None of their other blockmates had arrived yet. Eloise could steal Jules away for a quick catch-up, just the two of them. Jules looked stringier, leaner than usual; perhaps she was preparing for a new role. She was dressed casually, in jeans and a blouse, but she had gone to some trouble with her make-up and her long blonde hair had been blow-dried.
Jules had the same faint forehead wrinkles and crow’s feet and laugh lines as Eloise; what the French writer Colette had described, at 37, as the first ‘claw marks’ of age. It took real backbone for Jules to let things run their course, Eloise always thought admiringly, given what the Hollywood women Jules spent her working life around did to themselves to stave off aging.
Even Eloise felt the pressure to do more sometimes. When she’d been younger, she had disdained make-up as anti-feminist. Now she disdained Botox and fillers as anti-feminist, and wore make-up every day. Perhaps in another ten years she’d be disdaining facelifts as anti-feminist and getting her lips and forehead injected every month. It was so easy to be morally principled as a feminist when you were young!
Eloise’s mother, though she’d also been an academic and had not seemed particularly worried about her appearance, had got a facelift when she was 45. Eloise had returned home from school one day to find her mother sitting up in bed looking like she had survived the Battle of the Somme. It had been traumatic for her to see the mother she adored – whose face she knew and loved in all its complexity – emerge from the bed a few days later looking like a smoothed-out stranger.
From the couch, Binx reached out her hands to squeeze Eloise’s, and Eloise felt the surge of her wife’s love for her through her fingertips. Binx had a spot of color high on each of her cheeks, the only signs of the day’s bar crawl.
‘I know, you want some time with Jules,’ Binx said. ‘I’ll go finish setting up.’
Near the front door, Binx had already arranged her propaganda material, including posters of the posthumanist Don Llang, for whose rights Binx was currently advocating. This man was suing his doctors for not supporting his choice to replace his own arms, even though there was nothing wrong with them, with technologically advanced prosthetic limbs; he wanted to upgrade his body, as if it were an iPhone and he desired the newer model. So he’d chosen to get the surgery done in China, and of course it had gone horribly wrong, and an infection had set in, and now Don Llang was in danger of losing his legs too. (‘So it worked out great!’ Eloise had said brightly to Binx. ‘Now he can get prosthetic legs to match his arms!’ Binx had given her a withering look in response.)
Eloise took Jules out to the terrace and asked the bartender to pour them a couple glasses of wine. The undergrads were still hanging lanterns, sending furtive glances in Jules’s direction, but Eloise didn’t suggest they go sit in the study or otherwise try to hide Jules away where they wouldn’t be disturbed.
She knew that Jules disliked being taken out of the normal ebb and flow of everyday life – the constant toll exacted on her for her fame. Above her bed, during their sophomore year, Jules had stuck an image torn from a National Geographic magazine: a half-and-half photograph of a manta ray beneath the sea, and, above the water, a sailboat tilted on its side. That image was an expression of Jules’s melancholy, Eloise thought. She was never allowed to be in quite the same element as anybody around her; she was always sinking or surfacing.
Eloise had made up her mind, back then, that when Jules was with her she’d let her feel free to be nothing much at all – as her friend, she could be a refuge from all the demands other people made on her. They could talk or not talk, be silly or serious, silent or boisterous, share dirty jokes or painful childhood memories.
Eloise’s parents had often said to her that she should be a therapist because of this innate ability to make people feel comfortable. On her good days, she thought of her self-help books for a popular audience (rather than academics) as mass therapy: instead of sitting with people one on one, she was ministering to millions. On her bad days, she wondered if she had sold out. The advance for her most recent book had been extraordinarily large, even larger than the massive sum she’d been paid for the first. It was, in part, what had enabled Binx to start her foundation, though money had never been Binx’s problem – she was a trust fund kid. Her parents were generally supportive of Binx’s research – the lab in the basement was all thanks to them, though they had no clue what she was doing in it – but Binx hadn’t yet told them much about her new identity as a posthumanist.
‘So . . . how’s the love life?’ Eloise said to Jules, jumping right in to the juicy stuff to make her old friend laugh.
Jules looked at her blankly.
Then Jules’s whole face softened as she looked over Eloise’s shoulder, and Eloise thought, I’m not wrong! She’s brought someone along to the reunion! She turned, intrigued to see what the man who had finally captured Jules’s elusive heart, or at least her attention, looked like.
But it was only Jomo, pulling a suitcase behind him and radiating wellbeing, in even better shape – if that was possible – than he’d been back at college, and fresh as a daisy after his transatlantic flight.
Chapter 3: Rowan
Thursday evening of Reunion Weekend
(May 24, 2018)
Near sunset, in the bathroom on the top floor of entryway C in Kirkland House, where generations of Harvard students had performed their ablutions, Rowan was coaxing his older daughter to take a shit.
There were two things afflicting Alexis: a new fear of any toilet that wasn’t exactly the same as the one in their home, and severe constipation (in part due to the former fear).
The previous week, the apple-cheeked kindergarten teacher whose class Alexis would be in come September had stopped Rowan in the corridor after orientation to discuss Alexis’s phobia at length. She’d implied it was a response to some unspecified emotional upheaval at home, and also emphasized that this was why she recommended that all parents take up the city’s new offer of free, universal pre-K once their child was four, so that they were more ‘resilient’ and ‘school-ready’. As principal of the school, Rowan had subjected other parents to the same sort of inquisition in that same corridor. Listening to his daughter’s teacher, he’d understood for the first time why, as he told them about their child’s problems, the expression on those parents’ faces had become pained. They’d been thinking, How much longer is this jerk going to make me feel bad about my parenting?
It had been more than three days now, and the dam still had not burst, so Rowan had set Alexis up on the toilet in their Kirkland suite and was letting her watch cartoons on his phone. He knew it was a decision he would live to regret when she began to demand access to his phone every time she needed to go; it was one of those slippery-slope things that would take a lot of parental energy to reverse. So be it. He had also let her eat two, going on three, boxes of sultanas while on the toilet, in the hope that it would get her system going. It didn’t set a great example in terms of hygiene, but what the fuck.
He’d found the sultanas among the food supplies (breakfast bars, crackers, nuts, bananas) they’d brought with them to avoid spending too much on meals over the weekend. Mariam had even shamelessly packed a couple Tupperware containers; at the paid events included in the reunion roster – the Friday children’s festival barbecue, the Sunday brunch – they could ferret away food for later.
So there would be no everything bagels at Au Bon Pain, no hot chocolates at Burdick, no turkey-and-cranberry-sauce sandwiches at Darwin’s on Mount Auburn . . . just thinking about those sandwiches weakened Rowan’s resolve. The one concession would be Pinocchio’s. Their cheese pizza was still under twenty bucks for a large, and pizza was one of the few food groups that his fussy daughters could reliably be counted on to eat.
It was good they were being frugal. Registration for the reunion had been eye-wateringly expensive, and they’d bought the train tickets late so they’d been forced to take the pricier Acela Express, and because Eva was und
er the age of three they couldn’t make use of the affordable evening babysitting service provided by undergraduates. Mariam had obsessively researched babysitters in the Harvard Square area, even interviewing a few over the phone, and finally settled on a graduate student in Eloise’s department who was studying toward a degree in child psychology, but she did not come cheap. Then there was the $150-a-head cost for their group dinner on Friday night, which Jomo had booked without asking any of them if they were happy (and able) to pay that much.
Rowan peered in at Eva in her crib. She had rolled onto her back, throwing out her limbs like a starfish. He was worried she was waking up, but she was out cold, exhausted after a day of travel and excitement. Eva was always easy to put down to sleep at night; it was the early-morning waking that was her specialty. Alexis, on the other hand, now slept until eight am if they let her. Her version of parent torture was to morph from an angel into something witchy once it was past her bedtime – which was a minute after eight pm – and then resist going to sleep for at least another hour.
He caught himself feeling exasperated by his daughters’ sleep habits and turned the thought around 180 degrees: how he loved them and their quirky habits! This was one of the mantras he and Mariam recited whenever they felt they were collapsing under the weight of the demands of 100 per cent committed parenting with zero outside help – no grandparents who lived in the same city, no aunts or uncles, no nanny. No help at all.
‘When they are grown and gone, we will have no regrets, because we’ll have been there for them every step of the way,’ Mariam would say to him, or he to her, if they sensed the other person was near the end of their tether.
Sometimes they said this to each other, in bed at night, with a hint of desperation in their voices, aware that the subtext was Tell me we will survive this! Tell me this thankless labor will one day be over! Then one of them might crack comedian Michael McIntyre’s joke; aware the night might be long if the girls so chose, instead of saying ‘Good night’ to each other, they’d say, ‘Good luck.’
Rowan wished he’d managed to bring up a couple cold beers from the cocktail party that was just hitting its stride at Eloise’s residence. Oh, wait, he thought sarcastically. No. What he really wished was that Eloise hadn’t banned children from the reunion welcome drinks.
He’d fumed about this to Mariam after reading Eloise’s entry in the Red Book. How could she say young children weren’t welcome at an early-evening event on the first night of the reunion? Didn’t she realize that most people in their class were parents by now, and that they might need or want to bring their kids along? And even if she’d felt compelled not to invite other people’s kids, surely his and Mariam’s daughters deserved special treatment since Eloise and Jules were their dual goddamn godmothers (‘oddmothers’, technically, since Mariam hadn’t wanted the religious overtones).
From the terrace of Eloise’s residence downstairs came the sounds of merriment, the constant low hum of conversation interspersed with laughter, the rising tones of welcomes as old friends reunited, the clink of glasses and pop of corks and crunch of fresh ice being poured into tubs.
He looked out the open bay window and felt glum at being all the way up there instead of down with the gang. Even his annoyance at Eloise couldn’t get in the way of the pleasure of being with his blockmates again, on this campus. When he and Mariam and the girls had arrived at Eloise’s place late that afternoon, they’d found Eloise and Jules out on the terrace, laughing at some story Jomo was telling about his plane almost crashing. Seeing his old friends, Rowan had felt so secure, like he had re-established a stake in the ground.
Out the window, Rowan noticed a group of graduating seniors who were using carts to transport their worldly belongings across the courtyard, through Kirkland’s brick archway, to a U-Haul parked on the street. Nobody at the party on the terrace paid them any notice. They had already become ghosts, ejected from the university’s bosom the moment they’d graduated that morning.
He’d seen those same students on his way up the stairs to get settled on the top floor. The door to their suite had been propped open and he’d caught a glimpse of them hastily taking down posters and rolling up rugs, their commencement gowns dropped to the floor. A look had passed between him and them. He knew they felt sorry for him, coming back to this dormitory to relive his glory days, usurping their space. But he felt sorry for them, for having no idea what it was going to be like out there in the world, far away from this charmed place.
Rowan lay back on the single bed beneath the window, letting the cooling evening air wash over him (he made a mental note to set the lock on the window so the girls couldn’t open it). All the beds in the suite had been neatly made with white sheets and crimson blankets sporting the Harvard insignia. He planned to take the blankets home at the end of the weekend, whether or not it was allowed.
Only one pillow per bed, though, which was a problem. During Mariam’s second pregnancy, she’d formed the habit of falling asleep with a pillow clasped between her arms and, mystifyingly, he had too (perhaps it was similar to the phenomenon of partners of pregnant women putting on weight, thanks to all that solidarity comfort-eating). He would never admit to any of his friends that he was now unable to fall asleep without hugging a pillow. Except maybe to Jomo – because Jomo never felt the need to laugh at anybody else.
It was crazy to think that he and Mariam had spooned in these single beds almost every night of their years together at college. Now, at home in Bushwick, they kissed and scooted over to their respective sides of the queen-size bed, squeezed their pillows, and hoped for sleep. Good night and good luck.
Rowan could feel a headache starting up behind his eyeballs. He closed his eyes, processing the day.
The train trip had gone okay until he’d noticed a young white guy pacing the aisle, carrying a backpack. Normally Rowan was a pro at separating those with mental health issues, or other reasons for being distressed, from those with criminal intent – he wouldn’t be a very good school principal if he wasn’t. But being on that train with his wife and young daughters during a heightened terror alert rating (it was permanently in the red these days) had made him feel on edge.
The placard in the seat pocket, which he’d been forced to stare at while Eva slept in his arms, didn’t help his nerves. In capital letters, the familiar goad to citizen surveillance was spelled out: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING. Beneath it was another phrase, asking people to snitch on their fellow train passengers by appealing to their sense of solidarity: WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER . . . LITERALLY.
He’d meant to point it out to Mariam for a laugh – it was sort of funny to think of the Amtrak employee who’d come up with this zinger. But she’d been reading to Alexis, and then he’d fallen asleep. When he’d woken, the man was gone. Rowan hated himself for thinking the worst of a young person who was probably just struggling to get through the day. This was how a lack of decency and compassion at the highest levels of power trickled down, infecting even his most intimate thoughts.
From South Station they’d taken the T to Harvard Square, then trekked with the girls and their luggage across the Yard to the Science Center, to collect their registration packs from reunion headquarters. Alexis had dropped her cupcake and was crying inconsolably, and Eva needed a diaper change. Rowan had felt his bad mood thickening like egg whites being whipped into peaks.
Inside the Science Center, he and his family had made their way to the fifteenth-reunion table. A student, probably only just finished with his freshman year, looked up as they approached, and Rowan had seen himself through this boy’s eyes: a middle-aged dad who didn’t earn enough to afford a nanny in order to leave the kids at home, with a head of hair just beginning to do the sad, monkish bald-spot-on-top thing, and a definite dad bod – not out of shape, but not in it, either.
Rowan had looked down and realized that he was wearing his socks pulled halfway up his calves, his oldest sneakers, khaki shorts, and a t-shirt th
at Alexis had silk-printed at school with the words My Dad Rulz. He didn’t even remember getting dressed that morning.
He’d been about to apologize for his appearance and make a joke at his own expense, anticipating this kid’s disdain for someone like him, who had once upon a time been smart enough to go to Harvard but was no longer smart enough to understand that you come to your reunion wearing your game face, ready to do battle with the egos of everybody else in your class.
Before he could say anything, though, the boy had given him a genuinely warm smile. ‘Welcome home,’ he’d said to Rowan.
Home? Home! He was home!
The instant Rowan’s reunion lanyard was placed over his neck – the crimson ribbon like the banner of knighthood, his name and graduating year on the laminated name tag proof that he deserved to be there – his bad mood was gone.
On the return trip through the Yard to Kirkland House he’d playfully pointed out to Alexis the bronze statue of John Harvard, and how shiny one of his shoes was because tourists liked to rub it for good luck (he did not mention that students liked to piss on it in the middle of the night). A tour group had approached the statue, taking turns touching the shoe, and he’d felt like shouting at the top of his lungs, ‘I went here, folks! I actually went here!’ as if that would make them want to touch his old sneaker for good luck too.
It had been intoxicating, to be back on campus and see people from outside its ecosystem looking in at them with awe – a real live Harvard student, returned for his reunion!
But now he felt his mood plunging again. Those tourists probably wouldn’t have believed that a guy like him had ever gone to a place like this. And if they’d asked him what he’d done with his life since college, how he’d made good on all those opportunities, would he tell them the truth?
‘Any luck yet, sweetie?’ he whispered loudly to Alexis in the bathroom, trying not to wake Eva. Alexis farted once in response.
Life After Truth Page 5