Old Friends

Fiction

There are flies on her salad plate. She talks with her hands; she doesn’t notice she’s swatting them away. They buzz away; they buzz right back to her half-eaten lettuce. Their wings are cut glass. Their heads are full of eyes.

I’m questioning why I came at all. I enjoy watching flies contaminate her salad much more than listening to her talk about whatever she’s been saying for the last twenty minutes. I suppose I came because I’d never been to this hotel before. Some grand historic hotel that New York celebrities have visited for decades. She often stays here on weekends. She told me to meet her at the rooftop pool. I’d never seen a rooftop pool before.

I turn my attention away from the flies for a moment, but I can’t focus on the words coming out of her mouth either. I can only focus on her teeth. All pearls, all pushed and prodded into a neat little line.

Every single night, she flashes those pearls and the world rises to its feet and pounds its hands together. One smile causes an uproar. Every single night.

She says the same words every single night. Every night, she is having the same epiphanies, crying the same tears, smiling the same smile. She lives the same life every single night. Audiences love her. She and her pearls are the biggest new Broadway star.

She’s talking about the play; I learn this once I look past the pearls and register the sounds leaving her lips. It’s a play that was written a long time ago, a play that high schools put on mediocre productions of, a play that, in this moment in time, is having a Broadway revival. Tonight, she will stand on a tall wooden platform and live a life she has memorized. Tonight is no different from any other night. No, tonight will be the same. She is telling me what it will be like tonight, but I’ve seen the play already—most people have.

In the play, she is poor. She wears rags and is desperate. So many girls must’ve played this role before, but to me, she is unique. She has two lives, so jarringly different from one another. In one life, she spends the weekends at rooftop pools; she’s lavish. She orders caviar and extravagant drinks and luxurious names sit on the tags of her clothing. She thinks the world should rise to its feet and pound its hands together for her, but it only does so in her other life.

Now, she wears a gold swimsuit. Her wrists are weighed down with gold. Her neck and her ears are too. Gold is just an element. Gold is just dust in space. She probably never dreamed of being addicted to an element, but expensive gifts led to an expensive taste and now she spends her weekends at rooftop pools, drenched in it. In her other life, she doesn’t wear gold. Some of her lipstick is on her pearls now. Pearls smeared with cherry red wax.

She is looking at me now, lips closed. She is expecting me to talk. I mention how gold is just dust in space.

“You always were so into those science classes,” she chuckles; her laugh is a bell chime.

We head up to her hotel room. She’s showering, getting ready to perform again tonight.

On her desk is a bag of nail polish. I pick it up. It’s heavy. She’s got a million little bottles of paint. She gets out of the shower and puts on a robe, picking out clothes from her suitcase.

“You’ve added to your collection,” I give the bag a light shake.

Her bell chime echoes around me. “I brought that for you, in case you wanted to paint your nails. My character of course can’t wear nail polish.”

I begin taking the bottles out and lining them up. I open one, a pale sparkly purple, and smell the fumes of chemicals. I arrange the bottles by height, then I change my mind and arrange by color. When we were children, we’d go up to her mother’s room and paint our nails with her ruby red polish. We weren’t allowed to have colorful nails at that age. So we would relish the process of painting, and then use soaked cotton balls to remove the evidence. Our fingers would be stained red, the room left smelling of acetone—the crime scene full of clues. 

When we were sixteen, I gave her a set of rainbow nail polish for her birthday. I told her she was of age now. She told me it was the best gift she got that day. We were a cliché back then, two girls with dreams so much bigger than the blue suburban houses we grew up in. We wanted cities and adventure and the world to sweep us off our feet. Opportunity got in the way: I got a good job offer from a real estate agency back home, and she moved around, trying to figure things out and start her acting career.

It happened so quickly. She told me she was moving to New York, then that she got the part, and then that the shows were selling out. I saw her on a magazine cover at the grocery store checkout. There I was, still in my hometown, still stuck in my predictable life, while hers moved faster and farther away by the second. Our duo had split, but I came to New York to meld it together again, if only for a night. 

Her life in the play is the same as I remembered from last time. In the first scene, she is kneeling in a kitchen. The lighting is dim. The audience is taken through laughs and tears, but the destination is always the same—the world rises to its feet and pounds its hands together. It always begins the same; it always ends the same. The man sitting next to me begins weeping in the second act when all hope is lost. I watch him from the corner of my eye. He’s bunched up in his seat, a fist held to his mouth. The rectangular glasses balancing on his nose reflect the lights from the other world he’s observing. He’s completely entranced. He knows that the lack of hope is part of the plot, but is transported nonetheless. The lights dim, and the clapping reminds him of reality. He unclenches his hand; he readjusts in his seat and relaxes.

         I wait in the hotel room for her to return after the show. She comes in babbling about what happened behind the scenes, what mistakes were made that no one in the audience noticed. She wipes her face down. She is in between her two lives, slowly morphing back into the actress.

         There’s a long pause. I’m thinking of new topics to bring up. Do people recognize you in the streets? Do strangers give you flowers? What’s the flower you get most often? Roses? No, no. No more questions about the play. She must be sick of them. Yet, the play seems to be all she has talked about since I met with her this afternoon.

         “I never thought I’d be an actress,” she says.

“You were in all the plays at school.”

         “That was different. That was … silly. I was never the lead anyways.”

         “Do you like being the lead?”

         She pauses again. She brushes her hair in a mirror. Her back faces me, but I can see her looking at her reflection. She stares into her own eyes; her mouth is cracked open. I can tell she doesn’t want to answer.

         “How come you brought the nail polish?” I finally thought of a new topic.

         Her eyes soften, her mouth cracks a smirk, she transforms. “You’re of age now. You should be able to paint your nails.”

         I see my childhood friend before me. Giggling with red nails. Driving in our neighborhood late at night with radio pop music turned up as loud as it could go. Talking about all the places we would see once we got older.

         “I miss being young,” I say. “I miss when painting our nails felt like the biggest deal in the universe. Like it would completely transform you into who you wanted to be.”

         “There’s something powerful in choosing those little details about yourself.” She opens the bag of polish, and the room is an orchestra of glass against glass. She pulls out a royal blue polish.

         “If I were to wear this, I could be spontaneous. I could be wild and funny. I would go to bars all night long.” She digs around in the bag more and pulls out light pink. “But if I wore this. That small patch of color on my fingernails suddenly makes me a respectable businesswoman. Someone who goes to Sunday brunches and has a secretary and a color-coded planner.”

         “What does wearing no nail polish mean?” I gesture to her hands.

         “It means I’m someone else, I suppose.”

         I peer into the bag and grab a red polish. “If you chose this, you would be your mother.”

         She bursts out laughing, not the bell chimes but guffaws and bird squawks. It’s something I haven’t heard in a long time, and I doubt she has either.

         “How is she?” I ask.

         “She’s quite different. Dad left and I started the play. Everything changed overnight. I send her money now and she leaves me alone.” She twiddles her thumbs and stares into the distance. Her blue suburban house and white picket fence family dissolved once she moved out. Her visits back home are rare.

         Another wave of silence washes over us, crashing and intense. She claps her hands together.

         “Let’s get a drink!”

We sit at the hotel bar and listen to the chatter surrounding us. Her fingers idly tap the countertop. We sip, we stare, we talk about nothing. I think about what shirt I’m going to wear tomorrow. My mind drifts. I swirl my drink in my cup, watching the liquid move up and down.

         “You’re someone else,” I say at almost a whisper.

         “I’m playing a character.”

         “No, I know you’re playing a character. I mean that you’re different ever since you started playing a character.”

         I stare into my drink. I want to dive into it. I want to be submerged and fill my ears with it so that I don’t have to listen to this conversation a second longer. I’m hurting her, her brain is going to be full of my words for a long time, but I can’t stop.

         “You’re different,” I repeat.

         “I know.”

         “You’re okay with it?”

         “Most people can predict what’s going to happen to them,” she says. “The change was predictable. I get money, I get fame, I get flowers every night. I spend a little more. I wear more jewelry and designer clothes. I’ve entered a new world, now I’m just trying to fit in with it. At least I’m doing something meaningful with my life.”

         “What does that even mean?”

         Her hand thuds on the table. “Moving back to do real estate? You were never passionate about real estate. You wanted to make some scientific breakthrough! You wanted to change the world! We both did! I just can’t believe you’re pissed off at me for leaving, for doing what I always wanted. It’s not my fault you didn’t.”

         “Life isn’t always what you plan. I didn’t want to spend my life waiting for something grand to happen to me. I saw opportunities and I took them.”

         “I didn’t just wait for this role.”

         “Well it’s a miracle it landed in your lap.”

         She’s rubbing her forehead. “I’m going to go to bed,” she stands up from her seat. “I hope you liked the show tonight. I’ll see you in the morning.”

         I watch her leave. My friend, someone I used to pass notes to in class and whisper secrets to at sleepovers. Now it’s bars and stages and rooftop pools. The scene has changed, the characters evolve. I wonder if I have refused to change with everything. 

         I keep swimming in my glass. People can change. People will change. But why did it have to be her? Why do the good ones have to change?

         I stumble my way back to the hotel room. She’s asleep in one of the queen beds; she left the one by the window for me. The room is blurry.

         “I’m sorry,” I whisper in her direction.

  I wake up and her bed’s empty. Her suitcases gone. A note on the desk.

We’ll always be friends.

         The bottle of red nail polish I pulled out yesterday is still there. I paint my nails. It smells like chemicals. I could’ve just told her the play was fantastic. I could’ve pretended that she hadn’t changed at all.

She went on living her memorized life for longer than everyone expected. I read once that she had a performance where she broke down crying in act one, and her understudy took over for the rest of that night. I like to think that it was me she was crying about. I know it wasn’t.

Pandemics | October 2020