by Amy Gentry
“It’s just a money problem,” I said, amazed at how completely the Sunday doubles had changed my perspective on such things. “Lily’s doing fine.” Relief at saying the words out loud flooded through me.
“Thank god,” Gwen said, tears coming to her eyes again. “I’ve been so worried. I’m sorry for that shitty thing I said about feeling sorry for yourself. I just—sometimes I don’t know how to handle your feelings. They’re so intense.”
The tension draining out of the air made me feel light-headed, and I let myself collapse onto the sofa, leaning my head on the back. Gwen sat next to me, perched on the edge, her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands.
“I missed you, Gwen.”
“Me too.”
There was another long pause, and something occurred to me. “Gwen, don’t be offended by this, but— Is that why you’ve been meeting with Rocky? To get closer to Bethany?”
I stared up at the ceiling to avoid looking at her, and she answered in a muffled voice, as if she had her hands over her face. “It’s embarrassing, but yeah. I thought, I don’t know, maybe he could sort of put in a good word?”
“Well, maybe he has. She invited both of us tonight.”
Gwen turned to me and grabbed my elbow. “This is going to be insane, right?”
“Absolutely bonkers.” Suddenly we were back in the forest preserve clearing, surrounded by a half-eaten picnic lunch, joking about meth labs and Corn Queens. I pointed at the bags in the hall. “I even bought new clothes. That’s how nervous I am.”
“Bring it to my room, we can get ready together.”
“Solidarity!” I shouted.
“On this weird night.”
“It’s going to be so weird.”
“Well, Mackenzie.” Gwen imitated Bethany’s classroom hauteur, adding a posh British accent. “You doooo want a top-tier job, don’t you? Research I?”
“Bethany dear, there’s more to life than academics,” I rasped as Rocky, brandishing an imaginary glass in the air. “What about drinking ? Allow me to refill that glass for you, Gwendolyn, sweetheart!”
“Oh, Pyotr, stop pinching the girls’ bottoms or you’ll never get tenure!”
We rolled on the sofa, shrieking with laughter.
7
It was chilly walking through the early darkness to the Libertorium in our dresses, and we were silent most of the way. The swish of my flared skirt against my new boots made the familiar path strange. Gwen had applied my makeup, and I could still feel the slow, cold sweep of the triangle sponge over my cheeks and the precise feathery strokes of the eye liner, see the fireworks behind my closed lids as she smudged my eye shadow with her little finger. When I opened my eyes and looked in the mirror, I saw a serene and beautiful woman staring back at me where I was used to seeing a flushed, anxious, overgrown adolescent. Gwen pulled my hair up into a bun, and the earrings looked, for the first time, as if they really belonged.
In the elevator, I very nearly pushed the button for Nona by mistake. As we whooshed past the mezzanine, I tried to forget that in twelve hours I’d be back here again, wearing work pants and an apron. We emerged into a white-walled hallway, my first time to see the residential part of the building, and followed it all the way to the end.
I turned to Gwen.
“Here we go,” she whispered with a tight smile. She rang the doorbell.
I couldn’t quite place what was strange about the sound of approaching footsteps on the other side of the door until it opened, and Bethany stood in the doorway, barefoot.
“Come in, come in! Oh, you’re all dressed up, and here I am looking like a pajama party.” She gestured at her oversize red sweater and jeans, which, compared to Gwen’s and my dresses, looked both comfortable and enviably covered-up.
The apartment we stepped into with conspicuously clacking heels was not the icy modernist loft I had been anticipating, but rather a warm, inviting aerie, the rooms painted odd shades that complemented one another perfectly, salmon and teal and buff under white birthday-cake moldings. Photographs and brightly colored miscellany hung on the walls, and neat rows of books sandwiched between antique bronzes and fertility gods lined the mantel and windowsills and every other amenable surface, giving the apartment a comfortably cluttered look. The lights were low and ambient, emanating softly from lamps. On the dining room table, real candles flickered in tall brass candlesticks.
A beam of brightness spilled out from the navy-walled kitchen, where overhead lights were presumably indispensable, and Rocky appeared in the kitchen doorway. He, at least, was dressed to his normal level of dapperness.
“Girls! Let me pour you some wine!” I stifled a grin and forced myself not to make eye contact with Gwen as he plied us with pleasantries.
Behind me, Bethany was taking Gwen’s coat and exclaiming over her dress. I kept walking and passed the threshold into the kitchen, where Rocky hovered over a fleet of wineglasses in various shapes and sizes. “Bethany hates stemware, but I insist on using it for parties. It’s good luck if it breaks.”
Tiny china plates littered the countertop, each heaped with a different jewel-like substance. I gestured toward them. “These are so beautiful.”
“Zakuski!” he said, beaming. “This is what we eat before the meal in Ukraine. These are cauliflowers, red peppers, and beets—I pickled them all myself. Here we have cold potatoes and sardines in oil. Deviled eggs. Cabbage dumplings. And here is salmon roe, trout roe, and, best of all, the beluga, a special treat for me.” Describing the food had brought Rocky’s accent to the surface. He slid a glass of white across the island toward me, sloshing it ever so slightly, and gestured toward the other glasses. “White before dinner, so as not to ruin the taste buds. We’ll have champagne with the caviar—Bethany prefers it to vodka, though it’s less authentic. Red with the meal. A digestif afterward.”
“Are you trying to kill us?” I laughed.
“If I wanted that, I’d insist on the vodka,” he said with a wink. Then he slapped his forehead. “Where are my manners? The kitchen is hot. Allow me to take your coat.”
Without waiting for my assent, Rocky stepped around me and curled his fingers under the lapels of my jacket from behind, lifting it gracefully off my shoulders. His knuckles traced a path along my bare collarbone and caught on the neck of my dress lightly, in a way that could have been accidental or not. I shivered.
“You are still cold?” His voice sounded closer to my ear than I expected.
“No, I’m all right.” I stepped forward and picked up the wineglass, feeling Rocky’s eyes slide along my torso, from shoulder to waistline.
“You look very beautiful tonight,” he said.
But when I turned around, he was already on his way to the hall with my coat. Bethany and Gwen appeared in the door-way.
“Mac, pour us some white,” Bethany commanded, and I obeyed as unquestioningly as if I were taking orders on a brunch shift. “So, Gwen, remind me who you studied with at Columbia?”
Gwen thanked me as she took her wineglass, and then obediently began listing her undergraduate professors. I held out the other glass to Bethany, who turned without seeing it and led Gwen into the living room, still exclaiming over old colleagues. Unsure what to do, I followed them with Bethany’s wineglass in one hand and my own in the other.
Rocky stood politely in front of his armchair while Bethany and Gwen settled onto the sofa. I placed Bethany’s wine on the coffee table in front of her just as she heaved a sigh and said, “You must miss New York terribly. And, I suppose, the real Ivy League.”
I took the only open seat on the other side of the coffee table from Rocky, but, seeing that Gwen and Bethany were still deep in a conversation that excluded me, he crossed over and pulled up a hard-backed chair at my elbow.
“So, how has the independent study with Bethany been going?” He leaned forward confidentially, putting, I thought, scare quotes around the words independent study. “Is she . . .” He paused to search for t
he word. “Enlightening?”
“I don’t think she would call it that,” I said truthfully. “But I do love the class. It’s pushing me, intellectually. It’s making me think in different ways than I ever have before.”
“Hmm,” he said, a menacing twinkle in his eye. “Not like my class.”
“No, I didn’t mean that! I love Futures. It’s just—you know, you can go so much deeper one-on-one.”
“Mine is an introductory-level course.” He bared white teeth under his smooth, flared lips. “There is much more to be done with the topic, for those who choose to go on with it.” In the background, I could hear Bethany chattering on, something about having to fire her research assistant after so many years, what a shame, and then it was back to New York again, the subways, the food, Gwen’s inaudible responses drawing enthusiastic agreement from Bethany: “I know, I know!”
“I know,” I echoed. Then, perhaps goaded by all this New York talk and starting to feel the wine, I found myself saying, “I might do something with virtual museums and film. Or something.”
“Really?” Rocky looked at once flattered and amused.
“Maybe. I’m still deciding.”
He leaned forward and put a hand lightly on my knee. “If you want to talk more about it, I’m always available. You know, this year, I intend to support one student application for the Joyner.”
The conversation on the sofa ceased abruptly. Bethany leaned forward and picked up her wineglass from the coffee table as if seeing it for the first time. She took a long sip while Rocky withdrew his hand from my knee casually but not quickly.
“Don’t listen to him, my dear. Rocky is always trying to nab the Joyner for one of his students, but he hasn’t done it yet. It’s cute, really.”
“It only takes the right student,” he said, lifting his wineglass and saluting her with a swig. “What’s cute is Bethany thinking it’s her, and not her students, who win the fellowship. It’s admirable, I suppose, how she accepts the heavy burden of responsibility.”
“I haven’t heard any complaints.”
“Bethany’s policy is take all the praise, and none of the blame,” Rocky said to Gwen and me.
“Blame me all you want, darling, no one’s stopping you. But don’t try to poach my students from under my nose. Mac’s too smart for you.”
“That’s patently clear,” he said, flashing me a dazzling smile. “Here’s to Mac.” He raised his glass and took another sip, nearly emptying it.
Gwen held up her glass, which was more than half-empty. She was already a little tipsy, and I guessed, with a flash of sympathy, that she’d been sipping nervously while Bethany talked. “To Mac,” she said. “My best friend.”
Bethany nodded, making eye contact with me for the first time. “Mac the Beauty Queen. Long may she reign.” They drank.
I raised my glass. “If we’re toasting me, we have to toast Gwen. Without her, I wouldn’t even be here.” The wine was going to my head, too. “Here’s to Gwen!”
“To Gwen!” Bethany raised her glass.
“I must refill for this!” shouted Rocky. “You deserve more than a drop for a toast.”
He came back with a freshly opened bottle and made the rounds, splashing everyone full before saying, “To Gwen! The future of the futures of art history!” and swallowing half his new glass in one gulp.
Next, Rocky insisted on toasting Bethany and himself, both separately and together, and then after that, in rapid succession, roommates, students, and colleagues. When he arrived at the department chair, Bethany cut him off, laughing. “Must we?”
“Then it’s zakuski time at last! Up, up, everyone to the table.”
The dining room table was a massive oak slab set with woven place mats, flanked with rough wooden benches and high-backed chairs upholstered in shockingly bright floral silk. Rocky disappeared into the kitchen and came out with armloads of the tiny plates, which he carried and placed on the table with a waiter’s practiced ease. Next came towel-lined baskets that turned out to contain warm, soft buckwheat pancakes the size of my palm—Rocky called them blini—and dishes of sour cream and chives. The last thing he brought out was the bottle of chilled champagne with four flutes.
“We’ve already used up all our subjects for toasts, so I suggest you merely drink this as quickly as you can,” he said. “Everyone dig in.”
The zakuski were messy but delicious, the pickles dripping brine all over the place mats, the cold yellow potatoes weeping oil. I’d never tried caviar before, had even scraped the orange blobs of salmon roe off of supermarket sushi, but that was clearly not an option tonight. At Rocky’s suggestion, I covered a warm pancake with melting sour cream and dropped a dollop of the black caviar on top. It looked so much like a pile of tiny seed beads that I half expected them to scatter and roll off my plate onto the floor.
“More, much more,” Rocky urged—he sat at my left at the foot of the table, Bethany at the head, Gwen directly across from me—and I complied. When I bit into my caviar-heaped pancake and felt the cool, briny beads burst on my tongue, tears came to my eyes. “Now the champagne,” he said. I took a swig while some of the caviar was still in my mouth and felt its dry sweetness meet and mingle with the swirls of saline. After that I ate countless blini heaped with caviar, neglecting the dishes of red and gold roe in favor of the expensive black beluga. Rocky seemed pleased.
Everyone else seemed pleased, too, both with themselves and, for the moment, with each other. Having passed over a bump early in the evening, it was as if we were all silently turning to each other again and again, congratulating one another on having jointly spun this warm buzzy cocoon of food and wine and laughter. Bethany acted amused by Rocky’s antics and affectionate toward Gwen and me; Gwen, I thought, had seldom looked happier.
“We are almost ready for the main dish!” Rocky said. “Who is hungry?”
I was amazed to find that I was, but Gwen demurred.
“That is because we have had no vodka.”
“Pyotr Semyonovich,” Bethany said. “Absolutely not.”
“Vodka makes room in the stomach,” Rocky explained as Gwen pursed her lips.
“That’s Ukrainian nonsense with no basis in fact.” Bethany turned to Gwen earnestly. “They also think you get a cold from being out in the rain.”
“Nevertheless, it is true!” Rocky protested.
“I’ll try it.” I held up my empty glass.
“Good girl! This is a very sensible student of yours, Bethany. I can see why you like her.” He went into the kitchen again, shouting over his shoulder, “One shot! You will see how much more hungry you are after one shot. Or, if not one, then two.”
* * *
Half an hour later, Gwen, Rocky, and I were all roaring drunk.
Bethany, perhaps accustomed to this turn of events, had accepted her shot, but when we all tipped ours back, sending the fire straight down our throats, she only sipped off the top of hers and set it back on the table. Every time Rocky sang another song, yelled another saying in Ukrainian, and insisted we take another shot, she nursed her vodka, watching us wryly.
It really did make me feel hungrier. I put down a few more blini between shots, and when Rocky brought a platter of beef tenderloin and roasted vegetables from the kitchen, I attacked it with a fresh appetite. Rocky tipped cabernet into our forgotten wineglasses, and for a moment there was a lull in the laughter and talking as, remembering ourselves before this more serious course, we set about cutting up the beef and eating it in the politest way our drunken hands could manage. I sipped cautiously at the red, aware that the table was already slanting, and was relieved when its dusty warmth seemed to steady me.
In the temporary calm, through which the genteel dinner party music was audible for the first time in over an hour, I looked up from my plate at the three faces around me and was seized with a feeling that was both new and old. It came on me as suddenly as a stomach cramp: Bethany and Rocky, Gwen and me.
&nbs
p; We were not a family. Gwen was not my sister. Rocky and Bethany were not our parents. Nevertheless, sitting around the table, I felt for the first time how professors could be like family, how they could, in fact, make Gwen and me into something closer to sisters than we could ever be on our own. They taught us. They mentored us. They fed us, mind and body; they protected us from catastrophe; they prepared us for the world ahead. When we were burdened with impossible tasks and surrounded with words as impenetrable as swarms of bees, they made the Program survivable. We loved them, in a way. We couldn’t help it. They were all we had.
I felt tears rising and then, with a hiccup, the mellow beef. I caught myself in time. Excusing myself, I rose from my bench and walked crookedly down the hall to the bathroom. Once inside, the rose wallpaper and brighter lights woke me up a little. I flicked cold water on my face with my fingers and patted my flushed neck with a wet hand. The sentimental nausea dwindled. I looked at the mirror, trying to convince myself that I was marginally sober, and rejoiced to find that if I concentrated I could stop my reflection from tilting.
I went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet, then washed my hands, dried them, and went out into the hall. I felt steadier on my way back to the table, stable enough to look up rather than at my feet.
Which is how, just before crossing the threshold, I came to meet Bethany’s eyes at a distance of some twenty feet. She was standing just inside the door to the kitchen opposite me and, like me, she had halted just before stepping into the dining room. Her eyes were perfectly steady and calm, but wide, in their doll-like, eloquent way. Without moving her head, she lowered her eyes slightly toward the table and raised them back to mine, challenging me to look.
I followed her gaze downward and saw that Rocky had Gwen’s hand between his on the table and was massaging it, saying something very soft and low. From where I stood, I could see Gwen’s face. She stared into his eyes with a vodka-addled expression that knocked the breath out of my lungs.