To Casey, it seemed upside down to call a minority person a racist, or a woman a sexist, a poor person a snob, a gay person a homophobe, an old person an ageist, a Jewish person an anti-Semite. All these labels were carelessly bandied about at school. But she admitted that it was possible to hate yourself and easy to hate others because you’d been hated. Hatred had its own logic of symbiosis. Her father refused to buy a Japanese car and instead drove an Oldsmobile Delta 88. Casey found this absurd, yet she’d never had a brother shot by a Japanese soldier or experienced a hostile colonial occupation. She saw that her father’s stance was a powerless person’s sorry attempt to regain some dignity. Casey wanted to believe she could rise above her father’s smallness. But the crazy thing was that her father probably considered himself just as Casey considered herself: broad-minded and fair.
She was no longer welcome in his house; she was no longer his daughter, he’d said this. He might be right that she had no idea what it was to lose everything. Had she lost everything? Life seemed too vast, so many things to consider, and she was overwhelmed. How would she explain to Jay what had happened? He would see the bruises and think her father was a monster. Jay’s own father had walked out when he was three. Casey hoped Jay wasn’t home. In the morning, after sleep and coffee, she’d talk to him. The elevator finally arrived.
Inside the apartment, Casey heard the bathroom radio that Jay never turned off, but it didn’t sound like the news. Jay preferred the station with its spooled taped news reports because it broadcast the weather in five-minute intervals, but also because the editorial content was so absurd. He called it radio station bang-bang because from listening to it, you’d think that all there was in New York was bedlam, murder, and mayhem.
Casey dropped her bags on his Jennifer Convertible sleeper sofa, removed her hat, and brushed her hair back with her hands. Then she plopped down in Jay’s grandmother’s armchair—the only good piece of furniture in the place. Casey planned to have it re-covered for him one of these days; Jay’s maternal grandmother, who’d recently died, had watched over him and his brother when they were boys while their mother worked at the Trenton Public Library. Jay was unequivocal in his adoration of her. Casey leaned back, feeling calm, nearly overjoyed to be at Jay’s. Then his voice drifted from the second bedroom that he used as his office. Jay was likely on the phone. Managing directors had no qualms about calling him any time of the day. Casey leaped up and rushed to him.
She saw the girls first. Jay lay across the beige wool carpet with two naked girls—one of them joined to him, straddling his hips, and the other crouched over his face, his mouth tight to her body. She was an attractive redhead with gold-colored eyes; the other was a pretty blonde. They looked like girls she and Jay could have known from school, but prettier than Princeton girls. Casey scrutinized them. They looked happy—their faces flushed. A half-empty bottle of red wine rested on Jay’s white Ikea desk. A year ago, he had borrowed his mother’s car, and he and Casey had driven out to Elizabeth to buy the desk and a pair of white shelves. They’d eaten Swedish meatballs in the store cafeteria. She and Jay had never had sex in this room and not on any floor in quite a while. His stereo was set to a top forty station, something he never listened to, and Casey was glad it wasn’t radio station bang-bang because that was their joke. The song playing was “Lady in Red,” and Casey focused on its maudlin lyrics and the rattling of the air conditioner—its chassis hanging out the casement window. They hadn’t noticed her yet.
Casey stood, unwilling—or unable—to speak. In her mind, she kept repeating, Oh God. Oh God. Oh God. It seemed almost a pity to interrupt them; they were having so much pleasure. The three of them resembled gleeful children playing a game. They were youthful and attractive, and their sex looked like a sporting exercise more than anything else. Jay opened his eyes from his labor and stretched his neck upward, jostling the blond one with the spectacular breasts who was perched on his shoulders. He wondered how he would manage to satisfy both girls. He didn’t want to get a weak performance review back at some Louisiana sorority house. The fantasy he’d held for years was turning out to be less than satisfying. Nevertheless, he congratulated himself, because he would never have discovered this information in any other way. No matter what, however, he could not climax—must keep the boat afloat, he told himself.
The girl with the long legs wrapped loosely around Jay’s neck continued to thrust her pale hips toward his face. For an instant, she woke from her dreamy gaze and pulled herself away from him, adjusted her position, and then thrust on.