His face was carrying a charge. His mouth was slack again with anticipation.
“Figure out the ending first. Not everyone agrees, but that’s something I’d recommend.”
“An airplane heading home to America through an ashcloud…”
“Okay,” she said, “but who’s on it?”
They were at the serving table. Curtis carved off some roast chicken for Whitney and then for Jack. Whitney forked her slice and held it up to Jack and made a face like: Aren’t you so happy now? He gobbled it off her fork and Curtis frowned and then served her a second helping.
Behind them, Will and Leonard had been struggling to find a single overlap in their L.A. maps. Something had changed in Leonard since their first encounter outside. She’d disappeared for wine and come back chatty—looser of jaw, sparing no detail, seemingly, of her first twenty-two years on earth.
She was from the Palisades, she said. Rustic Canyon, she said, which “some slummingly classify as Santa Monica.” Leonard had been in “private school, K through 12,” she said, “near the country mart, near the country club.” Her father “knocked up my mom when he was a caddy there, where she’d bought a membership just to have a quiet place to drink and not be slobbered over by someone without money.…Little did she know,” she said. Her mother did “business in Asia, overseas for weeks at a time, Japan in the nineties, China in the aughts.” When her mother was away, it was “just the two of us, me and Scott.” They were right there, “not far from the Rockingham circus, even closer to the Lewinskys, right smack at the center of the bull’s-eye, circa nineteen-ninety-whatever—or so I’m told. I was, like, a baby.”
Home was “as weird as it sounds” and school was “filled with the names you’d expect,” which made her feel “like even more of an outsider than I already was,” with an absentee mom and a dad who “probably loved Riviera more than he loved me—and neither of them even worked in the industry.” She rattled off her GPA and test scores and the places she got into and the places she didn’t, and said “the one exception was that I was exceptional at French.” But they “never went to Europe, never went to Paris,” she said. So she spoke French on just a couple occasions only in the wild, on a trip to Vietnam, “in some cafés in Hanoi— it was literally life-changing.”
College was a way to “get out of the canyons,” she said, and “finally get to France.” She’d gone to school with “the same people for thirteen years,” she said, and summer camp in Malibu with “the same Westside Jews since middle school.” At NYU, though, everywhere she looked were “the same kinds of JAPs, and in many cases literally the same exact ones from home.” She read French. She enrolled in the school of individualized study. She listened to hip-hop out of the banlieus. She could move easily, she said, between “the clip of Parisian and the slang of North African immigrants.” It went on and on and Will nodded along, wondering at times what Whitney and Jack were talking about so happily.
Life in the dorms, Leonard said, was an extension of everything she’d already experienced back home, only set in “the miserable winter grays of lower Fifth Avenue.” The heat never worked in her suite. Her roommate fucked her boyfriend in the room while they thought she was asleep. When she complained, the roommate had her boyfriend build a shower curtain around her bed, hanging a contraption from the ceiling that collapsed on them “while he was pounding her in the ass one night, and I was on the other side of the room, wearing headphones and—get this—reading Madame Bovary.” The other two members of the suite lasted only until December (suicide attempt) and March (midterm scandal), granting her the opportunity to move alone into the cursed room, “with its stench of bong water and depression, and its view of the Empire State Building.”
She lived the next year with a girl from the Valley, in an even more destitute suite, “giant by lower Manhattan standards,” but with “a seemingly direct pipeline for bugs from the boiler room.” She found a first-year analyst at Morgan Stanley to spend time with, mostly so she could “be alone at his apartment.” He worked “twenty-eight hours a day and full-time on weekends.” He required “three blow jobs a week, that was it.” But if he was stressed about something at work, he might “try and fail to make me come…”
It was the line on her lips as she reached the carving station. They’d covered a lot of ground in the distance from the door to Curtis’s chicken.
And so, she said, she would go to Paris for a year to “figure things out.” It was her escape, she said, the only thing that had “made life tolerable.” Arriving in Paris in September and walking around on the first afternoon was “the only time I’ve cried over something from feeling good.” Her apartment was near the Canal, “near enough to the classrooms, near enough to the good places.” She’d lived with two foreign roommates, “a German couple,” she said. She went to clubs at night. She chose “a nom de fête.” She met “a boy.” She met “another boy.” She followed his band on tour to Brittany and then Bordeaux. She felt her interests “coming into focus in ways they wouldn’t have back home.” The place was “alive to me,” she said. The place was “filled with my people.” And it was affordable, she said, “half the cost of New York—New York truly is the worst.” She could “never go back.” But then the year ended. It was time
