Single, Carefree, Mellow. Katherine Heiny

thought she illustrated children’s books and was picturing some large friendly girl who dressed like Raggedy Ann and had a sunny outlook.

      Then they enter into quite an extraordinary period of conversation, lasting through this glass of wine and the next one (which Sasha also has to go get), during which they discuss publishing, romance writing, and whether or not anyone actually reads poetry anymore. Sasha, who is drinking her wine in big nervous gulps, wonders if she should tell Anne about the time she got very drunk at a publishing party and explained to a famous poet what slant rhyme is. (This is an extremely funny story, but not everyone seems to appreciate it.)

      And it is at precisely this point that Anne leans forward slightly and says, “You know, Carson won’t stay with you.”

      Sasha blinks. She had almost forgotten who Anne was.

      Anne smiles grimly. “He’s just cunt struck, is all.”

      The writer in Sasha rushes forward to examine this sentence. Cunt struck. The term is so ugly, yet so arresting, that she almost admires it. Maybe she could use it in a book someday. But the rest of Sasha is cringing. Cunt struck hangs before her like it’s written in an angry black scrawl. Does Anne really think it applies to her, to Carson and her?

      “You think you can just take whatever you want, whether it belongs to you or not,” Anne says, and now her voice is shaking. “You’re a home-wrecker, and you have no morals at all.”

      Two things occur to Sasha at this instant. One: Having morals is not something she’s ever aspired to. Successful writer, loyal friend, pretty girl; those have been goals, but she can’t say moral person has ever made the list, and that’s kind of startling to realize. Two (and this possibly should have occurred to her quite a while ago): She doesn’t have to sit here and listen to this. She can leave.

      So she does. She pushes back her chair and walks right out of the bar. Does it worry her that she’s left Anne to settle the bill? No. Does it bother her that Anne may be molested or harassed by the world’s scariest bartender? Not at all. Is she even a little concerned that Anne may come out of the bar and not have enough sense to walk toward Broadway instead of Columbus and be murdered for the money in her pocketbook and her pricey scarf? Not one bit. In fact, Sasha feels like right now she herself could walk toward Columbus with impunity. She has no morals, right? The muggers and murderers would see her as one of their own, and stay out of her way.

      Sasha walks almost twenty blocks downtown in a sort of daze before she thinks to use her cell phone. She paws through her bag and is relieved to find her phone (suppose she had to go back for it!). Maybe she should be calling Carson right now, but that’s not who she wants to speak to. She calls Monique at work.

      “It’s—me,” Sasha says, and her voice breaks so harshly between the two words that it sounds like a badly spliced tape.

      “Oh, my God!” Monique says. “How was it? Are you okay? Is she holding you at gunpoint? If you need me to call the police, just say the word leopard in your next sentence.”

      Sasha leans against the side of a building. She feels as though the world has come back into focus. “I don’t need you to call the police,” she says. “And if I did, how I am supposed to work the word leopard in unobtrusively?”

      “Well, I don’t know,” Monique says. “I was trying to pick a word you wouldn’t say accidentally, like street or bagel. And you just did say leopard.”

      “Yes, but I don’t need you to call the police,” Sasha says. “I just need you to meet me somewhere.”

      “Okay, all right, just a minute,” Monique says, apparently thinking out loud. “I’ll tell them I’m working from home—hardly anybody’s here anyway. Are you on Broadway? I’ll start walking up.”

      Sasha is on Broadway so she keeps walking downtown. She does not want to think about Anne, so she thinks about Monique and the code word leopard some more. They will have to come up with a foolproof one. Monique is right, it should be something that they wouldn’t say accidentally. She wonders what the top ten words they use are, anyway. Let’s think: street, bagel, bar, guy, book, sleep, write, rent, shower, beer are probably all up there. So possibly leopard was a good choice, or maybe zygote or plankton. Sasha and Monique also have a contingency plan in case one of them is ever wanted by the police and has to go on the run. They will meet the first Monday of every month in the Au Bon Pain in Times Square, and exchange money or messages or whatever is needed. They once spent a long and very pleasurable evening working this out, and what Sasha thinks most people don’t realize is that they would actually do this for each other, indefinitely, no question about it.

      Sasha looks up and sees Monique down the block, and has that thrill you get from seeing someone familiar on the streets of New York, like looking through a box of old paperbacks at a garage sale and finding a copy of a novel you love. And this time the pleasure is intensified because Sasha is not just running into some random acquaintance. Monique is hurrying straight toward her, a look of concern on her face. Her roommate, who has left work early, and who would have called the police if need be.

      She doesn’t need to wonder anymore. Monique is on Sasha’s side, that’s whose.

      Now here is something interesting: Sasha doesn’t tell Monique about the term cunt struck but it never occurs to her not to tell Carson. It is the kind of detail that Monique would remember, though she might never bring it up again, where it seems like Carson ignores everything about Sasha that doesn’t fit with his perception of her. She can tell him anything.

      She is in Carson’s room at his club, sitting in front of the air conditioner in her nightgown, drinking a very small bottle of whiskey from the minibar, while Carson rubs her feet. She went out for Indian food with Monique and had several more glasses of red wine.

      “First, she said I was younger than she thought I’d be but not as pretty,” Sasha says, loudly, because of the air conditioner.

      Carson laughs. “Well, you don’t know whether that’s a compliment or an insult,” he says, “because you don’t know the known parameters.”

      But Sasha doesn’t want to get drawn into a mathematical discussion. She tells him the rest of it, and when she gets to the cunt struck part, it doesn’t seem so awful to her anymore, not really, but Carson squeezes her foot tightly, almost painfully. She looks at his face and his expression is harder, stonier, than she has ever seen it before. She realizes suddenly that although Carson has said from the beginning that his wife didn’t understand him (you cannot imagine Monique’s scorn at this phrase) it is actually true. Anne does not understand him, or does not understand him well enough, to know that saying what she did would make Carson angry. But Sasha knew, she realizes. That’s why she told him.

      Sasha shakes her foot gently so he will release it, which he does and reaches for his own drink.

      “Monique said Anne had an agenda,” she says. “And evidently it was to tell me what an awful person I am.”

      Carson smiles. Whatever he feels about what Anne said, he’s apparently going to keep to himself. “I like the way you not only tell me what happened to you, you tell me what Monique thinks about it.”

      Interestingly, Monique feels almost the opposite about this, and never wants to hear what Carson thinks about anything. Sasha wonders if this makes Carson a nicer person than Monique. Monique would argue that no, someone who cheats on his wife is by definition not a nice person. How would the four of them—Sasha, Monique, Anne, Carson—rank from nicest to least nice? A sudden alcohol-induced yawn makes her jaws ache and Sasha finds she is too tired to worry about it. She gets out of her chair and crawls into the bed.

      “Where did you meet her, anyway?” Carson asks, beginning to get undressed.

      “Some bar on Amsterdam,” Sasha says, yawning again. “If it had a name, I don’t remember it.”

      “I saw an apartment today that I