Sasha looks up and sees Monique down the block, and has that thrill you get from seeing someone familiar on the streets of New York, like looking through a box of old paperbacks at a garage sale and finding a copy of a novel you love. And this time the pleasure is intensified because Sasha is not just running into some random acquaintance. Monique is hurrying straight toward her, a look of concern on her face. Her roommate, who has left work early, and who would have called the police if need be.
She doesn’t need to wonder anymore. Monique is on Sasha’s side, that’s whose.
Now here is something interesting: Sasha doesn’t tell Monique about the term cunt struck but it never occurs to her not to tell Carson. It is the kind of detail that Monique would remember, though she might never bring it up again, where it seems like Carson ignores everything about Sasha that doesn’t fit with his perception of her. She can tell him anything.
She is in Carson’s room at his club, sitting in front of the air conditioner in her nightgown, drinking a very small bottle of whiskey from the minibar, while Carson rubs her feet. She went out for Indian food with Monique and had several more glasses of red wine.
“First, she said I was younger than she thought I’d be but not as pretty,” Sasha says, loudly, because of the air conditioner.
Carson laughs. “Well, you don’t know whether that’s a compliment or an insult,” he says, “because you don’t know the known parameters.”
But Sasha doesn’t want to get drawn into a mathematical discussion. She tells him the rest of it, and when she gets to the cunt struck part, it doesn’t seem so awful to her anymore, not really, but Carson squeezes her foot tightly, almost painfully. She looks at his face and his expression is harder, stonier, than she has ever seen it before. She realizes suddenly that although Carson has said from the beginning that his wife didn’t understand him (you cannot imagine Monique’s scorn at this phrase) it is actually true. Anne does not understand him, or does not understand him well enough, to know that saying what she did would make Carson angry. But Sasha knew, she realizes. That’s why she told him.
Sasha shakes her foot gently so he will release it, which he does and reaches for his own drink.
“Monique said Anne had an agenda,” she says. “And evidently it was to tell me what an awful person I am.”
Carson smiles. Whatever he feels about what Anne said, he’s apparently going to keep to himself. “I like the way you not only tell me what happened to you, you tell me what Monique thinks about it.”
Interestingly, Monique feels almost the opposite about this, and never wants to hear what Carson thinks about anything. Sasha wonders if this makes Carson a nicer person than Monique. Monique would argue that no, someone who cheats on his wife is by definition not a nice person. How would the four of them—Sasha, Monique, Anne, Carson—rank from nicest to least nice? A sudden alcohol-induced yawn makes her jaws ache and Sasha finds she is too tired to worry about it. She gets out of her chair and crawls into the bed.
“Where did you meet her, anyway?” Carson asks, beginning to get undressed.
“Some bar on Amsterdam,” Sasha says, yawning again. “If it had a name, I don’t remember it.”
“I saw an apartment today that I liked,” Carson says. “I have an appointment to see it again on Friday. Will you come look at it?”
Sasha nods, but is not paying attention. She thinks of all the bars and restaurants along Broadway between 106th and Thirty-sixth and how she and Monique have met for dinner or drinks in almost all of them (this could be the reason they never seem to have any money) and she realizes that Anne could have picked one of those places and then Sasha would have felt bad every time she walked past it, and it would have ruined whatever happy memory she had of being there. But instead Anne chose a bar Sasha had never been to, where she wasn’t known, which she didn’t even like. Sasha never has to go there again.
Sasha probably would have slept right through the appointment with the real estate agent on Friday except that Monique called and woke her to say that she’d just talked to the Brooklyn branch of her office. When they were all on the Upper West Side two weeks ago and went drinking and then had slices of Koronet Pizza with her and Sasha, they all got severe food poisoning, with two of them ending up in the hospital.
“But it can’t have been from the pizza,” Sasha says, “because we all bought slices, and you and I didn’t get sick.”
“Exactly!” Monique says. “Apparently we’re immune because we eat there so much.”
“I don’t know whether to be excited or worried,” Sasha says.
“Excited,” Monique says definitively. “We’re like some new super-species!”
After that it’s impossible to go back to sleep, so Sasha gets up and gets dressed and goes to meet Carson and the real estate agent. She’s only fifteen minutes late, which is really only five minutes late for her, but she can see as she approaches that the agent is tense, though Carson looks relaxed.
“Hello,” Sasha says, as she walks up to the building’s entrance, where they are waiting for her.
“You must be Sasha,” the real estate agent says. She’s a woman in her thirties with spiky brown hair and Sasha can tell from her expression that she was expecting Sasha to be different somehow, more sophisticated, maybe. She wonders if that’s going to be her life from now on if she stays with Carson, people expecting her to be something she’s not.
The apartment is on the third floor of a building on East Sixty-seventh Street, directly across from an ice cream store called Peppermint Park. These are both strikes against it because Sasha has always felt she doesn’t belong on the Upper East Side, and besides, how much weight would she gain with an ice cream parlor right across the street?
But she and Carson and the real estate agent go up and tour the apartment, and Sasha decides that the main thing wrong with it is that there’s nothing wrong with it. She and Monique concluded long ago that you’re not really living in New York unless there’s something wildly negative about your apartment, like the one they lived in where the shower was in the kitchen, or the one in the building The New York Times dubbed “the house of horrors” because so many people committed suicide there. In their current apartment, you can roll a marble downhill from the front door to the back of the kitchen.
The real estate agent says, “I know Carson especially liked this place because it has a room for you to write in. It’s just a little hidey-hole, but I think you’ll like it.”
The real estate agent leads her to an extremely small sunny room with a perfectly square window, and just enough space for a desk and a writer. Currently, Sasha has no desk, she has to use the kitchen table after she clears Monique’s breakfast dishes off it, and the only view is across the air shaft into their neighbor’s kitchen. This has never bothered Sasha, though. She does not even know where she is ten minutes after she starts typing.
She walks over and looks out the window of the hidey-hole, wishing that the stupid real estate agent had not called it that because now she doubts she can ever think of it any other way.
Carson comes up behind her and puts his arms around her. “Do you like this room?”
“I love it,” Sasha says. But really, she is thinking that Monique would love it. She would love that Carson chose an apartment with a room for Sasha to write
