Bad Habits Read online

  “Your admirer at the bar will be disappointed.” The man with the salt-and-pepper hair has been following us with his eyes. Now he pulls out his wallet and throws down a bill.

  “Oh, he’s not an admirer. Just killing time waiting for his lady friend,” she says with a short laugh. “Besides, this always scares them off.” She holds up her left hand and wiggles an engagement ring, though I could have sworn it wasn’t there a moment ago, when her hands were folded on the bar.

  “Congratulations.” In the time-honored tradition of best friends, I take her hand to get a closer look and see a giant solitaire on a double-rowed band of tiny diamonds like teeth. Her fingers are cold and dry. I feel something like an electric shock at the contact and hold her hand a little longer so as not to jerk mine away. As a result, we are still connected at the fingertips when she climbs into her chair, and I am left with the distinct impression of having helped her into her seat. I draw my hand back and sit down. “It’s stunning.”

  Gwen smiles her thanks, and I open my mouth to ask the next obvious question. But just then, with an alacrity I am certain he reserves for people who look like Gwen, the waiter appears. I point to a scotch located three-quarters of the way down the drink menu, at that precise inflection point that suggests both expensive tastes and a certain restraint in indulging them. “Double, neat.”

  It’s Gwen’s turn. “Make me something good?” She flashes the waiter a smile, and he scurries off to comply, leaving us alone.

  “Who’s the lucky guy?” I say, thankful that the interruption has kept me from betraying my rabid curiosity. “I had no idea you were even seeing someone.”

  She blushes. “I haven’t posted anything about it online.” And she names a recently exiled Brazilian director whose first film, made on a shoestring, was so universally adored that several big Hollywood names are rumored to be lined up for the second.

  “Wow.” My eyebrows shoot upward, though I manage not to gasp. “I can see why you’re keeping that close to the vest. So, what’s he like?”

  “Oh, you know. Wonderful. Amazing.” She laughs. “I never know how to describe people.”

  “He must be brilliant.”

  She shifts in her seat. “He’s very private.”

  That seems like a clear enough signal to move on, but I can’t help myself. “Must be hard for him being famous, then.”

  “He’s not,” she protests.

  The waiter arrives with the drinks and we are spared the argument. He tosses a pair of thick white napkins on the table and sets down my tumbler of scotch and Gwen’s slender highball, something cloudy with a twist.

  “Cheers.” She raises her glass. We click rims and take a sip.

  While I’m still savoring the warm shudder of scotch going down, Gwen asks, “How are your mom and Lily?”

  I grimace and exhale ninety-five-proof through my teeth. “They’re great, thanks for asking.”

  “Did you see them at Christmas?”

  “My mom knows not to expect me, with the conference,” I say a little stiffly.

  “Having a big annual conference smack between Christmas and New Year’s must be awful.”

  “It really is,” I lie.

  “It’s like a naked bid for loyalty.” She wrinkles her nose.

  I take another sip. I know all about naked bids for loyalty. My mom’s first relapse happened just after I drove away to college for the first time. I wound up living at home and commuting. Further relapses always coincided with some important opportunity; my application to the Program was very nearly derailed by one of them.

  Gwen breaks the silence with a laugh.

  “I’m sorry I’m having so much trouble with your name. My mom used to have a patient named Claire. She always had her panic attacks at dinnertime for some reason. The phone would ring right as we were sitting down, and it would be Claire hiding in a bathroom stall at some charity banquet, and my mom would have to talk her down.” She pauses and takes a sip, looking thoughtful. “I hope she’s doing okay.”

  “Your mom?”

  She laughs, startled. “Her patient. Mom and Dad are fine.”

  Of course, they are. What do a physics professor emeritus and a psychoanalyst with family money have to worry about? “They must be delighted about the engagement.”

  She’s been fiddling with her napkin, and now she crumples it abruptly. “Gallant died last year.”

  “Oh no! I’m so sorry.”

  “Well, he was twenty-two years old. A ripe old age for a cat.”

  As Gwen launches into the details, I find myself drifting back to the nights I spent in the Whitneys’ guest room with their big black-and-white cat curled up beside me. The alcohol has softened my defenses against the uncomfortable realization that despite my success, there’s some part of me that still longs for Gwen’s house in Wheatsville, where Gwen herself lived only a couple of years. A few words are enough to conjure it all back: the breakfast nook and formal dining room they actually used, the modern rug in the always-neat living room, Gwen slumped on the white sofa looking like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, the TV screen light flickering over her face instead of stained-glass lozenges.

  At the same time, there is another part of me that is becoming increasingly aware that all this inane chatter about cats is taking the place of something Gwen very much doesn’t want to talk about, and that I very much do.

  Without bothering to wait for a natural pause, I ask, “When’s the wedding?”

  Gwen flushes, and then I do, too. I’m not invited. We haven’t drifted apart. Gwen doesn’t want me in her world.

  I never belonged there in the first place. But she’s the one who invited me in.

  Gwen

  2

  Gwendolyn Whitney showed up on the bus in the middle of sophomore year, soft ivory beret setting off her long, dark hair, belted camel coat standing out in the sea of ski jackets and buffalo plaid.

  Beside me in the seat, Trace cracked a dirty joke. I turned away, leaned my knit cap against the window, and watched my breath fuzz over the outside world.

  An hour later, there she was again, sitting a few rows ahead of me in homeroom. “Gwendolyn Whitney?” the teacher said, solving the mystery of how the two of us happened to wind up in the same classroom: Whitney, Woods.

  If it weren’t for that shared initial, I might never have known Gwen’s name. Her new Prius was already on order from the dealer, an apology from her parents for moving her away from Manhattan in the middle of the school year; once she turned sixteen and got her license, she’d never set foot on a bus again. Everything would have been different if her name hadn’t been Whitney, if mine hadn’t been Woods.

  It seemed my father had left me something, after all.

  * * *

  Two weeks later, Gwen spotted La Règle du jeu in my unzipped backpack during homeroom.

  “Rules of the Game,” she said. It took me a moment to recognize the English title. “Is that Renoir?” She leaned over for a closer look, and the ends of her dark, shiny hair brushed my forearm.

  “Uh, yeah,” I said.

  “Why did you bring it to school? Is it for a class?”

  Nothing I did was for a class. “I’m returning it today,” I said uncomfortably.

  “Is it good?”

  The question stumped me. Quimby had never asked my opinion on the movies he lent me, and it had never occurred to me that I could have one. The films I liked best—​subtitled, black-and-white, thronged with women in opulent gowns and men who wore pistols—​were clearly not made for me. Watching them late at night in my closet already felt like a transgression.

  But the girl kept looking at me with her unblinking dark brown eyes, and I felt myself blush.

  “Um, yeah.” I racked my brain for something else to say. “It’s really good.”

  “What is it about?”

  Another challenging question. I’d been high as a kite when I watched it after my shift last night, and the black-and-white figures in the
ir warm ocher wash had often looked interchangeable. Anyway, I didn’t watch Quimby’s movies for the plots. I watched them to get lost in their strange, luxurious foreignness, to get a glimpse of that shimmer of something more I’d seen the first time. But I was afraid if I didn’t answer the question, or answered it wrong, Gwen would stop talking to me. And I wanted her to keep talking to me. She shimmered, too.

  “There are these people,” I tried. “And they’re all in this house together, and they’re having affairs.” My face burned. With a burst of inspiration, I remembered something that had seemed important: “And they go hunting.”

  Pathetic.

  “Do you think I could borrow it?”

  So quickly and naturally had she moved from wanting to asking that her hand was already reaching for it. It wasn’t a greedy gesture; there was something generous in it, even, a default assumption that giving was as easy for everyone as it must be for her.

  I slapped my hand down instinctively, crushing the flap over the video. “The guy who gave it to me probably wouldn’t like me lending it out.”

  She frowned, and I instantly regretted it. For a second she had thought we were the same. What I really wanted was to watch the film with her—​she was so clearly its rightful audience—​but I couldn’t invite her over. I pictured Gwen in her pristine coat walking through the kitchen, past countertops littered with Dollar Tree bags and unwashed dishes, and then pausing to examine the pictures on the living room mantel—​toddler-me in a tiara, Mom’s pageant photos, my father cut out of the family shots—​while Lily’s TV chefs yammered in the background.

  Worst of all, I thought of my mother sizing Gwen up, taking in her ivory beret. Asking me, with a sarcastic smile, how we’d met.

  Gwen was looking at me carefully. “What if you came over after school and we watched it at my house? We ride the same bus, right?”

  Later, I marveled at her tact, the way she’d clocked my expression and corrected course. At the time, I felt only a rush of pleasure that she’d remembered me from the bus. “Sure,” I said, already thinking of an excuse for Trace and the Kevins. “I’ll see you after school.”

  The bell rang. Gwen said au revoir, with a shade of irony. I decided to sign up for French.

  * * *

  I never went back to Quimby’s. His copy of La Règle du jeu lay on the floor until I accidentally kicked it under the bed.

  These days, I watched movies with Gwen on her flat-screen TV. We rented them by mail from a film society in Chicago, and what we couldn’t rent, Gwen found online and bought.

  In February she turned sixteen, and after that we drove the Prius into the city almost every weekend for repertory screenings. Gwen was still too nervous to drive alone—​she’d taken driver’s ed by correspondence, and what with one Dr. Whitney working overtime at the particle accelerator lab and the other always on the phone with her Manhattan patients, the practice hours had been fudged. Gwen’s anxiety about driving worked in my favor, inuring her parents to my constant presence in their house. My mom certainly didn’t object to seeing less of me.

  When Gwen started picking me up for school in the morning, my attendance record improved. We’d go back to her house after school and do homework in her room until it was time for my shift, and then she’d drop me off at the Frogurt Palace. Now that I had a ride everywhere, new vistas of time opened up. My floundering GPA slowly began to right itself.

  Gwen never talked about missing her friends in New York, where she had attended a famous prep school for girls. “Everyone knew everyone there,” she said when I pressed her for details. “Imagine being in the same classes together since first grade. It was really boring.”

  I knew that New York couldn’t possibly be more boring than Wheatsville. But even if the suburbs were not as novel to her as she pretended, Gwen clearly liked having her own personal tour guide to Wheatsville’s low-rent charms. When we weren’t watching movies, we hit the pancake house for bowl-shaped Dutch babies filled with powdered sugar and lemon slices, or the kitschy-quaint gift shops along the Riverwalk for hand-pressed stationery, or the grocery store for a picnic of fruit and fancy chocolates—​Gwen always managing, discreetly, to pay. At night we strolled aimlessly around the Riverwalk, kicking pebbles into the oily water, or hopped the wall at the public library to roam the sculpture garden. And all the while, wherever we went, we talked and talked about life, art, boys, the movies we watched together, and the books from my father’s old bookshelf I’d started plowing through in an effort to catch up to Gwen’s vast and seemingly innate knowledge.

  Now that I wasn’t high all the time, I’d started waking up earlier, before Mom and Lily got up. The house was so quiet and peaceful that I found myself able to finish my homework every morning before Gwen came to get me. In the shelter of my thoughts, I sometimes pretended I was just doing a little extra studying before heading to my private school on the Upper East Side, where I’d known the girls so long they bored me to tears.

  Over the summer, Gwen and I holed up in her basement viewing room and lived together in the films of Godard and Truffaut and Varda, Pasolini and Visconti and Fellini. By fall, a shared fantasy language had begun to infect our reality. After Blow-Up, we mimed a tennis match in Millennium Park; inspired by Daisies, we bought black-and-white dresses from Goodwill and practiced drawing thick rings of eyeliner around our eyes to match its reckless heroines, Marie I and Marie II. Even though I was taller, it went without saying that she was Marie I.

  “We even look the same,” she said, snapping a photo of us as the Maries with the retro Polaroid she got for her seventeenth birthday.

  We looked nothing alike, but I wasn’t going to be the one to say it.

  * * *

  “I’m pretty sure the missing Corn Queen from three counties over is buried under this log.”

  We were picnicking in the forest preserve late in the afternoon spring of senior year. The seventeen-year cicadas were out, screeching their heads off.

  “I do hear those local pageants get very competitive,” Gwen said, kicking her heel on the underside of the trunk. “Do you think the runner-up hired a hitman, or was it an amateur job?”

  “It was probably a satanic cult. Those were very big when I was in pageants. These woods were supposed to be swarming with D&D-crazed teens who needed little blond beauty queens to chop up for their rituals.”

  Gwen looked around appreciatively, taking in the slant of light through the twisted tree trunks. “To be fair, this is where I’d go.”

  I nodded. “There was also a wandering meth lab that roamed from grove to grove in an old ice-cream truck, luring junkies with its haunting jingle.” I took a bite of bread and spoke around it as I chewed. “And, of course, sex traffickers.”

  “It’s a wonder your mother let you out of the house.”

  I snorted. “There were probably more pervs by the yard in that kiddie pageant culture than in a federal prison.”

  Gwen unwrapped her chocolate bar. “I got flashed on the subway when I was nine. It’s a rite of passage in New York. When he caught my eye, he lifted his newspaper and I could see it, like, lying in his lap.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “That’s one thing I’m not looking forward to about—” She stopped herself abruptly.

  “You were going to say ‘going back.’ ”

  Her face flushed an ugly red.

  “You got into Columbia.”

  She was silent for a second, and when she looked up her face was white. “Mac, I’m a legacy.”

  “It’s okay.” It was absurd to feel disappointed. Sure, I’d managed to drag my GPA out of the gutter, and my standardized test scores were the same as Gwen’s. But it wasn’t like my dad had been a professor there. “At least I got a full ride to Urbana College.” I chucked a hard elbow of bread into the trees and grabbed an apple with a fake smile. “Just imagine, Urbana College! A whole thirty minutes away.”

  Gwen had been studying her chocolate bar wrapper, but now she looked up.
“It’s actually a good school.”

  “I didn’t notice you applying.” She looked like she’d been struck. I forced my voice to soften. “Anyway. Congratulations. I’m glad one of us is going somewhere.”

  “Thanks.” It was barely audible.

  I pictured the Columbia brochure. Velveteen quads nestled in thriving metropolis. Then I took a deep breath and picked up a paring knife to cut the bruises out of my apple. “Can I visit?”

  “Whenever you want,” she said eagerly. “You can even stay at my parents’ place—​they have plenty of room.”

  “They’re moving back, too?”

  “Well, with me in New York, there’s no reason—”

  “Right.” I dug the blade in. No reason for anyone to stay here a second longer than they had to.

  “What I mean is, my dad’s job at the lab finished up last year. They’ve been staying for me. I wanted to finish high school here.”

  There was a pause while I took it in. I cut a slice off my apple and tried to think of something to say.

  “Anyway, undergrad doesn’t matter,” she went on smoothly. “It’s what you do next that counts. After graduation you can get an apartment with me in New York and become a filmmaker.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know, publishing or something.” She shrugged. “Maybe grad school. It’s a long way off.”

  Four years. It did seem long. Impossibly long.

  Gwen studied my face. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she reached into her backpack and pulled out something in a frame. “This is for you.”

  It was the Polaroid of us from last summer, arms around each other in matching dresses, mounted on a piece of handmade paper from the stationery store. She had written a quote along the edges of the photograph in neat, flowing script: The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream.—​Virginia Woolf

  “I picked the quote because it’s sort of about cameras, if you read it a certain way,” she said nervously. “Is it too weird?”