LITMIR.BIZ

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that falls below her knees, panty hose and shoes that look clunky and orthopedic, something a nurse or your grandma might wear. But it’s her hair—that red—that gets me. Montreal red, the color old ladies in the city dye their hair instead of trying to keep their natural color or letting it go grey. It’s not red, exactly, but more burgundy, with a bit of that purple that’s the color of eggplant. Aubergine—that’s the word. A bit of aubergine mixed with the color of the reddest wine. It’s no one’s real hair color. It belongs to the old ladies and to Eva.

      It’s 3:00 p.m. and Jack and I are sitting at the same table we have been since eleven. I’m drunk, and so is he. Eva is still here and I’m glad. She’s sober and has offered to drive Jack to the airport. If we don’t go soon, Jack will miss his flight, so we stumble out into the afternoon and smoke cigarettes and wait for Eva to bring her car around to pick us up. There’s still a line to get into the restaurant. We’re going to have to find someplace new, and this time, I make a vow to myself, I’m not going to write about it.

      “Looks like someone has a fan,” Jack says as he wraps his arms around me.

      “She’s cute,” I say.

      “Not as cute as me.” Jack gets cocky when he drinks. “Maybe she can keep you company while I’m in Toronto.” Jack also worries about what I’m up to with whom when we’re apart, even though we have an agreement about this.

      I kiss him on the lips. “Nope. She’s not as cute as you, baby.” Jack smiles. I think I’m going to throw up. I am not a baby-sweetheart-darling-sugarpie kind of girl. Jack likes that kind of thing so sometimes I do it for him and I hate that more than I hate the baby conversation and Parrot Girl.

      Eva zips up in front of the restaurant in a silver Saab convertible. Jack and I pour ourselves into the car and we head to my place in the Plateau. Jack and I race up the stairs and into my apartment. We grab his bags and we’re off to the airport. “It’s really nice of you to do this, Eva. We could have taken a taxi.”

      “No, no, don’t be silly. It’s no problem. I just wish we had more time to talk. There are so many things I’d love to ask you about.” She bites her lower lip. “But I don’t want to be a pest.”

      “How about you come over after we drop Jack off and we’ll have some wine and talk all you want?”

      “Oh, my goodness, Sara, that would be the most amazing thing.”

      “Then it’s a plan.”

      I toss a packet of breath mints at Jack and straighten his shirt before he heads to the check-in counter. I feel like his mother. But he’s thirty. Biologically, I couldn’t actually be his mother.

      “So how long have you two been doing the long distance thing?” Eva asks as we wait for Jack to get his boarding pass.

      “Almost a year.”

      “Gosh, that must be hard.”

      “Not really,” I say. It’s easier than trying to explain how it isn’t hard most of the time but then some of the time it is, like when I’m sick or he’s sick, or at night when I think I hear something weird or I can’t open an especially tight jar of kosher pickles. The worst is when I have to go to a party or dinner and it’s all couples and I wish he was there so we could snicker together in the back of the room—Jack is good for that—and not feel alone and old.

      “I don’t think I could do it. You must really trust each other.”

      “We have to,” I say. I don’t have to tell Eva about my arrangement with Jack, that our relationship is open, that we can have sex with other people, but not date them, we can screw them, but not love them. I once told Genevieve about this and she called me crazy. I said it was practical, better than making all sorts of promises to each other only to have them broken. Gen called my attitude defeatist. I called it modern and reminded her that she told me once that she had exactly the same arrangement with the two boyfriends she had before Ted.

      “Look how that worked out,” Gen said.

      “You were fine with it at the time.”

      “I could have never done that with Ted.”

      “I’m not saying you should have. It’s different with you and Ted.”

      “It’s never going to be serious with Jack unless you’re monogamous.”

      “Who says I want serious? Who says monogamy is the only way?” Discussing the finer points of your open long-distance relationship with your staunchly monogamous married friend is ill-advised.

      “Come on, Sara. You’re almost forty.”

      “Yup. I’m almost forty.”

      I know that I’m supposed to know what this means. People say it all the time. You’re almost forty. Wow, you’re turning forty. How are you with the big four-oh? How am I with the big four-oh? The big four-oh is super, and I’m not quite there yet, but thanks for reminding me. And yes, I know I’m not married and I know I don’t have a baby and I don’t think I want either of those things. And yes, my boyfriend is nine years younger, so you can stop asking questions and doing speculative math in your head. I am fine with the big four-oh, but you people are freaking me out, and I already had my freak-out at thirty-five, so stop it or I will slap you.

      Eva wanders over to the newsstand, leaving Jack and I a moment alone. It’s always the same. I’ll be ready, almost anxious for him to go, to get back to work, to sprawl in my bed and sleep alone, but then I want him to stay and I nearly cry. I kiss him goodbye at the security gate and he says he loves me and that he’ll call when he gets in.

      I find Eva at the newsstand thumbing through a celebrity tabloid. “That one’s my favorites,” I say.

      “Me, too,” she says. “It’s so trashy.”

      “But not too trashy. There has to be a balance.”

      “I used to buy it at this Metro stop up in Chabanel when I’d go look at fabrics, then I’d put it inside, like, V or Japanese Vogue or something and read it on the way home. I didn’t want anyone to see me with it.”

      We step out of the terminal and walk to Eva’s car. “You can’t worry about what everyone else thinks.”

      “Oh, I don’t, not now. Especially after reading that column you wrote about embracing your guilty pleasures.”

      “I wrote that years ago.”

      Eva stops for a moment. “Two thousand and one, I think. Sometime in the spring?”

      I have no idea if she’s right, but I’ll assume she is. “I think you know more about me than I do.”

      The drive to the airport and back with the top of Eva’s convertible down has sobered me up and a dull headache is setting in. Eva parks and we walk to the corner and buy two bottles of cheap French wine at the depanneur. A couple glasses and my headache is masked by the liquor. Then there’s the guilt and the phantom pain of work tomorrow. It’s not even eight.

      Eva walks around my apartment as if it were a museum. She looks closely at everything, every picture, every knickknack, the title on every spine of every book on my shelves. She doesn’t touch a thing. I take my camera out and upload the weekend’s photos onto my computer. Of the twelve DOs for the fashion page, seven are strong enough to use. I only need five. I have fifteen DON’Ts, of which ten are hysterical, but I only need five of those, as well. And then there’s Parrot Girl.

      I hate Parrot Girl because I don’t know what to do with her. It used to be easier when people just dressed how they dressed and it was about style, not irony and preciousness or getting their picture taken. I’m tired of Parrot Girl and all the other girls who may not have parrots but they’re the same because they try so hard not to be. I hate Parrot Girl and her soccer socks and her cowboy boots and her satin jacket. But I hate her most because I know she looks ridiculous and that she is a DON’T. But it’s not about me

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