She thought about texting Hutton back, but…she burned with hurt and rejection. If he was going to treat her like this for the millionth time, the very least he could do was call. Or text during the day; she’d settle for that.
Callie walked out into the street. The city her oyster, she was alone, dressed up, had no plans, and now she had income to count on. Should I treat myself to a late-night dinner at the bar at Balthazar? she wondered.
No. She wasn’t hungry; and besides, she’d just eaten an entire two-person serving of assorted meats. She needed…to dance it off, she realized. She hopped in a cab and headed back to her neighborhood, stopping into Outcast, the venerable gay bar around the corner from her apartment.
Outcast was packed tonight with shirtless guys—most of them embarrassingly young—and a lone bachelorette party getting sloppy drunk at the bar. Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” hit the speakers as soon as she walked in. Her friend Jared was behind the bar in a white tank top and extremely low-slung jean shorts. She lifted herself up onto the polished wood, elbowing two boyish blondes out of the way, and kissed him hello.
“Babe!” Jared yelled over the music. “Shots?”
She nodded. He passed her two ounces of tequila and she knocked it back without salt or lime, tossing him her tote bag to stash behind the bar.
“I have to dance!” she screamed over the music. “Come find me when you want to smoke!”
Callie fought her way through the dance floor into the middle, shimmying between couples. She found a two-foot circle all to herself and started dancing, throwing her hips around while her feet moved in complicated steps, a mishmash of the ten years she’d spent doing competitive jazz routines. The DJ mixed “Drunk Girls” into “Bad Girls,” then sped up the beat and added some of the vocals from Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy Is Mine” over another beat made up of Lil Wayne grunting. Callie never wanted it to end.
She stayed on the dance floor until she was soaked in sweat, then ducked out for a cigarette with Jared. They came inside for another round of shots and a little bit of cocaine; she danced more; they smoked more; did more shots; danced more; did more coke, then finally closed down the bar around 3:00 a.m. Callie grabbed her bag from behind the bar, walked over to the DJ—a platinum-haired waif crossing gender’s Rubicon from one side to the other, though she couldn’t quite tell in which direction—and kissed them full on the mouth.
“That was epic,” she said. “Thank you. Do you have a card?”
“Anytime.” The DJ winked, handing their card to Callie. “Let me know if you want me for anything.”
Callie slung her bag over her shoulder and smiled. “Good night, you guys. That was so much fun. It was exactly what I needed.”
She hugged Jared and walked the single block back to her apartment in the rain, collapsing into bed alone, the speaker buzz still ringing in her ears.
Cat lay in her bed on Monday night while a summer storm raged outside, the night flashing white with lightning as the raindrops beat a steady drum on her building’s lumpy windowpanes.
She tried to plan an outfit for the next day while staring out the window. No suede in the rain, she told herself. No white. Tomorrow would have to be all black, she decided, something appropriate for her own funeral.
Paula had left a voicemail asking her to come in the next day, but Cat didn’t know what that meant. She’d spent her whole life being a good girl, a hard worker. The very idea of being reprimanded at the one place where she’d managed success in her life made her so sick to her stomach that she’d spent the entire day in bed. Apparently Bess’s mother had texted Cat’s mother, Anais, a link to the New York Post story. Cat thought of the email her mother had sent her, the last thing she’d read on her phone before turning it off again:
Schate Katteke, hoe moeilijk. U besteedt te veel momenten zoeken naar je eigen mooie weerspiegeling, en nu: heb je het gevonden. Ik zie U graag, maar je bent niet op zoek naar de juiste dingen.
[Dearest little kitten, how hard. You spend too much time searching for your own reflection, and now: you have found it. I love you but you are looking for the wrong things.]
It was so easy for her to say that. Rijmenam—the Flemish hamlet that Takeshi and Anais Ono lived in just north of Brussels—wasn’t just three thousand miles away. It was actual lifetimes, universes, galaxies away. The little stores open only from eleven to three, and never on weekends; her mother’s two Clydesdale horses, rough and muddy and velvet-mouthed; the tidy little BMW that her father drove into town; the farming priest whose eggs they left a fifty-cent piece in the honor box for. It was all another world. When their butcher died, Anais had gone to his funeral, wept with his widow. Cat shopped at Whole Foods.
In the 1970s, her father had been sent to Brussels by Mikimoto to attend a European law school course, while her mother, an abstract painter, had been working extra hours at a country stables just off the train stop in Jezus-Eik, a small Flemish town outside the city.
Takeshi Ono had shown up one afternoon to the stables sporting brand-new jodhpurs, tall patent boots, an immaculately flocked helmet, and a spotless suede two-button sport coat. Nearly two meters high, thin as a rail, and perfectly groomed, he looked as though he’d simply gone into a riding store and asked for the best—which, of course, he had, after receiving an invitation for an afternoon of riding from one of his new colleagues.
He couldn’t yet read Flemish well enough to follow the signs, so Takeshi wandered through a few stone archways until he reached a set of white stucco Tudor-style stables arranged around a dirt ring. A ruddy-faced girl with braids—the picture of rural health, practically an eighteenth-century painting—had stood in the middle of the ring running a pretty little painted mare in a circle. She’d looked at him and giggled at his new clothes. He looked like he belonged in a magazine.
“Anais est a la bas,” she’d said in heavily accented French, assuming he’d have no Flemish at all. “Back,” she continued in English. “Back by the horse sleeping,” she directed, pointing to stables that made a hallway to another ring, that one covered. He nodded, gave a small bow in thanks, then strode purposefully across the dirt to the stalls.
At that very moment Anais Pieters, in a ripped pair of overalls and a stained T-shirt reading “Fuck Nixon,” was trying to pick out the hoof of their new pony. Anais was backing him into the stall, but Chokotoff wouldn’t go. She gave up on moving him and tied his bridle loosely to the stall door, leaving too much slack. As she ran her hand down the horse’s leg, applying pressure at the knee to let him know she’d be picking up his foot, Takeshi appeared, hands outstretched to pet the horse, his destiny.