. . let's just say something was missing. I couldn't seem to work up a head of steam about ending up as a skinny effeminate man teaching nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature on some remote little Midwestern campus where I'd probably have had a series of crushes on a series of students who'd flirt with me to make sure of their grades. In another era I'd probably have done it anyway, a flaming queen's choices are about as limited as a woman's, but, well, the times being what they were, I stood up one day in the middle of reading The Wings of the Dove, marked my place, took my three hundred dollars out of the bank, and moved to New York.”
“Are you glad you did?”
“Yes, absolutely. I never really wanted to teach Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, I wanted to be Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. And really, when nature has elected to provide you with the soul of a tragic diva and the body of a scrawny man who started going bald at twenty-two, well. . .”
Mary said, “I was sixteen when I met my husband. My ex-husband. But, sixteen. Think of that.”
“You were a Lolita. I'll bet you could work those hometown boys.”
“Not really. I was pretty enough, I guess, but sixteen felt awfully young then. Not like today. Constantine was my first boyfriend, can you believe that?”
“You married your childhood sweetheart. It happens.”
“I met him at a dance. A church dance in my neighborhood. He was assistant foreman of the crew my brother Joey worked on. He was my older brother's boss, and he seemed so important. He seemed like somebody. He was twenty-one. He showed up at this dismal little dance in a church basement wearing a red sport coat.”
“Snappy.”
“I'd just seen a picture of a boy in a magazine wearing a red sport coat like that. I think I fell in love with the jacket first, to tell you the truth. First the jacket, then the boy.”
“It's one way of doing it.”
“And I wanted to fall in love. I could hardly wait. You see, my parents, well, I was so terribly afraid of ending up like them. I wanted something—better. I thought I'd do just about anything.”
“I guess that makes two of us, doesn't it?” Cassandra said.
That was the first of the ladies' lunches, as Cassandra insisted on calling them. After that, Mary met him every four or five weeks, always in the same restaurant. She began to feel a certain defiance in meeting Cassandra, a small thrill of illicit pleasure. Mary told herself she was meeting Cassandra to keep track of Zoe, and that wasn't untrue, but after six months or so, after five of the ladies' lunches, she had to admit that she also liked seeing Cassandra for the sake of seeing Cassandra. Within their range of shared topics she could say anything that entered her mind, and she knew Cassandra didn't feel superior to her. If anything, she felt superior to Cassandra, though she didn't like to think of it in those terms. So much in her life was difficult, and these lunches were surprisingly easy. They didn't count; they didn't matter. Cassandra could be relied upon to keep the conversation going, just as Mary's family had once relied on her to do. She was never boring (Mary had begun, somewhat queasily, to think of Cassandra as “she”), and she reminded Mary at regular intervals of Mary's beauty and of the contention, however doubtful, that at fifty-five she was just now entering the realm of true feminine mystery. After one of the lunches it occurred to Mary that Cassandra reminded her, in certain ways, of her childhood friends, the Italian girls from her old neighborhood to whom she hadn't spoken in over thirty-five years. Cassandra had a similar raucous extravagance; she seemed to take a similar pleasure in her own gaudy if limited prospects. Here she was, a friend who paid court and did not threaten, and Mary found that she liked having this secret friendship. She carried it with her in the shops of Garden City and at her club meetings, where the other women were unfailingly kind and courteous and not in any way truly interested in the divorced Italian wife of a Greek man who built shoddy subdivisions.
At the sixth of the lunches, Cassandra turned up with Jamal. Mary arrived and found the two of them, Jamal sitting in her own usual chair, propped up on a telephone book. He