“Gala, Gala, do you believe the part about the port?”
This was Cassandra the next morning, on the phone. Although she and Gala couldn’t be bothered to make the effort to see each other in person all that much anymore, the two of them still did G-chat and sometimes even talked on the phone; Gala was still for Cassandra a Sylvie stand-in, the girlfriend on whom she liked to download her woes. “He thought I’d be all placated if he offered me some port. Who the hell drinks port anymore anyway? And! He said we could have dessert and everything, like I was this little girl who needed to be offered an éclair from the dessert cart, or I would throw a tantrum. Do you think that’s the way he sees me?”
That’s the way everybody sees you, Gala thought, but said: “That’s rough, the part about the tennis. This reminds me, I had this really cool thing last summer with this guy who was a washed-up tennis pro but still pretty hot. He picked me up at McCarren Park one Saturday. Didn’t you meet him? No, I guess that must have been Sylvie.”
“Oh?” Cassandra tried but failed to make her tone of voice sound casual. “Is Sylvie dating anybody these days?”
“I thought she was Sicilian dead to you.”
“Yeah, but.”
“Sylvie just works all the time and you already knew that. Just like she already knew that you would still be sleeping with Edward even after he broke up with you. You’re onto each other. Friendships like yours: you can’t get rid of that shit.”
“Can’t you?”
“Well, maybe you can or maybe you can’t. I don’t know. Oh my God, Cassandra, you’re making me late to work again!” Gala had a new job now, with decent benefits even, at an up-and-coming social media think tank in Chelsea. Her supervisors were guys and they all had crushes on her and she had already gotten a raise. Gala Gubelman was moving on with her life. Most nights after work she went out for OKCupid dates on the High Line. Gone were the carefree days of letting guys pick her up on the subway, or even in the more salubrious setting of McCarren Park. Gala knew what wise women approaching the age of thirty all know, which is not to leave the master plan of their lives up to fate. “I have to go, Cassandra. But next time, Jesus, Cassandra, text me, that’s what the ladies are doing with each other these days.”
“Ladies? Ladies, you say? I thought that texting was for men. I thought that women still wanted to talk to each other.”
“Not so much, I don’t think.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re busy.”
“Does Cassandra even have a job, or what?” Sylvie wanted to know.
This was later on that evening, when she and Gala were having dinner at her place. They had a standing Wednesday night date in which they agreed to stay in and cook and smoke pot together. Outside it was snowing. Inside Sylvie’s Chinese paper lantern cast a homey pink glow on the surroundings. The radiator hissed. Before answering, Gala peeled off her mittens. Red mittens, old ones, hand-knit by some girl who had been in love with her at Bennington. Every time it snowed Gala Gubelman wore those mittens and every time she wore them she thought not of that girl, whose name she could not even remember, but of that time and place and of being young and desired. In the years since Bennington she had had many lovers, but at some point in her mid-twenties she had stopped going to bed with other girls and made the pursuit of men—stolid, not so interesting as other girls usually were, preferable only for the width of their shoulders or the remarkable feats of their cocks—her focus. Something of the poetry of sex had gone out of it right around this time, Gala had noticed. That girl, whoever she was, had threatened to throw herself into the lake in North Bennington after Gala had rejected her. Nothing had come of the threat but the high romanticism of it had been enough to make on Gala an enduring impression.
“Uh, she job-hunts, I think.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Good point.”
“I mean, seriously!”
Sylvie was indignant. But then, Sylvie was always indignant. That had not changed.
Gala pushed a lock of hair behind her ear, concentrating. She was in the middle of unpacking groceries: toothsome produce she had picked up after work at the Union Square Farmers Market. Now that they were almost thirty, she and Sylvie were not so painfully broke anymore. They could afford such indulgences from time to time. They had even started to give dinner parties and to go to them. The plan tonight was to make a very ambitious, multilayered frittata. Sylvie had gone so far as to buy an expensive cheese around the corner at the Greene Grape, something she would not have seen fit to do in the old days.
“Wait, she’s not working right now, I don’t think, but she was working recently. Fern Morgenthal set her up with something—something at this restaurant she was working at, I think…”
“Cassandra waitressing?”
“No, no, I think she was just a hostess actually. That was it.”
“Oh well, is that all? If she quit then, I really can’t blame her. You don’t make any money doing that.”
“Yeah, but. I don’t think she quit, I think Fern said she was fired, eventually I forget why.”
“Oh.”
Sylvie would have liked to blame her for this but couldn’t, not when you considered how many times she and Gala had been fired from various jobs in New York City themselves. There was something kind of exhilarating about the experience of being fired, Sylvie thought, remembering. She could still recall one fabulous, fiery exit she had made, storming out of the office of that fashion agency where she had briefly worked in a pair of white leather short shorts that she knew she looked totally hot in. The middle-aged fashion editors had all glared at her, enraged. They must have imagined that with her youth and her beauty and the unblemished golden backs of her thighs she had it all. And I never even knew, Sylvie thought. I never even knew how lucky I was. Then, too, she remembered, there had been the early, frantically sexual love affair with Bitsy Citron’s older brother, Ludo. The collapsed cardboard boxes and unfinished canvases of his studio; the immortal occasion of their final parting in which she had hurled a roast chicken from FreshDirect onto his lap, the grease splattering his expensive Swedish jeans. Artists, Sylvie fumed to herself. Artists were the worst. She took it as a personal affront sometimes to think that they alone might have managed to preserve some of the youthful idealism and high-mindedness that she had lost since college, and would never get back again.
“Hey, do you have a Le Creuset pan or anything like that?” Gala asked all of a sudden, getting sick of talking about Cassandra. They were always talking about Cassandra, it seemed. “I’m wondering what I should cook the frittata in.”
“Sure, sure,” said Sylvie smoothly, and reached for a wonderful old mustard yellow one hanging from a hook on the wall.
“Oh my God! This is great. This is gorgeous. I’ve been wanting to get one just like it.” They had reached the age, also, when buying new cooking appliances was even more exciting to them than buying new clothes. “Where did you get it?”
“My grandmother,” Sylvie lied, and no more was said about the Le Creuset pan or Cassandra for the rest of the evening.