FIVE
Georgiana
Georgiana knew that between millennials and their therapists her contemporaries had figured out how to blame their parents for all sorts of life problems, but when it came to Georgiana’s pathetic dating history, it really was her parents’ fault. They sent her to a private school down the street, where everybody knew everybody else’s business and had all been friends since they were four, and so by the time they hit puberty they were all basically siblings and the idea of dating felt downright perverted. They sent her to an all-girls summer camp until she was twenty, where everyone burped and let their leg hair grow long. They made her take ballroom dancing classes at twelve, where the boys wore white gloves, and her assigned partner, Matt Stevens, kept time by exhaling forcefully through his nose, directly into her face. It was no wonder she arrived at college a virgin, a fact so humiliating she lied about it to everyone, including her freshman-year boyfriend, Cody Hunter, who happily but unknowingly deflowered her in a single, extra-long bed that smelled of Axe body spray and lacrosse pads.
She had plenty of friends who were guys, but whenever she was interested in anyone, she avoided them rather than face the embarrassment of her blushing and social awkwardness. This meant that at the age of twenty-six she had had a total of three boyfriends, two sexual partners, and the romantic confidence of a tadpole.
As much as she wanted to build on her one great lunchtime conversation with Brady, she found herself unable to re-create the situation. When she saw him in the halls she smiled and said hello, but it seemed one of them was always with another colleague or on the way to a meeting starting momentarily. They overlapped at lunch a few more times, but there were always others at the table picking at plastic containers of Thai takeout or salad.
Lena and Kristin were endlessly indulgent, willing to discuss even the smallest hallway interaction and parse it for meaning, but even they agreed that if Georgiana wanted to make Brady her fourth boyfriend/third sexual partner, she was going to have to find a way to talk to him again. It turned out, though, that Brady took care of the issue himself.
Georgiana had a weekly tennis match on Monday evenings, so she changed into her skirt and top in the second-floor office bathroom, the one papered with maps of Laos and Cambodia, and slung her racket and bag over her shoulder, heading down the spiral staircase, out past the mailboxes and reception, and into the warm evening. As she was about to cross Montague, she heard a voice behind her and turned.
“Hey, Georgiana, wait.” It was Brady.
“Oh, hey, what’s up?” She smiled, her stomach immediately flipping like a fish.
“You walking to the tennis courts?”
“Yeah, I have a match at six.”
“Oh cool, I’m going that way too.” He smiled. The walk sign illuminated, and they crossed together, along with a sea of joggers, bicyclists, commuters carrying laptop bags, and mothers pushing strollers.
“Who are you playing?” Brady asked.
“Oh, today I’m playing this girl June Lin. It’s annoying because our matches are supposed to be entirely five-fives, but she’s definitely a five-oh. She’s just not great, but whenever we play I get annoyed and end up trying to force her to run and then get sloppy.”
“So you’re really slumming it by playing down to her level, huh?” he teased.
“I mean, I’m not trying to be a brat, but there is a different circuit for five-ohs. I don’t understand why she wants to lose all the time.”
“So you always beat her?”
“Well, no, because I get frustrated and screw up!” Georgiana laughed.
“So maybe she is going along, beating all these five-five players, and it’s just convincing her further that she’s a five-five?” Brady asked, faux innocently.
“I mean, that’s exactly what’s happening! It’s a vicious cycle!”
“I gotta tell you, Georgiana, you come off like a nice person, but underneath you’re a competitive beast! I was going to ask if you wanted to play sometime, but now I’m not so sure,” he teased. The light breeze was ruffling his hair, and he had rolled his shirtsleeves up his forearms. Georgiana was suddenly aware of how close they were, how easily they had fallen into step, how little goose bumps were now covering her bare legs. She shook the thought away before she became fluorescent red and ruined everything.
“I’d love to play. Let’s do it,” she said.
“Cool, are you free after work tomorrow? Or is that too much tennis two nights in a row?”
“There’s no such thing as too much tennis for us five-fives. But I’m not going to go easy on you. And if you’re not at least five-oh I’m going to be a real snot about it,” she warned.
“I wouldn’t expect anything less. And just so you know,” he tilted his head at her, squinting his eyes, “I think you’re actually a ten.” With that he turned and walked back the way they had come, and Georgiana died forty-seven deaths inside. It was the cheesiest, best thing any man had ever said to her, and she immediately pulled out her phone to text Lena and Kristin. They had been waiting on the shore, searching the seas for signs of hope, and finally, their ship was coming in.
The next evening they met on the front steps of the mansion and walked together to Atlantic Avenue. Brady had on athletic shorts with a small, clear sticker still affixed to the leg, and his tennis bag looked brand-new. They warmed up at the net playing mini tennis, volleying the ball back and forth. She could see he held the racket comfortably, had a nice swing, and moved with the ease of a practiced athlete. They backed up to the service line and rallied. He was strong—Georgiana always liked playing against guys—and they took turns walloping the ball cross-court, neatly placing their shots in the same spots over and over. When they started playing for points, Georgiana realized that she was indeed much better than he was, but that he was a fun competitor. He played fast and hard but occasionally hit one crazy shot that was so wildly misplaced they had to chase it onto the adjoining courts, yelling apologies to their neighbors and stifling their laughter. They played for an hour until the whistle signaled the end of their session and the next pair sauntered onto the court, stretching ostentatiously, unwilling to miss even a second of their allotted time. Tennis players were notoriously intense.
Georgiana and Brady began playing once a week, usually on Tuesdays. At work they maintained a professional distance, exchanging quiet nods and grins in the halls, sitting at opposite ends of the lunch table. But on the walks to and from the courts they talked. They talked about Brady’s travel bug; about the year after college he spent in the Peace Corps, stationed in Uganda; the time he attended a wedding there and they slaughtered a goat and asked him to take the first bite even though he had barely met the bride and groom and the idea of goat made him queasy. His parents were international aid workers, and he’d grown up traveling with them, had a passport full of stamps by age ten. Georgiana told him about the safari she took as a child, her grandmother so bored by the entire thing that she read a novel in the back of the Jeep while drinking gin from a tiny flask; and the time her brother climbed Kilimanjaro with his college roommate and ended up getting so sick he lost fifteen pounds. (Cord quickly gained it back on a steady diet of corn chips and salsa.) With each story told, Georgiana was horribly aware of the differences in their lives. While Brady had struck out on great adventures, had seen so much of the wide world, Georgiana had lived as a coddled rich girl, and, if pressed, would admit that most of her great adventures involved a sleepaway camp that cost twelve thousand dollars a summer or college trips to the Caribbean or Mexico that passed in a haze of mezcal and cerveza.
When Brady went away for two weeks, traveling to a malaria conference in Seattle, Georgiana felt her days go flat. Gone was the bubble of expectation she felt each morning walking down Hicks Street to work, eager to spy him at the printer or mailboxes. Gone was the happy swagger she felt thwacking the tennis ball at him, knowing he was spending an entire hour facing her, waiting for her to dictate his next move. She felt her life was on pause, and fourteen days stretched before her like an eternity.
To pass the time, she met her brother for dinner at the Ale House on Henry Street after work one night. She hadn’t really spent any time with him one-on-one lately, and so they took a booth in back and ordered pints of Sour Monkey, burgers and fries, and a plate of calamari. Much to their mother’s horror, Georgiana and Cord were absolute garbage disposals, eating anything and everything. When she was eleven and Cord was home on college break, they would hold contests to see who could eat the most chicken tenders, who could eat more hot dogs. It was disgusting, but they loved it, and their mutual enthusiasm for junk food was a bond between them.
“So, we haven’t even really talked about your honeymoon. How was it?” Georgiana asked. “And please don’t tell me how many times you boned.”
“Well, we boned a lot.” Cord nodded seriously. “Mostly doggy style.”
“Shut up.” She rolled her eyes.
“No, it was awesome. Turks is beautiful, we did tons of hiking and swimming and snorkeling, and we got massages and did all the romantic crap.”
“Sounds like an episode of The Bachelor. Cool.”
“It was unabashedly cheesy. Literally everyone at the resort was on their honeymoon. It was all couples and rose petals and people holding hands and feeding each other strawberries and champagne.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that was your style, but okay.”
“Aw, are you jealous because you don’t have anyone to get a couples massage with?”
The waitress came by and dropped off the platter of calamari, and Georgiana set about squeezing lemon all over the crispy mess.
“First of all, couples massages are just weird. I think they’re designed so that people who hate each other can do something romantic and not talk.”
“Hot take, okay.”
“And secondly, maybe I do have somebody.”
“Ooooh, that’s exciting. Anyone I know?”
“Nah, a guy I work with.”
“That’s tricky. Do people at the office know about it?”
“No way. We’re keeping it quiet.”
“That’s smart. I slept with my boss once and now it’s all anyone at work talks about.”
“Cord, your boss is Dad.”
Cord cackled and grabbed one of the big, gross calamari pieces with all the frilly legs and shoved it in his mouth. He really was the best brother, happy to give her valuable life advice and eat all the scary bits of squid.
Without Brady at work, Georgiana was actually incredibly productive. She cranked out new copy for the annual report, she sorted through photos, she ate lunch in record time, proofreading her own work at the table while her colleagues talked animatedly and unappetizingly about digging new latrines in Mali.
On the Sunday of Brady’s second week away, Georgiana was hungover (Lena’s boyfriend had hosted a single-malt tasting), but she dragged herself out of bed to meet her mother at their racket club, the Casino. They had an eleven o’clock court time and they would retreat to the apartment for lunch afterward. As they began to hit, Georgiana could feel the difference all her extra playing had made. Not only had she doubled her weekly tennis, but she’d started running a bit more often, wanting to keep herself fast on the court.
“Georgiana, you’ve lost weight,” her mother said approvingly. She was always the first to notice even the most infinitesimal of fluctuations in Georgiana’s figure. “Do you have a new beau?”
Georgiana was startled by her mother’s guess. They rarely spoke about her love life, and when they did her mother usually referred to men as Georgiana’s “friends” with barely a wink.
“Well, there is a guy I’ve been playing tennis with,” she admitted, her cheeks, already pink with exertion, growing ever pinker.
“That’s nice. Don’t forget to let him win sometimes, dear.”
Classic mom, Georgiana laughed to herself. Georgiana would never let anyone win on purpose, not even if they had a broken leg. When Cord was getting ready to hike Kilimanjaro he had received six inoculations in one arm and could barely swing his racket, and Georgiana still played her heart out and spanked him royally. He would have fallen over with shock if she’d done anything less. Competition was their family love language.
At noon they walked back to Orange Street, where Georgiana’s father was at his desk with a stack of newspapers and Cord and Sasha were unpacking a bag of bagels and smoked salmon on the kitchen table.
“Oh my God, bagels from Russ and Daughters!” Georgiana exclaimed, making a dive for the bag to grab a poppyseed.
“Put it on a plate, dear, you’ll enjoy it more,” her mother admonished as Cord laughed. Sasha was carefully arranging silverware and napkins on the table as though Kate Middleton or the cast of Queer Eye were coming by shortly to judge her. Georgiana just wished Sasha wasn’t there. It was exhausting being around someone who tried so hard all the time.
As they ate, Sasha broached her favorite topic: what of their family memories she might throw in the garbage. “Georgiana, I know you really don’t have a lot of storage in your apartment, but I was wondering if you might want to take your tennis trophies? And there is that wooden animal I think maybe you made? The tail goes up and down? Do you want that?” she asked in a hopeful voice, carefully spreading the thinnest layer of cream cheese on a plain bagel.
The “animal” was a beaver and a great source of private shame for Georgiana. When she was in the sixth grade they had taken a woodworking class at school and been instructed to choose different projects. One girl made a small game where a seesaw launched a ball on a string through a hoop. Another made the base for a lamp that would flick on and off using a system of pulleys. Georgiana found instructions for making a ten-inch beaver that rolled on four uneven wheels, causing its wide, flat tail to thump up and down. She spent weeks on it, sanding the wheels and covering it with varnish, making a pretty crosshatch pattern on the tail. It wasn’t until they shared their final projects that someone realized what she had done.
“You made a beaver, Georgiana? You know what that means, right? You literally made a beaver!” The laughter was endless. She was a nice girl—Georgiana had never spoken about her vagina, never mind learned slang for it. Somehow everyone else seemed to get the joke, though, and it was the highlight of the year for most of the class, cementing Georgiana’s reputation as utterly asexual. Every time she looked at the beaver she felt a pang of humiliation. She knew she shouldn’t care anymore, but over time it had come to symbolize her romantic failures and deep lack of maturity.
“I’ll come take a look, but I really don’t have much space,” Georgiana hedged. She wasn’t sure why, but she couldn’t bear to imagine Sasha throwing the stupid beaver away. She had spent weeks making it and putting it in the garbage just felt wrong. And she was secretly proud of the tennis trophies even if they were from high school and college.
After they finished lunch, after Georgiana went and kissed her father hello and goodbye, after she agreed to go with her mother to a philanthropy-themed luncheon the following week at the University Club, she followed Cord and Sasha back to their house. Sasha gave her an empty Fresh Direct bag for her to pack her things, and she made her way up to her childhood bedroom. She admired the trophies lining the shelves, but then realized there was actually a lot more stuff still there. She had books and photo albums, a crystal Tiffany dish that once held her earrings, a tin of dried rose petals she had brought home from her grandmother’s funeral, a drawer full of old glue sticks and gummy bottles of nail polish. She sorted through it, leaving the junk and piling the things she felt nervous about Sasha throwing away into the bag. Someone had swapped Georgiana’s favorite marigold coverlet for a plain white quilt, making the room look like a sterile hotel. She found the marigold one folded in the bottom drawer of the dresser and, just to make a point, spread it back on the bed where it belonged. When she finished, she realized the beaver was still sitting on her desk. She didn’t actually want it in her apartment. She poked her head out her door and looked around. Cord and Sasha were in the kitchen making coffee, so she buried the thing in the back of her closet.
Georgiana had once woken up in bed with a naked couple. It was her senior year of college, and she’d driven to Amherst to visit Kristin. They had gone to a Chinese restaurant and had scorpion bowl races, where they ordered two giant vats of red punch for the table, divided into teams, and sucked out of straws to see who could finish first. They then went to a bar where Georgiana didn’t know a soul but had a wonderful time drinking buckets of Bud Light and playing “I never,” which Georgiana was very good at since she had never really done much of anything. They went back to Kristin’s off-campus house, where Georgiana was assigned the bed of another girl who was away visiting her parents in Boston, but when she got up to pee in the night, she ended up slightly turned around in the dark and climbed back into the wrong bed—the bed where Kristin and her senior-year fling were passed out. They woke up six hours later, wildly hungover, only to realize that Georgiana was in the wrong bed, and while she was wearing a navy T-shirt that said henry street tennis and a pair of leggings, the other two occupants were completely buck naked. Luckily, they thought it was totally hilarious, and they told everyone at brunch in the dining hall, where Georgiana ate four waffles before she realized she was still drunk and had to sleep it off before getting in her car and driving back to Brown.
To this day that was only the third penis Georgiana had ever seen, not counting the end of Boogie Nights or The Crying Game. (Movies didn’t count. Neither did porn, not that Georgiana watched any. She was very afraid of her phone getting a virus.)
Georgiana wanted to wake up next to Brady. She wanted to eat waffles with Brady. She definitely wanted to see Brady naked. When he came back from his two-week trip, they resumed their Tuesday tennis dates. Brady’s hair was slightly longer, and he had gotten some color on the bridge of his nose. Georgiana teased him that he’d actually lied to everyone and taken a beach vacation instead of hanging out in government conference rooms. Nobody looked this good after talking about malaria and flying cross-country in coach.
After they played for an hour, they were both sweaty and thirsty. It was a warm evening and Georgiana took a big swig from her water bottle while Brady changed out the tape on his racket grip.
“Did you cheat on me while I was gone?” joked Brady. “I see you got that nice underspin on your backhand. Who’d you play with?”
“I know! I figured out what I was doing wrong! My mom and I were playing over the weekend and suddenly it clicked.” She threw her water bottle back in her bag and pulled her hair out of her ponytail.
“That’s so cute you and your mom play together,” Brady said, and Georgiana promptly felt about twelve years old.
“She’s nearly seventy, so I go easy on her. She actually told me I should let you win.”
“You talk to your mom about me?” Brady asked, bumping her shoulder with his own.
“She asked who I was playing tennis with!” Georgiana said mock-defensively. “I didn’t say we were, like, lovers!”
“So that’s it then? I’m just someone you play tennis with?” He bumped her shoulder again but left it there so that they were leaning against each other, his whole arm warm on her side.
“I guess so far.” She leaned back against him and she could feel their closeness with every inch of her body. He reached for her face and tucked her hair behind her ear. She lifted her chin and he kissed her, his lips soft and warm. They looked at each other and laughed. She felt lightheaded with happiness.
“Come on.” Brady grinned, tossing the grip tape into his bag and zipping it closed. Georgiana grabbed her stuff and together they walked the path out of the park, simultaneously pretending nothing had happened and knowing that everything had changed.
The next week they made plans to play after work, and since the courts were a ten-minute walk from Georgiana’s apartment, she cleaned her place ahead of time and left a bottle of wine and a six-pack in the fridge. In the morning she moisturized her arms and legs carefully, she washed her hair even though it was going to get sweaty, and she debated for a solid ten minutes about her underwear. White cotton underpants were obviously not sexy, but she couldn’t fathom playing sports in a lace thong so she settled on a light pink bikini pair that were at least small enough to be cute.
Georgiana played like garbage that evening, too anxious about what might happen after their game, but Brady played even worse. Since the courts were by the East River, his crazy shots went flying off into the water, and even though they started out with six tennis balls they ended with only four. They hit like such idiots Georgiana was pretty sure people thought she was a three-five and she would have been mortified if she weren’t so busy thinking about how Brady’s chest looked in his shirt.
After they finished, they both smiled at each other, flushed and uncomfortable as they delivered their lines. “My apartment is just down the street, want to come over for a beer or a drink?”
“Oh, sure, that would be cool.”
They barely talked as they walked, and when Georgiana unlocked the door to her place she held her breath, suddenly afraid he would change his mind or that she had left, like, a giant teddy bear in the middle of her bed. Once they closed the door they didn’t even pretend to look for a drink. Brady kissed her and she kissed him back. They kicked off their shoes and pulled their shirts over their heads and fell on the bed, tangled up and sweaty and laughing, and when they finished Brady lay on his back looking at the ceiling with a silly smile on his lips.
“You know how they say you can tell how good someone is at sex by watching them dance or play sports?” Georgiana asked. “Well, the great news is that you are much better at sex than you are at tennis.”
“Oh, thank God,” Brady laughed. “I don’t even want to know what the sexual equivalent of hitting two tennis balls in the river might be.”
“I think that would be like, breaking a bone or a piece of furniture.”
“I mean, breaking furniture could be fine. I bet some very prominent sexologists have broken a bed.”
“I think sexologists are the people who study sex, not the ones who are really good at doing it.”
“You think they learn everything from books? I don’t think so. I think they probably need to log field experience to get certified. Like how a hair stylist needs to give student haircuts.”
“What would be the bigger risk then? Letting a student sexologist sleep with you or a student stylist cut your hair?”
“I’d pick the haircut,” Brady said. “I’m not vain, but I am very picky about who I have sex with.”
“Me too,” Georgiana said seriously. She sort of felt like she should confess how inexperienced she was, how few boyfriends she’d had, how little she knew about this whole thing, but at the last minute she bit her tongue. It was going so well, why screw it up by admitting that? She was just so happy.
While they remained formal at work, they fell easily into a routine outside the office: they met for tennis and sex every Tuesday, then sex without tennis on weekends. They didn’t only have sex—sometimes they went for a run through Brooklyn Bridge Park, around the piers and down into Red Hook, where the Statue of Liberty seemed impossibly close, where tugboats were moored along the docks, where they ran past warehouses with open doors and could peer inside and see glassblowers and welders and artists working. They played basketball on the courts at Pier 2, where teenage boys blasted music as they waited for their turns, spitting and leaning against the cement wall. Then they would go back to her apartment and shower—or not—and fall into bed hungry and exhausted.
Sometimes it felt like the extreme physicality of their relationship was all tied up with their intense connection. They were two bodies who loved being alive in their bodies. They were not just mouths and hands and breasts, they were quads and hip flexors and biceps, they were muscles to stretch, to ice, and their sweat was part of everything they did. Georgiana felt most like herself when she was moving, and she could tell that Brady was the same way. When she was running, she never worried about who was looking at her or what she should say; the butterflies and knots in her stomach were replaced by the pleasant burn in her lungs and her legs, knowing that the only thing she needed to worry about was moving, pushing forward, that she belonged entirely to that moment.
Brady didn’t seem interested in meeting her friends or family yet, and she didn’t push to meet his. It was natural to keep their relationship a secret at work, with him being so much more senior, and a decade older; maybe it made the spark even brighter, to know that they existed in a place outside of normal life. Georgiana didn’t need to be his girlfriend; she didn’t need to stake that claim, because she knew, completely and positively, that everything she felt for Brady was reciprocated, that they could call it friendship and he would still look at her in a way that made her insides go hot and electric. They were friends with benefits, and for Georgiana that benefit was that she was sleeping with someone she loved completely.
