Authors: Jennifer Close
The Smart One
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Close
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Close, Jennifer.
The smart one : a novel / Jennifer Close. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
“This is a Borzoi Book”—T.p. verso.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96232-4
1. Single women—New York—Fiction. 2. Life change events—Fiction. 3. Adult children living with parents—Fiction.
4. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3603.L68S63 2013
813’.6—dc22 2012018662
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Front-of-jacket photograph © Mimi Haddon/Digital Vision/Getty Images
Jacket design by Abby Weintraub
v3.1
For Tim
,
My favorite one
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
CHAPTER
1
From inside her apartment, Claire could hear the neighbor kids in the hall. They were running from one end to the other, the way they sometimes did, kicking a ball or playing tag, or just running for running’s sake. They had their dog with them too, a big, sad golden retriever named Ditka, who always looked confused, like he couldn’t understand why or how he’d ended up living in an apartment in New York.
Claire muted the TV and listened to see if the kids were going to stay out there for a while, or if they were just waiting for their parents to take them somewhere. She hoped it was the second option. It was Saturday morning, which meant they had hours ahead of them. Having them out there made her feel trapped in her own apartment. Just because she was sitting on the couch in sweatpants and had no plans to leave didn’t make the feeling go away. She could sense their presence on the other side of the wall, so close to her. She could see the shadow of Ditka’s nose as he sniffed at the bottom of the door. They were invading her space, what little of it she had. And it was interfering with her plan to be a hermit for the whole three-day weekend, something she was getting better and better at.
Last week, she was crossing Broadway and a man crossing the other way looked her in the eyes, pointed to her face, and said, “I want to fuck you.” On the street, she’d blushed and walked away quickly. But when she got home she realized two things: The first was that the comment had pleased her. Claire was pretty, but it hadn’t always been that way. She was the kind of girl who grew into her looks, who suffered through an awkward stage of braces, unfortunate haircuts, and
overalls in her teen years. Now, when men called out to her, “Hey, Princess. Looking good, beautiful,” she was grateful. She would duck her head and pretend to be embarrassed or insulted, but if they called out, “Smile, pretty girl,” she always obliged.
The second thing she realized was that the man on the street was the first person to talk directly to her in almost three days. She didn’t know whether to be impressed with herself or very disturbed. She chose a mix of the two.
THE KIDS IN THE HALLWAY
were getting louder, and Claire turned up the volume on the TV, hoping that their parents would come out soon and tell them to come inside or at least quiet down. The kids’ names were Maddie and Jack, and they were somewhere in the nine-to-eleven age range. Jack was older, and starting to get that shoulder hunch that preteen boys get, like the whole world was so embarrassing, he couldn’t even stand up straight. Maddie was the kind of kid who believed adults found her adorable, shouting out things like “Purple is a mix of red and blue” in the elevator for Claire’s benefit and then smiling and looking down at her shoes, as if she were shy. They both had dirty-blond hair and buckteeth, and Maddie would find out soon enough that she wasn’t adorable or charming, so Claire always smiled at her.
She and Doug used to call them the Hamburger Helpers, because every night the smell of ground beef and onions came wafting out of their apartment. Sometimes Claire wanted to call the kids into her place to give them something to eat, anything that wasn’t meat and onions in a pan. It used to be a running joke—whenever they’d smell the ground beef cooking, Doug would say, “Is it tacos for dinner?” and Claire would answer, “Nope, just some good old-fashioned Beefy Mac.”
Together, she and Doug talked endlessly about the family. They wondered what possessed the Hamburger Helpers to raise a family in an average New York City apartment. Every Sunday they watched as the dad took the subway with Maddie and Jack to Fairway, watched the three of them return carrying loads of groceries, struggle onto the elevator, and go up to their apartment. Wouldn’t they have been better off in the suburbs? Wouldn’t things have been easier?
Claire and Doug laughed when Jack failed his spelling test and they heard the fight through the wall, heard Jack say, “Fuck spelling,” to his parents. They agreed that it was only going to get worse over at the Hamburger Helpers’ as Maddie and Jack hit puberty and hormones crawled all over their tiny apartment. They pitied the family and what was in store for them.
Now Claire realized the family was probably pitying her—that is, if they’d even noticed that Doug had moved out. Either way, they seemed to be getting a lot more annoying.
WHEN DOUG AND CLAIRE CALLED OFF
their engagement, her friend Katherine had said, “In some ways, it’s worse than a divorce.” It was Claire’s first night out since the whole thing happened, and she and Katherine were at a wine bar near her apartment. “I guess it’s because it ended before it even started, so it’s like someone dying young.”
“Great,” Claire said.
Katherine wasn’t listening. “Or maybe it’s because by the time people get divorced, they’re usually like really sick of each other, and have done bad things and are ready to move on. With you guys, no one saw this coming.”
Claire figured this had to be the strangest response she would get. Katherine, a friend from high school, was so perpetually messed up that you got used to it after a while. Her first week in New York, she’d watched a thirty-two-year-old woman leap off the subway platform at Twenty-third and Park, killing herself as she got hit by the number 6 train. Katherine had skipped work for two weeks, leaving her apartment only to purchase a small white Maltese for eight hundred dollars from the pet store on the corner with her parents’ credit card. Things since then had been touch and go. Claire could forgive her strange reply. Surely everyone else would know how to be more appropriate.
But Claire was wrong. Apparently no one knew how to react to her news. Her two friends at work, Becca and Molly, decided that their mission would be to cheer Claire up by telling her all of the bizarre love stories they knew. Sometimes the point was clear (“My mom was engaged before she met my dad, you know!”) and sometimes it wasn’t, like the time Molly told her about her sister who worked as a nanny
and ended up running off and marrying the father of her babysitting charges, leaving his first wife in their dust. “Isn’t that romantic?” Molly asked.
No
, Claire wanted to say,
that’s not romantic, it’s adultery
. But she stayed silent and smiled.
Becca and Molly had been nice coworkers to have. They were all around the same age, all enjoyed getting an occasional drink after work to complain about the office, and were happy to have lunch together. She had always liked them. Until now. One afternoon in her office, as Molly told her about all of the friends she had who were getting divorced, Claire said, “Well, at least I won’t have to be Claire Winklepleck. Now there’s a silver lining.”
Molly stared at her for a moment, and then said quietly, like she didn’t want to upset Claire, “So many women don’t take their husband’s name anymore. You wouldn’t have had to do that if it made you uncomfortable.”
“Right,” Claire answered. “Right.”
She’d decided that day that Becca and Molly had to go. It was really for the best. She began to avoid them. Whenever she saw them coming toward her office around lunchtime, she’d pick up the phone and call her voice mail, so that when they popped their heads in, she could roll her eyes and point to the phone, then wave them along, as if to say, “Don’t wait for me, this could take forever, just go, go on!”
MADDIE AND JACK WERE NOW
screeching and laughing in the hallway, the kind of laughing that often turned into hysterical crying, when one kid hit another and the game quickly went south. She waited for that to happen, but they quieted a little bit and resumed their game, some sort of crummy hallway soccer, she assumed. She hoped that they’d be out of there by the time she wanted to order dinner, because she didn’t want to have to wave to them and say hello, have to pet the dog and smile as she accepted her food.
She probably shouldn’t even be ordering out, considering her money situation, but what difference did twenty more dollars on her credit card really make at this point? The credit card balance was so high, so unbelievable, that she was able to ignore it most of the time, to pretend
that there was no way she’d spent that much in the past six months. It just wasn’t possible.