There was promise of escape, though. The previous week, Sadie had been summoned for a talk with Val, her publisher, who had congratulated her on finding Tuck’s book—“Delores would have never even looked at that New Economy stuff”—and told her that as of July 1, she would be an associate editor (not assistant but associate, which meant a sort of double promotion) overseeing a new series of novels by writers under the age of thirty-five called “Fast-Forward Fiction,” a title clearly devised by a team of marketers who still listened to their Creedence Clearwater Revival or whatever on cassette tape. “If you can sit tight for a few more weeks, we’ll make it official,” said Val, with a tight smile. “It’s not official?” asked Sadie. Val shook her head. “It is. We just haven’t told Delores yet. So, please, not a word to anyone. We don’t want Delores to hear about it from anyone other than me.” “Of course,” Sadie told her, “I completely understand.” And she did—no one wanted to upset Delores—but she also didn’t. Why must they all be, perpetually, in Delores’s thrall? And, more important, if Delores put up a fight—as she might, for she’d certainly realized how dependent she was on Sadie—would they retract the promotion? This didn’t seem out of the question.
Sadie glanced at Lil, who looked anxious and weary, despite her constant proclamations of joy about Tuck’s book. The joy, Sadie thought, had been a bit too long coming, which was why Sadie had concocted her little plan. Though she’d failed to take into account the fact that she’d now have to work closely with Tuck, about whom she was still a bit too ambivalent. Sometimes she found him funny and charming, with a sly, satirical eye, and she wondered why she’d wasted so much energy disliking him. Just as often, though, she was disgusted by his overabundance of pride, which his dismissal from Boom Time had exacerbated rather than cured. Sadie didn’t doubt his affection for Lil, but she found something unnerving in his need to marry her immediately, and in the way, now, he made such a big show of her being his wife—his arm always draped heavily around her—never mind that he was eternally abandoning her, refusing to come with her on New Year’s Eve or, now, allowing her to be cornered by this smarmy guy, with his thin, reptilian lips and his ersatz British affectations (a tweed jacket in June?), who was now blathering to Lil about the decline of the novel, but peering at Sadie expectantly, an ironic smile twitching at his jowls. He reminded Sadie of some sort of desert mole, with his dark, tiny eyes, blinking behind microscopic, rimless spectacles, his skin nearly the same colorless brown as his hair.
“So you worked with Kappy at Random House?” he asked, turning to her.
“I did,” she said, offering him, unthinkingly, a small grin. He was, she thought, the sort of fellow who would be easy to win over and hard to dismiss. Better to get away quick. Toward the back of the loft, she spotted Tal, leaning against the kitchen counter and glumly sipping a beer. He’d been acting strangely since Thursday, when his agent had given him the good news. In fact, he hadn’t wanted to come tonight. “You go by yourself,” he’d told her. “You haven’t seen any of them in ages.” It was true. She had been spending all her time with Tal. She hated to admit it—hated to think what it might signify about herself—but she couldn’t stand to be apart from him. At work, as she drafted letters and thumbed through manuscripts and checked on contracts and answered the phone, a low buzz, a sort of vibration, enveloped her body—she imagined it as a circle of wavy lines, the sort that connote electrocution in the old Warner Bros. cartoons—rising in volume and intensity as the day progressed, so that by six o’clock, her need to see him, to feel him and smell him, was as physical and unignorable as the need to breathe or sneeze. It wasn’t sex exactly. But she wasn’t sure what it was.
“Will you excuse me for just a moment?” she said, rattling the ice cubes in her plastic cup. “I’m afraid it’s time to—”
“Her entire family talks like that,” Lil said.
“No, they don’t,” she said, giving them a small wave and turning toward the kitchen. Here it comes, she thought. And, yes, a moment later, Lil’s voice came at her.
“They’re kind of an old New York family, but in the Jewish way. Like in Laurie Colwin?”
Sadie’s family was a favorite topic with Lil, who imagined the Peregrines to be terribly special and genteel and charming, playing chess on long winter nights, arguing about subjects intellectual, engaging in quaint customs at the holidays. To some extent this was true—or sort of true—but that didn’t necessarily make them fun, and regardless, Sadie disliked having her life read back to her, transmogrified into mythology. But that was Lil, making myths out of accidents, deciding that, say, the sidecar was “our drink” or Von was “our bar” or even determining that their little circle of friends constituted a “set” (a word she appeared to have gleaned from Gatsby), when in reality they were just a bunch of people who were friends in college (though equally friends with other people, like Maya Decker and Abe Hausman) and had ended up living together, and thus grown close. But to Lil, the very groupness of their little group was as important as the individual friendships that comprised it. Sadie knew, of course, the reason for this: that Lil felt herself an alien in her own brash family and, thus, sought a sort of hysterical comfort in her friends—not to mention Sadie’s own family. And Lil’s parents, from the little Sadie had seen of them, were indeed a bit horrible, but then so were Sadie’s own. Lil just never saw that side of them, never saw the ways in which Rose could be cruel and controlling, and James silent and remote.
By raising the volume on her “excuse me’s,” and pushing aggressively on the elbow of a young man whose muttonchop sideburns curled fiendishly toward each other, Sadie managed to make it to the kitchen area, where she wove in and out of the various bodies opening and closing and drinking from bottles of wine and beer and liquor, and, at last, wrapped her arms around Tal’s narrow waist and looked up into his face. It was an odd face. The mouth too wide. The nose long, sharp, like one of Picasso’s women. The whole thing just slightly too compressed, too small for his long body. He would never be a leading man, though it wasn’t clear to her—even after all the years she’d known him, the long nights talking, the dark walks around campus, years back—if he wanted to be. His latest round of headshots, she supposed, supplied the answer: a three-quarter view, which minimized the slope of his nose, his dark eyes gazing stormily at the camera from lowered lids. “It’s your George Clooney shot,” she’d told him. “My agent picked it,” he’d said with a shrug.
“Hey,” he said to her now, flatly. Who knew how long he’d been standing here on his own, half crushed against the counter, waiting for her or Dave to come rescue him from abject boredom.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah.” He untwined her arms from him, put his bottle down on the counter, and stretched his arms up over his head, yawning. “Dave and I were talking about getting something to eat.”
“You don’t want to see the band?” To her left they were setting up, laying out a complicated network of wires and amps.
He shook his head. “They suck.”
“Okay.” Though she wasn’t sure she needed one, she began making herself another drink: fresh ice, slosh of bourbon, cherry juice. “Are you heading out now?”