It was not altogether untrue what Gala had said. Cassandra did live off this man for a time until one day she didn’t, anymore, and she had to go and pawn those sapphire earrings. Worse than that, much worse, she had to get a job. This was how she eventually ended up as a coat-check girl at a steakhouse in midtown. One night she checked the coat of Pansy Chapin’s husband, Jock, who was dining there on business but did not have any reason to recognize her or to know that this member of the subservient classes and his cosseted wife had once been girls together on a hilltop in Vermont.
But before this, long before, Cassandra had come to meet the man she lived off one fine April evening at a party on Fifth Avenue, to which she had been invited by Fern Morgenthal as her plus one. What Fern had not bargained for, however, was Cassandra getting propositioned by the host in the middle of said party.
“But you can’t do that, Cassandra!” she wailed. “You can’t just, like, drop everything and run away to the Hamptons in the middle of the night with Jude St. James’s father!”
The two of them were hiding out in the bathroom of his apartment on the night of the party, gossiping and conspiring in high-pitched voices, because Bennington girls are, in addition to being easy, hysterical.
“Why ever not?”
“Because, for one thing, his own daughter won’t even speak to him.”
“So?”
Fern went wildly on:
“This one time, she told me, he bribed her to give him her puppy…”
“Bribed her with what?”
“A building in her own name on Park Avenue. Somebody else manages it, obviously, and rents it out and all that. But! Don’t tell anyone but that’s the income she lives on while she’s in Africa. She lives off a building on Park Avenue.”
“That’s kind of genius actually.”
“What is?”
“Bribing her with a building on Park Avenue to get the puppy.”
“No it isn’t, it’s manipulative! And then! He didn’t even keep the puppy. He just took it from her and gave it to some bimbo he was seeing, Jude says. He just wanted to give her a lesson. Like, that she wasn’t above money after all. That nobody is, Jude said.”
I hope he never gives me a puppy, Cassandra was thinking. I’d prefer jewelry.
“And another thing. How are you going to get there, anyway? Will you take the Chutney? The one time I went to the Hamptons, I took the Ch—”
“The Chutney, what the hell is that, the Indian bus?”
The idea only seemed like common sense to Cassandra: she was imagining that there might be a Japanese bus called the Wasabi, a Mexican one called the Tamale, and so on—the possibilities were endless. But the Fung Wah, in fact, no longer existed. It had been shut down by the Feds. This was yet another thing about the world as Sylvie and Cassandra had known it that had changed.
“The Jitney, the Jitney! The bus that goes to the Hamptons is called the Jitney.”
“Whatever, Fern. We’re not exactly going to be taking the bus, I don’t think.” Cassandra opened her clutch and fished around for her lipstick. But one did not want to put on a fresh coat of Yves Saint Laurent lipstick, costing thirty-four dollars per gilded tube, with one’s breath stinking of those very excellent oysters she had cadged from the hors d’oeuvres table, she felt. “Oh my God. I wasn’t prepared for this! Do you by any chance have a breath mint on you?”
“No!”
“No, no? Then what are you good for?” Cassandra screamed at Fern, her handmaiden. She faced the mirror, fluffing her hair; the Yves Saint Laurent lipstick now cradled in the palm of her hand like a grenade. “I’ll tell you what you’re going to do right now; I promise I’ll make it up to you later. Run down to the nearest bodega and get me some breath mints. And then I’ll distract him until you come back.”
Fern looked at her torturer helplessly. Then she cried out:
“There are no bodegas on upper Fifth Avenue!”
“Try Madison, then. No, scratch Madison, everything on Madison will be closed by now. Lexington, Fern. I guess that means that you’ll have to try Lexington. Well, what of it? You’re a lithe young thing, aren’t you? What are you staring at me for? Run, Fern, run!” She had a pleasant vision of Fern’s Bambi-like legs prancing buoyantly into the night.
“But Cassandra. Aren’t you going to give me any money?”
“What are you, a retard? I never have any money on me, remember!”
Fern ran. While she was waiting, Cassandra noticed in a stack of magazines arranged next to the toilet a copy of the most recent Bennington alumni magazine, addressed to Jude St. James’s father. She flipped toward the back pages to the alumni notes, searching for updates from the Bennington class of 2003. Bitsy Citron, she read, had founded a sarong importing business. A couple of years from now, when her father died, she would inherit millions; diamonds are forever. Meanwhile, that other heiress, Penelope Entenmann, and her son, Prajeetha, had relocated from living on a private beach in Hawaii to one in Ibiza.
Cassandra read on, and on. Angelica Rocky-Divine had gotten married. Lanie Tobacco, of all people, had also gotten married, to the very same man of whom she had once uttered the immortal words, “Rough night. I fucked a hippie,” which only went to show you the mysterious nature of love itself. Vicky Lalage, meanwhile, wrote in that she was living on the Vineyard year-round and “still working on her art.” Cassandra took away from that rather austere encapsulation that Vicky, at least, was still single. (The maniacal Tess Fox had indeed dumped her and had moved on to men.) Gala Gubelman was not married yet but would be engaged by this time next year, to a mediocre young man, met on OKCupid, who co-owned a distillery next to the Lorimer stop. And oh how Gala Gubelman, once, had hated earth tones—
How all of them, all of them had been unable to conceive of their own lives as ever being anything other than fantastical, beautiful, richly and expensively textured!
“Ready?” said Jude St. James’s father, having just appeared in front of Cassandra carrying an Italian weekender bag.
“Ready,” said Cassandra, and she surrendered.
The hell with the breath mints, she kissed him.
Cassandra was not just plain kissing, but French-kissing, Jude St. James’s father when Fern Morgenthal, her Bambi-like legs prancing buoyantly, buoyantly into the night, was crossing Park Avenue and was hit by a taxicab and killed. Luckily, unlike Sylvie and Cassandra and the rest of the Bennington class of 2003, Pansy Chapin, Gala Gubelman, Angelica Rocky-Divine, the notorious Lanie Tobacco, Bitsy Citron, Penelope Entenmann, Vicky Lalage, and nameless others, Fern had graduated seven years afterward and had not lived long enough to be unhappy or to concede, in her final, blinkered moments on earth, that New York City had lost its luster. Because it hadn’t, yet. The lights were still brilliant when she was called.