You are drunk, she informed herself drunkenly, feeling the spin starting in the middle of her head.
She unbuttoned his shirt so she could see his tattoo, but it seemed to spread all around and she was too close to his chest to be able to tell what it was. He was pushing himself against her and she could feel his hardness through her jeans and his. She meant to ask him about the tattoo, but she forgot the question before she could.
His hands were on the waistband of her jeans and then he was pulling at the button. Am I really gonna do this? Right here, right now? the least drunk part of her was asking, while the rest of her was barreling along.
He undid the button and zipper before she could pay attention. She felt his two hands on her bare ass.
Intoxicated as she was, there was something she needed to know. She pulled her mouth away from his. “Do you have something?” she asked. “A rubber or something?”
“No. Do we need it?”
“We need it,” she said.
“Aw, shit,” he said. He took his hands out of her pants. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“All right.” He looked agonized in his impatience. “I’ll go in there and find one. You stay here.”
Bridget felt the first tendril of shame as she buttoned her pants, the second as she fastened her bra and closed her shirt. She sat down on the grass. She looked up at the sky to a moon that was barely a sliver. She felt tears running down her face.
What am I doing?
Travis came back. He recognized the change in her mood. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she said. “I’m not.” Beer told the truth.
She wrapped her arms around her knees. Her body was closed for business.
“You gonna be sick?” he asked.
“No, it’s not that.” She paused and considered. “Yes, I guess I am.” She went around to the back of the bar and retched her guts out. She felt better in one way and worse in another. Nausea abated, reality came back.
She returned to sit on the grass and Travis sat next to her. “Feel better?”
“Not much,” she said. She put her arms around her knees again. She rested her head on them. God, I hate myself.
He patted her hair very sweetly. “You’re a beautiful girl and a fine pool player,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said into her knee.
“You want to go out sometime? Tomorrow?” he asked. “We can take it slow if you like.”
She lifted her head and tried to muster a smile for him. If she was going to have a hideously destructive one-night stand, she had at least picked a nice guy for it.
“I’ve got a boyfriend,” she said.
“Well.” He nodded. “Of course you do. Lucky guy.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think he feels so lucky.”
You have to be someone.
—Bob Marley
“I don’t know if we should go forward with the wedding,” Carmen said to Jones.
She sat at the table in the kitchen of their loft. The kitchen table at home with her mom was pine or cherry wood or something like that, with a million rings and scars on it. It was soft. This table, like everything else in their kitchen, was stainless steel. You could wipe off any marks, but it was hard under her mug, hard and cold under her elbow. Had Jones picked this one? Had she? Probably Annaliese, the designer, had picked it. It turns out I hate this table, Carmen thought.
Jones looked up from the espresso machine. She could tell he was about to press the button, but that he decided it would be unseemly to start up all the boiling, steaming racket when such a serious statement had been laid down.
“Carmen.”
“How can I think about that now? How can I think about flowers and hors d’oeuvres? I can’t.”
“How can you not? Come on. We’ve talked about this. What are you going to think about? Tibby? Are you going to think about her all day long? About your friendship? How many days or weeks in a row are you going to do that? And do you really think it’s helping, at this point?”
The tears were so warm in Carmen’s eyes and so cold by the time they got to her chin and dribbled down her neck or dropped onto the table. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“Move on. Call your agents. Call your manager. Set up some auditions. Look at flowers, visit caterers, buy yourself the most gorgeous, most expensive fucking wedding dress in New York City.”
Carmen studied a teardrop as it sat pertly on the metal surface of the table as if it were the only one. Well, there were more where that came from. She wiped it into a wet stripe with the tip of her finger. “I don’t know if I can.”
Jones knew about grief. You couldn’t say he didn’t. His brother had died at eighteen of a drug overdose when Jones was sixteen. “You can’t let it define you,” he’d said at the time he told her about it, maybe three months after they’d met, and then he’d never spoken of it again. He was either very good at grieving or very bad, and Carmen wasn’t sure which.
“Do you think that sitting here in your sweatpants day after day is some kind of tribute to her?”
Carmen shook her head.
“Carmen, I could see it for the first week. Ten days. I get it. But you’re not helping anybody here.”
Carmen shook her head again.
“I’m not saying you try to forget about it. Of course you can’t. But you take the sadness with you, you keep moving and you integrate it into your life, and the burden gets lighter over time.”
Carmen nodded. He’d given this speech before.
“Okay?” he said, like a coach sending her back onto the field.
She shrugged. “I don’t know if I can.”
Jones stood there staring at her for an extra moment. She knew her hair was wild and her face looked sallow. The sweatpants were not attractive. He was probably thinking how ugly she really was. It was probably a relief not to have to get married to her. She thought of the beautiful girls in Jones’s office who were constantly fluttering around him with their straight, silky hair.
He dropped his coffee cup into the sink with a clang and it startled her.
“All right, Carmen. If you don’t want to get married, that’s your decision.” He walked to the door, then turned around. “I love you. I want to marry you. I’d marry you today. I want to keep moving forward. You know how I am. But if you don’t want to, that’s for you to decide.”
Carmen put her hands over her face.
“But I’m not moving backward,” he said as he put on his coat. He opened the front door to leave. “That’s one thing I’m not going to do.”
Bridget slept in a field for the third straight night and woke up under a hot, damning sun. This bit of earth was positively the sunniest place in the state of California, and she was not enjoying it.
She was still nursing the hangover from the night at the bar, and she couldn’t shake it. Too much time had passed to blame the alcohol anymore. Was it the guilt? The self-loathing? She biked into Sacramento to look for something to eat that might settle her stomach. After she ate a sourdough roll and drank a cup of jasmine tea she rode by a Planned Parenthood office and stopped her bike.
There was a part of her that cringed at what she had almost done that night and a part of her that wished she had done it. She wanted to cross a boundary, not stay on this side of her life anymore. She wanted to tear it all down and dare herself to feel any worse.
She walked into the office with a long-haired swagger and signed her name on the sheet. As instructed, she went to the bathroom and left a urine sample. She penned a little drawing of the sun on her warm plastic cup. An ancient Earth, Wind & Fire song was playing when she went back to the waiting room, and she found herself dancing to it. She didn’t feel like sitting down.
She was free. She had that, at least. She had nowhere to be, no one to answer to. She slept under the stars. If she was going to be wrecked, at least she’d be free.
The nurse came into the waiting room and called her n
ame. “Bridget Vreeland.”
“Me,” she said. Her name was one thing she was left with, and she had mixed feelings about it. Maybe she could change it. She’d call herself Sunny. Sunny Rollins, like the saxophone player. Or Sunny Tomko. She’d borrowed Tibby’s old name once before when she’d needed to be someone different; Tibby would let her borrow it again.
She followed the nurse to an examining room. “Should I change into one of those gowns?” she asked. She wasn’t afraid of anything.
“Let’s just talk to begin with,” the nurse said. She was pretty old. In her sixties at least. She had hopeful eyes, Bridget thought, but sort of sad. It was hard to say which they were more. “What can I do for you?”
“I need birth control.”
“Are you using any now?”