Bad Habits Read online

  I stared at the words, as measured and beautiful as ringing bells, too overwhelmed to parse their meaning. I had no objection to buried treasure, but floating smoothly sounded more like Gwen, and therefore, I decided, more like me. “It’s perfect.”

  “You’re my best friend, Mac.” It was the first time either of us had said it, and it felt solemn, like a vow. “Nothing’s going to change that.”

  December 29, 2021, 8:45 p.m.

  SkyLoft Hotel, Los Angeles

  To hide my expression, I take a slow sip of scotch, letting the heat melt and dissipate on the tip of my tongue. When I set my glass down, I feel completely fine about not being invited to Gwen’s wedding.

  “Coming up soon, then?”

  “Well, it’s not like it’s tomorrow.” Gwen stumbles over her words. “There’s a lot of prep to do, so I’m actually heading out there now to—”

  “At the villa?”

  A muscle jumps in her jaw as she nods. Gwen’s parents keep an apartment in Paris and a villa in Tuscany, as well as a time-share in Colorado for ski trips. It’s not something she’s ever enjoyed talking about, though early in our friendship I was invited to join them on several family vacations. Something always came up at home, coincidentally, just before it was time to go; some emergency with my mom, with Lily. A naked bid for loyalty.

  “Andreas is on a shoot in Rome, so I’m joining him first for a little while. Then I’ll go out and help my parents get the villa ready.”

  Wedding prep in Tuscany. A shoot in Rome. The alcohol is hitting my unaccustomed system hard. I wonder if Andreas came from money, like Gwen, or if he merely appreciates hers. Filmmaking is an expensive hobby. “It must be amazing. Being with someone like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like . . .” I search for a word. “You.”

  “Andreas and I are nothing alike,” she says hurriedly, then laughs. “He’s so ambitious.”

  I laugh a bit more explosively than I intended. Gwen, not ambitious? She was the one who first told me about the Program. I can still remember the thread of panic that ran through me when I read her postcard from Columbia, with its casual reference to Emerging Studies at Dwight Handler University as the “best interdisciplinary program in the country.” People here call it “the Program” like it’s a cult, she’d written, and I knew right then that she was applying. I’d been using Urbana College more like a weekend crash pad than an education, regularly spending the night in the dorm rooms of men I hooked up with at college parties. I taped Gwen’s postcard to the dashboard of my used Nissan hatchback and vowed to become exceptional. I woke up earlier, studied later, attended summer institutes where I met professors from places like Columbia and Yale who could help get me in. And when it was time, I asked Gwen, the most powerful person I knew, for a peer recommendation letter. Gwen, with typical grace, asked me for one, too. That we both got in was nothing short of a miracle, and I attributed it almost entirely to her.

  It was true that in the years after she left the Program, Gwen’s do-gooder career struck me as rather quaint. Philanthropy is the teacup Chihuahua in capitalism’s designer handbag. Bethany wrote that. Gwen is the one who told me about Bethany, too. But we’ve all mellowed since then. Now I derive a strange comfort from watching Gwen attain success in a field so far from my own—​her work for political exiles in Haiti, her seed fund for medical NGOs. That she would downplay it now bothers me, inviting the unwelcome thought that her current career uses her parents’ connections more than her intellect.

  “Come on, Gwen. You were at the top of the Program. The best.”

  Infuriatingly, she does not contradict me. Instead, she plays with the knot of her bamboo swizzle stick. “It always meant more to you than me, my being at the ‘top of the Program.’ I was so afraid of disappointing you.”

  I gulp down the rest of my drink and gesture to the waiter for another. The forbidden mix of alcohol and medication has taken full effect now, and Gwen’s outline has softened to a shining brunette nimbus, her face a landscape of shadows that leap and shrink in the flickering candlelight. When I relax my eyes, I see two distinct Gwens, side by side, a present Gwen and a past Gwen. I try to sort out which is which, but they keep switching places. I wonder if she sees two of me as well: Mac and Claire, past and present me.

  It’s past me who answers: “You could never disappoint me.”

  She takes it as a joke, or at any rate she laughs. “Oh, really? I’m quitting my job, Mac.” Lit up by her lemony cocktail, she’s already forgotten my name again. People born rich can always choose to forget who you are at a moment’s notice. “I’m not going back to work after the wedding. I know what I want, now.” She stirs her drink.

  “What is it?” I steel myself: housewife, mommy, venture capitalist, cult leader?

  “To be happy.” She looks up from her drink with shining eyes.

  It’s the first time this evening I want to kill her, and the last thing I remember before blacking out.

  The Program

  3

  I stared up at the dark canopy of oak leaves on the quad. Beyond them loomed the gargoyles of Dwight Handler University and, further still, softened by a haze of pollution, the factory district of our northern industrial city.

  I was here. I was really here.

  “The students call it ‘Black Square.’ After the Malevich painting, of course,” said the tour guide.

  The leaves weren’t really black, but a black-veined auburn where the sun shone through. I could see how later in the fall, when they carpeted the ground in inky piles, the quad might live up to its nickname, but now, in early September—​the grass still green on the manicured lawn, the air crisp but not yet frigid, autumn sunlight transforming the abandoned smokestacks of the coke ovens into a romantic backdrop for its gothic spires—​the DHU campus looked straight out of the catalog. Students lay reading in the grass. Professors with brutalist haircuts and leather satchels clicked across the flagstones in hard-soled shoes. The bell in the clock tower clanged three times.

  I drew in a deep breath. Today was the first day of the Program, and of my real life. The proof was that Gwen stood right beside me, clutching an orientation folder that looked just like mine.

  That morning I’d roamed around our shared north campus walk-up in a waking dream. Everything I saw reminded me that I was living in Gwen’s world now. The furniture consisted mostly of cast-offs from her parents’ Manhattan residence, and a brand-new TV stood in the corner of the living room, loaded with streaming apps paid for by Gwen. Even the shelves flanking the long-disused fireplace held Gwen’s books, not mine; I never bought anything I could check out of the school library. Still, I’d read all but a few—​many while lounging in those same wingback chairs. They felt more like home to me than my mom’s house.

  When Gwen woke up, we ate breakfast together—​black coffee and Bircher muesli soaked in plain yogurt overnight, with a dollop of Gwen’s favorite almond butter—​and pored over course titles in the catalog. Diasporic Feminisms. Futures of Art History. Dualities of Motion and Emotion. Introduction to Economimesis. It was easy to see why it took an average of six years to complete the Program. There was more than enough knowledge here to fill six years—​six lifetimes, maybe. And I would spend every minute of them not just as Gwen’s best friend, but as her colleague. The layering of this fledgling professional relationship over our new intimacy as roommates had an intoxicating effect on me. For the first time, it hit me that if I worked hard enough, got my degree, and landed a tenure-track job as a university professor, I’d never have to leave Gwen’s world again.

  Of course, before any of that happened, there was the little matter of what I would live on. All the doctoral students had tuition waivers, but my stipend was only $9,000 a year, and first-years weren’t allowed to teach. I dreaded loans. I was eligible for work-study, but I knew from Urbana College what that was like: minimum wage under fluorescent lights, dishing up nachos in the cantina for professo
rs with warm, pitying smiles and fellow students who pretended not to know you. I needed a job that was dignified, lucrative, and within walking distance—​my car had died soon after I arrived. Gwen, who’d never liked driving much, had left hers with her parents. She was used to public transportation and could, I supposed, always call a cab.

  At least finding work was something I knew how to do. After spending the morning together in long lines at the registrar and student ID office, Gwen and I parted ways—​Gwen for an optional meet-the-faculty lunch, me for the only four-star restaurant in the neighborhood. Nona occupied the mezzanine of a grand old university-owned apartment building called the Libertorium, and it was a far cry from the Frogurt Palace. On my way, I slipped on the diamond studs stolen from my mother’s dresser long ago. I’d read somewhere that a “good diamond,” however small, could lend anyone an aura of success.

  The earrings worked. “We don’t usually hire from the university, but you look like you can hustle.” The manager, Derek, handed me an apron. “That’s ten dollars, we’ll take it out of your paycheck. First training shift tomorrow, ten a.m. Don’t be late.”

  Flush with success, I met Gwen back on the quad just in time for the campus tour. Strolling the grounds with a small herd of students, we listened to the tour guide’s monologue on the black leaves (the color came from high arsenic levels in the soil), founder Dwight Handler’s various obsessions (theosophy, Fletcherism, model ships), and, of course, the notorious rigor of the student population at DHU. Gwen and I suppressed a giggle when the tour guide solemnly pronounced the number-one ailment treated at the student health center, after depression, to be anal fissures from prolonged studying.

  The tour ended on the university seal by the front gate, just as the bell tolled four. It was time for the new student reception.

  “Do you think Bethany Ladd will be there?” Gwen said doubtfully, studying the campus map. “She hasn’t been at any of the events so far.”

  “Which one is she again?”

  Gwen looked up from her map, too distracted to hide her surprise at my question. “She basically invented the Program. Ethical Negation?” She saw my face and tried to play it off. “Everybody says she’ll get a MacArthur when the new book comes out.”

  “Oh, right.” I went beet red and followed her without any more questions. Over the summer, I’d read as many books by Program faculty as I could find, but Ethical Negation had always been checked out from the Urbana College library. I should have tracked it down and bought it. How had Gwen known it was the important one? The same way she had learned about the Program in the first place. Her father’s professor friends or the parties at Columbia, full of boring people who knew everything. And then there were the intangibles. Like the way she’d known to wear her jeans tucked into Hunter green wellies today, even though the weather was fine, with a V-neck cashmere sweater in a calming shade of melon. The women on the tour had shown up in a rainbow of cashmere sweaters and rain boots. Even the hipsters, with their perfectly dyed undershaves and tattoos from classic children’s books, wore wellies, though perhaps they were meant to be ironic. No doubt they’d all read Ethical Negation. How many other gaps between my knowledge and Gwen’s lay waiting to trip me up?

  I fingered an earring nervously and followed her across the quad to the reception.

  * * *

  “—and a few more surprises!”

  Department chair Margaret Moss-Jones, a tall woman in her sixties wearing loose layers the color of dirt, stood at the front of the reception room, listing the activities for tomorrow’s orientation retreat.

  My heart raced. The whole thing was a surprise. The day-long orientation retreat hadn’t been on the schedule, and Margaret had sprung it on us with the air of someone tossing a handful of confetti. First thing tomorrow morning, we were all supposed to caravan upstate to a farmhouse “on loan from a generous faculty member” for a day of team-building exercises. The retreat would culminate in a dinner and campfire where we were supposed to mingle with professors who’d made the trip. Good clean fun, and impossible for me to attend, given my work schedule.

  “Without further ado, please enjoy yourselves, but don’t overdo it—​you don’t want to be hungover for the obstacle course!”

  There was polite laughter, and the students in the wood-paneled seminar room broke into chatty groups.

  “What am I going to do?” I hissed to Gwen under my breath, clenching my plastic wine cup. “I can’t miss my first day of work.”

  “Can’t you drive up after your shift?”

  “My car’s still broken,” I reminded her.

  “Does someone need a ride?”

  Gwen brightened and smiled over my shoulder, and I turned to get a look. The man who’d spoken was not movie-star handsome, maybe, but he was definitely TV handsome: tall and solid, a hank of black hair dangling over thick eyebrows, nearly touching the tip of his Roman nose. In his double-breasted jacket—​oddly formal for the occasion—​he looked older than the rest of us and a little hardened. But when he flashed his dazzling white teeth, I saw baby fat around his chin and cheeks and thought he couldn’t be much older.

  Gwen spoke up. “Mac’s, um, having an emergency root canal tomorrow morning.” She was a terrible liar.

  Boy Gangster winced sympathetically. “Oh no,” he said, with a hint of an accent too faint to place. “Does it hurt?”

  I curled my tongue in my cheek and nodded. Then I lifted my plastic cup. “This is helping.”

  He leaned toward me, raising his glass of red and touching its plastic rim to mine. “Here’s to that. When’s your appointment tomorrow?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “I was planning on driving up around two.”

  I could find a way to get cut early. It was just a training shift. “That would be perfect.”

  “Meet me in front of the library—​Mac. That’s short for Mackenzie, right? Mackenzie Woods. And that must make you”—​he gestured at Gwen with his glass—​“Gwendolyn Whitney.”

  “Our fame precedes us.” She sidled a little closer to me. “I haven’t seen you around today.”

  “I just got in,” he said vaguely. “Rocky.” He thrust his hand out, and we each shook it in turn.

  “So, what have you got tomorrow morning?” Gwen said.

  Rocky raised his glass of wine meaningfully and winked. “The same thing I have every Saturday morning. Most Sundays, too.” Catching sight of someone behind us, he drained the glass in one gulp and rattled it so that the last few beads of red slid back and forth along the bottom edge. “Speaking of which. If you’ll excuse me.” He wandered toward the bar with his empty glass.

  “I wonder what his deal is.” I took a tiny sip and licked my lips compulsively to ward off red wine stains. “I don’t remember a ‘Rocky’ on the email list. I guess it’s a nickname.”

  Gwen was still following him with her eyes. “Oh my god.”

  “He doesn’t seem like a first-year. What do you think—​third? Fourth?”

  “He wasn’t on the email list because he’s not a student.” Gwen grabbed my jacket sleeve and turned me toward the open double doors, where a woman in her fifties with a dark red bob and blunt-cut bangs was shrugging off a stiff woolen cape. In her knee-high boots with dramatic spike heels, she only came up to Rocky’s shoulder, but she had the air of a much taller woman. Expertly balancing his already half-drained refill in one hand while receiving her cape with the other, he seemed to shrink into the background.

  “That’s Professor Pyotr Semyonovich,” Gwen said in awe. “Mr. Bethany Ladd.”

  * * *

  Six o’clock came early the next morning. Sheepish about my mistake and nervous about my first shift at Nona, I had left the reception early and walked home alone. Before I went to bed, I’d pulled Gwen’s copy of Ethical Negation off the shelf and flipped through it idly. This morning I cracked it open again, determined to get through the introduction over breakfast. But I must have been grogg
ier than usual, because after only a couple of pages, I found myself completely lost and had to start over. By the time I left for my training shift at Nona, I had managed half a chapter but had to admit to myself that I’d need to read it again. I didn’t really understand it.

  My trainer at Nona looked me up and down with a bored smile and showed me around the kitchen until the Saturday slam hit. Within minutes, our section filled up with boozy brunch-goers, and I forgot about everything but carting French toast out of the kitchen, refilling coffees, and tipping the contents of mimosa pitchers into champagne flutes.

  When it was all over, and my trainer had thrown a couple twenties my way and left, the time was 1:30. I was supposed to be meeting Rocky in half an hour.

  “Shit.” I yanked at my apron strings. “I have to get out of here. Am I cut?”

  Derek flashed me a sadistic smile. “Trainees do the side work. Guessing you haven’t started yet?” He gestured toward the laminated sheets dangling on strings near the walk-in. “I’ll need to check it before you leave. Sometimes we get a second slam. You wouldn’t want to leave your coworkers hanging, would you?”

  “Right.” I thought of my actual cohort, the pack of grad students enjoying lunch on the farm, perhaps doing trust falls into bales of hay. I took a deep breath, checked out the laminated sheet, and started hauling racks of glasses and coffee mugs to the wait stations. I sprigged parsley and wedged lemons as sloppily as I dared, arranging the prettiest ones on top. I did the same trick with my tub of silverware, rolling the top row as tightly as cigarettes and stacking them neatly over the disastrous rolls below.

  Still, it was 2:04 by the time Derek okayed me to go. I was officially late. I ran to the library, bag bouncing on my back all the way.