“What play is it?” she asked.
“It’s actually amazing. I shouldn’t complain. I think it’s going to be big—or something’s going to happen with it. It’s, you know, an ensemble thing about people, friends, in the East Village. Sort of satirical. The writing is just amazing.”
“That sounds great,” said Beth, truthfully.
Emily waved her hand, as if to dismiss her previous enthusiasm. “It’s okay.” She did, indeed, look very, very tired, the thin flesh under her bluish eyes—really a strange, unearthly shade of aqua—tinged gray with lack of sleep, worry lines tracing a faint script across her forehead. “Anyway,” she said breathlessly. “How’s the place? Do you hate Queens? Did you have any trouble getting here?”
Beth opened her mouth, then closed it. “Actually, I was here the other night,” she confessed, with a twisted smile. “For dinner.” Emily frowned, as though she couldn’t believe Beth could find her way to the neighborhood without explicit directions from Emily herself.
“You were in Williamsburg?”
Beth nodded, folding her mouth down into an ashamed grimace.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I was on a ‘date,’” she said, smiling, for some reason, with embarrassment. She and her friends didn’t go out on dates. “With that guy from the wedding.”
Emily widened her eyes. “Beth, holy shit. That really hot guy? The blond guy? What’s his name? I didn’t talk to him at all.”
“Will,” said Beth. “Will Chase. You think he’s, um, hot?” She heard herself pronouncing this word with quotes around it.
“That was Will Chase,” cried Emily, pulling the lollipop out of her mouth with a childish pop. “Wow. Wow. That’s not how I pictured him.”
“You’ve heard about him?” asked Beth, her heart thunking. This was not the reaction she’d expected. But then, of course Emily had heard about Will. He was a close friend of Lil and Tuck’s.
“I think Lil was kind of into him before she met Tuck,” Emily was saying.
“What?” Beth’s heart now seemed to have dislodged itself from its surrounding tissue and begun jumping, freely, around the inside of her rib cage. “Really?”
Emily nodded. “She makes him out to be kind of a romantic figure.”
“How so?” asked Beth.
“Well, I’m sure you know.”
Beth shook her head. “I don’t know that much about him.”
And so Emily explained: He’d been a journalist in London, it seemed, before coming to the States to do his Ph.D. He was, Emily thought, a bit of a hotshot at some British paper or other, writing unusually harsh and learned book reviews or, possibly, interviewing terrorists. “Something like that,” Emily said. “I think maybe he was trying to write—or wrote?—a novel or something. There was some trouble—maybe no one wanted to publish it? Or maybe someone did and it got really bad reviews?” The difference between these two scenarios was so huge, Beth couldn’t believe that Emily didn’t recall which it was. It had to be the former. If Will had published a novel, surely he’d have mentioned it. “And he went to Stanford,” Emily was saying, “on a Fulbright, I think, to do comp lit. Maybe not a Fulbright. Some big-deal fellowship—”
“He was at Stanford!” Beth cried. Her brother was a senior at this exact school. “Recently? When Jason was there? Not that they’d have met.” She busied herself with unpeeling her lollipop, in an attempt to slow the thoughts dashing around inside her head. Stanford. She’d been at Stanford—on the actual campus, in the main library—four or five times in the last few years. She could have walked right by him. “Who did he study with there? I know a few people in English—”
“I don’t know,” interrupted Emily, who was wearied, Beth knew, by her friends’ infatuation with academia. Emily’s mother was a professor, and there was nothing terribly exciting about it, she often reminded Beth and Lil. Lots of committee meetings. “But I guess he hated Stanford. You know. He’s from London.” Beth thought it would be inelegant to correct her. He was, of course, from Oxford. She knew this much, at least. “And it’s Palo Alto. Everyone is, like, blond and jogging and they think he’s insane for smoking or whatever.” Beth nodded. On her visits she always wound up feeling pale and enervated in comparison to those around her, including her hale, athletic brother. “Anyway, he starts hanging at this particular bar.”
A pretty waitress, her bare arms tattooed with small Hebrew script, handed them chipped mugs of coffee and set a pitcher of cream on the asphalt in front of Beth. “Here you go,” she said. “It should just be a few minutes.”
Emily peered sadly into the creamer. “I bet this isn’t skim milk,” she said.
“No,” confirmed Beth. “It’s half-and-half.” She sloshed some into her coffee and passed the pitcher to Emily, who made a face and set it back down on the ground so quickly it nearly toppled. “So,” said Beth.
Emily swallowed some coffee and sighed. “So,” she said. “He gets to know this cute bartender, who you know has her eye on him. Here’s this guy, he looks like a fucking J. Crew model—”
“He doesn’t,” Beth protested weakly.
“He does,” said Emily, in a tone that made it clear this wasn’t necessarily a positive attribute. “So they become, like, friends and he tells her that he’s always dreamed of living in New York—like every other person in the world—and that he has this idea that maybe he’ll apply to transfer to Columbia.”
“But if he was here on a Fulbright,” Beth prodded, “then how could he? It doesn’t work that way. You have a host institution—”
Just then, the waitress poked her head out. “Emily?” she called. “We’re ready for you.” The girls picked up their cups and followed her—Beth shaky with anticipation and utterly without appetite—inside to a small table by the front window.
“So what happened,” asked Beth as soon as they were alone again, her heart threatening to jump out of her mouth. What had happened? What could possibly have happened?
“Well,” said Emily. “The bartender was like, ‘Let’s go.’”
“Let’s go where?” asked Beth.
“To New York.”
“Wait,” said Beth, slowly. “She said, ‘Let’s go to New York,’ meaning ‘Let’s go to New York together.’”
“Yup,” said Emily.
“But they barely knew each other.”
“I know.”
“I don’t get it,” said Beth. “What happened?”
“He married her. And dropped out of Stanford.”
Beth stared at Emily in amazement. Nobody would do that. Nobody would drop out of one of the top Ph.D. programs in the country—so what if it was in some dull California suburb? So what if you didn’t love it?—to move to New York with someone he barely knew.
“You’re kidding,” she said finally. “He dropped out of Stanford.”
Before Emily could answer, a series of short bleeps issued forth from the brown corduroy coat Beth remembered from college; they’d purchased it, together, at Mini-Mart, marveling over its full fur collar. “That’s Sadie,” she said, fumbling for the source of the noise. “Shit,” she muttered, “where the fu—oh,” and drew, finally, a shiny, oblong wand from her right-hand pocket, its keypad glowing blue. “Sades,” she said. “We’re at Oznot’s.” Uncomfortably, Beth looked around, certain Emily was breaking some unwritten code of deportment, but no, no one was paying them any attention at all. Two tables down, in fact, a couple sat, facing each other, talking away into their own separate phones. “Okay, cool. We’ll see you then. Cool deal.” She held the thing up to Beth. “Sadie’s coming,” she said.