Oh God, she’d thought, putting down her knife. Before her lay the remains of a red pepper, its delicate seeds clinging to the counter. This is bad. And an impulse came over her: to take off her white chef’s apron and walk out the door, to go to Emily’s or, really, Sadie’s. Sadie could make sense of all this. But Sadie was always with Tal now. Lil had barely seen her since the wedding. And she didn’t want to talk to Tal, nor did she want to talk to Tal and Sadie together, a smugly happy couple, offering advice to their troubled friend. How could they understand anyway? In choosing each other they’d taken the easy route, the path of common understanding. There would be no arguments of this sort between them. They knew each other completely.
Just then, the phone emitted its shrill digital chirp, a sound Lil hated, and she rushed back to the study—they didn’t yet have a phone in the kitchen—certain that Sadie was on the other end, that she’d summoned her with her thoughts. By the time she’d arrived at her desk, the ringing had stopped. Tuck must have picked it up in the bedroom. She heard faint murmuring through the closed door, then Tuck’s boisterous laugh. “Hey, honey,” he called. “Lillian? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” she said, in a small, choked voice. She wasn’t prepared to face him. Tuck opened the bedroom door with one long arm and smiled at her, the portable phone cradled under his left ear.
“Hello,” he said, softly, with a crooked smile. “It’s Rob. He’s wondering if we want to come over and have a drink with him and Caitlin.”
“I don’t know,” said Lil, the words sounding wobbly and wrong to her. “I don’t really feel like going out right now. And I’ve already made dinner.”
“No, later. After dinner. Maybe at nine or nine thirty. Caitlin’s not even home yet.”
“They don’t want to come here?” Lil desperately did not want to go out, did not want to walk through the cold wind on Metropolitan all the way to the Green-Golds’ dingy flat. But she knew she should agree. This was Tuck’s way of apologizing. “We still have all that leftover wine from the wedding.”
“No, they want us to come there. Caitlin’s really tired. Today’s her heavy day: three classes. And Rob’s baked a pie.”
“Okay,” whispered Lil, forcing herself to smile. Rob’s pies were disgusting. “That sounds great. I’m going to go check on the pasta.”
“Okay, I’ll have a quick shower.” He turned back to the phone. “You still there, Robby?” Lil shut the door and went back to the kitchen.
Lil always forgot about Rob and Caitlin in cataloging her friends, as they didn’t fit neatly into any particular category, and yet she and Tuck generally regarded the fact of the couple’s existence as a happy accident, a sign that the Roth-Hayes were meant—if not fated—to be together. Rob Gold was a childhood friend of Tuck’s, who’d dropped out of Bard to trek through Asia, then resurfaced a few years later in Portland, Oregon, living in a squat and heading up some sort of anarchist group. It was he who had tipped Tuck off to the story that had gotten him in so much trouble.
Lil, meanwhile, knew Caitlin Green from Oberlin. Like Lil and Sadie and Beth, Caitlin had studied English—the four of them, in fact, were the only women selected for the Honors seminar their senior year. Her parents taught biology at Haverford or Swarthmore, someplace Quaker, and her early and prolonged exposure to academe had lent her a too-warm sense of her own intellectual superiority and sophistication, which, in turn, led her to regard her fellow students with unconcealed disdain. She adopted a world-weary pose in all her classes, even the Honors seminar, resting her round cheek on one black-nailed fist, sighing whenever someone asked a question she found particularly elementary, and periodically trying to catch the professor’s eye, so the two might commiserate over these sad products of the American education system, who didn’t fully grasp Bataille’s concept of sovereignty. Her field of specialty was “queer theory” and she habitually accused professors and peers alike of “unconscious gender bias” and such, when not organizing rallies for the LGB union and “students of color,” though she herself was neither gay nor visibly ethnic. If questioned, she said that she was bisexual and that Jews were “the original persons of color.”
In college, Lil had hated Caitlin, particularly after she launched a campaign against George Wadsworth, Lil’s and Sadie’s advisor, whom she considered dangerously misogynistic (“Why,” she shouted, on Tappan Square, “are there only four women in Honors English?”), but she seemed to have changed, matured, in the ensuing years, during which she’d met and married Rob, who was slight, and odd, and serious. His latest project was a nonprofit aimed at curbing the prison industry, which Lil had not really seen as “burgeoning” and “sinister” until Rob explained it all to her—that prisons were now run by private companies, which had, of course, a profit motive for getting as many people as possible behind bars. A week after their wedding, she and Tuck had run into the couple on Bedford and discovered the coincidence of their mutual acquaintance. Caitlin had lost weight. She was now gaunt (but still, Lil noted, wide-hipped) and her eyes were smeary with dark circles, which lent her face a hollow, exhausted look that, Lil decided, was strangely sexy, as though Caitlin had traveled many places and done many things.
“Will you guys be okay?” Beth asked as they finished their coffee. They were both restless and reluctant to step out into the cold. “Did he get severance?”
“He did,” said Lil. “But it’s getting hard. We just have to find ways to cut back.”
“I’m sure Caitlin Green can help with that,” said Sadie. The Green-Golds lived like monks, making do with almost nothing, in a dingy railroad apartment they’d cordoned off into small, nooklike rooms, subsisting on various grains and nuts and legumes, and riding their bikes around the city rather than taking the train or a taxi.
Lil rolled her eyes. “I know. We went over there the night Tuck was fired.”
Her friends let out a chorus of groans.
“I was a wreck. And I was stupidly honest with her.” She paused, unsure if she should speak honestly again. “I told her our apartment was too expensive and that this was going to push us over the edge.”
“What did she say?” asked Sadie. “That you should become vegan?”
“Yes!” marveled Lil. Sadie shrugged. “She’s just too much. She was like”—Lil adopted Caitlin’s ripe vowels—“‘It’s unbelievable how much you can drop on cow pus alone.’”
“Cow pus?” queried Beth, her mouth bunched in revulsion.
“Milk,” Emily told her.
“And I told her I love milk. I just can’t imagine giving it up. And she said, ‘Dairy cows are raped, like, twelve times a day.’”
“Even the organic ones?” asked Beth skeptically.
“That’s exactly what I said,” cried Lil, turning her palms upward. “She says even the organic ones.” Lil sighed. “They only spend forty dollars a week on food.”
“Well, that’s not hard when all you eat is beans and rice,” said Emily.
“True,” said Sadie, with a roll of her eyes. But Lil felt there was something admirable about such frugality, though in Rob and Caitlin’s case, it seemed slightly histrionic, because Rob was rich. Truly rich. His father owned half of Atlanta and all of Richmond. Their apartment was studded with heavy bureaus and thick rugs and oils of long-nosed ancestors filched from his great-grandfather’s Rhinebeck “cottage.” It was all a game to them. They could live on nothing but get married on Baldhead Island. They could eat beans but buy Hindu Kush.