—
On Sunday I had texted Isabel to arrange the week’s lessons. She answered:
Isabel: in la
Me: What?
Isabel: LA
Me: Cool. When are you coming back?
Isabel: for auditions
Me: Nice. When are you coming back?
No reply. I went to bed calculating weekly totals and woke up to a blank phone. In the afternoon I tried her again:
Me: Isabel, do you know when you’re coming back to NY?
Isabel: depends
* * *
—
On Wednesday I was slow to get out of bed. What did it matter, when there were so many empty hours in the endless day? I did my diligent four at the desk, then ran the Prospect Park loop, my legs lead and the air thick. I couldn’t remember October ever being so hot. The leaves weren’t turning. I was back to sundresses. Every night a box fan cooled me down.
Obviously the planet was sick. When I really thought about it I felt ill too. I thought about how the PhD students of the future (if they still existed) would read today’s novels hungry for any mention of climate change, the same way today there were full-length books on the nineteenth-century novels’ “veiled critiques” of colonialism. How desperately we wanted to believe that Austen had comprehended the colossal crime of her motherland, even though for her the sugar trade was probably just a plot device to get the second son out of England. Not that I was better. I was worse. Climate change wasn’t even a plot device to me. It was just some lousy way to express my mood.
That is to say, I was human. My thoughts always boomeranged back to myself. By the time I had stretched and showered and picked through the kitchen for lunch, I was back on the self-pity truck. It was so hot, and there were so many hours in the day, and though I could hear Church Avenue—horns honking, delivery trucks beeping, a construction crew jackhammering—I had fallen out of the city’s daily life. I had nowhere to be. I kept taking Lacie’s books off the shelves, touching them, wanting to have read them, but unable to sit through a single sentence.
The fridge, too, I kept returning to, looking at all the Christmas cards and gallery announcements, all the engagement photos and save-the-dates. Sophie’s wedding invitation, a year old and faded by the sun, particularly bewitched me. Tasteful and discreet, a tiny gray square of paper printed in Garamond, it was, I decided, almost ostentatious in its subdued announcement of impending matrimony, its implicit rebuttal of all the gushing photo-saturated cardstock around it. A dozen times I had taken it down and examined it, but on my third or fourth perusal that restless day, I noticed something new. Rather than some obnoxiously cute joint email account, Sophie had simply included her own personal address for RSVPs.
Sophie. Tiny, forthright, laughing Sophie. Sophie who had wanted to know what Lacie was like in high school, Sophie who sensed the dysfunction between her husband and his mother, and called that dysfunction a haunting. Who worked at The New Yorker. Who had said she was delighted to meet me.
To write the email I wore one of Lacie’s old T-shirts with the neck cut out. Curled on the couch, in her usual spot, with my laptop on my knees, I composed the perfect missive—offhand, casual, charming. I didn’t think it was too weird. I was new in town. We had a mutual friend. But I still felt nervous. When Sophie wrote back a few hours later suggesting the following afternoon—adding that it would have to be lunch, it would have to be Midtown, did I mind the schlep, any chance I’d be in that neighborhood anyway?—I did a little dance around the room.
* * *
—
Watery indigo. Cream. Black loops floating in pools of red, a ribbon of emerald green. Silky, fluttery, the dress clung to me, elegant, but vibrating with patterns: oscillating dots on the sleeve, mustard yellow V’s edged in cobalt and ore.
Last week, getting ready for dinner with Ian and his gallerist, Lacie had sauntered into the living room wearing this dress. Trailing the clean, bright scent of shampoo, twirling a little and laughing, she had asked, “What do you think? Good enough?”
This was not like her. Usually when I said I liked her outfit, she blinked at me. But now she wanted reassurance. “Gorgeous,” I said, putting aside my book, which was really her book: Excellent Women. “Wow. That dress is really wild, actually. It’s crazy.”
She held out the hem. “Yeah, isn’t it? This pattern is called Dutch Wax, but it’s actually from Southeast Asia.”
I considered. “Yeah, it looks kind of batiky.”
“Yes.” Her eyes shone. “Wait, do you know this story? It’s kind of fascinating.”
I did not know the story, and I did not particularly care, but I was interested in how her eyes were shining. “Tell me.”
“These Dutch traders copied batik patterns from Indonesia, and took them home and started to mass-produce them, thinking they would be a big hit in Europe, but they never really took off. So then they started shipping the clothes to West Africa, and the merchants there loved them; they started making their own, with local colors and symbols, and all these allusions to history. So now some people call it African Wax. It’s funny because it’s totally wrapped up in the story of colonialism, but it’s also become this symbol of colonial resistance.”
She nodded meaningfully when she said colonial resistance, and I thought of her work with Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and I felt vaguely guilty, because I was basically a political sloth, and then I mirrored her emphatic nodding and hummed, “That is so cool.”
“Yeah, and then these high-end designers got into it. I sort of love it because you really can say that it is ‘authentically’ Asian and European and African. I mean, it looks African, whatever that means, but when you trace it back, and back, you end up in Indonesia. It’s this endless loop of copying and borrowing.”
I thought of the costumes she had made for my play back in high school. That beautiful dress. Leo’s suit. Since then her delight in textiles had only grown. She had grown. A sort of fierce, squirmy tenderness shot into my heart.
“That’s so cool,” I told her, but really I was talking about us, us together, the myth of us, Lacie with her costumes, me with my writing. “That’s awesome.”
Now, a week later, I knew what I was going to wear to lunch. I had known it ever since I wrote that email, though I did go through the motions of trying my own clothes on first. But it was always going to be the Dutch Wax. When I saw myself in the mirror I grinned, and took from Lacie’s dresser a little gold chain to fasten around my neck.
* * *
—
Returning later that day, I rounded the corner and saw Ian waiting on our building’s front steps.