I poured the smoothie into a glass and set the blender noiselessly in the sink. I started to walk away but then returned and washed up instead. Kate was a neat freak. I didn’t want to be a slob my first week. I was still in my pajamas. I had lain in bed and listened to Hillary come in that morning and get Kate up and into the shower. I could hear the drawers opening, the toilet flush, the water running. It was like spying. So this was how Hillary did this and that, and this was how they talked when they were together. I’d lain there, thinking Hillary wasn’t
quite as deadening as I usually made her out to be. In the morning, I thought, and I’d bet at night too, her low steady voice seemed soothing. I’d bet her movements were all slow and careful and trustworthy.
The switch in hours, now that nights and not days were my main responsibility, meant that a lot of my old duties were taken care of. In order to keep a few nights off I had retained some mornings, and I found those a bit of a relief. I set my alarm early, got into the shower by six thirty, and was tending to Kate, my hair wet and brushed back in a headband, by seven. At those moments it felt like my old job, and I felt less like a freeloader, drinking tea I hadn’t paid for and eating one orange when I wanted two. Frankly, by the time Kate and I had stocked up the kitchen to feed an additional, non-shake-drinking person in addition to our dinners, I was both pampered and pointless. (There had been some leftover condiments, baking supplies, and spices from the previous house, but a lot were items Evan enjoyed—a certain type of grainy mustard, star anise, which Kate never liked—I quietly threw them out.) I believed I was costing her far more money than my presence in the house was worth. She didn’t need me most nights, except for the occasional bathroom trip, and I found it difficult to get over the idea that I should be working madly all night if she didn’t call for me. So when I wasn’t sleeping, I cleaned or cooked, straightened up compulsively. Finally, the morning of my dinner with Jill, Kate told me I didn’t need to dust the windowsills when she paid someone else to do that. Then she added, “You’re going to dinner with Jill tonight, right?”
“Yup,” I’d said. “We’re going to gorge ourselves. In a demure way.”
She’d laughed, and said, “Get my purse, would you please?”
I stalled as I walked over to the table with her bag in my hand. “Take the American Express,” she said. “Treat yourselves.”
“I haven’t done anything for you,” I’d said. I tried to speak softly because Lisa was in the next room. I held on to Kate’s purse but didn’t take out her wallet. I had the money for once, and I had planned to write a check for dinner. To be honest, I was looking forward to it, to signing with a little flourish and overtipping.
“You moved,” she retorted. “Jill helped you. People always give things when friends help move.”
“A twelve-pack and a pizza, not a six-course French meal. It’s too much. You’re paying me to sleep,” I told her.
Kate had given a big, rattling sigh. “Please let me give this to you,” she said. “Do you realize how lucky I am that I even have the money to employ you? I’m grateful. This is me being grateful.”
“But I feel like your—your kid,” I said. I had almost said “mistress” but caught myself. I was thinking of kept women in old movies, all marabou and nail polish, but I knew I had teetered on the edge of invoking Cynthia instead. We tried not to talk about her. We blocked all the chinks in our conversation to prevent her slipping in.
“If you were my kid I would never send you to Le Champignon,” she said. “I probably wouldn’t even buy you tacos.” She gave the purse another pointed look. “And I know what caviar costs,” she added. “So I’d better see some on there.”
THE MAITRE D’ SEATED US
near a window, pausing, holding the wine list up against her chest as we settled ourselves. She handed it to me and then said, “How’s Ms. Norris?” I blanked for a moment, then realized she meant Kate, who at one time had been a regular.
“Oh, she’s great,” I said, recovering. “How did you know?”
The maitre d’ gave me a mysterious smile. “She had her friend phone and ask us to take special care of you tonight,” she said. “Please give her our regards.”
When the maitre d’ had strode away, her long skirt swishing around her legs, Jill and I looked at each other.
Jill raised her eyebrows at me.
“She and Evan used to come here a lot,” I explained.
“Oh. Lucky. What do you suppose ‘special treatment’ means?” Jill asked.
“I’m not sure,” I told her. “Maybe we get a massage.”
I opened the wine list and recognized nothing, so we asked for glasses of champagne. There was a pause while we studied our menus, and then I said, “You look really good, you know. I like your hair.”
Her hair was no longer scarlet but auburn, and the effect against
her skin was kinder and warmer. She was wearing big silver hoops and a black silk shirt, her mouth the color of a berry.
“Thanks.” Jill blushed slightly. “I toned it down for interviews. I got this internship thing and just thought I should screw them into thinking they’d hired a professional.”
“Well, I love your unprofessional look too,” I said. “But you’re graduating soon, et cetera.”
“Et cetera,” Jill agreed. She sipped her champagne. How adult we seemed, dressed up and out to dinner without parents or even boyfriends along. I liked this. I could develop a real taste for it.
“What’s the latest with this trip this summer?” Jill asked.
“I’m doing a little research,” I said. “In a way I want to push for Turkey, you know, or Bangkok, but then I remember that I’ll be the one navigating all this. So we’re thinking start small. Florence, maybe. Paris. It’s all new to me anyway. Think you’ll come?”
She rolled her eyes. “God, I hope so. Let me know when you have a date set and I’ll see what work looks like.” She chewed some ice and then said, “How are classes?”
“They’re not bad. I’m just taking the two, you know, the Renaissance art and then the lit class.”
Jill laughed. “You’re not even taking anything in your major?”
I started giggling like a fool, trying to keep it quiet so we didn’t seem unsophisticated. Next to us a woman with upswept ash-blond hair glanced our way over her wineglass.
“Not one pathetic marketing course?” Jill went on.
I caught my breath. “Oh god, I hate my major,” I said. I started laughing again. “I hate ad people and marketing people. I think they’re all full of shit.”
“SPECIAL TREATMENT” TURNED OUT
to mean courses we hadn’t ordered but which kept arriving nevertheless, accompanied by thumbnail descriptions. Each tiny portion was set before us with a flourish, gleaming against the black plates like jewelry or tiny works of sculpture that demanded some admiration before we even thought of touching them. There was a fat ivory-and-coral lobster claw with pale green endive browned at the edges; thick coins of gold-and-garnet beets laid
with chunks of bacon; a creamy, rosy-beige disk of duck’s liver atop a doll-size salad of mushrooms and greens. I kept wondering how they had done this, asking myself if they had roasted the beets or boiled them, if you could get the endive like this just by searing it or whether it needed braising first.
“Wake up,” Jill whispered.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “How do you think they got this olive crust to stick on the lamb?”
“They have free labor to do it for them,” Jill said. “Didn’t you see that article in the
Cap Times
?”
“What, like slave labor?” I paused in chewing my lamb. “I wouldn’t have come here if I thought they had some dicey illegal immigrant thing going on.”
Jill sipped her water. “No, it’s some apprenticeship thing. People come in and work for free because it’s an education or an honor or something. I think a lot of high-end restaurants do it.”
Now I remembered. I’d read part of it to Kate. “Just think, some unpaid geek might be back there plating our next course even as we speak. I’m kind of jealous, actually. I bet they taste everything.”
By the time we had finished coffee and cognac and agreed to call a cab and get my car in the morning, I was leaning back in my chair, hazy with goodwill and dazzlement.
“Can you imagine the people who come here all the time?” Jill said.
“Sure. Evan and Kate did. Maybe now he and Cynthia do. But they probably don’t disgrace themselves quite like this. Well. Maybe Cynthia does.”
I was trying to imagine taking my parents to a place like this. After I’d cooked for her birthday my mother had conceded that just steak wouldn’t have been as nice. But I could just hear them: my mother asking question after careful question before she finally ordered the chicken, my father going straight for the steak and asking for a baked potato.
I took a last sip of my coffee. I really couldn’t see my parents here. It embarrassed and even hurt me a little that I didn’t really want to.
Jill was looking thoughtfully around the room, which had gotten darker and quieter as other people finished their meals and ours kept
going on. Her lipstick was long gone and her cheeks were flushed from the wine, a faint sheen across her nose. She—and I, I bet—looked a little worn and tired out by food and wine, like we’d both been made love to instead of cooked for. The music was interrupted every now and again by laughter from the bartender, a murmur from another table.
“How’s life at Kate’s?” Jill asked. She poured a little cream from a silver pitcher into her coffee. She normally drank it black but had informed me a few minutes before that she believed in using everything put before her at a good restaurant. Then she had used the tiny silver tongs to drop one lump of brown sugar and one lump of white sugar into her cup.
“It’s good,” I said. “It takes some getting used to. Someone else’s house and all.”
“Well, if you ever need to move back in just let me know.”
“Why would I need to do that?”
Jill looked away. “No reason. Just if you decide it wasn’t such a good idea.”
I felt a plum-sized knot of misgiving gather just below my diaphragm. “You don’t think it was?”
She shook her head and laughed lightly. “Of course it was. I just mean if something comes up, or whatever. I don’t mean anything. You feel good about it, right?”
“Sure,” I said. “I feel great.”
I WOULD HAVE LIKED
to go back with Jill to our old apartment and just sleep on the couch. I missed being back there after a long night, drinking coffee in the morning and arguing over whose turn it was to go for scones. Since I had left, we still saw each other once a week or so, for lunch or on Friday nights for fried cod and beer. It was a shock to me how much I missed her. I didn’t have these throw-away moments with Kate, sitting around between school and work in the dead time of an afternoon, and running into each other, happily tipsy, in the living room at the end of a long night. At Kate’s everything was organized, right down to when one of us would leave the house to give the other some space. Jill and I always stumbled into cooling-off periods
like that when we realized we were arguing over whose teacup was in the sink, who’d bought the toothpaste that tasted like cough syrup.
It wasn’t that Kate and I didn’t get along. It just had taken me more time to get used to this new arrangement than I had expected. I had thought it would be easy to get comfortable in a house I already knew so well, so I was doubly surprised to find myself wandering back to my room and closing the door when Hillary or Simone was there. The house, I saw, became another place when they were in it. They moved through it differently than I did; I saw them set the remote and the flower vases in different spots than I would have, and I heard by the rhythms of the showerhead that they did not bathe Kate as I did. Hillary’s showers were over quickly, and I imagined her standing three feet away, hosing her down like a Chevy. I detected the same scent hovering around Kate’s skin each day Simone was there, and it turned out she used a lavender oil to massage her shoulders and arms after her shower. “Do you want me to do that too?” I had asked Kate.
“Oh, you don’t have to,” she said. “It’s just a little extra Simone always does.”
I heard in her voice that faint note of surprise at having to explain something to an outsider. It was a private thing, I gathered, a little ritual Simone had devised. I cooked, Hillary took her around for the brisk and boring errands, and Simone, who’d briefly attended massage therapy classes, rubbed her shoulders. It should have pleased me the way we divided up the duties of providing Kate with little comforts and pleasures here and there, but I found it discomfiting. I’d felt I knew the most intimate things, and did the most for her, was trusted the most by her, but maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I lived here because I was the least of three evils. Maybe on my nights off Kate, blushing, asked Simone to get the blue butterfly out of the nightstand. Or maybe it was understood, and she didn’t even have to ask.
EVENTUALLY, AFTER A MONTH
or so, I felt less like a visitor. I would stay out in the living room, reading, forcing myself not to put the book down and jump up when Kate arrived with Hillary or Simone. This is
my home too, I reminded myself, staring at the print on the pages. I can sit here and read in my home, on my couch.
When Lisa showed up her presence was like a blaring stereo. It stirred us up. She jolted the quiet of the atmosphere in Kate’s house, her voice hoarse and loud where Kate’s was so tiny and mine—I had recently realized—had become sympathetically, unconsciously soft. She strolled into the living room with glasses of wine or beers for each of us, pausing to swirl it under Kate’s nose if it was one she liked. When Lisa was around I was furthest from feeling like a visitor, or even an employee.
“How’s Jill?” she asked one night. We were sitting in Kate’s bedroom watching
The Godfather
. I had put Kate against a pile of pillows on her bed, and Lisa and I had dragged a couple armchairs to each side of the bed.
“I saw her downtown the other night with this hot little thing,” Lisa continued.
“That’s Tim,” I said. “She met him at her new job. She’s deeply involved. Now she wants to fix me up with all his friends.”