Not really, Fern thought, but Cassandra persisted: “I was living with this girl Pansy Chapin on East Seventy-Ninth. It was a beautiful apartment, totally chic, totally just so; Pansy has all of these really great antiques. Then, just after I’d moved in, and I had to pay this absolutely enormous security deposit, she upped and got engaged to another hedge-fund manager.”
“What do you mean, another?”
“Oh, Pansy’s always had these fabulously rich boyfriends. She’s gorgeous, even if she did just have to get a boob job. Like, even when we were at Bennington, the rest of us would be sitting around all weekend eating apple cider doughnuts, whatever, and she’d have some guy flying her to Paris for a rendezvous at the Plaza Athénée. She brought me back this umbrella once. A pink umbrella. From Paris—”
“Well, that was nice of her, anyway,” Fern interrupted.
“No, it wasn’t. It broke! It broke, Fern, it broke!”
“Well, I mean, um, yeah. Umbrellas will do that. I guess.”
“Be that as it may, I am prepared to take the loss of the umbrella that Pansy Chapin gave me entirely personally. So! Where was I? Oh, right. So it’s years later and there I am living with her and she meets this guy and she gets engaged and she moves into his place in TriBeCa. And then, get this, she decides she doesn’t want to pay rent at our place anymore. I was like ‘Pansy, just get your boyfriend to pay it for you, what’s it to him? He’s a goddamn hedge-fund manager’ but no. Anyhow. We ended up having to break the lease in the end. It was this big fucking ordeal. I lost a ton of money. I had to pawn my great-grandmother’s wedding silver,” she added threateningly, as if to let Fern know to what depths she, a fellow Bennington girl, might one day have to stoop on the godless streets of New York City.
Wedding silver? thought Fern. Who cared about wedding silver anymore? What she and everybody else she knew thought was cute was arranging things in mason jars.
“I pawned my signet ring,” Cassandra went on, in a torrent of high emotion. “An amethyst necklace, all of these gold charm bracelets I had. One of them even had real emeralds…”
But mentions of signet rings and charm bracelets were falling, like so much else, on Fern’s deaf ears.
“And now, now I’m through with stuff like silver. I don’t pretend anymore. I’ve just given up on all fronts, I moved out to Queens with Orpheus and I eat from the taco truck. But, when I first moved in with Pansy Chapin, I thought we’d have dinner parties! I thought I was going to learn how to make—sole Véronique! Chicken Marbella! I only ever got as far as spaghetti carbonara, though.” Cassandra laughed, a crazy, reeling laugh. “I used to imagine myself using my great-grandmother’s silver. I had this rich boyfriend, too, back then, I thought I’d have him over and he’d see the table set with my great-grandmother’s silver and he’d ask me to marry him…I thought I’d have this whole other life.”
There rolled over her another memory, this one of the lemon chiffon cocktail dress hanging on her bedroom door, crystallized in the lavender-honey light of Sylvie’s apartment.
“Jesus. What happened?” It was to Fern the disappearance of the man and not the silver that was the more foreboding detail, and for the first time the woeful saga of Cassandra was starting to make her worry about her own prospects as a woman.
“Oh, him. He dumped me. I had this friend Sylvie, Sylvie Furst. Sylvie was right about—everything. As a matter of fact, Fern, since you like to date artists, this story might come in handy sometime. About a million years ago now Sylvie used to date this guy, Ludo Citron—”
“Oh my God.” Fern stirred delicately with the reverence of one who still believed in art. “I know him.”
“Yeah, he’s supposed to have turned into this really big deal in the art world, I guess.”
“I mean. I don’t just know who he is. I actually love his work. I actually own a pair of his Pumas.”
You would, thought Cassandra, and resumed:
“Well, once it was all over between them, what Sylvie did was, she threw a roast chicken at him! It landed on his lap.”
“But Cassandra, that’s terrible! I would never do something like that. Never, never, never,” vowed Fern.
“Not now, maybe. But you might, someday.”
Fern elected to ignore this. Somehow the story of some crazy chick throwing a roast chicken was not in keeping with the dignity of art.
“Wait, what happened to your boyfriend you were telling me about? Did you throw a roast chicken at him, too, or what?”
“No, but— If only I had listened to Sylvie! See, she used to say I wasn’t really the kind of girl he was going to marry. He went to Harvard and I think he was just into me because I was this slutty, bohemian Bennington girl; I don’t think that sexually speaking he was all that into preppy girls and can you blame him? They’re homely! Also, I’m fatherless. Did I ever tell you that? That means I have no self-esteem to speak of around men. Absolutely none! Sylvie was right about that, too. Where was I again?”
“Hey, I’m sorry your boyfriend dumped you and that you have daddy issues and all, but what are you talking about? You’re actually saying that a Harvard guy will be into a Bennington girl for sex but that he won’t marry her? Maybe in, like, 1962 we had that reputation but now—”
“You don’t think that Bennington girls are still complete and total sluts? Because I sure do.”
“You have some kind of dated ideas about female sexuality, if you ask me. If a girl happens to enjoy sex”—the girl Fern was thinking of was herself—“it doesn’t mean that she’s a slut.”
“Okay, but if she’s desperate for it?”
“Desperate? I’m not—”
“Right, because you’re so powerful because this older male artist wants to marry you. You were a sculpture student, you said? Done any of your own work lately?”
“Well, I mean I just graduated, Cassandra. And then I was in Berlin—”
“See, see! You haven’t. You haven’t done any of your own work and neither have I. I wasted my twenties on men and buying stupid French lingerie I couldn’t afford and I don’t know what the hell else. So did most of my friends who went to Bennington. None of us have one goddamn thing to show for it.”
“You really hate that place.”
“Oh God, it’s a total fucking racket. And the worst part! Speaking of money. I’m still paying off my student loans.”
“You are?” But Cassandra had graduated, like, ages ago, Fern was thinking.
“Well, come to think of it I’m not exactly paying them off at the moment, but…”
Fern was silent, and Cassandra, frustrated to no end by her low affect, thought: Sculpture students were not apt to be perceptive. Their average intelligence was only a cut above that of the modern dancers.
“So! Did I tell you I started a new job today?”
Fern thought it wise, at this point, to change the subject.
In that? Cassandra was thinking—meaning the dangerously tatty black lace tights. No pants.
“Uh-huh. It’s on the Upper East Side. Fifth Avenue, way, way up there, past the Met, even…”
“Carnegie Hill,” shot back Cassandra, not to be outdone.
“Carnegie what?”
“Carnegie Hill. That’s what it’s called. That neighborhood.”
“Oh, cool. It’s super fucking fancy, whatever you want to call it. Actually, I got this job through Bennington!”
“Do tell.”
“Well—do you remember that girl Jude St. James? Oh, I forgot, you’re so much older than me, she wasn’t your year. She was my year to begin with, except she took all this time off to go to Africa. I don’t think she’s graduated yet, or maybe she’s not even planning to anytime soon. She’s a lesbian and she’s passionate about Africa,” added Fern, as if these two facts added up to a third.
“Africa…” muttered Cassandra, wondering why the hell it was that rich people always wanted to go there; she sure didn’t.
“Well, anyway, she totally grew up at this humongous place on the Upper East Side. Only—get this—she’s always going round and telling people she’s from East Harlem instead. Whatever. I actually went to East Harlem once! I met this guy, on the subway platform at Union Square. We made eye contact. Before we knew it, I was back at his mother’s place in East Harlem. Now that was weird. His mother made us dinner afterward. Goat stew or something sketchy like that, and I’m a vegetarian. Where was I again…?”
“You were telling me about how you got your new job through Bennington.”
“Oh, right, thanks. I’m working for Jude’s father. That’s whose apartment it is on Fifth Avenue. That’s where I was earlier today. He’s so loaded, he doesn’t have to do anything anymore except look after his money and fuss over his art collection. That’s what he hired me for. He asked Jude: Do you know any Bennington girls who would be interested in helping me to organize my art collection? So Jude, she suggested me!”
“Ah!”
“It’s kind of an awkward setup, though, because Jude really hates him, she says.”
Cassandra, of course, did not have a father, but had long observed that girls who did, especially rich ones, often hated theirs and was not surprised.
“And! Turns out, some of the stuff he collects is really, really incredibly filthy, too.”
“Really?” Cassandra was titillated.
“Uh-huh. I was surprised because, you know, nothing really seems filthy nowadays, right? I think maybe it’s because I’m more used to seeing porn online, you know? It seems dirtier somehow in paintings or drawings. It seems dirtier when you see it on paper, somehow.”
“I disagree, Fern. I disagree with the thrust of your premise completely. Everything online—everything online is not only antierotic, if you ask me, but banal, as well.”
“Oh my God, that is so not true, Cassandra! I think that technology and everything has really made the world a better place.”
“How, though? And don’t say, Oh, it’s made things so much more convenient! I hate that word—convenient. Convenient, expedient! So go ahead, tell me! How has it actually made the world a better place?”
Fern responded by listing a number of apparently rather pithy celebrities whom she suggested that Cassandra could follow on Twitter. And that was the end of that.