Yvette rests an elbow on the back of the couch. “Did you girls meet Brett’s sister yet?”
“Kelly was at the prod meeting,” Lauren says. She notices with a delighted little start that my wineglass is empty. Before she can get up to grab the wine bottle in the kitchen, Jen is behind me, topping me off.
“Do you think she will make a nice addition to the group?” Yvette asks.
“She’s a mom,” Lauren says, in lieu of no.
“I’m a mom,” Yvette says. “So don’t let Jesse tell you it’s unfeminist to have children. You’re all about that age where you need to start thinking about what you want to do.”
There is a chorus of soft lies about our ages: thirty, twenty-nine, thirty-two and a half.
Yvette sighs, pinching the fabric beneath her arms and shaking it, trying to air it dry. “In any case. I hope you will be welcoming to this new woman. I know you think it’s more interesting when you give each other a hard time, but I promise you are all interesting enough on your own.”
Jen throws her head back and squeezes her eyes shut in blinding exasperation, and I can’t say I blame her. Yvette likes to act like she left the show on principle, when what really happened is that she threatened to walk if they didn’t give her more money, and Jesse called her bluff. I don’t know why Yvette pretends like this didn’t happen. Here she is, the ne plus ultra figure of gender equality, and she would rather the world knows she values her integrity over her wallet. Integrity is just the rock you hit your head on when you lose your fingerhold on power. The last thing the world needs is one more woman with principles. What we need is women with money. Women with money have flexibility, and nothing is more dangerous than a woman who can bend any way she wants.
Jen groans. “We welcomed her, Yvette.”
Yvette turns to face Jen. “So you wrote her back?”
The question gives me whiplash. “Wrote who back?”
Yvette replies, over Jen’s protestations that she not, “Brett’s sister reached out to Jen and asked her to tea. She told her that she admires the way she’s scaled her product”—Yvette throws a look to her daughter—“did I say that right, dear?”
Jen rolls her eyes, but she nods.
“You’re not going, are you?” I set my wine on the table. I had been enjoying the taste up until now.
“Why wouldn’t she go?” Yvette asks me, in the gentle, infuriating tone of a therapist prodding you to reexamine a preconceived notion that is patently false.
I squeeze my shoulder blades tighter together. The hypocrisy of this woman. “Because,” I say, very slowly, as though Yvette is an invalid who may have trouble following, “Jen and Brett don’t get along, and it would probably be very hurtful to Brett if Jen went out of her way to befriend her sister.”
Yvette’s posture improves as well. Appallingly, she says, “I very much doubt it. With the contributions Brett strives to make in this world, she doesn’t have the bandwidth for such petty grievances.”
Lauren pops a cracker in her mouth, watching the two of us anime-eyed.
“I told her I couldn’t go,” Jen says, slamming a cabinet door shut in the kitchen, startling us out of our standoff.
Yvette gives me a smile that says she hopes I’m happy (oh, I am), before rolling back the sleeve of her linen button-down. Jen has inherited her mother’s love of linen. “Ah!” she exclaims. “I’ve got to get going if I want to make the twelve-thirty class.” She heads to the door and plops down on the cane-backed settee while she stuffs her feet into her shoes.
“Be nice, girls.” She stands, pressing her palms together, like it will require divine intervention for such a miracle to happen. “The whole world is watching.”
Yvette really took the air out of our sails, and so we disband not long after she leaves. It’s three quarters of a mile to the Canal Street station, the city a humid, gloomy fishbowl, but I decide to walk it anyway rather than get an UberBLACK, my usual move. My mood is not usual. I have the feeling of being both drowsy and frenetic, of yearning for and dreading the next season, all compounded by the email that arrived in my inbox while I was at Jen’s. I read and reread the message from the private investigator on my walk. I don’t realize that I’m covered in a film of sweat until I descend the stairs to the subway, swipe my MetroCard, and walk past three silent Christian missionaries who do nothing to try to convert me.
John Gowan from Spy Eye Inq. has responded to my latest panicked missive, assuring me that my mother’s funeral was at St. Matthews, as I reported it in the book, and not at St. Mark’s, as the friend of my grandmother’s claimed at my event in Chicago. I look up from my phone sharply—the tunnel is coughing hot air in my face. I step over the yellow line and strain to see if that’s the downwind from the express or the local. You always feel it coming before you see it.
The ground burbles beneath my feet, and a cast of headlights sends tourists scattering back, unlike the inured city roaches that hold their ground. I stay where I am too, like I always do when I rarely ride the subway, feeling one millionth of the train’s impact as it cannons into the station. It’s a blow at first, your hair sucked straight off your head, your dress, if you’re wearing one, flying up to reveal your underwear, but once you get past the initial confrontation you find it’s more of a pull, an invitation. Something you could almost imagine accepting.
Huh. For the first time in a long time, I might be a little bit drunk.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
Brett
How do you feel about your sister taking Jen Greenberg on a girl date?
Lisa’s text stops me bone-cold. I read it again with a flu-like shiver. Taking implies that this girl date with Jen has already occurred. I was with Kelly yesterday, and I’m due to meet her at our warehouse on Long Island for our quarterly advisory board meeting in one hour. Was she planning on telling me?
“Please,” Arch says, disappearing behind the door of the refrigerator, “no phones this morning. We promised.” She reappears with a container of milk. Real milk. Milk that will grow a third arm out of your forehead, with hormones and fat and BPA leached from the plastic jug Arch got at the corner deli for $2.99, along with a loaf of Pepperidge Farm bread and some precut cantaloupe. Cantaloupe! She might as well eat jelly beans for breakfast. You don’t understand; women like Arch are an endangered species in a city where a packet of powder and nut milk passes as a big breakfast on a Grub Street food diary. It’s one reason I keep holding on.
My phone buzzes with another text from Lisa. Jen invited her to Lauren’s sexy slumber party party
Then another. See if Kelly can swing an invite for you lollololol
I’m actually being serious BRETT
Need to get you in the same room with the others
No one wants to watch you peddling a stationary bike by yourself all fucking season long. BORING.
NOT EVEN JESSE
I raise a thumb to respond, but Arch plucks my phone out of my hand.
“Plates,” she orders lovingly, when I start to protest, “to the left of the stove.”
It’s been nine days since Kelly and Layla moved into my old apartment downtown and I moved into Arch’s one-bedroom on the Upper West Side, and, as Arch reminded me last night, nine days since we’ve had sex. The place is a mess. My shit is everywhere. I’m stressed about Morocco. (Don’t think I’m giving up that easily.) Every night, we are on StreetEasy, searching for two-bedrooms in an elevator building by Arch’s office on the west side, between $6,500K and $7,500K a month. I’ve raised $23.4 million in capital, and I still can’t afford to buy in this town.
I set the plates on the counter and Arch drops a piece of toast on each, sucking a finger that’s gotten scalded. We look at breakfast and then at each other with wrinkled noses. The toast is the color of Jen Greenberg’s heart. Black, in case that wasn’t clear.