Because she didn’t have the courage to refuse when Stephanie showed up the next day with a dress in a dry cleaning bag and lots of helpful suggestions as to the best ways to ask for money, Ava agreed to go to Steve Buckley’s party. Since so little of their project had involved discussing books, Ava had few occasions to feel that she contributed anything useful, and more and more she felt prey to the worry that Stephanie might one day wake up to how unequal their relationship had become and cast her aside. This whole thing wasn’t quite what she had envisioned, but any of her alternatives seemed terrifying. Her house, her job, her best friend, all were now inextricably tied to the fate of the House of Mirth. Also, there were some moments when the two of them were dressed up, shining with youth and sparkly eye shadow, standing arm in arm in front of a crowd of glamorous, fashionable people, that Ava felt a breathless wonder that this all somehow belonged to her.
So that night, Ava ended up at the rooftop bar of a fancy hotel in the meatpacking district, trying to make small talk while waiters circulated around a pool lit in a rotating kaleidoscope of neon colors, and stars shone in the clear night above. Because Stephanie had lent her clothes, the feeling that she was an impostor, an inevitable disappointment of extra pounds and dark hair, weighed even more so on her already stilted conversation. Luckily, Mr. Buckley proved so talkative, little was required of her. Words poured from him as if he were afraid the lingering notes of each previous sentence might somehow occlude the passage of the next, his intonation building in enthusiasm and urgency until the conversational crescendo subsided without any obvious cause, only to immediately start swelling up again. Ava found this unpredictable torrent of verbiage a little exhausting. He also seemed to require a lot of reassurance, and finally, sick of smiling and nodding after every thought, Ava looked away, vainly pulling up the front of her dress as it dipped and fluttered past her sternum.
Because of the season, they were enclosed in a glass box. An icy wind blew off the river, banging the awnings of the buildings below, while here, thirty floors above, people lounged on low chairs around a gently lapping pool lit by glimmering lanterns. The women were barely dressed; to be so nearly naked on a rooftop in January seemed just one more manifestation of the magical invulnerability of wealth. The men surveyed the women with self-congratulatory approval. Ava watched a waiter’s fleeting expression of disgust as he mopped the spilled drink of a woman laughing loudly into a cell phone. A man in a sport coat and jeans lit a cigar, and the young woman next to him smiled through the smoke. A hungry-looking teenager in a sparkling dress sang along to a pop song as she squirmed on someone’s lap, tapping an expensive shoe, her feet puppy large at the end of her spindly calves.
After a while, Steve Buckley stopped jiggling one crossed leg over the other and stood, professing a desire to mingle. Ava shrank from him, sure that this would be the moment when everyone’s displeasure that she was not Stephanie would become too obvious to ignore, but he took her firmly by the elbow. A little shocked at this untoward self-assurance, Ava followed. To each new group of people, he introduced her as “my private librarian,” and she was confronted with a shadowy, sexy fiction that fell over her like a painted flat obscuring the dusty, cluttered backstage of her ungainly self. She found she didn’t actually mind it so much; it seemed to have such an immediate effect on people, everyone lighting up with a flirtatious eager welcome. There was something oddly relieving at being so labeled and therefore not responsible for explaining who she was in any real capacity. Sailing beneath the protection of Mr. Buckley’s money and influence, she was complimented, cooed over, asked about her literary club, her answers hung on. His wealth commanded such a sphere of deference that for the first time she really understood why this mode of life appealed to Stephanie. She felt charming, commanding, safe. Disgracefully expensive bottles of champagne were ordered, and Ava drank immoderately, realizing that all those counts and barons she liked to read about must have felt like this their whole lives. A woman with slanted green eyes and a tragic Romanian lilt to her voice twirled one of Ava’s curls between her fingers. “So beautiful,” she murmured in her ear. “Thick like a horse’s tail.”
Beyond the diminishing reflections of their translucent enclosure, New York City glistened like a present offered just for her. How smart of them to drink in the sky like this, she thought, as her glass was replenished again unasked, like gods on Olympus. A few bottles later, a girl, six feet in heels with the soft, ripe face of a child model, brought Ava to the bathroom, giggling and whispering racist jokes of the former Soviet republics that Ava didn’t understand. But this girl was beautiful, and to be the recipient of this passing affection almost seemed to raise Ava up, to include her in the sisterhood of striking beauty, and Ava responded eagerly, hungrily. Her arms grasped at the tiny waist and the friendship of a passing hour. The bathroom had plum-colored walls and a black glass chandelier, and the beautiful nymph offered her cocaine. Ava almost refused, but as the girl, whose name Ava hadn’t caught, bent toward her, rummaging in a small silver bag propped against her thigh, the temptation to slide into this identity, one for which she was already dressed, proved overpowering. She didn’t want to break the gossamer intimacy that bound the two of them, just two extravagantly beautiful women living the life that attends beauty. She had done cocaine once in college to feel closer to Sherlock Holmes but, as she inhaled, she realized that whatever she had done before was so inferior to what she was now consuming, it barely merited the same name.
The evening became more impressionistic after that, scenes of glimmering lucidity alternating with stretches of patchy darkness. She ended up in the pool at some point, in her cocktail dress, cavorting with other scantily clad young women like Rhine maidens keening for gold. One of them nibbled her ear while another, laughing, swam a lazy backstroke around them. Ava was overtaken by a blissful immediacy, and she floated in a succession of quickly passing moments where nothing had any consequences. Her past fell away, her boring previous life immaterial to this sparkling now, while the future consisted only of finding the glass of champagne she kept misplacing. She accepted offered cigarettes, delighting in the smoke, a substance as ephemeral as she felt, as if she had smoked her whole life. Everything was glorious.
At some point, she found herself in an animated conversation with Steve Buckley, urgently agreeing with everything he said, while his hands played against the silk dress that clung to her body like a wet tissue. The dark corner they had found almost demanded confidences, and she was absorbed in his recitation of a tragic childhood when he surprised her by wrapping his arms around her neck and leaning close over her ear, asking for a blow job.
At first, she wasn’t sure she had even heard him correctly, but then, looking into his slightly unfocused but intent eyes, she realized that she had, and for some reason she felt flattered. An evening’s worth of fawning and blandishments had worn down her critical faculties; if his wealth and status could be as admired as they seemed to be at this party, surely that must make him admirable himself, she figured. The champagne, the cocaine, the effervescent buoyancy of her evening all seemed a gift from this man, an act of generosity in bringing her with him into these giddy heights where pools floated thirty stories in the air and the winter wind couldn’t touch you. It even struck her as affecting that among all the models and starlets, he had chosen her, and this seemed the final validation of the person she had started to become in the bathroom so many hours ago. She was glamorous, beautiful, triumphant; she owed it all to him. A blow job seemed the least she could do. Her knees hit the slick marble harder than she would have liked, and the thought that she would have bruises tomorrow was the first glimmer of her capacity to think about the future returning, but it was quickly swallowed by the darkness around her. She undid his pants and noticed with a disdainful twinge that he was wearing silk boxers, her disapproval of his fashion choices another indication of her critical faculties trying to surface. He wasn’t erect, but as he was still looking down at her expectantly, she took him into her mouth. Then, as the cocaine in her system fought a valiant stand against a quickly approaching sobriety, she wondered what on earth she was supposed to do with this flaccid penis. She started to giggle. Giggling and the subsequent bouncing of unresponsive flesh against her tongue made the situation even more ridiculous, and she could feel that she was careening down a slope of amusement from which she wouldn’t be able to recover. Steve Buckley didn’t give her very long to try and removed himself with disgust. “Fuck the both of you,” he said, walking away from her increasingly uncontrollable laughter.
It wasn’t until she was shivering in the back seat of a cab, wet and mortified, that the thought cracked through the lingering haze of drugs and alcohol, that probably Steve Buckley would not be offering any further support to the House of Mirth, and that she had messed everything up once again.
* * *
When she told the whole sordid story the next day, looking for sympathy, while they waited in line for coffee, Stephanie was horrified. “Ava, that’s one of our members, for fuck’s sake. How unprofessional can you possibly be?”
Ava snapped the lid back on a bottle of ibuprofen, and put it back in her purse. “What, are you saying you haven’t slept with him?” she said around the two pills on her tongue.
Stephanie offered her iced coffee with a disappointed shake of her head. “Of course not. What do you take me for? This is business.”
“Can we just not talk about it anymore?” Ava drank most of the coffee in one long sip trying to ignore the brutal sweetness of Splenda that was setting her teeth on edge and then realized she needed to go home, immediately, and stay there for at least a day.
* * *
A day spent in her darkened bedroom did nothing to relieve the vertiginous feelings of regret and dismay that surged up and over Ava in successive waves. How could she have come to this? She tried writing, but every time she sat down to the quiet of her own head, it immediately filled with recrimination about the night before. She tried reading Thomas Hardy, but his heroine Bathsheba Everdene was so noble and virtuous and independent that Ava couldn’t bear the comparison. She moped from bed to chaise and back again, trying to avoid the condemning eyes of all the portraits around her apartment—the plaster Athena, the portrait of Balzac looking all rumpled and sweaty, as if taken aback at her transgressions, and worst of all, Arthur Rimbaud with his beautiful eyes and his noble brow, and that other young man that he still called so strongly to her mind. Even Mycroft seemed to be avoiding her and spent the day napping behind the toilet.
Every time she accidentally remembered the feel of Steve Buckley against her tongue, the sharp acrid smell of him resurfaced and filled her with nausea. Why did women agree to do such things? How perfectly revolting. Eventually her stomach was protesting so much, she started to wonder if maybe she was just hungry; she had already gone through the last of the saltines, the one crumpled sleeve was all she had to eat in her apartment. She waited anxiously for four o’clock, the hour that the Lazarus Club laid out the cheap Brie and pâté for its members at cocktail hour. Now that she was so desperately poor, she often made do with this for her dinner.
She brushed her teeth and ran her fingers through her hair and, slipping into the reassuring dowdiness of a cardigan, ventured out into the world. As soon as she entered the ballroom, she was glad to see George. In a black overcoat whose previous owner had been about six inches shorter and fifty pounds heavier, George was hovering over a table laid with a white cloth with a cracker in his mouth and one in each hand. The strap of a messenger bag across his chest seemed the only thing preventing him from falling headfirst into the hors d’oeuvres.
“Hi, George, just arrive?” she asked.
He nodded. “Had to tie on the feed bag straight away. My dining hall credits ran out last week.” A dab of spinach pâté fell out of his mouth and onto the strap of his bag.
“You’re going to come down with gout if you keep eating all of your meals here.” She delicately spread a tuft of goat cheese on a cracker. “I guess we both are, although once in a while I go home and eat some greens.”
“Vegetables.” Indicating a green mound of dubious vegetarian pâté with his elbow, George made little sandwiches out of cheese and Melba toast, wrapping them in napkins for later. “I have a hard time picturing you returning to the quiet homestead and butchering a head of kale.”
She took a sprig of grapes and bit one off. “True, those were richer times, but still. This stuff is pretty bad.”
“I’m supposed to go to a party with Stephanie later, some launch for a fitness magazine or something, so maybe their offerings will be a tad healthier.”
“I feel like you’ve been out with her every night this week.” Ava tried not to watch as he spread a layer of pâté on a layer of Brie and laid a slice of cheddar on top.
He popped the whole edifice into his mouth before he answered, so Ava was privy to each stage in its mastication. He smiled. “I know. They keep putting me on the guest lists, and not just as a plus one. To my astonishment, George Harazi has become quite the social commodity. I’m considered an excellent raconteur, and not a few women have complimented my style. This acclaim is so unaccustomed, I have a theory I was actually in some terrible accident the morning I got this job, and all that has followed has been the fantastical imagining of my dying breath, à la Ambrose Bierce.” He began filling his pockets with napkin-wrapped bundles of cheese. “I mean, surely you agree that all this can’t possibly be real.”
“I wish none of it were real. I’m never going to one of Stephanie’s parties again.” A squeal floated across the room from Aloysius. “So Stephanie and I, we’re only figments of your imagination?” Ava asked.
George looked down at her with a funny gentleness. “You two are the least believable part of the whole thing.”
They crossed into the parlor, with its distinctive odor of floor wax and mildew, a smell George referred to as “pine-scented funeral home.” An old man snored on a damask settee, his chin resting on his crested blazer. A woman clawing a Reader’s Digest looked up as they passed and frowned, muttering to herself about trollops and Saracens. Ava looked at George, but he seemed unconcerned, carefully putting away several napkin-wrapped bundles of crackers into his shoulder bag.
“Just be careful, George,” Ava said, rubbing her temples that had started to throb again. “I would hate to see you lose yourself in all this. High society can be very corrupting, you know.”
They sank into chairs on either side of a large bay window. It had started to snow. “I know, I know, I’ve read all the novels too, how easy it is to stray from the path of virtue, et cetera, but when such opportunities present themselves, some of us, and I’m not necessarily including you in this denomination—” He cleared his throat. “Some of us need to seize the day lest we end up old and alone, in shit-stained pajamas, living on cat food and the lost promises of our golden youth. You’re a pretty girl, so such an end is far more unlikely, and in truth, for me as well, now that I’m so damn popular, but really, why take chances?”
“Jesus, George. That’s pretty dark.” They sat for a moment and watched the snow, and Ava was taken by a longing so strong to return to the path of virtue, she could actually feel it rising up her chest and constricting her ribs. But at this point, she couldn’t even imagine what that would look like.
George cleared his throat. “So speaking of Stephanie...”
“Were we?”
“Aren’t we always, really?” When he recrossed his legs, Ava noticed a small dab of Boursin embedded in the corduroy of his knee. “She mentioned you might be taking steps to get our mirror fixed? Aloysius stopped by today, and I managed to distract him with some well-timed questions about Portuguese water spaniels, but I’m not sure how long I can keep up the subterfuge. My knowledge of dog breeds is sadly limited.”
“She put you up to this, too?”
George considered. “It seems our best option, and also, I kind of miss having Ben around the place. He had a kind of uprightness that really elevated the tone. Also he was teaching me how to rewire our lamp, and I’d like to finish the job.” He handed over his phone. “His number’s in there from coordinating lumber deliveries. Per aspera ad astra, as my high school yearbook urged repeatedly.”
As she held the phone, Ava felt just how much she desperately wanted to see Ben, a longing that made her insides ache—his bright, clear expression, his soft work clothes, his dedication and his blameless poverty—fuck it, she decided, and pressed his number.
When the phone clicked through, she thrilled to hear the familiar voice.
“Hello?” He sounded a little different than she remembered, higher, softer. Absent the righteous anger that had only grown in her memory, he sounded like such a nice, forgiving guy.
“Hi, it’s Ava. Don’t hang up.”
The pause was only a breath, but it was enough to let Ava know his indulgence was precarious. “That would be a pretty rude thing to do,” he said. “I’m not a total jerk.”
She felt the aspersion. “How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m fine. How are you?”
An expectation that she would explain her call seemed to weigh on each word, an awkward lag to the normal rhythm of conversation, while she frantically tried to think of an excuse besides the favor she needed and which felt totally inappropriate. She happened to glance at George who gave her an enthusiastic thumbs-up, and it struck Ava that he would never offer such condescending encouragement to Stephanie and then thinking of her partner, a solution popped into her mind and she lunged for it. “I just called to let you know I’ve got some money for you. I wanted to pay you some of what we owe.” She turned her back on George’s surprised expression.
“Oh. Really?” The hopeful rise in his voice must have betrayed some conflict on Ben’s part because there was a pause, and when he spoke again, his voice had resumed its normal register. “Thanks.” When he continued, he sounded embarrassed. “That would really help me out right now.”
“Maybe we could get together sometime. I could give it to you in person.”
The promise of payment made him amiable. “Sure, we could get a drink or something. You can fill me in. I saw you guys in the Times. It sounds like you’re doing pretty well.”
A flush of embarrassment at the thought he might have seen her latest article was joined by an equal flush of pleasure that he had. “It was just the style section, so...” She laughed a little too brightly. “But yeah, it’s been pretty crazy. Sorry it took me so long to call.”
“Yeah.”
This seemed dangerously ambiguous, so Ava wound up the call before he could elaborate. They made their plans to meet the next week, and she gave George back his phone with the funny vertigo of finding she had quite easily accomplished something she had been determined to refuse.
“You’re in charge,” George said with a shrug.
This confirmation of authority was gratifying, and seemed to reassert her place in everything. She was safe. He offered her another cracker, but Ava shook her head, distracted by the large window through which she could see the early winter darkness pressing against the snow. Ava found the shame of her lie dissipating rather quickly in the benevolent glow of the fast-descending hibernal twilight and the promise of seeing Ben again so soon. And Stephanie would be so pleased.