Bennington Girls Are Easy (13 page)

Sylvie opened the door to the apartment wearing a dirty white peasant blouse and a pair of little pale floral underpants. Cassandra figured that she was just waking up and would put some pants on, at least, once she saw Edward, but she didn’t. Instead, she stood in front of the door and said: “Cash. Did you bring cash, Cassandra?”

“Let me get my stuff, Sylvie.”

But even as she marched into the apartment, all she could think of was the sight of Sylvie’s face this morning—it haunted her: it seemed to belong, already, to a stranger. Cassandra imagined her, years later, becoming the kind of rich person who tips badly in restaurants; who during the Christmas season sifts through bargain basements with a pinched, red nose and a bad attitude. She saw her becoming, in short, the kind of person she wanted nothing whatsoever to do with.

Over the years, Cassandra and Sylvie had shared a remarkable degree of physical closeness. They often slept in the same bed. If Cassandra was crashing at her place and had forgotten a toothbrush, she’d use hers. But this morning when she looked at Sylvie, she didn’t see that person, that pretty young girl, at all. No. She saw a withered, squirrel-like figure with bags of death under her eyes.

Meanwhile, the apartment looked, to Edward, like something out of a nineteenth-century tenement. What was that smell, that rotting smell? Was it—could it be—
lemons
?

“You two better get out of here fast,” Sylvie was saying. “I’m very busy today. I’m having an industrial-sized refrigerator delivered any minute now.”

Cassandra thought: The hell you are. How is an industrial refrigerator going to fit in this tiny apartment? Then: Oh, what do I care anymore? She just wanted to get her stuff and get out of here.

Sylvie began to roam around the apartment like a rabid animal on a pair of little scratched naked legs. It was only then that she happened to glance down at them and realize that she had forgotten to put any pants on. Hah! She wasn’t going to put them on either. That would serve Cassandra right, in front of Edward. God, did he look like a stiff or what? She noted the judgmental clench of his jaw, the staunchly masculine contempt he exuded. Sylvie could just picture him tying somebody to a bed, that one!

“Did you bring cash? Cassandra? Come on, did you bring the money? You owe me six hundred dollars!”

Six hundred dollars for what? Edward was wondering as he scooped into his arms as many pieces of Cassandra’s clothing and bedding as he could carry. He kept his own financial affairs in perfect order and any talk of outstanding debts aroused his suspicions.

“I need that money, Cassandra. I need it for rent.”

“Rent? But I paid you for May already and I’m leaving right now.”

“If you don’t give me that money, I won’t be able to pay my rent and Pete will get mad at me again. He tried to evict me once, remember!”

Now they were talking about eviction? thought Edward. Jesus! This was getting serious.

“I remember, Sylvie, but that was ages ago. You’ve been paying your rent just fine for months now.”

“But I still owe him back rent!
Back
rent!”

Cassandra sighed.

“Then that’s your back rent, Sylvie, not mine.”

Edward was trying to get out the door when Sylvie wrenched an olive green satin pillow out of his hands.

“Hey!” Edward cried out. And it was at this point in the morning’s events when he thought: It all must be a dream. Or why would he be engaged in what, to the casual observer, would have appeared to be a pillow fight with his girlfriend’s best friend?

“That’s mine!” Sylvie insisted.

“It is not, Sylvie! Pansy Chapin gave me that pillow.”

“Oh,” said Sylvie, letting go. “I thought it looked like something I would have.” Pansy has great taste, she thought.

“Sweetie, do you think you could hurry it up here? I’ve got almost everything now. Why don’t you do one more sweep through this place and then—”

“Seven years,” muttered Sylvie, to no one in particular. “Seven whole years in New York City I’ve been paying my own rent, and I just really think someone else should pay it for me for a couple of months. I mean, I just really think I deserve somebody else to pay my rent.” She hissed at Cassandra: “Not everybody can just spend their money on pretty dresses! Not everyone has a rich boyfriend who takes them for fancy weekends at the Harvard Club!”

Edward, listening to all of this, thought that explained a lot. Sylvie must be jealous that she didn’t have a Harvard boyfriend when, obviously, every woman in the world wanted one.

Cassandra went to collect her products in the bathroom and said: “You know what you’ve done, Sylvie? I’ll tell you what you’ve done. You have poisoned my natural generosity.” She felt that this line struck so cleanly at the heart of the matter that she repeated it: “You have poisoned my natural generosity.”

All of their final words to each other took place in Sylvie’s bathroom, that lyrical, old-world bathroom, the two of them standing at the foot of the white-painted antique dresser on which were displayed the confections of their many shopping expeditions together: white almond talcum powder. Bluebell and hyacinth hand soap. A stack of elaborately papered soaps from Italy. Cassandra scooped her beauty products into a tote bag, the caramelized light of the spring morning streaming across her face. As she did, she noticed the white French champagne bucket at the foot of the famous claw-foot bathtub. Goddamn it! She’d been counting on taking that with her, too, only to look down and see a pair of Sylvie’s tiny blue lace underpants floating in the shallow water.

Nevertheless, the gentleness of the light in the bathroom—the girlishness of it—made her think that what she wanted to do right now more than anything actually was hug Sylvie. She wanted to press that petite body close to hers. And now, gazing into Sylvie’s mirror, in front of which the two of them had stood while getting ready to go out so many times, she recalled Sylvie’s steady artist’s fingers smoothing out Cassandra’s eyeliner and trimming her fine blond hair when she used to give her haircuts. She recalled those fingers holding the scissors so close to the nape of her neck with what had been, to Cassandra, unquestioned tenderness.

And now here was Sylvie, staring at her with true, black hatred in her eyes.

Sylvie was, in fact, thinking: Bitch. Bitch. The fucking bitch. Other people! They never fail to disappoint you.

Edward was downstairs by now, waiting with Cassandra’s stuff. The two women were left to duke it out alone.

“You want that money so much, Sylvie? I’ll give it to you. But before I do, I want you to understand that by you bullying me into giving it to you, this means that I will never be friends with you again. No, let me finish. We have had a long and a rich friendship”—she was thinking of the two of them, golden- and black-haired respectively, sipping raspberry lime rickeys in the Sunken Garden at Radcliffe—“but you make me give you this money and I will never be friends with you again.”

And Sylvie, without a moment’s hesitation, said: “Cash?”

Sylvie and Cassandra were children of divorce. What did it feel like to get divorced? they used to ask each other. But as of today, Cassandra no longer wondered. Cassandra now knew.

“You like cash so much, Sylvie, I’ll make it cash. So let me tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to the ATM, the one at the bodega around the corner. Don’t think I’m going to skip out on you; I’m not. Don’t think I have any interest in holding on to your keys; I don’t. I’m going to come back here and give you the money and the keys, and then it will be over, Sylvie. I will never be friends with you again.”

But before Cassandra went to the bodega, she paused at the doorway and said rather grandly: “And another thing. Please go get me my mother’s Le Creuset pan.”

It was one of those wonderful rustic old omelet pans with a mustard-yellow bottom. Sylvie scrunched up her face as if trying to come up with a way to justify her keeping the pan, but evidently decided against it. She went and got the Le Creuset pan from the kitchen and handed it to Cassandra. The heavy black handle looked almost too heavy for her, brushing against her feeble bare legs. It was the only moment during the whole encounter when she looked the least bit defeated, standing there in her underpants.

I
t wasn’t over yet. Sylvie the petite but indomitable got a second wind. Standing upstairs in her apartment, out of breath from the adrenaline of it all and counting out the six hundred dollars Cassandra had just given her from the ATM, she seized on an idea. Quick, she had to act quick! This was going to be
fun.

“Hey,” she called down the stairwell, just as Cassandra and Edward were struggling with opening the rusty latch of the door. “One more thing!”

She charged down the stairs, hunching her body over the moldering pale blue stairwell. The money was still in her hands—no way would she let it go. Money! It felt so damn good. It wasn’t Nutella that was better than sex, Sylvie thought. It was money. Live in New York City long enough, and you’ll soon learn that lesson for yourself.

Cassandra, the fool! Cassandra would learn it, too.

Pete the landlord was in his apartment on the first floor playing the piano, the wild, layered notes of the keys lending a delirious cast to the proceedings. By now, he was used to Sylvie having melodramatic scenes with various roommates and so he didn’t bother to come out to see what was going on, figuring that this latest unpleasantness, too, would pass.

Why, Cassandra asked herself, should something about the wreckage of this scene, which was, in a weird way, rather beautiful, recall to her now Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
? One’s liberal arts education came floating back to one at the strangest of times.

“Did she tell you?” Sylvie demanded of Edward.

“Now, listen you—” Edward was a gentleman, but even a gentleman could not be expected to treat some crazy chick without any pants on like a lady.

“Oh, you stay out of this,” said Cassandra. “What is it, Sylvie? And then we’re leaving. We’re
leaving
,” she repeated.

But Sylvie’s eyes continued to blaze down on Edward. The lemons collected in the garbage bags stank to the ceiling, clogging the air with decay.

“Did she tell you about Le Bernardin?”

“Le Bernardin?”
repeated Edward. That fancy French fish restaurant in the West Fifties? He knew it well. His Park Avenue grandmother used to take him there on his birthdays. That might be a nice place to take Cassandra for her birthday next year, he thought. Then stopped himself from going any farther. He and Cassandra were never going to make it as a couple after all. He could see that now. No way could he ever marry a girl like this, a girl who lived in a nineteenth-century tenement teeming with putrid lemon skins in one of the outer boroughs, and who, previous to recent events, had claimed to consider this wretched Sylvie creature her best friend.

“Why don’t you ask her who’s taking her to Le Bernardin?”

But Edward never did ask Cassandra who was taking her to Le Bernardin, figuring that Sylvie was nuts and the hell with her.

“Oh my God, I forgot the Le Creuset pan!”

Cassandra’s voice rang out in the middle of the night, disturbing Edward, who had been sleeping soundly beside her.

“What?”

Can a man ever get any peace? he wondered.

“The Le Creuset pan, the Le Creuset pan! Remember? Sylvie gave it back, but then I left it, I left it. Oh my God, do you think I left it when I went to get the money at the ATM? It would never still be there, if I did…”

“Now, now,” said Edward tiredly, lifting her nightie.

Cassandra continued to believe for the rest of her life that she must have done just that—left the Le Creuset pan on the floor of the bodega where she had gone to use the ATM. But in fact she had left it at the foot of Sylvie’s staircase, where it was with no small satisfaction discovered immediately after she and Edward left and returned to its rightful place upstairs. That night Sylvie had an omelet and a glass of wine. Her omelets were very tasty, Sylvie reflected on taking a bite. Now! If only she could find a way to market them.