Ever since moving out of Sylvie’s nearly a year ago now, Cassandra had shown a positive genius for ending up in the wrong boroughs. The right borough, obviously, was Brooklyn. But to get to, say, Williamsburg from Astoria, it took three train transfers, and Cassandra, not caring for Williamsburg in the first place, couldn’t be bothered. She started turning down invitations, and before too long people knew better than to invite her, because if the event was in Williamsburg, no way would she come. Greenpoint was okay according to Cassandra on something like a once-every-six-weeks basis, but only if you went out for Polish food, and that was just because she happened to be fond of borscht. None of her other friends gave a damn about borscht; they were all raring to go try the latest, distinctly non-Polish places that were cropping up along the avenues. But soon, Cassandra had stopped venturing to Greenpoint either. She had vowed to never walk the scenic streets of Fort Greene ever again, and this included all of its outskirts, which she claimed were also Sylvie-haunted. Cassandra had never even been to Bushwick and she intended to keep it that way, thank you very much. Bed-Stuy had jumbo rats. Park Slope? You did not invite Cassandra there, no, not even if you lived there, not even if you were throwing a housewarming party; everything about it put her in a cantankerous mood and was subject to relentless commentary the minute she got off the subway. People kept telling her that she could find no objection to Brooklyn Heights, at least; Brooklyn Heights was so beautiful. Boston is beautiful! Cassandra shouted at them. And Boston is boring. Brooklyn Heights, it is so beautiful and so boring, you might as well just be in Boston. This was the last straw, people felt: comparing New York to Boston.
Her friends all found her behavior increasingly exasperating. It might have worried them, if only they had been interested, but the fact of the matter was they weren’t anymore. They were women going on thirty now and they were always busy. Meanwhile, Cassandra had become just like Pansy Chapin before her: the one Bennington girl for whom you had to go into Manhattan if you ever wanted to see her.
“Do you ever actually see Cassandra anymore?” Sylvie asked Gala at brunch in Fort Greene one afternoon. Sylvie had just ordered: Sweet-and-Salty French Toast ($14). Gala: Lettuce-and-Watercress Salad with Marcona Almonds ($12, Hardboiled Egg $2.50 extra).
“No,” Gala had said, thinking that she really should have gone with the French toast instead and counting on Sylvie giving her a bite. “Does anybody?”
The absence left by one’s female friends is best filled with—what else?—a man. Thank God for Cassandra, then, that Edward had resurfaced. Just that fall, the two of them had started sleeping together again, although, as he so frequently reminded her, taking on his old paternalistic tone, “we aren’t actually together.” Actually, the situation worked out well for both of them, for no longer having much to say to each other as human beings, perhaps having not had that much to say even in the beginning, their bodies now said the man-to-woman essentials. Cassandra even showed a savage absence of sentimentality in visiting Philadelphia again, where, instead of enjoying the fruits of Edward’s tony social life as a girlfriend, she waited for him in his apartment like a mistress, creamy, stockinged legs in the air. This was a relief actually. By now she knew that she would have gotten sick of all of those Christmas concerts and horse races, had life with Edward ever shed its glamorous unreality and become real.
“Oh my God! You look so pretty. Where are you going all dressed up, Cassandra?”
It was Fenna Luxe, Orpheus’s latest girlfriend. She was a willowy blonde who played the guitar and did Reiki and presently she was standing in the hallway of their apartment naked. After many failed attempts at being more respectable, Orpheus and Cassandra had decided to run a clothing-optional household. She spent so much time getting in and out of the bathtub that finally she figured why get dressed at all, and Orpheus didn’t mind, because Cassandra had very nice boobs and he enjoyed looking at them and this meant that Fenna, who was utterly lovely, now could also flounce freely out of the confines of his bedroom au naturel. Cassandra didn’t mind Fenna being naked either and, being lonely these days, enjoyed her company very much. Fenna had been a Bennington girl but after Cassandra’s time and only very briefly; she’d dropped out after getting a record deal and because she hated the weather.
“The Upper East Side,” said Orpheus. “She’s going to the Upper East Side. Cassandra is the only person we know who ever goes uptown.”
“Cool,” said Fenna, who was from Malibu and not inclined to be judgmental, except about the weather.
“Midtown. I’m going to midtown. The Harvard Club is in midtown.”
Cassandra stood in front of the mirror studying her features and darkening her eyebrows, as had been recommended to her by Lee, that night at the diner. Lee, it turned out, had been correct: emphasizing her eyebrows gave Cassandra’s peaches-and-cream countenance a sense of distinction it had not had previously. It also, although she did not know this, made her look older. Which she most certainly was, and felt.
“Oh,” said Fenna, “it’s that guy Edward again!”
“Uh-huh,” said Cassandra, spraying perfume. L’air du Temps, her favorite. Sylvie used to wear it, too, though in her case not since high school, probably. The girls used to pick up deeply discounted bottles of it at Marshalls. I bet she wears something organic or artisinal now, Cassandra thought, something made in small batches in Brooklyn. Fenna wore rose oil, plain and undiluted; Cassandra even borrowed it from her sometimes, which was just another plus of living in a clothing-optional household, because under one’s clothing or even a bathrobe rose oil can get sticky.
After leaving the apartment that night, Cassandra splurged on a cab to midtown; it doesn’t take too long to get there from Astoria, and so for once she could afford it. She swayed into the well-appointed lobby of the Harvard Club on a pair of hot pink suede d’Orsay stilettos that were the sexiest shoes she owned. After a series of days of subsisting on salted tongue empanadas, she was very much looking forward to ordering shrimp cocktail and filet mignon. She and Edward kissed. Once they were seated, he looked serious, but then he always looked serious. This, too, was one of his charms. Another one was that he didn’t care for Brooklyn either: or, even more gratifying, he scarcely knew that it existed.
“Cassandra…” said Edward. Why doesn’t she wear color anymore? he found himself wondering, for her dress tonight was striking and black. There was this one yellow dress he had been fond of her in—some soft, nearly see-through material—he’d always wanted to get close to her and touch it whenever she was wearing it. What had become of the girl in that dress? Like most heterosexual men, he was not observant enough, however, to guess that the change in her appearance had anything to do with the darkening of her eyebrows. It was more of a general impression that he gathered, staring at her across the table right now.
“Yes?” Much fluttering of her lashes, while eating a shrimp.
“Cassandra…Cassandra.” Edward cleared his throat and resumed his professorial tone. He was not a professor actually, though Sylvie had once proclaimed that he looked like one. “Cassandra, we are going to have a nice dinner tonight, a nice long dinner, we can have dessert and coffee and everything, and then at the end of the evening I am going to put you in a cab and I will give you money for it and you are going to go home.”
“Oh, so you don’t want me to spend the night?” She was fine with that, not spending the night.
“No. I mean that I am going to make you go home immediately after dinner. I didn’t reserve a room for us tonight.”
“You didn’t?”
“No, I didn’t. This is a platonic dinner, except, except that after it we are not going to be friends. It would be inappropriate, given the circumstances.”
“Are you engaged?”
“Hey!” Edward was disappointed. “How did you guess?”
“You used to say how very, very emotional I am; how very passionate; how very, very intuitive.”
“Well, then,” said Edward, grateful that the waiter was now clearing his oyster shells and that soon they’d be onto their entrées.
“Who is she? Did she go to Wellesley? No, Harvard. Are you marrying somebody else who went to Harvard?”
“Duke, actually. She was the captain of the tennis team.” He was too much of a gentleman to add that she had graduated much later than either of them; she was twenty-five, or nearly a decade his junior. But there was such a big smile on his face when he said the part about the tennis team that Cassandra had to accept that he was actually in love with her.
“What’s her name?”
“Keller. Keller Houghton.”
“You are engaged to a woman named Keller? Keller? Repugnant fucking name.”
“It’s her middle name she goes by. Her real name is Cynthia.”
“Of course it is, of course it is! I could have told you that if only you had asked me, I’m intuitive, after all.”
By the time the entrées arrived, Edward was thinking to himself that Keller was rather less intuitive than Cassandra, and wasn’t that a blessing, because marriage to one of these self-confessed very, very emotional, passionate, intuitive women was apt to get tiring. As a matter of fact though, he would have preferred that she go by Cynthia. He thought that once they were married he might try calling her that. Cynthia, sweet Cynthia. Her real name, which might become to him alone a nickname—a catcall of husbandly possession. To tell you the truth, Keller wasn’t as beautiful as Cassandra either. Strictly speaking, most people looking at her would have said she and Cassandra were quite similar—Keller was even blond, with some of the same general rosy and pleasing characteristics. But Keller wasn’t romantic. For instance, Keller: Keller wore sensible underwear. She had only one sexy set for when they dressed up to go to black-tie events and that was that.
“How is your filet mignon?”
“Good, good. I mean: excellent,” said Cassandra, trying to list all of the eligible or even not-so-eligible men she knew in New York City who might be persuaded to take her out for luxurious red meat suppers in place of Edward. She was getting to be more like Sylvie in her calculations, although unlike Sylvie, she would have preferred to get protein and get laid in the course of the same evening.
“I’m glad, sweetie.” Edward was content with digging into his diver scallops.
“Did you just call me sweetie?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t ha—” He was thinking of Keller and what she would say if she could see him right now dining at the Harvard Club with a woman like Cassandra. Keller may have been less emotional, but she also had less of a sense of humor, and a sense of humor in a wife might count for something, it occurred to him now.
“Oh, it’s fine, Edward. I like it when you say it, actually. Only I guess that now when you say it, it has to be platonic.”
Bennington girls, Edward thought, while proceeding to make deft small-talk with Cassandra over the entrée portion of the evening: they were romantic. Tragic, even. That ex-friend of Cassandra’s, Sylvie, the crazy wild black-eyed chick with the apartment full of rotten lemons: tragic. Still, there was something kind of romantic about the apartment full of rotten lemons; neither Keller nor any of her friends would have been capable of such majesty of ruin, such an artistic statement that would connote in one image the desolation of their lives. They didn’t have it in them! Cassandra in those hot pink, obviously, heartbreakingly Parisian pumps of hers now looking forward to being sent back to Queens in a cab was also a little bit tragic. He recalled her lingerie, things called teddies and garters and basques, beautiful, silly, soon-to-be-broken things that she begged you to ply apart. He still desired her, but you didn’t want to marry somebody tragic unless you wanted to blow up your life, and no way did Edward want to blow up his. He would be married in a royal fashion in Rittenhouse Square and move to the Main Line, and Keller would bear him two fine and able young children. But he never forgot her. Cassandra. Or Sylvie either. The stench of rotten lemons. Sometimes when he was sitting alone at the breakfast table or when he scooped up his children, especially his daughter, into his arms the memory of it would drift into his brain, perfuming and permeating his otherwise untroubled life.
“Do you remember Harvard-Yale weekend?” he asked her.
Cassandra replayed the words: Harvard-Yale weekend. She had still been living in Boston then, that weekend she took the train to meet him in New Haven. She had been wearing her camel-hair coat, the hem of which was not yet coming undone. On the train she had fancied herself playing the Franny part in Franny and Zooey—that Zooey went stark raving insane after that weekend was entirely lost on her at the time, though Sylvie had pointed it out. Anyway, that weekend felt like a lifetime ago. And now Cassandra, not Sylvie, was the one thinking: I was so young then.
“Yes” was all Cassandra said now.
“Well, right before we went to the Harvard-Yale game, that morning we met up in the hotel, do you remember that you begged me not to make us go?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, and you were squeezing me so tight you wouldn’t let me get out of bed and you said, ‘I like sex so much better than football.’ You just wouldn’t get dressed and go to the game. It was then I knew that I’d never be able to marry you.”
“Because I don’t like football?” This was getting ridiculous! Edward was an intellectual. He didn’t like football either, unless it concerned the Harvard-Yale game, and then it was apparently sacred.
“See, but Keller. Keller has a good attitude about things. Keller likes sex and she likes football.”
“Because her name is Keller! Keller! She sounds like a dyke.”
“Hey now! All I’m saying is that a wife, a wife has to be able to have sex with you and then get out of bed and go to the football game, or whatever the occasion is. I have a big social life in Philadelphia, Cassandra; I have things to go to. I like to be with people. You like to be either in bed alone with a man, or you like to go gab to your girlfriends, and you don’t know how to do anything in between.”
If Cassandra had been interested in what is known as “personal growth”—and who, pray tell, is honestly interested in that?—she might have taken Edward’s words to heart. She might have thought: My next serious relationship, I will remember that. My next serious relationship, I will do better! Instead, she decided that clearly she was much better cut out to be a mistress and that was just fine with her. Exciting, even. A relief quite frankly, if being a wife meant you had to act all into football. They chewed the rest of their entrées in a fine and nasty silence.
“Port!” she heard Edward saying with that combination of gusto and good manners that she now despised in him, and would forever afterward. “Remember how sometimes at my apartment in Philadelphia we used to drink port?”
But now it was Cassandra who asked: “Do you remember…?”
“What?”
“Do you remember what else happened the weekend of the Harvard-Yale game? Do you remember that woman who harassed us?”
“Where are you going with this?”
“That woman. The black woman. Maybe that helps to narrow it down for you?” She smiled at him wickedly, and Edward got a sinking feeling about what was coming.
“Remember after we got out of the game, that black woman who was driving down the street in a nasty beat-up old car and rolled down her window just to shout Fuck you! at us. Remember her?”
“Some people, because of their histories, feel so disenfranchised…” Edward began, preferring to take a sociological tone.
“You know why she did that, Edward?”
“All right, Cassandra. Why?”
“Because she knew. She knew we were a really fucking annoying couple. Smug. We were smug.”
I am not so smug anymore, she was thinking; smugness being the divine privilege of youth, and she was not, as had just dawned on her here at the Harvard Club, quite so young anymore.
“Hey—”
“By the way, Edward, that black woman, that woman in her nasty old car, I think I can kind of begin to understand her rage. Can you? No, no way, you’re way too one percent.”
(Just the previous fall in downtown Manhattan there had been the tumult, and finally the anticlimax, of the Occupy Wall Street movement, from which Cassandra had cadged this phrase and during which Gala was to remark to Sylvie on another occasion when the two of them met up for brunch in Fort Greene: “You know something funny? In the old days I would have gone over to Occupy Wall Street to meet guys, but now that just seems dirty. Now it just seems so much cleaner to meet them online.” “Totally, totally,” Sylvie had agreed, lunging at an elderberry cocktail.)
“Hey,” Edward attempted to soothe Cassandra, “let’s not get carried away here.”
“Oh, please. Where more relevant to bring up the one percent than at the Harvard Club, I ask you?”
She could sympathize with it, she felt. The viewpoint of that so-called disenfranchised black woman on the decayed streets of New Haven that day. (Could New Haven possibly have been so decayed when Franny voyaged there? It did not seem possible.) She believed it because she was a fallen woman, not from virtue, which nobody took seriously anymore, but from class, which people did.
“This is just another reason I’m going to marry Keller. She doesn’t go around making scenes at the Harvard Club.”
“Where better to make them, though? The masses ought to storm these places, they ought to—”
“Jesus.”
“Oh forget it. I don’t like you, Edward, I’ve never liked you, and I can’t believe I ever fucked a Republican, but! That reminds me. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to get a room?”
Edward didn’t. That was for Cassandra the last straw. She got up from the table and, in doing so, even skipped dessert, a tactical error that later on, in the cab, she regretted. But d’Orsay heels are great for an exit like that and her hips swayed deliciously. Plus! She gave all of the more compatible, but bored, couples dining at the Harvard Club that night something interesting to talk about after she had gone.