In Five Years

Chapter Six

It’s a Saturday in June, and I’m going to meet Bella for brunch. We haven’t seen each other in almost two months, which is the longest we’ve ever gone, including her London sojourn of 2015, when she “moved” to Notting Hill for six weeks to paint. I’ve been buried in work. The job is great, and impossible. Not hard, impossible. There is a week’s worth of work in every day. I’m always behind. I see David for five minutes, maybe, every day when one of us wakes up sleepily to great the other. At least we’re on the same schedule. We’re both working toward a life we want, and will have. Thank god we understand each other.

Today it’s raining. It’s been a wet spring, this one of 2025, so this is not out of the ordinary, but I ordered some new dresses and I was hoping to wear one. Bella is always calling my style “conservative,” because ninety percent of the time I’m in a suit, and I thought I’d surprise her with something unexpected today. No luck. Instead, I tug on jeans, a white Madewell T-shirt, and my Burberry trench and ankle rain boots. Temperature says sixty-five degrees. Enough to sweat with a top layer but be freezing without one.

We’re meeting at Buvette, a tiny French café in the West Village we’ve been going to for years. They have the best eggs and croque monsieur on the planet — and their coffee is strong and rich. Right now, I need a quart.

Also, it’s one of Bella’s favorite spots. She knows all the waiters. When we were in our twenties, she’d go there to sketch.

I end up taking a cab because I don’t want to be late, even though I know Bella will be running fifteen minutes behind. Bella is chronically fifteen to twenty minutes late everywhere she goes.

But when I arrive she’s already there, seated in the window at the two-top.

She’s dressed in a long, flowing floral dress that’s wet at the edges — at five-foot-three she’s not tall enough for it — and a crimson velvet blazer. Her hair is down and falls around her in tufts, like spools of wool. She’s beautiful. Every time I see her I’m reminded just how much.

“This cannot possibly be happening,” I say. “You beat me here?”

She shrugs, her gold hoops bouncing against her neck. “I couldn’t wait to see you.” She gets out of her chair and pulls me into a tight hug. She smells like her. Tea tree and lavender, a hint of cinnamon.

“I’m wet,” I yelp, but I don’t let go. It feels good. “I missed you, too.”

I tuck my umbrella under my chair and loop my raincoat over the back. Inside it’s chillier than I thought it would be. I rub my hands together.

“You look older,” she says.

“Gee, thanks.”

“That’s not what I mean. Coffee?”

I nod.

She holds her cup up to the waiter. She comes here far more often than I do. Her place is three blocks away on the corner of Bleecker and Charles, a floor-through level of a brownstone her dad bought for her two years ago. It’s three bedrooms, impeccably decorated in her colorful, bohemian, I-didn’t-even-think-about-this-but-it-looks-gorgeous perfect style.

“What’s darling Dave up to this morning?” she asks.

“He went to the gym,” I say, opening my napkin.

“The gym?”

I shrug. “That’s what he said.”

Bella opens her mouth to say something, but closes it again. She likes David. Or at least, I think she does. I suspect she’d like me to be with someone more adventurous, someone who maybe pushed me outside my comfort zone a little bit more. But what she doesn’t realize, or what she conveniently forgets, is that she and I are not the same person. David is right for me, and the things I want for my life.

“So,” I say. “Tell me everything. How is work coming at the gallery? How was Europe?”

Five years ago, Bella did a show of her artwork at a small gallery in Chelsea named Oliander. The show sold out, and she did another. Then two years ago, Oliander, the owner, wanted to sell the place and came to her. She used her trust fund to buy it. She paints less than she used to, but I like that she has some stability in her life. The gallery has meant that she can’t disappear anymore—at least not for weeks at a time.

“We nearly sold out the Depreche show,” she says. “I’m so bummed you missed it. It was spectacular. My favorite by far.” Bella says that about every single artist she shows. It’s always the best, the greatest, the most fun she’s ever had. Life is an upward escalator. “Business is so good I’m thinking about hiring another Chloe.”

Chloe has been her assistant for the last three years, and runs the logistics at Oliander. She’s kissed Bella twice, which has not seemed to complicate their business relationship.

“You should do it.”

“Might give me time to actually sculpt or paint again. It has been months.”

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice to achieve your dreams.”

She smiles sideways at me. The coffee comes. I pour some creamer into it, and take a slow, heady sip.

When I look up, she’s still smiling at me. “What?” I ask.

“Nothing. You’re just so… ‘sacrifice to achieve your dreams.’ Who talks like that?”

“Business leaders. Heads of companies. CEOs.”

Bella rolls her eyes. “When did you get like this?”

“Do you ever remember my being any different?”

Bella puts her hand to her chin. She looks straight at me. “I don’t know,” she says.

I know what she means, what I never really want to talk about it. Was I different as a child? Before my brother died? Was I spontaneous, carefree? Did I begin to plan my life so that no one would ever show up at my door and throw the whole thing off a cliff? Probably. But there isn’t much to be done about it now. I am who I am.

The waiter circles back to us, and Bella raises her eyebrows at me as if to ask you ready?

“You order,” I say.

She speaks to him entirely in French, pointing out items on the menu and discussing. I love watching her speak French. She’s so natural, so vibrant. She tried to teach me once in our early twenties, but it just didn’t stick. They say that languages come better to people who are right-brained, but I’m not so sure. I think you need a certain looseness, a certain fluidity, to speak another language. To take all the words in your brain and turn them over, one by one, like stones — and find something else scrolled on the underside.

We spent four days together in Paris once. We were twenty-four. Bella was there for the summer, taking an art course and falling in love with a waiter in the Fourteenth. I came to visit. We stayed at her parents’ flat, right on Rue de Rivoli. Bella hated it. “Tourist location,” she told me, although the whole city seemed for the French, and the French alone.

We spent the entire four days on the outskirts. Eating dinner at cafés on the fringes of Montmartre. During the day we wandered in and out of galleries in the Marais. It was a magical trip, made all the more so by the fact that the only time I’d been out of the country was a trip to London with my parents and David and my annual pilgrimage to Turks and Caicos with his parents. This was something else. Foreign, ancient, a different world. And Bella fit right in.

Maybe I should have felt disconnected from her. Here was this girl, my best friend, who fit this faraway place like a hand to a glove. I didn’t, and yet she still she took me with her. She was always taking me with her, wanting me to be a part of her wide, open life. How could I feel anything but lucky?

“To get back to the prior discussion,” Bella says when the waiter is gone. “I think sacrifice is in direct opposition to manifestation. If you want your dreams you should look for abundance, not scarcity.”

I take a sip of coffee. Bella lives in a world I do not understand, populated by phrases and philosophies that apply only to people like her. People, maybe, who do not yet know tragedy. No one who has lost a sibling at twelve can say with a straight face: everything happens for a reason.

“Let’s agree to disagree,” I tell her. “It has been too long since I’ve seen you. I want to be bored senseless hearing all about Jacques.”

She smiles. It sneaks up her cheeks until it’s practically at her ears.

“What?”

“I have something to tell you,” she says. She reaches across the table and takes my hand.

Instantly, I’m flooded with a familiar sensation of pulling, like there’s a tiny string inside of me that only she can find and thread. She’s going to tell me she met someone. She’s falling in love. I know the drill so well I wish we could go through all the steps right here at this table, with our coffee. Intrigue. Obsession. Distaste. Desperation. Apathy.

“What’s his name?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes. “Come on,” she says. “Am I that transparent?”

“Only to me.”

She takes a sip of her sparkling water. “His name is Greg.” She lands hard on the one syllable. “He’s an architect. We met on Bumble.”

I nearly drop my coffee. “You have Bumble?”

“Yes. I know you think I can meet someone buying milk at the deli, but, I don’t know, lately I’ve been wanting something different and nothing has been that interesting in a while.”

I think about Bella’s love life over the last few months. There was the photographer, Steven Mills, but that was last summer, almost a year ago.

“Except Annabelle and Mario,” I say. The collectors she had a brief fling with. A couple.

She bats her eyes at me. “Naturally,” she says.

“So what’s the deal?” I ask.

“It has been like three weeks,” she says. “But Dannie, he’s wonderful. Really wonderful. He’s really nice and smart and — I think you’re really going to like him.”

“Nice and smart,” I repeat. “Greg?”

She nods, and just then our food appears in a cloud of smoke. There are eggs and caviar on crispy French bread, avocado toast, and a plate of delicate crepes dusted with powdered sugar. My mouth waters.

“More coffee?” Our waiter asks.

I nod.

“Yum,” I say. “This is perfect.” I immediately cut into the avocado toast. The poached egg on top oozes out yolk, and I scoop a segment onto my plate. I make a vaguely pornographic noise through a mouthful.

Bella watches me and laughs. “You’re so deprived,” she says.

I throw her a disgruntled look as I make my way to the crepes. “I have a job.”

“Yes, how is that going?” She tilts her head to the side.

“It’s great,” I say. I want to add some of us have to work for a living, but I don’t. I learned a long time ago there is a difference with Bella, and our relationship, between judgmental and unkind. I try not to stray over the line. “I think it’s going to be another year, and then partner.”

Bella does a little shimmy in her chair. Her sweater slips from where it sits on her shoulders and I’m met with a slice of collarbone. Bella has always had a zaftig figure, glorious in its curvature, but she looks slimmer to me today. Once, during the month of Isaac, she lost twelve pounds.

Greg. I already have a bad feeling.

“I think we should all go to dinner,” Bella says.

“Who?”

She gives me a look. “Greg,” she says. She sucks her bottom lip in, lets it pop back out. Her blue eyes find mine. “Dannie, I’m telling you, you don’t have to believe me, but this one is different. It feels different.”

“They always do.”

She narrows her eyes at me and I can tell I’ve crossed it. I sigh. I can never quite say no to her. “Okay,” I say. “Dinner. Pick any Saturday two weeks from now and it’s yours.”

I watch Bella as she loads up her plate — first eggs, then a crepe — and feel my stomach start to relax as she eats with gusto. The sky changes from rain to clouds to sunshine. When we leave the streets are almost entirely dry.