“From where I’m sitting, I think you dodged a bullet,” Hannah says as we gaze out at the rows of crimson velvet seats. “I’d be terrified to do anything with this many people watching.”
My eyes scan up to the mezzanine and then the balcony. Performing in front of this many people would have been my dream.
I wipe at my eyes, embarrassed they’re starting to well. I thought this was going to be my life: performing in front of an adoring crowd. I wonder where the Sliding Doors moment in my life was that I took a left instead of a right and it all went so completely wrong.
Hannah shoves a wad of napkins in my direction. “Paula’s going to have a double homicide on her hands if you don’t stop,” she says around a mouthful of bagel.
“I really tried to make it work here,” I tell her.
“You make it sound like your life in New York was awful. It hasn’t been that bad, has it?” she asks.
“Nothing worked out the way I thought it would.” I dab at my eyes and the napkin comes away streaked with orange and purple splotches.
“I don’t think that’s how life works, Finn. If life worked out how I thought it would, I would have been a teacher slash ballerina slash astronaut, and you know I’d be terrible at all of those things.”
I laugh at the mental image of her trying to control a room of screaming eight-year-olds while wearing a tutu and a space helmet. “But that’s different. That’s kindergarten career-day stuff. I could see this. I didn’t change my mind, but then . . . no one would let me.”
“Do you remember the night we met? You told me you were going to be famous.”
“Oh god, I was so obnoxious!” I hang my head and cringe at my nineteen-year-old self, so sure this would happen for him. What would he think of me now? “I feel like I wasted all my time in New York on dreams that didn’t come true.”
“So what? So you didn’t ever get cast. Sounds like a crappy life to me anyway. Eight shows a week? No free weekends? No social life? Cater waitering between roles for cash? Only so . . . what? You can make it and schlep around the country on a coach bus playing regional shows in Des Moines and Phoenix? You’d hate that.”
“How do you even know all of that?”
“I googled it when you quit. I wanted to be prepared to talk shit about your path not taken.”
I nudge her with my shoulder, touched by her willingness to hate my enemies, real or imagined. “But it’s not just that.” I stand up and pace a track from one end of the stage to the other to burn off some of the anxiety this conversation is creating.
“Enlighten me.”
“It’s theater, it’s Jeremy—” She scoffs at the mention of his name. “Hell, it’s Theo, too. I wasted so much of my time here.”
“I think you’re focusing on all the wrong things,” she says, a hint of defensiveness creeping into her voice. “We had fun, didn’t we? To me, New York is that time we went to a Yankees game before remembering that neither of us give a shit about baseball, so we bought hats and hot dogs and left. It’s slices of Artichoke pizza in the Village at four in the morning, and biking across the bridge to Dumbo on summer weekends so we could stare back at New York across the river. It’s the eight million dinners, and brunches, and nights out, even the ones that kind of sucked because those would be the best to laugh at over bagels the next morning. Not to mention the Christmases. Well, just the good ones. To me, New York is us, and that wasn’t time wasted. Not to me, anyway.”
“I’m sorry, have you seen my best friend? I think aliens might have abducted her because that was sappy as hell.” But then I lean my head on her shoulder because she’s right—there were lots of good parts, too. She leans her head against mine and we stare out into the theater.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” she says after a minute, and I nod. “I’m sad for me, though. It feels like I just got you back, but I know you need to go.” I understand because I feel the exact same way.
“I think a fresh start will be good for me. But we can have video calls—maybe we can do a monthly virtual movie night, all four of us? And you have David now. You’ll be okay.”
She lifts her head and stares down at the remnants of her bagel in its foil wrapper in her lap. “I don’t know. He’s pretty mad at me right now.” She says it casually, but when I turn to look at her, her teeth are gritted, like she’s trying hard not to cry.
I squeeze her arm and try to make my voice light, pushing aside the toll this conversation has had on me, too, and say, “Let’s get back to everyone before Paula kills us for all this eating and crying.”
As we stand up, I add, “You know I’m always here for you if you need to talk, right? Even when I’m not physically here, here.”
* * *
? ? ?
?After a short drive from the theater, our taxi pulls to a stop amid a stretch of luxury stores on Fifty-Fifth Street, all closed for the holiday. We must look like a clown car as we exit: Hannah in her red gown; me in the technicolor dream cape; Theo in King George’s shiny red-and-gold suit, complete with a powdered wig, crown, and dalmatian-spotted capelet; and Priya in a black beaded flapper dress giving her best Velma Kelly. Across the street, a family of tourists in matching blue puffy coats stops to gawk. The dad pulls out his phone to snap a photo of the spectacle.
Theo leads the way to a gold door beside a planter box of hedgerows while Priya brings up the rear, toddling behind us on her pin-thin stilettos. Her range of motion is constrained by the dress, which is tight around her knees before splitting off into a curtain of beaded fringe.
When we enter, a ma?tre d’ in a plaid sport coat looks up from his iPad. “Ah! Mr. Benson, perfect! Welcome to the Polo Bar.” He shakes hands with Theo, clapping him on the shoulder like they’re old pals. “Would you like to have a cocktail before heading downstairs?” he offers.
After a round of dirty martinis served alongside silver bowls filled with perfectly salted chips, mixed nuts, and little fried balls that turn out to be olives stuffed with morsels of sausage, the ma?tre d’ leads us downstairs. The windowless dining room resembles the end-of-days bunker of an equestrian-obsessed member of the landed gentry. We’re seated in a cognac leather booth along one wall. Each seat has a plaid pillow, for decoration or lumbar support, I’m not sure. As I survey the wood-paneled dining room, I can’t help but grin at how we’ve upgraded from the dining hall pancakes of our first Christmas.
The moment we’re settled, another waiter in a plaid bow tie and vest descends on our table with a bottle of champagne. The sound of the cork popping echoes around the deserted dining room.
“I’d like to make a toast,” Theo says, clinking his knife on the side of his champagne flute.
“Finn,” he begins, “did you know I consider the night I met you to be one of the best nights of my life?”
Even though my memories of the evening are hazy, at best, my cheeks flame at the mention of that night. The only night we were more than friends.
“Because that night brought you all to me, and you’ve become more like family than my actual family.” Of course we cherish that night for wholly different reasons. I feel myself deflating, like a squeaky balloon giving its loud, flatulent death rattle. “I know today might be the end of a tradition, but it’s not the end of my love for each of you. Our kinship is tattooed onto my heart. Not literally, obviously, but if we have a few more bottles of this”—he points at the bottle of Perrier-Jouet in the ice bucket beside our table—“I could be convinced.”