“Pansy!” Cassandra called, later on that night.
There was no answer.
“Pansy!” Cassandra moaned again, from her bedroom. But still, Pansy refused to answer, because she was in the midst of her elaborate beauty preparations, rubbing her entire body with a concoction of brown sugar and baby oil, in the exact same ritual she had done ever since her days at Bennington and that Cassandra did now, too. Because for Pansy, at least, there was a new guy in the picture—a new hedge-fund manager, in fact; it hadn’t taken her long to nab another one since the breakup of her most recent engagement. What Cassandra didn’t know yet, poor thing, was that Pansy was planning on moving into this new guy’s loft in TriBeCa, just as soon as he gave her a ring. He was thirty-five and, to Pansy’s mind, on the fast track to marriage. Like Cassandra, she would be turning twenty-nine next year and was starting to get nervous. Even in this day and age, a girl could afford only so many broken engagements.
“Pansy!”
Jesus, what could possibly be the matter? Pansy wondered. It wasn’t a fire, at least, because she would have smelled it. So obviously, short of a fire, there was no reason to get out of the bathroom before she was ready; Cassandra could wait. Pansy surveyed her sleek, freshly oiled brown body with a cool appraiser’s eye; what good fortune it was, to be so beautiful.
Eventually she swaddled herself in an oversize white terry-cloth robe—stolen from the Westin Excelsior in Rome; Pansy, much like Gala Gubelman, had a touch of the kleptomaniac about her when the occasion called for it—and went into the living room, where she fixed two martinis, strong, before carrying them to Cassandra’s bedroom. The door was ajar, and Cassandra was sprawled facedown on her bed, shuddering with tears.
“Here,” said Pansy, handing her a martini. “It looks like you could use this! What’s the matter?”
“It’s—Edward!”
So he dumped her at last, Pansy thought. She, like Sylvie, had suspected that Cassandra and Edward’s relationship would not be long for this world.
“Oh, no! What happened?”
“He—he dumped me.”
“Oh, you poor thing…” began Pansy, wondering if she was on the right track here, for she was not, by nature, the heart-to-heart type.
“And he did it over e-mail, too! Look!”
Pansy read the e-mail, which was not all that interesting or revealing unto itself, though she knew that Cassandra would be hell-bent on discussing its finer points. It was gentlemanly and brief—with a coldness at the heart of it that the illusionless Pansy identified as being absolutely final.
“But our relationship wasn’t like that!”
“Like what?”
“Well. We didn’t really do things over e-mail.”
“Oh.”
“Our relationship was—classy.”
“Well, count your blessings, in this day and age. At least he didn’t do it over text message. Or on Facebook.”
“Pansy! I’m not on Facebook!”
“Oh right. Of course not.” Pansy was on it herself only because if you were as photogenic as she was, why not?
The loneliness of her life—without Sylvie, without Edward—suddenly struck Cassandra in that moment. Oh my God, she thought, undone. I’m single.
“Pansy, may I ask you a question?”
“What is it, Cassandra?”
Valiantly Cassandra tried to frame her thoughts.
“Do you believe all that stuff about how single women can still love themselves and have self-respect and inner strength, blah blah blah?”
“No,” said Pansy Chapin. “I do not.”
“Me neither.”
“Being single is like shopping at Trader Joe’s.”
Cassandra understood at once where Pansy was coming from.
“It’s a sign of a compromised existence,” Pansy continued. “Have you ever gone to a party where they actually served frozen hors d’oeuvres from Trader Joe’s? Those dreadful slimy potstickers and so on? I have. I wanted to die.”
“I hate Trader Joe’s!”
“Of course you do.”
“I don’t want to end up as one of those sad-sack girls you see around who shop at Trader Joe’s and have Tuesday night book clubs and are proud of their banana bread recipes…”
“Oh right, those girls all own cutesy oven mitts from Anthropologie, don’t they? They own oven mitts with poodles on them. Poodles or reindeer.”
“Yes! Ugh. You know something else? I’ve never liked Anthropologie either.”
Cassandra sat on her bed, pondering her future. But all thoughts led back to the past and to Edward.
“I know. I’ll write him a letter.”
Please don’t, Pansy was thinking, with the ruthlessness of one who has loved and lost many a time. If only women knew how unattractive the spectacle of having a bad breakup made them. The cozy “nights in” with the dreaded ice cream and lumpy socks, the recurrent tears and all of the wasted months of emotional “processing” and ever-spiraling conversations about a situation that could never ever change—Pansy hoped that Cassandra didn’t think that any of that was going to be going on around here!
But already, Cassandra was blathering on about her choice of notepaper. She reached for her letter box, from which spilled sheets and sheets of French stationery.
“And I’ll stain it with my scent…Or, I know! Can I borrow that vanilla Santa Maria Novella perfume of yours? I keep meaning to go to the store downtown and buy a bottle for myself…”
Then why don’t you already? thought Pansy, who, ever since grade school, had blanched at the thought of sharing things.
Cassandra, meanwhile, was getting so caught up in the specifics of this imaginary letter to Edward that she almost forgot that he had broken up with her.
“You know, I just remembered something,” said Pansy, trying to steer Cassandra away from the notion of the letter. “I just remembered how much I liked your first boyfriend. The one you had who used to come and visit at Bennington.”
“Oh, really? I liked your first boyfriend, too.” Cassandra was thinking of the one Pansy used to go visit at his duplex on Central Park South.
“Oh, but he was hardly my first—” Pansy, with her epic list of lovers, was temporarily flummoxed.
“No, of course not. But I mean, the guy you were with while we were at Bennington.”
“Well,” Pansy admitted. “He was the first of my fiancés.” And the only one of them I ever loved, she thought, and was surprised by the swell of true emotion she felt in that moment. She heard herself suddenly saying: “You know, Cassandra, don’t take it so hard with Edward. I think there can only ever be one true love anyway.”
“What true love?” Cassandra asked.
Pansy Chapin sighed.
“The first one.”
Edward, sitting at his broad oak desk in his apartment in Rittenhouse Square, poured himself a good stiff drink before opening Cassandra’s letter. He found himself irritated at first, and then—was it on account of the lingering scent of Santa Maria Novella vanilla perfume on the envelope?—subtly, mysteriously aroused by the prospect of hearing from her again. Since he’d sent her that e-mail nearly a week ago now, there’d been no response. Finally, he’d texted her a couple of times just to check up on her, and still no word. Not that he was worried. After all, she was living with Pansy Chapin now—a girl of whom, unlike Sylvie, he had every reason to approve—and surely Pansy would be there in the apartment to comfort her; that’s what girlfriends were for.
Once he finally read the letter, though, he smiled. The main thing he took away from its contents was that she would let him fuck her again. But that could wait, he told himself, because in the meantime, to recover from Cassandra and her emotional excesses, he had taken up with a nice girl from his rowing club who wore Lily Pulitzer and had graduated from Wellesley.