Page 12 of Sunny Side Up

five

“SUNNY. NO. YOU. DID. NOT.”

People at the two tables beside us turned to look at Brooke, who had stood up and was now gripping her chair in disbelief.

We were packed into a tight corner of Via Carota in the West Village.

The restaurant was loud, but Brooke had just straight-up shouted.

Noor grabbed her arm and pulled her back down into her chair while Brooke covered her mouth with her other hand.

Then Noor leaned forward and mimed turning down the volume.

I was telling them all about how I had seduced my friendly neighborhood construction worker, like something out of a bodice ripper.

“I cannot believe you were just like oh yeah, 6 a.m., that’s normal, come on up, total stranger,” said Brooke.

“There is something about it being six in the morning,” said Noor.

“It’d be great if you could not murder me,” said Brooke, imitating my voice. “I have a meeting at 9 a.m. with my board of advisers.”

“Like, 2 a.m., 3 a.m., Friday, Saturday, sure.”

“ Maybe Thursday, if you’re a youth,” said Brooke.

Noor waved her away. “I am a youth.” (She was forty.) “But 6 a.m. is so pure . And you sullied it. ”

“Okay, thank you,” said Brooke. She and Noor were both laughing now. “That’s when people are heading into exercise classes, giving their kids breakfast. I don’t know, flossing?”

I started losing it, tearing out of my right eye. “Stop, stop, I’m crying.”

“You started this,” said Brooke. “Keep going.”

I took a minute to compose myself. I dabbed my right eye with a cloth napkin, then set it back down in my lap with a mascara stain.

The waiter dropped off our appetizers, so I held off for another minute while we admired our feast of bruschetta, burrata, Via Carota’s famous Insalata Verde, and an order of artichokes.

We were nearly finished with our bottle of wine (something cozy and red, I don’t know, it was delicious, Noor always handled this part and knew not to totally bankrupt us in the process) and ordered a second right there, while we had him.

Once we no longer had an audience, I took a sip of my wine, leaned into the table, and divulged some of the raunchier details, including one that involved the kitchen counter and a jar of frosting.

My cheeks flushed the whole time I filled them in, but it was thrilling to share ev-er-y-thing with two girlfriends in a way that I don’t think I had since, what, college?

Honestly, the recapping was almost as fun as the sex. Almost.

“You guys. I have never, ever, ever had sex like that before. It was wild. Like both of us knew this was going to be a one-time thing—”

“Why?” Noor interrupted. “This sounds incredible.”

“Agreed,” said Brooke. “ I’m gonna start fantasizing about him.”

“Be my guest,” I said to Brooke. “And, okay, but: I just feel like the one-night stand of it all—”

“One- morning stand,” corrected Noor. “Six in the morning is an insane time for a booty call.”

“I just feel like the one-TIME thing of it all,” I said, “the fact that we both knew we were never going to do this again meant no inhibitions, none of my usual worries about what the guy thinks about my gut or my thighs jiggling, no restrictions on what I did or suggested, because I wasn’t all caught up in what I looked like, because I didn’t feel like I had to act like someone’s future wife. ”

“But if it was just a one-time thing, and you really feel the need to bring a date to your brother’s wedding—no judgment, I would, too—then you might want to start taking dating apps seriously.”

We had all made a pact to join the dating apps together. We even took photos for each other, but as far as I knew, none of us had really considered actually using them yet.

“Honestly, I probably never would have signed up if it weren’t for you two holding my hand through the process,” said Brooke. “Ezra and I started dating way before even Tinder existed.…”

“I don’t think I would have either,” I admitted.

“No comment,” said Noor. “But Sunny, in solidarity with your Wedding Date Deadline, Brooke and I will focus our swiping efforts, too.”

“We will?”

“Yes. We will all promise, with Sunny, to turn over a new leaf in our love lives and each have something positive to report at our next dinner. What are friends for if not to peer pressure one another?”

Our giant bowls of pasta arrived, and we turned our focus to Brooke’s ex.

“What’s the latest with Ezra and Nanny Tits McGee, Brooke?”

Brooke’s story was brutal, but certain, uh, characters in it had become major players in our group chat. She had caught Ezra cheating with the nanny. She knew he was a douche. This wasn’t really a shock. She was mostly just disgusted by the whole thing.

Brooke and Ezra had met as undergrads at Penn and were married by twenty-six.

She’d tricked herself into believing that the first few years were “fine” and “totally normal.” Just your average growing pains after the honeymoon phase: adjusting to Ezra’s newfound late nights at the office, so late that sometimes he slept at his desk, or so he claimed; his relentless travel schedule that left her having to parent three kids alone; Brooke taking on the role of perpetual bad guy; Ezra getting to be fun dad who came home and doled out what was left of his candy from the airplane; his lack of involvement with the kids’ school and general apathy surrounding anything to do with actually raising them.

Brooke had been unhappy for at least two years, but she felt trapped because she’d put her career on ice when she was pregnant with her second.

It all came to a head one evening when the two of them were supposed to have a date night, a welcome excuse for Brooke not to have to cook.

Ezra called to say he got stuck at the office.

A mere two minutes after that bullshit excuse, Brooke pulled out her husband’s iPad to order a pizza, and a giant pair of breasts popped up in the corner of his iPad.

A blue bubble of text followed: “See you soon, naughty boy.” The breasts turned out to be the nanny’s, which started to make his other cancellations and late nights at the office fall into place, and the rest was group chat history.

Now we were obsessed with the relationship that the nanny and Ezra were trotting out across social media (all these overblown, lengthy posts about finding the love of your life, “when you know you know,” and “making sacrifices in the name of love”) in order to legitimize the affair, or something.

The cliché scenario of the Tribeca husband and the nanny was one of the things that bothered her most about the affair.

The part you don’t normally hear about the nanny cliché is that, in this case, the nanny was about twenty years older than both Brooke and Ezra, so there was no real sympathy for the woman; she was a fully formed adult who knew the arduous, sometimes impossible work it took to keep a family together.

No, this woman was just a straight-up homewrecker who talked a lot of shit about Brooke to Ezra.

(Cheaters always forget about the cloud!

Wouldn’t you just disable iMessage? What an entitled idiot.

Didn’t even bother to clean up his mess.)

Brooke decided enough was enough—she’d get a divorce, demand her rightful amount of child support and alimony, move in with her parents on the Upper West Side for a bit, and then figure out how to revive her styling career.

Which, between Noor’s TV connections, my extensive network, and Brooke’s former contacts, was already garnering an impressive client base.

After analyzing Ezra’s latest Instagram post (no caption, featuring a weirdly up close, double-chinned selfie of the nanny and him, smiling in front of a random Five Guys), Noor explained how her ex-husband Sam wanted to bring his boyfriend, Paul, the first person Sam had been serious about since the divorce, to an upcoming dinner party that Noor was throwing.

In many ways, I think Brooke and I envied their close relationship. Even though Zack and Ezra sucked, we couldn’t help it: Parts of us still missed parts of them. In other ways, Noor’s divorce shit was messy.

“You could not pay me to have Zack bring a girlfriend to dinner at my house,” I said.

“I basically did pay for Ezra to bring a girlfriend to my house,” said Brooke.

The three of us laughed, then ran through the feedback we imagined our respective therapists would say about this situation.

We agreed that they’d probably all tell us to use this as an opportunity to set boundaries, and then wondered aloud why setting boundaries was so hard for us, especially when we were so committed to moving onward and upward.

That portion of the conversation required an entire bottle of wine.

I accepted, about halfway through, that I’d be hungover for the entirety of the next day.

Every time the three of us got together, we ended up brainstorming and scheming about at least one of our next big professional moves.

This time, we focused on how Brooke could make New York metro private clients her primary focus, since it would mean less traveling to LA for commercial shoots, less stressful prep for editorial shoots, and far more flexibility.

Brooke was typing our suggestions into her phone with the fury of a reporter.

Noor almost knocked over her glass of wine, she was so amped.

We had initially bonded because of our divorces, but this shared, hypermotivated drive to build something and watch it succeed beyond our wildest dreams; this very real love of helping others do the same; this unspoken ethos all three of us seemed to have that “all ships rise with the same tide”: This is what made our friendship so powerful.

We walked together for two blocks out of everyone’s way.

Noor was finishing a truly insane story from her restaurant days about a banker who’d paid hundreds of thousands to surprise his supermodel date—who’d assumed she’d been ditched—by jumping out of a cake.

We alternated between yelling “YOU’RE LYING,” stopping to grab each other’s arms for dramatic effect, and wiping away tears of laughter.

I left dinner on a high, ready to take on the world.