Edward was trying to get out the door when Sylvie wrenched an olive green satin pillow out of his hands.
“Hey!” Edward cried out. And it was at this point in the morning’s events when he thought: It all must be a dream. Or why would he be engaged in what, to the casual observer, would have appeared to be a pillow fight with his girlfriend’s best friend?
“That’s mine!” Sylvie insisted.
“It is not, Sylvie! Pansy Chapin gave me that pillow.”
“Oh,” said Sylvie, letting go. “I thought it looked like something I would have.” Pansy has great taste, she thought.
“Sweetie, do you think you could hurry it up here? I’ve got almost everything now. Why don’t you do one more sweep through this place and then—”
“Seven years,” muttered Sylvie, to no one in particular. “Seven whole years in New York City I’ve been paying my own rent, and I just really think someone else should pay it for me for a couple of months. I mean, I just really think I deserve somebody else to pay my rent.” She hissed at Cassandra: “Not everybody can just spend their money on pretty dresses! Not everyone has a rich boyfriend who takes them for fancy weekends at the Harvard Club!”
Edward, listening to all of this, thought that explained a lot. Sylvie must be jealous that she didn’t have a Harvard boyfriend when, obviously, every woman in the world wanted one.
Cassandra went to collect her products in the bathroom and said: “You know what you’ve done, Sylvie? I’ll tell you what you’ve done. You have poisoned my natural generosity.” She felt that this line struck so cleanly at the heart of the matter that she repeated it: “You have poisoned my natural generosity.”
All of their final words to each other took place in Sylvie’s bathroom, that lyrical, old-world bathroom, the two of them standing at the foot of the white-painted antique dresser on which were displayed the confections of their many shopping expeditions together: white almond talcum powder. Bluebell and hyacinth hand soap. A stack of elaborately papered soaps from Italy. Cassandra scooped her beauty products into a tote bag, the caramelized light of the spring morning streaming across her face. As she did, she noticed the white French champagne bucket at the foot of the famous claw-foot bathtub. Goddamn it! She’d been counting on taking that with her, too, only to look down and see a pair of Sylvie’s tiny blue lace underpants floating in the shallow water.
Nevertheless, the gentleness of the light in the bathroom—the girlishness of it—made her think that what she wanted to do right now more than anything actually was hug Sylvie. She wanted to press that petite body close to hers. And now, gazing into Sylvie’s mirror, in front of which the two of them had stood while getting ready to go out so many times, she recalled Sylvie’s steady artist’s fingers smoothing out Cassandra’s eyeliner and trimming her fine blond hair when she used to give her haircuts. She recalled those fingers holding the scissors so close to the nape of her neck with what had been, to Cassandra, unquestioned tenderness.
And now here was Sylvie, staring at her with true, black hatred in her eyes.
Sylvie was, in fact, thinking: Bitch. Bitch. The fucking bitch. Other people! They never fail to disappoint you.
Edward was downstairs by now, waiting with Cassandra’s stuff. The two women were left to duke it out alone.
“You want that money so much, Sylvie? I’ll give it to you. But before I do, I want you to understand that by you bullying me into giving it to you, this means that I will never be friends with you again. No, let me finish. We have had a long and a rich friendship”—she was thinking of the two of them, golden- and black-haired respectively, sipping raspberry lime rickeys in the Sunken Garden at Radcliffe—“but you make me give you this money and I will never be friends with you again.”
And Sylvie, without a moment’s hesitation, said: “Cash?”
Sylvie and Cassandra were children of divorce. What did it feel like to get divorced? they used to ask each other. But as of today, Cassandra no longer wondered. Cassandra now knew.
“You like cash so much, Sylvie, I’ll make it cash. So let me tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to the ATM, the one at the bodega around the corner. Don’t think I’m going to skip out on you; I’m not. Don’t think I have any interest in holding on to your keys; I don’t. I’m going to come back here and give you the money and the keys, and then it will be over, Sylvie. I will never be friends with you again.”
But before Cassandra went to the bodega, she paused at the doorway and said rather grandly: “And another thing. Please go get me my mother’s Le Creuset pan.”
It was one of those wonderful rustic old omelet pans with a mustard-yellow bottom. Sylvie scrunched up her face as if trying to come up with a way to justify her keeping the pan, but evidently decided against it. She went and got the Le Creuset pan from the kitchen and handed it to Cassandra. The heavy black handle looked almost too heavy for her, brushing against her feeble bare legs. It was the only moment during the whole encounter when she looked the least bit defeated, standing there in her underpants.
CHAPTER 29
It wasn’t over yet. Sylvie the petite but indomitable got a second wind. Standing upstairs in her apartment, out of breath from the adrenaline of it all and counting out the six hundred dollars Cassandra had just given her from the ATM, she seized on an idea. Quick, she had to act quick! This was going to be fun.
“Hey,” she called down the stairwell, just as Cassandra and Edward were struggling with opening the rusty latch of the door. “One more thing!”
She charged down the stairs, hunching her body over the moldering pale blue stairwell. The money was still in her hands—no way would she let it go. Money! It felt so damn good. It wasn’t Nutella that was better than sex, Sylvie thought. It was money. Live in New York City long enough, and you’ll soon learn that lesson for yourself.
Cassandra, the fool! Cassandra would learn it, too.
Pete the landlord was in his apartment on the first floor playing the piano, the wild, layered notes of the keys lending a delirious cast to the proceedings. By now, he was used to Sylvie having melodramatic scenes with various roommates and so he didn’t bother to come out to see what was going on, figuring that this latest unpleasantness, too, would pass.
Why, Cassandra asked herself, should something about the wreckage of this scene, which was, in a weird way, rather beautiful, recall to her now Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2? One’s liberal arts education came floating back to one at the strangest of times.
“Did she tell you?” Sylvie demanded of Edward.
“Now, listen you—” Edward was a gentleman, but even a gentleman could not be expected to treat some crazy chick without any pants on like a lady.
“Oh, you stay out of this,” said Cassandra. “What is it, Sylvie? And then we’re leaving. We’re leaving,” she repeated.
But Sylvie’s eyes continued to blaze down on Edward. The lemons collected in the garbage bags stank to the ceiling, clogging the air with decay.
“Did she tell you about Le Bernardin?”
“Le Bernardin?” repeated Edward. That fancy French fish restaurant in the West Fifties? He knew it well. His Park Avenue grandmother used to take him there on his birthdays. That might be a nice place to take Cassandra for her birthday next year, he thought. Then stopped himself from going any farther. He and Cassandra were never going to make it as a couple after all. He could see that now. No way could he ever marry a girl like this, a girl who lived in a nineteenth-century tenement teeming with putrid lemon skins in one of the outer boroughs, and who, previous to recent events, had claimed to consider this wretched Sylvie creature her best friend.
“Why don’t you ask her who’s taking her to Le Bernardin?”
But Edward never did ask Cassandra who was taking her to Le Bernardin, figuring that Sylvie was nuts and the hell with her.
—
“Oh my God, I forgot the Le Creuset pan!”
Cassandra’s voice rang out in
the middle of the night, disturbing Edward, who had been sleeping soundly beside her.
“What?”
Can a man ever get any peace? he wondered.
“The Le Creuset pan, the Le Creuset pan! Remember? Sylvie gave it back, but then I left it, I left it. Oh my God, do you think I left it when I went to get the money at the ATM? It would never still be there, if I did…”
“Now, now,” said Edward tiredly, lifting her nightie.
Cassandra continued to believe for the rest of her life that she must have done just that—left the Le Creuset pan on the floor of the bodega where she had gone to use the ATM. But in fact she had left it at the foot of Sylvie’s staircase, where it was with no small satisfaction discovered immediately after she and Edward left and returned to its rightful place upstairs. That night Sylvie had an omelet and a glass of wine. Her omelets were very tasty, Sylvie reflected on taking a bite. Now! If only she could find a way to market them.
PART III
Bitters
CHAPTER 30
Cassandra never forgot the first night she hung out with Pansy Chapin. She was privileged to be a guest in the living room of Gazelle, the house where Pansy and so many of the other superrich girls lived, Bitsy Citron among them. Bitsy was the house ringleader and her dog, Brioche, the mascot. Brioche was a silver Pomeranian, whose coat went nicely with Bitsy’s waist-length mane of champagne-blond hair, highlighted on the private beaches and yachts of St. Bart’s, where her family was rumored to own fabulous quantities of property.
That night, when Pansy and Cassandra were both eighteen years old and hanging out in the living room of Gazelle, the air was blue with smoke. Everybody smoked in that house, except for Cassandra, who after all was only visiting from one of the tamer, quieter houses across the quad. Some girl had an acid trip while sitting on top of the moss green velvet sofa, beginning to shake uncontrollably and slide down the cushions. Nobody did anything. Eventually Bitsy stormed out of her dorm room, stalked by her boyfriend, the Bulgarian sculptor guy, who was lushly showering her with a fistful of euros. This move had great cachet because the dollar was said to be losing its value even back then. Pansy Chapin turned to Cassandra and asked her:
“Have you ever had an STD before?”
“No,” said Cassandra, who, it being only her freshman year, was still technically a virgin. This crisis was remedied over the course of the following summer, under the deft tutelage of a much older gentleman and family friend. Sylvie, always pragmatic, had gotten it over with back when they were still in high school by crashing a party at MIT one Saturday night and going home with the first guy she found there who looked like he might actually know what the hell he was doing and not turn out to be a virgin himself; with MIT guys, anything was possible. Still, Sylvie preferred them to Harvard guys because Harvard guys were not merely nerds, they were assholes.
“Ugh, yeah, well, I guess you don’t really look the type. But! You never know. I think I might have one,” Pansy whispered.
“Oh, no,” said Cassandra, shocked.
“Tell me about it! Because if I do, it’s going to be a disaster.”
“Oh my God, you don’t think you have—”
“AIDS? Of course not. Nobody gets that anymore. But I think I might have, like, maybe chlamydia or something.”
“I had chlamydia once,” Bitsy Citron volunteered.
“You did?” Pansy Chapin squealed.
“Uh-huh. If you have chlamydia, it’s like this…”
Her boyfriend, the Bulgarian sculptor guy, was now sucking her toes in front of everybody. Everybody was used to this: they had sex everywhere, even in the kiddie pool outside of Gazelle in which Brioche was prone to taking a piss. Bitsy had beautiful feet. You could thank St. Bart’s for those, too. The sand made the bottoms all soft.
“My vagina has something black coming out of it,” Pansy Chapin wailed. Pansy Chapin was wearing tennis whites. “Black, I said, black! Oh my God, this is going to be a disaster,” she repeated.
“Why?” asked Bitsy idly.
Pansy Chapin related how that very weekend she was supposed to be going to New York City for a sex-crazed weekend with her fiancé at his duplex on Central Park South, and how he was going to kill her if he found out that she had an STD, because it would mean that she’d been cheating on him again.
“Have you been?” asked Cassandra. Not to be judgmental; just because she was genuinely curious.
Pansy and Bitsy both looked at her blankly. The Bulgarian sculptor guy finished sucking Bitsy’s toes to his personal satisfaction and got up to go back to his studio. Bitsy French-kissed him good-bye.
“The thing is: I can’t fuck this relationship up. I’ve got to marry this guy! My trust fund,” Pansy Chapin now confessed to Cassandra, “you see. It’s one of those small, tasteful ones. Nothing to write home about.”
“Are you from Boston, by any chance?” Cassandra had pegged her as being from one of those old Brahmin families, having grown up on some tony side street of Beacon Hill, maybe.
“Maine. Bar Harbor.”
Better and better, Cassandra thought. Bar Harbor sounded very tony indeed.
“Oh, well. I’m from Boston. Cambridge,” she clarified.
“You know? I think we have things in common,” promised Pansy.
Cassandra’s heart leapt. Bitsy, never having stepped foot in New England before visiting Bennington, wasn’t interested in any of this. Why hadn’t she gone to Bard? she sometimes wondered, say on the dead of a Sunday evening. It would have been just that much closer to the city to make a difference. She changed the subject by complaining about this absolutely humongous diamond ring she had lost at the bottom of Julian Schnabel’s swimming pool while she was fucking some guy whose name she couldn’t even remember: “I think he was maybe, like, one of the art handlers or something…”
“Oh poor Bitsy, just ask your family to get you another,” Pansy said. “They own diamond mines, don’t they?”
“Yeah, but.”
Brioche then waddled into the living room, wagging her tail and drooling, because one of Bitsy’s friends had just fed her some of her antidepressants.
“You’re in love with Pansy Chapin,” Sylvie accused Cassandra later on that term. It was spring term of their freshman year; the lilacs at the End of the World were flowering outside their window in mad profusion, and Bitsy and the Bulgarian sculptor guy could be found wildly rutting in a ditch of broken daffodils. Every weekend that marvelous season Pansy Chapin vanished to a duplex on Central Park South and she took two weeks off of classes—nobody called her out on it, nobody cared—to be flown to Paris by her fiancé and feted like a kept woman at the Plaza Athénée. For Cassandra, she brought back from Paris a pink umbrella. She used it for years, years after college, Cassandra did, until it was just like the daffodils, that pink umbrella, bought by one Pansy Chapin in Paris for one Cassandra Puffin in Bennington, Vermont: its neck broke. Gala Gubelman was in love that spring, Penelope Entenmann, Vicky Lalage, and Angelica Rocky-Divine, too. If the notorious Lanie Tobacco out of all of the girls wasn’t, it was only because Lanie Tobacco wasn’t sentimental, Lanie Tobacco wasn’t a fool, though she was arrested right around this time by the Bennington Police for “bicycling under the influence.” Chelsea Hayden-Smith and Beverly Tinker-Jones, younger even than Cassandra and Sylvie were then, younger than any of them, had not yet plunged to their deaths through the wide glass windows of the fifth-floor dance studio of the college’s performing arts building; they had not yet applied to Bennington, had not even heard of it or the purported excellence of its modern dance program, perhaps. Sylvie’s hair was black. Cassandra’s, still golden. They were lying in bed when Sylvie made her accusation about Cassandra being in love with Pansy Chapin. Twin beds they had then, the type of beds they would never after college sleep in ever again.
“Am not!” Cassandra protested.
“Are too! You’re fascinated by her. Bewitched by Pansy Chapin! That bitch. Also! That apple gr
een cashmere sweater she gave you? The hand-me-down. If I were you, Cassandra, I’d stop wearing it. It’s way too tight on you.”
“I can pull off a tight sweater, thank you!”
“Yeah, but, I don’t know. Not that one, somehow.”
“Oh yeah, well, you’re in love with Gala Gubelman, so there!”
“Am not!”
“Are too! I bet, why, I bet that you want to make out with Gala Gubelman!”
“Whatever, Cassandra, everybody on campus has already made out with her.”
And now, years later, Sylvie was living just blocks away from Gala Gubelman in Fort Greene and Cassandra, meanwhile, had crossed the river—the River Styx, maybe—to worship at the devilish altar of Pansy Chapin on the Upper East Side.
CHAPTER 31
“Bitters, I thought. Bitters and soda. You know. I first got into these when I did my year abroad in Italy.”
Pansy reached for the brilliant orange bottle of Campari and began mixing her and Cassandra cocktails. If they both happened to be home on any given evening, that was what they did. They made a ritual out of it. Orange, as it happened, was one of Pansy Chapin’s favorite colors—and all the more striking a predilection, that, because so few people could pull it off; but Pansy, with her deep, moneyed tan and streaky blond hair, could. It was right after the Fourth of July. Pansy had just gotten back to the city from the Hamptons, and Cassandra from a weekend spent at a horse show in the Pennsylvania countryside with Edward. The orange of the bottle of Campari matched exactly the orange of the silk scarf that Pansy was flaunting, jet set–style, in her hair.
That Pansy dressed like this even in the privacy of her own home was only confirmation of her supreme glamour to Cassandra.
“Do you remember…” she began, accepting Pansy’s cocktail. “Cheers.”
“Cheers! Do I remember what?”
“When you used to make martinis for us?”
“Hmm…?”
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