LITMIR.BIZ

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chair has one leg shorter than the others so she has to sit at a slight angle.

      “Ew, he’s putting the limes in our beers with his finger!” Monique whispers.

      “Oh, it’ll be fine,” Sasha says. “The alcohol will kill the germs.” (Won’t it?)

      The bartender walks over eagerly with their drinks. He seems to have a lot of energy for such a skinny, dried-out husk of a person. “There you go, pretty ladies,” he says and then retreats back to the bar, where he watches them. He looks like an animated skeleton.

      “So did Carson have any idea why Anne wants to meet you?” Monique asks.

      Sasha shakes her head. “He knows nothing about it.”

      “Well, clearly she has some sort of agenda,” Monique says, drinking her beer. “It’s just that you don’t know what it is. You’re like Neville Chamberlain going to the Munich Conference.”

      “I guess,” says Sasha, whose knowledge of world history is a little vague.

      “Maybe she’s going to ask you to give him back,” Monique suggests. “Maybe she’s going to say, ‘I come to you in sisterhood and ask you to return him to me,’ or something.”

      “Well, he’s not really mine to return,” Sasha says uncertainly. “And besides, he says that she doesn’t act like she wants to get back together. He says she’s very frosty.”

      “Oh, surprise!” Monique says. “He has a yearlong affair with a twenty-six-year-old blonde and his wife is frosty about it!”

      Sasha blinks. She wishes she could shake the feeling sometimes that Monique sympathizes with Anne entirely too much.

      “So, can I ask why you’re going?” Monique says. “Why didn’t you just tell her it wasn’t a good idea? You could still call and cancel.”

      “I don’t know why I agreed,” Sasha says, and at the time of the original phone call it was true. But now she supposes she agreed to go because it was interesting. Life is full of good things—buttered toast, cold beer, compelling books, campfires, Christmas lights, expensive lipstick, the smell of vanilla—and Sasha is by no means immune to them, but how many things are just flat-out interesting? How many things are so fascinating that you can’t stand not to do them? Not many, is Sasha’s opinion.

      “Well, what are you going to wear?” Monique asks. “I think you should wear your green blouse and your black pencil skirt.”

      Sasha knows that this is what Monique would wear. They are the same height and weight and even have the same hair color, but everything about Monique is sharp angles, including her hair, which is cut in a perfect slant toward her chin. Sasha’s hair is long and unruly and she wears jeans and T-shirts almost all the time. And sometimes when she is finishing writing a book, she wears the same jeans and T-shirt for days on end, for good luck.

      “And definitely your Egyptian earrings,” Monique says.

      Sasha smiles. “Okay, definitely those.”

      The bartender, who by now is really giving Sasha the creeps, does his springy walk again and brings them two more beers. “These are on the house,” he says.

      So they drink the beers and Monique notices a sign above the bar for cream of potato soup and says she’d rather shoot herself than eat anything served here, and Sasha says it’s so disturbing that the word potato is in quotes, like maybe it’s not made from real potatoes, and Monique says it almost certainly isn’t, and they discuss the new tailor shop that opened near them and put up a sign saying FOR ALL YOUR TAILORING “NEEDS” and what are those quotes supposed to signify? And they talk for a while about when they moved into their current apartment and one of the movers turned out to be a guy that Sasha had started to give her number to at a bar but at the last minute changed her mind and gave him just a bunch of random digits and how that made moving day so much more hellish than it already was. This actually happened three years ago, but they still discuss it fairly frequently.

      Sasha does not know what this kind of conversation is called. It is not small talk, and it is not gossip precisely, nor is it deep and meaningful discussion. Dialogue, meeting, palaver, visit—none of them seem quite right. If there is a term, Sasha is unaware of it. She only knows she never wants to be without it in her life. Never, never, never.

      Sasha is twenty minutes late to her meeting with Anne, because she tends to be ten minutes late wherever she goes and also because she spent an extra ten minutes looking for her Egyptian earrings.

      So she has to hurry into the bar, feeling sweaty and rumpled, and right away she regrets her visit here last night with Monique because the cadaverous bartender says, “Well, hello, again!” making her sound like a regular.

      Anne is sitting at the lone table (is in fact the only person in the bar) and though Sasha supposes it could be some random woman and not Anne, she’s very sure it is.

      She hurries over and pulls out the chair opposite Anne. “Sorry I’m late,” she says. “I lost track of time.”

      Anne is regarding her coolly. Maybe she doesn’t like the idea of Sasha losing track of time before their big meeting. Finally she says, “You’re younger than I thought but not as pretty.”

      Sasha wipes a little moisture from her upper lip. “Well, all my life I’ve wanted to be this cool elegant beauty,” she says, “and in reality I think I’m more a friendly blonde a lot of men have wanted to have sex with. Though that was pretty nice, too.”

      If Anne looks shocked by this, it’s no more than Sasha is. (Imagine Neville Chamberlain saying such a thing!) She resolves to think before she speaks again. Although she has no intention of saying so, she thinks that actually the reverse is true of Anne—she is older but prettier than Sasha had imagined. Anne has very pale skin, though to Sasha it looks strangely devoid of pores, and black hair cut in a short bob. Her eyes are pale blue with dark lashes. It’s a Snow White kind of pretty and completely the opposite of Sasha, who has quite a few freckles. Also, Anne is wearing a dark blue suit, with an expensive-looking patterned silk scarf tied around her throat. Sasha can never wear scarves. She always takes them off and stuffs them in her purse after half an hour.

      There is a long beat of silence and then Anne says, “Perhaps we should get a bottle of wine.”

      “I don’t think they sell it by the bottle here,” Sasha says. “Only by the glass.”

      “Two glasses of wine, then,” Anne says.

      They both look at the bartender but he is sitting behind the bar, avoiding eye contact, and showing no signs of coming over to them. Evidently that’s something he does only on rare occasions, or for two girls in their twenties.

      “I’ll have red wine,” Anne says, as though Sasha is the waitress. Sasha feels a sudden flash of compassion for Carson. Is this what their life together was like?

      But she doesn’t really see a point in arguing, so she crosses the bar and orders two glasses of house red from the bartender, who becomes spookily animated again and says, “With pleasure, my lovely!” and Sasha is really starting to wish they’d gone somewhere, anywhere, else.

      When she returns to the table with the glasses of wine, Anne says, “I hear you used to be a receptionist and now you’re a writer.” She says this the way someone might say, I hear you used to be a junkie and now you’re a prostitute.

      Sasha has a sudden bad-tempered urge to tell Anne how supportive Carson is of her writing, how if she hasn’t finished her pages for the day, he’ll sit in her living room, reading fashion magazines or watching Unsolved Mysteries with Monique, even on nights when they have only an hour or two to spend together.

      Perhaps Anne senses her misstep because she says, “I hear you write children’s books,” in a slightly friendlier tone.

      Are they not supposed to mention Carson’s name? Why does Anne keep saying I hear

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