—
Meanwhile, Professor Sobel had found himself with an extra ticket to Tristan und Isolde at the Met and had decided to extend another invitation to Cassandra. He got this idea because his ex-wife was a great opera lover as well, and he had a long history of running into her at performances there. When faced with the possibility of confronting one’s ex-wife, it always did a man’s ego good to have a comely former student on his arm. Cassandra would do, he felt.
“You think the crowd’s old here,” he remarked to Cassandra, once they were seated. “You ought to go check out the people who still go to chamber music concerts.”
“I love chamber music!” swooned Cassandra, jumping ahead and imagining Professor Sobel paying to take her to other concerts in the future; she could get used to this.
It was predictable, Professor Sobel thought, Cassandra liking chamber music. Everything about her—just like every other Bennington girl he’d had a crush on before her—was getting predictable. He asked himself: Would it be worth it to go through with the whole silly charade of seducing her? After all, a poor fatherless girl like Cassandra might get clingy afterward. Originally—back when she was not so predictable— her rather orphanlike air had been a major part of what had attracted him to her It could be great fun destroying a girl like that if you were in the mood for drama; but Professor Sobel realized that he wasn’t, anymore.
“About love…” He groaned, and sighed. Taking a girl to go see Tristan und Isolde was a natural segue to talking about love, and why not toy with her expectations a little? “How much do you know about it, anyway? Hmm? A girl like you?”
“Enough,” said Cassandra smiling, though in fact she was thinking of Edward. It had been over a month now, and there’d been no response to her letter, in spite of her noble efforts with the Santa Maria Novella vanilla perfume on the underside of the envelope. Evidently the breakup had been for real. The only thing that would help her to get over one man was to go to bed with another. She was looking forward to testing this theory with Professor Sobel at the end of the night.
“It’s overrated.”
“It’s what?” said Cassandra, incredulous.
“Overrated, I said. Love is overrated. Also it’s repetitive. It’s so goddamned repetitive! So you don’t know that much about it, do you, or you would know that for yourself.”
“But love makes the world anew! At least, the great thing about it is that it has the capacity to do that, don’t you think?”
“All I can tell you, kiddo, is: passions weaken in your sixties. That’s the one thing that Proust never lived long enough to understand.”
“Proust! What’s Proust got to do with anything?” I thought we were on Wagner tonight, she said to herself, momentarily thrown by these ever-shifting cultural references.
“Oh. I used to teach him. He’s my other great love. Didn’t you know that? Maybe it was before your time.”
“But you’re on the music faculty,” Cassandra protested.
“Doesn’t matter. Bennington is—interdisciplinary! They pride themselves on mixing things up.”
“Actually, I kind of hated that it was so interdisciplinary. I don’t think I got a good, solid education at that place at all. Actually, I thought a lot of the curriculum at Bennington was stupid.”
“A lot of things are stupid,” said Professor Sobel pleasantly; on this, at least, they could agree. “And not just at Bennington, either, more’s the pity.”
They sat there brooding—not even pretending that they were connecting—until the curtain came up. By intermission, Professor Sobel was thrashing to take a smoke break. Cassandra followed him outdoors. See, this is what I mean about her being clingy, he thought to himself as they stood next to the fountain getting dirty looks from all of the smoke-free spectators. There was nothing like the self-righteousness of nonsmokers, the idiots, to put him in a wrathful mood and suddenly he announced:
“Let’s blow this joint.”
“This joint, you’re calling it now? This joint? It’s the Met!”
“So what? It isn’t a very good production.”
Actually, it was. And Professor Sobel knew it, too. But he was bored with Tristan und Isolde, tonight. He was bored with everything.
“But…” Cassandra, unable to accept the crummy turn of events that was taking place before her eyes, tried to appeal to his paternalistic side, a technique that never failed, or so she imagined, with men. “But what about my education?”
“Your education? Jesus, I thought we already covered that. I thought we agreed it was a total fucking waste.”
“But I mean my cultural education. Just because I might have graduated a while ago doesn’t mean that my education stopped! I feel like the whole point of living in New York City is to do things like go to the opera…” The thought occurred to Professor Sobel that there must have been thousands upon thousands of young women in New York City believing this drivel and at the starkness of this revelation he didn’t know whether to laugh or to weep. So he did what he did all of those years ago on learning that the modern dancers had died, and lit another cigarette and never thought about it ever again.
“I mean,” Cassandra was now saying, “what if I go to a cocktail party next week and this production of Tristan und Isolde comes up and I want to have something intelligent to say about it?”
“Intelligent! You don’t need to be able to say something intelligent about anything, ever.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What I’m talking about is: all right, so say you’re at a cocktail party. You shouldn’t be the one to say something intelligent about this production of Tristan und Isolde, you should ask somebody else, preferably a man, what he thought about it, and preferably with an alluringly air-headed question mark in your voice.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“You mean it comes to this?”
“What comes to this?”
“Why”—Cassandra threw up her hands—“you might as well say—a woman’s whole life!”
“And to think, I thought you were so interested in continuing your education. You ought to thank me. This has been an extremely educational evening for you.”
“But it’s—horrible, horrible! What you’re telling me.”
“Well, what did I tell you? Don’t you ever remember anything?” Professor Sobel was thinking back to the first meal he’d had with Cassandra, that lunch at La Grenouille, that April afternoon, the deepening, thrilling roses in Cassandra’s cheeks, the superb, velvety taste of his frogs’ legs Provençale. “Childhood is ending all the time.”
CHAPTER 34
And so it is, thought Cassandra, walking down Central Park South alone after the opera. She had gone and watched the rest of it by herself, not that she had been able to concentrate. It had seemed too much of a confession of failure to leave when Professor Sobel did—that is, if they were not leaving to go home together. She couldn’t have borne to humiliate herself in front of him that way—just what would he have thought, that she was going to go home and watch Netflix or something degrading like that? Being single is like shopping at Trader Joe’s, as Pansy Chapin in all her wisdom had said. Cassandra flinched, recognizing that Pansy Chapin was right. Still, she told herself, certain standards of behavior must be upheld: another humiliation that could not be borne, obviously, was taking the crosstown bus on a night like this. And there was the inconvenience of it being too late to walk across the park. This accounted for her decision to amble down toward Central Park South, where she was hoping to be able to pick up a cab. Sylvie hated this part of town, Cassandra knew, but she loved it. Especially at nighttime, she loved it. Also, it helped being in a part of town where there were so many hotels. It meant that you could count on two important things: being able to use a decent bathroom and getting a cab. After all, if you were an attractive young woman and you were well dressed, Cassandra had found, one of the bell captains was sure to assume you were a guest
and hail one for you. She didn’t have the strength, right now, to hail one herself.
Once she was inside the cab she took out her phone and cradled it in her hand, wondering who she could call to complain about Professor Sobel right now. But it was late and anyway, all of her friends that she could think of had boyfriends and would probably be with them right now: it was a beastly hour to be alone. As the cab turned down Madison, she observed a cool, impassive blonde in a brief black dress on the arm of a businessman. Maybe she’s a high-class Russian prostitute, Cassandra thought to herself, excited. The Carlyle, for instance, was full of them: Edward had taken her there for martinis once. At the thought of Edward, Cassandra felt discouraged again, and thinking about Edward led naturally enough to thinking about Sylvie, from whom she was also now totally estranged. Never before, it occurred to her, had she been without a boyfriend and, even worse, without a best friend.
Still, one of the well-known advantages of living in New York City is that if it’s late at night and you don’t want to be alone, you don’t have to be. You can go to a bar or a diner. Cassandra, upon realizing that Professor Sobel, that bastard, hadn’t even taken her out to dinner this time, decided to go eat. There was a twenty-four-hour diner just around the corner from her apartment, over on Second Avenue. She flinched and almost decided not to proceed when the first person she saw in there was a middle-aged man with hairy arms wearing pea green hospital scrubs and wolfing down a burger. His hunger seemed immense, his lonesomeness palpable. Are these my people? Cassandra wondered. By this she meant the people who hang out in diners, the people who have nowhere else to go. But she stayed and slid into a booth anyway. She made up her mind to order black coffee and a fried egg sandwich. The coffee arrived, bracing, medicinal. Cassandra took a few life-giving sips and heard somebody asking her:
“Excuse me. Did you go to Sarah Lawrence by any chance?”
“No,” Cassandra said, startled that a stranger should have spoken to her here. She looked up to see a faded blonde in a black leotard sitting at the counter eating French fries.
“They have feta on them,” the stranger said, pointing. “Want to try? Feta and oregano, I think. They’re Greek French fries. They’re good!”
“No, thank you.”
“Were you ever in the theater, then? Costume design? I feel like maybe I know you from back when I did costume design…”
“Nope.”
“Window dressing? Did you ever work in window dressing? I used to do the windows at Bergdorf Goodman. I did the holiday windows and everything!”
“Oh, really? They’re beautiful. But no, I never did anything having to do with window dressing or costume design or anything like that. So, sorry. I don’t think we’ve met before.”
“Wait, Bennington. You went to Bennington.”
Cassandra laughed.
“Lucky guess. You’re right, I went to Bennington.”
“Orpheus. Do you have a friend named Orpheus?”
“Orpheus McCloud?”
And then she remembered. She remembered where she had met the blonde in the leotard before. Of course. It was on that night, that snowy night, when she and Gala and Sylvie had gone out to his apartment in Astoria together.
“Wait, you used to date Orpheus, right?”
“If that’s what you want to call it, sure.”
Cassandra blushed, feeling that further intimacies were coming. They were. Lee, it came back to her. The stranger’s name was Lee.
“I used to go all the way out to Queens to fuck Orpheus,” Lee said now. “That was back when I still thought having casual sex was actually exciting. Now I’m used to it. It’s boring. It’s as boring as everything else. Anyhow, I remember I would stop at that taco truck they had, the one right under the train tracks. I wonder if it’s still there. He never fed me, Orpheus. What was I expecting, I wonder? Younger guys don’t. I cooked for him sometimes, but that got kind of pathetic, so I stopped. That must have been years ago, come to think of it. Years!”
“Oh yes, I remember now. You were making a lamb roast.”
Now it was Lee’s turn to laugh. Caustically, Cassandra noticed.
“Can you honestly tell me you don’t want any French fries?”
“All right,” Cassandra admitted, and took one. “Hey! You’re right. These are good.”
She helped herself to another, as her sandwich arrived.
“I told you so. But all that oregano makes your breath stink. So it’s the kind of food you really have to eat after you get laid, not before.”
“Hmm. Is that so?”
“Wait, so did you or didn’t you get laid tonight? When I saw you walk in here, I thought you did.”
“No,” Cassandra confessed, thinking with shame of her date with Professor Sobel.
“Oh.” Lee seemed disappointed. “I just figured you had. And you must have left right afterward because the guy was an asshole: that happens to me all the time. It’s just the way you’re dressed and everything. You didn’t get all dressed up to come to a diner on Second Avenue, did you? That’s a very pretty dress you have on. I noticed it right away. I know fabric,” she added, rather ominously, Cassandra thought.
“Oh right, costume design. Are you still doing that?”
“Oh, no. I’m not doing anything with my life right now, actually. I have a problem with the morning,” Lee said, as if this explained everything, which, to Cassandra, it did. She translated it to mean: I have a problem with life itself.
“Are you an insomniac?” she asked her.
Lee nodded.
“That’s why I hang out at diners, see. Diners are good for that. Also, the Apple store. The Apple store is the best thing that ever happened to insomniacs in this town, if you ask me.”
“The Apple store?”
“Yeah, the main one right across from the Plaza. It’s open twenty-four hours! It always has really good music playing, too.”
“I see,” said Cassandra slowly. She did see—she saw the crazed and sleepless and lovesick and abandoned denizens of New York City all converging upon the Apple store, say around three a.m., and pacing back and forth, till morning came, in its glacial white depths. Maybe I should get a job, she thought, sobered. Or I might end up like one of them.
What she failed to observe, however, was that she bore something of a resemblance to Lee already. Somebody else could have seen it—Sylvie, for instance, or even Gala. But we can seldom see such things for ourselves. Lee, also, saw it and asked her now:
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
This, too, felt like a confession.
“But you’re not married.”
“No…”
Lee hailed the waiter and ordered an egg cream. “Want one? Please don’t say, Oh no, I’ll just have some of yours. I hate it when women do that.”
“Me, too. But no thanks, I don’t want an egg cream. I do want more coffee though.”
She made eye contact with the waiter to get him to come over.
“You’re pretty,” Lee said, assessing Cassandra. “But you’d be even prettier, you could be absolutely stunning as a matter of fact, if only you had darker eyebrows. I know! You should have raven black eyebrows!”
“But I don’t have raven black hair,” Cassandra protested, reasonably enough. “Why should I have raven black eyebrows?”
“It’s the contrast, silly! The contrast on you would be fabulous.”
“Would it?”
“I used to be a makeup artist once; that’s the problem with being a blonde, and I should know! Blondes are pretty and some men may prefer them, but. Brunettes have better eyebrows.”
“Do they?”
“Always,” said Lee remorselessly. “And any blonde you can think of who does have good eyebrows pencils them in. Your eyebrows are a good shape but you really, really need to start penciling them in.”
“My roommate…” began Cassandra, trying to picture Pansy’s eyebrows, which she was certain were just devas
tating, if only she could remember them. “My roommate is a natural blonde, and I assure you that there is nothing second-rate about her eyebrows. Her name is Pansy Chapin and she was one of the top two or three most beautiful girls at Bennington. The other two were my friend Gala Gubelman—oh! You met her that night at Orpheus’s—and this modern dancer with very red hair called Angelica Rocky-Divine.”
“She sounds like a bitch,” said Lee, of Pansy.
“She is,” Cassandra replied, not without affection.
CHAPTER 35
One night about a week later, Pansy and Cassandra were making spaghetti carbonara together when Cassandra noticed, all of a sudden, that Pansy was wearing a diamond ring. It sparkled on her delicate brown finger, for Pansy Chapin was tanned all over. Even at Bennington she had been legendary for her audacity to frequent the tanning booths in town, rather than go flabby and blanched, like lesser mortals, over the course of the New England winter.
“Oh, that’s so pretty!” Cassandra exclaimed. “Is it your grandmother’s?”
Cassandra had one quite similar to it, from her grandmother. It had been passed down, along with the wedding silver and some other pieces of jewelry: an amethyst drop necklace on a fine gold chain, long jade earrings, several gold charm bracelets, and a handsome gold signet ring that Cassandra thought was very chic and just the sort of thing that Pansy herself might wear. The diamond ring of her grandmother’s was something that she used to wear to black-tie events with Edward, she reflected, and all of a sudden regretted that the spaghetti carbonara she was making was not for him.
“No, actually,” Pansy admitted. Since it was already the middle of August by now and she intended to move out of the apartment by September 1, she might as well go ahead and break the news to Cassandra. “It’s—from Jock! We’re engaged,” she clarified, seeing that Cassandra appeared to be a little slow on the uptake.
But this was madness, Cassandra thought. Just how many broken engagements did Pansy think a girl could afford to have? Nevertheless, in the spirit of hypocritical female friendships that make the world go round, she turned off the kitchen faucet so that she could come over to Pansy and better admire the ring.
Bennington Girls Are Easy Page 16
