And then came Ethan. Domi’s birthday: still celebrated, celebrated with vengeance in the face of it all. Liquor enough to make a party; the apartment full of people, gathering limits be damned; the air hot and sticky, like someone’s breath. Domi was drunk already and didn’t notice him, but Margaret felt a tingle zigzag between her shoulder blades. A friend of a friend of a friend, out of place in a charcoal-gray suit. A suit! She felt an irresistible urge to dishevel him. The room was dizzy and humid and loud and she drifted away from Domi and crossed the room and put her hand to his throat and caught the knot of his tie in her fist.
They ended up outside, on the fire escape that was little more than a ledge, so small that when they both squeezed onto it they were close enough to kiss. Between their feet: Domi’s broken flowerpot, full of cigarette butts and ash. Ethan, he said. Just finished at Columbia when the Crisis put everything on hold. All night, people came and went in the room behind them, laughing, drinking, forgetting—for the moment—everything else. Neither of them noticed. The night air gathered close like a blanket drawn over their heads. They talked and talked until they found themselves squinting into the peach-colored sunrise spiking its way between the buildings. Inside, the party had burned down like a banked fire. A handful of people curled up on the rug and the sofa, a tangle of lonely puppies. Domi had gone off to bed, not alone.
I should go, Ethan said, and Margaret took his jacket from her shoulders, where he’d placed it in the late-night chill, and handed it back. It was the only time they’d touched all night. She wanted to kiss him. No: she wanted to bite him, hard enough to draw blood.
It was nice meeting you, she said, and went inside.
* * *
? ? ?
The next evening, after curfew, she walked across the bridge and uptown, ducking into the shadows when the few cars still out flashed by. She left her bike in the apartment: outside, even locked-up bikes would be stripped of parts by morning, and Ethan, he’d said, lived on the fourth floor. Now and then she passed someone else and they exchanged a brief glance before moving on, each of them on their own mysterious errands. A hundred and twenty blocks uptown to Ethan’s building, where his window glowed like a wide-awake eye. She climbed the fire escape and set her fingers in the half-open window, and at the noise he looked up, startled, put his book down. Lifted the sash and let her in.
In the morning, a ring of her tooth marks blossomed on his bare shoulder.
* * *
? ? ?
Domi didn’t like it.
You’ve changed, she said, all you think about now is him. She said it like that—him—a fragment of pit she needed to spit out.
Your fancy boyfriend, she said. With his fancy apartment. So much nicer than here.
The truth was that it was a studio, three flights up, just one big room with a futon for both couch and bed and an old clawfoot bathtub in the kitchenette—but it was safe and warm. Ethan’s family wasn’t particularly fancy or rich—his mother was a nursing-home aide, his father an engineer—but they did have connections: his landlord was an old friend of his mother’s from high school and had rented to him at a steep discount; Ethan could afford to wait out the Crisis a long time. The truth was that Domi could have been in her own apartment, too—a much nicer one—if she’d chosen: her father’s electronics company made the innards of half the cell phones and computers in the country; he owned two yachts, a small private plane, houses in London and L.A. and the south of France. One on Park Avenue, too, where Domi had grown up: she’d pointed it out to Margaret one afternoon, and they spat on the sidewalk and fled before her father’s driver could chase them away. Her mother had died when she was eleven, and a month later her father married the Danish au pair and Domi swore that once she left home she’d never speak to him again, and she hadn’t. In college, she’d ripped up his checks and mailed back the pieces.
So that’s it, Domi said, you’re just going to hide out with your rich boyfriend and ignore all this, while the rest of us scrounge?
Margaret’s hands were chapped and raw; a week ago someone had grabbed at her coat, tearing it, hungry for more than she was offering, but she’d gotten away. She had mended the rip with yarn—red, the only color she’d had—and the stitches traced a jagged gash along her collarbone.
Fuck both of you, Domi said, but Margaret didn’t answer. She was already on her way out the door.
* * *
? ? ?
He spoke half a dozen languages fluently, could get by in even more. Not bad for a white boy from Evanston, he’d joke. His parents had both loved traveling, had chosen a different country for each vacation; he’d been to four continents before he was ten years old. He was an only child like Margaret, and this was one of the things that drew them together: the feeling that they were the last twigs on the family tree, grafting themselves together for strength, to forge something new.