Something Blue

two

I managed to make it downstairs (where I gave Rachel's doorman the gruesome highlights), into a cab (where I again shared the tale), and over to Marcus's place. I burst into his sloppy studio, where he sat cross-legged on the floor, playing a melody on his guitar that sounded vaguely like the refrain in "Fire and Rain."

He looked up at me, his expression a blend of annoyance and bemusement. "What's wrong now?" he said.

I resented his use of the word now, implying that I am always having a crisis. I couldn't help what had just happened to me. I told him the whole story, sparing no detail. I wanted outrage from my new beau. Or at least shock. But no matter how much I tried to whip him into my same frenzied state, he'd fire back with these two points: How can you be mad when we did the same thing to them? And, Don't we want our friends to be as happy as we are?

I told him that our guilt was beside the point and, HELL NO, WE DON'T WANT THEM TO BE HAPPY!

Marcus kept strumming his guitar and smirking.

"What's so funny?" I asked, exasperated. "Nothing is funny about this situation!"

"Well maybe not ha-ha funny, but ironic funny."

"There is nothing even remotely funny about this, Marcus! And stop playing that thing!"

Marcus ran his thumb across the strings one final time before putting his guitar in its case. Then he sat cross-legged, gripping the toes of his dirty sneakers, as he said again, "I just don't see how you can be so outraged when we did the same thing-"

"It's not the same thing at all!" I said, dropping to the cool floor. "See, I may have cheated on Dex with you. But I didn't do anything to Rachel."

"Well," he said. "She and I did date for a minute. We had potential before you came along."

"You went on a few lousy dates whereas I was engaged to Dex. What kind of person hooks up with her friend's fiance?"

He crossed his arms and gave me a knowing look. "Darcy."

"What?"

"You're looking at one. Remember? I was one of Dexter's groomsmen? Ring a bell?"

I sniffed. True, Marcus and Dex had been college buddies, friends for years. But it just wasn't a comparable situation. "It's not the same. Female friendships are more sacred; my relationship with Rachel has been lifelong. She was my very best friend in the world, and you were, like, the very last one stuck in the groomsman lineup. Dex probably wouldn't even have picked you except that he needed a fifth person to go with my five girls."

"Gee. I'm touched."

I ignored his sarcasm, and said, "Besides, you never painted yourself as a saint like she did."

"You're right about that. I'm no saint."

"You just don't go there with your best girlfriend's fiance. Or ex-fiance. Period. Ever. Even if a gazillion years elapsed, you still can't go there. And you certainly don't hop in bed with him one day after the breakup." Then I hurled more questions his way: Did he think it was a one-time thing? Were they beginning a relationship? Could they actually fall in love? Would they ever last?

To which Marcus shrugged and answered with some variation of: I don't know and I don't care.

To which I yelled: Guess! Care! Soothe me!

Finally, he caved, patting my arm and responding satisfyingly to my leading questions. He agreed that it was likely a one-time thing with Rachel and Dex. That Dex went over to Rachel's because he was upset. That being with Rachel was the closest thing to me. And as for Rachel, she just wanted to throw a bone to a broken man.

"Okay. So what do you think I should do now?" I asked.

"Nothing you can do," Marcus said, reaching over to open a pizza box resting near his guitar case. "It's cold, but help yourself."

"As if I could eat now!" I exhaled dramatically and did a spread eagle on the floor. "The way I see it is, I have two options: murder and/or suicide… It would be pretty easy to kill them, you know?"

I wanted him to gasp at my suggestion, but much to my constant disappointment, he was never too shocked by my words. He simply pulled a slice of pizza from the box, folded it in half, and crammed it in his mouth. He chewed for a moment, and with his mouth still full, he pointed out that I would be the prime and only suspect. "You'd wind up at a female corrections facility in upstate New York. With a mullet. I can see you now slopping out gruel with your mullet flapping in the prison yard breeze."

I thought about this and decided that I'd vastly prefer my own death to a mullet. Which brought me to the suicide option. "Fine. So murder is out. I'll just kill myself instead. They'd be really sorry if I killed myself, wouldn't they?" I asked, more for shock value than because I was really considering my own death.

I wanted Marcus to tell me that he couldn't live without me. But he didn't take the bait in the suicide game as Rachel had when we were in junior high, and she'd promise that she'd override my mother's classical music selections and see to it that Pink Floyd's "On the Turning Away" was cranked up at my funeral.

"They'd be so sorry if I killed myself," I said to Marcus. "Think they'd come to my funeral? Would they apologize to my parents?"

"Yeah. Probably so. But people move on fast. In fact, sometimes they even forget about you at the funeral, depending on how good the food is."

"But what about their guilt?" I asked. "How could they live with themselves?"

He assured me that the initial guilt could be assuaged by any good therapist. So after a few weeknights on a leather couch, the person, once racked with what ifs, would come to understand that only a very troubled soul would take her own life, and that one, albeit significant, act of betrayal doesn't cause a healthy person to jump in front of the number 6 train.

I knew that Marcus was right, remembering that when Rachel and I were sophomores in high school, one of our classmates, Ben Murray, shot himself in the head with his father's revolver in his bedroom while his parents watched television downstairs. The stories varied-but, bottom line, we all knew that it had something to do with a fight he'd had with his girlfriend, Amber Lucetti, who had dumped him for a college guy she met while visiting her sister at Illinois State. None of us could forget the moment when a guidance counselor ushered Amber out of speech class to give her the horrific news. Nor could we forget the sound of Amber's wails echoing in the halls. We all imagined that she'd lose it altogether and end up in a mental ward somewhere.

Yet within a few days, Amber was back in class, giving a speech on the recent stock market crash. I had just given my speech on why grocery-store makeup was the way to go-over more expensive makeup-as it all comes from the same big vats of oils and powder. I marveled at Amber's ability to give such a substantive speech, barely glancing at her index cards, when her ex-boyfriend was in a coffin under the frozen ground. And her competent speech was nothing compared to the spectacle she created when making out with Alan Hysack at the Spring Dance, fewer than three months after Ben's funeral.

So if I were striving to destroy Rachel and Dex's world, suicide might not be the answer, either. Which left me with one option: stay on course with my charmed, perfect life. Don't they say that happiness is the best revenge? I'd marry Marcus, have his baby, and ride off into the sunset, never looking back.

"Hey. Give me a slice after all," I said to Marcus. "I'm eating for two now."

That night I called my parents and broke the news. My father answered and I told him to put Mom on the other extension. "Mom, Dad, the wedding is off. I'm so sorry," I said stoically, perhaps too stoically because they instantly assumed that I was solely to blame for the breakup. Dear ol' Dex would never cancel a wedding the week before it was to take place. My mother turned on her sob switch, wailing about how much she loved Dexter, while my father shouted over her in his "Now, Darcy. Don't be rash" tone. At which point, I dropped the closet-story bomb on them. A rare hush fell over the phone. They were so silent that I thought for a second that we had been disconnected. My father finally said there must be some mistake because Rachel would never do such a thing. I told them I never would have believed it either. But I saw it with my own two eyes-Dex in his boxers in Rachel's closet. Needless to say, I said nothing about Marcus or the baby to my parents. I wanted to have their full emotional and financial support. I wanted them to cast the blame on Rachel, the neighborhood girl who had duped them just as she had duped me. Perfect, trustworthy, good-hearted, loyal, reliable, predictable Rachel.

"What are we going to do, Hugh?" my mother asked my father in her little-girl tone.

"I'll take care of it," he said. "Everything will be fine. Darcy, don't you worry about a thing. We have the guest list. We'll call the family. We'll contact The Carlyle, the photographer. Everyone. You sit tight. Do you want us to come out on our same flight on Thursday or do you want a ticket to come home? You say the word, honey."

My father was in full-on crisis mode, the way he got during a tornado watch or a snowstorm or anytime our declawed, half-blind indoor cat would escape out the back door and dart out into the street, while my mother and I freaked out, secretly delighting in the drama.

"I don't know, Daddy. I just can't even think straight right now."

My dad sighed and then said, "Do you want me to call Dex? Talk some sense into him?"

"No, Daddy. It won't do any good. It's over. Please don't. I have some pride."

"That bastard" my mother chimed in. "And Rachel! I just can't believe that little tramp."

"Dee, that's not helping," my father said.

"Well, I know," my mother said. "But I just can't believe that Rachel would do such a thing. And how in the world could Dex want to be with her?"

"I know!" I said. "There's no way that they're actually together, right? He couldn't really like her?"

"No. No way," my mother said.

"I'm sure Rachel is sorry," my dad said. "It was a very inappropriate thing to do."

"Inappropriate isn't the word for it," my mother said.

My father tried again. "Treacherous? Opportunistic?"

My mother agreed with this assessment. "She probably wanted him the whole time you were with him."

"I know," I said, feeling a fleeting sense of regret that I had let Dex go. Everyone viewed him as such a prize. I looked at Marcus to reassure myself I had done the right thing, but he was eyeing his PlayStation.

"Has Rachel called to explain or apologize?" my dad continued.

"Not yet," I said.

"She will," my mom said. "And in the meantime, you stay strong, honey. Everything will be fine. You're a beautiful girl. You will find someone else. Someone better. Tell her, Hugh."

"You're the most beautiful girl in the world," he said. "Everything's going to be just fine. I promise you."