“Well, maybe I don’t anymore,” was all Rae said.
Ellen looked very concerned now, like someone else had inhabited her best friend’s body. “Rae, look at how much you’re changing for him,” she said. “I know it’s hard to be objective when you’re so close to it, but won’t you trust me on this?”
“I know I’m changing,” Rae admitted, though she had an unshakable feeling that she didn’t know exactly how much. She was so far down the rabbit hole that connected her soul and Dustin’s that she seemed to have lost her ability to look at herself in the third person. “But that’s what you do for love,” she went on. “You change with the other person, and sometimes for them.”
“Sure, you change to make each other better,” Ellen said. “But he’s not making you better, he’s taking you for granted.”
“No he’s not,” Rae said, though what she meant was,So what?Taking people for granted was love’s most beautiful luxury—you could show them your splotched and ugly parts and they still stayed. That’s what true commitment was.
“Better to get out now than in five years,” Ellen said. “I know you’ve invested a lot already, but it’s all sunk costs.”
“Stop comparing love to stock markets,” Rae snapped.
“Seriously? You’re the one who’s been commoditizing love with your Wall Street approach since the day I met you.”
“Not anymore,” Rae said, aware she was an aching contradiction but unaware how to pause the pain or the paradox. “Just stop.”
“Fine,” Ellen said, looking down to read, or at least stare at, the menu.
Rae evaluated her menu too, counting each word to try to calm herself down, but it just made her feel incompetent to see how these two laminated pages were more of a literary success than anything she’d ever produced.
She looked up at Ellen again, who appeared as tired as the parents next to them. “I appreciate your concern,” Rae said. “But I’m not walking away.”
Ellen looked like she had another argument on the tip of her tongue, but she swallowed it. “Let’s order.”
“Want to split the lemon and ricotta pancakes and the Goldie Lox omelet?” Rae asked.
“I’m vegan now, actually,” Ellen said.
“Vegan?” Rae said, like Ellen had just announced she was joining a nudist colony in the Amazon. “Since when?”
“Aaron and I started last week. It’s better for the environment.”
Rae humphed, anticipating the blandness of vegan wedding cupcakes. “Well, we could share something else,” she offered, scouring the menu for dairy-free, meat-free, flavor-free alternatives.
“I don’t think I want to split today,” Ellen said.
She didn’t say it unkindly, but it felt like ninety-six splinters poking into Rae’s heart. “No worries,” Rae said. “I’ll get both for myself.” She’d take half back to Dustin to try to entice him out of bed. To Ellen, she explained, “I worked up an appetite staying upright on the lurchy train over here. Subway surfing really works the muscles, almost as much as penthouse stairs.”
“You need to start treating yourself to more Ubers.”
“In our thirties,” Rae said, trying to give herself something to look forward to about getting older. “That’ll be the Uber life stage.”
“Then helicopters in our forties?”
“Private limos in our forties,” Rae said. “Helicopters in our fifties.”
“Makes sense. We wouldn’t want to peak too early.”
As their smiles nearly scrambled, the waiter arrived to take their separate orders.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CUTTING LOSSES
“What’re you watching?” Rae asked Dustin as she walked into the Lorimer Loft after work one nondescript weekday toward the end of summer. Her face and hair and suit and sneakers were sticky from her underground commute and that infamous, Manhattan-patented way that subway platforms locked hot air in grimy, rat-guarded vaults.
The stuffy, sticky feeling was pressing on Rae’s mind, too, after hours of phone calls with clients who were trying to figure out whether the sudden drop in the S&P 500 meant they should delay their acquisitions. Rae’s scripted advice—she felt a self-resentful pride at how she was now allowed to give advice, albeit scripted—had been that no, they should proceed as planned. Asset prices were deflated, making it a favorable time to buy.
