Look at me: by Jennifer Egan Page A

Charlotte looked at the sky, its cryptic, heedless promises filling her with delight. It was already August. In that old orchard where Scott Hess had driven her, the pears must be fully ripe, if not already gone.

Chapter Four
    As the days after my lunch with Oscar multiplied without a call from him, I turned to wholesale afternoon drinking. A week had passed, I’d left him three messages he hadn’t returned, I’d seen friends in the evenings and found it eerily awkward, as if there were something everyone wanted to tell me, but was afraid to.
    When I had first broached the topic of an alcoholic beverage with Mary Cunningham last October, she bustled about her impressive wet bar and emerged with her favorite cocktail, a daiquiri sweet: an icy, pale green elixir that infused my head with a melting sensation of peace. I had sought out that peace thereafter in further ladylike daiquiris with Mrs. Cunningham and occasional swigs from the wet bar when she was away at the hairdresser. But it was back in New York that my drinking, as readers of charts like to say, spiked; it spiked the warm milk I drank before bed, and gradually my early evenings, when I sipped vodka tonics on my sectional couch and studied the faux-Gothic ruin on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. One morning I found myself looking for booze at nine-forty-five. There was none left.
    I called Oscar again. He was in a meeting (that great modern euphemism), but I left word that it was urgent, then opened the new Vogue to distract myself. The model/hooker/junkie thing was back in play, girls propped like broken puppets against graffiti-scarred walls, snail trails of mascara etched on their million-dollar faces. I never lost interest in which younger girls were getting work, girls with the faces of tree frogs, bison and antelopes. Yet the pictures shimmered with a pollen of newness that I still could not resist; it made me turn the pages in a kind of trance until I had seen every one, at which point the pollen would have vanished as irrevocably as the fabled dust on butterfly wings, replaced by a familiarity that was almost crushing.
    In the kitchen, I managed to unearth an ancient brandy bottle, and poured myself a glass. Hansen, my fiancé, had been partial to brandy, so I kept a bottle around in the assumption that it was one of those things men liked. For all the men who had drunk my brandy since Hansen, it was his memory I still consulted when I wanted to know something about men generally. No one would have been more shocked by his archetypal status in my thoughts than Hansen himself. We hadn’t spoken in more than a decade.
    I drank, staring at the phone in a rising state of outrage. Finally, emboldened by the drenching heat in my chest, I called Oscar again, this time identifying myself as Sasha Lewis of the New York Post. He was on the line in three seconds—I counted.
    “Fuck you,” I greeted him.
    “Pardonnez-moi?”
    “You’re taking calls from the New York Post , but when it’s your oldest client you’re in a meeting?”
    “That was beneath you, Charlotte.”
    “What the hell is happening over there? I haven’t heard a—” My drunken belligerence surprised even me.
    “If you wish to have a business conversation,” Oscar said coldly, “call me in a businesslike fashion.”
    “I have called—and what about?—I told you—”
    “Beep,” he cut me off. “That was my aggravation meter. You’re entering a danger zone.”
    I slammed down the phone, then sat limply on the couch, shocked by my vivid display of desperation.
    I opened my address book and searched for someone to call. I went through it page by page: other models, rich men in various parts of the world; clients I’d worked for regularly over the years. But their calls to me had begun tapering off, and the energy it would require to reel them back into my life felt herculean. Hansen was still under “H”; I’d transferred him from book to book over the years so he always