The Portrait of a Mirror

by A. Natasha Joukovsky

  They dropped off her suitcase on the fifty-second floor and returned to the elevator. Mercury was, as far as clients went, a rather good one, Dale told her. Jack Howard was a force of nature, and Prudence Hyman’s stern earnestness was mostly comical. Yes, that was really her real name, and Diana should practice saying it in the mirror without laughing. She (Prudence Hyman, coded PH) had the chiseled personality, Dale explained, of someone who grew up with a name as unforgivably bad as Prudence Hyman. While many women might have gone by Pru or Dennie, or assumed a new name in marriage or something, Prudence resolutely rejected every opportunity to soften or forgo her moniker. She might even have been accused of deliberately flaunting it. She baited displays of immaturity and toyed with those who took them, all through Socratic lines of questioning so resolute they effectively precluded retaliation.

  —And she keeps editing my slides to abbreviate “Standards” to “STDs.”

  —Oh, I can totally see it, Diana gestured expansively, “Promoting the Deep Penetration of Global STDs.”

  PH was in a tough position at Mercury, though, and with less than a year under her belt had very recently, as in the last three or four weeks, acquired a—Dale dropped his voice, almost requiring Diana to lip-read—service animal. It was a very small dog that could only be for some kind of nonphysical ailment, presumably depression or anxiety. Diana howled in disbelief. This project was getting better by the minute.

  Yes, she went to Vail fairly often. Dale went to Breckenridge. Each had frequented the other’s mountain home base and had complimentary things to say. Diana would be spending the long weekend in Nantucket. Dale loved Nantucket. Several of his childhood friends’ parents had places there, but this weekend he would be in Spring Lake. Spring Lake was in New Jersey, but in, you know, the nice part of New Jersey. Both of both of their parents were professors. Dale’s taught law at Boston College, but he had majored in English. He’d done his thesis on Milton. Very serious, he intoned in a pompous Britishy accent meant to self-deprecate in proportional compensation for his vanity. Diana’s second major had been philosophy. How unusual in the consulting world. They had both been attracted to the profession because it preserved optionality. No one ever gave humanities students enough credit for common sense.

  Dale insisted on buying her pretzel (and latte) on the forty-ninth-slash-fiftieth floor. Diana congratulated him on paying like a god. She was shockingly decent at imitating the authoritative Morgan Freeman–ish accent. He accepted her offer to, in return, get lunch. The sushi up here was, for corporate cafeteria sushi, really remarkably good, but was even better at Circle 2shi in the Underworld. Both Dale and Diana, it was discovered, greatly enjoyed sushi but often ordered sashimi instead, not so much for its gastronomic purity as American restaurants’ near-total inability to properly prepare the rice. They had both seen that documentary . . . what was it called? Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Yes, right. It took years to learn how to prepare the rice. Sushi was, truly, just not the same outside Japan. They agreed that the 800 yen omakase at Narita Airport’s best counter might well be preferable—in terms of sheer fish-and-rice quality itself, stripping away all thoughts of decor and ambience—to even, say, Nobu or Morimoto. There was something charming about the gruff passage of each single perfect piece of sushi from the hands that made it, anyway. Really, you know, authentic, right?

  The authentic Morimoto was, by the way, in Philadelphia, Dale said, not defensively, but not not defensively. The New York location was derivative. Dale had been to both locations, but Diana had only been to the one in New York. The one in Philadelphia was like a whitewashed Pueblo structure that opened into a purple neon cave, she learned. It had a local art gallery with soaring gothic windows above it. Dale knew the owner, a former housepainter, very unpretentious. Diana’s childhood friend Georgia Wimberly’s older sister, Audrey, had gone to Penn and interned at a local Philadelphia gallery, but she wasn’t sure which one. Dale knew Audrey Wimberly well. They both followed her on Instagram and agreed she might post fewer pictures of her coffee.

  It was at best a half-turn away from the kind of pompous, fundamentally solipsistic conversation Diana and Dale would have enjoyed eviscerating if they overheard, or floundered to carry on out of politeness with someone else. But with each other, every turn of phrase took on an inexpressible deeper meaning, like a permanent double entendre had been embedded into the English language itself. They were talking so fast and so excitedly and had so much in common that Dale was afraid he might start losing track of what he’d read about Diana versus what she’d told him herself. He had definitely lost track of time. They discarded the remnants of second breakfast and made their way to the elevator.

  —Well, if you know Audrey Wimberly, you must know the one and only Julian Pappas-Fidicia, Dale ventured with the confidence of already knowing the answer.

  —Oh, you know Julian, do you? I just had brunch with him yesterday. I see quite a lot of him, actually. We were in the same debating society—when I was an undergrad and he was at Darden. He works with my husband now.

  She said the last sentence quietly but distinctly. Dale realized that up to this point he had been subconsciously steering the conversation away from any mention of spouses, but now felt a sudden, pressing need to let Diana know he was engaged and happy.

  —Yes, my future wife actually knows Julian better than I do, but we’re all friends from Penn.

  Diana looked very directly into his eyes, almost as if she could see through them, smiling wickedly, like she’d been wanting him to mention his fiancée and was gloating in her victory. There was something almost supernatural about the expressiveness of her face, in the range of emotion she could project and transform from second to second. He found it borderline disconcerting, and was eager to be further disconcerted. Those were freeze-in-tracks eyes. Lethal eyebrows.

  —Oh, you’re getting married? Well, I guess I should give you my congratulations, and very best wishes to your bride.

  She guessed she should, but she didn’t.

  It was ultimately a loaded declaration that formed a silent pact. That feelings might be alluded to but never spoken, that lines might be bent but not crossed, that all truly important conversations would be restricted to hypothetical and metaphor and negative space. There was to be a fundamental honesty in their joint self-deception. Even if they couldn’t tell each other exactly the truth, lying was not permissible either. All’s fair in love and war, but there are steadfast rules for dead-end mutual flattery.

  —So, what’s her name?

  —Prudence Hyman.

  The elevator stopped on fifty-two. Diana laughed as the door opened—genuinely, and recklessly loud.

  —Kidding! I’m kidding, he whispered. It’s Vivien.

  CHAPTER VI.

  In the well-established rumor hierarchy of the sill school gossip network (“Sill Mill”), the 2004 news of Wes’s father threatened the creation of a new categorical apogee. The least valuable still-Sill Mill-worthy news was anything positive—college acceptances, belated loss of virginity, outrageously phenomenal birthday/holiday presents (cars were not permitted on campus, but wraithlike status symbols nevertheless)—anything, essentially, that portended greater social clout to the subject of the story than its narrator fell into this category. Next came minor misfortunes or infractions: injuries to star athletes, low-grade infidelity, illegal intervisitation charges for an established couple, other nonexpellable disciplinary infractions, other objectively dumb behavior (e.g., mercury poisoning from extreme overconsumption of dining hall tuna). The expulsion or withdrawal of a far-fringe/little-known student/under former for upper formers would fit here as well, the key criterion being a high ratio of narrative schadenfreude to narrator consequence. The third tier included most other expulsion and/or withdrawal cases, heavy drug/alcohol use, sexual rampages, high-grade infidelity, stealthily aborted pregnancies, consensual student-teacher relationships, low-grade self-harming attempts for attention, and creative combinations of mu
ltiple misdemeanors. The major definitional exception to categories two and three was eating disorders. Confirmed ones, while certainly not “minor” misfortunes, were tier-two gossip—more depressing than salacious—while debatable eating disorders (very often perpetuated by envy and not eating disorders at all) fell, at their recounted height, firmly in tier three.

  Things got tricky in the fourth tier, as major scandals often approached or simply were actual tragedies, requiring dissembling gossip-transmission mechanisms, for narratives to be well warmed in the cloak of concern. Particularly egregious expulsion/withdrawal situations (a cool sixth former mistaking, in a 3:00 a.m. drunken stupor, a teacher’s apartment carpet for the bathroom urinal), high-grade self-harming attempts not for attention, abject sexual abuse, and the death of a student, teacher, parent, or sibling fell in this category.

  But when, on a crisp, clear October day, an afternoon resplendent in its perfect, autumnal Connecticutness, the varsity cross country coach pulls the popular senior prefect aside and sends him to the headmaster’s house—not office, but house; when he does so not so much in a “you’re in big trouble, mister” kind of way, but almost with an apology; when Coach doesn’t provide any explanation, but, as the prefect turns to run past the club fields, squeezes his shoulder more than a few seconds longer than anyone has ever seen Coach squeeze anyone’s shoulder before; when Father Griffin opens the door with an expression that fails categorization, florid forehead wrinkling, as if unsure of the face he is supposed to make; when (as it was later discovered) the prefect’s father, Charles Wesley Range III, has been indicted on three counts of insider trading and promptly shot himself on the second floor of their East Seventy-Fourth Street town house—well, there just wasn’t really a gossip category for that.

  Dean Kennedy was tasked with retrieving some personal items from his dormitory and driving him into the city. That Wes was immediately whisked off campus, directly from the headmaster’s house before sports ended—that was in and of itself a solid tier-three situation, full of tantalizingly unanswered questions and prone to rampant speculation. By Formal Dinner, there were essentially two leading theories. The first was that Wes had been quietly found to be on some kind of academic performance-enhancing drug and Sill, to avoid a reputational scandal with its darling boys’ prefect, had allowed him to atone in the form of medical treatment. (Wes had, it was known, at least on rare occasion purchased Adderall from Kate Manningham’s highly profitable personal prescription.) Proponents of the second theory argued that no way, Wes was already into like half the Ivy League on full athletic scholarships. His grades no longer really mattered, they reasoned, before venturing in a respectful hush that it had to be something worse.

  It was posited that Marnie Davenport, whose father worked at a hedge fund in the same building as YW Capital Management, was the first to learn something close to the full story later that night. It turned out that the new tier-five category of information was of an almost nuclear-bomb variety in that it was something one wanted to be known to have possession of, but not publicly heard—even in care-cloaked words—to be disseminating. Marnie made rather a big show of holding back, saying simply that it was unspeakably awful and not Wes’s fault and they all had to be unfailingly kind to him and it was the sort of thing that Wes should be allowed to share and talk about on his own terms (but perhaps making an exception for Ainsley Cooper, as Wes’s girlfriend, who in turn may have needed one or two or three shoulders to cry on). By the next morning, when Charlie Range’s indictment-suicide was also the cover story of the New York Post (BANKER BLOWS BRAINS IN $23M BROWNSTONE [salacious photo]), the Sill administration was forced to make a school-wide announcement at morning meeting to dispel rumors that, particularly among the under formers, were, seemingly impossibly, far more indecent than the truth. Dean Kennedy delivered the full set of facts. Wes would be gone for at least a week and a half. This was a personal tragedy for a strong leader of the Sill community. It was not Wes’s fault, and it was every student’s obligation to be unfailingly kind to him. It was, she explained, the sort of thing that Wes should be allowed to share and talk about on his own terms (though Lauren Coddington later overheard her telling the modern European history teacher Mr. Bern that the sorry affair was not an unexpected byproduct of the Bush administration’s unconscionable lack of governmental financial oversight).

  Once Dean Kennedy lifted the taboo from the school and internal gossip lost its appeal amid fact and transparency, the Sill Mill alumni network was more than fair game. Recent graduates of all types weighed the news from current-student friends and siblings against the story in the Post before regaling all the sordid details to their college mates. It was in this round of dissemination that Sebastian Floris (Sill ’08) informed his older sister, then a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in the history of art.

  Though he had been two years her junior, Vivien Floris most certainly remembered Wesley Range. For the majority of her time at Sill, Vivien had been terrifically homesick, agonizingly shy, and really, in retrospect, far too intimidated by the New York–New En gland old money, grander even than the old money she grew up with on the Philadelphia Main Line. Despite being younger, Wes had been a total embodiment of this kind of stratospherically prestigious pedigree. He was all shaggy hair and perpetual tan and gracefully frayed khakis that didn’t quite fit, but didn’t quite fit in just the right way. Vivien’s family had three homes, yes, but Wes’s had at least five, and home wasn’t really the noun one would use to describe any of them. He flew private, obviously. As a human being, she thought, he was reminiscent of a work of art: a well-valued one, prominently displayed in an exclusive gallery, so obviously expensive she wouldn’t even dream of asking the price. Rejection was bad enough, but rejection from an under former? Unthinkable shame; unimaginable risk. She was barely a fringe member of her year’s cool-girl group (semi-affectionately/semi-offensively dubbed the “Sillian Rails”). It was a precarious, fraught social position, one of which, at the time, Vivien had been acutely aware and intensely protective.

  And so, even less than two years out of Sill, before the general impression of her prep school years had donned the fuzzy veneer of nostalgia; before her memories had permanently set into the wide-angle tableaux of brick colonnades and rolling fields and crisply delineated seasons; before, in short, the oeuvre of her memories from Sill was reduced to the preview of a movie she remembered seeing and being touched by, but for which she couldn’t quite remember the plot—even then Wes had occupied the privileged glamour of distanced abstraction, and a far larger, rosier corner of her mind than to which he had any right.

  The idea that Wes had experienced such a great personal tragedy touched Vivien deeply, and made him somehow more approachable, despite the distance between them. On more than one occasion she considered sourcing his telephone number or email address. But what would she say? Hey, I know we’ve never really spoken, but I felt like we shared some pretty loaded gazes a couple of years ago and, hey, I’m really sorry about your dad, and if you’re ever in Philadelphia it would be great to see you. Oh, yeah, sorry, this is Vivien. No, Vivien Floris. Disaster. There was a nonzero chance he would not even remember her. Being close to home again and slightly more mature and really excelling in her college coursework, Vivien had started to, as they say, “come out of her shell,” but she was not that brave, not yet. She told Sebastian to give Wes her condolences only if the appropriate situation presented itself. They never spoke of it again. Presumably, the appropriate situation had never arrived. But when the boys at Penn asked her out she still caught herself thinking about Wes while rendering her decisions, and when, weeks after he would have received his college email address, Wes still had not friended her on Facebook, Vivien felt a very real pang of phantom rejection.

  It was not until she met Dale McBride in a comparative literature senior seminar on the nineteenth-century Russian novel that Wes was fully relegated to the subconscious depths of her mind. What he
lacked in wealth and lineage Dale made up for in sophistication—a more valuable social attribute in intellectually focused undergraduate circles anyway. His parents were academics first and attorneys second. They were both philosophically minded, and he’d grown up listening to them argue passionately about the law in its relation to the categorical imperative and Rawlsian veil of ignorance and utilitarian pleasure monsters and Heidegger—if Heidegger made any sense at all if you didn’t read him in the original German (consensus was no). Because his parents had the summers off, Dale had traveled extensively; instead of buying a place on the Cape or the Islands, which many of his friends’ families had anyway, they got a lovely one in Nice for a fraction of the price. As a result, Dale spoke very good French—better, certainly, than Vivien. He knew how to sail, was above average at golf and tennis, genuinely enjoyed going to the opera, and even played the violin. Brookline High School wasn’t Sill or anything, but it was nothing to sneer at, surely. There was no shortage of other girls invidiously consternated by the news that Vivien Floris was dating Dale S. McBride.

  But it was still a surprise to her, the way they fell in love. It wasn’t in grand gestures and glances, but little by little, in more of an auditory than a visual way. He was good-looking, certainly, but what she really loved about him was the way he talked about books and ideas. He had a fervent, almost reverent belief in the power of literature to affect the world in a very real way. He was impressed that she’d applied to PhD programs to continue her studies in Northern Renaissance art, and absolutely understood “the tremendous appeal of very-exact cheese.” No, he was not making fun of her idealism—he wanted to be a novelist himself—and the cheese was a metaphor, yes, clearly, for order and control in a transient world of relentless precarity. She shouldn’t care, he assured her, if Grace Cho, who was also applying to PhD programs, thought realistic figurative still lifes were boring and overstudied and unlikely to lead to tenure-track positions. Grace Cho, Dale told Vivien, probably thought a metaphor was a Spanish bullfighter. They started having sex. For her birthday, in December, in what turned out to be one of those small but genuinely life-changing kinds of gifts, Dale got Vivien Ovid’s Metamorphoses—the beautiful little red Loeb set, bifurcated in Latin and English (though she went on, literarily speaking, to prefer Humphries’s poetry translation). For his birthday, in March, she gave him a poster of Goya’s Portrait of Pedro Romero, the artist’s favorite matador. He was tickled to the core: she’d given him a metaphor. She proceeded to show him, in wonderfully explicit physical terms, what exactly it was a metaphor for.