With Friends Like These: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

completely forgotten—and Jules was not a friend to be kept waiting. To get to Soho by subway would take a half hour at minimum. While I was cursing my behavior—self-absorbed, thoughtless—a taxi stopped at my feet to discharge a passenger. I silenced the frugal Minneapolis girl within me and opened the door. “See you in twenty minutes,” I said to Jules as I sped away.
    Later, I wondered why I hadn’t identified that taxi as an e-ticket to hell.

CHAPTER 2
  
Jules

    I was parked on a crimson banquette, sipping wine, trying to talk myself out of ordering
frites
. The longer I waited, and the more I smelled the overflowing paper cones being delivered to every other table, the more I wanted what was in them—salty and crisp on the outside, tender and mushy inside. Which was exactly how I’d described myself the year before in a personal ad that attracted no one I’d want to lie next to, even on a gurney.
    Finally Quincy showed. “Jules, I’m so sorry,” she said, bending to kiss me on the cheek, the rim of her cap bumping my face.
    That she was wearing faded Levi’s I could overlook, but sneakers? Not that a leggy, 118-pound woman can’t get by with minimal effort. “You’re forgiven,” I said, because that’s what I do, forgive people, providing they aren’t my blood family. “But this isn’t the first time, you know.” Ever since Quincy Blue and I’d shared an apartment she’d run behind schedule by the same forty minutes. I waved over the waiter. “Drink?”
    Quincy cast a dubious eye on my wine’s salmon tint. I suppressed an urge to lecture her on the current cool quotient of rosé. “Sauvignon blanc, please,” she said.
    “We should order. I’ve got a lot going on today.” Officially I might have forgiven her, but I felt cranky nonetheless.
    “In the time it takes me to make a list, you’ve knocked five items off yours.”
    “Why, thank you,” I said. It’s true that I am efficient, a woman who’s learned to power her life by insomnia, a woman with a lot of balls in the air—though as far as that kind goes, only one set at the moment. Whenever I need to complete a form identifying occupation, I’m never sure what to write. Personal shopper/actress/hand model?
    This afternoon Quincy and I were celebrating that I’d gotten my first residual for a commercial I’d filmed six months ago. I’d played a bride ecstatic about drain cleaner, and the irony wasn’t lost on me, since on the day we wrapped, Ted moved out, disengaging at the moment when I was sure he was going to ask me to become attached forever. I might be smart, but not about men. Thirty-four sessions of couples counseling had convinced Ted to quit law school. Now he was in Hawaii, finding himself in the surf, and I was dating Arthur Weiner.
    “What’s going on?” Quincy asked as we waited for a two-tiered seafood platter accompanied by, yes, a double side of
frites
.
    “I have an audition at three, a client at five, and dinner with Arthur.”
    “How’s it going with him?”
    I searched her words for an edge of condescension. A few weeks ago, when I’d introduced Arthur to Quincy and Jake, I’d caught a judgy whiff. I’d been seeing Arthur for two months. He is older, shorter, and balder than Ted—shorter and balder than most men. The mastermind behind our relationship was our fourth former roommate, Chloe—Arthur used to be her boss at an ad agency—and despite his high negatives, it was she who’d badgered me into giving him a shot. Now, on a daily basis, I allow Arthur to tell me that I’m the best thing to happen to him since puberty. On his arm, I see myself as he sees me—as a girly brunette goddess, not a candidate for a weight-loss scam.
    “I like Arthur,” I said. “He’s talented, he’s smart, he worships me. He might be a keeper.”
    Quincy laughed. “Still so cheap?”
    The trouble with confiding in friends—Chloe excepted—is that they tend to discount the good and fixate on the bad.