“It’s just that I’d like to pay for the groceries. You already do so much,” she said, her tone anxious. This was true. For the past ten months, he’d paid for the rent, utilities, and cable. “I’m sorry. About the soup. I didn’t mean to make you eat sale soup. I’m the student, so I should be eating the—”
“Casey. . .” Unu spoke sternly. “Eat the food you want. Stop worrying about this stuff. For God’s sake, I told you I’d take care of—” He caught himself and took a breath. He was losing his temper.
“Okay, okay.” Casey got quiet. She didn’t want to fight with him. Suddenly she felt so tired, worrying about his pride and their lack of money, and there was her stupid future to consider. She still didn’t have an investment banking job lined up for the summer—the top-tier firms paid the highest internship salaries. Lots of Internet companies were looking, but she had no interest in that world. Hugh or Walter might be able to help her get a spot on the Kearn Davis banking program, but she was embarrassed to call them for a favor. It seemed like another backdoor entrance. Kearn Davis didn’t bother to recruit at Stern; the only New York business school they recruited from was Columbia. Sabine had been right after all. Names mattered so much.
“I’m sorry, Unu,” she said, not knowing why she was apologizing.
“We will be all right.”
“I know,” she said, unable to look at him. “I know. I’m sure of it.”
At the checkout aisle, Unu refused to let her pay for the groceries. He paid for everything with cash and kissed her good-bye on the street before she went to catch the 6. He carried four bags of groceries, two in each hand, and watched his girlfriend running to the train station.
Casey was a conscientious student and didn’t find B school to be difficult. On Fridays, after her class in corporate finance ended, she met with her section to work on their group projects. The section went out for beers afterward at Mariano’s, but as usual, Casey begged off. She said good-bye to her friends, then headed for Ella’s house in Forest Hills to see her goddaughter, Irene.
The train ride to Queens was less than thirty minutes, making it an ideal time for her to read for pleasure. She’d begun Middlemarch again recently, finding comfort in the familiar world. She opened the book and found two letters from Virginia in place of a bookmark. One of them she’d read last night when she got home, and the other she had put aside to savor later.
Casey tore open the envelope. In it was a card with a Caravaggio painting on the front—a young boy with a succulent vermilion-colored mouth—and inside were folded sheets of Florentine marble paper where Virginia had continued the writing when there was no more space left on the card. At the sight of Virginia’s girls’ school cursive writing, so much like Ella’s—full of fat loops and highly dotted i’s—Casey felt happy.
She laughed out loud when she read the first line in the card—“Brace yourself”—anticipating one of Virginia’s ugly-American-in-foreign-country escapades. Virginia didn’t avoid scrapes, she yearned for them. At the sound of her own laughter, she remembered herself and looked about her. But none of the passengers had noticed, and none peered over her shoulder to read her card. The train—full of weary passengers heading home—trudged along its tracks unremarkably, fulfilling its usefulness. The train lights didn’t flicker, the stops were smooth, and they weren’t stuck in a dark tunnel listening to a sad story from a drunk panhandler passing his paper coffee cup—the predictable moments attached to a daily train ride. With a long letter to keep her company, it was cozy sitting there between a pair of commuters in light jackets, headphones over their ears. From one of their headsets, she could make out a voice that sounded like Ray Charles and piano playing. Her eyes strayed to the second line of the first paragraph: “Dearest beloved Casey, Jay Currie is to be married.” Had she misunderstood Virginia’s florid language? She reread the line; her eyes had lost track.
“I’ve gathered intelligence about the bride from friends who attended the engagement party at the Metropolitan Club,” Virginia wrote. Jay, a member of Terrace, had been close with members of his own eating club as well as those of Ivy—Virginia’s eating club. Their worlds had mingled often.
He was marrying Keiko Uchida, Virginia wrote—a taciturn foreign student with large brown eyes and pale lips who wore gray pearl studs in her ears. Her mother’s family was crazy rich, and her father was a high-ranking salaryman who worked for Hirano, a porcelain company. Her mother’s father gave something like a gymnasium to Brown University, where Keiko and her brothers later went to college. Her mother’s best friend in New York was a member of the Metropolitan Club and hence the engagement fete there. The boys of Terrace and Ivy said the fiancée was pretty and congratulated Jay. The girls of Ivy found her ordinary and little.