But this group, our group, wanted nothing to do with money, the whiff of which had, they thought, spoiled their brash bourgeois parents and aunts and uncles, all of whom were, inevitably, doctors or lawyers or businessmen or sometimes teachers, and none of whom had read Sentimental Education or could identify the term “deconstruction” or made regular visits to the theater, except, perhaps, to see musicals or Neil Simon comedies. They—the adults—were too corrupted, too swayed and jaded by the difficulties and practicalities of adulthood, by the banal labyrinths of health insurance and Roth IRAs, by the relative safety of Volvo versus Saab versus Subaru, or flat Scottish cashmere versus the newer, softer, fluffier—but possibly less durable—stuff, imported from Nepal, that Neiman’s is carrying lately. Their children were interested in art, though they wouldn’t have ever put it like that. They had read Sentimental Education—Dave in the original French—and directed Ionesco and Genet plays. They went to the Whitney Biennial and visited the new galleries in Chelsea and Williamsburg and twice attended the Lucian Freud retrospective at the Met, but scorned anything to do with Picasso or Seurat or Monet or—my God—the Pre-Raphaelites. They kept up with not just The New Yorker but Harper’s and The Atlantic and even, for spurts of time, The New York Review of Books, and lately, Lingua Franca and Salon and various little magazines, though they agreed that the heyday of such ventures had passed decades earlier (what they wouldn’t have given to be transported back to those early days of The Partisan Review, arguing Trotsky with Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy). They joked about Derrida and Lacan and Heidegger and Hume and Spinoza and New Criticism, and went to Shakespeare in the Park, and to see the RSC at BAM, and to movement-oriented stage adaptations of Anna Karenina at La Mama, and to Goddard, Fellini, Pasolini, Lubitsch, Bergman, and, of course, Woody Allen festivals at Film Forum.
Or, at least, they had done so—read their classics, favored black-and-whites in repertory—for four long years. Now, at twenty-six, as they struggled to make rent on their grimy apartments, as they bathed in chipped bathtubs, which in Emily’s case—poor Emily being the most impoverished of the group—also served as a kitchen sink, they were starting to feel a little tired, a little sick of the nights in cafés typing on their laptops, the endless drinks dates because who could afford to eat dinner out. Lately, they were starting to look upon their parents’ houses, the green of their lawns, the comfortable lives of their youth, with a bit more kindness.
And then—entirely without warning—Lil announced that she was getting married, married to a man she’d met in her doctoral program, a man none of them knew well, if at all, though they’d glimpsed him at parties over the past year, Lil’s first at Columbia. He was older, at least thirty, and had an aura of glamour about him, which the girls attributed as much to his large, masculine features as to his polite, disaffected air. There was, Sadie remarked, a bit too much James Dean about him. He’d studied poetry, like Lil, before dropping out to take a job at a new magazine, supposedly a cross between Spy and The New Yorker, but focused on business, or technology, or both. Lil spoke as if this was a great opportunity for him, but her friends weren’t convinced.
As was the practice of those of their class and generation, she’d introduced him, at first, as her “friend,” and they’d pretended for some months that there was nothing more to the story. So well did this pretense work that they’d barely adjusted to the idea that Tuck was her “boyfriend” when he became her “fiancé”—though thankfully she refrained from using that term. It was impossible for them to imagine Lil married, in part because it was impossible to imagine any of them married. They knew no married people of their own age. And so, when Lil called her friends, one by one, and told them, in the hushed tones required by her summer job—an internship at a poetry organization, where she was largely responsible for answering the phones—that not only was she getting married but also that she would have an actual wedding, with a white dress and a rabbi and maybe even a veil and a bouquet (though definitely no bridesmaids in matching dresses, that much she could promise), she waited, tensely, for the jibes, the disapproval. But they were so shocked, her friends, that none—not even Dave, not even Beth—could think of anything to say, other than “Wow!” and “Lil, that’s great!” and “I can’t wait to meet him, really meet him.”
Two weeks later, the couple got in Lil’s beat-up Accord and drove down to visit Tuck’s family in Atlanta, where his mother—hair elaborately dyed and streaked an unnatural auburn, nails manicured to a high sheen—outfitted Lil with an alarmingly large diamond, tucked inside an elaborate Victorian setting, for which she apologized. “Those old settings don’t show off the stone at all,” she said, her lipsticked mouth pulling down at the corners. “But it’s at least three carats.” The ring had belonged to Tuck’s grandmother, his mother’s mother, and possibly her mother before that, no one knew for sure. It was exactly Lil’s size and precisely her style, the girls told Lil, though in fact the ring instilled in them an odd mix of anxiety and admiration, aesthetic interest and adolescent annoyance. It was so large, so “important” looking (in the words of Rose Peregrine, who agreed that she should have the stone reset), so unequivocally grown-up. Were it not a family heirloom, according to Emily, it would be horribly uncool.
Beth, meanwhile, felt that it quite possibly defied the feminist principles they’d mastered—or, she’d thought, internalized—in college. The ring claimed Lil as somebody’s chattel, some man’s prize. “You’re wearing an engagement ring?” Beth whispered into the phone one hot night in August, incredulous. She was still in Milwaukee, working on her doctorate. In September, once she’d finished teaching summer session—two sections of Feminist Approaches to Twentieth Century Advertising—she’d move to New York to teach at the New School and write the second half of her dissertation, which she couldn’t do without a semester or two of research at the Museum of Television and Radio, a need that neatly coincided with her absolute desperation for her friends and her mounting disgust with freezing, boring Milwaukee. That is, if she could get everything straightened out with her teaching credits. She’d been sure she had enough, but in June—after she’d accepted the job at the New School—she’d received a note saying no, she was one credit shy. Maddening. And embarrassing. She said nothing of all this to Lil. “A real engagement ring?” she asked, peevishly, instead. “Like, a diamond?”
“Yeah,” said Lil, sighing. “His mom gave it to us. It means a lot to her that I wear it, so I feel like I have to.”
“Oh,” said Beth. “I guess I didn’t think you were the sort of person who would wear an engagement ring. But it makes sense, I guess.” Lil, she thought, was moving in this new and strange direction, becoming someone other than the girl she’d roomed with in college, the girl who’d earnestly churned out papers critiquing the phallocentric focus of Harold Bloom’s critical work on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. “But you don’t feel weird, wearing this big rock on your hand? It doesn’t make you feel like your mom or something? Or like one of those girls we went to high school with? It doesn’t make you feel”—she paused here, unsure of what she meant—“like you’re someone you’re not?”