They had all promised Lil that they would stay until midnight when a band—that is, the band, the band that had crashed Lil’s wedding—would play. “They opened for Beulah last night,” Lil confided, “at Bowery Ballroom.”
“Yeah,” Dave confirmed. “They’re getting a lot of play on college radio.”
“Do you like them?” asked Lil, in such a way that there was only one appropriate answer.
“They’re okay,” he conceded. “They’re very tight. I’m just not loving that produced eighties sort of sound.” He shrugged. “But everyone’s doing it. It’s cool.”
Soon after, Lil began to worry that she wouldn’t be able to make it to midnight, much less beyond. She installed herself on the couch with a glass of wine and one of Kapklein’s colleagues, an extraordinarily tall young man with dun-colored hair, a mildly self-satisfied expression, and the skittish air of a greyhound. His name was Tom Satville and he was quick to tell Lil that he himself was not just an agent, but a writer, too.
“Iowa,” he explained. “Fiction. I’m finishing up a novel.”
“Wow,” said Lil. “How do you have time?”
He took off his glasses, revealing small, round brown eyes, with deep maroon smudges under them. “I don’t sleep much.”
“Oh.” Lil nodded. “I wish I could do that. I’d get so much more done. Tuck is like you. He can stay up all night working.” In fact, though he often stayed up all night, she wasn’t sure he was actually working. The television often seemed to be on.
Tom Satville smiled in a way that made her slightly uncomfortable. “Yeah, well, you kind of have to be like that these days. The workday is getting longer and longer. We’re just a small agency and nobody leaves before seven. Nobody takes lunch…” This was clearly a favorite subject of his.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s partly what Tuck’s book is about—”
“That’s what my novel is about, too. It’s set in an office, an ad agency—”
“At Boom Time, it was, like, the staffers lived there. Tuck kind of loved it, though.”
“But you didn’t?” he asked in a husky voice, draping his arm across the back of the couch on which they sat. She pulled her skirt down over her knees.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I liked that he loved what he was doing. He was so excited about it.” She remembered those evenings, the previous summer, when he’d call her as he left his office, the sun just setting, the air cooling, and say, “Meet me for dinner.” She’d shower quickly and pull on a sundress, run the ten blocks to Oznot’s, where they’d sit in the garden and drink Lillet—this was why she’d served it at the wedding, because of those happy nights—and eat thin slices of lamb. Each day there’d been a new story, a new triumph, just as when they’d first met, the previous fall, and spent hours at Aggie’s, drinking bourbon and reciting lines of Wright and Lowell and Berryman. That all seemed so long ago, and she and Tuck so young. “I guess I missed him,” she told Tom Satville. “We’d, you know, been in school together. So I’d seen him all day, every day.”
“And you’re still in school?”
“Mmm-hmmm.” Across the room, Tuck’s friend Gary appeared to be shoving bananas down his pants. “The sad thing is, I’m one of those people who became an English major because I wanted to sit around and read novels. Whereas Tuck loves the hard stuff. He actually gets deconstruction and all that. It was all so easy for him.”
“Was he bored?” asked Tom Satville, his hand sliding lower, to her shoulder. She’d thought, somehow, that men didn’t hit on married women.
“Maybe,” said Lil.
“People like to be challenged,” he told her. “Especially intelligent people.”
“True.” This explanation pleased her, as it would allow her to give up her suspicion that Tuck was, simply, a failure, a person who lacked the drive and discipline to finish his degree, who had opted out at the first opportunity. Stop, stop, she told herself. Why would she be thinking this now on the night of his triumph? What was wrong with her? “I think also some people just can’t deal with the hypocrisies of academia. It’s like, they love books so much that dissecting them grows kind of tiresome. Like my friend Sadie.” She pointed across the room, where her friend, in a belted dress of dull gray silk, stood talking to Ed Slikowski, their dark heads bobbing toward each other. “Have you met her?”
He placed his glasses back on his face and peered toward the kitchen—not the direction she’d pointed—scrutinizing the throng of women attempting to uncork a bottle of champagne. “No, I don’t think so.”
“She’s Tuck’s editor,” said Lil. “Sadie Peregrine.”
“Oh, right! Yes. Sadie Peregrine. I’ve never met her, I don’t think—”
“She was the star of our department—”
“So you know her from—”
“Oberlin.” Lil tried to catch Sadie’s eye, but she was nodding enthusiastically at Ed Slikowski. “Everyone thought she would go to grad school. Her thesis won the big award. Her advisor wanted her to send it to The Atlantic.”
“What did she write on?” Lil hadn’t thought about this in ages. It was so embarrassing, how stupid she’d been, how unsophisticated. She had not been the star, but she could have been, she was sure of it, if she’d had parents like Sadie’s, if she’d gone to Dalton. Her own children—if and when she had them—would be raised in New York, without television; they would go to St. Ann’s, like Dave, where they could take yoga instead of gym.
“Dawn Powell. The Ohio novels.”
“Oh, brilliant,” said Tom Satville, dipping his head in delight. He had, Lil thought, a faint British accent. “Most undergrads write on Plath or Dickens.”
“I know,” cried Lil, declining to mention that she’d written on Plath, though obscure Plath—the early landscape poems, really quite Audenesque, not “Daddy” and all that.
“Which one is Sadie, again?” the agent asked brightly. “I can’t believe we haven’t met. She’s Delores Rosenzweig’s assistant, right?”
“Sadie, come here,” Lil called loudly, by way of an answer. “We’re talking about you. Sadie.” With visible reluctance, Sadie pulled herself away from Ed Slikowksi, who held in his hands, Lil saw now, a bowl of the spiced nuts Sadie loved. “Sadie, this is Tom Satville. He works with Kapklein.”
“Oh, hello,” said Sadie, with a nod of her neat head. She knew Lil wanted her to say something brisk and professional, like, “Sadie Peregrine. I’m Tuck’s editor.” That was, of course, why Lil had called her over here, to instigate a frenzied professional discussion of the sort Lil disproportionately loved. Under normal circumstances, Sadie had no aversion to shop talk, but she was not in the mood for it tonight. This whole party—the huge deal Lil was making about Tuck’s contract, before he’d even signed the thing—made her nervous, for it only underscored the extent to which Tuck’s fate—and, by extension, Lil’s fate—lay in Sadie’s hands, a power she wasn’t quite sure she wanted, in part because, as of now, she didn’t have very much power, still being a serf in Delores Rosenzweig’s increasingly ineffectual fiefdom. An influential serf, sure, since Delores had largely checked out lately, to the extent that Sadie was essentially doing her job for her, but a serf nonetheless, with a whimsical and strange and anxious ruler, who often reneged on agreements and meted out unfair and illogical criticism or punishments.