We went to the house to meet her. “Is she our friend?” Susan said. She was trying to remember. “I don’t think she is,” Susan said. Susan was right. She was always right. Antoinette wasn’t our friend. She was, if anything, a nemesis. She had met Susan around an advertising campaign that Susan had spearheaded. The product that Susan had been advertising was a cosmetic that had been manufactured in accordance with the new understanding. It respected both animals and the environment. But Antoinette was incensed about where it was made and fired off a lengthy letter. Susan had responded, point by point, and she and Antoinette had become acquaintances. That’s where I came in. I was having lunch with Susan, trading normal updates (her husband was thinking of designing a new house for them; my wife had started cooking traditional Greek), when she asked me what I thought about Antoinette’s letter. She handed it to me across the table for inspection. “This is massively rude, for starters,” I said. “Though this woman does appear to have a good heart.” Susan told me I had to have breakfast with the two of them that next Sunday. It didn’t seem like a request. That breakfast went fine enough. I sensed that Antoinette was always on the verge of pouncing on Susan and tearing her limb from limb, so I made jokes, introduced distractions, cleared my throat more than was necessary. And so, every four months or so, the three of us got together under these conditions. This was the most recent iteration, the meeting at Antoinette’s new house, which she now shared with what, Susan explained, she called her “newest lover.” Susan mimed sticking her fingers down her throat when she spoke the phrase. “This guy,” Susan said, “is either twenty years younger than her or twenty years older. I don’t remember which, but it’s the same difference.” Also present would be the newest lover’s cousin, a classical composer of some note who had recently renounced symphony work as a result of a disturbing increase in mistreatment of musicians by other musicians. Antoinette wanted to pair them off and see if Susan might throw her firm’s considerable weight behind a campaign to stamp out musician-on-musician cruelty. Susan enlisted me. A car came. We rode twenty minutes to the house. Susan rang the bell. I knocked. Antoinette answered. “Hello,” she said. “Look who’s here to make the world better.” Not a jot of irony was discernible in her tone. Behind her in the house a darkness loomed. We went in, knowing we were turning on a projector that we probably couldn’t stop.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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