“Regardless of how I feel about the insane ambushy trip you just took me on, without asking if I wanted it or even telling me where we were going—where is that kind of money going to come from, Mark? I don’t get it. It takes six months of fact-checking for me to make that kind of money.”
“I’ll find a way,” he said. “That’s what I do. I find a way.” He allowed himself not to respond to the first part of her questioning. Cassie didn’t raise it again, either.
CHAPTER FOUR
IN THE MONTHS TO COME Cassie understood that not only did she not want Mark Brumfeld spending more than ten thousand dollars on a ring for her, she didn’t want him spending that much money on anything, or spending another cent on her. One night a couple weeks after their trip to the Diamond District, Natalia texted. “The Pollys plying Mrcry Lng then aftr to sn cty. come?” Every month or so she would hear from Natalia, a text here or there, asking her to come see the old band play. For a couple of years now it seemed like the last thing in the world she’d do. She even thought of writing her ex-bandmate and ex-girlfriend back to say, “Y th fuck wld I wnt 2 do tht.” But she was ready for a night away from literary talk, away from titanium rings and various cuts of diamonds. So while she didn’t have it in her to go see her old band play with their new bassist, she headed up to the bar for drinks after. It was nearly midnight by the time she arrived. She’d taken four shots of rye whiskey and had a Brooklyn Lager at home before she got there.
Far to the back of Sin City, all her old bandmates were bellied up to the bar. There were four or five other girls standing beside them. It was unclear to Cassie who was part of the crew and who wasn’t. But Natalia caught her eye before she even had a chance to figure out who she should say hi to.
“Well, Jesus Christ if it isn’t Cassie Black,” she said. She was far enough into her night that her gaze kept falling down to Cassie’s elbow, then back up to her face, like she was looking her up and down. “The fuck’re you doing here?”
“I figured the time had come, I might as well see what you were up to.” Her shoes stuck to the floor. Natalia put an arm around her like they’d never broken up. It felt like returning to her parents’ country home in the Wisconsin dells: not just nostalgia for what she’d been missing—though there was that, too—but something new, a new experience that was also every bit as good as she remembered it. A bartender who couldn’t have been a day older than Cassie was when she first arrived in the city stood on the bar and poured cans of Budweiser down the front of her shirt. She was wearing a blue tank top that said PBR across the front. Cassie couldn’t tell if it stood for Pabst Blue Ribbon or Pro Bull Riding. Natalia kept coming up from behind and snaking her hands up right onto Cassie’s breasts. Cassie remembered what those tobacco sunburst hands could do, their brown cuticles so distinct from the pale hands Mark had been touching her with since they got together.
By three A.M. they were back at Natalia’s place. She lived in a one-bedroom at the corner of Second and Second, in an apartment her parents had bought as an investment. She’d grown up on the Upper West Side and the New York Cassie and the rest of their Wellesley alum friends were inhabiting would always feel like Natalia’s New York, not theirs—both to them and, clearly, to Natalia. Now, here in her apartment, with her arms squeezed around her ex-girlfriend, Cassie felt like time had passed in the tiny observable increments by which Natalia’s middle had expanded—it wasn’t anything you would notice looking at her in clothes. But when she wrapped her arms around Natalia, Cassie found they didn’t fit as neatly as they once had. She was like a balloon with two more breaths breathed into it. Like herself, only now a little more of it. In the morning Cassie’s head felt like her brain was a terrible fit for the size of her skull.
“Morning, darlin’,” Natalia said. She was wearing the same GETTIN’ LUCKY IN KENTUCKY T-shirt Mark had been wearing the night she’d met up with him again in her new apartment. Natalia had slept in it. Cassie couldn’t have told her so if she wanted to.
She didn’t want to.
“Coincidence of all fucking coincidences you were there last night,” Natalia said. “What were you doing at Sin City, anyway?”
“Uh, you texted, yet again, and I decided to go with it. Bored.”
“No, I didn’t,” Natalia said. She’d pushed herself up so that her back was against the crumbling plaster wall next to her bed. The hair in her faux-hawk was mussed against her head.
“Didn’t what,” Cassie said.
“Didn’t fucking text you,” Natalia said. “Okay, I’m a little freaked out.” She grabbed her phone from her bedside table. It was a little slate-gray Nokia you could slide open to reveal the world’s tiniest QWERTY keyboard. “Oh, fuck,” she said. “Your number is attached to some old messages I always used to send to Deron. How fucking long have you been getting texts from me?”
Cassie considered lying. But what good would lying do at this point? She was in bed naked with her ex-girlfriend. She said it had been almost two years. Maybe once a month or so. Natalia had begun to develop light crow’s-feet around her eyes. They wrinkled just the slightest bit. A small dimple drew in at the side of her mouth. She looked like she might get truly angry, but then her whole face settled like the topwaters of a man-made pond after a cannonball. “Well, I’m glad I have been. I’m glad you’re here. It’s like a meet-cute, but in real life, so I guess just a meeting of people, that is also cute. Kind of thing.” Cassie wasn’t so glad she was there, but she kissed Natalia on the forehead.
“If you’re going to text me again,” she said, “text just me.”
On the 5 train back to her place Cassie thanked the fucking Lord that she knew Mark wouldn’t be home, that he’d be out at the coffee shop working on his Goldman essay. Still. Again. But when she got back he was sitting in the kitchen nook.
“Morning morning,” he said.
“Listen, before you say anything—”
“No, before you say anything,” Mark said. “I know I’ve been crazy. I get it, I truly honestly get it. I was depressed, I wasn’t paying attention. Faites attention! I know I must’ve been a nightmare. But it’s gonna get better, I swear. First, because this.” He was holding a stack of maybe forty pages of paper between thumb and forefinger. “I finished and e-mailed the Goldman piece off today. Should hear back soon. But I’ve also been realizing—so I got us a couple Willow Garden gigs. A brunch at a Bobby Flay place up in Midtown that pays, like, crazy money. Like you-won’t-believe-it-if-I-tell-you money. And you’re never gonna fucking believe this—we’re gonna headline 9-C finally.”
It was the best gig they’d ever had, and while Cassie knew while they were talking that she wasn’t in love with Mark one iota—even his hands just looked aspic and grimy to her all of a sudden—in the midst of the ambient guilt of the infidelity she’d just walked home from, she said, “Great, great, great, that’s just great,” and went into their bedroom to sleep off the pleasures of a night with Natalia.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING MONTHS moved with the lugubrious pace of waiting for a dial-up connection to get on AOL. Cassie got more fact-checking for US Weekly, and a couple other celebrity rags even started e-mailing when they had extra work. She got so much work she was able to give up some shifts at the bar, and to pass work off to Mark, who was going to run out of funding from his Ph.D. program that summer, even if he still bought people drinks and used his MasterCard to keep a bar tab open. The Willow Gardens started getting more gigs—they opened for Old Crow Medicine Show at Irving Plaza, recorded the background music for a documentary that was later shelved by PBS. Mark’s Emma Goldman/Thoreau/Emerson piece was accepted by TUT. For a period after the piece came in galley pages, he seemed happy. The issue arrived and Cassie would come into the bathroom and find the journal on the back of the toilet, spine cracked to the middle of the piece. Sometimes she would come home and find Mark lying on the couch, looking at the contributors’ notes page of the journal—they only allowed contributors a singl
e line of bio. Mark’s said, “Mark Brumfeld is a writer living in Brooklyn,” which seemed to Cassie a tautology, or at least a solecism. But six months after the piece ran he’d still never had even an e-mail from a single reader, and the next issue came out and there wasn’t a single letter to the editor about it. The publisher of the new Goldman book did not get in touch to thank him. That fall his attempt to go on the academic job market was a near total failure. He had one Skype interview. It didn’t go well. He was so stressed during that period he couldn’t have had sex if he’d tried.
He hadn’t tried.
Not that it mattered to Cassie. She was going to see Natalia’s shows again, and found herself at the place on Second and Second almost every week when the Pollys weren’t touring. Some nights she went home with Natalia, some nights she didn’t, and the uncertainty of it was just the antidote she needed to the stagnation with Mark. During a period when the old band was on the road, for what she figured was no reason other than that she was around more, Mark asked Cassie if she wanted to get dinner.
“Who’s paying for a night out?” Cassie said.
“Let’s just go. To Superfine. We haven’t been there in ages.” They walked the long way from their place to DUMBO, and down to Front Street. The Willow Gardens had played a Sunday Bluegrass brunch there every weekend for two years, until they gave it up so Mark could finish his essay. The whole neighborhood was unrecognizable from when they’d first started playing there. For years it had been broken façades and empty storefronts, twelve-story apartment buildings inhabited by squatters and rats. Or just rats. Now they passed a Pinkberry and a West Elm and some huge new bookstore with plate-glass windows and concrete and they were in front of the restaurant before Cassie realized where they were. Inside was all exposed brick and huge oaken joists running the length of the ceiling. The owner of the place came up to greet them.
“Saved you guys your favorite, right next to the stage,” Jenna said. She had a long, forced smile on her face. Cassie couldn’t for the life of her understand why. They’d left Jenna in the lurch after Mark decided to cancel their last gig on only two days’ notice so he could get started on his essay. He’d told Cassie she never even e-mailed him back. Now here she was pulling out a chair for him, and bringing over huevos and Bloody Marys for them both before they’d even had a chance to start looking at the menu. There was a duo onstage, just a mandolin and banjo player playing clawhammer versions of Radiohead songs. Cassie recognized the melody of “Exit Music (For a Film)” just as soon as they started playing.
“I know you probably thought it wasn’t on my mind anymore,” Mark said. “And I know you expressed ambivalence. Confused. I know. But I think the reality will bring it home for you. And the thing is, I just needed time to get the details together. I mean, it takes more than you might think to put in an order, and get all the specs right, and before I had to take care of selling stock and all—complicated.” Cassie hadn’t the slightest idea what the fuck he was talking about. “But here,” he said.
He pulled a black felt box out of his jeans pocket and put it on the table in front of her.
Probably Cassie should have understood by that point she was being proposed to. But the banjo player kept popping his high G string next to her when it should’ve been pegged to his fretboard, and the jalepeño-ey smell of the huevos was pervading the space all around them, and so it wasn’t until he’d opened the box that Cassie saw Mark was putting a diamond ring in front of her. It was everything she wouldn’t have picked. There was a huge stone in the middle, perfect cut. It must have been two, two and a half carats, and a kind of sickly sepia color, like she was looking at it in a 1920s photograph—or better yet like she was looking through it at the table, which was sent back to another epoch, much like her sex life had been as a result of her father’s retrograde gaze. She could see from the harsh shine on its setting that the band was titanium. Cassie pictured herself hanging half out of the passenger-side window of a Honda Odyssey, somewhere halfway between New York and Philadelphia, on the New Jersey Hellacious Turnpike, her finger swelling, EMTs getting ready to amputate right then and there—“Take the finger off,” they’d say, “and if that won’t work, just cut from the elbow.”
“This really isn’t—” Cassie said.
“I know we haven’t talked about it since we went up to Forty-seventh Street that day, but like I say, it took me a little while to get things together.” He wasn’t quite smiling. He was saying a lot of words in a moment that even in the best case was meant to speak for itself. This was not the best case. She could see sweat on his forehead, a little color back in his cheeks for the first time in ages.
“Where on earth did you have money for that?” Cassie said. She was speaking against her own better judgment, but it was all she could do.
“My grandmother bought me Disney stock every year for my birthday since I was a kid. I forgot about it. Then I got to telling Julia about our visit to the Diamond District and she got all excited about the idea, and she reminded me. Then it took some time to get the certificates from down in Baltimore, and go to the bank to get it sold and—well, but wait. Who cares. I’m asking if you’ll marry me.”
Cassie looked at him with his aspic hands on the table and that huge diamond in front of him. It could have paid for another eight months’ rent for them both (and would pay for another year’s rent for him one day) and the mandolin player onstage kept haphazardly hitting his open G string while he was trying to play the melody of a song from Kid A he’d transposed into B-flat minor. It was literally the worst note you could play against the melody. She could see Jenna watching from behind the maître d’s station. She’d always had a little thing for Jenna but had never been able to pursue it because she was with Natalia, then Mark, and now Natalia and Mark, and Jesus fucking Christ if she didn’t just get up from the table, walk out onto Front Street and over to the huge green park that had been built there in the past year, an immense refurbished merry-go-round at its back next to the river. She walked all the way down to the water, where she looked out across the river to where the brown, flat, windowless façade of the AT&T building was staring blankly back at her, evincing not one iota of whatever emotion was buried beneath. She took the A train to Natalia’s place, where she could crash for a couple nights while the Pollys were on tour in the Midwest. No matter how she tried, she could not get herself to picture the look on Mark’s face as he sat jilted and alone at that table in Superfine. In fact, as seemed to be the case whenever she wasn’t in love with someone, or was, for that matter, she couldn’t get herself to picture what he looked like at all.
CHAPTER FIVE
IN THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED, Cassie saw Mark only at the Willow Gardens practices, where he didn’t mention her having jilted him and she didn’t say a thing, either. She wondered at first if everyone knew and was just trying to play it cool. After a couple of weeks it became clear no one knew but the two of them—and, she guessed, Jenna, who they wouldn’t see unless they went to Superfine again. They had a wedding gig to play up in Connecticut, so they needed to learn a whole slew of new songs. Months passed during which Mark didn’t say anything and she didn’t say anything until the summer came back around with its blazing heat seeping into the city’s asphalt, which seemed to retain daytime heat like the memory of recent scorn, and convection-heated subway stations. One afternoon Mark texted her to see if she’d have lunch with him. It was Brooklyn, so instead they had brunch, they met early, which seemed the safest way. They met at Tom’s Diner—Mark had moved to a place on Adelphi, above a coffee shop that had opened there just the week before he moved in, but people were hanging out in Crown Heights now, so he was, too. She still wondered where he’d gotten the money to live alone.
“So listen, I have to tell you something,” Mark said after they’d sopped up all the excess hollandaise from their eggs Benedict.
“Me too,” Cassie said. She could see in the light that flickered in his watery eyes that he wanted
to go first, but she went first instead. “I know I shouldn’t have just cut out like that, but I just wasn’t ready to talk marriage and I never had been. I never even could talk about it. I mean even that first time you took me to the Diamond District, I was like in shock—we hadn’t even discussed it. I mean I guess I should’ve said something, but with you all into it how could I? I just couldn’t. Didn’t. I don’t know how we got our signals crossed so bad—”
“Well, you did go on that trip up to the Diamond District to look at stones with me,” he said. “I’m not sure how mixed a message it could’ve been. Least not on my end. I thought it was a romantic surprise, not some shock. But that’s not why I wanted to meet.”
Cassie dragged one last piece of English muffin across the viscous yolk-and-hollandaise mess on her plate. She didn’t have the energy to argue, to say she didn’t even know they were going to the Diamond District that day, and by the time she realized what they were doing, there was no way to tell him.
“I’m moving back home to my parents’ place,” he said.
She was shocked.
“After you just moved?” she said. He told her that he’d used the money from selling her ring back after she’d stormed out. Blew $2,500 of it on a broker’s fee. Then he’d received a bill from the IRS for the sale of all that Disney stock—apparently you were supposed to calculate the difference between the basis points on the stock from its purchase date against the historical value—or was it the current value?—“Jesus, fuck,” Mark said, “I still don’t even get it—but I owe the IRS thousands of bucks I don’t have, and you can’t just sit on it like you can a credit card.” He was out of money, out of prospects, there was nothing left in magazines these days, and the chance to go back on the academic job market and maybe by some deus ex machina be saved was still months away. He figured a move down to Baltimore, where it was cheaper and where he would reassess, would do him some good. Also his parents said he had to. He could get some shit job and figure out what was next.
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