“Undergrad?” she repeated. “Oh, I went to Notre Dame.”
As soon as she had admitted this, she wished she hadn’t. Having arrived in New York only five months before, she was already acquainted with the eagerness with which those interminable Ivy Leaguers pried into the facts around your college education just so they had an excuse to bludgeon you with their own. And she had stepped into his trap! “Let me guess. You went to Harvard,” she said, beating him to the punch line. She tilted her chin at him, aiming for charming defiance.
“Well, yes, actually,” Seth admitted with a nod. Unfortunately, the charming defiance didn’t manage to outshine the leaden fact of Notre Dame. He glanced over her shoulder, to see if anyone more worthy of his attention had drifted into view behind her. She hated New York at times like this, so full of intellectual phonies desperate to take any opportunity to assert their superiority in ways that, honestly, would have been considered just rude in the Midwest. “Guess they weren’t supposed to let girls from Ohio into this particular corner of the demimonde,” she told him tartly. “A Harvard boy who writes for Vanity Fair, how on earth did you get stuck talking to a loser like me?”
“Just lucky, I guess.” He shrugged, playing the double negative now. “And what do you do, Alison?”
She looked him straight in the face. “I’m, actually, I’m an actress.” She tried to keep her confidence up but she knew how idiotic this would sound to him, or anyone, in point of fact.
“So how is that going for you?” he asked, with deliberate disinterest. Too bad, she thought. I thought he was kind of cute. He was already someone she had known in the past. “I’m going to get another glass of wine,” she told him.
“Terrific,” he noted flatly. It was so dismissive she blinked a little, and took a step back. He had turned away, and was saying hello to some other loser friend of Lisa’s, a girl with an eager smile and enormous breasts. Alison felt her heart constrict with a tinge of fear and disappointment. Whatever, he’s a creep, she told herself. Then she pushed through the bitter little crowd of young professionals who had gathered for a fun evening in Lisa’s ugly and overpriced apartment, trying to get to that table in the corner where people had dumped the wine bottles they’d delivered as party gifts.
“You met Seth!” Lisa exclaimed, sticking her head out of the closet-sized kitchen and raising her eyebrows with smug, conspiratorial glee. “He’s so fabulous. Really it is ridiculous how successful he is, he has his own column for Vanity Fair and he’s had pieces everywhere, I think he’s doing something for Vogue right now. Maybe GQ. Or that piece maybe already came out, I can’t remember. He’s very prolific and he knows a ton of people plus I think he’s really hot, he’s so tall. His family has buckets of money, his father is something huge at Goldman Sachs and you should see where he lives in Tribeca.”
“Goldman Sachs is like the institutional version of the anti-Christ, Lisa,” Alison reported with an air of sincere regret that this fact had somehow escaped her friend’s notice.
“I’d put up with people calling me the anti-Christ if I had money like that,” Lisa tossed back at her.
“Yeah, well, I think your friend mostly wanted to get laid, so it’s fine. I’m from the Midwest, we don’t do that on a first date,” Alison reported. “Plus he’s an asshole.”
“No, he’s great!” Lisa insisted, pretending that Alison’s position on sex with strangers was so outdated and ludicrous she didn’t even have to acknowledge it. “He’s juggling a lot of different commitments, magazine people have to have so many things going on that sometimes it takes them a little time to unwind and just be themselves. Plus he told me he just got here from a big meeting with the Times Sunday magazine, which he’s been really worried about . . . So he’s probably still just thinking about that; he’s under a lot of pressure because so much is happening for him right now. And tomorrow he’s running out to the Hamptons, his parents have a place in Amagansett and there’s some big family party he has to go to.”