The Birthday Betrayal

I knew something was wrong the moment I saw the table. I had arrived at Cormorant exactly fourteen minutes late, which for me was practically on time, given that I had changed outfits four times and spent twenty minutes on my eyeliner because I wanted everything perfect. In the car I had checked my teeth in the visor mirror and then sat with the engine off for a full minute, telling myself not to hope so loudly that the room would hear it. The restaurant sat perched on the edge of the bluffs overlooking the bay, all glass walls and low amber light, the kind of place where the hostess knew your name because the hostess had been trained to know your name, where a single dinner cost more than my first month's rent after college. Roman had reserved the corner table, the one with the view of the water and the private screen of potted olive trees that separated it from the rest of the room. The valet took my keys without looking at my face. I smelled garlic and lemon from the kitchen door as I came in. Someone at the bar laughed too loudly. My heel caught on the runner and I righted myself without looking down. I remember those details because later I needed something ordinary to hold onto. Except when I walked in, the hostess didn't smile. She looked at me the way people look at someone who has arrived at a funeral in a party dress. "Right this way, Ms. Voss," she said, and her voice was careful, like she was holding something fragile. I should have known then. But I was too busy being nervous. Roman and I had been together three years, and for the last six months I had been waiting, with the specific and humiliating patience of a woman who has already picked out a dress in her head, for him to ask. He was forty-one. He had been married before, briefly, disastrously, and he had told me once over whiskey that he would never do it again. I had laughed and said I didn't need a piece of paper. I had meant it, mostly. But then his mother had started asking, at every dinner, with increasing sharpness, and Roman had started looking at me differently, and I had started to hope. Thirty-two felt like a good year for hope. He had texted me that morning: Dinner tonight. Wear something beautiful. It's a surprise. I had spent the whole day in a state of low-grade tremble that I mistook for joy. I had left work early. I had gone to the salon. I had worn the green silk that made my eyes look like sea glass, the one I had bought two years ago and saved for an occasion that had never quite arrived. The occasion was arriving now, apparently. I rounded the olive trees. And there she was. Josie Lang sat in my chair, in my seat, the chair I had sat in at every dinner Roman and I had ever shared at Cormorant, and she was wearing white, a soft white sweater the color of cream, and she had her hair pulled back in a low knot that made her look younger than thirty-four, which she was, which I knew exactly, because I had known her since we were eighteen and she had moved into the dorm room next to mine with a suitcase full of cashmere and a smile like a knife. "Wren," she said, and she stood up, and she had a bouquet, a ridiculous bouquet, white roses and something spiky and blue, and she held it out toward me with both hands like a bride at a wedding. "Happy birthday." I didn't move. "Oh, don't be like that," she said, and her smile widened, and her eyes did that thing they did, the thing that had always made me feel like I was the one being unreasonable, the one who was holding a grudge, the one who had made everything so difficult. "I know it's been a while. But it's your birthday. I wanted to see you." "Josie." My voice came out flat. "What are you doing?" "I brought you flowers." She pushed them toward me. "Take them. Your taste has improved, by the way. The green is much better than the pink you used to wear. It makes you look less... soft." I heard the insult. I always heard the insults with Josie. She had a way of saying things that sounded like compliments until you ran them back in your head three hours later at two in the morning. Roman was standing by the table, and he had his hands in his pockets, and he was watching us with an expression I couldn't read, something between amusement and annoyance, like he was watching two people argue about a parking space. "Roman," I said. "What is this?" "It's a surprise," he said. "Like I told you." "A surprise," I repeated. "I ran into Josie at the club last week," he said, and he reached over and took the bouquet from her hands, and he set it down on the table next to my empty water glass, and I watched him do it, I watched his fingers brush hers. "She said you two had lost touch. She wanted to make it right. I thought it would be a nice thing." A nice thing. Josie sat back down, in the chair, and she turned to Roman, and she said, "You did this, Wren? The green? It's perfect." And then, before I could say anything, before I could even sit, Roman pulled out his own chair and sat down next to her, not next to me, and he reached for the bread basket and started tearing off a piece of focaccia, and then he picked up the shrimp cocktail that was sitting in the center of the table, the one I had ordered in advance because it was my favorite, and he began peeling the shrimp one by one with his fingers, pulling off the tails, and he put the cleaned shrimp on a small plate and set the plate down in front of Josie. "Eat," he said to her. "You need it." The plate sat there. The shrimp sat there. I stood there. Three years. Three years of holidays and business dinners and nights where he came home late and I pretended not to smell the perfume on his collar. Three years of his mother's little comments, of his ex-wife's emails, of the way he said my name sometimes, with a small pause before it, like he was trying to remember it. Three years of deciding I was fine, actually, that I had waited long enough, that I wasn't going to be the girl who demanded things. I had waited so long. And this was the thing I had waited for. Josie picked up a shrimp. She bit into it. She looked up at me, and she smiled, and for just a second, behind the smile, I saw her, the real her, the girl who had been my best friend, the girl I had loved, the girl who had slept in my dorm room and cried into my shoulder, and I thought, absurdly, that this was the most honest I had seen her in years. Then she said, "Your taste really has improved. He's so much better than the last one." And I understood. Not all at once. I understood it the way you understand a diagnosis when the doctor stops talking; the words are already there, they were always there, they had been sitting in my chest for years, waiting for me to look at them. I knew what Josie was doing. She had been doing it since we were twenty-two and she had "accidentally" slept with my junior-year boyfriend, and then since we were twenty-five and she had "accidentally" told my boss that I had been looking at other jobs, and then since we were twenty-eight and she had "accidentally" invited my fiancé, the one who had given me a ring and then taken it back, to a party where she had spent the whole night with her hand on his arm. She always said the same thing, afterward. I didn't mean anything by it. You're so sensitive. You always do this. And I had always believed her, because it was easier to believe her than to admit that the person I loved most in the world, the person I had told my secrets to, the person who had held my hand when my father died, was also the person who was taking everything I had. I had cut her off three years ago. I had changed my number. I had moved. I had finally, finally, closed the door. And Roman had opened it. He had found her at his club, at the club, the private club, the one where members had to be sponsored, the one where I had never, not once in three years, been invited. He had brought her here, to my birthday dinner, to my table, to my seat, and he had peeled her shrimp. I looked at him. He was frowning at me now, the way he did when I was taking too long to respond to something, when I was being, in his phrase, difficult. "Wren," he said. "Sit down. You're making a scene." "I'm making a scene." "Yes." He gestured at the room, at the other diners, at the potted olive trees that screened us from the world. "People are looking. Sit down." I didn't sit down. The bouquet was on the table. The roses were the exact white of Josie's sweater, and I thought about how she had chosen them, how she had probably stood in the flower shop and picked the ones that would match the outfit she had planned, because she had planned this, of course she had planned this, she had probably planned it the moment Roman approached her, or maybe she had approached him, maybe she had been circling him for months, maybe this was the project she had been working on since the day I stopped answering her calls. I didn't know whether Roman was sleeping with her. I didn't know whether it even mattered. What I knew, with a clarity that felt like a light switching on at the back of my skull, was that I had spent three years waiting for a man to choose me, and that when the test came, when the moment came, he had not chosen me. He had chosen the flowers. He had chosen the shrimp. He had chosen the woman who had spent a decade trying to take everything I had, and he had chosen her at my own table, on my own birthday, in front of the city. The betrayal was not that he had not chosen me. The betrayal was that he had brought the one person who had ever been able to take things from me into my own birthday dinner and called it a nice thing. The door was right there. The glass door, the one with the brass handle, the one that opened onto the bluff path. I could walk out. I could sit down. I could pick up the bouquet and throw it at her. I could pick up the bouquet and throw it at him. I stood there, and I felt the green silk against my skin, the beautiful green silk that I had saved for an occasion, and I thought about the girl I had been at eighteen, the one who had moved into the dorm room next to Josie's with two suitcases and a scholarship and a belief that if she were just good enough, just smart enough, just kind enough, the world would give her something. I had worked so hard to be good. I looked at Josie, who was eating a shrimp, and I looked at Roman, who was frowning, and I looked at the door, and I made a decision. I didn't walk out. Not yet. I sat down. I sat down, and I pulled my chair an inch closer to the table, and I smoothed the green silk over my knees, and I looked up at the waiter who was hovering nearby with a menu he didn't know what to do with, and I said, "I'll have the scallops. And a glass of the Pouilly-Fumé. Actually, make it the bottle." The tablecloth had a crease from being folded in storage. A candle burned too low and left a ring of wax. I set my water glass on a different ring so I would not make a new one. The olive trees in their pots smelled like dust and oil. Someone at the next table laughed, then stopped, as if they had remembered they were not supposed to look. The waiter nodded and fled. Josie stopped chewing. Roman stopped frowning. "Wren," he said, and his voice was cautious now, because he had expected tears, he had expected the scene, he had expected the thing that would let him be the reasonable one, the one who had tried, the one who had been patient with my difficulties. He had not expected me to sit down and order wine. "It's my birthday," I said. "We're going to celebrate." I picked up the bouquet. I looked at it, at the white roses and the spiky blue thing, the thing I couldn't name. And then I looked at Josie, and I smiled, and I said, "Thank you for the flowers. They're exactly what I would have chosen." She blinked. She blinked, and something shifted behind her eyes, something small and wary, the way an animal goes still when it hears a branch break in the woods. Josie had spent fifteen years learning to read me the way you read a familiar book, and she had expected the chapter where I cried and left and hated myself for leaving. She had not expected this page. I set the bouquet down. I turned to Roman. "You should have told me she was coming," I said, and my voice was warm, warmer than it had been in months, and I saw him relax, just a little, because he thought I was coming around, because he thought this was the part where I forgave him. "I would have brought her a gift." He laughed. He actually laughed, the deep easy laugh that had made me fall for him in the first place, and he leaned over and squeezed my hand, and he said, "That's my girl." That's my girl. I held his hand. I held it, and I smiled at him, and I smiled at Josie, and I smiled at the waiter who was arriving with the wine and the scallops and a small candle in a glass, and I thought about what I was going to do, and how long it would take. I had been waiting for three years. I could wait a little longer.