Before starting as a freshman he’d worried that Harvard would stamp out some of his idealism about what he could change in the world. But it had the opposite effect – it was as if his idealism was fed on steroids, growing and growing, taking on dimensions he’d never dreamed were possible.
This insecurity he was feeling, the frustration at his financial circumstances, was new. He couldn’t blame it on Harvard, or even on President Reese. It was the disappointment of a man approaching middle age who’s realized that when he was younger he received a different memo than most others. The memo he’d got was: To be happy you must live according to your principles. His peers seemed to have got a memo that said: To be happy you must be rich.
He was a moron for believing, hoping, that he would one day be recognized and rewarded for all his good work, at the helm of a public school in a low-income part of Brooklyn, guiding kids with few prospects through the dramatic ups and downs of their young lives. As all the wise folk in the world know, for work to truly make you happy, it has to be an end in itself, not a means to an end. Most days, he felt it was. He loved his job. But lying on that single bed, hearing the sounds of the party down below, he could not stop the negative thoughts from rising. Am I wasting my life? Will I never be rich? Doesn’t Mariam deserve better?
He needed to get out of that room. Being alone up there, mired in his normal role as a dad instead of embracing being pretend-young, like everybody out on the terrace, was messing with his mind.
Rowan plugged in the baby monitor and read the fine print in the instruction manual. The signal should be strong enough for it to work from downstairs.
He promised Alexis a bag of Skittles if she gave him back his phone and got off the toilet (the toilet bowl was still empty). He wiped her face clean, brushed her hair, and checked her dress wasn’t too filthy. She immediately realized that they were going on an adventure and became cheerful and talkative – or maybe it was the food dye in the Skittles. He checked on Eva again, then carried Alexis down the staircase of the entryway, with the monitor’s walkie-talkie device tucked into his pocket.
He should at least have changed his shirt, he thought as he approached Eloise’s residence, but it was too late. If he went back upstairs he might never make it down here again.
In the entrance hall, on a long couch pushed against the wall, sat a row of children who had mistakenly been brought along to Eloise’s kid-free event. They’d been bribed into obedience by their no-doubt-shamefaced parents: each of the kids had their eyes glued to a screen in their palms. Rowan set Alexis up with his phone, and left her on the couch with a twinge of guilt.
The common area was packed with people. Everybody and nobody looked familiar to Rowan. Circles of his classmates were locked in conversation, and he didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone and be forced to talk until he had a drink in hand. He got himself a beer from the inside bar, and felt his headache ease with the first sip.
Out on the terrace, Rowan spotted Binx talking to a guy he recognized from his freshman Expos class: he’d been obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe, and now looked unfortunately similar to his literary hero, with thick eyebrows and sunken eyes. Binx had cut her hair very short and was wearing a gray tunic that made her look like she belonged in a Franciscan order. Had she been a nun once? Rowan vaguely remembered some story about this. Binx seemed to change her convictions as often as most people changed their phone cases.
She could get away with wearing that tunic and still look stylish because she was thin and young. He wondered if Eloise felt self-conscious about getting a bit heavier in recent years. It was an awful thing for him to think. But it was a point in his favor, and he was going to claim every point he could tonight. For whatever sick reason, everyone found it sort of adorable when men became overweight as they aged – why else was ‘dad bod’ a thing? (He hoped it still was.) Yet when women showed any sign of weight gain, they were tied to the stake and burned alive.
Mariam liked to joke that the cultural moment when ‘mom bod’ was desirable was just around the corner. Not MILFs, that was not at all the same thing, she said – that was about mothers whose bodies showed zero evidence of having carried or borne a child – but the real thing: loose plucked-chicken belly skin, silvery stretch marks all over the place, boobs resembling socks filled with wet sand. In Rowan’s eyes, her mom bod was attractive, though she didn’t always believe him when he said this. All the physical signs of what she’d gone through on behalf of both of them filled him with tender desire, and anyway, as soon as she took off her clothes, he barely noticed any of the changes.
Where was Mariam? He needed to find her.
On his way past the bar, he noticed that the bartender seemed too old to still be at college. Maybe the university no longer employed undergraduates as barkeeps for the reunions, like they had in Rowan’s day. He’d done one stint working the bar at reunion events with Jomo at the end of their sophomore year, and they’d made a fortune in tips. It had been the best job ever. Why hadn’t he done it every single year, he wondered. He had been too noble for his own good, that’s why. Every other summer he’d left as soon as final exams were over to go build houses in Guatemala or teach English to new immigrants.
He heard Jules’s distinctive laugh from across the terrace. She was with Mariam and Eloise, and the three of them were sitting in a circle around a half-eaten wheel of baked brie.
It made him happy to see Mariam with her oldest friends – with their oldest friends. He couldn’t remember the last time she had been out with girlfriends in New York. They were both too tired to go out in the evenings, and the cost of getting Ubers to and from the city was prohibitive.
He hadn’t seen Jules in a while, not since Thanksgiving. He wondered if she had anybody in her life to come home to in the evenings. She was a person who did not naturally share this kind of information even with her closest friends; whether it was because of her nature or her fame, it was hard to tell.
Rowan felt glad that she had Jomo as her best friend, at least. He knew that the life she led was not an easy one, in contrast to what most people believed. Years ago, he and Mariam had watched helplessly as Jules was almost crushed to death by paparazzi and fans as she tried to get from the hotel entrance to where they were waiting for her in a cab. When they finally got to the restaurant, people kept interrupting their conversation to ask for photos with Jules, and in the end she apologized to Rowan and Mariam for ruining their night.
She felt trapped, she’d said to them, in a maze she had stumbled into when she was much younger. She did not know how to find a way out. She wanted to swim in the stream of normal life, yet at the same time she had to keep some part of her true self hidden, in order to survive her own fame. It was probably why she was such a good actress; she was able to draw on that private self when she was working. But the rest of the time she had to defend it from being exposed.
This was particularly hard since she refused to live only in that pristine high-altitude air of the very rich and famous – she always said she would die if she stayed up there too long, like a mountaineer in the death-zone on Everest. When she’d arrived as a freshman, right from day one she hadn’t wanted to be treated any differently from the other students (though in fact it was already too late for that: the windows of her suite in Weld had been bulletproofed).
Yet on move-in day, as their parents hovered nearby, Jules, Eloise and Mariam had drawn straws just like any other roommates, to see who would get which room. Mariam had once told Rowan that Jules had seemed relieved to get the shortest straw, to end up in the bunk-bed double, sharing with Eloise, as if it would make up for all the other things they would have to endure as her roommates.
Eloise had been so clueless – so weirdly starved of popular culture by her intellectual parents – that she hadn’t known who Jules was, and had never seen any of her movies. Mariam did know who Jules was, but she didn’t care about Jules’s fame – all that mattered to her was that they got along. The Ha
rvard housing office had their freshman algorithm down pat, in other words. It was almost creepy how well they’d matched up 18-year-old strangers to be compatible, as if they’d been spying on them in their normal lives to get the special sauce of each rooming configuration just right.
‘Where are the girls?’ Mariam said in a sharp voice as Rowan approached.
She’d tied up her hair and was wearing a blue paisley-print dress she’d made herself. She looked so beautiful to Rowan.
He held up the baby monitor. ‘It’s okay. I heard Eva cough just now. And Alexis is in the hallway with the other strays, watching something on my phone.’
Mariam gave him a look that he understood to mean she was uncomfortable with his decision.
‘I’ll go back soon,’ he said.
The other two women were looking at him with a bemused expression on their faces. Had they been talking about him?
He went inside to find Jomo, before Mariam had a chance to change her mind and order him to take Alexis back up to their room. What he’d done wasn’t right, he was more than aware. They’d already negotiated a fair division of labor; he’d be getting his time off the next morning, when Mariam was taking the kids to the children’s festival at the Quad so that he could go to the Harvard chapter Phi Beta Kappa meeting.
He kept forgetting to look at the program to see who was delivering the PBK keynote. At the previous reunion it had been Stephen Hawking, and the poet’s address had been given by Garrison Keillor, and it had been one of the most inspiring mornings of Rowan’s life. Now Hawking was dead and Keillor had been caught up in some sort of #MeToo scandal.
He scanned the room and saw Jomo at the piano, about to start improvising alongside the string quartet, all of whom were women and already in Jomo’s thrall.
Rowan knew Jomo well enough to understand that this wasn’t what it might look like to outsiders. Jomo often did this sort of thing when he felt that Jules wasn’t paying him enough attention. Like a child, really – it was exactly how Alexis acted up, doing frantic jazz ballet moves whenever she felt Eva was getting more of her parents’ time.
Whether Jomo was conscious of it or not, Rowan knew his ultimate goal was to get as many of their classmates as possible to start listening to him playing the piano, which would bring in others from the terrace, including – ideally – Jules. But Rowan had seen how the three women were bonding over that slab of brie. Jomo had his work cut out for him.
Rowan left the common room, and was on his way down the crowded corridor to check on Alexis, when somebody touched his back.
‘Hi! Rowan, right?’
Rowan turned. The only girl he’d ever had a crush on while he was dating Mariam at college was standing behind him. Camila Ortiz. They had volunteered at CityStep together in their junior year, teaching dance to kids at inner-city schools in Boston.
Everything he’d known about her back then came to him in a rush. She was from Rosario, a port city in Argentina famous for having the most beautiful women in the world. She did not think she was beautiful, because she was short. She had a brother who used a wheelchair. She’d majored in economics and had dreamed of working for the World Bank. She’d used a knife and fork to eat pizza during CityStep committee meetings. Like Rowan’s mom, she loved reggaeton Latin pop. She had once cried during a screening of Steel Magnolias. And at the CityStep fundraising ball – he could no longer remember why Mariam hadn’t been there that night – Camila had taught him how to dance cumbia.
‘Hi . . .’ he said.
‘I’m Camila. Camila Ortiz? We did CityStep together one year.’
Perversely, he stayed with the pretense of not knowing who she was for just a beat longer. ‘Camila . . .? Ah, yes.’
She sipped her seltzer, and he saw she had a gold band on her ring finger. For no good reason – why should it matter to him, since he too was happily married? – he felt heartsore at the sight.
‘You haven’t changed,’ she said, smiling up at him.
How could he have forgotten the most important thing about Camila, her dimples? Her dark hair had gone completely white in just one swath, and he wondered if it was from a past shock or trauma. He’d once read about that happening to a man who’d survived a shark attack.
The white streak suited her. She had no make-up on; she didn’t need any. Like him, she was dressed casually, in her travel clothes by the looks of it – jeans, t-shirt, sandals.
‘Where are you living these days?’ he said.
‘I moved back home to Argentina,’ she said.
‘Rosario?’
She looked pleased that he’d recalled this. ‘No, Buenos Aires now. My husband’s from there, and that’s where he got a job.’
Rowan did not want to hear about her husband. ‘What are you doing work-wise?’
She paused. ‘Um . . . it’s weird to say, but my husband is the mayor of Buenos Aires . . . and I’m his chief of staff.’
‘That’s incredible!’ Rowan felt overjoyed that Camila, like him, had not left public service.
‘Yeah. And we have three children, though to be honest we have a lot of help.’
‘It must be great living close to your families,’ Rowan said.
‘Yes and no. They don’t do much. By help, I mean we have a whole team of people working for us at home. Sometimes my husband and I joke that we’re only part-time parents.’
This was usually the sort of sentiment that sickened Rowan, but somehow coming out of Camila’s mouth it didn’t bother him. And surely, given her line of work, it was in service to a greater good that her children were being neglected by their parents.
‘How is your brother?’ he asked. ‘I remember you saying he was a talented artist.’
‘My brother died.’ She said nothing more, but touched her hair, right at the part where it was white. ‘And you? Did you go into teaching like you always wanted?’
‘I did, I did,’ he said. ‘I’m the principal of a public school in Bushwick. You would know everything these kids deal with from CityStep. I feel really lucky to have work that is meaningful.’
He looked at her closely to see if this had raised his moral stock in her opinion.
It had. Her eyes shone. ‘That’s wonderful, Rowan,’ she said. ‘And I take it you’re a dad?’
His heart sank. Was it that obvious? Then he realized she was referring to the My Dad Rulz line on his top. ‘Yeah, two daughters,’ he said. ‘Five years old and eighteen months.’
‘I’m breastfeeding,’ she said, out of the blue, her hand to her shirt. ‘Sorry. I just hear the word “daughter” and on go the taps.’
His eyes went to her breasts – more to figure out what she was talking about than anything else – and he saw that her t-shirt was wet from leaked milk. He had absolutely no idea what to say or do in response.
As if to explain, she said, ‘I can’t use breast pads. They give me thrush.’
Oh my God. He and Camila Ortiz were discussing the state of her nipples.
He didn’t want her to go yet. ‘How old is your baby?’ he asked, discreetly handing her a napkin.
‘She’s four months.’ She dabbed at her shirt with the napkin. ‘I’d better get back to the room. She’s with the nannies upstairs.’
‘You’re staying in Kirkland House too?’ He’d imagined that she’d rented out the penthouse of the Charles Hotel.
‘Just because we run a South American city doesn’t mean we live like drug lords when we travel,’ she said, giving him a playful look of reproach. ‘I love staying in the dormitories. I sleep better in these single beds than I do in my bed at home.’
He wondered for an instant whom she’d shared her single bed with during her years at college.
‘See you again, I hope,’ she said. ‘At some event or another. There’s a lot going on this weekend. I don’t know if I’ve got the energy to do this reunion thing properly.’ She put one hand on his shoulder and gave him a single beso on his right cheek. Then she was gone.
&nbs
p; It took Rowan a little while to recover from this encounter.
There was a squawk from the baby monitor in his pocket, but nothing more. Eva often did that in her sleep, emitting one anguished cry. It always took him back to the sound she’d made right after she’d been born, a single yell of protest. Then she’d gone very quiet as she’d looked around the birthing room, calmly taking it all in. She had locked eyes with Rowan for several wondrous seconds. Only a few hours later, this alert gaze was gone, and her eyes were unfocused. But she had already given the game away: she was a superior being from another galaxy come to observe human life.
He ducked into a room that looked like it was Eloise’s home office. He could feel the tendrils of his earlier headache sneaking back into the space behind his eyes. It would be good to gather his thoughts, away from the noise.
He jealously browsed the contents of Eloise’s bookshelves, all those books she had the time and leisure to read without interruption. It had been some time since Rowan had read a book cover to cover. On their shelves at home, he and Mariam still prominently displayed all the books they’d read for various courses at college, which made them look like a Renaissance couple to anybody who visited. Yet he had retained almost none of that knowledge. Just recently he’d dipped into a book on evolutionary biology, from a class he’d aced in his senior year, and not a single word of it made any sense.
Eloise’s shelves held the usual suspects, a lot of positive-psychology tomes, and books with titles like Principled Pleasures and Are You Happy Now? There were several foreign-language editions of her own books, each with a different cover.
At the end of one shelf, acting as a kinky bookend, was a life-size model of a human brain, encased in glass and mounted on a stand.
He picked it up. It was such an extremely bizarre organ, the brain. Then he noticed the plaque affixed to the bottom of the stand: For Eloise, whose brain – behold! – is the most bewitching of them all. May we mindmeld forever. Binx
Life After Truth Page 7