For a moment, as the three of them sang in the car, she almost felt happy.
The song ended.
Traffic released.
The SUV pulled into the Cooper garage. They climbed out of the car with significantly less care than they’d used getting in; Cat heard stitches popping on her thigh seams, but it didn’t matter. They didn’t have much farther to go. The spider silk underlay of Bess’s gorgeous cocktail dress, made over a period of years on the island of Madagascar, had come loose from its moorings and hung down haphazardly over her knees. Bess fingered it sadly.
“I bet we can get away with jeans tonight,” Cat whispered.
Though it was 6:00 p.m., RAGE was still abuzz with activity. The cubicles were filled with at least a dozen women Cat had never seen before; she assumed they were permalancers hired to take over the workload that she and Bess had left behind. Through the glass walls of Margot’s office they could see Lou, Margot, Paula, and Constance assessing a naked plus-size model who was currently halfway into a burlap evening gown, her face and arms obscured by the fabric ballooning over her head.
The staff had moved from their high-summer uniform of filmy silks onto that year’s pre-fall theme of midi-length shifts in a mix of suede and sweatshirt material, a half-nod toward colder days. Many of the new hires wore eggplant tones; one of them even had eggplant-colored thigh-high kidskin boots so tight they could be stockings. Cat didn’t recognize them, couldn’t even guess the brand. She hadn’t been to a showroom in weeks.
As they strolled through the cubicles on their way to the southwest corner, only Molly greeted them, giving both women a hug. She wore a navy boiler suit with “BEALE” written on the pocket in silver paint, having taken Cat’s suggestion that she “find a work uniform in order to free up time in the day” rather literally. Still, on her twenty-year-old frame the polyester blend draped with some charm, and she’d rolled the sleeves and cuffed the legs just so above her platinum sneakers, which transformed her from overdressed college intern to chic insider, hair pulled back into a clean ponytail, two inches of blue remaining on the tips.
“Raphael and June are just grabbing some dinner, but they’ll be back soon,” Molly reported, holding open the door to Cat’s office. They walked in.
Cat’s office was a mess. The desk was covered with accessories and sewing notions; her Aeron chair had been removed and replaced with two makeup stools. Her books had been boxed up and stacked in the corner to make room for three dozen pairs of shoes now residing on the shelves.
Bess had tried to make some impact on the space, too, replacing the PMS board items with causes and buzzwords in the hope that it would rub off on anyone who came into the room:
+ —
nickel mines diamond mines
Nile Valley Silicon Valley
urine-powered batteries cold fusion
child diplomats child soldiers
Cat was the only one who paid attention to it, although Molly had eventually texted a photo of the board to Ella, who had rolled her eyes and deleted it. June the stylist had her own list tacked to the back of the door, dividing the city’s designers into “lets us keep merch” and “demands merch back,” undoubtedly more of interest to visitors to the space than the PMS board.
Cat rooted around on the desk until she found a tiny pair of scissors, which she used to snip the already-ripping side seam of her dress until it was loose enough for her to wriggle out of. She snapped the fabric of the industrial-strength rubber bodysuit that Raphael had insisted she wear underneath the structured cocktail dress. Her internal organs, sensing freedom was nigh, started to ache.
“I think we have to cut this suit off,” she said.
“There’s a hook on the desk somewhere,” Bess replied, moving her hand through the debris until she found a coated vinyl shepherd’s crook. “Stand up and turn around.”
“We have to get it off or I’m just going to pee in it!” Cat cried, her stomach cramping.
Bess failed to budge the clasps.
“Hold on,” she said. “I need more leverage.” She took off her shoes, braced one foot up on the desk, and pushed against the wall. “Okay: I’m gonna pull!”
At that moment, Molly opened the door and the whole office got a glimpse of Bess in her orange spider-silk slip trying to yank the bodysuit off Cat: two giant swans bent half-naked over a desk, standing in a puddle of priceless clothes.
The permalancers sharing the nearest cube rolled their eyes. “Is that what they do all day? I have an MFA from Iowa and I’m still not full-time,” one muttered to the other. “This is horseshit.”
“Tell me about it,” said the other one. “I’ve been interning at Cooper every summer since the ninth grade.”
Bess gave up, finally using scissors to cut it off, and the leotard snapped against the wall like a rubber band. Cat was too frustrated to laugh; huge red welts glowed where the seams had dug into her skin.
They both changed into comfortable clothing: plain black jeans and an ivory jacquard-knit top structured with a lace effect from Alexander McQueen for Bess; and leather leggings, a black crocheted zip-up hoodie from Adidas, and a pair of rattlesnake sneakers from Jimmy Choo for Cat.
As they were wiping off their makeup and reapplying moisturizer, Raphael and June walked in the door. Cat braced herself for a wave of criticism but instead felt the quiet joy of approval.
“I love this,” June said immediately, pointing to their clothes. “Casual wear says, we are comfortable with each other. It’s totally convincing.”
“Cocktail dresses are for beards,” Raphael agreed immediately. “Let’s do red lips and clean skin.”
“Every modern woman’s fantasy: being an undercover beard.” Bess sighed. “My mother will be so proud.”
June looked down at Cat’s sneakers. “I have one edit. The rattlesnake takes you from Patti Smith to mail-order Eastern European bride,” she said, handing Cat a pair of black canvas Vans. “Switch and sit for makeup.”
Molly packed their handbags—a pair of neon plastic cubes—with house keys, cigarettes for Cat, wallets, and their fully charged cellphones.
“I feel like my daughters are going off to prom,” she said jokingly, looking at her two bosses. “I’m a cool mom! Call me if you need a ride! No judgment!”
Fifteen minutes later Jim drove them silently downtown to Paahtoleipä, the new Finnish toast-only restaurant on Mott Street. When they pulled up to the restaurant, Cat could make out five photographers waiting outside with bored looks on their faces; after Jim opened the door, she could hardly make her way through them while she and Bess posed against the restaurant’s painted window.
Someone held open another door for her, and she found herself inside a crowded town house that had recently been converted into a junk-shop-slash-restaurant. Editor-slash-model-slash-junk-shop-slash-urban-farmhouse, she thought, wending her way to the back through tables that were shoved so tightly together she was sure her butt cheeks grazed several faces.
Chris Spruce and Jent Brooks stood up politely as soon as they spotted Cat and Bess. The two mid-thirties actors wore matching ensembles of dark, slim-cut chinos, simple button-down shirts, and light jackets, each with three days’ worth of stubble beneath their fresh haircuts: stylish but not fashionable, poster boys for nonthreatening suburban masculinity.
The two women towered over their dates, but when she sat down, Cat kissed Chris Spruce full on the mouth as soon as their heads were even. He kissed her back dramatically. She heard cellphone cameras click around them. Mission accomplished, she thought. Maybe we can leave after our first piece of bread.
“I’m Cat,” she said. “Sorry to spring that on you, but I wanted to get it out of the way.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” Chris whispered, pulling out her chair and helping her into it with a smile. “But you should know”—his voice grew even quieter—“I am the gayest man on earth.”
“It’s true. He had sex with a man less than an hour ago,” Jent
added as he helped Bess into her seat, running his fingers through his black hair. “But I’m straight and available if you’re truly into short actors.” He leaned forward with comedic suggestiveness, flipping Bess’s hand over and stroking the inside of her palm.
Both women smiled.
“I don’t think we’re shopping in that particular aisle,” Bess admitted.
“The tall ones never are unless they’re in actual poverty.” Jent sighed. “Only illiterate teenage models want to date short guys. But someday I am going to find a tall, smart, beautiful woman like the two of you who is going to let me climb her like a tree. It’ll be epic. Minstrels will sing songs about it.”
“We ordered the first ‘toast course’ for the table, by the way,” Chris interjected with a snort. “Do you girls drink?”
“Yes,” chimed Bess and Cat in unison. “What kind of wine goes with bread?”
“Traditionally I’d say that one might want a finer boxed varietal to wash down a loaf of Pepperidge Farm smeared with Miracle Whip, but maybe that’s more an ‘alone in my apartment’ kind of thing,” confided Chris. “Should we just ask which one has the most alcohol?”
“Definitely,” Bess replied, signaling to the waiter, who slithered through the table maze around them. “Red, right?” The table nodded. “Can you please bring us your most alcoholic bottle of red wine?” she asked sweetly.
“That’s probably”—the waiter looked up thoughtfully—“the ’93 Comte Georges de Vogüé, from Côte de Nuits. A lovely pinot. The black cherry is a perfect complement to the buckwheat course that’s coming up—adds some fruit to the nuttiness of the grain.”
“Great,” Bess replied. “Four glasses, please.”
Two more waiters appeared with their first course, managing to squeeze around the table and lower all four plates simultaneously as though they were dining at Daniel. “Your first course,” chirped one of them without apparent irony, “is a pan-roasted buckwheat and almond meal unleavened artisanal flatbread, brushed with quail egg whites, seasoned with house-made blackened sesame, and set in a bed of handpicked dandelion greens. Enjoy!”
The waiters disappeared as quickly as they’d managed to appear.
Cat looked down at her plate and stared at her food, dumbfounded. Nestled in the middle of a few limp leaves was…matzoh.
“Are these fucking saltine crackers?” Chris hissed to Bess. “This. Is. Not. Food.”
“I’m so fucking hungry, I don’t care,” Bess replied, cramming the cracker into her mouth. It crumbled immediately, dusting her lacy top with particles of unleavened bread. She gave Cat, Chris, and Jent a look of terrified hunger and began snatching the crackers from their plates, shoving them into her mouth like a monster. Everyone’s servings fit into her jaw in a single stack. Cat giggled uncontrollably.
The waiter reappeared with their wine.
“I see we’re all loving this first course,” he said enthusiastically, gesturing at their empty plates. A sheepish Bess covered her mouth with her hand while Cat, Chris, and Jent nodded to the waiter sincerely, trying not to laugh.
“It was amazing. Bring us five more just like that, except you can bring them all at once,” Chris ordered.
“Ooh, are we switching to the tower? Wonderful. I’ll let the kitchen know.” He winked. “It’s just like the seafood tower at Balthazar, but it’s our own grain-based version. You’re going to love it.”
He poured at what seemed like a deliberately glacial pace. Chris and Jent aren’t so bad, Cat thought, but she was so bored: bored with the elaborate presentations, bored with the showcasing, bored with her own overdetermined life. She was bored with sitting here and pretending to care for the waiter’s sake about what the waiter was so effectively pretending to care about for the customer’s sake, all because someone, somewhere in her orbit, had been convinced that this restaurant’s gimmick was worth supporting with the faint currency of her identity. She was a penny passing through a vending machine, through a thousand change dishes, tumbling through a thousand fingers. Eventually, Cat was starting to realize, someone would drop her on the ground and it would be bad luck to pick her up again. They’d leave her for the next passerby. And maybe—just maybe—she’d be kicked into the sewer before anyone spotted her.
The waiter finally finished and turned to take the bottle back to the bar with him. “You can leave that on the table,” Cat pointed out quickly, making space next to her plate. “Thank you.”
“Well done,” said Chris. All around them, diners nibbled on their own meager toasted slices of bread and stared indiscreetly, a few tables still snapping photos of the foursome. Bess and Cat might be Photogram-famous in the right downtown circles, but Chris and Jent were truly on their way to genuine multiplex celebrity.
“You guys are nice and all,” Cat said, swallowing half her wine, “but this place is a disgrace.”
“I think—and correct me if I’m wrong—but the executive producer on Jent’s last movie’s current girlfriend’s ex-stepson is an investor,” Chris said slowly. Jent nodded.
“Can you imagine having a child who is so stupid that they’d put your money in something like this?” Cat asked.
“Or so cynical,” Jent replied, gesturing to the packed room and the crowd that had formed outside. “They’re making a fortune on flour. I don’t know about you guys, but I’m from here, from Staten. And I don’t mean to be one of those people, but this is insane.”
“I’m from Tribeca,” Bess piped in. “I was born at St. Vincent’s. I miss specific years in specific New York neighborhoods the way amputees miss limbs. I’m so nostalgic for the West Village in 1997 that it literally hurts, you know? Or Williamsburg in 2000. Or Bushwick in 2004. It’s the most bittersweet thing in the world. God, someone brought up Monkey City the other day and I almost cried.”
“I loved Monkey City,” Jent replied, giving her an approving look. “I remember sitting on the floor in 2005 watching the Dalí movie where someone gets stabbed in the eye and eating the best polenta of my life.”
“I just can’t imagine a world where someone feels that way about this toast restaurant,” Bess said. “The waitstaff here. Is this honestly not absurd to them? Is this a real memory, an indelible part of their New York history? Will it hurt to remember it?” Just then, a server appeared with a multiplate tower of breads and crackers, which he dramatically placed in the center of their table.
“Okay: this is the tower,” he said with a flourish. “Let me walk you through it. We have a nine-grain biscuit that’s been wood-fired with Hudson Valley cedar and seasoned with anchovy crumble; a spelt and buckwheat pancake wrapped in a rice-based phyllo dough; a buttermilk johnnycake dusted with house-made artisanal toasted coconut flour; four petite almond meal loaves proofed in locally grown corn grain alcohol from our neighboring urban farm; and of course our signature rye rieska, a Finnish specialty, with a small side of cured lutefisk processed in the traditional birch ash, along with a selection of our house-made mustards.”
It was basically indistinguishable from the bread basket at Olive Garden save for its massive size. But the waiter’s sincerity as he searched their eyes for criticism and approval was, in fact, genuine. The group realized they couldn’t bear to hurt his feelings or denigrate his livelihood, no matter how absurd, with even the slightest eye roll.
“Thank you,” Bess said kindly.
“This looks amazing,” added Jent, his tone generous.
The waiter smiled in relief, having successfully delivered a $400 basket of the simplest food on earth, and retreated back to the kitchen.
“If thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee,” Cat said quietly to herself, staring down the bread in her palm.
“To be fair, this is, like, the best bread I’ve ever had in my life,” Bess replied as she finished off a johnnycake and started on one of the miniature almond loaves.
Chapter Thirteen
The meal at Paahtoleipä finished up uneventfully, but Cat, s
till hoping to hear from Hutton, wanted to leave right after dinner. Chris obviously didn’t mind. Jent was polite enough about it. So the group ate their bread, Photogrammed some behind-the-scenes pictures of themselves with the chef, and parted ways a few blocks from the restaurant. On busy Bowery no one noticed Chris and Jent hopping out of the Cooper SUV, their good-night kisses merely friendly pecks on the cheek.
Once they approached Delancey, traffic stood still. Hutton still hadn’t replied to Cat’s text from earlier. The doors were unlocked. This was her chance.
“I’m walking home,” Cat announced abruptly, opening her door while they were stopped at a light. “See you tomorrow.”
“Seeya,” Bess, busy texting, replied dreamily, while Jim was disapprovingly unresponsive. Whatever, Cat thought. I don’t need a babysitter. I can go where I want.
Her feet hit the pavement flat—oh, sweet sneakers!—and Cat pulled her hood up as she hustled over the Williamsburg Bridge, down Broadway, turned on Driggs, and slid sunglasses onto her face before walking into Leicester.
It didn’t do much good. At least three people spotted Cat and took her photo while she waited for the hostess; they were using Mania, she was certain. The first user to flag Cat and accurately tag her clothing would get five Mania points, good on any form of merchandise in their online store, a juggernaut that was fast becoming the Amazon Prime of clothing.
“Hiya! How many?” asked the hostess.
“Just one,” Cat said. “Outside, with an ashtray.”
“Right this way,” the hostess said, to the obvious exasperation of the four groups who had been waiting up front.
“I’m Yelping this,” grumbled a man behind Cat, just loud enough for her to hear. He clearly meant the comment to be threatening—that Cat or the restaurant would quake at the internet wrath of another predatory credit-rich white male being denied his god-given right to go somewhere and spend spend spend as soon as he’d read about it in New York magazine—but Cat, her stomach grumbling, found herself so irritated by him that she actually lit her cigarette, turned around, and exhaled in his face before walking outside after the hostess. Then she ordered a double tequila on the rocks and a Pacifico, keeping her sunglasses on and the cigarette dangling from her lip while she drank alone.
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