When the group settled at a large table in the back, Amanda raised her glass and called out, “Chin-chin!” Florence and Lucy looked at each other unsurely, but mumbled “Chin-chin” back with the rest of them.
Simon’s assistant, Emily, a friendly Midwesterner, had turned to the newcomers to try to draw them into the fold. “So where are you guys from?”
“Amherst,” said Lucy in a barely audible voice.
Amanda cut in: “Did you go to school there? That’s where my brother went. Stewart Lincoln?”
Lucy nodded but it wasn’t clear which question she was answering, and she offered no further commentary.
Emily asked Florence, “What about you?”
“I went to the University of Florida. Gainesville.”
“Oh cool,” Emily said. Everyone at the table nodded supportively. She might as well have just told them that she had cancer, so aggressively tactful was their response. Nearly all of them had gone to Ivy League colleges or their equivalents.
“Have you been down to Hemingway’s house in Key West?” Fritz asked.
Florence shook her head.
“It’s awesome. They have these six-toed cats descended from his actual six-toed cat.”
“God, don’t tell me we’re still pretending Hemingway is relevant,” Amanda said. “What is this, ninth-grade English class?”
Fritz rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Amanda, all I said was that he had a six-toed cat.”
A little while later, while they were on their second round, a middle-aged man in an orange kurta circulated the bar peddling roses. When she saw him, Amanda said, “There is literally nothing tackier than a single red rose. Someone should tell that poor man to start pushing peonies. Then he’d move some merch.”
Everyone laughed except Florence, who stared quietly at Amanda, slightly awed. Who didn’t like red roses? For that matter, who didn’t like Hemingway? How could this girl, no older than Florence, hold such blasphemous opinions so cavalierly?
On it went. Throughout the rest of the night, Amanda dropped cultural references that, until Florence Googled them later, seemed like little more than a series of disordered syllables: Adorno, Pina Bausch, Koyaanisqatsi.
In Florida, Florence had grown used to being the most sophisticated person in the room. But in this grubby bar, she felt inadequate—stupid, really—for the first time in her life. She had been blithely walking around thinking she knew more than everyone and all of a sudden she realized she didn’t know a thing. If you’d asked her that morning, she would have said that red roses were just about the most elegant thing she could think of. And she hadn’t realized that maligning Hemingway was even on the table.
The next day, she stared at the blank page and felt an unfamiliar emotion: fear. If red roses were tacky, what else was she wrong about? How many other embarrassing errors would crop up in whatever she wrote? And for that matter, could she even begin to contemplate writing a novel without reading Adorno first?
She’d reread her old stories then and found them childish and clunky. She actually felt grateful to Amanda Lincoln, that smug bitch, for teaching her how little she knew before she humiliated herself.
The attainment of greatness now felt like just one possibility among many rather than her God-given right. It was entirely plausible that she would end up an editor rather than a writer. Or back in Florida, selling houses or bank loans. Nothing was guaranteed. Nothing was owed.
Her sense of self slipped from her as easily as a coat slips off the back of a chair. She’d outgrown the girl she’d been in Florida, but how did one go about building up someone new? She tried on moods and personalities like outfits. One day she was interested in ruthlessness. The next, she wanted to be an object of adoration. She put her faith in the transformative power of new boots, liquid eyeliner, and once—terrifyingly—a beret, as if an identity could seep in from the outside, like nicotine from a patch.
By the time she encountered Simon Reed at the Forrester holiday party, she had been in New York for two years and still a true self had not begun to solidify. She was a ship without ballast, tilting wildly in the waves. This very quality of unfixedness had probably attracted him to her in the first place. He was one of those men helplessly drawn to these young, shifting forms—for she was hardly the only twenty-six-year-old woman to find herself grasping in the dark for an identity.
He must have known that sleeping with a young assistant who worked for him had the potential to destroy both his career and his family. Why did he do it? Florence didn’t flatter herself with illusions of her own irresistibility. She suspected, instead, that he had a pathological addiction, not necessarily to sex, but to the sight of his own reflection—powerful, confident, desired—in an insecure young woman’s eyes. Plus, a nobody is less likely to kick up a fuss.
And he was right. She hadn’t.
7.
The Forrester office reopened on January second. A few days after that Agatha sent Florence to deliver a bag of books she’d recently edited to an author she was trying to woo. The writer lived up on Eighty-Seventh Street, all the way east. It was an unseasonably warm day for January, and Florence was happy for an excuse to get out of the office.
After she’d dropped off the books, she took her time heading back to work. She turned south and walked the perimeter of a pretty park running along the East River.
She stopped at Eighty-Fourth Street, where a crowd of people were gathered outside a large mansion on the opposite side of the street. They were all women, most of them dark-skinned. One wore a gray maid’s uniform under her parka, like a character in a play. The handful of white women among them chatted with one another or checked their phones.
The mansion’s double doors opened and a stream of girls in red plaid skirts poured out like a nosebleed. Florence read the gold plaque mounted above the door: The Harwick School. Simon’s daughters went here—she’d read it in a Vanity Fair profile of his wife. She looked back at the crowd of waiting mothers with more interest, but Ingrid wasn’t among them. Florence stayed to watch, perching on a bench across the street.
Most of the children were herded into waiting buses; not the yellow school buses Florence had ridden in Florida, but the kind with velveteen upholstery and a bathroom in the back. According to a heavyset teacher with a whistle around her neck, they weren’t even buses; they were coaches. “Coach One leaves in five minutes, girls!” she bellowed. “Let’s go, let’s go!”
Only after the coaches had pulled away, the nannies and mothers had walked off with their charges, and the teachers had been reabsorbed into the school did Florence stand up to begin her trek to the subway.
*
Back at the office, Florence was picking at her soggy, overdressed salad when Agatha called out, “Florence!”
Florence scooted to the door of Agatha’s office. “Yes?”
“Are you sure this is extra chickpeas?” Agatha gestured skeptically with her fork to the bowl Florence had just picked up from the Sweetgreen down the block.
“Um, yep.” She had, in fact, forgotten to ask for extra chickpeas.
“Clara is not happy about this,” Agatha said. “Clara needs her chickpeas. Clara’s going to force her mommy to mainline hummus when she gets home.”