XIII

The next day we went to visit Adam for dinner. We spent the day sightseeing while Adam was in class. We saw Big Ben and the changing of the guard and all of the other things you're supposed to see when you're spending the week in London. My big accomplishment of the day, however, was buying a dress I'd had my eye on in New York in the London outlet store. It was a strappy black number that slimmed me out in all the right places and made me look like I had an ass, which for the record, I did not. I decided to wear it to Adam's that night. Ill advised perhaps, but there's something about seeing someone that you've been involved with the way I was with Adam that makes you always want to look your best, if only to spite him in a way that he'll never even notice.
I'd psyched myself out pretty bad by the time we arrived at Adam's, and I wasn't sure exactly how I'd ended up on that side of the door, next to Eric and not Adam. I wondered if I'd ever stop feeling the way I did. I wondered if maybe things could be okay between us someday, we'd finish our respective roaming and settle back on each other, the way it was supposed to be. We'd find our place and time.
Then the door opened and I found myself face to face with an unfamiliar set of eyes. They were bluish green, but certainly not Adam's, in fact they were not male at all. They belonged to a young woman about my height. When I say young, I mean the girl couldn't have been two days past seventeen and when I say about my height, I mean that even though she was clearly my eye level, her model bone structure made her appear at least six inches taller. I hadn't gotten past confusion to anger before Adam rushed up behind her, potholder in hand. I knew from the look on Adam's face that my sheer terror showed through. I turned back to look at Eric and was relieved to find bewilderment.
I could have bolted right then. I knew exactly how long it would take me to run back to the hotel, and I was prepared to do it again. But I didn't leave then. I stood politely in the doorway and waited to be asked in.
"Janie, Eric, come on in." Adam regained his footing. "This is Keira." Keira smiled politely and stepped out of the way. I took note immediately that the introduction was not, 'this is my girlfriend Keira,' or 'the girl I'm fucking Keira.' Then again, it was also not 'this is my incredibly asexual flatmate Keira who I have no desire to sleep with in any way and I want us to get back together right now.'
I sat with gritted teeth through the awkward salad course, downing at least two glasses of white wine. I was drunk. While the boys finished making pasta sauce for the main course, Keira and I stepped out on the balcony for a smoke. She was the first to speak.
"So how do you know Adam?" She wore her insecurity like a badge. Maybe she wasn't his girlfriend, but he sure as hell hadn't forwarded that memo her way. I couldn't believe he hadn't told her about me AT ALL. I smiled politely and told her that we knew each other from school. She gushed about him like a fourteen year old in 1976 would have about David Cassidy. She told me all about the little quirks he had, most of which he'd picked up from me. I gritted my teeth some more, and bit down hard on my wine coated tongue. She was talking to me like I had never met him and she had just started dating him. Of course, that's because she had.
That's when I bolted. I excused myself, and after a brief stint of projectile vomiting in the bathroom, pardon, the loo, I made my exit. Eric followed after, tracking me down outside, and tracking us both down a cab. By the time we got in, it had started pouring, and I was glad. It made my tears less visible, and Eric had seen me crying enough for one spring break. Suddenly, I wasn't sad anymore. I was just plain mad, and somewhere between my genuine attraction to Eric and my loathing of Adam, I found myself kissing Eric in the back of that taxi on a random back road in London.
By the time we were in the elevator to the hotel we were practically undressing each other. Eric was definitely breaking the number one rule of guy code: he was sleeping with his best friend's ex-girlfriend. We shared one of the two full size beds in the room for the second night in a row, and when we arrived in Paris early the next morning, we opted for a single Queen sized bed.
Beyond the decision to go to Paris early, neither of us said much to each other between England and France. If my thoughts were an indication of the collective fears that we shared, then we were both caught somewhere in between an intense feeling of guilt at what we'd done to Adam, and an intense desire to continue the affair that we'd begun. Clearly, the term affair is used loosely in this context, since neither Eric or I was involved with anyone else at the time. Even now I can see how we made sense, we always had more in common than Adam and I. Even when Adam and I were together, we'd seek each other out across the room when something struck us funny at the same time, we'd weave and bob through groups at parties to share a bit of beer and conversation. We, on more than one occasion stepped out of a party to escape the noise and talk about book, music, and movies: the same things that had kept Adam and I together for so long. So how is it that the notion had escaped me for so long?
There was of course, the small problem of how to tell Adam. Did we tell Adam at all? Certainly not that we'd slept together, but what if this continued beyond Spring Break? Maybe it wouldn't, this was just a rebound fling. Two people, same place, same time, a little bit of wine and a whole lot of Europe- it made perfect sense. What kind of person was I, sleeping with the man-I-was-in-love-with's best friend? Repeatedly. Since then I've tried to justify what began as Eric and my affair. It seems in retrospect, that we ended up together much like Amy March and Teddy in Little Women. Eric had always wanted what Adam had, I think he wanted to see things the way Adam did, and through Adam's eyes he fell in love with me. I was never going to love anyone the way I loved Adam, even years later I know that, but Eric was a close alternative. He was my Amy March. Or maybe he was my Mr. Bear. I wondered if there would ever be the kind of passion that I'd had with Adam. I used the word ever, I thought in future tense. This was not a one-week issue.
We did go to the Eiffel Tower, and to the Moulin Rouge. We stayed in an old run down hotel about six cobblestone blocks from Monmarte with a Quick, a metro station, and a natural foods store within a short walk. The first night in the city, after sightseeing for the day, and having more than our fair share of veggie burgers and French fries, we climbed the cobblestone streets to the top of the hill at Monmarte. From there we watched the sunset over the Eiffel tower, and while I thought of Adam on the other side of the English Channel, his name didn't incur the bitter taste that I'd expected it to the day before.
We had our portraits drawn by the artists in the village square, and ate at the restaurant with the windmill. Not too long after dark it began to rain, and we raced each other back to the hotel. By the time we got there, we were both sopping wet. We peeled off our cold wet clothes and made love in a warm shower. After we dried off in the tiny bathroom, which was more like a storage room then anything else, we climbed under the covers, and quickly discovered that there was little if nothing that we could watch on television, due to our complete lack of French comprehension. We each had a lamp on the back of our side of the headboard, and when Eric went to sleep, I was almost finished with the Scientology book that he'd recommended. He'd finished "The Hottest State," on the train ride to Paris.
The next morning we made a miraculous discovery. It was still raining, and January rain being what it is, we elected to cut our sightseeing short and stay in for the day, immediately wondering how we'd fill our time: besides re-reading the books we'd already finished and having sex we were fresh out of ideas. Until we turned on the TV, and found the one thing we could understand and appreciate: Mr. Bean. We ordered in Pizza, and spent the afternoon watching old reruns of the British comedy, dubbed in French and gorging ourselves on greasy food. Late in the afternoon we made a mad dash for the grocery mart across the street, and bought ourselves enough ice cream to get through a couple of other French dubbed English shows, which while they were not as physically motivated as Bean, and as such not as easy to understand, were fun to make fun of just the same. We went to bed early in order to catch a train back to London early, and catch our afternoon flight. We started classes again in two days, and I did not want to think about midterms. I didn't want to think about Boston, and I certainly did not want to think about what this week was going to mean when Eric and I got back.