Bennington Girls Are Easy

by Charlotte Silver

  “Congratulations! It’s beautiful!”

  “Well, yes.” Pansy shrugged. As a matter of fact, her last ring had been even better, she thought, but perhaps there was no one in the whole world to voice such an ungrateful observation to right now, and suddenly Pansy Chapin, standing in their kitchen, glass of vino in hand, felt a lush, plaintive pull toward the wilds of memory and fiancés past. “It’s lucky that I happen to actually look good in diamonds. Anyway, it’s going to be a Jewish ceremony. Jock insisted on that. Thank God, though, I won’t have to convert. And his last name is only Kaplan, which isn’t too, too bad. I won’t even have to change my monogram!”

  “Well, isn’t that convenient?”

  “So, this means that I’ll be moving out, of course.”

  “Oh, right, of course—” But we just moved in, Cassandra was thinking. And they had signed a yearlong lease.

  “In September. Jock’s loft is fabulous, but we’ll want to start looking to buy in the suburbs. Not Greenwich!” Pansy clarified. “I think Greenwich is tacky! I’d like to be more in horse country…”

  “Do you ride?” Cassandra couldn’t remember.

  “Oh, no. Horses smell. I just like the clothing.”

  Equestrienne wear would look good on her, Cassandra agreed, and in no time got so mesmerized by the image of Pansy sporting dark jodhpurs and a Hermès scarf that she forgot their immediate predicament about the apartment.

  “Anyway, I’m sure you can find a roommate for September first. Some person, some Bennington girl…” Pansy yawned.

  “I guess,” said Cassandra wistfully, not feeling convinced.

  CHAPTER 36

  Cassandra’s solution to looking for a roommate was to call up Gala Gubelman and offer to buy her dinner.

  “With booze or without booze?” Gala wanted to know.

  My, but everyone is anxious about being taken advantage of in this city, Cassandra thought, but said:

  “With booze. My treat.”

  “All right then,” Gala decided.

  They picked a night when Gala was free and agreed to meet at J.G. Melon.

  “Ugh, there are guys in pink shirts all over the place here,” Gala muttered before flashing her dimpled smile at the bartender and saying sweetly: “I’ll have a Corona.”

  It was a steamy night at the very end of August. Cassandra had on an angelic white cotton dress and was sipping a gin and tonic.

  “Yeah, well, I used to come here with Pansy,” she said.

  “So that explains it.”

  “Thanks for coming all the way up here, anyway.”

  “Speaking of which!” Gala sighed, accepting her Corona from the bartender and asking him for extra limes. Gala Gubelman loved “extra” anything: limes, mayonnaise, hot sauce. “Do you know how long it took me to get here? First, the G train was down. Go figure! So I had to walk all the way to Atlantic Center. And then! Even when I finally got on the express…”

  Cassandra thought sometimes that the only thing she missed about living in Boston was that people talked a lot less about the subway there. One’s commute was not a continual conversational pitfall, as it was in New York. She cut Gala off to ask her:

  “Do you know anyone who’s looking for an apartment? I don’t want to live with a stranger. Pansy said to look for other Bennington girls, to start…”

  “Bennington girls! They wouldn’t be caught dead.”

  “What?”

  “Uptown.”

  With some defensiveness Cassandra began to enumerate the many subtle charms of the available apartment and its location. Gala dismissed every one of them as unlikely to be of sufficient interest. Also, she said, all of the girls from their year who she could think of already had their own places. No one was looking.

  “What are you getting to eat, anyway? I’m famished. The burger is good here, right?”

  “Yes. I always get the burger. But Pansy was fond of the Cornish hen, I remember.”

  “Cornish hen? Who besides little old ladies would order the Cornish hen? Are you fucking kidding me, Cassandra?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Pansy always was pretentious. I don’t know why you were ever friends with her. Sylvie and I weren’t. Fuck it, I’ll have the burger.”

  “Well, what about younger Bennington grads? Do you know any younger Bennington grads?”

  “Yeah, but. There’s a whole community of younger Bennington grads living in group houses in Red Hook. Red Hook is really big with them right now. Or! They can’t even afford to live anywhere in New York City at all and so they’re all decamping to Philly or Baltimore. Detroit could be next, at this rate.”

  Gala shrugged, indifferent. The bartender informed them that two guys in pink shirts had just sent them a round of drinks.

  “You know something? That never happens to me in Brooklyn,” she admitted to Cassandra.

  “It doesn’t?”

  But Gala was so beautiful! That’s outrageous! she was thinking. She told her so.

  “Yeah, but, you must be forgetting, Cassandra. It doesn’t matter if you’re beautiful or not. Chivalry is dead.”

  “Are you going to go home with one of them, then?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. Are you?”

  Her relationship with Edward over, her dreams of having an affair with Professor Sobel dashed, Cassandra thought: Why not? Why the hell not?

  “They look like they went to Williams,” Gala said. “Remember at Bennington when we used to go and crash frat parties at Williams?”

  As a matter of fact the answer turned out to be Amherst—the two guys who had sent them drinks had gone to Amherst. As Gala and Cassandra soon learned in the course of going home with them that evening, and forgetting to look for a roommate.

  —

  The following morning Cassandra, hungover and doing the walk of shame in punishing late summer sunlight down Lexington Avenue, texted Pansy:

  JUST A REMINDER THAT TOMORROW IS SEPTEMBER 1. RENT IS DUE.

  Pansy to Cassandra:

  IT WAS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO FIND A ROOMMATE, CASSANDRA. I’M LIVING IN TRIBECA NOW.

  Cassandra to Pansy:

  IT’S JUST FOR SEPTEMBER. I’LL HAVE SOMEONE BY OCTOBER 1. PROMISE!

  Pansy to Cassandra:

  JOCK WOULD DIE IF HE KNEW, BUT I DON’T EVEN HAVE THE MONEY THIS MONTH. I’M BROKE.

  Cassandra to Pansy:

  SPEAKING OF JOCK: GET HIM TO PAY IT, WHY DON’T YOU?

  Pansy to Cassandra:

  I CAN’T GET HIM INVOLVED. IT WOULD MAKE IT LOOK LIKE I’M MARRYING HIM FOR HIS MONEY.

  Cassandra to Pansy:

  AREN’T YOU???

  And when there was no response, Cassandra to Pansy again:

  WHAT’S IT TO HIM, ANYWAY? HE’S A GODDAMN HEDGE FUND MANAGER.

  Pansy to Cassandra:

  PLEASE STOP BOTHERING US, CASSANDRA. WE’RE IN THE HAMPTONS AND ABOUT TO LOSE RECEPTION.

  Bullshit! thought Cassandra. Would all of those hordes of bloodless yuppies in the Hamptons with their precious iPhones really stand for them losing reception? Could Pansy possibly be telling the truth? But Cassandra didn’t know, because among the numerous failures of her life in New York so far was the fact that she had not been able to nab any invitations to the Hamptons or anywhere else this summer. The only time she’d ever been to that corner of the world at all was once, in her Bennington days, as the guest of Angelica Rocky-Divine at the family estate in Sag Harbor: it had been off-season then and Angelica had run about playing the flute and wearing a long red silk kimono in the majestic, wind-swept apple orchards.

  After getting Pansy’s text messages, Cassandra endured a lackluster afternoon, spent killing time at various coffee shops up and down Lexington Avenue. How many iced coffees could a grown woman drink in a single afternoon? she had good reason to ask herself. Also, it was a Saturday, and Saturdays that are spent in the city in the summertime are always depressing. So is the day after you’ve had casual sex, usually. Almost inev
itably by about three o’clock in the afternoon, any residual animal glow has worn off and you start to feel desperate. The consolations of the flesh are merely temporary. This is why some people are driven to become promiscuous: they need to recharge that early, excited feeling again and again. Around dinnertime, sitting disconsolately on a bench in front of one of the boutiques on Madison Avenue and watching the European tourists go by, one of whom was a louche young man in lavender suede loafers walking a poodle, Cassandra texted:

  GALA, WHERE ARE YOU?? CALL ME!

  “Oh God, she’s texting me again,” moaned Gala. “She wants me to actually call her. Should I?”

  “I don’t care,” said Sylvie, who went back to squeezing lemons. Tomorrow it would be Sunday, and she was expecting a brisk crowd at the lemonade stand.

  The air was stifling in Sylvie’s non-air-conditioned apartment, and Gala undid the halter-neck of her ratty plum-colored vintage 1940s sundress—a garment she’d had as long ago as Bennington, and associated many exciting, libidinal memories with—and let her bare boobs spread out luxuriously as she flopped down on the floor. The floor struck her in that moment as the coolest place to be in the whole apartment.

  “Do you mind?” she asked Sylvie.

  “That you’re still friends with Cassandra?” She did mind, in fact.

  “No.” Gala motioned to her chest. “That I took my top off. I’m dying here.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Gala wiggled around on the floor to make herself more comfortable, propping one of Sylvie’s miniature flowered silk cushions underneath her belly. Then she called Cassandra, who without further ado started to blather on about the indignity of what Pansy had done and how she still hadn’t found another roommate.

  “I never liked that Pansy Chapin!” Gala announced.

  “But, wait. Then why did you have a threesome with her?”

  “That wasn’t Pansy Chapin, that was Bitsy Citron, and anyway, Cassandra, liking the other girl in a threesome has nothing to do with it.”

  “Oh.” Cassandra stood corrected.

  “This one time I was in the dining hall at Bennington and I happened to see Pansy having this, like, really intense-looking conversation with Orpheus—”

  “Wait, were you two dating then?”

  “Well, we were hooking up, anyway. We were involved, is the point. So! I went and eavesdropped on them. And then I heard Orpheus saying”—here, Gala, who was a very good mimic, did a Kentucky drawl—“Listen, Pansy, I am not saying that you are an evil person… And do you know what Pansy Chapin just sat there and said, without missing a beat? But, Orpheus, I am an evil person.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Yup, so don’t say I never told you so.”

  “But you told me so too late!”

  “Actually— speaking of Orpheus. He’s looking for a new roommate, he said.”

  “In Queens.” Cassandra pouted.

  “Cassandra will never move to Queens,” said Sylvie knowledgeably, as soon as Gala got off the phone.

  “Yeah, but.” Gala went into the details of Cassandra having to cover Pansy’s portion of the rent this month, and the two of them deciding to break the lease come October. “I think she’s looking for an exit strategy.”

  “An exit strategy! But I thought that Pansy Chapin was supposed to be her exit strategy.”

  “Well—tough luck for her, then. I ask you! Depending on Pansy Chapin!”

  “That’s the thing about life,” mused Sylvie.

  “What is?”

  “Well, you come up with an exit strategy, see. But then sometimes that’s not good enough. Sometimes you find out that what you really need is an exit strategy for your exit strategy.”

  CHAPTER 37

  “Silver? Silver? No, I’m afraid we don’t take silver. We already have a surplus of it in stock, and I’m sorry to say, it’s just not moving for us anymore.”

  “What is moving, these days?”

  “Anything mid-century modern right now. Mid-century’s all the rage.”

  Like what Pansy Chapin has, Cassandra thought. That bitch.

  “What about jewelry? Do you take jewelry?”

  “Well…” The salesgirl in her black sheath dress and period-appropriate red lipstick paused and looked over Cassandra from head to toe, as if trying to assess what the value of the jewelry of somebody like her might be worth. Not much, was her conclusion. She probably just has some piddling sentimental little hand-me-downs of her grandmother’s she’s hoping to cash in. My, but the world was a rough place out there right now, the salesgirl reflected, and not for the first time. Cassandra looked to her like a nice, genteel young woman who in another age could have gotten a decent job no problem, rather than being reduced to the absurd adventure of trying to pawn off her finery up and down the antique stores of East Sixty-First Street. The spectacles you saw, living in New York City! Any number of them could break your heart. That is, if you let them get to you, which the salesgirl, for one, had no intention of doing.

  “Oh all right, all right!” Cassandra exclaimed. It was the sixth store she had tried that afternoon and she was finally getting the picture. “You don’t have to go into it all, I already know what you’re going to say. Thank you for your time, anyway.”

  “You know. You might try the Diamond District, that part of town,” advised the salesgirl, watching Cassandra and her camel-hair coat. It was a beautiful coat, too, but the hem was unraveling. Cassandra, unlike the adroit Sylvie, was never at her best with a needle and thread and was going to seed on all fronts. She needed cash, and she needed it fast.

  The very next day, she found herself waiting in line in a dim, dusty establishment on the fourth floor of an undistinguished office building on the far reaches of West Forty-Seventh Street. The silver was so heavy that she’d had no choice but to take it in a cab. Cassandra was sent into a tiny room with a thick Plexiglas window. The jeweler sat on the other side of the window, his desk littered with greasy black wrenches and tweezers and scales. He weighed and accepted the glorious haul of wedding silver first, then tackled the jewelry.

  Picking up a pair of tweezers, he announced to Cassandra: “I have to take them out.”

  “Take what out?”

  “The stones.” He gestured to the diamond ring, the amethyst necklace. “To weigh them.”

  Oh well, diamonds don’t suit me anyway, thought Cassandra, but nevertheless found herself wincing as he pried it out of the scalloped rose gold setting, dating back to the Edwardian era: that ring had been in her mother’s family for generations.

  “Nice,” he said of the amethyst. It was a big one apparently.

  Next up to be dismantled were the charm bracelets. The individual charms, as well as the gold link bracelets, had to be weighed separately to determine their value. At the sight of these poor cast-off charms, the tears welled up and began to flicker on Cassandra’s eyelashes.

  “Look,” said the jeweler, stopping what he was doing to draw her attention to a charm in the shape of a seahorse. “Look, its eyes.”

  Its eyes were studded with two dainty emeralds. With an expert, single twist, he pried them out and then they, too, bounced up and down on the dingy scale.

  That did it. She let out a long, wounded wail. Thank God, though, she did leave there with cash; the jeweler, entirely unfazed by the sight of his down-and-out clientele bursting into tears, accepted everything. Outside on West Forty-Seventh Street it was raining and Cassandra’s mascara ran down her face in long, weepy, blackish violet streaks. She decided to walk back uptown. Meanwhile, it rained and rained. Soon she heard thunder. This catastrophic aspect of the weather suited her sense of personal devastation. At the Korean flower stands, dahlias were nodding their battered heads, pink and orange and purple, too, and mixed in with the sound of a man hawking sleazy plastic umbrellas—“Umbrellas! Five dollar! Umbrellas!”—were the rich, yearning chords of a man playing the violin. Life in the arts! Cassandra thought, with a momentary swell of pity f
or her fellow man. It’s a bitch. That guy’s pretty talented actually.

  By the time she had walked all the way over to the East Side—collapsing, to regain her strength, on a bench outside the entrance to Central Park—the weather had cleared. Two middle-aged women strode right past her, one of them puffing on a cigarette. They were just exiting the park.

  “If you want my opinion,” said the woman smoking the cigarette to her friend. “It’s time to get rid of the horses!”

  My sentiments exactly, thought Cassandra, and at that very moment she decided to call up Orpheus McCloud, who happened to be in bed, just for old time’s sake, with Gala. When old lovers are together, they will often discuss old times. Just as the phone rang, Gala was imploring him: “I’m sorry! I’m still, like, totally sorry about that STD I picked up from that guy Christophe I was sleeping with in Paris…”

  “Hey, why would Cassandra Puffin be calling me?”

  “Oh! I bet because I told her you had a room in your apartment that was available. She was living on the Upper East Side with Pansy Chapin, that frigid little bitch, and—”

  “Frigid is not the word,” said Orpheus, who, unbeknownst to Gala, had been unable to resist being swept into bed by the evil, luminescent, streaky-blond Pansy himself. “Well, I guess I might as well pick up. The only other person who’s interested in the room is Chase Raven.”

  “Chase Raven? But, wait! I thought he was dead. I thought he OD’d.”

  “No, he just took a term off to go dry out in Bali and never came back.”

  “Oh.” So that explained it.

  Orpheus picked up his phone. Cassandra got straight to the point.

  “Well, I just wanted to know: Is the room in your apartment still available?”

  It was; but when Orpheus got off the phone, Gala snuggled up next to him and said, “You know, Orpheus. I don’t know if you really want Cassandra for your roommate. She still doesn’t have a job yet.”