“Help you?” said the counter person.
“Kristin, hey,” said Greer. It was Kristin Vells, who lived on their street, and who’d been on their school bus year after year. Kristin who had been in the bottom reading group, the Koalas. She now wore a red Pie Land smock, and was as affectless as ever as she rang up their slices and their sodas. “You living at home?” Greer asked her.
“Yeah. It’s not too bad.” Kristin’s eyes passed across the two of them, and she said to Cory, “You’re living at home too, right? I’ve seen you.” As if to warn him: Don’t think you’re so much better than me, the way you two brains always thought you were.
“Yeah,” he said. He was no better or worse than Kristin Vells. Now Cory noticed that the Ms. Pac-Man machine was gone. Everyone had their own games at home these days and didn’t need to play in public. Over recent years, since the start of the large-scale retraction into the self, Cory had come to understand that feeling, and he actually wished he was at home right now too, playing another one of Alby’s video games.
He and Greer sat at a table and she held her dripping slice away from her as she ate, saying, “I can’t get anything on my outfit. I have so few clothes with me.”
“Greer,” he said. “Look at me.” Her eyes did a worried sweep up from plate to face. “I don’t know what our lives are going to be like,” Cory said, improvising. “Because who would have expected this would happen to Alby?”
“No one,” she said, her voice small.
“But it did, yeah it did, and then this other thing happened to my mom, and now this other thing has happened to me.”
“What thing?”
“Falling from grace with you.” His voice ached with strain. “Things are different for me now.”
“I know.”
“But different in various ways.”
“Like what else?”
“I don’t know. Things that don’t seem like me. For instance, I snorted heroin,” he said.
There was a dreadful suspension of time and a quick sequence of facial expressions he’d never seen on Greer before, and then she said, “You have got to be kidding me.”
“You know, this is a moment when you being all shocked isn’t going to do either of us any good.”
“Well, I’m sorry. Do you want me to be fake?”
“Fake would be good. Fake would actually be excellent. What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m basically in a state that is not like any state I have ever been in. And you can say to me, oh, I ought to get a job as your consultant for some upcoming high-profile event in San Francisco, but that would mean that you don’t understand where I am right now. Where my mind has taken me since this happened.”
“I loved Alby too, Cory. I think about him all the time, and I just fall apart.” Her voice was winding up and tightening. “I can picture him sitting with me, reading Encyclopedia Brown. I can picture him there, and I get so upset that I don’t know what to do.”
“I get that, but it’s not what I’m trying to say. I let myself be a consultant-in-training for a while, like we agreed I would, and now it’s over, sooner than it was supposed to be, and instead I’m here. And you, you’re out there working for this good place, working for someone who’s this shining example. You write moving speeches that matter, and you’re doing great. Stay with it, Greer. See it through.”
“So what will you do now?” she finally asked, her voice formal and unfamiliar.
“Oh, I guess I’ll do what I’m doing. Live here and take care of my mom and clean a professor’s house—and another house that my mom used to clean—and hang out with the turtle and be present.”
“Cory, listen to how you’re talking. You don’t even sound like yourself.”
It was too much for her, this otherness he was demonstrating. She couldn’t tolerate it, and she would never say that. She would never say to him, “Enough already, Cory,” but instead she would just keep trying, as if he were an extremely complicated school project. Right away he remembered the condensation project at the long-ago science fair, with all those ice cubes and funnels and water balloons, and his mother standing in front of it, speaking in her broken English. He didn’t want to be Greer’s project, the dreary object of all her hard work. It had never been hard work before.
From behind the counter, listening to everything, Kristin slid a whole pale pie into the oven for a takeout order, pushing the flat wooden paddle forward like someone making an aggressive serve in an obscure sport. Rain popped lightly against the plate-glass window, and the sky darkened in this town that Cory had lived in for so long and never imagined he would live in again.
“I can’t talk about this anymore,” said Greer. “I’ll drop you off at home and say goodbye to my parents, and then I have to get to Boston. Faith is meeting us in Cambridge at the bar of the Charles for a brainstorming thing, and tomorrow is the event.”
“Then you should definitely get going. The rain.”
Together they dutifully looked out at the rain, which was quickly getting heavier. He imagined her in her little red compact rental car, her jaw set as she drove with wipers mewing, heading toward Boston and a good hotel and women’s rights and a solid future and Faith Frank, who waited there like someone who could provide relief, which he could no longer do.
They both dropped some money on the table for Kristin, neither of them wanting to cede the task of tipping to the other. Because of that, it turned out the amount they left her was far too great, which was either an insulting gesture or a magnanimous one, depending on how you looked at it.
SEVEN
Very early each workday morning in the large, ivy-wrapped house in the suburb of Scarsdale, New York, Zee could hear the Vitamix TurboBlend 4500 roar as her mother, the Hon. Wendy Eisenstat, made vaguely newsprint-colored smoothies from blueberries and kiwis and protein powder and stevia and ice. “Dick, flaxseed or no?” Zee heard, and then the Hon. Richard Eisenstat called out his preference on this particular day. Then both judges went for a run through the local landscaped lanes of this expensive town, side by side like twin steeds, before leaving for their jobs at the Westchester County Supreme Court. Though Zee had an open invitation to run with them, the thought of it was terrible: running with her parents in the town where she’d grown up, living with them once again like an oversized child, while working at a job she hated. Running, yet getting nowhere.
Sometimes Zee and the other paralegals at Schenck, DeVillers, an enormous law firm in the financial district of New York City, were asked to stay very late. Up and down the corridor, lawyers sat in their individual offices, hunched over laptops or phones or black plastic bento boxes. But in an improvised area at the far end of the hall was a little gypsy encampment, where the paralegals all recognized one another as part of the same loosely delineated tribe, yet were also separate, weary, and guarded, in possession of complicated backstories that moderately absorbed Zee and served as one of the only ways she could keep herself at all interested in her job.
Across from her in the paralegals’ cluster was the heavy woman who had worked in a morgue, and who on breaks told stories about that job, and they all gathered around to listen. Also among them was the long-fingered, long-wristed man; recently Zee had discreetly Googled “abnormally long fingers” and the first hit she got was the medical term arachnodactyly. Fingers like a spider. He definitely had that.
And surely the other paralegals thought of Zee as just another kind of singular workplace character—in this case, the androgynous, sexually appealing gay woman. In the underheated office at Schenck, DeVillers on this very cold night in winter, she wore a peacoat and watch cap, which gave her the appearance of a member of a boy band who was trying to go incognito.