It wasn’t as bad as he thought. She was a fast-talking woman, so skinny and with such erect posture that she looked brittle. Seated across from each other, almost alone in a hushed circle of cream tablecloths and glassware and heavy, clinking silverware, they gossiped about work. He hardly knew enough of the names to keep up, but she talked enough for both of them. She told him about her life—nice apartment, Upper East Side, roof deck, cats. They found that they had a funny kind of black humor in common. In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster. Who could possibly know that better than they—the man who watched Alice die, and the woman who’d essentially killed Alice’s brother? When he looked at her he saw himself eight years down the line. It didn’t look all that bad.
And she liked a drink or five, so they had that in common, too. Martini glasses, wine bottles, and whiskey tumblers piled up between them, a miniature metropolis of varicolored glass, while their cell phones and BlackBerries plaintively, futilely tried to attract their attention.
“So tell me,” Emily Greenstreet said, when they’d both imbibed enough to create the illusion of a comfortable, long-standing intimacy between them. “Do you miss it? Doing magic?”
“I can honestly say I never think about it,” he said. “Why? Do you?”
“Miss it, or think about it?” She rolled a lock of her mousy, chin-length hair between two fingers. “Of course I do. Both.”
“Are you ever sorry you left Brakebills?”
She shook her head sharply.
“The only thing I regret is not leaving that place sooner.” She leaned forward, suddenly animated. “Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods. They’re just kids, Quentin! With all that power! What happened to Charlie and me could happen again to any one of them, any day, any minute. Or worse. Much worse. It’s amazing that place is still standing.” He noticed that she never said “Brakebills,” just “that place.” “I don’t even like living on the same coast with it. There’s practically no safeguards at all. Every one of those kids is a nuclear bomb waiting to go off!
“Somebody needs to get control of that place. Sometimes I think I should blow their cover, get the real government in there, get it properly regulated. The teachers will never do it. The Magician’s Court will never do it.”
She chattered on in that vein. They were like two recovering alcoholics, hopped up on caffeine and Twelve Step gospel, telling each other how glad they were to be sober and then talking about nothing but drinking.
Though unlike recovering alcoholics they could and did drink plenty of alcohol. Temporarily revived by a molten
“I never felt safe in that place. Never, not for a minute. Don’t you feel safer out here, Quentin? In the real world?”
“If you want to know the truth, these days I don’t feel much of anything.”
She frowned at that. “Really. Then what made you give it all up, Quentin? You must have had a good reason.”
“I would say my motives were pretty much unimpeachable.”
“That bad?” She raised her thin eyebrows, flirtatiously. “Tell me.”
She sat back and let the restaurant’s fancy easy chair embrace her. Nothing a recovering addict likes more than a tale of how bad it had been in the old days, and how low a fellow addict had sunk. Let the one-downsmanship begin.
He told her just how low he’d sunk. He told her about Alice, and their life together, and what they had done, and how she had died. When he revealed the specifics of Alice’s fate, Emily’s smile vanished, and she took a shaky slurp from her martini glass. After all, Charlie had become a
When he was finished, he expected her to hate him as much as he hated himself. As much, perhaps, as Quentin suspected she hated herself. But instead her eyes were brimming over with kindness.
“Oh, Quentin,” she said, and she actually took his hand across the table. “You can’t blame yourself, truly you can’t.” Her stiff, narrow face shone with pity. “You need to see that all this evil, all this sadness, it all
Her voice softened.
“It’s what killed Charlie,” she said quietly. “And it killed your poor Alice, too. Sooner or later magic always leads to evil. Once you see that then you’ll see how to forgive yourself. It will get easier. I promise you.”
Her pity was like a salve for his raw, chafed heart, and he wanted to accept it. She was offering it to him, it was right there across the table. All he had to do was reach out for it.
