After having lunch with Professor Sobel, Cassandra got off the train to go meet Sylvie and some of her charges at a playground. Today she was watching a brother and sister named Quinn and Imogen. Part of the fun of having Sylvie babysit was that there was plenty of juicy human material in it: she and Cassandra loved discussing the kids and what problems they were doomed to have when they grew up. In the case of these two children—Quinn was four and Imogen seven—the verdict was in: Quinn was homosexual and Imogen a bitch.
Quinn, it went without saying, the girls liked much better. He was a beautiful child with long, pale yellow ringlets and a face that, no matter what the situation, never dared convey any emotion beyond a wan, sulky boredom; Cassandra could well picture those sour lips smoking a Gauloises. His parents dressed him well, as was only the norm with four-year-olds in Brooklyn. How poignant his shoulders looked underneath his thin, hipsterish T-shirts; at this rate, he’d be wearing oversize glasses in no time. Quinn adored Sylvie, as children usually did, drawn to her physical energy and her noncondescending candor. The two of them did art projects, Quinn exquisitely sensitive to the colors he used in his watercolors. Like Sylvie, he gravitated toward a soft, sophisticated palette—pale blues and mushroom grays. No primaries! Ever. Primary colors were for other children with lesser taste.
Today, Sylvie and Quinn were sitting together, doing pastel chalk drawings on the pavement. Cassandra, seeing them, thought: Oh God, am I going to have to sit on the ground? This babysitting business sometimes got a little too rugged for her, even as a spectator. She looked down at her shapely navy blue dress—much more chic than black on a spring afternoon—worn to show off her figure to Professor Sobel. It was going to be difficult to kneel in that dress without the fabric tugging.
Quinn, seeing Sylvie’s friend coming, the blonde with the big boobs and the name he couldn’t be bothered to remember, thought: Oh no. She was going to spoil everything; she was going to take Sylvie away from him. And Sylvie was his babysitter. Sylvie was getting paid. Sylvie had to watch him and Imogen for money, which his parents had plenty of and Sylvie did not. Already, he and Imogen had these things all figured out; they were New York children and they knew the score.
“Hello, Quinn,” said Cassandra, with the phony voice she always used when speaking to children. The girls didn’t know this, but Imogen, who was an excellent mimic, did a fantastic imitation of Cassandra behind her back, saying: Hello, Quinn. Hello, Imogen. How are you? The syrupy emphasis Imogen placed on that last word, you, was lethal. Whenever she imitated Cassandra, she could count on putting Quinn in stitches. She never did it in front of her parents, though. Her parents were such fools, they liked Cassandra; they actually fell for that voice the way no child ever would. Parents just thought she had good manners.
“Hello, Quinn,” said Cassandra again, having failed to get even a perfunctory response the first time around. “How are you? Oh, and what are you doing? Drawing? Oh, I just love pastels, I remember those.”
Now this was another annoying habit of Cassandra’s around children: she was always waxing nostalgic around them. Every banal detail—a stick of pink chalk, a child’s green galoshes—could send her, madeleine-like, into a frenzy of reminiscences. Whenever Cassandra began a sentence with the words “I remember,” it meant the death of the conversation in the eyes of any child. What did they care about some chick’s old party dress, or forgotten birthday cake? They did not care, for they had not yet learned what Cassandra had at far too young an age—that all could be lost; that these banal details would be remembered with an aching heart forever afterward.
There are beautiful children and then there are beautiful children. Imogen belonged to the latter category. She had the kind of silky blond femininity, combined with a straight-backed confident carriage, that marked her already as the prettiest girl in the class. Even Sylvie was intimidated by the directness of her arctic blue gaze and had decided against telling her parents about the girl’s breathtaking tantrums. Like so many parents today, they considered their child flawless and would have considered the tantrums to be Sylvie’s fault.
Right now, Imogen was in the midst of practicing cartwheels, or perhaps practicing is not the word, for Imogen’s cartwheeling technique had long since been perfected. Her long legs spun in gorgeous circles. She was demonstrating for some other hapless little girl, who was rather on the chubby side and did not seem to get it. “Like this,” Imogen kept on insisting, bouncing up and down on the balls of her little blue Keds—Keds were an “in” sneaker this season, in Brooklyn, edging out even Converse. “Like this.” And then she’d do another cartwheel.
“Clap for me, Sylvie! Clap for me!” she called once she was finished. “Why aren’t you clapping?”
“I’m clapping, Imogen,” said Sylvie with great weariness, and then she did just that. Cassandra joined her, a little too late, which Imogen noticed, thinking: I hate Cassandra. Like her brother, she thought it was obnoxious that Sylvie let a friend of hers tag along when she should have been paying attention to them.
Cassandra was looking at Imogen doing cartwheels and, as usual, making it all about her. She had been quite hopeless not only at cartwheels but also at hand-clapping games and four square and…well, you name it. She sighed, remembering. It was true that childhood was a kingdom of many lost pleasures. But it was also a kingdom populated by other children, and other children could be so cruel. Maybe there was something to be said for surviving into adulthood after all.
Then Imogen, finally sick of doing cartwheels and hoping that Sylvie would cook up something exciting for her to do, threw her arms up in the air and ran toward the two young women. She braced herself for the inevitable, Cassandra saying: “Hello, Imogen. And how are you?”
“Why is your face so red?” demanded Imogen. She had cool, soap-flake coloring herself and already wondered what was the matter with the skin of so many grown-ups, when hers was so perfect.
Cassandra, whose naturally rosy skin was red from all of the champagne, put a demure hand to her burning cheek. God, she hated this kid. Imogen. No wonder Sylvie was so bone-tired these days, having to put up with her.
“Actually…” said Sylvie, addressing Cassandra, “I was wondering that myself. Are you…?”
“Drunk? Well. Tipsy anyway.”
Imogen’s ears pricked up at the word drunk. Now this was getting interesting. One thing she did kind of like about Cassandra: once she got the phony hellos out of the way, she often forgot that children were there in the first place and started letting all kinds of adult tidbits drop. At times like that Cassandra was worth paying attention to, or you might miss out on something good. Imogen’s parents were careful never to say things like “drunk” in front of the children and that kind of attitude got pretty damn boring after a while.
Quinn couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to any of this. He was deep in his drawing, massaging various tender shades of blue into the pavement, quite pleased with the results.
“Oh, Cassandra!” exclaimed Sylvie. “Don’t tell me that you and Professor Sobel…”
Aha! thought Imogen, picking up on the words Professor Sobel, almost as compelling and forbidden as drunk. So there was a man involved. This was going to be great.
“No, no! Professor Sobel is very subtle. He thinks it’s sexy to prolong things, I have this feeling.”
Imogen, having no idea just what it was this Professor Sobel fellow might want to prolong, listened to the two women hungrily.
“Subtle! Subtle! Is that what you call it? This, about the man who once did a baboon impression in front of you? Sitting on top of his desk in the music building? Do you remember that, Cassandra, or have you blocked it out?”
Cassandra now took a moment to recall the time when Professor Sobel, wearing a black cashmere sweater pitted with moth holes, hoisted himself up on top of his desk and crossed his legs. She had watched as Professor Sobel, still sitting cross-legged on top of the desk, started beating his chest and waving his arms and making these queer, animalistic, broken, moaning sounds. That episode lasted a good long time and had an almost operatic quality about it. Once he had finally stopped, he had looked long and hard at her with the I’ve got you gaze of the animal kingdom, and explained, “Every so often, a man just has to get in touch with his inner primate.”
Afterward, he’d sighed and put on a Beethoven string quartet and the two of them had never discussed the incident ever again.
“Oh that,” said Cassandra now. “Well, there is something kind of animalistic about the attraction between Professor Sobel and me—I’ve always felt that Professor Sobel has just a touch of this very male dominance and cruelty, combined with this veneer of verbal sophistication…”
All this was lost on Imogen, but she did think a grown man doing a baboon imitation sounded pretty cool. She loved imitations, being so good at them herself.
“If that’s a fantasy you have, you’d best be rid of it.”
“Oh, but I agree! By acting it out, right?”
“No, Cassandra, that is not what I—” Jesus. Sylvie stopped, realizing that she often found herself speaking to Cassandra in the same tone of voice she used on Quinn and Imogen. Quinn and Imogen! They were right there. They had heard everything, probably. She turned to the little girl and said: “Hey, Imogen, why don’t you show us your cartwheels again?”
There it was, staring her down, the fearless arctic blue gaze. No way Imogen was going anywhere. Oh, the hell with it, Sylvie thought, remembering her own wretched childhood. Kids always figured out what was up with the adults anyway.
So Sylvie turned to Cassandra and got to the point: “But Cassandra. You have a boyfriend, remember.”
“Oh, Sylvie, you’re being awfully—unimaginative about this. You know I’ve never necessarily believed in monogamy. I think there can be far worse betrayals between people than that.”
Monogamy. Imogen didn’t know what that meant, but even so, she was with Cassandra on this one: that didn’t sound too hot. Monogamy. It sounded like being forced to do something boring, like going to bed on time. Like something her stupid parents would believe in.
“Infidelity can hurt people, Cassandra.”
“Everything can hurt people,” Cassandra shot back, and Imogen, thinking, Well then, grown-ups must be wimps, because nothing ever hurt me, sighed and went back to doing her cartwheels.