CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“You don’t find it a little politically insensitive?” Janey asked CJ as the two women ascended from the L train to Williamsburg. “Something about it feels icky to me.”

CJ, still dragging her SoarBarre foot uselessly behind her, shrugged.

“I’m Indian and it doesn’t bother me.”

“I’m part Irish, and a boot-camp class claiming IRA members as founders might make me uncomfortable.”

The day before, they’d signed up for the latest SweatGood pass craze, Tamil Tiger Boot Camp, a military-style cardio and weight-training class led by former members of the militant separatist movement from Sri Lanka.

“Blast your metabolism with this mix of mental conditioning and physical training as you allow our highly trained military operatives to take your fitness to the next level,” read the class description.

“No one would take a class led by members of the IRA anyway,” CJ explained. “Who wants to work out with a bunch of pasty old white guys who drink beer all day? The Tigers were fierce. And don’t you think we’re doing a service to these people? They’re refugees and visitors to our country. We’re helping them live the American Dream.”

As usual, it was useless to argue with CJ about fitness or geopolitics. She grabbed her friend’s elbow to steady her as they stepped onto the curb, narrowly avoiding collision with a trim, determined woman power-walking a double stroller. The studio door was just a few down from where they were standing, and Janey could see a line forming outside on the sidewalk for the next class. As they approached, she spied a familiar vehicle, a bright blue Tesla with vanity plates reading SPRSTAR, idling at the end of the street.

“Shit! Beau’s here.” Janey paused and squeezed CJ’s arm. “Fugh! I can’t with him right now.”

“How do you know?” CJ squinted to make out the car. They’d had a big laugh when Beau shelled out a ridiculous amount of money for the custom-designed vehicle last year because he had a crush on the Tesla founder, Elon Musk.

“There it is! The car of the future. Ugh. You don’t think he’s here for this class, do you?” CJ steered Janey away from the line.

“I can’t think of any other reason he’d be in Brooklyn,” Janey said. “Beau doesn’t leave Manhattan unless he’s boarding a plane.”

CJ straightened to her full five feet two inches. “Then we confront him. You were going to have to run into him sometime.”

“I already did.” Janey told CJ how she’d sent Beau lard fries during her date with Hugh, causing her friend to erupt with laughter.

“I didn’t think you had that in you. That’s probably why he’s here. He has to work off a whole week’s calories after you sent him a bowl of fat. Let’s do this, mama. You don’t have to talk to him. I can call him a motherfucker, but you don’t have to say a word. And afterward maybe one of the Tigers could tie him to a chair and inflict some torture on the little bitch.”

She turned to CJ. “How do I look?”

“Gorgeous,” CJ said simply. “Stunning. The best you’ve ever looked.”

Janey glanced over her shoulder at the growing line. As far as she could tell, Beau wasn’t already standing in it, and no one had emerged from the car. Wasn’t it like him to let everyone else queue and cut in front at the very last second?

“Can we at least wait for everyone to go in so we don’t run into him?” Janey pleaded. “We can duck into this shop for a minute.” She pointed to the windows of the clothing store behind her, a place that sold children’s clothes made exclusively from baby alpaca wool. “I’ll buy something for the twins.” She grabbed CJ’s arm and pulled her into the warm little store that smelled faintly of wet goat. The door gave a little chime as they entered, but the bored salesgirl behind the counter didn’t even bother looking up from her iPhone.

CJ fingered the soft sweaters and mittens tied together with a string. “These won’t fit the twins. They’re getting bigger by the day. I don’t know if I should stop feeding them or what.”

Janey pinched her friend’s arm.

“I’m kidding,” she said. “I’m trying to get them to be more active. Steven thinks they’re fine the way they are. ‘They’re boys,’ he says. ‘They’re supposed to be a little beefy. We have little football players on our hands.’ ”

Janey hardly heard what CJ was saying. “The line’s moving. Beau’s getting out of the car.”

The petite salesgirl with a conspicuous unibrow finally decided she should be cordial. “Can I show you the spring line? We just got these in from Peru.” She picked up a pair of furry child-sized leg warmers. “All of our wool is fair trade, and the sweaters are knit by a co-op of former prostitutes in Lima.”

“I’ll take two of these little hats. I’m all about supporting former sex workers,” CJ said, picking up a red beanie and an orange one. “Their heads are a completely normal size.”

Janey watched as Beau bounced from the backseat of the Tesla, holding the hand of someone behind him in the car and dragging her onto the sidewalk. It was the girl. That beautiful intern. His new muse. Her replacement. She felt the early symptoms of a panic attack, tingling fingers and a gnawing tightness in the back of her throat. It hadn’t bothered her that her ex had gotten a new woman pregnant, but seeing her former business partner and best friend, her gay former business partner and best friend, bringing this giggly little girl to a boot-camp class was enough to reduce her to tears.

CJ handed the salesgirl her credit card and came over to sling her arm around Janey’s waist. “You’re better than he is. You know that. Let’s go. Don’t let him cheat you out of burning like a thousand calories with some reformed terrorists. We took the subway here, for god’s sake. We’re working out with that militia.”

They were the last to walk into the class and forced to stand in the back of the large warehouse, a former sugar refinery that retained a faint scent of burnt confectioner’s powder. Over the next five minutes, two Sri Lankan men in full combat fatigues and with precise British accents carefully explained the plan for the next hour. They would be divided into teams and made to compete against one another in various obstacle courses constructed throughout the old warehouse, which included tasks such as lugging boulders across the room, building stockades with thirty-pound sandbags, dismantling them and rebuilding them on the opposite side of the room, crawling on their stomachs underneath a maze of barbed wire, and scaling a two-story wall.

Beau was practically joined at the hip with his leggy new gal pal. The pair of them wore matching Rick Owens sweatpants and oversized hoodies with the words BE A UNICORN emblazoned on the front. On his head, Beau wore a rainbow-striped headband. They kept poking each other in their slim sides and giggling in each other’s ears. He usually despised public physical fitness. His trainer came to work out with him in his apartment where no one else could witness it. This new girl must have made him come.

“We could go over and say hi. Don’t you think it’s weird for the two of you to avoid each other? You didn’t get a divorce,” CJ said with her trademark practicality about all things that didn’t have to do with her weight or the size of her children’s pants.

But it wasn’t that simple at all. This was like the worst divorce of all time, one Janey hadn’t initiated, hadn’t wanted. When she looked at Beau with this new girl she felt cheated out of the life she thought she should have. It didn’t make any sense. He was a gay man and she was a straight woman. Theirs wasn’t a love story, and yet the pain of the split was as real as if they had been married for twenty years. She kept thinking back to an interview she’d seen ages ago between David Frost and Truman Capote where Truman had argued that true friendship was so much more intimate and deeper than love. At the time Janey hadn’t thought much of it. She’d just been researching something about Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the launch of a dress called the Audrey, but now the quote echoed in her mind.

The Tamil Tigers were wildly polite for former members of one of the world’s most dangerous armies, sprinkling their instructions with the words “please” and “thank you” and “if you would be so kind.” They conducted a lengthy roll call of all thirty guests, forcing the group to hold a steady plank position the entire time. Next up they were told to divide into teams at the start of various obstacles around the room.

“If you could please assemble your four-person team at one of the stations then we shall begin the first drill,” the taller of the Tigers said into a megaphone. Janey and CJ grabbed each other’s hands, the way you did when partnering up on field trips in grade school, and smiled at a pair of similarly aged women standing nearby. The Tigers took the competition seriously, giving each team a color—theirs was pink—and lighting up a giant scoreboard on the back wall. Each team received five points if all four members finished a particular obstacle course before the other team. Despite being one of the older teams in the room, the pink team was weirdly good at walking across a slack line and climbing an agility ladder. Janey looked over at Beau’s team and saw him struggling to stand on a balance beam while carrying a cement block. What did he think about this place? About the Tigers? They’d spent the better part of their entire lives talking about everything, critiquing the world, cataloging everyone else’s dysfunctions. Did the silence between them feel as deafening to Beau as it did to Janey? Would he laugh if she made a joke about all of the hipsters in the room pretending to guard Sri Lanka’s democracy by carrying organic burlap sandbags?

With the hour ticking down to the class’s final minutes, the pink team was in the lead and poised to face the yellow team in one final obstacle. Janey could hear Beau’s high-pitched giggle before she turned to face him. She knew her hair was a mess. She’d caught her ponytail on a length of barbed wire during the last drill and she was drenched in sweat.

“Hey there, Janey-boo,” she heard him say, realizing then that he’d known she was there the entire time. He lowered his voice an octave. “Hello, Chakori.” Beau despised CJ, had always looked at her as competition for Janey’s love, and refused to call her by anything but her given name.

Janey forced herself to smile. “Hi, Beau.”

“It’s good to see you taking care of yourself,” he said in a condescending voice. “I didn’t know you were back in the States.”

Of course with his new officemate next to him, Beau would maintain the charade of her leaving the company, of her fleeing to Europe on a whim.

“You little shit,” CJ spat at him before Janey had the chance to correct Beau’s lie. The Tigers ordered them to line up. This particular course involved carrying a large sandbag through a pit of mud, climbing a wall made of ropes, leaping off onto a trampoline over a trench filled with fire, belly-crawling under dangling live wires, and then conquering a set of monkey bars.

It was the playground from hell, which meant it was the worst kind of hell for Beau, a little boy who couldn’t play sports and sat on the sidelines of the schoolyard for thirteen years. Sure, grown-up Beau was strong and he was scrappy, but Janey was intent on winning this race. Beau was the last in his line, and so Janey hung back.

As CJ sprinted ahead of the leggy muse, Janey turned to Beau.

“You know damn well where I’ve been. How dare you poison our employees against me!” She could feel the hairs on her arms rise as she reprimanded him, and it felt good. To his credit, Beau flinched at her words.

“You’re looking a little less jiggly right now.” He reached over and grabbed Janey’s waist and pinched her love handles. “Still have a ways to go.”

She saw her teammate dive beneath the barbed wire, which was Janey’s cue to take off. With Beau close behind her, Janey heaved the sandbag up and over her head with barely a grunt, lifting her knees high to slog through the muck. At the other side she threw the bag on the ground in front of Beau, causing him to stumble and fall facedown into the gloop.

“YASSSSSSS!” she heard CJ scream. Even her FitWand was excited for her. “You’ve reached peak heart rate. You are burning an optimal level of calories,” it announced. “You are a good human.”

Janey turned to see Beau fume as he wiped the sludge from his face, taking off a palm-sized swipe of concealer with it. She was halfway up the rope wall when she felt a hand clasp her ankle and realized Beau was trying to pull her off. She kicked down at him, ignoring whistles from the Tigers admonishing them. All eyes in the grimy warehouse were on them. This race brought out Janey’s basest instincts. She finally wiggled free from his slippery grip, taking great pleasure when her heel grazed his expensive new nose. She summoned all her arm strength to heave her body over the top of the wall and onto the trampoline below. She could see CJ standing at the finish line holding her phone in front of her taking a video. Next to her, Beau’s muse nervously chewed on a perfectly manicured finger. Janey could feel him gaining on her when she emerged from beneath the live wires. She stretched her arms to begin the monkey bars. Beau hated monkey bars. She remembered sitting with him at recess while he mocked the other children who organized races to see who could cross the bars the quickest.

“They call them monkey bars because they’re for stupid, brainless monkeys, Janey,” he’d say to her, and she’d nod, because she wanted him to think she was also too smart to do something so silly.

Not now. Now she wanted him to see how much better she was at this than he was, how much stronger and faster she could be. In the middle of the metal contraption Janey knew she had him beat. She threw her legs up over the bar and hung upside-down to face him as he dangled from the first rung. She smiled, flipped back right side up, and continued, crossing the finish line and bringing home more of a victory than the Tigers would ever know. Her teammates greeted her with high-fives, and CJ wrapped her arms around her waist. She’d already gathered Janey’s coat and purse and began moving her toward the exit as Beau dangled helplessly from the metal bars.

“You’re so fierce. You’re a fierce, fierce warrior queen and don’t you forget it,” she said. “Now let’s shower and find a bar where we can consume some empty calories and celebrate how fierce you are.”