Exciting Times(26)

Next, Edith. She and Victoria were only acquaintances. No boyfriend, to Victoria’s knowledge. Back in Hong Kong from England a little over a year, just finished the PCLL, now on her training contract. Victoria was an associate. (I hadn’t asked Victoria if she outranked Edith, but Victoria thought I ought to know.) Most of Edith’s friends were from boarding school, Cambridge and law, and so, functionally, had money. (Victoria didn’t clarify ‘functionally’, since it was unimportant to Victoria whether someone cultivated a circle of rich people or just found themselves in one, but I supplied it myself.)

None of this was news, but I still liked hearing it.

It was obvious why Victoria wanted to know about Julian and much less apparent why I was grilling her on Edith. Victoria, too, would be puzzled if she considered it – but she had a pit viper’s brain. She saw not by looking but by rendering images of prey. She noticed all of Julian and the parts of me that pertained to him, and the rest she ignored.

If interested in Victoria, Julian would undoubtedly have some take about monogamy being contractual and the cheating element therefore being her and Ralph’s problem. Going on precedent, Julian showed attraction by purchasing gifts and being inadvertently rude about your background, neither of which I’d seen him do to her. Anyway, I hated her, felt ill picturing them together, and told myself my information made no difference so I could trade it for facts about Edith.

We split the bill.

*

English has a subjunctive. I learned that fact the morning I taught it. I knew French had one and suspected Irish did, but hadn’t noticed its moody fingerprints on my native language.

It turned out I didn’t know because the English subjunctive required phrasing I would never use. Apparently, you didn’t say: ‘What if I was attracted to her.’ You said: ‘What if I were.’

You deployed the subjunctive for the less-than-factual. If I avoided it, did that mean I only said true things? Or since I didn’t section off the imaginary, perhaps everything I said was just a wish or a feeling. And maybe I sounded stupid for not knowing grammar. I wondered if Edith had been fighting the urge to correct me.

‘What’s the difference?’ asked Kenny Chan.

I wasn’t confident of it myself, so I read slowly from the textbook, then rephrased until they pretended to understand. But Sybil Fu got all the exercises right. She wouldn’t have a few months ago. I knew it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that her parents literally paid her for getting good results, but it still made me happy.

*

I’d discovered that as well as her main Instagram account, Edith had one for her art. There were no references to it on the one she’d followed me from, but her friend Heidi had tagged it in a post she’d made a year ago. (Heidi had gone to boarding school with Edith, which was a normal thing for me to know because Edith had mentioned this in a comment that had come up on my newsfeed. My clicking Heidi’s name and going through her posts was less obviously the algorithm’s fault.)

On the art account Edith posted pencil sketches of buildings. Her scratchy, crosshatched style surprised me, but you could tell it was her from the odd careful detail. She was good. This came as some relief. I’d found the journals Julian had written poetry for at Oxford but hadn’t dug further because I was worried the poems would be bad and I’d have to keep living in his apartment.

Edith’s personal account was also an aesthetic triumph. The images were cool-toned and slightly faded, just enough to give reality a glaze. Her posts were like clues: here is some Edith, and some more over here, and an entire Edith somewhere beyond the squares. The things in the pictures obsessed me – the vintage gold-plate watch, the brown Saffiano iPhone folio case, the jade bracelet.

I wanted her life. I worried this might endanger our friendship, but so far it seemed to be facilitating it. Because she was richer and more important than me, I had an out from the suspicion that I was in fact her lesser on intellectual or moral grounds. She answered her phone or tapped at something on her iPad, and I thought: everyone else wants a piece of her, and here she is with me. This was stupid because when Julian had done that, I’d just resented him for not paying me attention – and I’d known him far longer than a month. Probably I was a bad person and could not correctly process emotions.

My collarbone was a comfort. I could find myself otherwise grotesque and still trace the lines in front of the mirror, thinking: this is sexy. This I would fancy if I were Edith and if I, Edith, liked women.





21

Edith and I were now hanging out a few times a week, but I had no idea why she spent time with me, let alone why she liked me. I supposed I was of anthropological interest. She’d ask why I didn’t ‘just’ do things. Why, she’d say, didn’t I ‘just’ check the weather before leaving the house, or ‘just’ use an app for this or that – and she found it fascinating when I said I hadn’t thought of it. Nothing escaped her. At a brunch place she referenced my not liking cheese, and when I asked how she knew that, she said I’d told her a few weeks ago. I never admitted to remembering things people had told me in passing. But I knew that this trait, which made Edith look frank and organised, would only make me seem like I didn’t get out enough.

‘You need to read the news,’ she said over coffee. ‘We can’t even choose our own candidates, and I read the news.’