Rebeck - Im Glad About You

B UT WHAT IS a demimonde, anyway? said Alison.

The guy she was talking to, someone named Seth, smiled like he knew the secret answer to that. He wrote a column about celebrity bedside reading for Vanity Fair and his name had shown up once even as a byline on a feature for that esteemed publication. Alison did not fully realize the import of this accomplishment but he did.

The demimonde, actually, he told her. Theres only one of them, grammatically speaking.

What? said Alison, confused.

The demimonde. Its called the demimonde. Not like a demimonde, not a demimonde like theres a lot of demimondes and this might be one of them. Theres only one to begin with, so its the.

Is there only one of them if youre speaking any other way? Alison asked.

Apparently not; its all the same demimonde, no matter where you find it, he noted, pleased with the inane complication that had grown like a flower out of his correction of her grammar. Its okay, he told her kindly.

Whats okay?

That you didnt know.

That I didnt know that people call it the demimonde? she asked.

I just mean, you dont have to be embarrassed, he said.

Im not, she replied, unembarrassed. The pleasure he had been taking in the grammatical discussion was fleeing quickly, and in fact it was occurring to him that the young woman was not quite as attractive as she had seemed mere moments before. She smiled at him with that sort of absurd warmth that transplanted Midwesterners tossed about New York like an unappreciated breeze. Because of that Vanity Fair byline, in addition to his rangy height, he was used to having a different effect on the women upon whom he bestowed his attention in social situations. Usually they sparkled more, with a charming willingness to acknowledge the sexual undertones of any discussion and the innate superiority of his position in the demimonde. He had often mocked them, frankly, to his male comrades, for that very thingtheir eagerness to attract was, finally, a bit of a bore, he thought. But this girl, who was clearly some sort of nobody, didnt get any points for avoiding all that. She was unsettling. Attractive, but not attractive enough to get over that bump of her own sense of equality.

Should I be embarrassed? she asked. She sipped one of those relentless glasses of white wine and grinned slightly while tilting her head, so that she had to glance up at him under long dark bangs. Her eyes were a startling green and they looked like they were laughing at him, but not unpleasantly. This was actually better flirting than hed had in months. Why didnt he like it more?

No, no, he said, but a whisper of polite dismissal had snuck into his tone. It smacked her enough for a crinkle of worry to appear between her eyes, and he felt bad. He felt bad! This girl was really no fun at all.

Oh, well. Oh! Okay, she said, recovering from the startling appearance of male aggression over what to her, frankly, seemed like a nearly nonsensical discussion. Her friend Lisa had invited her over just a few hours ago for drinks in her loft, which wasnt actually a loft; it was more like sixteen square feet and a skylight. And now a total stranger was clearly miffed with her because of some weird obsession he had with the demimonde, and whether or not it was a demimonde or the demimonde. This isnt eighteenth-century France, she thought. Who gives a shit?

Well, she laughed, opting for good humor, I did know generally more or less about the demimonde. I was an English major in college and we tossed the whole thing about during one endless class on Trollope and I finally figured it out, that there really is only one in general, that its a general sort of thing. But its not a bad question, the versus a. I just never quite put it all together so specifically. Until tonight! Thank you so much for clearing that up.

This was, of course, both completely true and utterly sardonic, but the wry amusement of her tone didnt win her any points. These seemingly simple situations were frankly problematic for Alison, whose untamed heart and effortless intelligence combined to create an unfortunately toxic cocktail for a certain breed of male ego. An ex-friend of her ex-boyfriend Kyle once told her that he got sick of how she had to show off how smart she was all the time. It was an irrational misreading of her characterAlison wasnt particularly interested in showing off; she just was not a fool and felt no need to pretend to be one, under any circumstances or for any reason. Unfortunately, her ex-boyfriends ex-friend was not the only male creature who had ever mistaken this trait for something less defined and more blameworthy.

Where was that? Seth the OCD word fanatic asked.

Where was what? Alison asked, confused again.

Whered you do your undergrad?

Undergrad? she repeated. Oh, I went to Notre Dame.

As soon as she had admitted this, she wished she hadnt. Having arrived in New York only five months before, she was already acquainted with the eagerness with which those interminable Ivy Leaguers pried into the facts around your college education just so they had an excuse to bludgeon you with their own. And she had stepped into his trap! Let me guess. You went to Harvard, she said, beating him to the punch line. She tilted her chin at him, aiming for charming defiance.

Well, yes, actually, Seth admitted with a nod. Unfortunately, the charming defiance didnt manage to outshine the leaden fact of Notre Dame. He glanced over her shoulder, to see if anyone more worthy of his attention had drifted into view behind her. She hated New York at times like this, so full of intellectual phonies desperate to take any opportunity to assert their superiority in ways that, honestly, would have been considered just rude in the Midwest. Guess they werent supposed to let girls from Ohio into this particular corner of the demimonde, she told him tartly. A Harvard boy who writes for