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Stephanie hung up feeling vaguely humiliated. She thought of her job at Christine’s, almost so she could feel worse, but felt strangely comforted instead. This made no sense to her, but she accepted the comfort. She wished that she could tell Sandra about her real job, but she didn’t dare. Perhaps Sandra wouldn’t be shocked, but she would think it was self-destructive and insulting to women. Well, maybe it was. She never got any writing done while she was hooking. Somehow the idea of coming home after a day at Christine’s and sitting down to write was impossible; her thoughts were clotted by the clamoring, demanding ghosts of the men she’d seen that day. She needed to make herself a nourishing meal and sit still and take care of herself, as her mother used to say. Working at Christine’s was a time for making money and resting her brain, she told herself. Writing would come later.
They could spend hours wandering through the dark rooms, holding their drinks and shouting comments at one another. Often they would meet friends of Babette’s who would invite them into the bathroom for cocaine. Sometimes Babette would go off to dance and Stephanie would stand on the periphery of the dance floor, watching the dancers grinning and waving their arms in blind delight or staring severely at the floor as they thrashed their limbs. Lights flashed off and on, and the disc jockey spun one record after another in a pattern of controlled delirium. Stephanie would stroll through the club, watching the non-dancers blankly scrutinizing the dancers or standing in groups that were laughing with mysterious animation. After about fifteen minutes, she would be forced to face the fact that she was bored. Then she would remember what she was like before she came to New York and realize that this was what she had pictured: herself in a glamorous club full of laughing or morosely posing people. In frustration, she would decide that the reason it all seemed so dull was that she was seeing only the outermost layer of a complex society that spoke in ingenious and impenetrable signs to outsiders who, even if they were able to physically enter the club, were unable to enter the conversations that so amused everyone else. This was a discouraging idea, but it was better than thinking that the entire place was a nonsensical bore that people actually longed to belong in.
It was a beautiful Halloweenlike night, and there were exuberant people on the streets. She walked happily, admiring faces and haircuts. She looked at people, dogs, cars and buildings, and everything pleased her. She stopped at a Korean grocery store and looked at the fruit. She was struck by how neat and beautiful it was in its organized, traditional piles. She thought of herself coming here every week and buying fruit, vegetables, bread, cereal and milk, and it seemed like a wonderful idea. She bought herself an apple, and walked home eating it.
not totally sure why i just kinda like this
CONSTANCE WAS DISCONCERTED by her meeting with Franklin in the East Village, partly because two years before he’d spent exactly one week ardently trying to seduce her, and then had abruptly dropped her to get married to a hitherto undisclosed fiancée. But there were other factors. “Constance!” he yelled. “God, it’s great to see you! You’re looking good! In fact, you’re looking beautiful!”
lmao
They burrowed into a conversation that skimmed over the present, then tunneled back through the five years since they’d met in a proofreading booth, where exhausted, languid Connie would sleep on the floor beneath her desk, using Franklin’s balled-up sweater as a pillow. They had nested in that booth every weekend for months, surrounded by literary supplements, plastic take-out containers, boxes of cookies and notebooks in which they furiously scribbled between jobs. It was where they had staged their lengthy, horribly detailed conferences about their sexual relationships. “The nightmare of the two thousand and one dates,” Franklin called it—or maybe she’d invented the nightmare part, she couldn’t remember. The tunnel deepened as they entered a thickly populated realm of old friends, acquaintances, scandals and memories that appeared like frail, large-eyed animals that paused to look at them, then blinked and ran away.
awww
They moved on, but from that point, Constance sat uneasily in her chair, no longer feeling like a woman entering a potentially successful phase in her career, happy in love and socially secure. She was, for several unpleasant moments, the isolated, lonely, insecure person she had been just three years earlier, a social blunderer, a locker-room towel for the maladjusted, unable to sell an article or figure out what to wear. Pull yourself together, she thought; it wasn’t so bad.
oof
“Well, we wanted to see it because the actress had silicone implants and we wanted to see what they looked like. Anyway, Alice was so upset by this movie. She kept saying, ‘That girl was so stupid, she deserved to die. You couldn’t have any sympathy for her, she was so weak.’”
“That’s not such an unusual reaction, you know.” Deana plucked another slender red rib from its white box and began to delicately strip it of meat with her teeth.
“Okay, maybe not, but she got so obsessed about it, it was as if she was terrified at the mere idea that somebody could be a victim.”
me i guess lol
In confusion, she withdrew from all these things, which were, after all, only the substance of her life, and viewed them from a distance. Job, social life, relationship. Could these really be the things she did every day? What place was she in now, what was this distance from which they all looked so appalling? It felt like a blank space, silent and empty, so lonely that if she hadn’t remembered it was all nitrous oxide–induced, she might’ve cried.
She slept on the couch in the den every night. At first it just happened that way. She’d be sitting before the TV with her glass of Scotch when Jarold would kiss the top of her head and go upstairs. She’d go into the kitchen and get a bottle and drink from it. She’d watch the chartreuse-and-violet people walk around the screen. It was sometimes a comfort.
She fell asleep on the hard little throw pillow. She always woke up with sweat around her collar and a stiff neck.
One night Jarold took her hand and said, “Come on, honey. Come to bed. You’ll fall asleep on the couch if you don’t.”
“I want to fall asleep on the couch,” said Virginia.
“No, you don’t,” said Jarold. He tugged her arm. “It’s unhealthy. Come into your nice warm bed.”
She yanked her hand out of his. “I don’t want to sleep in the bed.”
It was true. She couldn’t bear the thought of lying next to him. He could see it in her eyes and it wounded him. He walked away. He said nothing about it again.
They had egg sandwiches and fruit for lunch. Virginia had cleaned the kitchen and put a vase of pink and white carnations on the table. The fruit was cut up in a large cream-colored bowl. They helped themselves at a leisurely pace, sometimes eating the wet, lightly bruised fruit straight from the bowl with their fingers. The afternoon sun came in, lighting up a sparkling flurry of dust flecks.