For all of her flightiness, Séverine would say things like this, and they would lodge right into Teddy. It could have been a city of love for him, but then he might have ended up among the afflicted. Instead it wouldn’t be a city of love for him. His time with Séverine, the glories and splendors of downtown life, their adventurous loft dinners, his days doling out gently used foulards and minks to the fashionable, his strolls along the Hudson, dodging shady people but enjoying the view—it was all going to end sooner than he had planned, and he was going to have to begin extricating himself from the city before it ended his time with it first. He would break ties and his heart.
It all happened, then: Edouard died among the masses, and Teddy accompanied Séverine to the somber memorial. Séverine took her leave of New York the following year, returning to Paris and becoming somewhat well known as an artist. Her letters to Teddy lasted a whole seven months before she was gone entirely. She had lumped everything in New York into one disillusionment; to engage with Teddy would mean showing mercy to a place that had dumped her quest for romance in the mud.
A year after her departure, Teddy finally moved away, all the way to Cleveland, an hour and a half from where he had grown up. He hated the idea of returning, but it was cheap, and at least it wasn’t Youngstown. He found a small but clean one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a brand-new building. Because he had spent so much time belowground, he luxuriated in the place’s light as if it came from a thousand gilt candelabras. He found the job at Harriman’s soon enough.
He eventually engaged in the type of meaningless, hurtful flings that he had avoided for so long—lust won out, in the end—but any dalliance that he had always felt like a one-time miracle, a condescension on the part of a guy who might take him to bed, and their activity was always fueled by alcohol. When the world of “dating” apps arrived, Teddy felt as if he were seeing a concrete depiction of the many ways in which he had failed to enter the hallowed, privileged world of romantic success. Indeed, he had still never experienced true romance. It, too, had been interred.
“OPHELIA HELD IN HER HANDS the dead turkey, its bloody feathers matching her own headdress. Suddenly, she bit into its gizzard and drank its blood down. It was total nourishment. She would never be Hamlet’s slave again. She would never be anyone’s slave again. That is … unless she wanted to be.”
This was Stefanie’s interpretation of Thanksgiving, and these gruesome words ended her half-hour reading. Ranjana felt herself recoil. How on earth could someone take a seemingly peaceful holiday and transform it into this agonizing, overwritten bloodbath? The other writers seemed to share her reaction: Roberta attempted a brief clap; Wendy was biting her lip and pretending to look over her own pages; Colin pretended to be taking notes; and Cassie, of course, looked like she wished that Stefanie were as dead as the turkey.
“It’s, um, spirited, Stefanie,” Roberta offered, “but where does this fit into your novel? I don’t remember there being a character named Ophelia before.”
Stefanie—who had chosen to stand in the front of their circle, turning as she read in some sort of occult-themed incantation—let out an exasperated whisper. “I told you—this is a story within Esmeralda’s story. She’s having a daydream. It’s the same one from chapter three, but it’s continued here.”
Stefanie had never read chapter three to them, mainly because she had been writing this manuscript—which Ranjana had taken to thinking of as “her messterpiece”—for so many years. Looking across the circle, Ranjana saw Cassie unfold her arms and slide herself up by gripping the sides of her seat. This was a sign that Cassie was about to launch into one of her diatribes, so Ranjana piped up.
“I like the way that you’re playing with the Hamlet theme and retelling it from the woman’s point of view,” she said. It had been years since she’d read Hamlet (Wait—had she ever read Hamlet?), but she knew this: any time that you could say something complimentary about Stefanie’s work, you made her feel rationalized. The entire group, sensing the efficacy of Ranjana’s comment, nodded enthusiastically and looked at Stefanie’s seat, willing her back into it. She complied, too wistful in her self-love to see how excruciating the past half hour had been.
“Ran-ja-na, did you have something that you wanted to share today?” Roberta asked, jutting her head toward the fresh roll of pages that Ranjana had, once again, choked in her hands.
“Oh, it’s really nothing,” Ranjana said, feeling at once determined to read what she’d written and afraid at the prospect of doing so. She had written the pages out longhand, lest any electronic record of them ever be accessible to anyone else.
“My inner goddess is looking to have someone else’s inner goddess released alongside her,” Stefanie said, sparks in her eyes. She normally didn’t afford people this kind of enthusiasm, but she was still aglow from Ranjana’s fabricated praise. She motioned to Ranjana to move to the center of the circle.
This was too much to ask, but Ranjana stood.
Shakuntala met Kalpan three weeks ago—the same time that almost the entire village had. Her parents had been searching for a husband for the past year, trying every last family in the area that they could possibly find. At one point, they had even considered the idea of marrying her to a distant cousin with a missing arm, but when the man had come over for dinner with his family and ate a paratha in their presence, the sight of his one remaining arm whipping slivers of food into his mouth—like he was eating moths—had been so unsavory to Shakuntala’s mother that she had practically turned the visitors onto the street once the last bite of food was out of sight.
Then the rumors about a new man in town began. At first, Shakuntala’s family merely ignored the talk, since any new man in town who was a bachelor was surely to be wed off to one of the prettier, more desirable, richer girls. Then the rumors turned dark. The man went from “wealthy and handsome” to “reclusive and troubled.” Only a handful of people had beheld him with their own two eyes. One of them was the owner of the general store, Mr. Seth, who said that the man had approached him as he was closing the shop one night and asked if they could set up a weekly delivery of goods in the dead of night instead of during the daytime. The only reason that Mr. Seth agreed to this was because the man had compensated him handsomely. But soon enough, Mr. Seth seemed to regret his decision.