cheeks, pencil skirt, and two-thousand-dollar black Prada purse. Bird-brained Bethy, whose untested heart was cold as a stone. She went to charity balls for made-up afflictions like Shaking Leg Syndrome, but she’d never taken a subway, nor given a panhandler change. After a company-wide meeting, she’d announced, “Homeless people should just die instead of wasting everybody’s taxes.” Half her audience had smiled with glee because she’d expressed what they were too sophisticated to say.
A glory tour of Bethy’s most asinine declarations: “Black men are lazy. They like white women better because it raises their social status. Also, we’re SO much prettier” “Women shouldn’t work past thirty, because after that, their eggs rot, and their kids wind up retarded” “Men turn gay when their mothers are too needy” “Jews steal every time you turn your back. They start wars, too. Not in my daddy’s golf club. Christians only!”
The worst part, Bethy wasn’t capable of independent thought, which meant she was parroting somebody else. Her parents, or her private-school teachers, or her buddies eating half portabella sandwiches and finely chopped salads after a couple of sets of tennis at the Westchester Country Club, or the dipshit executives here at Vesuvius, who smiled in your country-bumpkin face, like you and your Indian boyfriend were the lone exceptions to their contempt for everything that was different.
Bethy let go and noticed Audrey’s oversized sweat suit and glasses. “What an interesting new look,” she said. “Did you sew that yourself?”
“No, I didn’t,” Audrey answered. She imagined poking Bethy’s eyes out. The juice would run down her face. Not so pretty then, sweetheart. Daddy’ll have to buy some Venetian glass, Sandy Duncan style. Then she blinked and tried to chase the image away. Big brown eyes, and Audrey’s thumbs, digging in deep. As easy as making a fist. The sound would be a quick, meaty pop. Fluid would splatter while she screamed. The image subsided like drying tears, and she wondered numbly what mean, petty thing had crawled inside her, sowing poison.
“Do you need anything?” Bethy asked.
“How about a raise? Think you can swing that from your trust fund, Bethy? Because I could use a dentist,” she said. Bethy squinted in confusion like she had ice-cream brain freeze, and Audrey walked on.
At her desk, she found a bouquet of white lilies. A couple of the smaller buds were still closed, but two had opened to full bloom. Someone had cut the stems on a diagonal to keep them fresh, then placed them in a square, water-filled crystal vase. She’d never been given flowers before, nor owned a piece of crystal. It was heavier than she’d expected. The note attached read: “Sorry, kiddo. Chin up.—Jill.” Next to the lilies were two cards. One, a picture of a poodle without caption from the head of human resources. The inside read:
Darling. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. Yours always, Collier.
The second note was a Hallmark sympathy card. The outside was carnations, and in black letters the inside read: “Sorry for your loss.” Every member of the 59th Street team had signed it.
She sat in her chair with an exhausted thrump. Could feel her pulse moving slowly, like the blood inside her was clotting. Remembered vaguely what she’d done to Jayne’s lamp and her clothes. Was frightened by it. Could see that she’d become unhinged. But more than all that, she was angry.
She opened the drawer, took out a .05 width pen. Line by line, over and over she crossed out every signature on the card. Hungover Craig, who spent five hours every night at The Dead Poet on the Upper West Side, drinking his weight in whiskey, then farting noxious tear gas all day at his cube. Sniveling Jim and his excuses, who bragged about the original Lichtenstein Girl in Bath hanging in his Park Avenue apartment, like becoming a member of the downwardly mobile, useless class was a badge of honor. Jealous Simon. His designs were more soulless than a Gropius, and if not for his dad, he’d be working for Trump. Louis, Mark, Henry, and David, the incompetent quartet. They talked sports half the morning, went on coffee breaks half the afternoon, then whined about how nobody ever gave them a shot. Sorry, boys, you were right, layoffs are coming early this year.
She scribbled until all that was left was a black card, wet and heavy with ink. Then she pulled down all the things she’d tacked to her cube over the last seven months