"Well. I don't know. The Empire State Building? My aunt used to work on the second floor."
"No longer? I love this building. I have been there three years."
"Three years ago."
"Oui."
"Oui."
Margaret pondered. Zabar's?
"Where are you staying?" she said.
"Hotel Elysée. You will meet me here, perhaps? Friday. We will have lunch downtown. Then perhaps a museum? I hope to see the Frick Collection. You will join me, yes?"
Well, Margaret thought, if this is what it entails—following Martin around—perhaps I can be his guide.
EDWARD HAD GONE OUT for the evening with a professor from Princeton whom his department was hopelessly wooing, so Margaret called Lily. They decided to do what it seemed to Margaret one always did when one required something to do—go to a restaurant. Lily expressed regret at the absence of Edward, but Margaret assured her she need not be so polite.
"I mean, how much life-affirming quotation can a person stand?" Margaret said. "Let him go show off to undergraduates. He's getting on my nerves."
Lily looked at her closely. "Margaret," she said, "Edward is not one of your schmucky college boyfriends."
"No. I didn't know him in college, that's true."
Margaret wondered if she would tell Lily about Martin, now that she finally had the chance. She observed her own actions these days with great curiosity, as if they were someone else's. I don't seem to be telling her, she noted. I want to, but somehow, given this opportunity at last, I am finding it difficult. I can't after all just announce it: The man on the plane! He's here! He's come for me!
They decided to go downtown to a restaurant owned by some friends. One of the friends was one of Margaret's college boyfriends, not schmucky at all, except that he had stubbornly preferred boys and came home from a summer in Rome with one who looked almost exactly like him. They had recently opened a restaurant in TriBeCa called Il Conto, and to their dismay, it had been discovered and approved by those people in New York who spend each evening discovering and approving new restaurants. Il Conto was a success. The two startled owners were now required to run it. To take reservations over the phone was easy enough, but then they had to honor them. They had to buy sufficient finocchio. The restaurant was not the toy they had expected, but a business crowded with artists and actors and agents all dressed in black and waiting, beaks gaping, to be fed.
Whenever Margaret went there, the room, undulating with black-clad figures, roaring with conversation, appeared to her as a massive, many-headed beast, the monstrous offspring of a funeral and a bar mitzvah.
Their friends were there, bookends in rumpled white shirts and Italian pants.
"Go away," Jimmy said desperately after he'd kissed them hello. "There's no room. There's no food."
"Stupid," said Carlo. "There's always room. There's always food."
They waited at the bar. It was early, so they would not have to wait too long.
"Maybe I'm not meant to be married," Margaret said, watching Jimmy fondly as he stood miserably at the door greeting patrons. She remembered waiting in the hall of his dorm so that she could accidentally run into him when he came out of his room. I'm going to tell her about Martin now, she thought. "There's this guy I met on the plane—"
"Margaret, adultery is such a middle-class indulgence."
"Edward thinks it's one's civic duty."
Lily frowned. "Edward?" she said thoughtfully.
Edward. Margaret sat on a barstool and sighed.
"What is it?" Lily said, responding to the sigh, tilting her head with both playful mock tenderness and real tenderness.
"Nothing."
It was as if, once the idea of adultery had come into her head, it was the only idea there. She continued to notice men everywhere, all the time: men in suits, men in jeans; she noticed the bulge running diagonally across the frayed fly of every pair of faded 501s. Just like an old queen, checking out the merchandise. She watched young men in khaki pants filling out deposit slips at the bank; she watched their wrists, showing from their blue oxford cuffs, the way Victorian men had once strained to catch a glimpse of a well-turned ankle. She assessed delivery boys in their rippling bicycle pants. She had become an absurd receptor of sensory stimulation, undiscriminating, insatiable, a monster of empiricism.
Lily put her hand on Margaret's shoulder and said, again, "What?"
"Hi!" said a man who had silently—it seemed silent to Margaret anyway—crept up beside them. "You're waiting, too, huh? Like orphans in an orphanage! What a city. My friend is meeting me here. I read about this place."