Vanessa knew she’d never achieve enlightenment when Fran said it had cost her $400,000 to build the meditation room. It had been Joel’s study, but Joel was gone. Vanessa told herself she and Harold didn’t have an apartment big enough for a meditation room, although she knew the real reason she’d never have one was the money. Harold wouldn’t spend $400,000 to renovate anything, not even a bathroom, which—what with fixtures and all that plumbing—was expensive to do. Still, she had gotten him to concede that those $10,000 Japanese electric toilets with the heated seats, automatic lids, and which made a purring noise when you flushed, were pretty neat and might well be worth it. But if he wouldn’t renovate a bathroom, he certainly wasn’t going to renovate a place whose sole purpose was to close your eyes and sit and not have something to show for it in the end. But Vanessa had no doubt it would be worth the money, because if she had a $400,000 meditation room she knew exactly what she would be thinking about as she meditated: how she had a $400,000 meditation room, and every time that thought came to her she’d feel happy.

Really, when you got right down to it, $400,000 was a steal. Instead of a gong, Fran’s meditation room had an antique Indonesian gambang (which Joel, Fran’s ex, used to call “the gang bang”—it sounded a bit like the end-of-intermission chimes at the Met, though not as harsh). The rack of prayer wheels, which looked like someone couldn’t keep enough paper towels on hand, was from a shrine in Katmandu and nearly two hundred years old. The beautiful floor—how could it be so smooth and at the same time studded with so many little black knots?—was bespoke teak from a monastery in Bhutan. Harold had talked about going to Bhutan, but gave it up after Vanessa asked, Is that where they make all the lighters? The what? he’d asked. You know, the Bhutan lighters.

The problem was that afterwards, Vanessa couldn’t convince Harold that she had just been making a joke. What had really happened was that she had not paid attention to what she was saying. and in all honesty, she had never heard of Bhutan before. Vanessa conceded that there were some gaps in her education—it had nothing to do with her intelligence. But Harold could be mean that way—as if being around her was an insult to his superior intelligence. She’d never completely forgiven him for the time they were in a furniture store and she asked to see the cadenzas. He had laughed in front of the salesman and said “Cre-denzas, babe, you want to see the cre-denzas.” He just wouldn’t shut up.

The two self-proclaimed “most successful” women of the Cicero, New York, high school Class of ’95 moved into safer territory—the kitchen. (There was, of course, Stacy Chandler who had gone to Harvard and become a thoracic surgeon, but it didn’t feel like she counted because Stacy was Black and hadn’t been part of their crowd). Vanessa always felt like she could spend her entire life in Fran’s kitchen. It had two restaurant-quality stoves, a convection oven, vent hoods, a massive refrigerator-freezer that Vanessa thought looked like a walk-in bank vault but had doors that were magically light and wheezed ever so pleasantly when you opened them and broke the seal that held them shut. Fran had a separate, file-cabinet-sized refrigerator just for the Chardonnays; the bottles always looked fresh and sparkly with their rivulets of condensation. Fran took one out without asking and quickly popped the cork. They moved past the work island, past the breakfast counter, to what Fran called her “kitchen lounge”—the sunken horseshoe of comfortable built-in seats with throw pillows and a view of the back lawn. From the front of the house you could see Long Island Sound, but the view from the back was also pretty: the swimming pool, the small duck pond, hedges, no sense that you had neighbors. Not bad, for Westport. Fran often said the kitchen lounge was the one place in the house you could really let your hair down. Vanessa had noticed it was often the only place you could really sit down—they never just sat in the living room, for example, because all the chairs were something like original Queen Anne antiques. She supposed you sat in the dining room if you ever got invited to dinner, but Vanessa knew she was an old, let-me-drop-by-and-hang-out-for-a-little-while friend, not a let’s-have-Vanessa-and-Harold-over-for-dinner friend. Maybe that would change now that Joel was gone. Harold hadn’t liked Joel. Harold could suddenly go off on you if you brought up the subject of Joel. Harold would lecture you about how Joel had only made his money by charging exorbitant fees for managing a hedge fund and hadn’t brought one goddamn useful thing into the world. At least in the olden days those robber barons had brought things into the world that were worth a damn: gold mines, railroads, steel mills. Joel basically was a big fat leech that had swollen up taking his steady suck on other people’s money.

Fran handed Vanessa her wine. It came in a large, oversized tulip glass with a slope that Vanessa felt matched the natural bend of an upturned hand, with a stem the right width to slide comfortably between her middle and ring fingers. The glass was so clear, it looked like the wine was just sitting there curled up in her palm and fingers. Vanessa loved to move her hand around and get the wine to swish, so it sloshed up the sides. And the sides gave ever so slightly when you pushed on them.

“So, do you and Harold have any travel plans?” Fran asked.

Vanessa was disappointed at the question—strictly a warmup. She and Fran had known each other forever—they had both dated Chuck Koslinski, captain of the high school football team for God’s sake, briefly at the same time. They had other things to discuss besides travel.

“Oh, Paris for our anniversary in the fall. We always go to Paris for our anniversary.”

It was like the one place left in the world she and Harold could agree was still worth going to. And it wasn’t as romantic as it sounded. They always stayed in the same pension where they had had their honeymoon—not because it was quaint and wonderful, but because it was cheap.

“We’re saving up to go someplace really exotic. Harold wants to go to Antarctica, but I keep saying I grew up with enough snow in Cicero to last a lifetime. I mean, I just want to go to some place high-end. High-end places have so much more interesting people than low-end places.”

You wanted to go to high-end places because then you could be confident everybody around you had made something of themselves—you’d never be around boring people who just wanted wanted wanted.

“And you?” Vanessa asked. “Now that the divorce is through, and you don’t have to go with Joel?”

Fran coughed.

“I never felt I had to go with Joel. For years, I wanted to go with Joel. And I might well travel with Joel again. Travel was never the problem.”

This sounded like the entrée into the deeper conversation that Vanessa wanted, although she suspected you did not need “a problem” to want a divorce. She could see just waking up one day and thinking you needed to spread your wings, hitch your wagon to a different star.

“But was there a problem? I mean something specific? I could see you deciding it was just time to move on.”

“Yes, Vanessa, there was.”

“So—I guess I’ve got to ask?”

“It was a sexual problem.”

Well, that could easily happen at their age, Vanessa thought.

“Not the one you would think, either. Remember Chuck? Joel had the same certain hesitancy Chuck had. I just got tired of it.”

“Oh, you mean he’d never? Oh, I’m so sorry, Fran. And you put up with that for twenty years?”

Fran nodded.

“Well, I guess he’s paying a stiff price for being a selfish lover! I mean, I’d do that to you to keep a house like this.”

“That’s very sweet of you, Vanessa.”

Vanessa liked to think that she and Fran had lived parallel lives—like two airplanes that had taken off at the same time. But Fran’s plane was always the one flying just a little higher. Both had gone to college, but Fran had gone to SUNY Binghamton, while Vanessa went to community college in Cortland. Fran had moved to New York City and had been enough of an actor to get a bit part on Law and Order. Vanessa had gone to Los Angeles and done some modeling: mainly standing next to and pointing to furniture in a showroom, a bit like Vanna White. Fran met Joel when she was hostessing at The Four Seasons. Vanessa met Harold when she was also hostessing—but at the High Spot Diner outside Binghamton, after she’d had to move back to New York. It wasn’t such a small deal being made hostess at the High Spot—she was promoted from waitress and was the first who wasn’t a member of the Conigliaro family, who owned it.

“You’re lucky, V. I get the feeling you married a much more generous man than I did.”

Harold generous? Harold didn’t have enough money to be generous. Vanessa was always thinking if they just had a little more, they could really do something for the world. Harold had once discussed setting up a small foundation that would give financial assistance to young, struggling classical singers, but Vanessa had nixed that when he explained it would require a significant capital expenditure, and she decided that would eat away at her peace of mind. Vanessa noticed that Harold sat on very few charitable boards, apparently because he couldn’t afford the large annual gifts such positions required.

Vanessa really didn’t know how much Harold had. Harold said men who let drop their net worth were like men who let drop they had gone to Harvard—they were the grown-up versions of the insecure little boys in first grade who hung out in the back of the bathroom and lowered their pants so they could look at each other and compare. Once, he had told her he had “about a dollar for every person in New York City, including the tourists,” so she figured it was only eight or nine million. You can afford nice cars with eight or nine million, but you really couldn’t afford a spectacular house like Fran’s, at least not in any place you’d really want to live. Harold said he liked thinking he had a dollar for every person in New York City, because it made his wealth become real, and, when walking through busy mid-town streets, it made him realize he had what should be an overwhelming amount of money. But she thought the analogy had its downside—sometimes he was a tightwad, so tight-fisted that spending twenty dollars was like he was killing twenty of his dear New Yorkers.

And then it occurred to her what was really ridiculous—Fran was implying Joel wasn’t generous, when he had just given her the house plus forty million in a settlement, when she was the one who had asked for the divorce?

“Well, Joel was pretty big-hearted with you!”

She thought Fran would think this funny, but her friend’s face became stiff and cold. Vanessa thought Fran was already pretty good at aping the rich-Connecticut-bitch look these days: hair sharply cut right above the shoulders, combed back and held in place with a tortoiseshell headband so her forehead was tall and imperious (although the word that went through Vanessa’s mind was “impervious”).

Finally, Fran laughed and got up.

“Well, with taxes and upkeep, I have to run a tight ship not to dip into capital,” Fran said.

Like shit you do, Vanessa thought. Forty million. What she could do with forty million.

“But I mean, you can do whatever you want. You have enough to express yourself. Enough to show the world who you are,” Vanessa said.

Fran offered her more wine. God, these glasses were huge. Just this little more and they had killed a whole bottle. That was okay—Fran would put her on the train back to the city. She’d nap and be okay because Grand Central was the last stop—she couldn’t miss it. Except then she’d have to go back to her tiny shithole apartment on Sutton Place, and Harold would probably be playing the piano and expecting her to hurry up for God’s sake and call the Indian place for dinner.

Maybe they should switch to red wine. The red wine looked even prettier in the big glasses, although they’d have to go get clean ones, of course.

“I mean, being a good person is just so expensive,” Vanessa said. “Just look at the price of the stuff you’re meant to eat. Free-range chickens? Grass-fed beef? I mean, Harold one day came and told me I should get a new coat because he doubted the down inside was from humanely raised geese. Harold has Buddhist tendencies, too.”

“He might have been pulling your leg on that one,” Fran said, back on the couch.

“No, he wasn’t. He just thinks we should have stuff that’s just a little better and more moral than what everybody else has.”

Vanessa understood her husband’s attitude toward material possessions. They shared an important belief—everything that was “mass” and “mass-produced” was soulless, killing, cheap, and not really good enough for anyone, but especially not for Vanessa and Harold. Harold had gone to small private schools and an excellent but tiny liberal arts college—he believed never having gone through some academic diploma mill had given him his quirky but original mind, the one that allowed him to design the ingenuous heat pump that made him his money (but which he sadly sold the rights to early on, missing out on the real money). They both took great umbrage at being called materialistic people; what they believed was that it cost a lot of money to self-fulfill.

“So, if something were to happen to Harold, what would you do?” asked Fran.

She had thought about this one about a million times.

“I’d take a trip. I’d eat, pray, love.”

“Where?”

“Not the Amalfi Coast, and I wouldn’t go skiing. And no Miami.”

She couldn’t stand the Amalfi Coast—oh so many tour buses swinging their way up those tight little switchbacks, oh so few sandy beaches. She had given up downhill skiing because the lodges roared like the old Cicero middle school lunchroom and the lift lines felt like they went around the block. Helicopter skiing was nice, but the skiers tended to be very good, and she always felt like she was holding people back. Harold always skied with her, which was very nice of him.

As for Miami, she didn’t like its endless parade of gleaming glass and white fin-thin tower apartment buildings right along the beach—so many of them all exactly the same.

She loved places that, in her mind, celebrated the individual—Dali’s home in Port Ligat was her favorite tourist site of all time, partially because they only let in a few people. Closer to home, there was Monticello, San Simeon, and The Biltmore, but that last one could get very crowded even though it was the largest private house in America. She’d love to buy some eccentric old mansion and gussy it up—but again, they really didn’t have the funds.

“I’d go to Iceland. Even though I hate snow, I’d go to Iceland. And I’d only go after Harold is gone.”

“Why Iceland?”

Fran was smiling at her, amused. Her blue eyes looked warmer.

“I hear it’s never boring.”

If there was one thing Vanessa was good at, it was avoiding things that were boring.

She was not shy about speaking her mind when she thought people were doing something only because they said they liked it out of social pressure, when any fool could see it really wasn’t fun. Who in their right mind could actually enjoy a baseball game? Half the time, you couldn’t see the ball. And opera. Oh God, the opera. Boy, did you have to pay a tall price to feel a little glamorous. Harold took her to one that was over four hours long and was all about this girl dressed up as a man who then dresses up as a girl again, so it was all very confusing. Harold probably liked it because the last act took place in a brothel, and when they weren’t caterwauling, the two sopranos spent a lot of time making out—though it really wasn’t lesbian stuff because one of them was supposed to be a man. Though it must have been a bisexual man, because the character at one point almost gave another man a blow-job right there on the stage.

She was pretty sure there was no baseball or opera in Iceland, but she really didn’t know.

“Well, I once dated a guy who was fascinated with Iceland,” Vanessa said. “Before everybody started going there. Funny how I’ve avoided going to Iceland with Harold, like I might bump into the guy. His name was Charlie. I’ll tell you all about him if you open another bottle.”

Fran got up.

“Red this time. I really like the red.”

Fran took her glass and retreated for a little while, came back with a new bottle and fresh glasses.

“Joel will probably send a van for this good stuff when he realizes where it is, so let’s drink up before he does,” Fran said. “It’s probably worth quite a bit, so enjoy.”

Vanessa smacked her lips. After Fran poured and Venessa swirled it in her glass and tasted it, Venessa thought it was the best wine she had ever tasted, although she always thought that at Fran’s after a couple of glasses.

“So, I knew this Charlie in LA. He was like my best boyfriend ever—though it didn’t last long. He always talked about how lucky he was to have me, told me I was beautiful, but best of all, that I made him laugh—but not in a way that felt like he was laughing at me. He said he loved having a girlfriend who made him laugh. Meanwhile, he was a riot, especially for a geologist. He lived in LA, but he hated the beach—can you imagine that?— which was a shame because he had a nice chest and lots and lots of this wonderful chest hair. But it wasn’t gross. It wasn’t on the back of his shoulders or anything. Harold has hair on the back of his shoulders. Anyway, Charlie was into mountain climbing and mountain biking, really more of a San Francisco kind of a guy. He’d grown up in Berkeley and wanted to be away from his family. He used to call his family the Flying Zamboni Brothers—although that wasn’t their name—because he felt like they were always doing this big human pyramid, and he didn’t like being the guy at the bottom with twenty-eight cousins and uncles standing on his shoulders. But I guess LA wasn’t far enough away from his family for him. One day, out of the blue, he says he’s going to Iceland to study earthquakes and the science of predicting earthquakes. God, he made Iceland sound nice. Volcanoes. Earthquakes. Huge lakes of steaming water. Like the most un-boring place on earth. He made Reykjavik sound like the center of the universe.”

Fran was looking at her, with a smile.

“Your friend’s last name wasn’t Wertheimer, was it? You didn’t happen to go out with the Charlie Wertheimer?”

Venessa couldn’t feel anything—not the glass of the wine she was holding, not the cushions that were supporting her bottom. She didn’t think she’d ever be able to speak again.

“Small world. Joel knew Charlie Wertheimer. He venture-capitalized him—he developed some sort of earthquake alarm system that I believe was quite successful. Charlie Wertheimer has sat in that very seat you’re sitting in now.”

Maybe he held this glass. Drank a bottle of wine from the same crate.

And Venessa could tell something else by Fran’s little smile. Vanessa didn’t need to ask—she had slept with him.

“But I hate to tell you this, Venessa. Charlie Wertheimer died of prostate cancer two years ago.”

Venessa had to catch her breath, wait for her heart rate to decline.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she finally said. “I guess I have no reason to go to Iceland now.”

“Charlie never mentioned you.”

“He deserved to die young,” Vanessa finally said.

Fran shifted in her seat, squinted at her.

“Why do you say that?” she asked.

“He never asked me to go to Iceland with him, and I really wanted to go,” Vanessa said.

Vanessa heard a sharp pop.  The wine glass in her hand had disappeared. She looked down to a mess of red wine and broken glass centered on her lap. Her right hand was bleeding.

Vanessa would swear her words had shattered the glass, but she guessed she had held its generous bowl too much in a death grip. She was lucky she had suffered only minor cuts to her thumb and forefinger.

Fran would send her the bill for having the kitchen lounge re-upholstered, and Vanessa would pay, but never go see the new Marimekko fabric.