Virginia was a graduate student in a foreign country, earning no money, yet she was living quite the life. Businessmen bought her dinners, and painters furnished the sex. Here and there, boyfriends bought her clothes and took her on trips. There was no self-consciousness in the way she wrote about her life: “Marco and I left his flat in Turin because it was too quiet, and spent a week at his villa in Lake Como.” Marco was the boyfriend of the month, and Sabine later explained to Casey that Lake Como was the loveliest resort town in Italy, adding that it cost lire to breathe its air. Virginia wrote about her friends, too, from Ivy and Brearley, and for some of them, especially the attractive ones, life after college was a long glamorous adventure. Casey was the first person in her family to go to college. Years ago, Virginia had argued that they were in the same camp since her biological mother probably hadn’t finished junior high school—and who knew about her biological father, the white American cad dad? But whatever Virginia’s genetic heritage, they were not in the same camp now, Casey thought.
For two and a half years, Casey had been trudging along the road, and here she was—at the damn fork again. What Sabine, Hugh, Walter, and her parents had tried to tell her were things she understood instinctively: Decisions had to be made, actions committed. But there was no guarantee, was there? Of getting into school, landing a job, of safety. People were also fired all the time, too. At Kearn Davis and at Sabine’s, she’d witnessed countless people being let go. Let go—it sounded like freedom. But Casey had not forgotten what it was like to stay at a friend’s apartment, being ashamed of grabbing an egg to thicken your thirty-nine-cent ramen noodle soup.
Sabine hung up the phone. Her expression was cold—her gaze all-knowing and silence icy. Flicking her platinum lighter, she lit another cigarette. Her frustration was palpable. She looked at her watch.
“Is it time for me to go?”
“No.” Sabine winked at her. How could she help this girl? she wondered.
“You’re not done with me yet.”
“No.”
“Okay. Lay it on me, sister.”
“Are you applying to B school?”
“I don’t know, Sabine. I just don’t know.”
“I hate it when you say ‘I don’t know.’ It makes you sound stupid. Or depressed.”
“Of course it does.” Casey thought about it. She worked seven days a week. Even her immigrant parents who did not finish high school took Sundays off.
“Get off your ass already. Don’t you have just a week to apply? You have to send in your applications.”
“Kevin thinks B school is a place to fill your Rolodex. And that networking is for the untalented.” Casey chuckled at this last bit.
“You’re not Kevin.”
Sabine meant that he wasn’t a Korean girl from a poor family. Despite her own marriage to an American, she routinely said stuff like “Most Americans think Asians are insects. You’re either a good ant, a worker bee, or a roach you can’t kill.” But it wasn’t as if she were a Korean nationalist, either: “Ignorant Koreans. Bunch of bumpkins with designer clothes,” she’d muttered after reading a magazine piece that cited Korea as having the highest number of female-infant abortions in the world. Sabine believed that in America, a kind of blended natural selection could operate: If you worked harder, thought more independently, knew who your rivals were, and had the right guides and necessary support, success was inevitable. In some ways, she was irrationally optimistic. She also thought God was bunk.
“I want you to do it this week. Come on, Casey.”
“Can’t we talk about how great my hat is?” Being around Sabine, a permanent grown-up, made Casey feel juvenile by contrast. At Kearn Davis, she was the young den mother, ordering brokers to get on planes, scheduling conference calls, ordering food for brokers, and snapping towels at them to get them to behave. But in Sabine’s office, she felt like a teenage girl, worried about her lip gloss clashing with her hatband.
Sabine tried to smile at Casey. Was she being too hard on the girl? But did anyone ever benefit from coddling? She twisted off the cap of her green-glass bottle of water and swigged from it like a boxer readying for another round.
The look frightened Casey. She got up to turn on the radio, keeping the volume low. A woman sang, “Yeah, you’re human, but baby, I’m human, too.” Jay had given her that excuse at one point about the girls—he was only human. After she took him back, agreed to marry him even, it struck her how she could know that he loved her and understand that he’d made a mistake, yet she could not erase what she had seen him do, or forget it. The image was tattooed in her brain, and the colors never faded. Every time they made love, she could imagine him doing things to her that he had done to women he had no real feeling for. And she had done the same before she’d met Jay. For a few weeks, she had carried a fetus—resulting from sex with a man whose last name she did not know. She wasn’t better than Jay. No. She wasn’t a better person. Her back to Sabine, Casey turned off the radio and then faced Sabine again. She felt like an indulged child, and for that, she was grateful to Sabine.