I treaded carefully while contextualizing Eliza’s existence. I drew her connection to people Boots had met while minimizing her personal significance, swallowing the niggling resentment I felt over doing this. I was not ashamed of Boots—if anything, I took pride in my proximity to such a likable human being—but I could not talk about him in front of him, which should’ve been the kind of Girls Night Out logic he was accustomed to from his friends.
“It’s not that I don’t want you to meet her,” I explained, “it’s just that I never see her. Next time she comes, we’ll have her over.”
Our kitchen table was covered by a broken burner and cardboard boxes. Boots was in the midst of repairing the burner and the boxes were for his pieces, some of which had actually been selling these days. Four in the last month after zero in the last six. This was a healthy turn of events for us both.
“It’s fine,” he said, remaining upbeat. “I’ll just be here, watching all the shows without you.”
“So low.”
“When do you think you’re coming back?”
He looked like he might cry but this was a function of the cat.
“Just curious,” he added, “it’s not like I’m waiting by the phone.”
He picked up his phone and tossed it onto a chair across the room.
* * *
The hostess decided against my familiarity as she removed a menu from her stand. Who goes to the same restaurant two nights in a row? No one, I telegraphed, let’s stick with that. In a different place, in a different neighborhood, repeat patronage would be perceived as a positive. But this place was too trendy. She probably ate this food for free after hours and was sick of it. She escorted me to Eliza, who was already in a booth in the corner, shielded from the din of the room. Spindly orchids hung from the ceiling, reaching down with their crooked joints.
“Do you think those are real?” Eliza asked.
Her manicure was the same shade as the petals.
“I know they’re real.”
“Fancytown,” she said, whistling.
Within minutes, Eliza was describing a distant universe. In this universe, her husband was putting pressure on her to have a second kid. I already knew this because of her tweets. New mothers were required to post all debates pertaining to the plights of motherhood as well as all articles about the conditions in places like Bhutan, stories that unsubtly boomeranged to the fact that they too had done something frightening and painful. Granted, they had done it on clean sheets and with lots of drugs, but they had entered into a universal sisterhood. Though I somehow doubted the mothers they pitied devoted any time searching for ways to hitch their virtue to the Elizas of the world.
Eliza’s offline universe was filled with local library drama, choking hazards, high fevers, faulty pelvic floors, gasoline-splattered shoes, and property disputes. The closest I’d ever come to a property dispute was the time we caught our neighbor kicking our wayward welcome mat away from her door.
“Are you guys thinking of getting pregnant?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to flip for it.”
“Be serious, you’re thirty-eight.”
“I know. I can count.”
“Don’t take it out on me,” she said, squeezing the words through her hyperaligned teeth.
“Take what out on who?”
Maybe I’d never connected with Eliza. Maybe we simply reminded each other of being young and any bond we felt was rooted in our respective narcissism and that’s why our odd-couple bit was collapsing like a soufflé.
Halfway through the meal, her sous chef friend appeared with an order of chèvre fritters. He had to get back into the kitchen, he explained, but first he wanted to hug Eliza. He was younger than I expected, for a friend of her husband’s. He wore a puka shell necklace and had ringlet hair and enormous vacant eyes, the kind that looked as if they were staring into the middle distance. Modern Psychology once printed that staring into the middle distance meant you were having a minor stroke, our copy editor having taken it upon himself to drop the words “urban legend has it that.” That was a bad week.
“How’s your food tasting?” he asked, hiding an anxious grin.
This question has always made me feel as if I’m being poisoned but Eliza had nothing but reassuring smiles for him. He seemed desperate for her approval.
“Brody’s like Jordan’s little brother,” she explained, after he disappeared. “He had a really hard time just existing before he went to culinary school.”