Fiona shook her head and told me to lower my voice.
Sam appeared at the door with a spool of plastic. He wrapped the things Fiona couldn’t pack into boxes, the hairpin legs unscrewed from the dining table, the fiberboard slats to the IKEA bookcase she kept saying she was going to replace for something sturdier.
I helped her carry the wardrobe box into the bedroom, and we started loading her clothes onto the bar.
“I unfriended Aaron on Facebook yesterday.”
“Where’s he staying?” I asked. “Do you know?”
“I can’t believe you used that word,” she said. She hesitated a moment. “But it’s true—you’re right—”
“What word?”
“You called me a divorcée.”
“Come on, I was joking,” I said. “Fi. I didn’t mean—”
“I’m meeting my lawyer next week to sign,” she said quietly. “Then it’ll be official.”
I started apologizing. Fiona lifted a hand in the air. “Don’t. It’s fine,” she said. She gave a hard little laugh and gazed toward the window behind me. “Fuck,” she said after a moment. It felt like she was glaring at me, with only the whites of her eyes. “I went from girlfriend to wife in six months. And now, this.”
I felt like an asshole. I’d meant to use the word—“divorcée”—with an ironic glamour, but the joke didn’t land right.
* * *
? ? ?
I didn’t think much of him when I first met Aaron, though I didn’t say so to Fiona, of course. His dad was Malaysian, but Aaron went by his British mom’s last name for auditions: he said “Aaron Johnson” sounded more like a leading man than “Aaron Liu.” A pretty-boy with dimples in both cheeks, he would often talk about big-time celebrities like they were close personal friends of his. One of Aaron’s favorite stories to tell involved fist-bumping LL Cool J on the set of NCIS: Los Angeles, the time he booked “Dead Asian Gangster #2.”
I was wary of how quickly things advanced with Fiona and Aaron—moving in together after only a month of dating, married six months later—but who was I to dispute Cupid’s arrow? That was how she talked in those days, like Aaron was fated into her life. Maybe I was just hating because I felt abandoned, so soon after she’d moved back to LA. She’d met him at work; Aaron was their part-time receptionist, a job that allowed him flexibility to dip out for castings. He became her work husband fast, and it was totally platonic at first. She’d been through it in New York, she said, her entire twenties spent on losers and weirdos who wasted her time, and worse. The last one stole money from her. Fiona had said she was swearing off men. She was living with her mother, anyway, which made dating impossible. Then Aaron happened.
After he and Fiona were married for a year or so, I guess I started to accept him. When he wasn’t prepping his sides and I wasn’t showing vacancies or dealing with repairs, we would meet up for happy hour, killing time before Fiona clocked out. Of the three of us, she was the only one who held a job with steady hours, a paralegal at a litigation firm with the name of its partners on a high-rise downtown. Those wine-soaked afternoons eventually led into Fiona and Aaron’s troubles, with me caught in the middle.
But before that happened, Aaron and I were good-time drinking buddies, then, somehow, we became friends. He was surprisingly easy to talk to, warm and charismatic in a way I didn’t expect—when Fiona had first told me she was dating an actor, I’d thought: Oh no. But hanging with Aaron, I came to admire his ability for taking rejection day in and day out, his unflagging resolve to keep chasing his art. It made me start to think about writing again, all those pitch ideas and treatments I’d started, up on Adderall, but never finished.
One time, he and I got to analyzing my bedroom issues with Ed, the guy I was seeing. We were sitting in a booth at a naval-themed dive in Koreatown, the walls adorned with yellowing paintings of schooners and battleships, the bar lit up by Christmas lights and silver tinsel in July. “Ed” wasn’t his real name, just what I called him behind his back because of the erectile dysfunction.
“Is it something that just kind of—happens?” I asked. “Is it normal in your thirties—”
“Whiskey dick?”
I told him Ed didn’t drink. He asked if it happened every time, and I didn’t answer.
“Jane,” he said. “Seriously?”
“I mean, we do other stuff—”