Holding their thin-stemmed wineglasses, they gazed down from the parapets at the gray slosh of water below. It was high tide, and the sea lapped the windows of pitch-coated taxis. Clarissa speculated on whether the flooded-out lower classes would switch entirely to paddleboats, lending New York City a Venetian air; and whether the rats in subways and ground-floor apartments had drowned in vast numbers or moved upwards in life. Richard suggested that they had instead learned to wear suits and to work in analysis in the finance sector. Then, delicately, with careful selections and excisions, they discussed the previous ten years of their lives.
As servers in sagging uniforms slithered like eels throughout the crowd, distributing martinis and glasses of scotch, Clarissa and Richard discovered, with the faint ring of fatedness, that both were single, financially secure, possessed of life insurance, unopposed to prenuptial agreements, anxious to have one boy and one girl, and crackling with attraction toward each other.
“I know it’s unethical to have children,” Clarissa said, twisting her fingers around her glass. “With the planet in the shape it’s in—”
“You deserve them,” Richard said. “We deserve them. It’ll all be offset, one way or another. The proposed carbon tax—”
His eyes were a clear, unpolluted blue. Clarissa fell into them, down and down.
There was nothing for it but to take a private shell together. Giggling and shushing each other like teenagers, since Clarissa, after all, was supposed to be assessing the art, and Richard evaluating a candidate for his father’s new venture, they slipped toward the stairs.
“Hush,” Clarissa said, as the bite of cigarette smoke reached her. Two servers were sneaking a break of their own, up on top of the fragile rooftop bar.
“Poison tide today,” one said, “up from the canal. Don’t know how I’ll get home now.”
“Book a cargo drone.”
“That’s half our pay!”
“Then swim.”
“Are you swimming?”
“I’m sleeping here. There’s a janitorial closet on—well, I’m not telling you which floor.”
Clarissa eased the stairwell door shut behind her.
As they descended to the hundredth level, where programmable plexiglass bubbles waited on their steel cables, Clarissa and Richard quietly congratulated each other on their expensive but toxin-free method of transport.
The lights of the city glimmered around them as their clear shell slid through the electric night. One block from Richard’s building, just as Clarissa was beginning to distinguish the sphinxes and lions on its marble exterior, he covered her small, soft hand with his.
Before long, they were dancing the usual dance: flights to Ibiza, Lima, São Paulo; volunteer trips to the famine-racked heartlands of wherever; luncheons at Baccarat and dinners at Queen Alice; afternoons at the rum-smelling, dusty clubs that survived behind stone emblems and leaded windows. And one day, at a dessert bar overlooking the garden where the two of them had rediscovered each other, Richard presented Clarissa with the diamond ring that his great-grandmother, then grandmother, then aunt had worn.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed. All the servers around them smiled gapped or toothless smiles. Other patrons clapped. How her happiness redounded, like light from the facets of a chandelier, in giving others a taste of happiness as well!
“Three generations of love and hard work,” Richard said, sliding the diamond over her knuckles. “Each one giving the best opportunities to their children. We’ll do that too. For Charles. For Chelsea.”
Dimly Clarissa wondered when, exactly, they had discussed their future children’s names; but there was nothing wrong with Charles or Chelsea, which were perfectly respectable, and now Richard’s fingers were creeping under the silk crepe of her skirt, up the inside of her stockinged thigh, and she couldn’t think.
A week later all three pairs of parents held a war council, divided the wedding between them, and attacked their assignments with martial and marital efficiency. Clarissa submitted to a storm of taffeta and chiffon, peonies and napkins, rosewater and calligraphy. She was pinched and prodded and finally delivered to a French atelier, the kind that retains, no matter what the hour, an unadulterated gloom that signifies artistry. Four glasses of champagne emerged, fuming like potions. A witchlike woman fitted Clarissa for the dress, muttering in Czech around a mouthful of pins.
Then, of course, came the rocket, robot, and drone, and Richard’s green glass bead on its silver chain.
And everything was perfect, except for one thing.
A taste—a smell—a texture shimmered in Clarissa’s memory of childhood, cool and luminous and lunar beside the sunshine of orange juice.
“Ice cream,” Clarissa said. “We’ll serve vanilla ice cream in the shape of the moon.”
This was the first time Clarissa had spoken up, and her Mim, in whose queendom the wedding menu lay, caught her breath, while Kel, her father’s third wife, and Suzette, Richard’s mother, arched one elegant, symmetrical eyebrow apiece.
“I don’t really know—” her Mim began to say.
Clarissa said, “It’s as close as anyone can get to the moon without actually traveling there. And the dress is moon white. Not eggshell. Not ivory. Not seashell or bone.”
Kel said, “I think the decorations will be enough. We have the star-field projector, the hand-blown Earth, the powder floor—”
“Little hanging moons of white roses,” Suzette added. “Plus a replica of Richard’s robot on every table. Isn’t that enough?”
“We’re having ice cream,” Clarissa said. “The real thing, too. Not those soy sorbets that don’t melt, or coconut-sulfite substitutes. Ice cream.”
“Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” her Mim said. “You are successful, and we are very fortunate, but it’s generally unwise to put that on display.”
“I disagree with your mother in almost everything,” Kel said, “but in this matter, she’s right. Where in the world would we find clean milk? And uncontaminated eggs? As for vanillin, that’s in all the drugstores, but it’s a plebian flavor, isn’t it?”
“Our people don’t have the microbiomes to survive a street egg,” Suzette said. “And milk means cancer in ten years. What will you want next? Hamburgers?”
“I’ll find what I need,” Clarissa said, fingering her necklace. The moon glass was warm against her skin. Richard could surely, like a magician, produce good eggs from his handkerchief.
Synthetic vanillin was indeed bourgeois, and thus out of the question. Clarissa took three shells and a boat, rowed by a black man spitting blood and shrinking into himself, to the Museum of Flavors. This was a nondescript office building in the Bronx whose second-floor window had been propped open for her.
Whatever government agency originally funded it had long since been plundered and disbanded. Entire crop species, classes of game birds, and spices now existed only in these priceless, neglected vaults. The curator was only too happy to accept a cash transfer for six of the vanilla beans, which he fished out of a frozen drawer and snipped of their tags. He was an old classmate from Princeton, who lived in terror that the contents of his vaults might be made known, attracting armed hordes of the desperate and cruel. But Clarissa, as he knew well, was discreet.
The amount exchanged approached the value of one of her spare Rothkos. Clarissa made a mental note to send one to auction.