The Break-Up Clause by Niamh Hargan
Chapter Thirty-Two
The beginning of the end was when George moved to Bushwick. Deep Brooklyn. It was an hour on the train from the Upper East Side, but Fia imagined that George would still be in Manhattan a lot, for both work and play. For her own part, she was more than happy to make the journey across the bridge, too. She pictured lots of weekends in George’s lovely, airy one-bedroom loft, the square footage making up for all those extra subway stops.
Somehow, though, it never really worked out that way.
For a while, things stayed the same. There were a few such weekends in the loft. ‘This is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life,’ Fia could remember George joking once, as they holed up with pizza and ice cream and Gilmore Girls.
Of course, overall, the two of them did see each other less regularly and certainly on a much less spontaneous basis – they couldn’t really run together after work anymore or grab a quick bite the way they used to. But via text, their involvement in the everyday minutiae of one another’s lives – the intimacy between them – endured.
Until, at some point – and, in the two years since, Fia has dearly wished she could pinpoint exactly when – George seemed to become harder and harder to get hold of. Communication began to feel more one-sided, George’s responses briefer, more delayed. Fia often thought that friendship – true friendship – could basically boil down to a simple yes/no question. Does this person unreservedly want the best for me? And, little by little, with George, she became less sure of the answer.
Omg, I got a pay rise today!Fia could remember texting, once. Minuscule, obviously, but Celia said they wanted to recognize the hours I put in on the Patterson thing. I’m at Sarge’s celebrating the best way I know how – with coleslaw AND pickles.
Cool!George replied, roughly fifteen hours later.
Fia couldn’t help feeling a bit defeated when she read that. Her little piece of good news really wasn’t a huge deal – she knew it wasn’t – but, once upon a time, George would have acted like it was.
She told herself that this was just the way of things sometimes, with texts. One person’s idle moment could easily meet someone else at a time of high-stress, chaos, preoccupation. There was nothing sinister to be inferred from that.
On the occasions that she and George met in person, though, things gradually became different there, too. A slight, unspoken stiffness developed between them – or at least, Fia thought so. As time went on, she sincerely found it hard to know whether it was all in her imagination. And, if it was real, did it come from George? Or did it come, in some subconscious way, from her – from her own vague sense of grievance, of groundlessness? It was all, essentially, a bit of a mindfuck.
Then, one unremarkable Saturday, they had a downright horrible brunch in Williamsburg. It took forever to arrange, and Fia still came more than halfway, but that was fine. It was all fine, she told herself, and they were going to get back on track. A long afternoon of mimosas and chatter was all that was needed to make things right, to make things easy and fun again.
George seemed a little irritable from the outset, though, distracted – and not in the way that Fia had seen her so many times before, where she’d spill out her latest drama or disgruntlement, make it something for them to share. She appeared, instead, to be dissatisfied in a distant sort of way – one that neither volunteered details nor invited questions. Put frankly, it seemed very much like she could do without this brunch altogether.
‘Oh wow,’ Fia said at some point, looking out the window onto the street. Somehow, unfathomably, that was what it had come to between them: commenting on their physical surroundings. ‘That’s quite the, uh, interpretation happening over there.’
On the corner, four people were performing what appeared to be a sort of slow-motion dance-slash-puppet show. They all looked extremely doleful, and behind them, a large placard featured a range of images so disparate as to reveal little about the theme of the whole thing. It could have been anything from veganism to the futility of war. COME SEE US TONIGHT AT THE BRICK THEATRE, 10 P.M.’TIL LATE! was the oddly jaunty exclamation at the top of the placard.
For a moment or two, Fia and George simply watched this all play out.
‘Classic Brooklyn, eh? Shall we go along this evening, see what the craic is?’ Fia proposed then, in jest.
‘I guess it could be interesting,’ George replied placidly, and Fia tried (once more with feeling) to steer the conversation towards some sort of life, some sort of their old repartee.
‘What?!’ she asked with a grin. ‘And here I thought we were friends, Georgina Ferarra. Have you forgotten the great spoken-word poetry disaster of 2019? I’ve barely recovered. How could you even consider subjecting us to two hours of whatever this thing is?’
However, George showed no recognition of the memory, no hint of amusement. Instead, she just offered an implacable shrug. ‘I don’t know. I guess maybe I’m just a little more open-minded than you are.’
And, right away, Fia knew that she’d never be able to explain how or why that sentence – we are not the same – hit her like such a slap in the face. She could imagine recounting it to her mother or sister, having them suggest that it didn’t sound so very terrible. And maybe they’d be right. Maybe she was being oversensitive. Again: mindfuck.
But, one way or another, rightly or wrongly, Fia suddenly felt as though she was eating with a stranger – worse than that, even, since she could only presume that a stranger would regard her with neutrality, maybe a little curiosity. From George, she now sensed – at best – disinterest, potentially even a species of mild contempt. The realization, right then and there over huevos rancheros, broke Fia’s heart a bit.
Of course, there was probably an opportunity – in that moment, and maybe in certain others, too – for her to have taken the bull by the horns; confronted the situation head on, demanded an explanation from George, issued an apology if it emerged that one were needed. In the eyes of any third party, all of this would have been, if not necessarily easy, then at least doable. Fia and George had, after all, spent the past two years laughing and crying together, sharing all sorts of private and pointless things. They’d spoken, sometimes, in unison. Or in overlapping sentences, spurring one another on. Their conversations had often had sudden, wild digressions, promises to come back to that in a second. There was always too much to say between the two of them. Throughout the course of their friendship, they’d covered such an extraordinary amount of ground.
In the end, though, somehow Fia simply wasn’t able to find the words. Perhaps the questions she really wanted to ask just felt too juvenile, too vulnerable. Why don’t you like me anymore? Why are you being so mean to me?
In her heart, she knew, sitting in that Williamsburg café, that this would very likely be the last time she and George Ferarra would ever set eyes on one another.
And, in the years since, there has been no joy in being proven entirely right.
Why Fia tells Benjamin Lowry any of this – much less tells him all of it, and more – is not clear to her. However, one way or another, that’s what she does, over the course of two vending machine coffees in a hospital cubicle and, astonishingly, more than an hour.
She even adds some flavour along the way, specifically for his benefit.
‘I mean, I know you probably can’t even imagine it,’ she says facetiously, at one point. ‘Someone accusing me of being close-minded and no fun?’
Maybe she doesn’t quite nail the delivery, though, maybe it comes out a bit less cavalier than she hoped – because, now that she thinks about it, is that a little concerning? That, in fact, Benjamin is not the only person ever to have levelled such accusations at her?
He just smiles, though, a little secretively. ‘Mmm, I don’t know. You might be a little more fun than I gave you credit for, Irish.’
A smile tugs on her own lips in response. ‘Yeah, well. You’re a lot less “fun”,’ she replies, a bit brusquely, and then she cannot help softening herself. ‘… But you’re funnier.’
It’s odd, that moment.
Odder still are all Benjamin’s little nods and questions along the way as she tells him about George, all the overlap she discovers in his experience. His break-up with Jessy, too, had apparently been a bolt from the blue, a mystery to this day.
‘The thing is: you don’t even get to look back fondly,’ he says. ‘I don’t care if it’s a friend, a family member, or a significant other. I mean, I guess that’s the point, right? A “significant other” can be anybody. When something ends like that, it’s all the same – every good memory is just kind of soured by the ending.’
‘Exactly!’ Fia replies, feeling almost giddy with the affirmation of it – the validation.
And, in her mind, she returns again to what started her on this whole story in the first place: that thing he’d said about Jessy, the clarity it suddenly offered her about George. She’s spent two years trying to detangle the situation, unable to perceive it as anything other than incredibly complex, as a riddle it was her job to solve. She’s tortured herself over it, periodically. But sometimes the simplest explanations are the most accurate: the relationship just was not one that, in the end, George cared enough to maintain. Perhaps that really is all there is to it.
‘You know what’s weird,’ she says eventually, draining the last sip of her horrible coffee, ‘despite everything, if George showed up next week and just wanted to go back to the way things were … that would be so tempting. I like to think I’d be all “you burned your bridges, I’m done,” and I’m sure that would be the smart thing to say. But, as pathetic as it sounds, I still don’t know if I could say it.’
‘I get that,’ Benjamin replies quietly.
And, though she would never in a million years have predicted it, Fia thinks he really does.