She had been pinned beneath their painted little thumbs. She was the one who’d convinced the others that the T3s should be the final three making up their eight-person blocking group, though Mariam and Eloise had voiced reservations. Then the T3s had convinced Jules to put up the seed money for the club, so that they could take out a lease on one of the old buildings in the Square and renovate it.
Later on, other women’s clubs were founded by other brave souls, and thrived, but Jules’s club was doomed to fail after the leaked nude photos. There had been too many cruel jokes in the media and on campus that all the women planned to do with their own space was frolic around topless in it. There was no recovering from the scandal. Not that the T3s cared – the club had been a ruse to get close to Jules.
Mariam’s neglected ice-cream was dripping down the sides of her cone. She watched the Traitors Three head off down the sidewalk, looking glamorous and guilt-free, and felt a torrent of rage sweep through her. One of them, Wenona, looked over her shoulder at Mariam, a backward glance that could have been a smirk. To be honest, Mariam wasn’t sure – she needed to update her contact lens prescription, as things had been looking a bit blurred around the edges, but she never seemed to find the time.
Jules, who was still walking up ahead with Jomo, seemed strikingly composed after the encounter. There had been so many other career lows (and highs) for her since then. And what a famous actress had to deal with daily in a hyperlinked, social-media-addicted world was probably so much more intense, Mariam thought, that maybe Jules had let go of any anger she’d once felt toward those three.
Or perhaps she had been prepared to stop and talk to those women who had once tried to ruin her life not because she was weak but because she was stronger than all of them put together. There was something different about Jules lately, Mariam thought, looking at her. She’d initially thought it was sadness, but now she saw that she was wrong. It was like a strand of something really tough and unbreakable had been braided into the softer, more fragile person they had known so well all those years ago. Jules’s unusually lithe body was an outward expression of some new internal hardness.
A thought floated into her mind: Jules had moved up a notch on the Mohs scale of hardness, something they used to kid Jomo about whenever he went on about it back when he first got into gemology, comparing the durability of rubies and sapphires and other precious gems.
‘Who were those women?’ Binx said, a bewildered expression on her elfin face.
‘Those were the Traitors Three,’ Mariam said.
‘The traitors who?’ Binx said.
‘You don’t know about the Traitors Three and what they did to Jules?’ Mariam said. ‘How is that possible?’
Eloise shrugged. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know about each other’s college years, I guess. Like any couple. Well, maybe not you and Rowan. But that’s different.’
Binx began to seem more upset than confused. ‘Why wouldn’t you tell me?’ she said to Eloise. ‘We covered all those years for Elly, and you didn’t mention it.’
Eloise was staring at Binx with a wide-eyed expression.
Mariam had been married long enough to know exactly what was happening: Eloise was trying to wordlessly signal to Binx to shut up. Whatever Binx was talking about – and Mariam did not know who Elly was, or why she was important – Eloise did not want to be having that conversation in front of the others. Binx got the message, and went silent.
They were arranged, by now, in a tableau outside the entrance to the Fly Club on Holyoke Place, finishing their ice-creams.
Mariam noticed that Jomo and Jules’s tongues had gone bright blue from the bubblegum flavor, and that was when she began to laugh, and so did the others, everyone except for Binx, whose stern baby-face – Mariam did not mean to patronize her, but she did look so young standing beneath the streetlight in her tunic – made her crack up all over again.
Five minutes later, however, Mariam felt her sense of humor fail as she rapped on the Fly’s door with the brass knocker, the thudding dance music muted by the thick walls of the grand old building. She had forgotten how it felt to willingly put herself in a position of abjection, waiting for some guy to deign to open up the door and decide if she was hot enough to be let inside.
Nobody had ever forced her to do this back at college – in fact Rowan had usually begged her not to – and yet on many nights she and her female friends had chosen to stand before this door, or one of the similarly intimidating doors to other final clubs, waiting to be let in. Or, worse, she, Eloise, and Jules had sat in the poky, freezing bicycle-storage room at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the Porcellian Club. This was the stuffiest club of all, not even allowing women to set foot in their plush upstairs quarters except on their wedding nights – when they were allowed to have their metaphorical cherry popped by their Porc Club husband in some room in the attic.
What woman in her right mind would want to spend her wedding night in that place? Especially after putting up with years of assholery from her partner and his Porc Club friends. But then, what woman in her right mind would marry a man who thought that being in the Porc Club was a good idea? The boys who fell for its promise of exclusivity and social superiority tended to be the ones with the weakest sense of self, most needy of external validation.
All the final clubs – even the Spee, which Jomo so loyally defended as being way ahead of the others in its more progressive politics – had always been designed to give young Harvard men their first, heady taste of power.
It was as president of the Spee that Frederick P. Reese II (a name suited more to a German baron than an American silverspooner, Mariam had often thought) had presided over the blackballing of countless hopeful candidates, and the sometimes brutal hazing of the sophomores who had been selected as the newest members of the club. It was excellent training for someone with dictatorial ambitions. He must have loved being able to decide who should be allowed in and who should forever be kept out, who should be punished and who should be rewarded with favors and appointments.
Beside her on the step outside the Fly, Mariam could sense that Jules, too, had stiffened as they waited for their knocking to be answered. This was exactly why Jules had fallen in with the T3s – so that women did not have to end up standing here.
Of course there’d been a lot of criticism of the women’s club idea, that it was trying to replicate a flawed, dubious model of social exclusion and dress it up as feminist empowerment. But that had never been Jules’s intention. She’d envisioned it as a place where women could stay up late debating ideas, planning their next activist moves in the struggle for gender equality, or just hanging out in a safe space. Ironically, given that one of the major impediments to creating a women’s club had been some arcane anti-brothel zoning laws that disallowed all-female establishments in the Square, the T3s had envisioned something very different than Jules had: they’d wanted a girly party pad into which men would be invited to sample the wares, like chocoholics allowed into Willy Wonka’s factory.
A guy with bleary, beery eyes finally opened the door to the Fly. It was unclear if he was a graduating senior celebrating his last day as a college student or one of the fifth-reunion alumni hosting the party for his class. What was clear was that he was not in the mood to play nice.
‘We’re here for the fifth-reunion afterparty,’ Binx said from the back of their little pack.
The guy took a long drink from his red plastic cup, keeping the door only slightly ajar so that they couldn’t squeeze past him. He took his time assessing Mariam, who was standing closest to him. ‘Really? Fifth reunion? Who are we kidding here, people!’
Jomo spoke up. ‘Is this really necessary?’
He appraised Jomo, trying to decide whether it was worth taking on someone twice his size. ‘Were you a member here?’ he said eventually.
That was when Jules decided to drop the J-bomb, as her friends called it. It was a very rare occurrence, something like a solar ecl
ipse, and when it happened, it was just as fascinating to watch.
She stepped forward and took off her baseball cap, shaking out her long hair so that it unfurled and bounced off her shoulders, almost in slow motion. She unzipped her jacket and turned down the collar so that her face was fully visible.
‘Let us in, dickhead,’ she said, in her mild midwestern accent.
He recognized her, and immediately obeyed. Once they were inside the empty downstairs common room – the party was upstairs, hence why nobody had heard them knocking for so long – he became their obsequious personal servant, getting them drinks from the bar and producing boxes of Noch’s pizza, then tiptoeing up the stairs when Jules dismissed him.
Eloise and Binx followed him upstairs into the fifth-reunion fray soon after, but Mariam and Jules decided to make themselves comfortable on the oxblood leather couches in the corner of the common room, cozily lit with antique lamps.
While Jomo messed around on the grand piano, Jules and Mariam ate most of the rest of the pizza, paging with greasy fingers through old Fly Club yearbooks, making fun of the men looking so pleased with themselves, and laughing at the homo-eroticism of the club’s Latin motto, which Mariam translated as ‘bonds should be lasting, not chafing or hard’.
Jules decided they should rope Jomo into playing the question game, which Mariam had invented sometime during their freshman year.
It was as basic yet compelling as it sounded. Each person took a turn asking the others a question; the only rules were that you didn’t answer your own question and you couldn’t ask the same question twice. It had, at the time she came up with it, satisfied Mariam’s love of deep and meaningful conversation, and it had also made group drinking feel more purposeful.
Jomo didn’t enjoy this game, but Jules had always liked it. While it involved sharing intimate things about yourself, that sharing was done within the safety of rules and strictures – a bit like acting, Mariam thought.
Mariam volunteered to go first. ‘What is the weirdest thing someone’s done while you were having sex?’ she asked. Sex questions were always a good warmer-upper, though in fact the answers were usually not that interesting – it was the ones about childhood and family that were most revealing.
Jomo was rubbing his eyes. Mariam knew he was jetlagged, still on London time. Jules, on the other hand, had perked right up – dropping the J-bomb had forced her to fully inhabit her identity, even flaunt it, and it suited her. She ran her fingers through her hair and patted Jomo’s leg. ‘Ooh, I can answer this one for you,’ Jules said. ‘And I bet you can answer it for me, too.’
Mariam was amazed: Jules and Jomo had actually slept together? There’d been constant speculation about this during their college years, though each time it had died down quickly in the face of their indignant rebuttals. This was the trouble with modern gender relations, they’d protested. Nobody would believe that a man and a woman could be best friends without secretly wanting to have sex with each other.
‘Not us,’ Jules said, seeing the look on Mariam’s face. ‘What I mean is, I know all his bad-sex stories, and he knows mine.’ She launched into a story about an old flame, one of the few guys she’d dated at college, who had never wanted to ejaculate because he didn’t want to corrupt Jules’s supposedly pristine femininity. (‘Whore/angel much?’ had been her classic response to this squeamishness, though it was probably lost on the guy in question.)
As she told the tale, it all came back to Mariam – Jules arriving home early in the morning after her walk of shame, telling Mariam and Eloise about her night while they all shared the bathroom, getting ready for the day.
The things you learn about other people’s paramours at college, and carry with you forever, Mariam thought. She even remembered what that guy looked like. She would be able to pick him out in a line-up. If she bumped into him later that weekend, or even decades in the future, at their forty-fifth reunion, the first thing Mariam would think was Oh yes, Jules’s old flame who had a thing about delayed ejaculation.
Mariam felt sort of lucky that she had no embarrassing stories of her own from random college hook-ups, because there had been none – though she had once shared with Eloise and Jules, early in her relationship with Rowan, a tale about how, in the heat of passion, he’d pulled a tampon from her with his teeth and flung it across the room, undeterred by its presence. That was the moment it had really sunk in for Mariam: This boy loves me. It had been a wonderful moment. If a shade gruesome.
Jomo looked as if he were in pain as Jules finished her story. He had always been so protective of her.
‘Okay, your turn,’ Mariam said to him.
‘I can’t answer that question,’ Jomo said. ‘It doesn’t feel right. Men aren’t as disloyal to their sexual partners as women are. We don’t share details the same way. And as a feminist myself, I feel that if a woman makes herself vulnerable to me in an intimate situation, I should respect that vulnerability by keeping whatever happened between us to myself.’
‘Seriously?’ Jules said.
Jomo smiled. ‘Nah. You both already know the answer. I believe you, Mariam, named the girl “pinkie finger Pamela”.’
Mariam laughed.
‘I’m going to attempt to elevate the tone of this game,’ Jomo said. He cleared his throat. ‘What is the part of your identity you feel most ambivalent about?’
Jules looked at Mariam to answer first.
Mariam knew what she would say if she could bring herself to tell the truth. That she had begun to develop some sort of religious faith, but didn’t yet know whether to trust it as something positive or to reject it as something selfish, bargaining with a higher power in the belief it would keep the people she loved safe.
It didn’t make any sense that her faith had followed in the wake of her father’s death. That should, really, have been the deal-breaker: that God would take her dad from her before she’d made peace with him.
It was Jomo who should be the new convert. God’s existence should have been confirmed for him – his mother had lived.
Mariam loved Jomo as her old friend, but she was not sure she would ever forgive him for having sobbed at her father’s funeral the way he had, sitting in one of the pews at the crematorium’s chapel, his whole body shaking. He had been crying not from grief but from relief. To Mariam, there was something disgraceful about grieving for someone other than the person whose body was lying in the coffin at the front of the room.
So in her response to Jomo’s question, she went for the easy answer, one that would let her deflect attention from the real issue. While Jules and Jomo shared another slice of pizza and a cup of red wine, Mariam delivered a soliloquy about her discomfort at being the descendant of Syrian Christians, for being indirectly responsible for what had happened in the civil war in Syria, and the ensuing refugee crisis.
Syrian Christians had traditionally been Assad’s allies, she told them. Her father had kept a framed portrait of Assad – first Assad Senior, then Assad Junior – on the wall in his study, and had not taken it down even when details emerged of the deadly Ghouta chemical attack on civilians, including children, and all signs pointed to Assad’s government being behind it.
Most Americans knew exactly zero about the conflict, and Mariam confessed to Jules and Jomo that she sometimes mentioned her Syrian heritage in a generalized way, to get the moral upper hand in situations where she knew it would bring her sympathy from a certain kind of well-meaning liberal.
These people would become much friendlier as they imagined Mariam’s mother at home in a headscarf, her father rolling out his prayer mat five times a day. They were pleased to be able to show her that she and her family were welcome in their country. And she accepted their goodwill as if she had earned it through some difficult childhood migration as an indigent Muslim, as if she were in daily contact with family members still trapped in Syria, desperate to escape.
The reality – which Jomo and Jules already knew – was nothing like that.<
br />
Both of her parents had been born in America. Her family hadn’t been wealthy, but they certainly had not been destitute. They hadn’t even gone to church while she was growing up – they weren’t even good Syrian Christians!
Her mother, meanwhile, far from covering her hair with a scarf, wore tight jeans, drank a lot, and got her roots dyed every six weeks. Mariam adored her, though they had little in common except for their green eyes. Since Mariam’s father had died, her mother had dated more men than Mariam had dated in her entire life before she’d met Rowan, which was – to be fair – not a lot (exactly two). But still. Her father had only been dead a couple years.
At some stage in her monologue, Mariam began to get emotional. She needed to get home to Rowan and the girls. She was overtired, she explained to the others. She was just like Alexis, she joked – she did not cope well once it was past her bedtime.
Jules walked Mariam to the door of the Fly. ‘I know how much you miss your dad,’ she said. She’d wrapped up a slice of pizza for Mariam to take back to Rowan, if he was still awake. ‘Whatever survival mechanisms you have to get through the mourning period, you need to use them.’
So Jules had seen right through Mariam’s little act. Of course she had. This was Jules, who was not only preternaturally attuned to when the people around her were dissembling but was as empathetic as it was possible for a human being to be.
It was almost midnight when Mariam reached Kirkland House.
On her way up the stairwell to their suite, she stopped in at the kitchenette one floor below, where she’d stored some milk for Eva’s night bottle feed. It would save her or Rowan a trip in about half an hour, she figured, since Eva usually woke at twelve-thirty am.
Another woman was already in there, not someone Mariam recognized from college. She was wearing a terrycloth dressing gown, and her hair – black with a rather becoming white streak – was mussed up from sleep. They smiled at each other, a look of understanding passing between them, both in the same mothers’ camp: they may once have been Harvard students at the top of their game, but now all they were was tired.
Life After Truth Page 9