“Where does he work?” Madeleine asks.
“Some hospital around here, I guess. I didn’t ask.”
“What kind of surgery does he do?”
Camille looks curiously at her friend. This is the difference between them, she decides. This anchor of practicality—or its sweet absence.
“What the hell should I care?” Camille smiles and takes a drink. Madeleine lifts her eyebrows and smiles in return, then tucks her feet under herself like a cat. She had removed her shoes at the door, although Camille had asked her not to. This is one of the small changes she’s noticed in Madeleine lately. Concern about floors. Clothing that has shifted away from bright, geometric prints to dull plaids and country colors. Today she is wearing, of all things, a quilted vest.
“I think you should consider joining the book group,” Madeleine says, swirling her glass. “At least come with me to a meeting and see what it’s like. Really, it’s just an excuse to get together with other women.”
Camille stares. Madeleine, she knows, can do better than that. Last year, she and her husband had gone to South America and brought the baby. It was part of some spiritual quest of David’s, something that Madeleine does not like to discuss, but that thrills Camille. She knows that, since moving to the suburbs, David has undergone a drastic and mysterious change—-abandoning convention rather than embracing it. According to Nick, he stopped attending client meetings at work and refused to use the computer. After his dismissal, he started hosting “clients” at home. This all makes Camille like Madeleine even more. To be married to a man like that, she must be a dissident, too. Camille praises herself for having unearthed a kindred spirit, for allying herself with the town’s only other fearless woman.
“Mmm.” Camille grins, holding her stare. “You know what I miss? The Cooler. Passerby. Do you remember those?”
“Of course,” Madeleine says, her face neither brightened nor clouded by memory.
“I wonder if we might have seen each other out somewhere. Oh, and remember Lit Lounge on Second Avenue? I think it’s still there.”
She keeps a lock on Madeleine’s eyes, seeking a hint of understanding. What she really wants to know is whether she still feels the burn. Does she, too, listen to music from her youth while driving and detect a carnal urge inside the traffic, catch the glances of strangers through car windows? It is an accepted truth, of course, that the reckless impulses of that music are dead now. There is nothing useful to be done with them. Still, the old rhythm catches in her, and she feels like a club princess trapped in a Toyota. In this state, she becomes aware of the hidden, parallel world beneath the mundane. Just beneath the surface of every defunct moment—waiting at a stoplight, finding a spot in the supermarket parking lot—lurks another moment, sexual, adulterous, waiting to be chosen. It shimmers faintly, a phosphorescent arc of lighter fluid ready to catch fire, detectable only to those attuned to it. She parks the car and watches the men and women going in and out through the automatic doors. Which of them are alight, secretly smoldering?
Madeleine waves her hand dismissively. She reaches into her tote bag and retrieves a copy of the book that her group will be discussing. Camille looks at the cover, a tablescape with dropped flower petals. Some bleak, bestselling woman’s memoir. She can think of no book she’d less like to read. Without checking the jacket flap, she is certain that the book has been marketed as “empowering,” that it is tailored to a nation of dispirited women looking for someone to pity, some way to cheer themselves.
“It’s a good way of meeting people around here. Really, it’s an excuse to get together,” Madeleine repeats.
Camille softens her eyes and smiles. What she wants to say is that she has no need to meet people. She only needs one friend, and Madeleine is it.
“I appreciate the offer, I really do. I guess I’m just not in the mood for reading right now.”
Later that night, Camille allows herself to type the doctor’s name into the computer. As she’d suspected, the name is so commonplace that nothing useful surfaces. She checks the rosters of local hospitals, hoping for a photograph of him, but there is no matching name, no matching picture.
“Oh, they never update their websites,” he says about the hospitals later. They are tucked at a corner table in a Spanish restaurant in the woods. “I’m at St. Joseph’s.” The way he says this is so offhand, so uninterested, that whatever seed of doubt Camille might have had is hurriedly interred.
His condominium complex has just been fumigated for termites, he tells her, so they go to her house instead. They wait in the driveway until the babysitter comes out to the car. The girl stares, and Camille widens her eyes in imitation.