Free Food for Millionaires

by Min Jin Lee

  “But you said that the sex was better when you love.. . .”

  “Yes, of course. . . but. . . love is not the same as a promise to be together always.”

  “But that’s what I want. And I think that’s what we all want, at least in the beginning.”

  “Well, yes. But I’m glad I didn’t marry Sean Crowley.” She mentioned the boy she gave her virginity to when she was fifteen.

  “But are you glad that you. . . slept with Sean?”

  The answer was a flat no, but then Casey didn’t want to say that. “I’m glad I had that experience,” she said. The reluctance in her voice was obvious.

  Pleased by her modest win, Tina continued: “I know what I want. I want him to promise me that he will want only me. There should be some sort of promise.” She couldn’t think of a better word.

  “You mean like a goddamn covenant?” Casey recoiled physically, almost repulsed by this suggestion. “Oh, come on, Tina. Get real. You’re twenty. You can’t get married. And what do you do if he’s terrible in the sack? That’s fucking ridiculous. You could be married for fifty years. Hell, with science the way it is, you could be married for seventy years. Then what?”

  “But you’re supposed to love. . . and you said that if you loved each other. . . that it’s better.. . . Then under your argument, how could the sex be bad? I’ve been thinking about this.. . .”

  “Yes, I can see that.” Casey laughed.

  “I think it would hurt so much if I wanted him, but he didn’t want me. . . for. . . for. . . always. You know? And vice versa.”

  “Yes, it would hurt.” Casey threw up her hands. “Sure. Of course it would hurt. But damn, Tina, love. . . is. . .” She stopped. “It’s this naked thing. You can get screwed over. . . but. . .” Casey felt her position was weaker because she believed less in her own theories. She felt her face sting suddenly. The swelling was worsening. She touched her face, not really wanting to know how bad it was.

  “You okay? Here, let me.” Tina pushed the hair from Casey’s forehead.

  “I’m fine,” Casey snapped, jerking her shoulder back. Then she saw Tina’s hurt expression. “Sorry. What I mean is, with love, you have to march into the possibility of losing.”

  Tina nodded, thinking Casey didn’t sound wrong.

  “Never mind,” Casey said. “Don’t do what I do but what you think is right. But whatever you do, you can’t keep yourself from getting hurt. The heart doesn’t seem to work that way. I want love, Tina. I want that. I’ll pay.”

  The streetlamps turned on, lighting Casey’s face, and Tina gasped at the depth of the bruises. “Your face. . .” Tina closed her eyes, then opened them, and a rush of sympathy overcame her.

  “Is it bad, Dr. Han?” Casey said with a smile, refusing to be moved by her sister’s concern. She bit the inside of her left cheek, knowing from Tina’s look that it must be awful.

  “We have to clean that up,” Tina said. She was trying to remain calm and keep from crying. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  3 NET

  WHEN THE SISTERS GOT DOWNSTAIRS, Leah and Joseph were in their bedroom with the door shut. The kitchen table was bare except for the plastic napkin holder stuffed with paper napkins and a shot glass filled with wooden toothpicks; all the surfaces had been wiped down, with no trace of a meal that had been thrown on the floor. The living room, located in the back of the building, was quiet except for the occasional screech of a distant car. In the bathroom with the burble of the tap running, Tina cleaned Casey’s face. Neither spoke—anxious that their father might be roused from sleep. After Tina finished, Casey put in her contact lenses. In their current state, her eyeglasses couldn’t be worn. She packed a duffel and messenger bag.

  Tina sent her off, giving her the money and securing Casey’s promise to call later that week. The sisters parted without any hugging or kissing—the intimate gestures that came so easily to Americans. The painted elevator doors closed, taking Casey down to the lobby, and Tina turned back to the apartment.

  Casey walked toward Queens Boulevard. She’d catch the N or R at Grand Avenue. She wore a wide-brimmed canvas beach hat and a pair of mirrored ski sunglasses lifted from a lost and found at Sabine’s. The pin dots of blood on her collar were indiscernible, so she hadn’t bothered to change her shirt. She was too exhausted to care. All she wanted was to fall into Jay’s bed. She didn’t want to talk, and he was likely at the office anyway. He worked most Saturday nights and Sundays.

  At the subway platform, Casey rested her things on an empty bench. The duffel was filled like sausage casing with summer clothes and shoes. In the messenger bag strapped across her chest were her books: copies of Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights that she read and reread for comfort; a collection of Pritchett’s stories borrowed long ago from Virginia and that she hadn’t read yet; the confirmation Bible she read each morning in private and a ninety-nine-cent marble composition notebook in which she copied her verse for the day. Also in the bag, wrapped in a cotton scarf, was a mint first edition of Lilly Daché’s biography that Sabine and her husband, Isaac, had given her for her graduation. Lilly Daché was a celebrity hat maker from the 1940s and 1950s whose career Sabine had modeled her own on. After Sabine gave her the book, she told Casey that she’d paid five hundred dollars for it. A retailer, Sabine couldn’t help talking about the cost of things.

  In her straw handbag, Casey carried cosmetics and a Vuitton wallet (another present from Sabine) with two hundred and seventy-two dollars in cash and her first Visa charge plate activated from her parents’ apartment that night. At the bottom of the purse, two rolls of quarters weighed heavily.

  Amazingly, the pay phone on the platform had a dial tone, but when Jay’s home phone began to ring, the R train came, so she hung up and ducked into the car. Soon she reached the Lexington Avenue station and switched for the 6. Before midnight, Casey found herself in front of Jay’s apartment building on York Avenue.

  With her own set of keys, she let herself into Jay’s cramped lobby—its walls painted a Schiaparelli pink. The lobby had just enough square footage for an upholstered stool opposite the elevator and a path for a resident to reach the six mailboxes behind the staircase. Jay’s box, as she’d predicted, was jammed, including a fat alumni magazine from Lawrenceville where he’d been a day boy. Casey flipped through his heavy stack of mail. They had an arrangement where he gave her checkbooks with signed blank checks and she paid his bills. He didn’t have time to sleep or spend money on a regular basis; his big-ticket items were skiing in the winter, golfing in the summer, and the repayment of school loans. In January, he’d received a hundred percent bonus and made one hundred and sixty thousand dollars in total compensation. Their point of view on money was identical: Whoever had more covered for the other. At school, when she’d had extra because her weekend job was steady, she’d paid their expenses. And now that he earned much more money, he picked up the tab.

  In return, when she stayed over during weekends and vacations, while her parents had the impression she was sleeping at Virginia’s, Casey did housewifey things for Jay—went to the dry cleaner for his shirts, tidied the apartment, scrubbed the bathtub, stocked the refrigerator with orange juice, milk, cereal, and coffee. She helped him select his suits, shirts, and ties—he preferred Paul Stuart over Brooks—and every night when they spoke on the phone while her parents were asleep, she reminded him to take his vitamins before saying good night. She could’ve cooked more but lacked real interest in the domestic arts—her repertoire was limited to baked ziti made with Ragú sauce and Polly-O cheese and a Lipton’s Onion Soup mix meat loaf. Nevertheless, Jay was grateful. He was a pleasure to take care of because he had beautiful manners. For that, Casey took her hat off to his mother, Mary Ellen.

  Casey’s face was hurting. In the dim light from a pink glass chandelier installed by the landlord’s nephew, she opened her compact to check her face. Her father’s mark on her face was less distinctly a hand—more liver shaped. She put away the mirror. Ja
y didn’t know about her father’s hitting her. He knew her parents were difficult; he was aware that she wasn’t meant to date white guys. But Casey never told anyone about the hitting. When she was a girl, her mother warned her and Tina that in America, if your parents disciplined you and the teachers at school found out, the state would put you in an orphanage. Consequently, Casey and Tina never told anyone anything. As they grew older, they saw their parents working yet unable to get ahead. Leah looked perpetually frightened in the streets, and both she and Joseph were treated like idiots by their customers, who cared little that the hardworking pair were fluent and literate in another language. Casey and Tina saw their parents’ difficulties and believed that Leah and Joseph meant well. And they feared their parents’ actions would be misunderstood. As if to confirm it, Jay called her parents bigoted: “Your silence about me is a form of collusion with their racism.”

  To Casey, it seemed upside down to call a minority person a racist, or a woman a sexist, a poor person a snob, a gay person a homophobe, an old person an ageist, a Jewish person an anti-Semite. All these labels were carelessly bandied about at school. But she admitted that it was possible to hate yourself and easy to hate others because you’d been hated. Hatred had its own logic of symbiosis. Her father refused to buy a Japanese car and instead drove an Oldsmobile Delta 88. Casey found this absurd, yet she’d never had a brother shot by a Japanese soldier or experienced a hostile colonial occupation. She saw that her father’s stance was a powerless person’s sorry attempt to regain some dignity. Casey wanted to believe she could rise above her father’s smallness. But the crazy thing was that her father probably considered himself just as Casey considered herself: broad-minded and fair.

  She was no longer welcome in his house; she was no longer his daughter, he’d said this. He might be right that she had no idea what it was to lose everything. Had she lost everything? Life seemed too vast, so many things to consider, and she was overwhelmed. How would she explain to Jay what had happened? He would see the bruises and think her father was a monster. Jay’s own father had walked out when he was three. Casey hoped Jay wasn’t home. In the morning, after sleep and coffee, she’d talk to him. The elevator finally arrived.

  Inside the apartment, Casey heard the bathroom radio that Jay never turned off, but it didn’t sound like the news. Jay preferred the station with its spooled taped news reports because it broadcast the weather in five-minute intervals, but also because the editorial content was so absurd. He called it radio station bang-bang because from listening to it, you’d think that all there was in New York was bedlam, murder, and mayhem.

  Casey dropped her bags on his Jennifer Convertible sleeper sofa, removed her hat, and brushed her hair back with her hands. Then she plopped down in Jay’s grandmother’s armchair—the only good piece of furniture in the place. Casey planned to have it re-covered for him one of these days; Jay’s maternal grandmother, who’d recently died, had watched over him and his brother when they were boys while their mother worked at the Trenton Public Library. Jay was unequivocal in his adoration of her. Casey leaned back, feeling calm, nearly overjoyed to be at Jay’s. Then his voice drifted from the second bedroom that he used as his office. Jay was likely on the phone. Managing directors had no qualms about calling him any time of the day. Casey leaped up and rushed to him.

  She saw the girls first. Jay lay across the beige wool carpet with two naked girls—one of them joined to him, straddling his hips, and the other crouched over his face, his mouth tight to her body. She was an attractive redhead with gold-colored eyes; the other was a pretty blonde. They looked like girls she and Jay could have known from school, but prettier than Princeton girls. Casey scrutinized them. They looked happy—their faces flushed. A half-empty bottle of red wine rested on Jay’s white Ikea desk. A year ago, he had borrowed his mother’s car, and he and Casey had driven out to Elizabeth to buy the desk and a pair of white shelves. They’d eaten Swedish meatballs in the store cafeteria. She and Jay had never had sex in this room and not on any floor in quite a while. His stereo was set to a top forty station, something he never listened to, and Casey was glad it wasn’t radio station bang-bang because that was their joke. The song playing was “Lady in Red,” and Casey focused on its maudlin lyrics and the rattling of the air conditioner—its chassis hanging out the casement window. They hadn’t noticed her yet.

  Casey stood, unwilling—or unable—to speak. In her mind, she kept repeating, Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. It seemed almost a pity to interrupt them; they were having so much pleasure. The three of them resembled gleeful children playing a game. They were youthful and attractive, and their sex looked like a sporting exercise more than anything else. Jay opened his eyes from his labor and stretched his neck upward, jostling the blond one with the spectacular breasts who was perched on his shoulders. He wondered how he would manage to satisfy both girls. He didn’t want to get a weak performance review back at some Louisiana sorority house. The fantasy he’d held for years was turning out to be less than satisfying. Nevertheless, he congratulated himself, because he would never have discovered this information in any other way. No matter what, however, he could not climax—must keep the boat afloat, he told himself.

  The girl with the long legs wrapped loosely around Jay’s neck continued to thrust her pale hips toward his face. For an instant, she woke from her dreamy gaze and pulled herself away from him, adjusted her position, and then thrust on.

  Casey felt herself fold inward like a dying fire—flames vanishing, the embers turning to black ash. She wondered if she could survive the moment. Her limbs wouldn’t move. She felt stupid more than angry, and her pride instructed her to be composed in front of these pretty girls who were fucking her boyfriend. She inhaled deeply and looked down at her feet. She’d put on black espadrilles when she left her parents’ house, and she felt ridiculous wearing shoes, because she was the only one in the room wearing any.

  Yet she could hardly look away from the three bodies, their bright skin taut and shimmering in the low wattage of the desk lamp. The longer she looked, the less human they appeared, as if they were a more primeval species.

  Jay turned his neck a few degrees. “Oh God. Casey. What happened? To your face? Are you all right?” He freed himself suddenly from the girls, saying, “Excuse me.” He pulled on a pair of blue boxer shorts over his condom-covered erection. He was so upset about her face that he didn’t think to explain the ménage.

  Casey stared at him as if she had never seen him before, then turned away. It hurt to look at him. She wanted the girls to get dressed, but they were in no rush. They didn’t know who she was, only that she was intruding. Why should they rush to pick up their things?

  Jay combed his tousled hair with his fingers. “This is Brenda,” he said of the redhead, and the blonde’s name was Sheila. They smiled genially, not thinking that the Asian girl was Jay’s girlfriend. They’d asked him if he had a girl, and he’d said, “No.”

  They were juniors from LSU who’d gone into a fancy Upper East Side bar with their sorority sisters on an annual end-of-the-year trip. After several margaritas each, the sorority sisters played Truth or Dare. Jay was a dare for Sheila, and when Brenda was also dared to find a one-nighter, the girls decided that it would be safer to do a triple rather than split up with strangers. They agreed on Jay. Brenda liked his pretty eyes and his jacket and tie, and Sheila thought he looked disease-free.

  Holding Brenda’s hand, Sheila approached Jay and asked if he’d oblige a couple of girls from out of town. At first Jay didn’t understand. Then they asked if he’d ever done a neck shot. A tray of tequila appeared. “Observe,” Sheila said. She rubbed lemon on Jay’s neck, then dabbed coarse salt on it. Brenda licked the area and downed a shot expertly.

  “Your turn,” they chirped like twin girls. Sheila applied juice and salt to Brenda’s neck and handed Jay his shot. Jay, seeing himself as a sporting fellow, did it perfectly on his first try.

  “Hey, Jay, what do you say?” She
ila asked him—proud of her rhyme.

  “Beats quarters,” he said.

  Jay’s colleagues, who dragged him to the bar after closing a deal, nearly fell down at the young man’s luck. “Fuck me,” one of the older men cried out.

  Brenda winked at him. “No, thank you, sweetie, this one will do.”

  Another of the men said, “Young Currie, don’t be a schmuck. This is better than making a million a year. You may never ever—” he appraised Sheila, then took some air into his lungs, “ever—” he shook his head, “get this opportunity again. Carpe diem, you get me?”

  Jay left the bar with a girl on each arm, hoots and hollers of applause cresting like a wave behind him. At the apartment, Sheila tuned the stereo and Brenda did a little dance while she took off her clothes. Not ten minutes into their dare, Casey walked in.

  “Hey there,” Brenda said to Casey in a friendly voice. It crossed her mind that maybe Casey might be Jay’s roommate, girlfriend, or even just friend. She could be his adopted sister. None of it was very clear, and Brenda’s buzz was fizzling out. Her best friend’s cousin Lola had an adopted sister who was Chinese and looked a bit like this girl, but not so tall.

  Sheila hooked her brassiere. “Hi.” She smiled brightly, with some flash of concern for the girl, who looked as if she’d been mugged or something. It was a little spooky how she didn’t talk.

  Casey tried to smile, but moving her face hurt. She tried to pretend she was meeting people from school or Jay’s work, but she couldn’t stand it. She turned and rushed to the master bath in Jay’s bedroom and locked the door.

  She retched a bitter liquid tasting of cigarettes. With water, she rinsed her mouth quickly, then glanced up. In the three-way mirror, she saw her face. The right side was purple, and her left eye had a curved gash above a blue-green-streaked bruise. Jay knocked, and Casey opened the door to push past him as he was saying something she couldn’t hear. She might have been shouting, she wasn’t sure. It was as though he were underwater and she were standing on shore. She got to the living room, pulled her hat down over her head, slipped on her sunglasses, and grabbed her bags. She dashed out the door and ran down the flights of stairs, gulping air to calm her wild heart.