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NOW
That feeling—of waiting for all of this to be over—didn’t go away. Joanna had been right the previous spring: she was cast in several important roles that first semester, but none of them engaged or compelled her as fully as Shoshana’s show, or previous shows, had. She tried her best, but she knew—and she knew that Coop knew—that she was just going through the motions. She was bored, to tears, by all of it. Her classes were easy, and theater felt like nothing. In their downtime, her friends sat around and had the same navel-gazing conversations they’d been having for three years now—no conclusions reached—and then they piled into someone’s car and drove into the city to see the same old shows, over and over and over again. Every show was courageous, inspiring, breathtaking, and Joanna began to think to herself, They can’t all be that good. Then, they would pool their funds and have the same lousy drinks at the same creepy bars, fending off the same would-be suitors, before going home and doing it all over again a week later.
Perhaps in an effort to ascertain where she and Erik had gone wrong—perhaps out of sheer boredom—Joanna dated a lot that year, to varying degrees of success. Some guys she went out with were creeps. Some were genuinely threatening. Most of them, though, were nice. Harmless. Funny, smart. Cultured, or at least on their way there. In short, exactly the kind of guy that Joanna had mocked Erik for not being that terrible night junior year, and exactly the kind of guy she thought she might have wanted. But none of them could hold her interest for more than a few hours. Even the ones that she let kiss her, or more, weren’t more interesting—just more insistent.
Joanna’s peer group had changed over the summer too—Ronnie had dropped out, Shoshana was sharing an apartment with three other women in Brooklyn, and Aaron had moved out to L.A. Without the three of them to fall back on (even Ronnie would have provided a certain kind of distraction), Joanna felt increasingly at sea, although she and Shoshana continued to keep in close touch—Joanna even spent much of Christmas break crashing on her couch. She felt terrible about leaving Poppa alone, but she couldn’t face Grace. Not when she still felt so lost. Poppa flew down to JFK on Christmas Eve and took her out for a nice dinner and a night in a hotel (to get her away from the moth-eaten couch at Shoshana’s, he pointedly did not say), but it was clear to both of them that she wasn’t much in the mood for festivities that year.
“Jo, listen to me,” he told her as they waited for the car she’d ordered to bring him back to the airport the morning after Christmas. She turned to him, stamping her feet on the pavement to try and warm them. She hadn’t packed right for this trip. Cold air escaped from his nose and his lips as he spoke, bringing to mind the cigarettes he’d smoked when she’d been very young. A memory of the smell of him in those days—tobacco and musk—hit her nose as a phantom scent, and she blinked back a tear. “I know,” he continued, “that things are…off…for you right now.”
“Pop—” she began with a sigh. He shook his head and tightened her coat collar like she was a little girl.
“You’ve gotta take care of yourself, understand? I don’t like seeing you like this. Things—they don’t always work out, but…” He trailed off and then, in a rush, said, “Oh hell, you know what I’m trying to say, don’t you, sweet pea? I love you, and you’ve looked terrible since I picked you up last night, and I’m worried for you.”
Now Joanna struggled to blink back a river of tears. If she’d had the energy, she may have been offended by his comment, but she didn’t—and, anyway, he was right. She looked terrible, because she felt terrible, and she felt terrible because…because nothing was the same.
Poppa’s car came a minute later, saving them from the kind of heart-to-heart that neither of them really wanted to have out on the frozen sidewalk, but he did whisper “In ten years’ time, this whole thing will just be another chapter in the story of your life” into her ear as he hugged her goodbye, and that line—so him of him—stayed with her.
A few days later, Joanna took the train to Northampton, where she was staying with Mary until it was time to return to Connecticut. It had been almost a year since they’d seen each other, and Joanna felt parched for some normal with her oldest, and best, friend.
That’s not what she got.
When she stepped off the train, Mary was already on the platform, jumping up and down, waving. She’d had a blowout and had kept her hair down and uncovered, despite the below-freezing temperatures, in order to show it off. She wasn’t even wearing mittens, though Joanna saw why after only a moment: on the ring finger of her left hand sat a simple, elegant engagement ring. It was small—just a thin band with a row of five miniscule diamonds—but it was beautiful, and it rocked Joanna to the core.
“Don’t you love it?” Mary breathed. Joanna, who hadn’t even known Mary was dating anyone—had she told her? Had Joanna become that self-absorbed, that she could so easily forgot her best friend’s news?—could only nod. After the last several months, and after her conversation with Poppa, this shocker truly disoriented her. She felt two steps behind from the moment she saw the ring.
“So…what happened?” she asked once they’d reached a coffeeshop and she could begin to catch her bearings.
Mary flipped her hair over her shoulder and beamed at the waitress who was delivering their drinks. Joanna’s gut clenched when she recognized the look on Mary’s face: it was the face of a woman so securely, so firmly, in love, that it spills out of her and lands on everyone and everything in her path. She’d worn it herself for years. She was happy for Mary, really, she was, but…oh, she couldn’t help but ache.
“Do you remember the date I told you about sophomore year, with the med student whose cousin lived on my hall? Andy?”
“Vaguely…” Joanna searched her memory. “Wasn’t it horrible?”
“Yeah: he was distracted the whole time, he picked a dingy restaurant, and then he made me pay for my own meal! Well…” She shrugged her shoulders and smiled again.
“Wait—I’m confused. That’s the guy you’re marrying?” Mary nodded, a blush spreading across her appley cheeks. “How did that happen? You were so pissed off!”
“I was, totally! That’s the crazy thing. And then, on Halloween, I went to a party with Rachel and her brother and some of his friends. It got a little too crazy, so we decided to go to a different friend’s house, where there was a smaller crowd. We left the first guy’s house, and we were walking down the street, and Rachel’s brother had already had too much to drink, so when he saw this group of people coming toward us and taking up the sidewalk, he tried to dodge out of the way, but he fell and gashed his head open on one of those fancy lightpost things. It was wicked gross, but we were close enough to the second friend’s house, so one of his friends ran to that guy’s house and borrowed a car, so we could take Rachel’s brother to the ER, and guess who the attending physician was?”
Joanna had gotten sufficiently turned around during Mary’s story that all she could do was return her expectant smile with a blank look. After a moment, Mary raised her eyebrows and exclaimed, “Andy!”
“Ah.” Joanna walked through the details in her mind and then commented, anti-climactically, “What a coincidence.”
“Yeah! He’s the one that actually recognized me. His shift ended pretty soon after he saw Rachel’s brother, and he asked if he could buy me a coffee. I almost said no, but the night was ruined anyway, and I was exhausted, so I figured what the hell, and we spent the whole night—literally—talking in the waiting room. We never got the coffee! We never even left the hospital! We just talked about…everything. And he apologized for our first date. It had been his first year in med school, and he’d been so busy and strung out, he said he could barely see straight, let alone make a good impression. But this time…he just kind of…didn’t leave me alone, and it got real serious, and he popped the question yesterday, and I said yes!”
“So you’ve only known him, really, for a couple of months?” Joanna clarified. She winced as soon as she said it; it sounded harsher than she’d meant it to, and she saw the hurt in her eyes that Mary tried to cover up. “I mean—sorry. I’m just, so surprised! What did your parents say?”
“They don’t know yet. Oh, I mean—they know about Andy. I told them I was seeing him a little while ago.” And you didn’t tell me? Joanna thought, before she could squash it down. “But I haven’t told them this yet. I wanted to tell you first.”
Mary gazed down at her ring again. “Jo, I know I was never like this. I always just went from one guy to the next, but…jeezum crow, I love him,” she sighed. “He’s amazing. You’ll love him too! He’s sexy, smart, charming, funny, sweet. I can’t wait for you to meet him.” She smiled across the table, and Joanna couldn’t help but feel her heart melt a little. She was a little curious—what must this guy be like, to make her Mary talk like this?
She found out that evening. Andy met the two of them for dinner, having picked out a casual, pub-style place that, miraculously, wasn’t packed on New Year’s Eve. He was handsome, Joanna thought, in a nerdy way—wire-rimmed glasses he kept pushing up, a polo shirt tucked into khakis with an actual crease in the leg. He was quiet too, but that probably made him good for Mary, who was so giddy and chatty that night that no one else would have gotten a word in, anyway. And he certainly was smitten. He couldn’t take his eyes, or his hands, off of her all evening. All that shoulder-caressing, hand-holding, finger-twining started to wear on Joanna, and she excused herself just before dessert. She stepped outside to get some air, wishing she had a cigarette, and glanced back in through the window. From here, she had a clear view of their table; Andy had taken advantage of their moment alone to cup Mary’s chin in his thumb and forefinger and pull her to him for a kiss that even took her breath away, fifty feet away and through a plate-glass window.
Just like Erik, she thought miserably. It was all she could do not to cry right there, in the slush and the dirt and the freezing cold air.