“At Bennington. Sylvie and I were living in the Pine Room then. Remember! I think it was our sophomore year. We had a fireplace, remember, and Alphie the security guard used to come and bring the logs and build the fire and everything. You would come over, and you’d make us dinner in the kitchen. You’d make us steak and Caesar salad and double-stuffed potatoes and real martinis.”
“As opposed to fake martinis?” Pansy yawned.
“Well. I guess what I mean is—real, adult martinis. It all seemed terribly adult to me anyway. When you used to come over and cook for us.”
Imagine cooking a group of girls dinner, Pansy thought, when everybody knew that the reason one learned to cook in the first place was to please a man.
“Are you ever going to learn how to cook, Cassandra?”
“Oh! That. Well, yes. I’m hoping to—now that we’re settled into the apartment.”
“Oh good. Feel free to use any of my cookbooks if you want.”
“Thanks! And, oh! That reminds me. If I learn to cook one of these days, then I can start using my great-grandmother’s wedding silver.”
On the very night they’d moved into the apartment, Cassandra had been positively giddy to show Pansy the silver, unfurling from the blue velvet depths of the box the long-stemmed scalloped oyster forks and ice cream spoons, to Pansy’s squeals of delight and approval.
“What I recommend is: learning a signature dish.”
“Yeah. Like what?”
“Steak, to start,” mused Pansy.
“Yeah. I think I can get the hang of steak. I hope.”
“My signature dishes are veal scallopini and Chicken Marbella.”
But I want those to be my signature dishes! Cassandra thought, with a wholly illogical sense of betrayal and indignation. Those are the perfect signature dishes for a girl to have.
“Fish, too. You ought to know how to do something with fish if you’re with a guy who prefers it. Some guys do. Sole Véronique, maybe…” Pansy was lost in thought. “That’s the one with the grapes.”
“Pansy.” Cassandra got up the courage to ask, for she had a certain grave matter on her mind. “What are your thoughts on monogamy?”
“Monogamy?” Pansy merely laughed.
“Oh, I thought so,” said Cassandra, relieved.
“Thought what?” asked Pansy suspiciously.
That you were a complete and total slut, Cassandra knew better than to say out loud.
“Oh, just that you would be—understanding.”
“What’s going on? Is there a guy? A new guy?”
“Well”—Cassandra hesitated—“kind of. Did you ever take a class with Professor Sobel?”
“Professor Sobel! The opera guy? Yeah, come to think of it I did. For one day! But he made us sit outside in the meadow just so he could smoke his precious cigarettes and I just couldn’t bear it anymore. It was February.”
“Yeah, he was famous for making his classes do that. Well, anyway. I was kind of a favorite of his back at Bennington, and then I ran into him earlier this year in New York, at this concert I went to with Edward. When I first moved to the city, he invited me to lunch at La Grenouille, to celebrate…”
“La Grenouille!” shrieked Pansy. La Grenouille was her favorite. She was jealous, suddenly, of a man taking Cassandra to La Grenouille, because Cassandra wasn’t as hot as she was, and girls who weren’t as hot as she was were, generally speaking, undeserving of the finer things in life.
“Oh, it was so much fun. I got the cheese soufflé. Have you had their cheese soufflé?” But of course Pansy Chapin had had the cheese soufflé; Pansy Chapin knew how to make cheese soufflé. “Well, and then after that he invited me to Le Bernardin.” Cassandra paused importantly. “For dinner.”
“But in a way, lunch is more chic than dinner, I think.” Pansy was recalling with a pang the reckless afternoon assignations, the gorgeous champagne breakfasts, of her youth. “Dinner is more obvious.”
“I think so, too! That’s exactly what I thought. But still, dinner is more…”
“Of a clear-cut invitation,” filled in Pansy. “From the man’s point of view.”
“Yeah, so…I’m attracted to Professor Sobel, but. The thing is, I’m not that into monogamy, actually, but Edward is.”
“Oh no, he isn’t,” Pansy assured her.
“Pansy.”
“No man is. Not really!”
“That’s a little cynical of you, don’t you think?”
“When you’ve been with as many guys as I have…” Pansy trailed off, reminding herself that Cassandra was something of a late bloomer, compared to herself. At age fourteen Pansy had lost her virginity on a private beach in Bar Harbor to a brutish Dartmouth senior who was summering there and had never looked back: thus began her storied romantic career. So how did you lose your virginity? was a bottomless subject at Bennington. An unusually large number of the girls there had scintillating stories to tell; Lanie Tobacco, for one, had been dismantled of her maidenhood on a pool table by the drummer of a band called “Leftover Crack.”
“I like older men myself,” Pansy said, changing the subject. “I mean, I like the idea of older men. I think I’d go quite nicely with one.” She paused, picturing herself, quite without qualms, as the ultimate accessory; a gold pocket watch, a vintage Jaguar in a snazzy color. “But the thing is, I’ve tried before, and I just can’t get into their bodies!”
“I’ve never been all that hung up on bodies, though. I just feel like physical attraction can be based on so many different things. You know?”
But Pansy didn’t know. She said: “As a matter of fact. What I really go for are black guys. Did I ever tell you about the time I dated this incredibly hot Cuban guy who turned out to be a crystal meth dealer? Oops! Did I say Cuban? I meant Haitian!”
“No!”
“Well—” Pansy began, but Cassandra interrupted.
“Is it true what they say about black guys?”
“What they say about their cocks?”
But Cassandra didn’t even have the patience to listen for Pansy’s answer, jumping in just to make clear: “Sex is a really intellectual thing with me.”
“Oh,” said Pansy Chapin, getting up to make herself another cocktail. The bottle of Campari was now half-empty. She would have to replace it; Pansy hated half-empty or tarnished things; they upset her love of physical perfection. “Oh, Cassandra, Cassandra! You’ll get over that.”
CHAPTER 32
“Pansy!” Cassandra called, later on that night.
There was no answer.
“Pansy!” Cassandra moaned again, from her bedroom. But still, Pansy refused to answer, because she was in the midst of her elaborate beauty preparations, rubbing her entire body with a concoction of brown sugar and baby oil, in the exact same ritual she had done ever since her days at Bennington and that Cassandra did now, too. Because for Pansy, at least, there was a new guy in the picture—a new hedge-fund manager, in fact; it hadn’t taken her long to nab another one since the breakup of her most recent engagement. What Cassandra didn’t know yet, poor thing, was that Pansy was planning on moving into this new guy’s loft in TriBeCa, just as soon as he gave her a ring. He was thirty-five and, to Pansy’s mind, on the fast track to marriage. Like Cassandra, she would be turning twenty-nine next year and was starting to get nervous. Even in this day and age, a girl could afford only so many broken engagements.
“Pansy!”
Jesus, what could possibly be the matter? Pansy wondered. It wasn’t a fire, at least, because she would have smelled it. So obviously, short of a fire, there was no reason to get out of the bathroom before she was ready; Cassandra could wait. Pansy surveyed her sleek, freshly oiled brown body with a cool appraiser’s eye; what good fortune it was, to be so beautiful.
Eventually she swaddled herself in an oversize white terry-cloth robe—stolen from the Westin Excelsior in Rome; Pansy, much like Gala Gubelman, had a touch of the kleptomaniac about her when the occasion called fo
r it—and went into the living room, where she fixed two martinis, strong, before carrying them to Cassandra’s bedroom. The door was ajar, and Cassandra was sprawled facedown on her bed, shuddering with tears.
“Here,” said Pansy, handing her a martini. “It looks like you could use this! What’s the matter?”
“It’s—Edward!”
So he dumped her at last, Pansy thought. She, like Sylvie, had suspected that Cassandra and Edward’s relationship would not be long for this world.
“Oh, no! What happened?”
“He—he dumped me.”
“Oh, you poor thing…” began Pansy, wondering if she was on the right track here, for she was not, by nature, the heart-to-heart type.
“And he did it over e-mail, too! Look!”
Pansy read the e-mail, which was not all that interesting or revealing unto itself, though she knew that Cassandra would be hell-bent on discussing its finer points. It was gentlemanly and brief—with a coldness at the heart of it that the illusionless Pansy identified as being absolutely final.
“But our relationship wasn’t like that!”
“Like what?”
“Well. We didn’t really do things over e-mail.”
“Oh.”
“Our relationship was—classy.”
“Well, count your blessings, in this day and age. At least he didn’t do it over text message. Or on Facebook.”
“Pansy! I’m not on Facebook!”
“Oh right. Of course not.” Pansy was on it herself only because if you were as photogenic as she was, why not?
The loneliness of her life—without Sylvie, without Edward—suddenly struck Cassandra in that moment. Oh my God, she thought, undone. I’m single.
“Pansy, may I ask you a question?”
“What is it, Cassandra?”
Valiantly Cassandra tried to frame her thoughts.
“Do you believe all that stuff about how single women can still love themselves and have self-respect and inner strength, blah blah blah?”
“No,” said Pansy Chapin. “I do not.”
“Me neither.”
“Being single is like shopping at Trader Joe’s.”
Cassandra understood at once where Pansy was coming from.
“It’s a sign of a compromised existence,” Pansy continued. “Have you ever gone to a party where they actually served frozen hors d’oeuvres from Trader Joe’s? Those dreadful slimy potstickers and so on? I have. I wanted to die.”
“I hate Trader Joe’s!”
“Of course you do.”
“I don’t want to end up as one of those sad-sack girls you see around who shop at Trader Joe’s and have Tuesday night book clubs and are proud of their banana bread recipes…”
“Oh right, those girls all own cutesy oven mitts from Anthropologie, don’t they? They own oven mitts with poodles on them. Poodles or reindeer.”
“Yes! Ugh. You know something else? I’ve never liked Anthropologie either.”
Cassandra sat on her bed, pondering her future. But all thoughts led back to the past and to Edward.
“I know. I’ll write him a letter.”
Please don’t, Pansy was thinking, with the ruthlessness of one who has loved and lost many a time. If only women knew how unattractive the spectacle of having a bad breakup made them. The cozy “nights in” with the dreaded ice cream and lumpy socks, the recurrent tears and all of the wasted months of emotional “processing” and ever-spiraling conversations about a situation that could never ever change—Pansy hoped that Cassandra didn’t think that any of that was going to be going on around here!
But already, Cassandra was blathering on about her choice of notepaper. She reached for her letter box, from which spilled sheets and sheets of French stationery.
“And I’ll stain it with my scent…Or, I know! Can I borrow that vanilla Santa Maria Novella perfume of yours? I keep meaning to go to the store downtown and buy a bottle for myself…”
Then why don’t you already? thought Pansy, who, ever since grade school, had blanched at the thought of sharing things.
Cassandra, meanwhile, was getting so caught up in the specifics of this imaginary letter to Edward that she almost forgot that he had broken up with her.
“You know, I just remembered something,” said Pansy, trying to steer Cassandra away from the notion of the letter. “I just remembered how much I liked your first boyfriend. The one you had who used to come and visit at Bennington.”
“Oh, really? I liked your first boyfriend, too.” Cassandra was thinking of the one Pansy used to go visit at his duplex on Central Park South.
“Oh, but he was hardly my first—” Pansy, with her epic list of lovers, was temporarily flummoxed.
“No, of course not. But I mean, the guy you were with while we were at Bennington.”
“Well,” Pansy admitted. “He was the first of my fiancés.” And the only one of them I ever loved, she thought, and was surprised by the swell of true emotion she felt in that moment. She heard herself suddenly saying: “You know, Cassandra, don’t take it so hard with Edward. I think there can only ever be one true love anyway.”
“What true love?” Cassandra asked.
Pansy Chapin sighed.
“The first one.”
—
Edward, sitting at his broad oak desk in his apartment in Rittenhouse Square, poured himself a good stiff drink before opening Cassandra’s letter. He found himself irritated at first, and then—was it on account of the lingering scent of Santa Maria Novella vanilla perfume on the envelope?—subtly, mysteriously aroused by the prospect of hearing from her again. Since he’d sent her that e-mail nearly a week ago now, there’d been no response. Finally, he’d texted her a couple of times just to check up on her, and still no word. Not that he was worried. After all, she was living with Pansy Chapin now—a girl of whom, unlike Sylvie, he had every reason to approve—and surely Pansy would be there in the apartment to comfort her; that’s what girlfriends were for.
Once he finally read the letter, though, he smiled. The main thing he took away from its contents was that she would let him fuck her again. But that could wait, he told himself, because in the meantime, to recover from Cassandra and her emotional excesses, he had taken up with a nice girl from his rowing club who wore Lily Pulitzer and had graduated from Wellesley.
CHAPTER 33
Gala Gubelman rolled over in bed. Cassandra was calling.
“Oh my God, so! What happened?” Gala asked.
It was the morning after Cassandra’s much-trumpeted dinner at Le Bernardin with Professor Sobel. Blissfully she ran through descriptions of warm poached lobster, oysters, and pink champagne, but none of this was what Gala had picked up the phone for.
“But then what happened? I mean at the end of the night.”
“Oh, well. He said he just had to get back to his place to listen to the complete string quartets of Elliott Carter on his new speaker system.”
“So music, he mentioned listening to music together. They always say that!”
“No, not together, is the thing. When I said, Oh how wonderful, or whatever, he said that for him, listening to music in the privacy of his own apartment was a serious business, and he preferred to do it alone and uninterrupted by the babble of precocious coeds.”
“Sylvie said he was an asshole.”
“Gala! You promised you wouldn’t mention her. She’s Sicilian dead to me.”
“Oh yeah? That’s exactly what she says about you, too!” Gala, ever since the girls’ breakup, had been “in the middle” of Sylvie and Cassandra, and, as is only natural where triangles of three women are concerned, had relished every minute.
“But seriously,” said Gala now. “What is it about him anyway?”
“Who?”
“Professor Sobel, silly. He looks just like a giant pirate!”
“But Gala, pirates are sexy. Pirates are an iconic masculine archetype.”
“Hmm.” Gala had to concede that C
assandra might be onto something there, but nevertheless shared with the fastidious Pansy Chapin a distaste for the aged male body on principle.
“You know what else I think it has to do with—” Cassandra said.
“What?”
“He’s a smoker, you know. He smells like cigarettes.”
“Ugh. As bad as Lanie Tobacco?” The notorious Lanie had acquired her campus nickname on account of the clotted stench that accompanied her tiny dark person at all times.
“But I like the smell of nicotine on a man.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“My father was a smoker.”
“Your father’s dead.”
“Exactly.”
“Is it just that you don’t want to be alone?” Gala persisted.
“Uh-huh,” said Cassandra cheerfully, thinking of how she had admitted just the same thing to Pansy. Self-respect, inner strength, blah blah blah, be damned.
“Cassandra.”
“Oh, what, and you do want to be alone?”
“Uh, no.”
The very suggestion was outrageous. The one dismal week at Bennington in which Gala Gubelman had been between admirers, she had arranged a trip to the town bowling alley with her girlfriends that Saturday night, not knowing what else to do with herself. Never again, she had decided, and by the following week she was screwing a freshman. Just to get her mojo back, she said. That had made Orpheus jealous and for the rest of the term they were boyfriend and girlfriend again.
“Well then, don’t tell me that I have to be.”
“But New York City is full of guys, Cassandra.”
“I don’t want a guy, I want a man, thank you very much.”
“Oh, I get it, somebody older.”
“Well”—Cassandra thought about this—“somebody who can take me out to dinner, to start…”
“Yeah, nobody takes anybody out to dinner anymore. That’s true.”
“That’s what Sylvie said. Sylvie said that guys today go Dutch.”
“It’s go Dutch or die, pretty much,” Gala Gubelman conceded, wondering if, what with the crummy state that modern dating was in, she shouldn’t be on the lookout for a Professor Sobel type herself.
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