At the subway platform, Casey rested her things on an empty bench. The duffel was filled like sausage casing with summer clothes and shoes. In the messenger bag strapped across her chest were her books: copies of Middlemarch and Wuthering Heights that she read and reread for comfort; a collection of Pritchett’s stories borrowed long ago from Virginia and that she hadn’t read yet; the confirmation Bible she read each morning in private and a ninety-nine-cent marble composition notebook in which she copied her verse for the day. Also in the bag, wrapped in a cotton scarf, was a mint first edition of Lilly Daché’s biography that Sabine and her husband, Isaac, had given her for her graduation. Lilly Daché was a celebrity hat maker from the 1940s and 1950s whose career Sabine had modeled her own on. After Sabine gave her the book, she told Casey that she’d paid five hundred dollars for it. A retailer, Sabine couldn’t help talking about the cost of things.
In her straw handbag, Casey carried cosmetics and a Vuitton wallet （another present from Sabine） with two hundred and seventy-two dollars in cash and her first Visa charge plate activated from her parents’ apartment that night. At the bottom of the purse, two rolls of quarters weighed heavily.
Amazingly, the pay phone on the platform had a dial tone, but when Jay’s home phone began to ring, the R train came, so she hung up and ducked into the car. Soon she reached the Lexington Avenue station and switched for the 6. Before midnight, Casey found herself in front of Jay’s apartment building on York Avenue.
With her own set of keys, she let herself into Jay’s cramped lobby—its walls painted a Schiaparelli pink. The lobby had just enough square footage for an upholstered stool opposite the elevator and a path for a resident to reach the six mailboxes behind the staircase. Jay’s box, as she’d predicted, was jammed, including a fat alumni magazine from Lawrenceville where he’d been a day boy. Casey flipped through his heavy stack of mail. They had an arrangement where he gave her checkbooks with signed blank checks and she paid his bills. He didn’t have time to sleep or spend money on a regular basis; his big-ticket items were skiing in the winter, golfing in the summer, and the repayment of school loans. In January, he’d received a hundred percent bonus and made one hundred and sixty thousand dollars in total compensation. Their point of view on money was identical: Whoever had more covered for the other. At school, when she’d had extra because her weekend job was steady, she’d paid their expenses. And now that he earned much more money, he picked up the tab.
In return, when she stayed over during weekends and vacations, while her parents had the impression she was sleeping at Virginia’s, Casey did housewifey things for Jay—went to the dry cleaner for his shirts, tidied the apartment, scrubbed the bathtub, stocked the refrigerator with orange juice, milk, cereal, and coffee. She helped him select his suits, shirts, and ties—he preferred Paul Stuart over Brooks—and every night when they spoke on the phone while her parents were asleep, she reminded him to take his vitamins before saying good night. She could’ve cooked more but lacked real interest in the domestic arts—her repertoire was limited to baked ziti made with Ragú sauce and Polly-O cheese and a Lipton’s Onion Soup mix meat loaf. Nevertheless, Jay was grateful. He was a pleasure to take care of because he had beautiful manners. For that, Casey took her hat off to his mother, Mary Ellen.
Casey’s face was hurting. In the dim light from a pink glass chandelier installed by the landlord’s nephew, she opened her compact to check her face. Her father’s mark on her face was less distinctly a hand—more liver shaped. She put away the mirror. Jay didn’t know about her father’s hitting her. He knew her parents were difficult; he was aware that she wasn’t meant to date white guys. But Casey never told anyone about the hitting. When she was a girl, her mother warned her and Tina that in America, if your parents disciplined you and the teachers at school found out, the state would put you in an orphanage. Consequently, Casey and Tina never told anyone anything. As they grew older, they saw their parents working yet unable to get ahead. Leah looked perpetually frightened in the streets, and both she and Joseph were treated like idiots by their customers, who cared little that the hardworking pair were fluent and literate in another language. Casey and Tina saw their parents’ difficulties and believed that Leah and Joseph meant well. And they feared their parents’ actions would be misunderstood. As if to confirm it, Jay called her parents bigoted: “Your silence about me is a form of collusion with their racism.”