Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  The swami turned over a card set to one side. ‘This is your greatest fear,’ he said. It showed an Egyptian mummy on an alien planet. Self-Preservation, the caption read. ‘Loneliness. You fear it more than anything else,’ the swami said. ‘See how this figure is so wrapped up in itself, it cannot be unbound?’

  The next one was captioned Mother’s Milk, and had disembodied nipples spurting milk against the backdrop of the galaxy.

  ‘This is your wish,’ he said. ‘You would like to be a nurturer. It doesn’t have to be as a parent. But it comes back to what I said earlier: you have not been able to find intimacy and desire – love and sex, if you like. Always one or the other.’

  Jomo thought of Giselle. She was so beautiful. So desirable. But was she really lovable? Was he?

  ‘And now, the last two cards,’ the swami said. One showed a bird’s wing made of metal, and was captioned Just Passing Through. ‘This is the key to your heart’s desire. Interesting!’ He looked up at Jomo. ‘This is a freedom card. You do not feel free, and you will not attain your heart’s desire until you do.’

  When the swami flipped over the final card, he gasped. It was clear what it represented, even to Jomo: two red apples mirrored in water, and a green snake slithering between them. It was captioned Temptation.

  Jomo studied the swami’s face – was this concern on his behalf part of the act?

  ‘Your heart’s desire is for something that is almost certainly out of your reach,’ the swami said. ‘So you have a difficult decision before you. Stay in your chains and keep all you have – or make yourself free and risk losing everything.’

  The session was over, but Jomo couldn’t find the energy to move.

  The swami pushed his spectacles higher on his nose. ‘The people who come in here are seekers,’ he said. ‘For many others, life passes them by. They eat, sleep, work, watch TV, but they don’t ask why. They don’t ask, What is the point? It is good you are asking, even if I cannot answer the way you might have wanted me to.’ His tone was apologetic.

  Jomo instantly forgave him. Of course he couldn’t answer the eternally unanswerable questions: Who am I? What will happen to me in my life? He was surprised by how quickly he’d been prepared to cede authority to a kindly old man turning his hand this way and that, making vague statements that he knew Jomo would connect up to real people and events in his life. It was an illusion of wisdom, yet it was still comforting. He could have sat there at that little table all day.

  ‘You have the ring already,’ the swami said, out of nowhere, as Jomo got up to leave. ‘It holds a mauve gem, in the shape of a teardrop.’

  Like any good magician, he had saved the best for last. ‘She is waiting for you. She has always been waiting for you.’

  On the plane, Jomo dug about in the back pocket of his chinos for the ring he’d been carrying around for several months now. Like the pea tormenting the princess, he could often feel its form when he was sitting down. It wasn’t even in a case. Just the ring, loose, as if it had come from a box of Cracker Jack.

  He was tempting fate to take the ring away from him, to make the decision on his behalf. Why else would he play a form of Russian roulette with a ring that meant as much as it did? A yellow-gold band holding the musgravite gem that his grandfather had sourced in Tunduru, Tanzania, for his grandmother, long before anybody knew that the mineral was one of the rarest on earth.

  A few months ago, Jomo had almost proposed to Giselle with that ring, in their favorite restaurant in Aspen, basking in the warmth of the log fire, his body aching from a day of skiing and – let it be said – fucking.

  When she’d excused herself to go to the bathroom, he had dropped the ring into her glass of wine. As soon as he’d done it, he knew he had to fish it back out. He’d envisioned her swallowing the ring by mistake, in one big gulp, or choking to death on his family heirloom.

  The waiter had given him a disapproving look as Jomo downed Giselle’s glass of wine and caught the ring in his teeth, but he’d cooperated in the cover-up, refilling her glass just in time for her return.

  Jomo knew she’d been disappointed at the end of that holiday, though she hid it well.

  The irony was that strangers had already proposed to her – in Italy, to be fair, where the men were totally insane. In the Piazza della Repubblica in Florence, a man had dropped to his knee and pulled his (dead) mother’s wedding ring from his wallet. Jomo had thought Giselle must know him – that he was an old flame – but she swore she’d never laid eyes on him. He hadn’t known whether to believe her until it happened again, in Rome. On both occasions, when she’d declined, the men in question had turned to Jomo and made a sound of pure disgust that he had not yet made this woman his wife.

  Why hadn’t he? It was hard to explain. Even in their most intimate moments, he felt an undertow of loneliness.

  At first, he’d thought this was a function of their different cultural and language backgrounds. But over time, the shield had stayed up, even after that trip to meet her family in Italy. He’d begun to wonder if it had more to do with them being temperamentally incompatible. Take their skiing trip. On Christmas Eve, in bed in Aspen, watching the snow fall outside, darkness onto darkness, her head against his shoulder, he had felt nothing but desperately alone.

  Whenever he tried to talk about it with Giselle, she would get confused by his mixed messages, and it would make the problem worse. It was unfair for him to do this, to ask the person he loved, ‘Do you also feel a little lonely when we’re together?’

  It was possible that he was the problem. All those years of buffet-dating, choose-your-own-adventure relationships. He’d had too much choice, for too long. He just needed more time to adapt to life in a bonded pair.

  He was of an age where he was beginning to stick out for being unmarried. It was no longer considered a sign of him wisely taking his time but as a problematic inability to settle down. He’d noticed business associates changing their demeanor on seeing no ring on his finger, on hearing him say ‘my girlfriend’ rather than ‘my wife’. A man approaching forty who is unmarried is a wildcard, and those in stable relationships were increasingly wary of Jomo, as if being around him for too long would spread havoc in their own lives. He was patient zero of a disease they did not want to catch.

  The swami’s message to him was simply the latest in a series that all seemed to be saying the same thing: Commit to the woman who so clearly wishes to commit to you.

  For instance, on his first day in London, he’d gone for a run through Hyde Park, and ended up in a meadow filled with wildflowers. The rest of the park was so stately and ordered that the overgrown meadow surprised him for seeming out of the national character.

  He’d sat down on a patch of springy heather for a rest and seen a small airplane writing letters against the sky, which began to shear and blur, erased by the elements, as soon as they were formed: M-A-R-R-Y M-E.

  Giselle deserved a grand gesture like that. She deserved somebody who shouted his adoration of her to the world.

  She had been rightly offended on discovering that he hadn’t even mentioned her in his Class Report entry. He had tried to explain (lamely) that if he’d mentioned his stunning, talented Italian girlfriend, who had already designed her own handbag line, it would come across as grandstanding, the wrong tone for the fifteenth-anniversary report, when his classmates’ entries would be more tempered with modesty as they approached early middle age.

  She’d eventually written off his failure to mention her as another quirk of American culture that was beyond her understanding. Then she’d forgotten about it entirely and said yes to a hens’ weekend at Cape Cod for one of her friends, over the same dates as the reunion. Jomo had pretended to be upset about this, but he’d felt relieved. And then guilty about feeling relieved that the woman he might one day marry would not be by his side at his reunion.

  The part about getting his tone right in his entry was true, at least. He’d worked a bunch of jobs through col
lege, one of them at the Harvard Class Report Office, helping the four full-time editors collate and edit the alumni anniversary reports, colloquially known as Red Books because they were bound in crimson covers. They had been published by the university for around 150 years – the earliest versions dedicated only to deceased classmates but gradually changing focus over time, becoming a way for classmates to self-report on their lives in whatever form they chose. Some people wrote long, painfully earnest entries; others wrote light-hearted limericks.

  His responsibilities in that job had included spell-checking and fact-checking the entries. ‘Don’t let Team Harvard down,’ his boss had said. People left out children and spouses, added degrees they’d never finished, invented companies they worked for or job titles they held. Sometimes Jomo had to flag things as potentially libelous (angry rants about very specific wrongdoings of politicians, for example, or insults hurled by classmates still caught up in some old college enmity).

  These were reminders of the depressing aspects of human nature, but there were upsides to the job too. Jomo had enjoyed tracking how the tone of the entries in each report was usually the same, as people’s lives followed similar general patterns. The five-year reunion updates were mostly open boasts, about consulting jobs and law school and exotic travel. The ten-year updates were mostly veiled boasts, about getting married or published or founding start-ups or charter schools.

  At the fifteen-year mark, the tone began to change. The entries were split between those who kept going with the charade of their lives being perfect and those who were ready to tell it how it was. People wrote of becoming parents either with overstated happiness or with an admission of being unprepared for the passionate drudgery of raising children. Some wrote of being promoted; others confessed to having been retrenched. The startling honesty of some of the entries was the first intimation that whatever unique status Harvard had once conferred on them had long since worn off.

  And Jomo knew already what was in store for his class in the years ahead. The twenty-fifth Class Report would be harrowing to read: divorces, kids who had lost their way, foreclosures, health scares. Worse, it was one of the few reports that allowed people to include photographs – one from college, one from their current life, which could sometimes feel like rubbernecking at a gruesome car accident. But the interesting thing was that people’s experiences of hardship seemed to make them nicer, funnier, more open. And lighter, as if by laying down their sense of being special they had put down a heavy load they were tired of carrying.

  That was the case for the fortunate ones, anyway. The survivors. For in every anniversary report, the In Memoriam list at the back of the book would grow ever longer.

  Jomo took out his copy of the fifteenth-anniversary report from the satchel at his feet. Thus far, the Class Report Office had stuck to their vow never to publish the reports online, so although it was bulky, he’d packed it for the reunion in case he needed a reminder about people’s names and vocations, and whether they had partners or kids.

  The list of names at the back of his class’s report was still short. This made it heartbreaking and also somehow more ominous: there was so much blank space there, waiting to be filled. There was something about the middle names of his deceased classmates, none of whom he’d known personally, that particularly moved him. Bound up in that middle name was all the hope of parents bestowing on their newborn baby names with personal or familial significance. A middle name was inward looking, unlike a first and last name. It was usually only revealed at birth – and at death.

  He turned to the front of the book and skimmed a few entries. Most were fairly traditional updates, but there were always outliers. Someone had written a short story about himself in the third person. One entry was a numbered to-do list. Another was a humorous open letter to the classmate’s parents, apologizing for not properly appreciating them until now.

  One entry caught his eye, because it was formatted as a poem. He recognized the name of the woman who’d written it. She’d been a member of the Kuumba Singers with him at college; he remembered her soloing for the version of the Lord’s Prayer in Swahili that he’d composed and arranged for the group to perform at one of their end-of-year concerts. His father had helped him with the translation, and they were still pretty much the only bits of Swahili that Jomo knew. Could he still remember them? He pictured the lines in his mind’s eye, so the guy in the pod next to him didn’t think he was a terrorist muttering prayers.

  Tunachohitaji utusamehe

  We need you to forgive us

  makosa yetu,

  our errors,

  kama nasi tunavyowasamehe

  as we do forgive those

  aliotukosea. Usitutie

  who did us wrong. Don’t put us

  katika majaribu, lakini

  into trials, but

  utuokoe na yule msiba milele.

  save us from this distress forever.

  The soloist’s short, devastating poem was titled ‘Waking on the Morning of November 9, 2016’. It described her dawning awareness that, with Reese elected president, she would be forced to live in a world that she had been told by trusted elders was long gone and could not be resurrected. It took many others – those who did not know fear firsthand – much longer to read the writing on the wall, she wrote in the Class Report. Not me. It used to be a treasured gift, to see into the future. I have closed my third eye forever.

  At the end of the poem she named and shamed Fred Reese, the president’s son and adviser, as some of their other classmates had too. Jomo wished he’d written something like this for his entry. He had not even contemplated bringing politics into his; he’d gazed at his own navel, at the smallish contours of his life.

  He finished off the icy dregs of his vodka tonic. On his most recent visit to the doctor for a check-up he’d been told that – though he thought of himself as being in excellent health – his blood pressure had gone up; he blamed that on the Reese administration.

  The air steward appeared at his side to refresh his drink. Jomo wondered if this man despised having to wait hand and foot on him. Did he fantasize about murdering everyone in business class with a butter knife?

  This line of thinking could do no good for his blood pressure.

  Jomo remembered feeling a strange envy for the elderly Harvard cohorts celebrating their fiftieth reunions and beyond. In their Red Book entries, they were no longer hustling to make something of themselves. They’d turned around and were looking steadily back, misty-eyed. So many of them wrote much the same thing: Did I go to Harvard? Did that really happen to me?

  Why would he feel envious of anybody so old?

  The insight gave him actual heart pain, like indigestion of the soul: it was because all their burning questions had been answered.

  Chapter 2: Eloise

  Thursday afternoon of Reunion Weekend

  (May 24, 2018)

  Eloise had opened up all the doors leading out to the terrace, which overlooked the Kirkland House courtyard.

  Just the day before, it had been freezing. A Boston screw-you with winter’s dying breath. She’d considered renting gas heaters for the party, a concession to the unpredictable weather. Today, however, it was magnificently warm. The new leaves of the trees shone so brilliantly in the sunlight that she couldn’t look at them directly. Hadn’t Virginia Woolf, in one of her novels, described leaves catching summer sun as the most dazzling light the eye could behold? She was feeling rather Mrs. Dalloway-esque as she prepared for the welcome drinks she and Binx were hosting in their Kirkland residence that evening.

  The caterer had already taken over the kitchen, and the smell of freshly baked bread was wafting through the residence. The florist had brought in the saucer magnolia arrangements that morning, for the downstairs rooms. The cleaner was putting out new soaps and hand towels in the guest bathrooms. On the terrace, the barkeep had spread white cloths over the trestle tables Eloise had rented. Undergrads working the reunions were hooki
ng lanterns onto overhanging branches. In an hour, the Harvard string quartet would arrive to set up.

  As the hostess of the first event on the reunion calendar, Eloise felt a responsibility to set the tone for the rest of the weekend. She wanted her classmates to feel, on arriving, that they had returned to a hallowed space, away from their everyday worries and cares. While they had come to reconnect with their younger selves, she felt they should also be encouraged to revel in their changed status as real adults.

  They had earned the right to mid-range prosecco in good flutes, not warm beer in red cups. The hors d’oeuvres menu would have a New England touch – miniature lobster rolls and bowls of clam chowder served with water crackers – but there were also some dining-hall throwbacks like popcorn chicken and buffalo wings with blue-cheese sauce. Not many people had taken the trouble to RSVP – who did, anymore? – but the reunion organizing committee had told her about a quarter of their original class of 1600 had registered for the weekend; most people, however, would only arrive on Friday. She had catered for 150 but was expecting closer to 100.

  Out on the terrace, Eloise breathed in the fragrant spring air. She felt what she often did at this time of year, a transcendental happiness in the category of Aristotle’s sublime beatitudo. The change in the seasons, and the end of the academic year, made her look up and out, made her want to ponder the big things – truth, beauty – that too often were swamped by more quotidian concerns.

  There really was nothing like late spring on this campus, she thought. The rituals, the pageantry, the festivities! Huge marquees had been assembled on every spare green or common, and crimson flags were flying in the Yard. Everywhere you looked, there were people in black gowns with mantles in various colors, wearing graduation caps that had been thrown into the air at commencement just that morning, when the university had ushered out a cohort of graduates with great pomp and ceremony in the outdoor Tercentenary Theatre. And now, the campus was pivoting to welcome back ex-students from the recent and not so recent past.