eleven in the morning Mary stood in her bedroom trying to decide what to wear, and she thought, This is what's happening to me. The thought, in all its clenched simplicity, made her sit down, harder than she'd meant to, on the green silk bench of her dressing table. This is what's happening. Up until then her recent circumstances had existed in her mind as a shifting mass of no discernible shape or dimension, bright and silvery in some places, dark in others, made up of more or less random events: the minute slippage of the copper-colored toupee her lawyer wore when he drew up the divorce papers; a string of amber beads she'd bought for Susan but decided, suddenly, to keep for herself; a cloudy Wednesday morning sky full of promise and warning, as if the two states were intimately related. There had been only small incidents like those, sharp but hardly illuminating, moored to the particulars of cleaning and shopping and her new job, and to the surprisingly intense nightly pleasure she found in going to bed alone. Now, as she tried to dress herself for lunch, she thought with an almost scientific detachment, This is what's happening. I live by myself in a five-bedroom house. My oldest daughter hardly speaks to me. My son loves other men. I'm trying to decide what to wear to lunch with the “godmother” of my younger grandson and I have no idea what to wear because I don't know what kind of place I'm going to and I've never had lunch with a man who wears dresses. She picked up a bottle of nail polish, set it down again, and it occurred to her that Cassandra might, at that moment, be sitting in an apartment somewhere wondering what to wear to lunch with a woman like herself, wealthy and respectable, well-groomed. “I'm not,” Mary said out loud, and was surprised by the sound of her own voice in the empty room. What had she meant by that? She was wealthy and respectable; she was undeniably well-groomed. What, exactly, was she not? She picked up the botde of nail polish again, looked at it as if some kind of clue might be hidden in the pale, glossy beige liquid. I'm not sure, she said to herself.
The navy St. John suit, she decided. And then, abruptly, she started to laugh. This is what's happening, she said to herself, and she decided to think of it as funny. She decided to think of it as funny, and just that suddenly, it was. Lunch with a man who might outdress her. All right, then. The navy St. John suit. The Ferragamo pumps. A simple strand of pearls.
Cassandra had chosen a restaurant on a street called Charles Street, in a part of the city where Mary had never been. As a younger woman Mary had known—had insisted on knowing—only the New York of theaters and hotels, of turreted limestone rising above the calm green dangers of Central Park. Now, in later life, thanks to her children, she'd been to unspeakable sections. She'd passed among beggars and lunatics, ruined a Charles Jourdan flat on a broken beer bottle, walked up flights of dingy, reeking stairs. Once, on her way to visit Zoe, she'd had to step around a turd, human, that lay like stupidity and degradation itself in the exact center of an azure-tiled vestibule. If she'd survived all that, she could survive lunch in yet another unfamiliar part of town, in the sort of restaurant someone like Cassandra would choose. This was happening. It could be funny, if you let it be. If you didn't look at it too hard, or think too far ahead.
Neither Charles Street nor the restaurant, however, proved half as trying as Mary had expected them to be. Charles Street was actually very pretty, shaded by trees, lined with town houses Mary herself could imagine living in, substantial old buildings whose generous windows revealed bits of elaborate moldings, of fluted ceiling medallions and chandeliers. One of the houses was covered in wisteria vines, through which Mary could make out a stone panel engraved with leaves, arabesques, and a weathered face that seemed to advertise one of the harsher virtues, forbearance or strength or adamant virginity. She stood before the face, which was netted in its tangle of coarse brown vines, and felt an odd but not disagreeable sense of familiarity, as if she might have visited this street as a child. The