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Brooke did not ask why a billionaire would want to have lunch with her. Not her place to demand that answer. She thought of the oyster, invisible beneath the water, indifferent to human life, busy with its humble task. There was a lesson. Leave behind the guilt that she had failed as a teacher. Forget her own mother’s skepticism. Make her an oyster! Useful, small, hidden, important, no, imperative. Let this be her purpose. Let her, unnoticed, make the world a better place. Because that was what they were doing, right?
mother had always crowed about her own age, never hesitated to pronounce it: forty-three, fifty-one, sixty-two. To be anything but proud of living however long you made it was empty vanity, one of men’s tools for keeping women in check.
It was a mediocre day, a typical Sunday, with its melancholy cloud cover, an atmosphere of industry suspended, people turned inward. It was a Sunday with that utter liberty that felt to her not promising but terrible. Should she propose brunch? Should she walk to the green market and ponder the vegetables but buy a flaky croissant? Should she get a coffee and look at the cheap books in carts outside of the Strand? Should she suggest a movie and shake peanut M&M’s into a bucket of popcorn and eat so much of it that she felt ill before the coming attractions were over? Should she call her
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Eventually, everything would come to pass, but for now there was that feeling of suspension, of navigating some interstitial space in which progress was not possible, in which you simply had to wait, mark time, because the future was inevitable. Brooke said they should get coffee, and though neither of them quite wanted to, they did. Sometimes it was a comfort, to do what was most obvious.
She admired Paige’s love of beauty but knew there was more to life. You were what you did in the world, not what you collected.
“This is what you should be working on. This is what needs do-ing.” A pause to play with the ice in his glass. “Forget changing the world or making it a better place or whatever nonsense you tell yourselves. What the world needs is a nonprofit that says, Oh, your parents didn’t work hard enough, we’ll make up the difference.
