Even though she was nearly always broke and had no health insurance, Sylvie had three indulgences that even under dire straits could not be ignored. They were iced Americanos, marijuana, and fine lingerie.
Cassandra loved lingerie, too, and when Sylvie had any money to spare, which was not often, she would hit all of the sample sales and buy matching pieces for Cassandra and herself. French lingerie. Italian lingerie. Lingerie that, to Cassandra, had been bought in New York, not Boston, not Cambridge, and so had the pixie dust of Manhattan on it. Every year on Cassandra’s birthday, Sylvie showered her with satin tap shorts, crepe de chine camisoles, rosebud or bluebell garters. Her packages to Cassandra were always beautifully wrapped, in lilac or celery tissues, in brown paper with a pink cotton bow.
They knew each other’s cup sizes and measurements—having been acquainted with the nooks and crannies and delicate variations of each other’s blossoming bodies ever since they were just fourteen years old: Sylvie, 34B, extra-small to small in bottoms, Cassandra, 36C, medium to large. They knew how their bodies and mood swings reacted to different brands of the birth control pill and how frequently (or not) they had orgasms and doing what and with whom.
Sometimes they’d trot around Sylvie’s apartment trying on the lingerie they’d just bought, pulling their stomachs in and thrusting out their boobs in bustiers and thigh highs in front of the dusty mirror. Then they’d plop down at the kitchen table and polish off another jar of Nutella, spreading it on pieces of burned toast they heated up in Sylvie’s oven because she was too poor in those days to own a toaster.
“Goddamn it, are we really that low on Nutella? Desperate living!” Desperate living was a catchphrase of theirs, to be employed in many a situation that the average individual might not feel warranted it. “Hey, Cassandra, go down to the bodega and get some. No, it’s okay, just go in your slip and throw a coat over it, you think that little Chinese guy who owns the bodega hasn’t seen worse at two in the morning? I can’t go, I’m totally high.”
“You are?”
“Cassandra.”
Sylvie was so animated, Cassandra always forgot that her best friend was actually a huge pothead.
“Anything,” said Cassandra, stopping to put her camel-hair coat on over her pink silk slip, “for Nutella.”
“It’s better than sex,” said Sylvie slyly, and although by now she had racked up a modest number of lovers, some of whom, like Ludo, were even good, it was still, in some private, girlish way, true.
Every February, the girls sent each other vintage valentines. Inside the valentines they wrote: “Guess who?” or “Your (not so secret) admirer” or, because they were both children of divorce and did not necessarily believe in the bonds between people being ever-lasting, “Don’t worry! At least somebody will always love you.”
Sylvie went just about everywhere in leggings, French sailor shirts, and motorcycle boots. Cassandra marveled at how great she looked even after traveling, the sight of her back home in Cambridge for the holidays after the grueling Fung Wah bus ride, in a black minidress and white lace tights, shaking snowflakes from her cap of dark hair.
During these years, Sylvie was still wearing her black hair in a dashing, insouciant pixie cut and was so abundantly, effortlessly sexy that she could pick random clothing off the floor of her apartment and get dressed and still look great; a true New Yorker by now, she applied silver eyeliner with expert fingers standing on the subway.
And Sylvie, during these years, her early, delirious years in New York City, the years in which she still deemed it worthwhile to apply silver eyeliner, fell in love with ease: there was a series of boys with supple young bodies and curly hair and names like Jasper and Angus and Max and she had loved them, in her fashion, loved them, loved them all.
And yet when, later on in her life, she thought back to this time, it wasn’t the boys she had been in love with that she remembered. It wasn’t those boys that came back. No, it was her apartment. The boys were blurry, where her memories of the apartment persisted in being almost unbearably specific. Yes, years, years later she was disconcerted to find that she could still remember nearly everything, from its wedding-cake ceiling to the rosy Chinese lantern she had splurged on at Pearl River Mart and hung up in the middle of the room, to its extraordinary natural light. That light could trick you into believing that you were in Florence—or the French countryside—or Athens—anyway, not America. Waking up there was like waking up in a jar of lavender honey. It was an apartment that was high on charm, light on convenience—not a single closet; the weakest water pressure in the world. Sylvie’s landlord, Pete, was a piano teacher of the fading hippie variety, who had bought the building long ago and was thoroughly uninterested in making improvements.
And Sylvie, who not infrequently fell behind on her rent, didn’t demand them.
Most bathrooms in the kinds of apartments people live in during their twenties are charmless, neon-lit squares; the faster you get the hell out of them the better. But Sylvie’s bathroom, ah Sylvie’s bathroom, it was a most romantic spot, with that lavender-honey light streaming in through long windows overlooking one of the ramshackle gardens of Brooklyn. The sink was an old-world shade of terra-cotta, and luxuriously deep. But for all that Sylvie’s bathroom was beautiful it was also, in a way, lonely; tinged with decay, or the foreboding of decay.
A decay that could only be feminine.
A bathroom where, washing one’s face late at night or in the cool thin light of morning, Sylvie sometimes would look at her reflection staring back at her in the mirror and suddenly have the presence of mind to remember that she was getting older after all.