“What do you mean? From . . . Hindi? Sorry, is this Hindi?” Margaret looked toward the speakers, music lowered but still on.
“Ugh, no, in bed, you prude,” Alice laughed. “And I think it’s Punjabi. What’s it like on the other side, anyway? Married sex, I mean.”
“Oh, I don’t find it much different from unmarried sex. With Mac,” Margaret said.
“And . . . ?” Lainey always pushed like this, and though the others were used to it, they were still grateful and uncomfortable both. They were nosy, too, but not quite so willing to pry.
“It’s fine.” Margaret shrugged.
“Huh. Don’t take this the wrong way, M, but why would you marry someone you didn’t have great sex with? I mean, at least, like starting out? If it’s going to get old, shouldn’t it start amazing?” Lainey always needled Margaret, and the meaner she was, the more Margaret sought her approval.
“I don’t know,” Margaret said. “Maybe I don’t think sex is everything in a relationship.”
“Well, neither do I,” said Lainey. “But it’s sure as shit not nothing. I mean, Adam, he has, like, cast a legitimate spell on me that I cannot break, no matter what.”
The stretch since their breakup following Margaret’s wedding had been their longest time apart yet, and Lainey was worried now that it would stick. Adam had been dating a fact-checker at the newspaper for long enough that she’d heard they might move in together, news that had made her feel deranged.
“But why would you want to? Break a spell like that?” Ji Sun asked, so tired of her friend’s failure to see her good fortune.
This got through, more than Lainey would let Ji Sun know, both the question and the way she asked it, the exasperation that revealed to Lainey, if only subconsciously, Ji Sun’s own frustrated desire for that kind of partner, for Adam himself. She would remember the way that Ji Sun had asked it, the look on her face in the mirror, when she and Adam got back together that June, a month before Alice’s wedding, and sated by a morning of just the sort of sex she’d missed so much, they wandered out of the apartment in search of ice cream, and she asked him to marry her.
He said yes, and swept her up, smiled his glorious, boring smile, and asked if she’d let him ask her again, maybe on a sailboat, so they’d have a good story to tell his parents, whom he would like to have pay in large part for the wedding. She chafed at how close practicality lay in wait beside romance, but she thought of the salt air and his bright face, a ring she chose for herself, and it dazzled her—let him tell his parents whatever he liked.
But wasn’t this a good story, too, surrounded by tropical fruits at their corner bodega, both sweaty and spent and as certain as they’d ever been, as they would ever be, about anything, for the rest of their lives?
Chapter 27
By the second year of their engagement, with no wedding date in sight, the others had begun to call Lainey and Adam the fiancées.
Meeting the fiancées, Ji Sun texted Margaret now, then coming yr way so get out the good stuff.
Margaret had begun working in a perfume store in the East Village, a job she didn’t strictly need, but liked as it gave her time to work on Margaret’s Musings, the blog that had improbably become her job, though the others didn’t understand what this meant, and whether she actually made any money or was just paid in clothes and face creams.
She photographed things she liked and wrote little treacly paragraphs about why. Lainey couldn’t discern much of a guiding principle beyond this; she might feature a café one day and an aloe vera plant the next. But she had a decent eye and a very expensive camera, and of course she appeared in many of the photos herself, wearing clothes that the reader could imagining layering with that same ease, and maybe they’d spin in the middle of a busy Brooklyn street then, too, and smile so brightly that a taxi driver would be moved to slow down and wave. Soon other websites had begun linking to her blog, and she was back on television, live now, as a Lifestyle Expert who appeared on Good Morning America a few times a month to tell women how to spend their money. The owners of the perfume store had hired her after she wrote an entry about their shop, and lovingly photographed Civet, their teacup Bichon Frisé, whom she described as smelling like the pouf in a vintage powder compact.
This was a nice image, Lainey would allow, but it rankled her to no end that Margaret was the one in the group considered a writer now, even though for the most part her prose was clumsy and labored, as well as mind-numbingly repetitive. The word transformative appeared in half the posts, and nearly every single one ended with the same invitation to the reader to Leave a comment if you like; I would absolutely adore hearing from you!
No one could ever find the door to the perfume shop, and Lainey and Ji Sun struggled even though they’d visited before. They’d lived in New York too long to ask, and though they had maps on their phones now, GPS couldn’t account for the way the garden-level shop seemed to retreat further from the street the nearer they got.
Adam finally discovered the door, overgrown with ivy that obscured the faint gold filigree that served as the only indication this was a place of business rather than some eccentric’s storefront home.
“How does this place stay in business?” he asked.
“You’ll see,” Lainey said, and opened the door to the plush, dark room. A dozen footstools in plummy velvet wound a path through the forest of black-lacquered tabletops; any surface not gleaming with gold and glass bottles heaved instead with tremendous bouquets of roses, so large they looked like topiaries, clouds.
“Holy shit,” Adam said.
“Only in New York, right!” Margaret beamed from a throne behind the counter. She loved to say this, marveled more than any of them at the city’s offerings. Can you believe this? About a pork bun, a drag bar, a beatboxer in the subway. Only in New York!
“It’s easy to see New York as one big amusement park if you’ve got loads of money,” Lainey said once. “Try living here broke.” Not that she knew what that was like, either, living as she still did with Ji Sun, but Margaret always seemed to stumble up like this, into still more wonder, oblivious as to why everyone else wasn’t doing just the same.
Margaret hugged each one of them in turn, breathed them in.
“Scent-free. Good,” she said. “Let me choose something for each of you! I’ll make samples.” She wore one of her diaphanous tops, wafty layers of pale cream silk that made her look a moth alighting on bright bottles in this basement boudoir.
Lainey lifted a bell jar from atop a seventy-eight-dollar candle, raised the candle up, and let her septum ring clink on the glass. It smelled like honey and cheese and about-to-rot funeral flowers.
“Ooh, let me grab one I know you’ll love,” Margaret said, and put down her perfume bottles, lifted another bell jar, and held it beneath Lainey’s nose. “You don’t even need the candle. The scent infuses these.”
“Ungh,” Lainey said, the smell taking her to another place. “That’s soo good. What is it? Tea?”
“Lapsang souchong! You have a good nose. Also toasted rice, tobacco smoke, and rose. I get leather, but it’s not listed among the notes.”
“Wow,” Lainey said. “Too bad it’s eighty bucks.”
“I’ll buy one for our place,” Ji Sun said.
Ji Sun was generous but unpredictable, her wealth an undercurrent the others acknowledged but tried not to pay too much attention to, as though if they did, something precarious that kept them close across this economic gulf might topple.
“No, don’t do that. It’s ridiculous.” Lainey felt enough guilt at how much Ji Sun subsidized her lifestyle, how little she paid her friend in rent, and how often Adam stayed over. “That price. I would feel physically ill burning a candle that cost that much.”
“Okay,” Ji Sun said, and put the box back on the table. “Suit yourself.” Money became more an issue as they moved away from co
llege, where everyone had lived in the same sort of space, and did the same work, more or less. Now they were choosing or changing lanes—marrying rich, as Margaret already had; coming into trust funds; failing to get interviews for even the poorly paid entry-level jobs that Quincy-Hawthorn had led them to believe were beneath them. Ji Sun wouldn’t pretend that the stakes were the same for her, but nor would she be made to feel guilty for her parents’ successes. “Margaret, help me choose something to bring to Mac’s family.”
They were headed together to Mac’s grandmother’s estate in rural Connecticut at the end of that summer. The trip was still months away, but they talked about it often, their reunion. They hardly saw Alice, even though she and Kushi lived in Brooklyn now, Alice having matched at Langone Hospital in March, and Kushi on a fellowship at Lenox Hill. As a first-year resident, Alice had strict vacation allowances, and they’d planned the trip around when she could get away.
“Are you sure it’s not going to be weird, with his cousins? Like we’re crashing a family reunion?” Lainey would have preferred to have the reunion with just them, but not having to pay for a full week together was hard to pass up.
“I swear, we will barely even notice them. The place has its own lake. We won’t even have to see them if we don’t want. Except in the pool. Besides, his cousins stay there all summer. They’ll be happy for some fresh blood.”
“All summer, huh?” Adam said. “What do they do?”
Margaret shrugged. “What does anyone. Do.”
“You should slap that little anticapitalist koan up on your blog, Margaret,” Lainey said.
“I know you’re teasing me,” Margaret said, “but French people aren’t defined by their work the way we Americans are.” She took a sleek black bottle from the table, unadorned save a simple sans-serif font, and asked for Lainey’s arm, sprayed.
Adam and Ji Sun leaned low and inhaled, the tips of their noses touching near the inside of Lainey’s elbow.
Adam laughed and Ji Sun felt lightheaded.
“That’s incredible,” Adam said. “It’s like stone, but . . . alive?” He drew Lainey closer to him, buried his face in the crook of her arm in a way that made Ji Sun sick with longing. She had by now accepted that she enjoyed this particular agony, that her desire for Adam was like a mild but chronic illness, flare-ups inevitable. Rarely did she feel woozy with it, but the combination of the scent, the space, their faces so near—it had undone a bit of the distance she’d put between herself and those feelings.
“I’m starting to get hungry,” Ji Sun said. “Can we eat?” There was a ramen place nearby with tables as elusive as the perfume shop’s door, but if they left soon they might get lucky. They did, and Ji Sun treated her friends because they didn’t expect her to, and so she could order everything she liked without the lengthy scrutinizing of the bill Lainey would otherwise do. While they ate, the smell of that mossy, sacramental stone kept lifting into the air and reaching Ji Sun, who feared she might cry into her broth.
She went back to the shop the next week and bought two bottles of the perfume, one for herself and one for Lainey. Ji Sun only wore it on evenings out, or special occasions, as its power seemed too strong for an ordinary day. It started with a straight-from-the-censer jolt of incense from some chapel where she must have worshipped in a past life. The scent shook something spiritual loose in her, made her reverent for her own skin. Lainey found it lovely but not holy, and wore it on random days, blindsiding Ji Sun over breakfast. They both brought it on the trip to Connecticut, unsummery a scent as it was, perhaps thinking its cool stone might subdue some of the swampy, relentless swelter of late August.
But neither one of them would ever be able to wear it again after what happened in Connecticut. Something turned acrid in the bottles after what Margaret did, and more sour still after what the rest of them failed to.
Chapter 28
The Connecticut compound had been dubbed the Warren before Mac’s time, for rabbit-related reasons that remained unclear. Mac’s father had told him that his grandmother adored rabbits in her youth, planted a whole unfenced field of Bibb and butter lettuces to lure them. Mac’s mother said rabbits had swarmed the property in the year after the remodel was finished, claimed her mother-in-law had had them killed by archers. One uncle said there was an underground wing somewhere that no one had ever seen where bunnies lived indoors, cared for by a decrepit butler who read them Richard Scarry books and baked them carrot muffins. If you stood at the lowest point of the land and the weather was right, he said, you could smell burning carrots on the breeze.
Their directions terminated at an ice cream shop up on a high hill, part of a working farm. Margaret had said it was just impossible to find the Warren without an escort, so they were to get ice cream and wait until Mac came to ferry them to his grandmother’s place, only two miles away but seeming more and more to be on another planet. Margaret’s instructions had listed her top three flavors, and Lainey licked a cone of “Purple Cow,” a creamy raspberry with chocolate brittle, and looked down into a valley of actual cows straight out of central casting, none purple, but all alien enough even in their ordinary colors, reminding her as they did of how quickly New York City’s streets and vistas had colonized her mind, made her forget there were hills like this, farms, animals untethered to human beings.
Lainey had experienced a version of this exact view on Margaret’s Musings, where her friend had profiled the shop a month ago. In Margaret’s photographs, the valley was greener and the ice cream a dreamier purple, more lilac and less bluey gray than the stuff melting onto Lainey’s hands now. There were no sticky wrists on Margaret’s blog. In the photos, Margaret sat on the same porch where Lainey waited now, Adam, Ji Sun, Alice, and Kushi still inside choosing flavors and browsing produce and knickknacks. Margaret wore a pair of gold linen gladiator espadrilles in the photos, paired with short-shorts and a cotton blouse. Lainey wore espadrilles now, though not in the gladiator style that required legs for days, and her shorts were even shorter. She wore a gingham top, steadfast in her belief that the right costume could change everything.
Margaret had photographed the wildflowers in milk bottles that sat on the tables, less delightful to Lainey now for having expected them. She’d been experimenting with her macro lens all summer, and one photo showed a little sweat bee doing its work, stick legs garish with hair, face desecrated by pollen, mandibles obscene.
Kushi came outside with a sundae in what looked like a milk pail.
“I got the Cattle Call! Connecticut’s answer to the Vermonster. If we eat it all, we get a cowbell!”
Kushi had driven them all from New York in an SUV borrowed from an anesthesiologist friend. The stubble on his face, his Transitions lens glasses, the sporty Keen sandals he wore—all conspired to make him look even more like the dad that Lainey knew he wanted badly to be.
“My hungry herdsman.” Alice laughed and kissed Kushi on the cheek, let the spoons she’d gathered clatter to the table.
The way Alice talked about it had Lainey believing that fourth year hadn’t been just the best year of med school to have a baby, but the only year. Having not gotten pregnant that year—in spite of “removing the goalie,” as Alice put it, right after she and Kushi were married—had turned her friend pregnancy-obsessed to a degree that unsettled Lainey, made it seem even more as though Alice was on an accelerated path to adulthood, already married and a real doctor now, trying for babies.
“For real if I’m ovulating on the day we drive there, we’re going to pull the car over and y’all will have to get out.”
“You know down to the day?”
“I know down to the moment,” Alice had said, and explained to Lainey a little bit about the charts she kept. Even in her women’s studies circles, Lainey hadn’t heard so much about cervical mucus, ovulatory bleeding, the welcome pain of mittelschmerz, the way the body’s temperature, measured precisely, would a
nnounce when it was in heat.
“All the time we spend trying to avoid it!” Lainey said, thinking back to their visits to the student health center for Plan B, the abortions she’d avoided thanks to a ready supply of the drug. “And there’s just this one little window.”
“I know,” Alice had said. She’d never been pregnant, to her knowledge, but felt even medical school hadn’t prepared her for the intimacy she now had with her own menstrual cycle. “And our timing is already so screwy.”
Their ice cream was soup by the time Margaret and Mac appeared, looking like an advertisement for leisure. Margaret wore a linen shift, the string of a white bikini knotted at her neck. Mac was deeply tanned in his tissue-weight Oxford shirt, sleeves rolled up, top three buttons undone, thick hair on his chest one of the few things Lainey found attractive about him. Adam had a patch of soft hair on his rib cage between his pecs, and Lainey realized, looking at Mac’s coarse curls now, that she still expected it might spread over his whole chest. But more likely he was done with this kind of growth at twenty-seven, and the hair would stay sparse until it turned white, fell out.
They piled back in the car, Ji Sun in the front seat as she’d been the whole way for reasons related to car sickness none of them had known her to have before this trip. Lainey watched as Margaret wrapped a scarf loosely around her hair, in its usual milkmaid crown. The white chiffon waved like a flag from Mac’s little emerald convertible as it sped down the open country road.
“She’s wearing a scarf,” Lainey said to no one. Even Margaret’s costume would have to one-up her own, animated, as Margaret’s was, from on high.
When Mac made a sharp turn off the main road onto a dirt one, Margaret’s scarf floated off her head, snatched up into the sky.
Lainey watched her friend’s delayed grasp for it, hands a slight strangle around her own bare neck, before she raised them up in the air, as if expecting the scarf would be spirited back to her on the breeze.
The Other's Gold Page 18
