That I didn’t even consider the possibility of running into Max at Will Maguire’s birthday party feels like a small victory. The last time I’d physically seen him was at Iz and Will’s housewarming party a year and a half earlier, before he was married. He’d recently gotten engaged, and she was there—Anastasia what’s her face—linking her model-skinny arm in his as they weaved through the party like conjoined twins. Seeing him that night—seeing them together—had floored me. A confusing, wrenching envy had stayed with me for too long after, which didn’t fully evaporate until months later when I met Burke.
“Heard you got married, Starling.” Max looks at me, and his eyes are the color of espresso, almost black. “What a goddamn miracle for you.”
Suddenly, from the depths of my mind, I remember his emails. For a brief, psychotic moment I want to laugh; I’ve been so preoccupied, so debilitated by my pain over Burke, that I completely forgot about Max’s emails—the snide, incessant, almost threatening messages he started sending me after Burke and I got engaged.
I recall the most recent ones, the three he sent in a row, just days before the wedding:
You never got back to me about that drink.
It’s rude to ignore someone, Starling. There are consequences for that kind of behavior.
I’m not joking, Starling. Consequences.
“You need to stop emailing me, Max.” I’m surprised at the level of anger in my voice. “Whatever you’re trying to do, it’s not working.”
Anastasia—now Max’s wife—whips her head around. Her eyes narrow. “What emails?” she spits.
Max cocks his head ever so slightly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Starling.”
“I don’t have time for this, Max. Just fucking grow up and stop playing your little games.”
He smirks and wraps his arm around Anastasia. “No offense, Starling, but I have better things to do these days than dick around sending you emails.”
How pointless it was to confront Max, to give his sadistic mind the satisfaction of knowing he’s gotten to me. I suddenly feel so ill I’m strangely lucid, as though I’m dreaming. I feel myself float up out of my body, and then I’m hovering above, watching myself huddled with Max and Anastasia. There is no jealousy, only a sharp, poignant sadness. For her, mostly, for having ended up married to a man like him. The feeling spreads across my chest, constricting, and the truth pulls me back into myself, so that I’m standing back on the ground with a sense of accountability I’ve never known before. Or maybe I’m just drunk. I didn’t eat dinner. I place my empty glass down on the bar and trace my gaze from Anastasia’s to Max’s, then back to hers.
“Your husband is a rapist,” I say bluntly, because every woman deserves to know whom she sleeps next to at night.
I’ve admitted these words to so few people that they sound foreign coming out of me. Anastasia’s face twists oddly; it takes me a moment to realize that underneath her Botox, it’s a scowl.
I lock my eyes to Max’s once more—they are small and dark and bitter—before turning around.
“Psycho bitch,” I hear him mutter as I walk away.
I feel free, and drunk from one cocktail, and too horrible to stay at the bar for another second. I leave without saying goodbye to my friends. I hail a cab, and only once its wheels are spinning do I let the tears break loose—silent, hot streams that drip down my neck and sternum.
I met Max LaPointe in the city when I was twenty-two, the fall after I graduated from Barnard. He was one of Will Maguire’s good friends from Duke, had cousins my family knew from Westport, and was one of those guys who seemed to know everyone, and who seemed to be everywhere.
“Starling,” he’d said the first time we’d met, locking his eyes to mine. “That’s a fucking great last name.”
After a monthlong flirtation we finally made out during a drunken night at Acme, after which I Irish-exited and left him stumbling around the dance floor. He called me a dozen times that night, but I was too scared to answer. I liked Max; he was the first guy in years whom I felt comfortable around.
But it was dangerous territory for me, to act on my feelings for someone. Doing so meant he’d inevitably learn about my OCD—there was no way to hide it—and that always, always ended badly.
Andie came over the next morning and gave me a pep talk. She told me that if I really liked Max, I had to be willing to take a risk and be honest with him. She said if he was freaked out by my compulsions, then he wasn’t someone I wanted to be with, anyway.
I called Max that afternoon. I apologized for ditching him at Acme and asked him to meet me for a drink at the Village Tavern. He showed up in jeans and a Duke T-shirt, his dirty-blond hair adorably tousled, and a feeling of tenderness washed through me. If nothing else, Max and I had become friends, and I genuinely believed that he was a good guy. I took a generous sip of my vodka soda and told him everything.
Max listened carefully, twirling his beer glass around in his hands. When I finished, he was quiet for a while, then cleared his throat.
“So, you’re telling me you have OCD and that it makes you touch doors in a certain pattern every time you leave a room?”
I nodded, heat creeping up the sides of my neck.
“That’s it?” A hint of a smile crossed Max’s face. “That’s what you’re giving me a heads-up about? Everyone in this city has something wrong with them, Starling. Besides, I already knew you had OCD.”
“You did?” I was surprised. “How did you know?”
“Will mentioned it, I think.” Max shrugged, then reached across the table and placed his hand over mine. “You don’t have to worry about it. I think you’re gorgeous, and cool. I’m into you.”
I was touched by Max’s words, and speechless. It was the first time in my life I’d had an honest conversation about my OCD with a guy I liked. After the incident with Colin Buchanan in eighth grade, I’d retreated into myself, and the shell shock had lasted through high school. I was still void of self-esteem by the time I started at Barnard, and the college environment didn’t help my insecurity. I hooked up with a few Columbia guys who got weird when they witnessed my OCD knocks firsthand. One asked me if I was a medium who was talking to dead people. Another time, I was standing in line for the bathroom at a party and overheard the guy in front of me ask his friend, What was the name of that blond girl Derek used to bang? She’s hot but, like, has those psycho mental problems.
Me. It was me. I was the girl with those psycho mental problems Derek used to bang. On the verge of bawling, I’d fled the bathroom line to go find Kendall.
Kendall had always attributed my unsuccessful love life to my not yet having met the right person.
But Max—perhaps Max was the right person. Finally I’d met someone who could see past my disorder, someone who shrugged it off so that it stopped defining me in my own mind. Max was charming, and smart, and being around him I felt beautiful, and confident.
That night, after another round of drinks at the Village Tavern, Max and I interlaced our fingers and walked back to my apartment, electricity humming between us. After we had sex, he stayed the night, the first time I’d let a guy sleep over since junior year.