Page 6 of Best Woman
Oh god, the pressure! I unzip the book and flip through pages of albums I’ve never heard of, mix CDs with esoteric titles likeBeach VibezandMike’s Hot Jamz Vol 69. There are a few Broadway cast recordings mixed in, but I’d rather throw myself from the moving vehicle than suggest we sing along toWicked.
A name catches my eye. “Who’s Ani DiFranco?”
She gasps, eyes wide. “What kind of question is that?” She’s overdoing it a bit, but she’s not the star of the school play for nothing.
I shrug. “One someone who has never heard of her would ask?”
“Put it in, put it in!” she insists, turning up the volume. We listen in silence for a moment to something that sounds more like poetry than music, and then a plucking guitar arrives. “I like it,” I tell Kim after a few verses.
“I can’t believe you don’t know who Ani DiFranco is,” she says, making a left turn past the complex where my pediatrician’s office is. “Are you sure you’re gay?”
My breath catches. “I’m not gay.”
She looks over at me, mortified. “Oh my god, I…I’m so sorry. I thought…I heard some people talking at rehearsal, they said you came out over the summer.”
I turn my head to look out the passenger window, hands twisting in my lap. “I did. I’m, uh, bisexual?” I hate the way it comes out as a question.
“Oh,” she says. Over the speakers, Ani is scatting little “aahs” and “ohs.” We listen to her sing about drowning for a moment before the girl beside me sighs. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have assumed.”
I still can’t look back at her. I don’t know why I feel so embarrassed. “It’s OK. I know a lot of people think it’s basically the same thing, or that I’m just…pretending I like girls too so I don’t have to like,actuallybe gay.” I turn toward her, weirdly angry and maybe a little hurt. “But if I was gay, I would have said I was gay. I don’t care what anyone thinks. I’m bisexual.”
“Use your education, and take an educated guess, about meeeeee…”
She turns in to my neighborhood, drawing up to the security gate. I give the guard my name and he waves us through. We drive by golf courses, a canal full of ducks, and rows of identical houses with identical cars parked outside. An old woman grips a walker as she makes the journey from her battered Cadillac to an open front door. We pull up to my house, and as I expected, my car is sitting in the driveway. I’m sure Aiden is upstairstaking his daily post-school nap, and my calls and texts are ignored on his phone.
I grab my bag. “Thanks for the ride.” Before I can open the door, her hand is on my arm.
“Hey,” she says. I look back at her. It’s golden hour and the sun is streaming through the window, illuminating her face. She is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. “Thank you for correcting me. I’m sure it’s fucking annoying to have people…get you wrong.”
My throat is tight. Her hand is so hot on mine. “Yeah. Um, you’re welcome?”
Something lingers between us for a moment. But then I remember that she is older, is into girls, and whatever camaraderie she just extended about me isn’t really aboutme,but about something that’s shared between us. And right now, that’s enough.
“It’s only twomillion, can you believe?” Everett says, without a hint of irony.
“What a deal.”
The apartment is on the upper part of the Upper West Side, and Everett complained about how long it took to get here from Chelsea for the entire Uber ride.
“The floors will need to be replaced, and the ceiling too.” He sashays through the open space, a general surveying the battlefield. “The exposed brick will have to go too. No one is doing exposed brick anymore. New appliances, new lighting. We’ll tear down that wall”—he points toward the living room—“and go for something open concept. So with renovations, maybe…three? That would barely cover the closing costs if I was buying downtown, can you imagine?”
I cannot. My rent is $1,200 a month, with two roommates, and we steal my neighbor’s wifi, which they should have thought about before hanging a photo of Susan Boyle on theirdoor, naming the wifi after her, and making the password “IDreamedADream.”
“Can you start taking notes? I want to get as much of this down as I can while I’m in the moment and unfettered by the ugly financial details.”
I take notes on my phone as Everett moves through the brownstone he and his husband are buying, jotting down random phrases like “urban pastoral,” “sensory deprivation tank,” and “Stephen Sondheim’s sex dungeon.” When I’m back at our office, I’ll attempt to translate all of this into a mood board and begin scouting pieces. It’s usually fun to shop with rich people’s money, to fill their homes with lovely expensive things I will never be able to afford.
“There are two guest rooms, so you can spend the night whenever you want when we’re working late. I can’t imagine how long it would take you to get back toChinatownfrom here!”
And he means it. If Everett had things his way, I would move in with him and his husband, an endless slumber party of billable hours. He loves to say I’m his friend first, protégé second, assistant third.
“Whatisthis? Julia, I told you I wanted golden beets, not red ones.” Everett cracks open one of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Riverside Park and chucks the $17 juice I purchased for him into the trees. I’m pretty sure there’s a scream from the street below.
“My bad.” I’m ninety-eight percent positive the voice memo he sent me this morning specified red beets, but Everett doesn’t pay me to tell him he’s wrong. He pays me—off the books—to drop off his dry cleaning, pick up upholstery samples for couches that cost more than a year of college tuition, and buyartisanal poppers for the sex parties he hosts every summer on Fire Island.
“I need to be alone in the space for a bit. Can you grab me an iced macadamia nut latte? And get yourself something, of course. It’s going to be a long day.”
“Sure, I’ll be back in twenty.” When I get back he’ll probably insist he asked for his latte hot and equal parts soy milk and half-and-half, but that’s a problem for future Julia—and whoever he dropsthatdrink on.
