Last Night at Chateau Marmont
Page 53

When she shivered, Julian leaned over and rested his head on her shoulder. “My crazy girl,” he murmured with pretend exasperation. “Never seems to realize that she could be warmer any time she’d like. Just has to turn on the heat a little, or—god forbid—turn the AC off. Or maybe wear a T-shirt to bed . . .”
“Not a chance.” Everyone knew that good sleeping conditions were cool, dark, and quiet; therefore, it stood to reason that the best sleeping conditions were freezing cold, pitch-black, and completely silent. She’d slept naked from the time she was old enough to take her pajamas off and could never sleep really well when situations (summer camp, freshman-year dorm, early-twenties sleepovers with guys she hadn’t had sex with yet) demanded she wear a nightshirt.
Brooke tried to read for a while, but her mind kept drifting to a series of anxious thoughts. She knew she should have just snuggled up beside Julian and asked for a back rub or a head scratch, but before she knew it, she was saying something completely different.
“Do you think we have enough sex?” she asked while adjusting the band on her eye mask.
“Enough sex?” Julian asked. “According to whose standards?”
“Julian, I’m serious.”
“So am I. Against whom are we judging ourselves?”
“No one in particular,” she said, a hint of exasperation becoming apparent. “Just, you know, the norm.”
“The norm? I don’t know, Brooke, I think we feel pretty normal. Don’t you?”
“Mmm.”
“Is this because of tonight? Because we are both really tired? Seriously, don’t be so hard on us.”
“It’s been three weeks, Julian. The longest we’ve ever gone before was maybe five days, and that was when I had walking pneumonia.”
Julian sighed and kept reading. “Rook, can you please stop worrying about us? We’re fine. I promise.”
She was quiet for a few moments as she thought about this, knowing she didn’t actually want to have more sex—not now, not being this tired—but that she wanted him to want to.
“Did you lock the front door when you came home tonight?” she asked.
“I think so,” he murmured without looking up. He was reading an article on the best guitar techs in America. She knew he had zero recollection of whether he’d locked the front door or not.
“Well did you or didn’t you?”
“Yes, I definitely did.”
“Because if you’re not sure, I’ll get up and check. I’d rather be inconvenienced for thirty seconds than dead,” she said with a deep, dramatic sigh.
“Really?” He snuggled deeper under the covers. “I couldn’t disagree more.”
“Julian, seriously. That guy on our floor died just last week. Don’t you think we should try to be a little bit more careful?”
“Brooke, sweetheart, he drank himself to death. I’m not sure that could’ve been prevented if he’d locked his door.”
She knew this, of course—knew every single thing that happened in the building because the super was a constant talker—but would it kill Julian to give her a little attention?
“I think I might be pregnant,” she announced.
“You are not,” he replied automatically and continued to read.
“Yeah, well what if I was?”
“But you’re not.”
“But how do you know? Mistakes happen all the time. I could be. Then what would we do?” She managed a faux sniffle.
He smiled and finally—finally!—put down the magazine. “Oh, sweetheart, come here. I’m sorry, I should’ve realized earlier. You want to cuddle.”
She nodded. Beyond immature, but she was desperate.
He shimmied over to her side of the bed and enveloped her in a hug. “And did it ever occur to you to say, ‘Julian, oh loving husband, I want to cuddle. Will you pay attention to me?’ rather than picking fights?”
She shook her head no.
“Of course it didn’t,” he said with a sigh. “Are you really concerned about our sex life or was that all part of the plan to get a reaction?”
“Yeah, just going for the reaction,” she lied.
“And you’re not pregnant?”
“No!” she said, a little louder than she intended. “Absolutely, definitely not.” She resisted asking him if it would be the worst thing in the world if she actually were pregnant. They’d been married five years, after all. . . .
They kissed good night (he suffered the spackled-on moisturizer, but not without a nose wrinkle and a highly exaggerated gagging sound), and she waited the requisite ten minutes until his breathing steadied before pulling on her robe and padding out to the kitchen. After checking that the front door was locked (it was), she headed over to the computer for a quick surf.
In the early days of Facebook, she’d been content to confine her online time to the all-encompassing world of Ex-Boyfriend Stalking. First she searched out her handful of longer-term boyfriends from high school and college, plus that Venezuelan guy she dated for a couple months in graduate school who fell somewhere between a fling and a relationship (had his English been just a touch better . . . ) and brought herself up to date on their lives. She’d been pleased to see that each and every one of them looked worse than when she’d known them, and she repeatedly wondered the same thing that was on the minds of so many twentysomething women: why was it, exactly, that nearly every girl she knew looked far better than she had in college when every guy looked fatter, balder, and much, much older?
A couple months had passed like this until she became interested in anything beyond pictures of her senior prom date’s twin boys, and before long she began accumulating friends from every era of her life: kindergarten in Boston, while her own parents were still doing their graduate work; sleepaway camp in the Poconos; high school in suburban Philadelphia; dozens and dozens of friends and acquaintances from undergrad at Cornell and her master’s program at NYU; and now, colleagues from both jobs at the hospital and the Huntley School. And although she’d forgotten the existence of many of the early friends until their names resurfaced in her Notifications folder, she was always eager to reconnect and see what the last ten or even twenty years had brought.
Tonight was no different: she accepted a friend request from a childhood playmate whose family had moved away in middle school and then hungrily scanned the new profile, registering all the details (single, graduated from UC Boulder, currently living in Denver, appears to love mountain biking and guys with long hair), and sent the girl a quick, cheerily bland message that she knew would likely be the beginning and the end of their “reunion.”