Excerpt from Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Which is why, counterintuitive as it sounds, I dreaded these dinners.

We were flaunting our former selves to our current ones. We'd become too disconnected, too leery of bridging the gap, too likely to run down a list of conversational categories as if detailing a car. How's the family? The job? The apartment hunt? As if making deeper inquiries would open up a sinkhole of sadness from which we'd never escape. Once, at an Indian restaurant, I watched Zach sullenly picking cubes of cheese out of his saag paneer. I don't know why he ordered it. He was in a self-flagellating relationship with dairy. I asked him if he had any fun summer plans.

"Lola," he said, twisting his face, "are you 'making conversation' with me?"

We hated asking these questions. Besides, I knew all the answers already. For instance, I knew allabout Clive's apartment hunt. He'd gutted a place in my ever-gentrifying neighborhood, a duplex penthouse with heated bathroom floors and two terraces, one of which got caught in the fold of the design magazine spread about the renovations. The building was a complex for childless men who divorced early and without consequence, men who would be young at fifty. Clive had a live-in girlfriend now, a giraffe of a person named Chantal with thighs so thin, birds probably flew into them. But he was still a poster child for New York divorcees, for inoffensive fine art and impressing women half his age by boiling linguine. Sometimes I'd see him on the subway platform and hide. I was not proud of this. But I was never in the right frame of mind to deal with Clive.

And yet the temptation was always there, to grab a stranger, point, and whisper: "Ask me anything about that man over there."

* * *

"Is Lola leaving us?" Clive barked from his end of the table.

He hiccuped but seemed delighted by it, like a baby. No one made it out of these dinners sober. Perhaps because they took place on Friday nights. Or perhaps it was because Clive never took care of the check and was impervious to all suggestions that he should. Zach's theory was that being cheap made Clive feel like he was running for office.Gather 'round, ye townspeople, and watch the multimillionaire eat a hot dog! Mine was that it was a show of respect, like we were all on the same playing field now that he couldn't fire us. Vadis's was that we were overthinking it: Rich people stay rich by not spending money; she should know (she was being grossly underpaid by the bedding socialite). Whatever the reason, we always split the bill, which meant cutting off our noses to spite our wallets and ordering as many cocktails as possible.

"How could you?" Clive asked, feigning a wound.

"Because I'm not interested in spending time with you."

"Liar," he bellowed, and slapped the table.

Even drunk and sloppy, a Viking demanding mead, the man was alluring. Maybe not to me, not anymore, but certainly to the Chantals of the world. See the sharp cheekbones to which his youth had clung like a cliffhanger. See the sparkly eyes of indeterminate color lurking below the swoosh of hair that flaunted its bounty. See the chin scar from a childhood bike accident in a town with no plastic surgeons.

"Where are you going?" he mouthed, more sincerely this time.

I pressed two fingers against my lips and moved them away. I could tell he wanted to sneak out with me, the conversational equivalent of eating a hot dog. But he couldn't risk being spotted smoking by some wellness fanatic with a platform. Plus, his desire to hold court was too strong. To leave would be to acknowledge the conversation would continue without him there to moderate it.

* * *

A long bar area connected the entrance to the dining room in the back. Patrons attempted to shift their stools even though they were nailed to the ground. They nursed cocktails with spears of dark cherries and citrus rinds. Mirrored shelving made the rows of booze seem infinite. I felt a sense of pride, imagining a foreigner stumbling into this place, noting that all the world's swank looks more or less the same. It was mid-May, the season formerly known as "spring," but the restaurant had yet to take down the velvet curtains that circled the entrance. Passing through them felt like walking onto a stage.

Excerpted from Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley. Copyright © 2022 by Sloane Crosley. Excerpted by permission of MCD. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.