Cassandra’s boyfriend, Edward, lived in Philadelphia. When she first met him, she was still living in Boston, and for many months now, they had been having a glamorous long-distance love affair, featuring classical music concerts, regattas, why, even corsages and bouquets of long-stemmed white roses, which Edward was bold enough to send, from time to time, to Cassandra’s office. They also attended, the previous November, the storied Harvard-Yale game. Cassandra met Edward on the train platform in New Haven, just, as she related to Sylvie over the phone, “like something out of Franny and Zooey!”
“Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t Franny go insane after the weekend of the Harvard-Yale game?”
“Oh, Sylvie, Sylvie, must you be so unromantic?”
“Yes, actually,” said Sylvie, and laughed. “If experience has taught me anything, yes.”
There is no good time, really, for one’s friend to get a new boyfriend, unless you happen to have one yourself. And Sylvie didn’t, at the moment. She hadn’t been in love or had a torturous crush, even, in quite some time. Torturous crushes were fun; she missed them. Just recently Gala Gubelman, who, while she was on her computer at work, loved to stalk other people’s exes online, had discovered that Ludo Citron was now dating a washed-up nineties movie star who had her own clothing line of ungainly separates sold at Opening Ceremony and had expected Sylvie to be jealous. But she wasn’t—she only felt a remoteness from that part of her past. The days when she had been involved with guys like Ludo seemed a long, long time ago. The idea that she could have been attracted to an artist was preposterous to her now. Sylvie had come a long way since college, and she no longer believed in art. It wasn’t sacred anymore. Nothing was. Money, maybe. Yes, money to Sylvie was starting to feel sacred.
As for Edward, he was an academic and handsome in a rather stiff, professorial style. He was several years older than Cassandra—in his thirties already—but Sylvie, upon hearing Cassandra’s description of him, said, “Wait, wait, wait, I think I get the picture. He’s a guy of our generation, but he has more in common with someone who’s sixty?”
“Yes!” exclaimed Cassandra, not in the least insulted. She just had that sweet, cozy feeling she got—that rush of serotonin—whenever Sylvie immediately understood what she was saying.
Meanwhile, now that she was finally living in New York, Cassandra figured that living with Sylvie would be only temporary. The plan was that she would stay there for the summer, then move to Philadelphia, once Edward proposed. Being the old-fashioned type, he didn’t want them to live together before marriage. Sylvie disagreed with Cassandra’s plan. Sylvie thought that Cassandra should move to New York City for good.
“And live with you?”
At the back of Cassandra’s mind was the thought of the security deposit that she had given Sylvie so many years ago now: she didn’t expect to get it back but she did think that there would be a kind of justice—good karma accrued—in getting to move into the apartment for a while.
Sylvie murmured her assent on the other end of the line, preoccupied with the evening ritual of rolling a joint.
“That would be nice,” Cassandra said. “That would be great!”
“Well, why not? We’ve always wanted to live together, and we haven’t, have we? Ever since college, I mean.”
“Is there anything you need?” Cassandra asked her, eager to appear to not be a mooch. Sylvie was sensitive about people being mooches, she knew. She was swift to complain if roommates used her shaving cream or if they preferred to get takeout at the soul food joint down the street rather than split the groceries: Sylvie was always trying to save money by eating at home and, being the child of hippies, favored a healthy diet. That anybody should treat themselves to takeout, ever, was a personal affront to her values, particularly fatty, low-rent takeout. “And now the whole apartment smells like barbecued chicken wings!” she had thundered to Cassandra once, over the phone. I will be different, Cassandra vowed. I will be the ideal roommate. (There is no such person, in fact. They do not exist.) “I mean, is there anything you need for the apartment?”
Everything, Sylvie thought to herself. I need everything. She had a bare, ragtag collection of silverware and dishes, none of which matched. She still didn’t own a toaster. Or facecloths; she took her mascara off with paper towels at the end of the night. That is, assuming she had a roll of paper towels on hand in the apartment. Sometimes she didn’t. Paper towels are expensive, too. Everything is expensive, Sylvie had found. Even things, like paper towels, that in her considered opinion had no right to be.
“Well…I could use more cooking stuff,” she said carefully, thinking that cooking stuff was only the beginning. Cassandra was known by her friends to be generous and a soft touch with money, and Sylvie felt that she might be convinced to spring for just about anything.
“How about a Le Creuset pan? My mother gave me this really beautiful old Le Creuset pan. It’s kind of a mustard color, on the bottom. Would you use it?”
“Oh, definitely!”
“All right then, I’ll bring it.”
“Can I ask you a question, Cassandra? It isn’t about the Le Creuset pan.”
Smoking pot had made Sylvie contemplative.
“Sure.”
“It’s about Edward.”
“Edward…?”
“Do you like him?” asked Sylvie, because she wasn’t convinced, from the way Cassandra talked about him, that she did.
“Like? Like…Well, that depends. Do you think it’s possible to like a man and be in love with him?”
“Of course it is!” shrieked Sylvie, to whom even the suggestion of such a contradiction was outrageous.
“Hmm. I’m starting to wonder. The sex is much better, I think, without all of that just hanging out and trying to be best friends with each other stuff. Because I don’t think I like Edward all that much, actually, but I am in love with him. And he’s in love with me.”
“Oh, so does that mean he doesn’t like you, either?”
“Maybe!”
The girls laughed.
Cassandra had this orange suitcase. Hermès orange, she called it. It was a very fancy suitcase and exactly the kind of thing that Sylvie, leading her threadbare twenty-something life, didn’t own. Cassandra first got that suitcase when she started dating Edward and it was the most potent symbol of her happiness. It was her vehicle out of the past and into the future—everything that the poor, discarded Madeline coat had failed to symbolize to Cassandra, the orange suitcase did.
Another symbol of her happiness was that ever since meeting Edward she no longer stooped to taking the Fung Wah bus; those greasy, perilous days of her youth were over. The first time she visited him in Philadelphia, she had mentioned the possibility of taking it. With his detached academic’s eye, he had compared traveling by the Fung Wah to traveling by steerage class, not that he had ever taken the bus himself.
“But, Cassandra! The Fung Wah was good enough for you to take when you came to see me.”
“But Sylvie, just imagine it…”
“What?”
“Just imagine traveling by the Fung Wah to go see a lover. Remember that weekend when my hair smelled like chicken vindaloo?”
“Oh God! Well, now that you mention it. Or you could end up smelling like McDonald’s…”
“Pork fried rice…”
“One time I was on this bus they were totally using to transport dried fish.”
“Not really!”
“Yes, really! Did I ever tell you about this one time, we pulled off at that hideous bus stop in Connecticut, you know the one, the one with the McDonald’s. I was sitting up front that time. So the driver turns to me and says— in English—apparently he actually could speak English when it suited him: “ ‘Hey, I’m going to take a smoke. Do you mind pumping gas?’ ”
“Oh my God! What did you say?”
“I pumped the gas.”
“You did?”
“Cassandra! Think about it. What if I didn’t do it, and the guy took his smoke break and forgot or something? Would you have wanted to run out of gas on the highway?”
Cassandra thought that was like Sylvie all over—petite but indomitable, pumping gas on a lonesome stretch of Connecticut highway.
“See, Sylvie. I have to go see Edward by Amtrak. I have to. And taking the train is so nice! I always go to the club car and order myself a Scotch and soda and potato chips. It’s the perfect combination.”
Scotch, thought Sylvie. Drinking Scotch on the train. Cassandra really was living it up, these days.
She had left Boston on April 1. That day, it had been raining, but then, as she might well have remarked to Sylvie, it always seemed to be raining in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge was a melancholy town. She wheeled her orange suitcase across the streets of Harvard Square, a young blond woman in a trench coat making, she fancied, an Umbrellas of Cherbourg type exit. Oh, the songs she might have sung! The child, the young girl she used to be!
That night, Cassandra and her orange suitcase—as well as her monogrammed navy L.L.Bean Boat and Tote, at the bottom of which, weighing it down, was the wonderful old mustard-colored Le Creuset pan of her mother’s—traveled by Amtrak to Philadelphia. It rained, and rained. Good-bye Massachusetts, good-bye Rhode Island, good-bye Connecticut…Outside Cassandra’s window, the Connecticut shoreline was shrouded in gray. When the conductor announced that soon they would be at Penn Station, Cassandra rubbed sleep from her eyes and thought, Good-bye, New England.
She got in so late that Edward did not come meet her at the station, something that a woman who was not in love—the pragmatic Sylvie, for instance—might have recognized as a very bad sign. What it might have told her was that Edward did not understand what an immense night this was in her life. When she got out of the cab at his apartment, though, he apparently didn’t think it was too late to go upstairs and have vigorous sex right away.
But Cassandra just wasn’t into it, that night. She remembered how, in the days of more simple, drowsy lovemaking with her very first boyfriend, she used to doze in the crook of his long arm; something not necessarily sexual but soothing. Something more in that mode was what she wanted right now. She was going to have to remember all of this to tell Sylvie; they were both fascinated by how different sex was with different people, or even with the same person, depending on the way you were feeling. Sex is so textured, Cassandra would say. I know, it’s amazing, Sylvie would say, smoking a joint.
The next morning, it was clear and beautiful. To someone who had grown up in Boston, spring came early to Philadelphia. The magnolia blossoms were out on the well-groomed streets of Rittenhouse Square. Cassandra put on a pale blue shirtwaist and moccasins and she and Edward went for a long, leisurely breakfast, reading sections of The New York Times like a real adult couple, at their favorite French café. Afterward, they went back to his apartment and had sex on the original Colonial floors of the living room. It was fantastic. Cassandra adored him. This was her new life and it was going to be splendid.
When she got back to Brooklyn, Sylvie asked her: “Do you think you’ll get married? He seems like the marrying kind.”
“Oh, yes.” Cassandra sighed sumptuously. “Absolutely.”
“But then, you might end up getting divorced.”
“Sylvie!”
“Well? Don’t pretend like it doesn’t eventually happen. Just look at my parents.”
“Yeah.”
At this point in their lives, Sylvie and Cassandra were both big on judging the messes their parents had made of their lives because they still believed that they, themselves, would do no such thing.
“I wonder what it’s really like,” Sylvie went on. “Divorce. Loving someone and then not loving them, and how with divorce you have to make it so official. You know. I’ve never been able to forget this. My mother once told me that the day she had to sign the divorce papers was the saddest day of her whole life.”
Cassandra never forgot that, either.