Several men shouted, “Hear, hear!”
Casey clinked her glass with the people near her.
Hugh elbowed Kevin. “Kevin, man, are you crying?” He pulled out a white handkerchief from his pants pocket and waved it in the direction of his boss.
Kevin squinted at Hugh, accepted the proffered handkerchief, and dabbed his eyes playfully. He tossed it at Casey, and she, too, touched the corners of her eyes, placing the back of her right hand over her forehead as if she were swooning. Everyone returned to their drinking. Casey was praying that no one would send her shots of tequila—she had to go to Sabine’s in the morning. The talk soon reverted to what brokers cared about: upgrades in airlines and hotels and Relais & Chateaux in America and Europe. Casey felt she could write a guidebook on the places she’d visited as a corporate flunky and from the conversations she’d overheard.
The brandy made her feel warm inside, its sweet taste coating her throat. She opened Hugh’s handkerchief to fold it back properly. The act of concentrating on getting the corners right when she had a good buzz going in her head was somehow pleasurable. On a corner was his monogram, HEU, in block letters.
“Hugh E. Underhill,” Casey said out loud.
Hugh turned to her. “Hmm?” He was also a little gone, having had a good-size bottle of cold sake by himself.
“What’s the E for?”
“Edgar.”
“After three years of sitting next to a person,” Casey said, “there are still things I don’t know about you, dear.” The tone of her voice was mocking. She looked at his face. He was truly a handsome man. He’d been a good friend to her over the years, not to mention the hundreds of lunches he’d bought for her. Whenever she’d try to pay him, he’d say, “I’m a good-looking and successful stockbroker, and you are a poorly paid gofer who went to a far better college than I did. And to think I almost never did my homework at Groton. Isn’t that rich?” Of course, he said all this in this way to make sure she never paid. Hugh was a hound, for certain, but he was a kind person. He was also a hedonist and, naturally, never made her feel bad about her spending habits. Hugh believed in pleasure and luxury like a religion. He despised abstemiousness.
Hugh smiled at her. “So have you missed me terribly? How have you gotten on?”
“It’s been unbearable, really.” Casey tried to keep a straight face. “Sometimes these powerful feelings of loss overcome me, and I can hardly function. If I fail at school, the blame will rest on you, Hugh Edgar Underhill.” She appeared as mournful as possible.
Hugh reached over and kissed her cheek, and Casey pushed him away. “Yuck. Cut it out.” She laughed.
“Don’t come begging for more,” he said.
The waiters brought glass equipment to brew coffee table side. Each set resembled pieces from chemistry lab—glass bowl-shaped beakers with a kind of elegant Bunsen burner fitted on their bottoms and delicate tins with Sterno fuel. Another waiter carried a ceramic crock filled with coffee from Hawaii. The headwaiter ceremoniously lit a tiny blue fire under each beaker, and the water in the glass beaker boiled rapidly. The brokers and traders were hypnotized by the coffee preparation. They looked like boys more than Wall Street guys worth millions. Casey liked them suddenly this way, for their innocence and absence of cynicism at such a gimmicky contrivance. For her, the effect was lovely enough, especially the aroma of good coffee being brewed. But each cup was ten dollars. Waiters put out cream in pewter pitchers, and Casey put some in her white coffee cup. She dropped two sugar cubes in her cup, though she normally took her coffee black, no sweetener. Feeling poorer than she’d ever felt, she craved every bit of luxury and feared never having any more, and what made it worse was that she was ashamed of wanting it so much, to consume it, to incorporate it somehow into her body. She didn’t want to feel poor anymore.
When she was growing up, her parents drank Taster’s Choice with Coffee-Mate, which they called “preem” after a nondairy additive they’d used in Korea. When she’d go to the grocery store with her mother, she’d finger the box of Domino Dots—sugar in perfect sharp cubes—but she’d never considered asking her mother to buy a box; it seemed so costly and frivolous compared with the store-brand white sugar in five-pound bags. From the ages of eighteen to twenty-five—she was nearly twenty-six—Casey had eaten at many different kinds of tables, some of the fanciest restaurants, private clubs, and homes in New York, but inside, she believed that she could be asked to leave at any moment, and what would she do but leave quietly with the knowledge that this was what happened to girls like her?