Sadie considered, shrugging back a tiny feeling of satisfaction—perhaps she could master the girl’s unhappiness. But a part of her knew she was being baited, knew Caitlin was laying a trap. “Well,” she said slowly. “I’d get rid of this futon. It smells of cat urine.”
Caitlin laughed again. “It does, doesn’t it? We pulled it in off the street. After we got upstairs we realized that it smelled like cat pee, but we thought maybe the smell would fade. But then because it smelled like cat pee, the cats kept peeing on it. Mumia won’t go near it.”
And you let me sit there? thought Sadie, furious. “Caitlin, Rob has money, doesn’t he?” she said, a thin stream of poison leaking into her voice. She was breaking the cardinal rule of New York bohemia—just as Rob had done the night before—pointing out a person’s financial situation. Nowhere but in New York, Sadie thought, were people so embarrassed to have money. “Why do you need to pull in furniture off the street? Can’t you just go out and buy a sofa?”
Shifting her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot, Caitlin considered this. “Rob has money from his family,” she said finally. “But he believes—it’s kind of an anarchist collective thing—that we should live as close as possible to the poverty level. We have a really strict budget and whatever extra money we have goes into Rob’s projects. He’s starting this new organization, kind of a support group for wealthy kids who want to live an ethical life.” She paused. “You must know a lot of kids like that, right? You went to Dalton, didn’t you? Maybe you could talk to the alumni people about bringing him to talk to the students? Or the alums? He’s an amazing speaker. He’s giving a talk at the New School in a couple of weeks. You should come.”
“Mmm,” Sadie murmured, glancing around the room. The bathroom, she thought, must be at the rear of the house, off the kitchen. She needed, desperately, to use it, but maybe not as desperately as she needed to leave. “I”—she smiled—“have to get going.”
Caitlin, at last, rose and followed Sadie back to the kitchen, where she unlocked the door. Mumia jumped up, placed his paws on Sadie’s shoulders, and licked her face. “Hey, sweetie,” she said stiffly, thinking again of fleas.
“Down,” Caitlin commanded. With a dejected whine, the dog lay back down on the scuffed linoleum floor. Sadie glanced toward a door by the window—the bathroom, surely—but picked up her bag, which was heavy with manuscript, and slung it, purposefully, over her shoulder. “You know, I’m glad you spoke honestly to me,” said Caitlin. “No one ever does. I think people are intimidated by me.”
“Sure,” said Sadie. She could barely concentrate on Caitlin’s words, so badly did she need to use the bathroom.
“You’re right about some things. It’s such a cliché, but I guess I keep thinking that none of this will hurt Lil, since she doesn’t know about it. Like, maybe it makes things better between her and Tuck, even, because he’s happier.” Here, she looked up at Sadie, widening her eyes in an attempt to indicate sadness and regret. “I know that this sounds dumb to you,” she said, coughing into her hand. “You know, I feel like you just don’t know much about real life.” Oh my God, thought Sadie. I cannot believe this. “You’ve never really been in love, have you? You think everything is so clean and easy. That I’ll just, like, get a pedicure and go out to dinner and everything will be fine. But it doesn’t work like that. Life is messy. It’s dirty.”
“Right,” said Sadie, through tight lips. She was not, was not, going to play along anymore.
“You’re not going to tell Lil anything, are you? About Tuck and me? Or about our talk?”
At last, thought Sadie, the real point. “I don’t know,” she said, her chest tightening with rage. And with that, she slipped out the door, raising her arm in a stiff little wave. She couldn’t manage to get out the word “good-bye.”
Down the first flight of stairs she walked calmly, taking care not to trip on the curling folds of linoleum, the low heels of her sandals tapping in a way that pleased her. At the landing, the smell of cabbage grew stronger, and she began to skip, then run down the final flights, bursting out the door into the fresh air, which wasn’t actually fresh at all, but thick with exhaust fumes from the BQE, and rotting garbage from the Dumpster at the corner, and overused oil from the Chinese takeout shop. Sadie looked around her. To the east lay Lil’s apartment. (Should I go right now and tell her? I should, I should.) To the south, she caught a glimpse of Will and Beth’s building, a ten-story brick box. Several blocks west and a few north she could find Emily. So many friends nearby. Williamsburg always made Sadie feel conscious of being a type—all these girls, these women, dressed just like she, wandering the streets carrying yoga mats and clear plastic cups of iced coffee and thick books of recent vintage, hair pulled back from thin faces with small, sparkly barrettes. And the men, in their low-slung corduroys and wide-collared shirts, carrying messenger bags, or sitting in the garden at the L reading copies of McSweeney’s or Philip K. Dick novels, stroking their sideburns.
And yet Metropolitan, today, was devoid of life. Which was just as well. She felt disgusted with humanity, and with herself. Why had she stayed so long? Why had she even bothered to try to talk to Caitlin? And why was it, she wondered, that Caitlin—just as in college, she realized—had managed to make her feel bad about herself. That perhaps she did know nothing of life in all its grit and dirt. That she had not given herself over to passion—ugh, that word—as Caitlin had. Was it true? She thought of Tal. Did she love him? She did, she did, and she told him so all the time. But then wasn’t there a part of her that wondered, is this all there is? Not that it wasn’t good, or that it wasn’t enough, or that it wasn’t exciting, but that it seemed, somehow, that there should be more. That she couldn’t just marry the guy who lived down the hall freshman year, the guy who’d waited patiently until she came around. And this was it, wasn’t it? That falling in love with Tal had been less an active choice and more a succumbing to the inevitable. And she could imagine, so easily, their life together, all so easy and good, the shine of approval from their friends and their parents and their steady accumulation of objects and houses and the negotiation of careers (for this was what was bothering him, she knew, that he knew he wasn’t coming back from L.A., that after this movie there’d be another movie, and then pilot season, and that he wanted her to come, and she also knew, somehow, that she might say she’d come, might visit him for a week in his new studio in Silverlake or wherever, knowing that she couldn’t stay, couldn’t live there, couldn’t even learn to drive, and it all just seemed a bit too much. She just somehow couldn’t do it.)
Stop it, stop it, stop it, she thought, stop this. Caitlin’s a snake. You love Tal. She’s not capable of passion. She just wants what everyone else has.
The clouds had drifted off and the sun, once again, cast a dusty, yellow light on the streets. It was a beautiful day, a perfect June afternoon. She should, of course, go home, make a salad, and read. But she would, she decided, walk down to the river, then maybe have lunch alone at Oznot’s, while reading. She smiled broadly, goofily. How good it was to be completely alone. Putting on her sunglasses, she trotted across Metropolitan, imagining she could see the water in front of her. As she crossed Roebling, she became aware of a voice behind her, growing closer and closer. “Miss, miss, miss,” the voice was saying. Miss what? she thought. Then a soft hand grabbed her upper arm. She let out a little scream, stopped short, and found herself looking into the round, freckled face of a man not much taller than she. His hair was sandy and thick, with a slanting cowlick above his left eye, and he wore a plain, dark suit, which gave her an idea who this might be. And, somehow, she knew that he knew that she knew who he was. “Are you all right?” the man asked. His voice was not deep, but had an appealing rasp.