Falling Together (3 page)

“Tell us what’s funny,” Pen ordered.

“‘Are you
getting warm
?’” said Will. He shook his head in amazement.

Pen put her pizza slice down and covered her face with her hands.

“Oh, no,” she said from behind the hands. “I was a nightmare, wasn’t I? Totally inept and screeching.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Cat. “No fair you two knowing something I don’t know.”

“That’s what she said,” explained Will. “In the bathroom. When I took off my sweatshirt.”

“Oh, God,” said Cat to Pen. “You said that?”

“I was a little freaked out, Cat.”

“You were
enraged,
” corrected Will.

“That’s what happens when I get freaked out,” said Pen, truthfully. “I get enraged.”

“And hurl insults,” added Will.

“I’m sorry,” said Pen. She looked at his face in the fading light and realized that ever since she had met these two people, she’d been too busy at first and then too comfortable later to really notice what they looked like. Will’s hair was wavy, but the rest of him was all straight lines: straight eyebrows, a straight mouth, his cheekbones two arrows pointing to the straight line of his nose. Even his eyes were somehow straight. It was a good face, but severe. When he smiled, though, with his straight, straight teeth, everything softened and lit up.

He smiled and said, “No problem. It got pretty scary there for a while.”

“Wait! I don’t think I thanked you guys, did I?” cried Cat. “Oh, God, I didn’t!”

Pen looked at her, too, and found that she was bird-boned and broad-faced, not pretty in an ordinary way, but a joy to look at. Her delicate brown hands danced when she talked. She knee-walked over to throw her arms first around Pen’s neck, then Will’s, planting kisses on their foreheads.

“That doesn’t usually happen,” she said, “the tonic-clonic thing. Grand mal. I haven’t had one in aeons. But I got thrown off last night.”

“How?” asked Pen.

Cat wrinkled her nose. “Ooh, well, a little party happened in my dorm, I guess.”

“You drank?” asked Will, then quickly added, “Not that you shouldn’t. I meant does drinking do it?”

“I don’t know if it was the drinking exactly. I think it was more of a triangulation.”

“Like in trigonometry?” asked Pen.

“Of course not,” said Cat. “I hate math. As in three things.” She counted them on her fingers. “I drank three beers, even though I hate beer. I stayed up too late. And I forgot to take my medicine.”

“So maybe you shouldn’t do that anymore,” ventured Will. “You think?”

“I definitely shouldn’t,” said Cat, nodding. “But I probably will.”

Then she reached out, grabbed one of their hands in each of hers, and squeezed. “Thank the Lord in heaven you didn’t call an authority figure. Or 9-1-1! Gosh, that would’ve been bad.”

Even in the heat, Pen felt her face grow hot, as her own voice yelling about calling 9-1-1 echoed in her head. In a flash, she pictured the ambulance screaming up to the building, Cat being slid into it like a batch of cookies, the hordes of gaping undergrads, Cat known forever after as the girl who mysteriously malfunctioned in the English building. Pen shot a don’t-rat-me-out-please look in Will’s direction, but he was already talking.

“It was pretty stupid of us not to, given the fact that we didn’t know what was wrong with you. A kid at my high school had epilepsy, so I sort of thought the seizure would be over fast. But we didn’t know for sure.”

Pen smiled her thanks at him. She wasn’t ready to tell Cat the whole story, yet, but she knew that she would tell her before long. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after that. There was plenty of time. She watched the sunset settle itself into dark pink and apricot layers behind the faraway trees.

“Your bed’s going to smell like citronella for weeks,” remarked Will.

“I don’t mind,” said Pen.

Y
OU
’
LL GO
,”
TAUNTED
J
AMIE
,
LEANING BACK IN HIS CHAIR
. “You know you’ll go. You know-know-know you’ll go-go-go.” He played the kitchen table like a conga drum, ending with a flourish.

Ignoring him, Pen focused on the food on her plate. It smelled winey and still held the shape of the take-out container: a tiny, brown, glistening mesa. Pen wheeled her knife and fork like birds looking for a place to land, poked wearily, took small, snapping bites. She set the knife and fork down with a bang.

“Why rabbit?” she asked irritably. “Why French? Again? I mean, I appreciate your bringing me leftovers, but enough with the rabbit and the snails and the congealed butter and the soggy crepes. Crepes don’t travel well; I thought we’d established that.”

Jamie shrugged. “It’s Nancy. She thinks if it’s not French, it’s not sophisticated, and if it’s not sophisticated, it’s a bad date.”

Pen narrowed her eyes. “If it’s not
French,
it’s not
sophisticated
?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“Why work so hard to please Nancy, anyway? Isn’t she just one of the Jims?”

“She was.” Jamie snagged a bite of Pen’s rabbit and grinned, chewing. “I just tonight asked her to call me ‘Jimmy.’”

Pen shook her head. “You are hopeless. Hopeless and bad.”

Roughly two years ago, shortly after Pen and Augusta had moved into Jamie’s apartment in what was meant to be a temporary arrangement, Jamie had devised a system that he called a work of genius and on which he congratulated himself with a glee and a frequency that Pen believed spoke volumes—and nothing good—about his moral development.

Upon first meeting a woman, he would introduce himself as James. At some point in their relationship, and this point could come within minutes or after several dates, whenever Jamie decided it was time for a phone number exchange, he would ask the woman to call him something else: Jim, Jimmy, Jay, or Jamie. For example, he might tell her, “I always introduce myself as James, but, actually, my friends call me Jim. I think maybe we should be friends,” or something along those cornball lines. Occasionally, if the relationship continued for long enough and the necessity arose, Jamie would initiate what he called, obnoxiously, “an ancillary nomenclatural shift.”

While the women took the changes to be a sign of growing intimacy, they were actually unknowing participants in a scheme that involved a reluctant Pen and the use of a code. In the drawer of the telephone table that had once belonged to their grandmother, tucked beneath the folder of take-out menus, Jamie had placed a laminated sheet (“Laminated?” Pen had said upon seeing it. “Are you kidding me?”) delineating the code:

If she asks for…

Most of the callers asked for “Jim.” There had been just three Jimmys (Pen had neither cried nor hung up on any of them) and two Jays, although Pen knew that the number of callers did not accurately reflect the number of women Jamie had met or dated because the majority of those women did not progress past the James stage. In two years, Pen had never once fielded a call from a woman asking for Jamie.

Pen was ashamed of her participation in the system, and every few weeks, she railed at Jamie for his treatment of women in general and for the system in particular, saying things like “You will burn in hell for this,” or “You suck,” or “You are hopeless and bad.” Just once, after a particularly fragile Jim had broken down on the phone, sobbing apologies to Pen, she had said solemnly, “Jamie, what would Dad say? He treated Mom like gold. He treated everyone like gold,” but when she saw Jamie’s eyes change, she knew she had gone too far.

The truth is that when Jamie first proposed the system—he had a brainstorm one day as he watched her answer the phone: “Hold on,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut, pointing at her with one hand, pressing his other palm to the side of his head, “I can use this. I
know
I can use this”—Pen hadn’t felt repulsed, but touched, even grateful. That her older brother would invite his emotional wreck of a sister and her sleep-disordered toddler to live with him at all was kindness enough, but that he would figure out a way to view Pen’s presence as an asset, something to high-five her over, rather than as the liability it clearly was, moved her nearly to tears, even now, whenever she thought about it. It was such a quintessentially Jamie thing to do.

When Pen was twelve and the despairing victim of mean-girl awfulness, sixteen-year-old Jamie had scooped her up and let her live for a whole fall in the reflected glory of his perpetual coolness, even letting her walk around the track at football games with him and his beautiful friends. Pen could still see Mary Anne Riddle’s evil face in the dazzling stadium lights, the dual stripes of her blush, her jaw actually dropping in an expression of envy and shock. Jamie had not discussed beforehand with Pen his decision to do this, had not set down ground rules or made her feel like she owed him. She was pretty sure he hadn’t even thought about it much. Under Jamie’s lawyer suits and caddishness, Pen knew he was still that carelessly generous boy, so that even when she called him “hopeless and bad,” she never really believed it.

“So we were talking about how you’re going to the reunion,” said Jamie. “How there’s no-no-no way you’re not going.”

Pen pushed her plate in Jamie’s direction. “Take it,” she said. “I’m through.”

“I thought you’d be eating dominatrix food with the dominatrix anyway,” said Jamie, digging in.

“She was tired and decided to order room service.”

Through a mouthful of rabbit, Jamie said, “I
thought
you’d be eating with her, but just in case you weren’t, I got you your own order of profiteroles. Check out the white box on the counter.”

Pen hooted with joy and began to sing a rough approximation of “La Marseillaise.” She paused and said, “Chocolate sauce?”

“In its own separate container for do-it-yourself, type-A-freak drizzling.”

While she was in the middle of chewing the first ungodly good profiterole, Jamie said, “It’s your ten-year college reunion, which is a big deal, right? Why weren’t you planning to go even before you got the e-mail?”

Pen swallowed, her throat suddenly tight, and, briefly, pressed her fingers to her eyes.

“You know why,” she said.

“The kid and no husband thing? Forget about it. Patrick sucks. Augusta’s awesome. You made out like a bandit with that deal.”

“You think I don’t know that?” demanded Pen, her eyes flashing. “And who gives a nit about what anyone thinks?”

Jamie smiled at “gives a nit,” one of their mother’s stock phrases, along with “shut the cluck up.”

“Good. So why not go?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Jamie looked down at the table for a few seconds, fingering his napkin. Pen watched his brow furrow and relax. The sound of a siren swirled in the distance, first faint, then louder. Jamie’s eyes met Pen’s.

“It’s not like it’s on the same day as the thing for Dad.”

As soon as Jamie said the word
Dad,
Pen saw her father’s face, yellow under that streetlamp, felt the stillness of his hand inside hers. She remembered the way he lay on his side, as though he were asleep. She put her hand over her mouth.

“Come on, Pen,” said Jamie, sighing.

“‘Come on, Pen’?” Of its own volition, her voice rose. Jamie glanced over her shoulder at the hallway that led to Augusta’s room. Pen took a breath and said more quietly, “‘The
thing
for Dad’? The
thing
means he died two years ago. Remember that?”