1. Do I Look Rich To You?

I hurried along through the dank air of early spring, overheating in my wool coat, irritable and red-faced after a restless night, having fallen asleep between nine and nine-thirty, bolted upright in bed at one-thirty, struggled for an hour trying to get back to sleep, only to get up to pee at five o’clock, at which point I surrendered to the dawn and set about careening around the apartment, rifling through stacks of postal mail, checking e-mail, making lists, organizing drawers and closets full of miscellaneous household items, trying on clothing and packing up bags of things to bring to the Salvation Army, the one on the far side of town, the only one left in this city now that the one nearer to my apartment closed last year. Then I set out for work.

My walk to the office takes me through a neighborhood much wealthier than my own. It has become obscenely chic in the last five years, thanks to restaurants and cafes and retail shops all designed to look like the bowels of spaceships as envisioned by 20th-century science-fiction cinema. The municipal government has gone to great pains in neighborhoods like these to plant native shrubs and flowering trees, to help us ignore how irrevocably divorced from nature we have become.

I walked into Ortolana, one of the boutique coffee shops, and submitted to the queue. After twenty-three minutes I gave my order to the cashier, who dabbed at a screen linked to another screen operated by a barista. I paid $9.43 for a six ounce cafe au lait and tipped 20%, and took my place in the orderly row of customers awaiting beverages.

Each person on either side of me was absorbed by their phone, making it easier to observe them unnoticed. Every one of them, regardless of gender, appeared freshly bathed in the perfecting waters of digital filters: skin taut as rubber, lips chubby with hyaluronic acid, laser-sculpted eyebrows. They were dressed in shades of white, gray, and black (though one woman wore a very small brown knitwear dress that emphasized her buoyant artificial breasts) and adorned with gold and silver jewelry.

The particulars of these aesthetics had been spreading, less like a trend than a virus, across this city and, I assumed, other cities too, indicating that rich people were multiplying at an accelerated rate or that there were thousands more who had figured out how to at least look rich.

At the magazine where I worked, staff writers who would have once been expected to show up at the office dressed neatly and modestly now wore $200 t-shirts, $800 caftans, diaphanous slip dresses with haute couture bra-and-panty sets visible underneath, or high-end athleisure. They were clean and groomed and odorless, and I felt filthy in comparison. When, I wondered, had journalists become integrated into the nexus of fin-tech-fashion-art?

But just then through the window I saw someone who looked more like me, which is to say less than immaculate, another woman ambling along, wearing a long black coat like mine, a black knit cap, and black boots. Her hay-blonde hair stuck out of the cap in frizzy tufts. Her head was bowed, I couldn’t quite see her face, but I was nearly certain that she was my old friend, Agatha. At that same moment a barista summoned me to the counter and so, with coffee in hand, I decided to follow her.

2. Object Permanence

Agatha and I had met when we were both in our early 30s, during what may have been my last ecstatic surge of social viability. We were in an amateur poetry writing class offered to the public by a prestigious private university and taught by a poet of some renown. Class size was limited to ten. The group was broken down into five groups of two, with each pair responsible for coaching one another through assignments and sending reminders about deadlines and cancellations, et cetera.

Agatha was, at that time, blossoming into a career as an art consultant. She’d earned her undergraduate degree at Brown and her master’s at Columbia. She’d completed internships at Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine. Unlike many of her peers and employers, she hadn’t come from significant privilege, but by that point she’d spent most of her life amongst the deeply monied, and her fiancé, Harold, had been made partner at one of the city’s top law firms. One month after her thirty-third birthday, she and Harold purchased a brownstone in a Brooklyn enclave that was just eclectic enough to satisfy their need to believe that progressive social values and economic ascendancy could comfortably co-exist.

Initially I felt nervous in Agatha’s presence—I didn’t know how to behave. She possessed many of the characteristics I coveted: she was beautiful but not vain, intelligent but not supercilious, cultured but not pretentious, kind but not cloying. She had opinions and did not bend them to appease others, though she listened closely to opposing views. She demonstrated a remarkable lack of anxiety about how or who she should be, accepted her own flaws and contradictions, and did not judge others for their hypocrisies.

I, on the other hand, was riven by misanthropic tendencies, and yet Agatha seemed to enjoy being around me. We had fun together. We asked one another questions about our childhoods, our romances, our creative aspirations. She invited me over for dinner a handful of times, only when Harold was out of town on work trips, so I never had the pleasure of meeting him in person.

As I followed Agatha down the sidewalk, remaining roughly twenty paces behind, I remembered how focused she could be, a skill embodied by the deliberateness of her gait. She had shown me this too during our study meetings, in the way she always managed to bring the conversation back around to the topic at hand, or in how she prepared a meal and set the table and poured wine and lit candles all while making me feel like she was paying total attention only to me.

The poetry writing class lasted ten weeks, with two weeks off for holidays. When it ended we continued to meet, Agatha and I, as friends, however less frequently. In the following year or so, we saw one another maybe once a month, and then our correspondence began to dwindle.

You’d think it would’ve been Agatha who lost interest or motivation, given the dimness of my aura relative to hers, but it was, I’m fairly certain, my fault.

My problem is what could be diagnosed as an underdeveloped sense of object permanence. I find it difficult to hold in mind people I love or who, allegedly, love me. When I feel lonely, I have trouble thinking of who might want my company. Occasionally I’ll jot down a list of names and post the list on my refrigerator, and I’ll try to remember to look at the list, to visualize what others refer to as community or support network; even then it is difficult to believe that the names on the list represent people who are truly a part of my life. Even more so, I cannot convince myself that were those people to compose lists of their own, my name would be included on any one of them.

It wasn’t that I forgot about Agatha. On the contrary, I wondered about her regularly. But I forgot that I could call her, that we could arrange to see one another. My pathological forgetfulness was one factor in our centrifugal drift. The other was Agatha’s baby.

3. Moral Imperative

In the early days of our burgeoning friendship, Agatha and I bonded over shared anti-natalist attitudes, which were couched in broader critiques of what we identified as bland and limiting social norms and expectations. This animated me. Here was a heterosexual married woman, well-positioned to breed, eschewing motherhood like me. There were enough things we were for, but to be against something brought us closer.

One Saturday morning, after having fallen out of touch for several months, I texted Agatha to invite her to MoMA, and she replied with apologetic tenderness—she was sorry she wouldn’t be able to make it, but was excited to report that the reason was a happy one: she was entering the second trimester of pregnancy and still managing severe nausea.

My first thought was that Agatha had not only betrayed me but herself, that she had proven weak where I hoped she could be strong, but I still felt affection for her, and we had spent more time together than I had with most other women I had tried to engage. I concealed my disappointed and showered her with emojis. I assured her that I would reach out soon, that I would love to see her and to properly celebrate.

And I did reach out again, and again and again. I sent Agatha poems I was working on, invitations to exhibitions and performances and readings, news clippings about authors we admired. I sent her silly memes and powerful infographics. The more I contacted Agatha, the less she responded, until it had been long enough for the baby to have been born, and I’d heard nothing.

At first I feared the worst—the very worst—but when I checked her social media feed I saw photos of a large healthy baby named Azalea. I saw that in the first five months of her life, Azalea had already been to MoMA and the Met and Dia and the Frick and the Whitney and the Guggenheim and PS1 and Asia Society and the Tate and the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum and the Museo del Prado and the Uffizi. She had napped in the shade of the Chiosco Ai Bardini while Agatha and Harold drank cappuccinos and ate from a platter of meats and cheeses.

I had followed Agatha from a safe distance for over a dozen blocks, diverging further and further from my route to work, and still did not have any idea where we were headed. I noted that Agatha held herself in a protective stance, with shoulders shrugged up and arms crossed over her bony chest, upper back slightly rounded and chin jutting forward. Yet there was something essentially balletic about her body and the manner in which she negotiated space.

Azalea must have been at least three by then. Agatha had actually sent me a birth announcement when the girl was around six months, one of those sturdy cards with scalloped edges featuring a few photos and a bit of text. In the lower left-hand corner, in her delicate and restrained penmanship, she had scrawled: Forgive the delay, I am too tired to speak let alone get to a mailbox! Here she is, the love of our life. xo A

As I kept my eyes on Agatha’s back I recalled how it had felt to receive this message, the admixture of disgust and resentment and sorrow and longing. I had known immediately that it was conciliatory, a kind of farewell. I did not text or call to confirm receipt or issue further congratulations; I assumed a posture of indifference. But with every step toward Agatha I now grew agitated. I was coming to see that confronting Agatha about her failure to maintain our connection was nothing less than a moral imperative, insofar as our relationship had been rooted in an increasingly endangered feminist solidarity. Wouldn’t she want to hear, I thought, my poignant analysis of her life choices and their implications for women everywhere?

4. Action Potential

I wanted to give her a chance to reflect before answering me—first I sent her an e-mail. It was brief, a few sentences, urgent but friendly and gentle in tone.

Several moments after sending, we reached a nondescript building and she walked up the steps toward the doors and, realizing it might be a while before she checked her e-mail, I sent her a follow-up text.

When she did not appear to register any notification of the text I glanced at my own screen and saw that it had not been delivered. I tried again, and the message did not go through.

She seemed to have forgotten the door code, she was pressing buttons in various four-number combinations. I was near enough to detect growing distress—her left hand formed a slender fist as her right finger pads worked on the panel. I texted her quickly and repeatedly, and the messages continued to go undelivered, and Agatha continued to struggle there in front of me.

I hadn’t taken even one sip of my cafe au lait, which had gone cold. As I lifted the lid to my lips and drank it entirely in one go, I saw my own hands were shaking with excitement. I tossed the empty cup into an overflowing trash bin and wiped the sweat from my forehead and, all at once unencumbered by the shame I carry around like a malignancy, strode purposefully toward my friend. Agatha! I called out, readying a smile. Agatha!

Recommended Reading: Motherhood by Sheila Heti