Class(65)

“Hey, stranger,” said Lou. “Long time no see.”

“I know—”

“Off to the office?”

“Unfortunately, I am—what about you?”

“I’m going to the dentist, if you must know.”

“I hope it’s nothing bad.”

“Just my lousy mouth with its many cavities.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I have the same lousy mouth.”

“I do feel better,” said Lou. “But what’s going on with Ruby? Zeke says she’s been out all week. Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” said Karen. “Well, it’s actually not fine. My marriage is literally on death row.”

“Whose isn’t?” Lou said with a laugh.

Karen knew she couldn’t keep up the banter indefinitely. “Lou, there’s something I have to tell you,” she began with a scrunched face. “I took Ruby out of Betts.”

“You what?” cried Lou, her eyebrows up near her hairline.

“I just—” Whatever remorse Karen had felt the previous night about sleeping with Clay was easily matched by the contrition she felt standing there. Maybe it was because her marital betrayal was an all-white affair, whereas her school betrayal contained a racial component.

“You just what?” she said again.

“I just got freaked out about Jayyden. That was part of it. He sort of made a threat against Ruby.”

“What kind of threat?”

“He told her he was going to—fuck with her.”

Lou paused to grimace before she spoke. Then she said, “Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with African American vernacular? Fucking with someone means you want to spend time with them.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Karen, staring at her shoes.

“And where is Ruby now?” asked Lou.

Karen motioned behind her. “She’s over there at”—Karen swallowed the final word of her sentence—“Mather.”

“Ah, the school Maeve fled to,” said Lou, reminding them both.

“Yes—except Maeve doesn’t actually talk to Ruby anymore.” But if Karen had thought she could enlist Lou’s sympathies by telling her about how Ruby had been blown off by her former best friend, she was mistaken.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lou said after a while. But she didn’t sound sorry at all.

Karen couldn’t very well blame her. The silence that followed was as thick as concrete, and it ended only when Karen told Lou, “I’m sorry too—about not telling you sooner.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say,” said Lou. But she thought of one thing: “I guess I thought you were different from them.”

Lou didn’t have to explain who them were. The words were like a fist through Karen’s stomach. “I hope we can still be friends,” she said helplessly.

“Sure, we can still be friends,” said Lou. But in that moment, Karen saw that her and Lou’s friendship, however richly textured, was ultimately one of association. With Betts out of the picture, they no longer had enough in common. They were suddenly two women on a street, one with light skin and one with dark. Since Ruby had decided boys had cooties, Karen didn’t even have the excuse of their kids being close anymore. “Anyway, as I was saying, I have cavities to fill,” Lou went on. But her tone had already changed; now it sounded distant and matter-of-fact.

“Of course,” said Karen. “Bye, Lou.”

“See you,” said Lou. She didn’t even say Karen’s name.

As Karen walked away, she wondered if there was anyone in her life other than Ruby whom she wasn’t in the process of alienating.



By chance, Troy had business in the office that morning. “Oh no,” he said as he passed by her desk.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“One look at those liquid eyes and that quivering lower lip told me everything,” he answered.

“Can I buy you a coffee?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not really.”

“What do I do now?” Karen asked him in line at the Starbucks in the lobby. “Do I tell my husband?”

“If you want to be a single mother, yes,” said Troy. “Otherwise, I advise keeping your mouth shut.”

“But what if I can’t stop thinking about him?”

“Write bad poetry and never show it to anyone. Or listen to Coldplay—that should cure you of feelings…The only thing that guy is good for in the long term is a fat donation to HK before the end of the tax year.”

“Why are you always right?”

“Please. If I had all the answers, I wouldn’t be having a fling with a man whose supposedly affectionate moniker for me is Fatso and who makes me feel bad about myself for not going to the gym every day.”

“Troy, that sounds horrible! You have to get rid of the guy.”

“Just as you must get rid of yours,” he replied.

Karen resolved to do as Troy had said.

But breaking free of Clay became that much harder to conceive of after a bike messenger arrived at the office that afternoon with a package for her. Inside was a palm-size pale blue box containing a pair of diamond studs the size of shirt buttons. While there was no accompanying card, Karen didn’t need one to know who they were from. For a few moments, she sat staring at the earrings and reveling in their scintillating splendor, which made her feel brilliant and desirable by association—and even more desirous of Clay. (The most recent piece of jewelry that Matt had bought her was her wedding ring, a simple gold band that owed its existence to a small-scale mining cooperative in central Peru.) At the same time, she couldn’t get past the notion that the earrings were, in some sense, payment for sex, which in turn made her feel like a prostitute. Disgusted with both herself and Clay, Karen closed the box and stuck it in the top drawer of her desk behind a three-pack of Post-it notes.