He was telling the truth, of course, despite his overdramatic tones. She wondered if, perhaps, he had, earlier, wanted to try to make love to her, in the proper way, but was worried that he couldn’t carry through till the end. This, she thought firmly, must be what had happened. She said nothing. “I don’t know how long this will last.” He dropped his tone of mock gaiety. “It’s been three years since the egg and I split up. That’s a long time. It could be forever. But as long as you want to come round here, I’m happy to have you. Though obviously I’m never going to be some sort of boyfriend in the way you’re used to. I’m never going to be Tuck.” Again, she tried to protest, to explain that she didn’t even know Tuck. “I’ve tried that route and it didn’t work. I’m not cut out for that sort of thing, the everyday stuff, the oh-you-look-pretty-today and how-was-work-honey. I just can’t do it. And I don’t go to dinner parties or gallery openings or lectures by visiting professors or any sort of poetry reading or family gathering. I travel frequently for stories and absolutely refuse to call home during my trips. In other words, I simply don’t do obligations anymore. I’m done. And that’s never, ever going to change.” She stared at him, jaw dangling. Was he for real? This speech seemed like something cribbed from a movie. Or, actually, a Martin Amis novel. “Though the other thing, well, it could get better.” She nodded. “Okay,” he said, more a question than a statement.
“Okay,” she whispered, smiling. “I’m going to go to the bathroom.” He pointed her to a robe of smooth blue flannel, hanging inside his small closet. Tripping on its long hem, she walked, again, through the sitting room to the tiny bathroom.
In the mirror, she looked closely at her brown eyes. She was, she thought, glad she’d stayed—glad Will had dropped his posturing and summoned her back (with, of course, another bit of posturing, but still)—but felt herself succumbing to vague unease, the causes of which eluded her. If she was honest with herself, she knew what he meant about Scarsdale. He thought, deep down, she wanted to get married—like Lil—to have children and move uptown or, of course, back to Scarsdale. Nothing, she thought gleefully, could be further from the truth. She was in New York, after four years in Milwaukee, all she wanted was to have fun, to do the things her friends had been doing for four years: to date mysterious men, to eat ethnic food in obscure restaurants and drink old-fashioned cocktails in hotel bars, to see foreign films in downtown theaters, to walk down the street anonymously. He was entirely wrong about her, imagining her to be a closeted bourgeois. Well, she would show him, she thought, narrowing her eyes at the mirror, in imitation of a film vamp. There was no way—no way—she would fall in love with him—how could she? His being a perverted know-it-all—but she would return here, to his apartment, until she grew tired of him. While seeing other people, of course. And, of course, he was full of shit, anyway, about not wanting or being able to do everyday things. He had extraordinarily expensive sheets—pale green sateen—for someone who wasn’t “good with things.” Perhaps, she thought with a shiver as she slipped out of his robe and lay down beside him, they’d been a wedding gift.
three
Four days after her encounter with Will Chase—for this was how she had started to think of it, as an encounter, rather like happening upon a bear in the woods—Beth arrived at a point of panic. Despite his countercultural pose—his alleged objection to monogamy—she’d expected him to give her a call. But he had not, and now, the following Sunday, she was headed back to the very same restaurant at which she’d dined with him to have breakfast with Emily, whose apartment was, indeed, around the corner, on North Eighth Street, just as Beth had thought.
On Thursday, when they’d made their plans, Beth had declined to mention that she’d been there already, even as Emily laboriously gave Beth directions, shouting into her cell phone from some busy corner (“You’re near the G, right? You can take the G to the L”). Her brain was already leaping ahead, wondering if she should call Will and tell him that she would be in his neighborhood and could, if he liked, stop by after breakfast. Sam, of course, would be with him, but did that really matter? Beth loved children—though she had very little experience of them—and she had already formed a picture of Sam as a tiny version of Wilclass="underline" large black eyes, a precociously inquisitive manner, blond wavy hair like Little Lord Fauntleroy. It was strange, she thought, that he’d not offered to show her a photo of the boy. Strange, too, that he’d told her very little, really, about himself, even as she blathered on and on. As the days passed—and the phone, just like in some stupid movie, refused to ring—she grew increasingly curious and speculative. Lil, she knew, would have all the information, being an expert extractor of personal histories, but she couldn’t bear the nerve-racking scrutiny that would accompany Lil’s involvement. She knew exactly what Lil would say: that Will pursued Beth rather than Sadie (though, Beth supposed, he might have pursued both) because Beth was more approachable. Lil had a way of saying things—a certain false gentleness to her voice, an overenthusiastic insistence that no, those pants do not make you look fat—that made her true, more unpleasant meaning utterly plain.
But what she dreaded more was Lil speaking to Will about her, feeding into whatever ideas he had about her as a predictable little bourgeois. “Has she taken you out to her house yet? Oh my God, you have to get her to take you out! It’s huge. Her mother literally could not clean it herself.” Lil being Lil, she didn’t want to know that Beth’s grandfather built the place in the 1920s, when Scarsdale was still a sleepy village and land there not necessarily expensive, and that the structure had started off much smaller, with space for the first Dr. Bernstein’s office added during the Depression. But Lil preferred to perpetuate this fiction of the Bernsteins as part of some sort of Scarsdalian elite, in possession of infinite sums of cash, when, in fact, her family was certainly not among the wealthiest inhabitants of the town. Her mother drove a Volvo, her father a Toyota. They didn’t belong to a country club, nor did they, by rote, spend Christmas on one of the various islands named after saints. But Lil—like Will—seemed transfixed by this weird popular mythology that had lately sprung up around Scarsdale, believing it to be a Jewish version of Cheever country, populated by polo-shirted, bob-nosed, golf-playing all-Americans. In fact, the opposite was true: in Beth’s lifetime, the town had become a haven for the tackily affluent. Women whose wrists sagged under the weight of eighty-carat tennis bracelets. Men who squeezed their bulk behind the wheels of tiny German cars. And their cruel, vapid children, trained to seek out weakness in their peers. Beth had sought refuge from them as soon as she could, along with the other hippies, Goths, math geeks, violin prodigies, and so on, in the town’s “A school,” where her mother taught. But even this odd institution—with its freaky, depressed student body—struck Lil as vaguely glamorous, peopled with misunderstood millionaires.
Emily, she knew, would regard the Will situation somewhat more sympathetically. She had done some curious things, sexually speaking, though Beth only had a vague sense of what these things were, as Emily tended to keep the specifics to herself, speaking in goofy euphemisms and referring to her boyfriends in code—“Method Actor,” “Big Law”—to prohibit the group from taking seriously her involvement with them. In college she’d hung around with a group of attractive dilettantes, a subset of the theater crowd, who favored self-consciously risqué gear—velvet hot pants, fishnet stockings, dog collars—and devoted much time to the organization and execution of “sex parties” or “orgy nights,” in their off-campus Victorians, which they painted purple or black and named “Whore House” or “House of the Little Death.” Their academic activities tended to consist of large-scale productions of Grand Guignol plays or public performance art projects involving nudity, like that of Sebastian Beckmann, who’d shaved off all his body hair and spent three days in a glass box in the middle of Tappan Square; or Seth Morris, who’d made a plaster cast of his penis, from which he manufactured a hundred bronze members, and “planted” them in the garden outside the Conservatory; or Emily herself, who, famously, baked a coffin made of bread (using ovens and flour at the group’s co-op, Tank), then ate her way out of it.