bored. All Jenn and Cait see is this woman who’s funny and bright and throws terrific parties with all these little clever touches. Cockades and little folding fans, okay, but in those gold frames? Marie Antoinette, okay, but mostly pictures of celebs and poodles. And we all danced to ‘Ça plane pour moi‘ at one point, and some woman’s wig got knocked off when Sara was swinging at a pinata shaped like the Eiffel Tower.”

“But Cait said it was very refined.” I still didn’t want to look at Jen, and see writ on her tired face the concern she never seemed to have for me, not when I needed it.

Jen snorted. “Please. Cait was too busy flirting with some sad dad who’s in the middle of a divorce to pay much attention. Just… I liked her. I think you’d like her, too.”

Anxiety curled its claws on my clavicle and pressed tight and hard, hard enough that I gulped for breath before I slowed myself down, slower, Mel, slower, safe.

“She’s so curious about you. She was laughing, but she said Josh told her you were nearly perfect, until you were completely terrible.”

“Josh wasn’t a very good boyfriend,” I hedged, the words rolling from my lips, the soft bunch of the “b” feeling too much like a kiss as I gave Josh his former title. “If I meet her, I’ll set the terms.”

Jen slipped her small, cold hand in mine and squeezed. “I think she needs this, Lissie.”

The car grunted as I pulled away from the curb, away from the hollow fantasy of Beverly Hills. At night, it bares its emptiness without fear; it does not exist but for consumption. At this hour, there were none to consume, and barely anything to be devoured.

***

Like any sensible, sophisticated thirtysomething woman in possession of her wits and several offshore bank accounts, I reached out to Sara Brookes in the most mature way possible: I waited until my parents went away for the weekend, cranked up a “Sad Girl Starter Pack” Spotify playlist concocted by some girl half my age, drank most of a bottle of champagne on my own, and slid into her Instagram DMs.

It took five attempts to reach the level of dominance and nonchalance I craved, but after half an hour and a KitKat, I settled on this:

Hey — I’ll meet you for coffee as long as it’s just you and me. I’m not a fan of your husband.

(You’d never guess I used to be a writer, but I do give myself points for brevity.)

Halfway through my second episode of Dateline that evening, my new phone gurgled an unfamiliar chime.

Wow! Yes, yes and yes! Sara’s first message read, followed quickly by a second.

I have to confess, this is like getting a DM from a character in a book you’ve read a quintillion times saying oh, hello there dear reader, so please excuse me if I fangirl slightly.

I stared at the speech bubbles on the bright white of my screen. Fangirl? What?

Do you want to come here? I can make lunch. The girls aren’t back from afterschool activities until 4 most days, and Josh is in New York all this week. Do you have any allergies? I make my own gluten free bread and almond butter. Wait! You’re not seven, what am I thinking? Be thankful you have never experienced mommy brain — it’s a real thing.

It may have been the bubbles whispering, but I had the oddest little sizzle of the uncanny, like I was messaging another version of myself on Instagram.

Or it doesn’t have to be here.

I stared at the blinking line of the cursor in the text box, waiting for another bubble from Sara to splash on my screen.

I’d rather meet in Santa Monica, I jabbed into the phone.

Of course! Wherever you like. As long as I’m done by 3, I’m at your disposal. What’s your address?

Cheeky, as if you don’t already know it, like yours is scribbled deep on my internal notepad to gaze upon when I need to remember which street to picture you living a life I might have led.

Unless you don’t want to meet at your home, which is completely understandable. I’m so sorry, sometimes I get a little too swept away on a tide of my own misplaced enthusiasm. Josh says it’s charming but it has its limits.

Clever, clever Sara. Like a seasoned fisher, she knew precisely which shiny bait to select from her tackle box to lure me onto her hook. And like a foolish fish who knew the bait wasn’t really a flashy fly resting on the water’s surface, I still couldn’t resist. I let the hook sink in my jaw.

No, I wrote, the cogs of my mind greased by alcohol. I’d be delighted to have you.

***

Now with my writing course over, the hard part of starting the novel begins. Kitty and Duncan and Cecily and poor, dead Edward keep pestering me to speak, goddammit! I have joined a writing circle with some of my classmates, three lovely women with whom I’m plotting to keep on track and keep writing.

October 1st I start writing in earnest. So for now, I am pausing this… whatever I should call it. Whatever you might call it. Sara calls it autofiction. She’s been gobbling it up like a can of Pringles since I gave her the link this week; she said she’s learned the word “moreish” from me and that’s the adjective she’ll use. Tomorrow, maybe Friday she’ll reach the first chapters about Josh. I can’t wait to know how her truth and mine collide.

Dear reader, I’m plotting her escape.