Chapter 2
It’s Gigi, not Danny, who first tells Eve about Pathos’s new angle. Gigi is trying on wedding dresses and has invited Eve along in what Eve takes to be a gesture of good faith.
Gigi looks spectacular in every dress. Which makes sense—she is an influencer with the glossy dark hair of a Disney princess and the proportions of a woodland fairy living under a toadstool.
“I know I’m saying this for all of them,” Eve tells her when they reach dress four, “but hot, babe.”
Gigi smooths the skirt. Flatly, she says, “I look like I’m going to get murdered in a Swedish cult.”
“I don’t know,” Eve says. “I don’t think it’s that bad.”
“No, that’s what I’m going for.”
“Oh,” Eve says. “Sure, why wouldn’t it be?”
The sales assistant swoops in to crow about how beautiful Gigi looks, how stunning and regal and mesmerizing. When she leaves to get another dress, Gigi says, “I hate it again.”
Eve has to step into the hallway because she gets a call from her manager about the album launch, which is happening tonight at a bar in Williamsburg. It’s just a check-in. Is Eve doing okay?
“Great!” Eve says. Eve feels like she’s going to throw up in the nearest potted fern.
When she returns to the dewily lit changing room, Gigi is back in her street clothes—a long black slip dress with a slit up the side.
“Are you okay?” Gigi asks.
“Oh! Yeah!”
“You’re all twitchy.”
The sales assistant rushes them again. “So?” she says. “What do we think? I think the second one really called to all of us.”
“I’m considering,” Gigi says. “Will you let me know if you get anything more funereal?”
To the poor woman’s credit, she doesn’t even blink. “You bet.”
Gigi exits, and Eve jogs after her.
“Surely marrying my brother isn’t a death sentence?” Eve says.
“It was a joke. Could you not tell it was a joke? I was smiling.”
“Were you really?”
“Let’s go back to your twitchiness.”
Eve rubs the knot in her shoulder. “Just the album, I guess. It’s more . . . vulnerable. Than anything I’ve done before.”
“How?”
“It’s mostly about Fletcher. He was pretty unhappy with it.” Eve hasn’t spoken to Fletcher since they bumped into each other at that party, where they made stilted conversation and tried to escape each other as quickly as possible.
“But most people have no conception of you or Fletcher as real people. Your music is just a vessel on which they map their own experiences.” Gigi puts on her sunglasses. “Maybe best to take a reader-response theory framework of it all. I want coffee.”
Eve subtly texts Shannon as they walk.
Eve: do we know anything about gigi’s hobbies or interests
Shannon: idkkkk yoga?
Shannon: ist hat reductive i don’t want to be a bad feminist
Eve: i think she’s a genius and we’ve been beguiled by her beautiful hair
Shannon: 100% plausible
Shannon: make her friends w us!!!!! :)
Gigi gets Eve’s order and pays for both of them. When Eve tries to thank her, she doesn’t react. They settle in at a too-small table by the window.
“How are things with Danny?” Gigi asks.
“Oh. They’re good. Really good.”
“Really?” Gigi says. “If you hurt him, I’ll put crushed-up cyanide capsules in your oatmeal.”
“How terribly specific,” Eve says.
“Danny is a precious commodity,” Gigi says. Her voice is, as ever, completely flat.
“No, I know.”
“Do you?”
Eve looks at her coffee. “I know it hasn’t been that long, but he really matters to me.”
She feels Gigi looking at her. Finally, Gigi says, “Do you love him?”
Eve swirls the ice in her cup. The table next to them is eavesdropping and not being subtle about it.
Does Eve love him? At the dress shop, he texted her from San Francisco, where he’s meeting with investors.
It was a picture of a sandwich board outside a café that said OUR SOUPS ARE HOT AND WEIRD.
He wrote: You are soups. The thought of him thinking of her made her feel warm and safe and generally like she had swallowed sunlight, which seemed, she recognized, like a disproportionate reaction to a joke about soup.
“We haven’t talked about it yet,” Eve says.
“How do you feel about the relationship health thing?”
“The what?”
“The new part of the app. The reason they’re in SF.”
“I don’t think I know about this.”
“They want to stop being for first dates and start being for relationships. They’re going to tell you what your relationship health is.”
“How could an app possibly know that?”
Gigi shrugs. “Ask Danny.”
“So the app tells you whether you’re in love?”
“Or whether your partner is pulling away.”
“I don’t know how I feel about that,” Eve says.
“Love is so hard,” Gigi says. Eve can’t tell whether she’s being sarcastic. “It would be so much easier if someone else did all that work for you.”