In later years it sometimes seemed to Cassandra that her life as a grown woman had only officially commenced with leaving Sylvie’s apartment that fateful Saturday morning and with moving into Pansy Chapin’s. It also seemed that it was much easier, in her life as a grown woman, to fall in love than it was to make friends. This was one of the revelations of adult life that most surprised her; others were more easily accepted. And yet after Edward, she met somebody else. Then, when that fell apart, too, she met somebody after him, eventually. But she never did dare to call any other woman in her life by those words, so blameless on the surface, but so dangerous underneath, my best friend.
Pansy Chapin, too, evaporated: she eloped with her latest fiancé in Torcello, surrounded by a canopy of fruit trees, oleander, and roses in the exact same spot where she had been proposed to by the first of her fiancés, and the only one of them she ever truly loved, her senior year at Bennington. For even Pansy Chapin, when she was young, had had a heart. Even Pansy Chapin, when she was young, had had it broken. And then one night Pansy Chapin made her husband the perfect duck a l’orange and the perfect vermouth and water with the perfect lemon twist for his dinner and looked around her perfect house and at her perfect antiques and wept and wept. She and Cassandra were never to speak again after that fiasco they had over breaking the lease on that place on Seventy-Ninth and Second, which had resulted in the catastrophe of Cassandra having to pawn her great-grandmother’s wedding silver, the lowest point of her life, lower even than that horrible day she had to schlep out to the end of the 7 train in Queens to go and get an abortion.
But still, Pansy Chapin had taught her things. It was Pansy, after all, who first had opened Cassandra’s more virgin eyes to the rapture of sex positions that actually work in the shower, it was Pansy who had passed down to her the narcotic beauty ritual of rubbing one’s entire body with a mixture of brown sugar and baby oil just before a rendezvous with a lover: something that Cassandra was to do throughout her life and the very scent of which stirred in her all of the agonies of desire.
And it was Pansy, too, silky, calculating little Pansy, out from such a tender age to nab a rich husband, who had possessed the wisdom to recognize that the only good reason to go to Bennington is to have something interesting to talk about at cocktail parties on Fifth Avenue later on. Even when she was long past the age when she should have dared to flaunt black leotards without a bra underneath but insisted nevertheless on doing exactly that, Cassandra noticed that she had only to mention having gone to Bennington in order to tickle in the average male animal of a certain generation and social class a reliable quickening of interest. This was the only legacy of her education that could be put to any practical use to speak of.
“Cassandra is a prostitute.”
Thus spoke Gala Gubelman to Sylvie Furst. This was some years later at brunch.
“Not really!”
“Well, all right, not really. Not exactly. But I thought that word would get your attention.”
“What now?”
“Well! She doesn’t pay her own rent. Some old guy’s been paying it for her. Also! He gives her jewelry. Sapphire earrings. She had them on. The last time I saw her.”
“Hmph!”
“Big sapphires, too. Jumbo. Swaying. Absolutely fucking huge.”
Sylvie was thinking, as she had the morning she bulldozed down the flaking blue staircase of her apartment in her tiny floral underpants, bringing to Cassandra’s mind Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, for one’s liberal arts education comes floating back to one at the strangest of times, that money is better than sex. But this was interesting, commendable, even, what Cassandra had done, in apparently combining the two. At this period in her life, Sylvie was beginning to seek an exit strategy from her exit strategy, because Clementine’s Picnic was struggling. The market for artisanal syrups was glutted, the “made in Brooklyn” model was getting overexposed. Sylvie had seen the future and it was in rooftop gardening. Her very first client was Vicky’s mother, Rosa Lalage. And from there she was launched on another wondrous career, Sylvie Furst, Urban Landscaper. Right around this time, she also took up self-care and returned to Zumba dancing.
“Also!” Gala relished being up on all the alumni news. “Pansy Chapin is pregnant.”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“That bitch.”
They clinked glasses and asked for the check.
“Fuck,” Gala fumed, tapping her forehead. “Fuck! Is this place cash only?”
“Yup,” said Sylvie complacently, but did not offer to cover for her. Better not to, Sylvie had decided as a matter of principle. People ought to be able to look out for themselves. Dependency got sticky.
This meant that Gala had to run, huffing and puffing, to the nearest ATM. Bennington girls were not the cross-country type, and furthermore, now that she was in her thirties Gala had to watch her figure; she had started to get a little out of shape around the middle and was no longer as ripely, lavishly beautiful as she had been in college. None of them were.
When she got back from the ATM, she put cash down on the table and announced:
“Do you know that we’ve been out of college now for ten years?”
“Jesus. Ten years! Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously! Didn’t you get the postcard in the mail about the ten-year reunion?”
“Oh, you know what? Probably not. I bet they have my old address on file.”
“Oh, right, right. That explains it.”
Sylvie no longer lived in the apartment in Fort Greene. The previous year Pete the landlord had sold the building for millions. The new owners had fixed it right up. She never went back. Though sometimes, sometimes that apartment and especially its bathroom, that old-world bathroom with its terra-cotta sink and its lavender-honey light, floated back to her in dreams, as it sometimes floated, unbeknownst to her, into Cassandra’s. Both Sylvie and Cassandra went on to live in places with far better and certainly more comfortable bathrooms than that one, bathrooms that had decent water pressure, not to mention other modern amenities. And yet they missed it. That bathroom, ornamental, outdated, practically useless for the unromantic purposes a bathroom is meant to serve, was the one that they missed.
“I wouldn’t go anyway,” Sylvie said, of the reunion. “Are you going?”
“I don’t know, honestly. Orpheus went back there to play a show last year and he said it’s not the same.”
“What’s not the same?”
“Well, for one thing”—Gala revealed the following bombshell in a conspiratorial whisper—“Bennington is now a non-smoking campus.”
“Get out!”
“I know! Outrageous! That’s what Orpheus and I thought.”
“This entire conversation is making me feel old.”
“Me, too. And you know what else Orpheus said? He said he didn’t even think that the girls they’re letting in now are as hot as they used to be, either. He said they’re just letting in, like, these boring preppy girls who weren’t smart enough to get into Middlebury. They don’t wear leotards. They don’t do art…”
Neither Gala nor Sylvie had done anything resembling art in quite some time either, but this went unremarked. One didn’t after college. Or only the very lucky or the very disciplined or, failing that, the very delusional ones still did. You had to grow up and accept this.
“The Bennington girl is a dying breed,” said Sylvie sadly.
“I know! And we’re the last of the species,” Gala agreed with her, as, going Dutch, they settled the check.