Regardless of our conspicuous consumption, Nina does an incredible job: she is smooth, well rehearsed, and thoroughly entrenched in the work. Bryce asks a question and she answers it before he finishes his sentence. She’s no visionary but she knows significantly more than anyone else in the room about the thing she’s discussing. I could not compete. I am proud of her.
Later, at our desks, I high-five her and we both laugh. “Let’s get a drink later,” I say. “Let’s get a drink now,” she says. It is two p.m. Sitting in my inbox is an email from my mother, apologizing for her behavior. I don’t feel like replying to it, and so I don’t. We both shut down our computers and discreetly leave the building. We go to a hotel bar six blocks away, and I order a Manhattan and Nina orders a gin martini, and we drink them very quickly and then order another round, and before long we are destroyed. Nina keeps checking her phone, which rewards her with frequent messages; theirs is a true love. “Do you think anyone will notice we’re gone?” she says. “They’re going to notice that dress is missing,” I say. She laughs and says, “It’s pretty hot, right?” I finish my drink. I ask her why she wore it. “Do you care that people were staring at your body? I mean, I was staring at it. It was all there for me to look at.”
“I don’t care if anyone sexualizes me as long as they remember me,” she says. “I don’t trust anyone anyway.” “I don’t either,” I say. We drink more. We begin to tell each other our secrets, about the things men have done to us, the horrible things. Since I am older, I have had more time to have had horrible things happen to me, but she has the extra layer of being Korean, and there’s a fetishization that goes along with being of Asian descent in this country that I, average Jewess, have never had to contend with. She shares some stories with me: creepy high school teachers, creepy college professors, creepy creeps. “No one’s ever followed me on the subway like that before,” I admit. “Like once a week it happens,” she says. She checks her phone again and sighs. Her real desires remain unfulfilled.
I tell her about the men who came through my household after my father died. My mother was always inviting over all these pothead social activists. A few of them would insist I sit on their lap and I could feel them hard up against me. “That was how I got attention, whether I wanted it or not,” I say. “It was always a secret between me and them.” “Did they ever stick it in?” she asks. “I always wore pants to dinner at my house,” I say.
One more drink and we’re sharing our rape stories. Nearly every woman I know has one. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard one of these stories I could buy an enormous, plush pillow with which to smother my tear-stained face. Near rape, date rape, rape rape, it’s all the same, I think. Close enough is rape. Once I had a friend tell me this breathless, elaborate story about fighting off a drunk man at a party. He tears her dress, scratches her skin, throttles her throat, and it ends with her punching him in the eye, but, she points out repeatedly, he never actually fucks her. “Thank god nothing happened,” she said to me. I stared at her, and then slowly responded. “Yes,” I said. “Thank god for that.”
Nina’s phone vibrates and she looks at it, scrolls, sighs with annoyance, and says, “Whatever,” and I say, “Exactly,” and we clink glasses and I tell her one more time that she did a good job on her presentation and she says, “Are you sure?” and I say, “I am sure,” and she says, “You wouldn’t lie to me, right?” and I say, “Nina, I am not here to lie to you, I am here to be your friend,” and she says, “Sister,” and I say, “That’s right, sister.”
Three drinks in and it is five p.m. and the bar is starting to fill up. Nina spills a little of her cocktail on her dress. The liquid is clear and it doesn’t matter, but it’s upsetting to her nonetheless and she grabs her purse and crosses the bar dramatically and ends up walking into the kitchen and then a waiter turns her around and points her in the right direction. I watch all this chuckling to myself. Oh, Nina, I think, you and your tight little dress.
Then her phone buzzes in front of me and I look at it because I am pie-eyed and also because I want to know what’s going on in her life that she’s not telling me. It’s a text from Bryce telling her he was glad she bought the dress after all, and then another text from him telling her how hot she looked in it, and then another text from him telling her that he would like to take it off her, and then another asking her to meet him at seven, and then a final text indicating specific oral desires, both given and received. And I say to myself: Oh. I don’t need to jump off cliffs into oceans to die, because every day there is a little death waiting for me. All I have to do is wake up and walk out the front door.
Indigo Gets a Divorce
We meet in the courtyard of a café near her loft, sunlight dotting us through a makeshift roof of narrow wooden beams. Overhead also are lustrous grapevines, which are spotted with nascent green grapes as small as nipples. Indigo is too thin, a wisp, the succulent post-pregnancy blossom faded. She is wearing a long scarf of raw, gray, glittering silk, and a flowing black dress, crystals embedded along the chest and the base of the skirt. This is her version of mourning.
I say, “Tell me everything.”
Her husband, Todd, has moved into a corporate apartment near his office. “Not that he was home that much to start,” she says. “Poor little Efraim,” I say. He is resting in a baby seat on the chair next to her. “He must miss his daddy.” “You can’t miss something that’s already gone,” she says. Her mother flew in from Trinidad the instant she heard and is cleaning their house as we sit there. “She fired the cleaning woman,” says Indigo. “Now I’ll never get rid of her.” She takes a deep, meditative breath, and I wait for her to say something balanced or forgiving or restorative, and she says, “I can’t believe I’ll be stuck with my mother in my home for the next eighteen years.”
“I didn’t see any of this coming,” I say. I would have called a totally different ending to their story. Divorce, perhaps, but ten years down the road, another child or two between them. We have expectations of our friends. I thought she was gone forever, off to Baby World, like all the other people in my life who’ve had children: Miriam, who moved to Connecticut with Howard and the twins, at last, Connecticut, a place to collapse; or Peter and Glenn, who moved to the DC suburbs for Glenn’s job but also because it was a better place to raise their adopted Chinese baby, Cassandra; or Pam, sweet Pam, who moved nowhere at all, just stayed in the same old apartment in Astoria, but disappeared, withdrew, a soldier surrendering early in the war.