"As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask."
— Erich Fromm
She arrived second, which was correct. Not first -- first was eager, first was the woman who had nowhere else to be -- and not last, because last was Margot's privilege and Margot was never late so much as delayed, which was a different thing. Jeannie parked on Bay View Terrace and checked her face in the rear-view mirror. This was not vanity. Or it was vanity, but it was also a diagnostic, a systems check. Hair: the colour still good, the grey managed by Dario in Subiaco every five weeks. Face: the Botox was holding; the filler along the jawline subtle enough that no one had mentioned it, which meant it was either invisible or so common among her friends it no longer registered. She was forty-five and she looked like herself at thirty-eight, which was not the same as looking young but was the goal -- not the reversal of time but its arrest, a particular vintage held at the right temperature.
The restaurant was one of the Claremont places that survived by understanding precisely what women like her wanted: good food in a room that looked expensive without being ostentatious, French doors open to the pavement so that arriving and departing could be witnessed. The table was in the window. Jeannie took the seat facing the door.
Karen was already there, which made Karen first, which was fine because Karen was always first and everyone had stopped reading anything into it. Karen had the look of a woman who had been pretty once in a way that suggested health and was now handsome in a way that suggested maintenance. Her husband sold industrial pumps to mining companies and drank too much at dinner parties, a fact the group acknowledged through euphemism: Colin was "tired," Colin had "a big week." Karen bore this with a composure Jeannie simultaneously admired and found repulsive, because the composure was real -- Karen genuinely did not seem to mind -- and Jeannie couldn't understand a woman who didn't mind.
Jeannie ordered a sauvignon blanc. Twelve-fifteen, the first glass, the legitimate glass, the glass that didn't count because everyone was having one and the sun was out and lunch without wine was not lunch but a meeting. The wine arrived and she took the first sip and felt the familiar softening, the slight recession of the sharp thing behind her sternum, the thing she had no name for and medicated with sertraline every morning and wine every afternoon. The first sip was always the best. The first sip was the moment the day became manageable.
Amanda arrived, then Pip, then the new woman -- Renee, or Rachael, something with an R -- and the table filled and the performance began. The conversation moved with practised rhythm: children first, then holidays, then real estate, then bodies, and then, always, the main event: other people.
The gossip was the point. It circulated like a currency, and like a currency it had rules of exchange that were never written down but universally understood. You paid with information and received social standing. Jeannie was the central bank. She received the most and distributed the least, which was how power worked in this economy as in every other: the person who controls the supply sets the value.
Pip's daughter had been accepted into medicine at UWA, delivered with calculated modesty -- "We're just relieved she got through the interview" -- and received by the table with congratulation and concealed assessment: where did this place Pip's daughter relative to their own? Amanda's husband had made partner, mentioned as though it had happened to someone else, because appearing too pleased was a vulnerability the table didn't reward. The new woman -- it was Renee -- was too eager. She laughed too quickly. She offered information without being asked, which was the social equivalent of handing someone your wallet on the street. Jeannie watched her with the assessing patience of a woman who had been deciding who was in and who was out since she was twelve at PLC.
The second glass arrived without Jeannie ordering it. The waitress knew. "Just a splash more," Jeannie said to no one, though the glass was full, and the phrase was addressed to an internal auditor whose standards were slipping.
Beneath the performance, the calculations ran. Renee: acceptable but eager. Amanda: performing indifference too hard, which meant the promotion was bigger than she was letting on. Karen: on water, unusual, which could mean anything from a diet to something Colin had done. And Pip -- Jeannie watched Pip most carefully, because Pip always knew things. Pip was slender, dark-haired, with a face that rested naturally in an expression of sympathetic interest, a face that made people tell her things. Her husband was in commercial real estate -- warehouses and office parks, the buildings you drove past without seeing that made their owners very rich. She sat on the committee of two charities and knew, at any given moment, the state of every significant marriage in the western suburbs the way a meteorologist knew weather systems.
"Have you heard about the Marcos?" Pip said, leaning in.
The table tilted toward her. Chris Marco -- the trial, the $250 million, the investors who had lost everything. The biggest financial scandal Perth had produced in a decade. The table discussed it with the delicious horror of people who believed, with a certainty that was also a prayer, that it could never happen to them.
"She must have known," Amanda said. "You don't live in that house and not know."
"She says she didn't," Karen said, and there was something in her voice -- an awareness that a woman could live inside a lie and not know it was a lie, because the lie was the shape of the life and the life was the only shape she had.
"Bob always says," Jeannie heard herself say, "if the returns look too good, they are." She lifted her glass. She believed this the way she believed in the floor beneath her chair: completely, without examination.
The third glass arrived with the main course, a salad she ate half of and pushed aside. The wine was doing its work. The sharp corners softened. The laugh came more easily. She touched arms, leaned in, was funny -- genuinely funny, with a timing and an edge that surprised people who had decided she was merely cruel. Cruelty and wit grew from the same root, which was observation, and Jeannie observed everything. She was, in this window, in this particular chemical state of wine meeting medication meeting sunlight, the version of herself she wished she were all the time -- the version that could enjoy a Wednesday, that didn't need the performance because she was, for a moment, the thing the performance imitated.
Karen said something. A half-sentence offered into a gap with the involuntary honesty of a woman who'd been sitting on something all morning. "Colin didn't come home Tuesday night." She said it to her glass.
The table went quiet. Not hostile -- the other kind, the kind that descends when something real has been said in a room that operates on the principle that nothing real is said. Amanda looked at her plate. Pip looked at Karen with professional attention. Renee looked frightened. Jeannie looked at Karen's hand on the tablecloth, and it was trembling.
She put her hand on Karen's. The gesture was not performed. It was not calculated. It was the other thing -- the thing that existed beneath the performance and surprised everyone, including Jeannie, when it surfaced: genuine kindness. She said: "I know." She didn't know what she knew. She said it and she meant it and the moment passed.
Karen straightened. She took a sip of water. She said something about a renovation, and the table received this the way a body receives stitches: with relief, with the understanding that the wound had been acknowledged and could now be covered.
Napoleon Street in the afternoon. Jeannie walked from Eric Street because the parking was impossible and because the walk gave her a reason to be seen. The street held the essence of a particular life: FLANNEL with its five-hundred-dollar slip dresses, Picnic with its thrown-on look, the cafes with their perpetual queue of women in activewear carrying yoga mats and lattes.
She walked past the shopfront where JEANNIE had been.
A wellness studio now -- fitout in progress, windows papered over, a COMING SOON sign in the sans-serif typeface every new Cottesloe business used. She didn't slow down. She didn't look. But her body knew, the way Bob's hand knew the shape of a violin neck. The shopfront was where she had been herself, or the closest she had come to being herself, for eight years.
The boutique had opened in 2009. European labels -- Italian silks, French linens, a Danish jewellery brand she'd discovered at a trade show in Sydney. The fitout cost a hundred and eighty thousand, which Bob paid without complaint, because Bob paid for things without complaint, which was his function. The shop was beautiful. The racks spaced like a gallery. The lighting warm. And it never turned a profit. Its best year it lost forty thousand, which Jeannie described to Bob as "basically breaking even" and which Bob accepted because the shop made Jeannie bearable in a way nothing else did, and the forty thousand was cheap if it bought him a wife who came home not angry but merely tired.
It closed in 2017. Jeannie attributed this to the retail downturn, which was true enough. But the deeper reason was that she had opened a luxury boutique in a suburb where luxury was ambient -- in the air, the sandstone, the ocean views -- and you couldn't sell it as a novelty because it was already the medium in which everyone lived.
She stopped at a quiet cafe. The afternoon pivot -- wine to coffee. She ordered a long black and opened Instagram.
Four thousand one hundred and eighty-seven followers. Down from four thousand two hundred on Monday. Thirteen people had decided her curated life was no longer worth watching. She checked the likes on recent posts. The coffee-and-novel flat lay had ninety-three, down from her average of a hundred and ten. The decline produced a small, cold vibration of unease -- the feeling that the surface she maintained was developing, somewhere she couldn't see, cracks she couldn't reach.
She posted a photograph of her coffee. The white cup on the zinc table, the afternoon light. Caption: Afternoons like this. She watched the first likes arrive -- a pulse, a tiny chemical event bearing no relation to happiness but occupying the space where happiness might have been -- and put the phone down and felt the weariness settle over her.
She was tired. Not sleepy-tired. The kind that has nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the accumulation of days that require effort and produce nothing except the maintenance of a surface requiring more effort every year. Everything was work, and the work produced nothing except itself.
The kitchen. Late afternoon sun through the west-facing window, the marble island turning gold. Shanel was at the island. Laptop open, textbook beside it, a mug of tea in both hands. She was reading. Her face had a quality Jeannie didn't recognise: absorption. Not the glazed absorption of scrolling but the real thing, attention that had genuinely forgotten the world outside the text.
Jeannie set her bag on the counter. Keys, phone, sunglasses. The ritual of return.
"You look tired, darling," Jeannie said.
Shanel looked up. Her face rearranged itself with the smooth efficiency of a girl who had been adjusting her expression for her mother since she was old enough to understand that her mother's gaze was not neutral. "I'm fine. Just reading."
"What are you reading?"
Shanel angled the laptop slightly -- not closing it, just tilting the screen a degree away from Jeannie's sightline. The self-censoring. The pre-emptive withdrawal of the real thing before it could be assessed and found wanting. "Just something for my media unit."
"Did you have lunch?"
"A wrap. At the ref."
"With Olivia?"
"With Sophie. And Maya."
The questions were directives disguised as curiosity. Jeannie asked about lunch to monitor food. She asked about companions to track the social map, because Shanel's social life was, for Jeannie, an extension of her own. Shanel answered with the precision of a press secretary: enough to satisfy, not enough to invite follow-up.
Jeannie poured a glass of water. The wine fridge was at eye level, bottles arranged by label and date. She didn't reach for it. Not yet. The pivot from lunch wine to evening wine required a gap, maintained through discipline and timing. She drank the water and looked at her daughter.
Shanel was nineteen. She had Jeannie's bone structure and Bob's colouring, a warmth that softened Jeannie's angularity. She was beautiful the way nineteen-year-old girls are beautiful: unconsciously, wastefully, with a carelessness that Jeannie found both enchanting and enraging, because to be careless about beauty was to be careless about the thing that mattered most, and to be nineteen and beautiful and careless was to possess a currency you didn't know the value of.
She sat down next to Shanel. She was still softened from the lunch, from the wine, from the genuine moment with Karen. She touched Shanel's hair. The gesture was tender. Jeannie was capable of this -- of the impulse that arrives before the performance catches up and converts it to something instrumental. "You have my bone structure."
Shanel smiled the correct smile: pleased, acknowledging. Beneath it, something else -- not rebellion but unease, the sensation of being claimed rather than known. She was nineteen. She filed it in the place where she filed the things she couldn't say.
"I was reading about --" Shanel began, turning the laptop back toward Jeannie, tentatively, the way you hold out a hand to an animal you're not sure of. "It's about how people construct identities that --"
Jeannie was already reaching for the wine fridge. The movement was automatic -- selecting the Doyen Bay, pulling the cork with the corkscrew from the third drawer, the one gesture in her daily repertoire that required no performance because it was witnessed only by her daughter, who didn't count, or who counted differently, as an extension of self rather than an audience.
"Hmm?" Jeannie was pouring. "Oh, that sounds interesting. Is it for your media thing?"
Shanel couldn't explain that the text wasn't about her media thing but about the way people build selves out of surfaces and performances, which was, had either of them been able to see it, a description of their family so precise it could have been written by someone watching them through the window. And Jeannie couldn't hear the half-sentence as an offering -- a daughter reaching across the space between them with something that felt important. Jeannie heard "media thing" and filed it under coursework, and Shanel saw the filing happen and withdrew and the moment closed the way all their moments closed: quietly, with both pretending it hadn't been a moment at all.
"Have you decided what you're wearing to the Hendersons'?" Jeannie said.
"Not yet," Shanel said.
Jeannie took her wine to the living room. The west-facing windows were full of light -- the ocean beyond the road and the pines, catching the afternoon sun in a sheet of gold. She sat on the sofa. She checked her phone. The coffee post had forty-seven likes. She scrolled. She sipped. The afternoon became the evening, and the evening became the night, and the night became the closed door of her retreat -- the white linen, the candle, the phone glowing in the dark, the scroll, the search for something she couldn't name in a screen that held everything except the thing she was looking for.
In the kitchen, Shanel closed her laptop. She rinsed her mug. She stood at the sink and thought about the passage she'd been reading, about constructed identities, about the distance between who you appear to be and who you are, and she thought about her mother at the wine fridge and her father on the lawn at dawn, and she didn't think these thoughts to a conclusion because she was nineteen and the conclusions were still gathering in the place below language where the things you will eventually understand wait for you to be ready.
She turned off the light. She went to her room. She closed the door.