married. It's only men who disappear up their own assholes searching for perfection, isn't it?”
“I don't know,” Zoe said. “I wouldn't marry this guy.”
“Never mind about that. Did you bring him home?”
“Mm-hm. I told him I lived right around the corner, he could take a shower at my place if he wanted to.”
“Good girl,” Cassandra said, “Like a lion bringing down a gazelle.”
“I'm a slut,” Zoe said. “What can I say?”
“So you got him home.”
“Mm-hm. And he took a shower, and you know. There we were.”
“What did he do with the dog, for god's sake?”
“I gave her a bowl of water, and she just lay down in the living room. She was a good dog.”
“And how was the sex?” Cassandra said. “Tell Momma.”
“Nice. Well, he was fast. He was too fast for me. But sweet. He fell right to sleep after, he rolled off of me and I think he was asleep before he hit the mattress.”
“Just as I told you,” Cassandra said. “Men with dogs.”
Cassandra worked as a seamstress, and she performed in plays put on in basement clubs. She wasn't the star. She played handmaidens and slave girls, or the heroine's best friend. Zoe always went to see her. In Bluebeard Cassandra played the doomed wife, standing outside a painted cardboard door and saying, “Oh, my master hath warned me never to trespass upon the sanctity and privation of this, his most inner chamber, but I've just got to know what's in there.” In Anna Karenina, or, Night Train she was part of a chorus that sang “Can't Stop Loving That Man of Mine.” In Secrets of the Chun King Empire she entered in a kimono and said, “The emperor has chosen Wing Li to be his concubine and the mother of his heir, to ascend with him to the realm of tranquillity that lies beyond the Blue Mountains, so all the rest of you girls can just get your butts on out of here.”
Zoe always applauded with pride and a lurking, stinging embarrassment. She loved Cassandra. She was vaguely burdened by her. She felt herself to be increased and diminished because Cassandra carried around the idea of her, Zoe, a girl who had set herself free. A girl who wasn't nice or ordinary. Sometimes she could be that girl. Sometimes she wanted only to sleep in a small white bedroom while Cassandra and the other Zoe walked through the streets glittering with all they wanted.
After her performances Cassandra would come out and have a drink with Zoe. The clubs were black as ice, full of ancient smells, a rot Zoe recognized from the bins of unwashed clothes kept at the back of the store. Cassandra introduced Zoe around. “This is my girl here, yes, ladies, the one hundred percent real thing. She's my protegee, isn't she gorgeous?”
People agreed that she was gorgeous. Who knew what they thought? Zoe sat on a barstool in her dark clothes, the black distance of the kohl she'd started wearing on her eyes. She sipped a beer and listened to them talk. The men in dresses didn't need conversation. They were a performance, they only needed her to watch.
“You know what I envy? Those little feet. Imagine being able to walk into a store and just buy any pair of shoes that caught your fancy.”
“Frankly, darling, I can think of nothing more depressing. It's so easy, any fool can walk into a store. What I love is the challenge. Finding a pair of pretty pumps in a size thirteen, now that's an accomplishment a girl can take pride in.”
“Uh-huh. Didn't I see that pair you got on hanging from a pole over the shoe-repair shop last week?”
“Look who's talking. Honey, the police are still trying to figure out who took that pair of canoes out of the lake in Central Park, but my lips are sealed.”
Cassandra and her friends didn't need Zoe for long. She said good night, left them talking and laughing together at the bar. Cassandra usually walked her to the door.
“Thanks for coming, angel.”
“It was a good show, Cassandra.”
“Well, there's a reason they call it the big time, and there's a reason most people aren't in it. Call me.”
“All right.”
“Not too early.”
“Never.”
When Cassandra came in the afternoons, in pants and a T-shirt, she sat at Zoe's kitchen table picking up crumbs with her fingertip. She said, “You kids should clean up a little more, you'll have this place crawling with roaches.”
Sometimes Zoe thought she should have a plan. She