The Life of the World to Come Read Online Free Page B

animalic variety, co-stars whose heavy accents bore no relationship whatsoever to the natural habitats of their respective genera.
    Even in lesser fare, she cut a brilliant ingénue or fender bender-er, conveying with the merest morsel of a look whichever ineffable feeling was required. Fiona was blessed with easy access to the full bright constellation of human emotions. She was wasted on the too-clever playwrights of New York, wasted on the horn-rimmed directors, wasted on her peers, those parched minds packed unstably into beautiful bodies. I never liked any of her acting friends—not one. Mackenzie Walters, loudmouthed and positively Amazonian, whom Fiona had met at an arts camp in seventh grade. Alice Gerson, a sweet but shivering bundle of unearned insecurities with whom Fiona frequently competed for parts. Joel Enson, Mackenzie’s even-louder-mouthed boyfriend who never once came to our apartment without cooking something elaborate out of our freshest ingredients that clearly didn’t belong to him. The parade of smirking autolatrists from Fiona’s acting class, boring men and boring women, each of whom had long ago convinced themselves that it was their intricate talent alone which daily attuned the spheres of Heaven and Earth.
    Fiona wasn’t one of them—she had character of the sort for which you cannot simply substitute in hair product—but it made me nervous that these were her friends. I found myself eyeing her for residue every time they came around, the way you might check your partner for ticks after hiking through a stretch of long grass. Could they infect my complicated darling with their swooning idiocy? Is lack of depth contagious? Of course not, I decided each night, as she curled herself once more onto my arm. She writes notes in the margins of poetry books in pencil; she listens to people when they speak.
    Her first true break arrived the summer before my third and final year of law school. Mercy General was one of the few television shows that still shot in New York; like me, it had been running for twenty-five years, and was a moderately successful soap opera featuring a number of suspicious doctors. Millions of laundromat employees, inpatients, cat-sitters, and children home sick tuned in each week to watch the uniformly attractive denizens of Titular Hospital make bad writing worse. Fiona won the part of nurse Jeanette, spunky-yet-sensitive medical neophyte and reluctant love interest to the Adonic Dr. Adam Strickland, who was portrayed by the actor Mark Renard: an Olympic-level brooder with no other discernable modes or abilities. Before doctor and nurse were killed off in a boating accident to end the season (but really the harbormaster did it), Fiona would appear in nineteen episodes—enough to quit waitressing, pay off her student loans, and gain a certain amount of traction within the industry.
    And when success arrived, she handled the change the way I knew she would, like a guarded but grateful weirdo. Most young actors never come anywhere near even the farthest outcrops of Fame Mountain, but suddenly we were—she was—being stopped on the street. It happened at least a dozen times that year, and in each instance she was embarrassed to the point of near-panic. Once, in a truly seminal display of awkwardness, she even went so far as to ask a befuddled autograph-seeker to reciprocate—there was a great deal of confusion, and no paper, and we landed on having the starstruck old lady sign the back of my hand in blue pen (“EILEEN R. STURDIVANT LOVE THE SHOW THANK YOU!”).
    It seemed very much like the start of something, even if the show itself was no great shakes. She was acting, I was learning, we were cooking and reading and walking and running together, and brunches and wine-bottle candlesticks and the record player playing and then so suddenly it’s summer again, and I’m a sudden lawyer now, and if it weren’t for that goddamn