Pineapple Street(3)
“Oh, right, okay.” Sasha nodded. “That makes sense.”
“What about this parlor furniture, though,” Cord tried again. “We could get a really comfy couch, and if we changed out the velvet curtains we could have a lot more light.”
“But those drapes were custom made for the room. Those windows are absolutely enormous, and I think if you took the drapes down you’d just be so shocked to realize how hard it is to get the right kind of thing there.” Tilda shook her head sadly, her blond hair shining in the chandelier’s light. “Why don’t you just live here for a little bit and really get to know the place and put some thought to what might make you the most comfortable. We really want you to feel at home here.” She patted Sasha’s leg firmly and stood, nodding at her husband and teetering her way to the door. “Well, we’d best be off—thanks for dinner. I’m just going to leave the Le Creuset here and you can run it in the dishwasher. No problem at all there—they don’t need to be handwashed—and I’ll take them home next time we come for dinner. Or you can just drop them at ours. And you can keep the vases—I noticed your tablescape was a bit spare.” She slipped on her jacket, ivory and pink with a hint of lavender, looped her handbag over her arm, and led her husband out the door, down the stairs, and back to their newly furnished, totally not-nautical apartment.
* * *
Whenever people asked Sasha how she and Cord met she would answer, “Oh, I was his therapist.” (A joke—WASPs don’t go to therapy.) In a world of Match and Tinder, their courtship seemed quainter than a square dance. Sasha was sitting at the counter at Bar Tabac drinking a glass of wine. Her phone had died, so she had picked up an abandoned New York Times crossword puzzle. It was nearly finished—something she’d never come close to accomplishing—and as Sasha studied the answers, Cord walked up to place an order and started chatting, marveling at the beautiful woman who also happened to be an ace at crosswords.
They’d gotten together for cocktails a week later, and despite the fact that “their whole relationship was based on a lie,” a phrase Cord liked to use regularly once he discovered Sasha couldn’t actually complete even the Monday crossword, it was pretty much the perfect romance.
Well, it was the perfect romance for a real, functional pair of adults with a normal amount of baggage, independence, alcohol use, and sexual appetite. They spent their first year together doing all the things New York couples in their early thirties do: whispering earnestly in the corner of the bar at birthday parties, expending outrageous effort getting reservations at restaurants that served eggs on ramen, sneaking bodega snacks into movie theaters, and dressing up and meeting people for brunch while secretly looking forward to the time when they would feel comfortable enough together to spend Sundays just lying on the couch eating bacon sandwiches from the deli downstairs and reading the Sunday Times. Of course, they got in fights too. Cord took Sasha camping and the tent flooded, and he made fun of her for being scared to pee alone at night, and she swore at him and told him she would never set foot in Maine ever again. Sasha’s best friend, Vara, invited them to opening night of her gallery show, and Cord missed it, stuck at work, and didn’t understand the magnitude of his transgression. Cord got pink eye and had to walk around looking like a half-rabid bunny, and Sasha teased him until he sulked. But overall, their love was storybook stuff.
It did take Sasha a long time to figure out that Cord was rich—embarrassingly long, considering that his name was Cord. His apartment was nice enough, but normal. His car was an absolute beater. His clothing was nondescript, and he was a total freak about taking good care of his stuff. He used a wallet until the leather cracked, his belts were the same ones his grandmother bought him in high school, and he treated his iPhone like it was some kind of nuclear code that needed to be carried in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, or at least wrapped in both a screen protector and a case thicker than a slice of bread. Sasha must have watched The Wolf of Wall Street too many times, because she always thought rich New York guys would have slicked back hair and constantly be paying for bottle service at clubs. Instead, they apparently wore sweaters until they had holes in the elbows and had unhealthily close relationships with their mothers.
Cord was borderline obsessed with his family. He and his father worked side by side every day, his sisters both lived in the neighborhood, and he met them for dinner all the time, and they talked on the phone more than Sasha spoke to anyone. Cord did things for his parents that she couldn’t fathom—he went with his father to get haircuts, whenever he bought new shirts he bought his father the exact same ones, he picked up the French wine his mother liked at Astor Place, and he rubbed her feet in a way that made Sasha leave the room. Who rubbed their own mother’s feet? Whenever she saw it, she thought of that scene in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta compared it to oral sex, and she got so upset she felt her eye twitch.
Sasha loved her parents, but their lives weren’t intertwined like that. They were casually interested in her work as a graphic designer, they spoke every Sunday and texted a bit in between, and sometimes when she went home to visit she would be surprised to realize they had traded in their car for something new and never mentioned it, and once had even knocked down a wall between the kitchen and the living room.
Sasha’s sisters-in-law were nice to her. They texted on her birthday, they made sure to ask after her family, lent her a racket and whites so she could join in family tennis on vacation. But Sasha still felt that on some level they would prefer she wasn’t around. She would be in the middle of telling Cord’s older sister, Darley, a story, and when Cord walked in the room Darley would simply stop listening and start asking him questions. Georgiana, his younger sister, would ostensibly be talking to everyone, but Sasha noticed her eyes never left her siblings. Their family was a unit, a closed circuit Sasha couldn’t ever seem to penetrate.