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  By the time they arrived at Penn Station, Iris was trying to picture how Laura would look when she saw her, but the image that kept appearing in her mind was Laura in her college days when she dyed her hair red and wore translucent, flowery skirts.

  Then through the rush of the crowd to find Laura waiting for them in a trim blue coat, black boots, and stockings. She wore a sliver of a barrette in her dark bobbed hair, her hands covered with fur-lined mittens. She and Iris smiled at each other tentatively, and Iris reached out to touch the black fur along Laura’s wrist. “Fake,” Laura pronounced, pulling off the mitten. “I’m married,” she said, holding her hand out to Iris. Everyone looked at the plain silver band on her finger.

  “You’re kidding,” Iris said. “You must be insane!” There was a pause during which she felt everyone looking at her, and she became confused, a sharpness in her voice which she hadn’t intended. “Oh, but I mean it in a good way,” she said quickly, reaching out to hug Laura. “Congratulations!”

  Erik stood silently watching. He had the look of an insomniac, with his slack, unshaven face and drooping hazel eyes. The beige coat he wore was both too short and too wide, probably purchased without fuss at a thrift store. Iris thought his smile, when he did smile, seemed more like a smirk. She didn’t think they would have much to say to each other.

  She wondered if Jeremy suffered any pang of heart at the news. He had never said anything to Iris, but she knew he was secretly in love with Laura. She watched him now as he pressed Laura’s hand, his eyes a deep liquid brown. “I’m happy for you,” he said, such kindness in his voice that Iris had to believe it was true.

  They spent the afternoon walking around Chinatown and Greenwich Village, going in and out of cafes to keep warm. They ate sushi in a darkly lit restaurant composed of slippery black surfaces where Japanese anime was projected on the wall. It was hallucinatory, Iris thought, watching the radioactive glare of characters as they jumped twenty feet into the air, their mouths opening in perfect circles, though no sound came out. She felt the incongruity of two worlds— the lurid, colorful vision flashing on the walls, and the dark, shining surface of the present moment, of reality, as she watched Laura’s nimble fingers fold and refold a napkin until it was the shape of a crane perched along the glossy table.

  Iris was struck by Laura’s calm. She seemed to take things in moderation, her face open yet peaceful, her entire being as still and clear as a drop of glass. Is that what love did? Iris wondered. Laura had undergone some kind of transfiguration, and there was nothing Iris could do but pretend to be happy for her.

  New York was always slightly unnerving to Iris. People looking at you, and you looking back. There seemed to be no end to dissatisfaction and desire. It was easy to look and to want to be someone else, to look and to feel that there was something you lacked. She had this feeling now as people stared at her, shapeless in her winter coat, making her way through a bar in SoHo after Laura. The bodies she pressed against were encased in black, as sleek and beautiful as cockroaches, with martinis dangling from their fingers. Erik had spotted a low table from which people were getting up to leave. He stood beside the sofa, silent and inscrutable, his coat neatly draped over his arm.

  The waitress came by to get their orders. Jeremy asked for a Coke.

  “You don’t want to drink tonight?” Iris asked him. She noticed a woman with slick, coiled hair at the table next to theirs holding a martini glass filled with black liquid. “I want to try what she’s having,” she said to the waitress.

  “Baha’is don’t drink,” Jeremy told her.

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Why is it again they don’t drink?”

  “It clouds the mind. We think you should always be in control of your actions.”

  “What do Baha’is think about sex?” Paul asked. He was sitting beside Erik, across from them, leaning over the table to hear.

  “They don’t believe in premarital sex,” Jeremy said.

  “So you’re celibate?”

  “Well, no.”

  “So you have sex, but you don’t drink,” Paul said. “How do you decide to do one thing and not the other?”

  Iris stared at Paul. “He’s an atheist,” she said to Jeremy. “He likes to pick apart people’s religions.” She didn’t mention that he liked to pick apart people as well. This pleasure of his could be exhausting to Iris, like finding a loose thread and pulling just to see it unravel.

  The waitress came back with their drinks. Iris lifted her conical glass, trying to catch the murky light. The black liquid reminded her of ink, and she wondered if it would stain her lips. She took a tentative sip.

  “How is it?” Laura asked her.

  “Worse than I expected,” she said. They smiled at each other. They weren’t used to seeing each other with men around. She wondered what Laura thought about Paul. It made her nervous and also excited whenever she caught Laura or Jeremy staring at him. When they watched him, it was as though they were studying her as well, turning her over in their hands to catch a gleam in a surface they hadn’t seen reflected before. She supposed she did the same thing to Laura whenever she studied Erik, but Laura never cared what people thought.

  “So tell me more,” Iris said. “How did it happen so quickly?”

  Laura shrugged. “It just seemed like the right time. We both wanted it, that’s all.”

  “And did you tell anyone?”

  “Our parents. Erik’s mother drove down from Connecticut to be our witness.”

  Iris wanted to ask Laura why she hadn’t been told as well, but she sensed that she was being conventional, trying to impart significance to an event that had nothing to do with her. She touched Laura’s arm. “I want to give you something.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “But I want to,” she said, feeling more excited by her idea. She slipped one earring off and then the other, amethysts surrounded by tiny silver pearls. “Do you remember? I bought these from that man in New Orleans.” She looked at them again before pressing the pair into Laura’s hand.

  Laura was silent as she studied the small gems in her palm. Her face was impassive, her lips slightly pursed. When she tilted her head to put them on, it seemed as if she were making a concession to Iris, for courtesy’s sake. She looked at Paul and gave him a knowing smile. “It’s ten-seventeen,” she announced.

  Iris leaned back on the sofa, taking a sip of her drink. Two more hours until the new year. She watched as Laura’s fingers traced the rim of her wineglass, her fingers bare except for the silver band on her left hand. Iris wondered what had become of her other rings— the Irish wedding band with the two hands balancing a crown, the red drop of amber with its gold splinters, the lime green stone flecked with pink which looked like a turtle’s carapace. It was strange, but Iris felt Laura receding further away from her the more she concentrated on her bare fingers moving over the glass.

  Erik got up to go to the restroom, and Laura asked Iris if she wanted to take his seat.

  “All right,” she said. She got up and sat down next to Paul.

  “How are you doing?” he asked her.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “And you? Are you enjoying yourself?”

  “Sure.” Paul lowered his voice. “He doesn’t talk much, does he? He just sits there and doesn’t say a word. Kind of creepy, if you ask me.” He pointed his head in Laura’s direction. “She’s nice, but she has bad teeth.”

  “Bad teeth.” She gave his arm a little shake. She couldn’t help but smile, though.

  “What?” he said when she looked at him. “I can’t help it. I notice these things.”

  She looked at her friends across the table. Jeremy was showing Laura the sketches he had done while visiting his mother’s family in Peru. She had already seen them and thought they were bad, but she was oddly touched by his enthusiasm. “What do you think of Jeremy?” she asked Paul.

  “He’s interesting, but he’s a hypocrite.”

  “I appreciate him more
now,” Iris reflected. “In high school, Laura and I used to call him a monster. He always made us feel bad about ourselves.”

  “Why? What did he do?”

  “He was always thinking about the consequences of things. About the larger issues in the world.”

  “You mean about things other than himself.”

  She looked at him. He was always trapping her. “I guess,” she said. She took hold of his wrist to look at his watch. It was a little past ten-thirty. “You’re twenty-four now,” she said. “Happy birthday!”

  “Yes, that happened about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Oh.” She was silent for a moment. “Is that why Laura was talking about the time before?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she know?”

  “I told them at the restaurant, remember? I guess she has a better eye for detail than you do.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I forgot.” She grabbed his hand and held it in her lap. “Happy birthday,” she said. She bent over to kiss his hand.

  “Well, thank you,” he said.

  “Do you like being born on New Year’s Eve?” she asked.

  “No, you always end up feeling ripped off.”

  Iris caught a glimpse of the damp, craggy walls of the tunnel before the subway plunged again into darkness, rattling away as if a piece of it were missing. She liked how the train was moving even though she was sitting still. She was hurtling toward some kind of void, and there was nothing she could do. She sat back in her chair, blinking, staring at the people around her. Beside themselves, there were only three others on the subway, two older men and a woman about her age, all of them alone, spaced out among the empty seats. This moment, this sliver of time, between one year and the next, was so palpable. You were forced to reflect on all you had and hadn’t done, and there was always a hope that things would change—or more important, that you would change. What did it all mean? She looked at the strangers’ faces, wondering what each of them was thinking, sitting here on a train on New Year’s Eve.

  “Five more minutes,” Paul said, glancing down at his watch.

  “Isn’t it funny that we’re on a train?” she said.

  “At least it’s heated.”

  “A train?” Jeremy said. “What’s wrong with a train?”

  “It’s just not the most exciting place to be.”

  “You want something more exciting than this?” Paul said.

  “She gets bored easily,” Laura said. “She always likes to be moving about.”

  Iris laughed. “Am I the only person who thinks we should be somewhere else?” She looked at Erik, but he only looked back at her without saying anything.

  “Tell us more about your cousin,” Laura said to Jeremy.

  “He’s an artist. I don’t know him that well, actually. And I haven’t seen him in two years.”

  “What kind of pictures does he paint?”

  “Abstract things,” Jeremy said. “Lots of blues and yellows.”

  So they were going to a party hosted by a person none of them really knew. At the last minute, they had decided to go to this party, and now they were stuck on a train as it was approaching midnight. She thought about all the people crammed into Times Square who were about to watch the ball drop. She herself had never been to Times Square on New Year’s Eve, though she had seen the countdown numerous times on television. It was funny how people never failed to turn on the television at parties she went to. It stemmed from the same desire she had now. People wanted validation of what they were feeling, or needed to absorb some kind of momentum from the crowd, to become part of a current of emotion larger than themselves. It was a way of marking the moment, of trying to sustain a certain level of euphoria. Iris wondered if she would ever become like her parents, who were asleep in their beds by ten p.m. She didn’t know which was worse. To be like her parents or the people watching their television sets as the ball dropped.

  She looked up and noticed Erik watching her. They regarded each other for a moment, and then he looked away, clearing his throat, his hands folded quietly in his lap. Iris couldn’t tell whether his silence was a result of shyness or a feeling of superiority. He had probably murmured no more than twenty words that night to her. She didn’t understand how Laura could have fallen in love with him.

  “Thirty seconds,” Paul said.

  She squeezed his hand. “I won’t forget this,” she told him.

  A cigar was perched between their host’s fat fingers, and he held a glass of Scotch in the same hand. “Jeremy,” he said. “The light of my life. Why are you always materializing out of nowhere? Who are your friends here?” He stared at each of them, sizing up their proportions. He was not a bit like Jeremy, Iris thought. He was large and ponderous, and he had his own atmosphere. Everyone’s eyes were on him.

  Victor turned to Erik, who was standing next to him. “So what do you do?”

  “I kill a lot of rats,” Erik said.

  “Magnificent,” Victor said, nodding his head. “This is a nice group of friends you have, Jeremy. Please enter.” He gave a little bow and flourish of his hand.

  They dumped their coats and bags in a corner, leaving Jeremy behind as he talked to his cousin. A woman dressed in a Barbarella outfit was swirling ribbons in the air. The ribbons undulated like serpents as the woman rippled them about her body, moving them in circles above her head. In Victor’s studio, people had formed small clusters; dotting the room like constellations that grew and then disbanded. As they didn’t know anyone, they headed for the food, but they had arrived too late. The table was littered with olive pits and torn husks of bread, soiled napkins and stray plastic cups holding dregs of wine. A yellow formless cheese hardened under the glare of the light, coated with a plastic sheen. Paul poked at the remains of a ham bone, and Erik lifted up empty wine bottles. Iris and Laura abandoned the table, wandering around the studio to look at the people and the paintings. Haphazard streaks of blue and red paint marred the wood floors. They stopped in front of two huge canvases, both of them unfinished, leaning against the wall.

  “What do you think?” Laura said.

  Iris shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never understood modern art.” She looked around the room at Victor’s paintings, all of them abstract, driven by geometric forms. “I guess they don’t do much for me,” she finally said.

  “I like that one the best.” Laura pointed across the room to a layered patchwork of blue and green prisms. “It makes me think of the glass that you pick up on the beach.”

  Iris tilted her head. “I like your image better than the painting.” She turned around to examine the unfinished paintings leaning against the wall. She could see pencil lines on the sections of blank canvas, and it seemed a miracle the way the empty spaces metamorphosed into color. “I like these,” she said to Laura. “It makes me see the effort behind it.”

  Laura smiled. “I thought the point was not to see the effort.”

  Paul and Erik came up to them, handing them plastic cups filled with red wine. Laura turned toward Erik with a smile. Her fingers grazed the back of his neck and rested against his collar. Paul was looking at Laura, and Iris wondered if he thought her attractive. She peered over her cup, taking another sip of wine as she studied them. She heard a whir and then a click and turned to see a white-haired woman lowering her camera. “For Victor,” the woman said with a smile, moving away to take snapshots of other guests. Iris touched her face, already flushed from the martini. She wondered what Victor would see when he was given the photograph. The four of them standing there as if for an eternity, when already the scene was dissolving, about to disappear. Maybe there would be a time when she would remember this moment, and no one in the photograph would be in her life anymore. It was a possibility.

  A young woman with red hair slinked by in a dress that was cut low and plastered to her body. She was thin like Laura, with delicate bones, one of those waifs who could be glimpsed in advertisements, peering at you with hunger.<
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  “Why don’t you ever wear things like that?” Paul whispered in her ear.

  Iris jabbed his elbow, making him spill a little of his wine.

  “Hey,” he said, looking down at the floor and then examining his shirt. “You can’t take a joke.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “What’s wrong with wearing something like that?”

  “You’re annoying me,” she said. She glanced at Laura and Erik, wondering if they could hear, and then she moved away, walking along the table as if looking for something to eat. Paul followed and cut himself a wedge of melted Brie. He offered it to her, and she shook her head.

  “So why are you afraid to wear something like that?” he asked.

  “You never give up, do you?”

  “Are you afraid it would be too ‘demeaning’?”

  “I wouldn’t feel right.”

  “You don’t want people to look at you.”

  “No, not like that,” she said. “What if I told you to begin showing some chest hair?”

  “I would if you wanted me to.”

  “Thanks but no thanks.”

  “You see?” he said.

  She felt a surge of despair rising in her. “I don’t see why you’re always trying to change me.”

  “I just think you’re afraid of certain things.”

  “You don’t like who I am,” she said bitterly.

  “You said it, not me,” he replied.

  She felt her eyes clouding over and blinked as she looked at the woman with red hair laughing across the room. She didn’t understand why he enjoyed making her doubt herself. It was hopeless. They always ended up arguing about trivial things. “I don’t know why we’re together,” she said. She felt dizzy moving away from him. A piece of hair hung in her face, and she pulled it behind her ear. Laura and Erik were talking in the corner, their heads bowed close together. Iris didn’t feel like joining them and stumbled out of the room. Blood was rushing to her head, and she felt things slowing down, as if her ears were plugged with cotton and the world was far away.