by Nathan Hill
Then he died.
You spend a long time feeling miserable about this, feeling in some way that your brief friendship with Bishop was a test you failed. Here was a person who needed help, and you did not help him, and now it was too late. And you write a letter to Bethany expressing this misery because she is the only person who would understand it, and it’s probably the only letter you’ve ever sent her that is utterly without guile, without subterfuge or ulterior motive, the first time you aren’t self-consciously trying to get her to like you and instead just sincerely expressing a true emotion, which is that you feel sad. And this letter begins a thawing in your relationship with Bethany. She writes back and says she too is sad. And you both have this in common, this sadness, and you grieve together and the months go by and your letters begin to move on to other subjects and your grief seems to lift and then one day Bethany signs her letter—for the first time in years—“With love.” And all your guile and obsession ignites again. You think: I might still have a chance! All your love and neediness comes back, especially when she writes one day in the first week of August 2004 and invites you to New York. She asks you to come at the end of the month. There will be a march, she says, through the streets of Manhattan. The idea is a silent vigil honoring soldiers who’ve died in Iraq. It will happen during the Republican National Convention, which will be under way at Madison Square Garden. She wants to know if you’ll come march with her. You can stay at her place.
And suddenly your nights are sleepless and agitated as you fantasize about seeing Bethany again and you worry about not screwing up what is obviously your very last chance to capture her heart. It’s like you are living the plot of the Choose Your Own Adventure books you loved as a child, and it’s up to you to make the right choices. This is all you can think about until the very day you leave: In New York, if you do everything right, if you choose correctly, you can get the girl.
To go to New York, go to the next page…
You drive from Chicago to New York, stopping once in Ohio for fuel, again in Pennsylvania for sleep, checking into a shabby hotel you’re too amped up to actually sleep in. Next day, well before dawn, you drive the rest of the way and stash your car in a parking garage in Queens and take the subway into the city. You walk up the stairs from the subway station into the mid-morning light and crowds of downtown Manhattan. Bethany lives on one of the upper floors of the building at 55 Liberty Street, a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, which is where you are right now, at this moment, in 2004. Where the towers once stood is now a well-cleared and poignant hole in the ground.
You walk its perimeter, past street vendors selling falafel or candied nuts, guys hawking purses and watches laid out on blankets on the ground, conspiracy theorists handing you pamphlets about 9/11 being an inside job or seeing the face of Satan in the smoke of Tower Two, tourists on tiptoe craning their necks to see above the fence and holding their cameras aloft and checking the picture, then doing it again. You walk past all this, past the department store on the other side of the street where European tourists taking advantage of the weak dollar and surging euro load their bags with jeans and jackets, past a coffee shop with a sign that says NO FREE BATHROOMS, down Liberty Street where a mom tugging her two children asks “Which way to 9/11?,” until you’re there, Liberty and Nassau, Bethany’s apartment.
You know all about this building. You’d looked it up before coming. Built in 1909 as the “tallest small building in the world” (due to narrow lot size), with a foundation going five stories down, unnecessarily deep for a building that size, but the architects of 1909 didn’t yet understand skyscraper construction, so they overdid it. Was built next door to the New York Chamber of Commerce, which has since been converted into the New York office of the Central Bank of China. Just across Nassau Street from the ass-end of the Federal Reserve Bank. Teddy Roosevelt’s law office was among the first tenants.
You walk through the front doors, past a wrought-iron gate, and into the golden lobby, tiled floor-to-ceiling with polished cream-colored stone slabs pressed so close together you can’t see the seams. The whole place feels airtight. You approach the guard desk and tell the man sitting there you are here to see Bethany Fall.
“Name?” he says. You tell him. He picks up a phone and dials. He stares at you while he waits. His eyelids look heavy from sleeplessness or boredom. It seems to take a long time for someone to pick up, long enough that the guard’s stare becomes uncomfortable and so you break eye contact and pretend to look around the lobby, admiring its austere tidiness. You notice the total lack of bare lightbulbs, as every light source has been cleverly hidden inside recesses and alcoves, making the space seem less like it’s lit and more like it’s being thoroughly glowed upon.
“Miss Fall?” the guard finally says. “Got a Samuel Anderson to see you?”
The guard keeps staring. He has no expression whatsoever.
“Okay.” He hangs up and does some motion under the desk—turns a key, flips a switch—something that makes the elevator doors open.
“Thanks,” you say, but the guard is staring at his computer, ignoring you.
To go up to Bethany’s apartment, go to the next page…
On the way up to Bethany’s apartment, you wonder how long you can reasonably wait in the hall before she’ll think you’ve gotten lost. You’re feeling like you need a minute to compose yourself. You’re having that hollowed-out nervous feeling like all your insides have fallen into your feet. You try to convince yourself that it’s foolish to feel this way, foolish to feel so nervous over Bethany. After all, you only really knew her for three months. When you were eleven years old. Silly. Almost comical. How could someone like this have any sway over you? Of all the people in your life, why does this one matter so much? This is what you tell yourself, which does very little to calm the riot in your belly.
The elevator stops. The doors slide open. You had been expecting a hallway or corridor, like at a hotel, but instead the elevator opens directly into a blazingly sunlit apartment.
Of course. She owns the whole floor.
And walking toward you right now is someone who is definitely not Bethany. A man, about your age—late twenties, maybe early thirties. Pressed white shirt. Skinny black tie. Perfectly rigid posture and down-his-nose gaze. He’s wearing an expensive-looking watch. You consider each other a moment, and you’re about to say you have the wrong apartment when he says, “You must be the writer.” And there’s something about the way he inflects the word writer that carries an edge, like he doesn’t believe writer is a real profession and so he says it like someone might say, “You must be the psychic.”
“Yeah, that’s me,” you say. “I’m sorry, I’m looking for—”
And at that moment, behind him, just past his shoulder, she appears.
“Bethany.”
For a moment it’s as if you had forgotten what she looked like, as if all those photos she packed in her letters never existed, as if you had never scoured the internet finding all manner of publicity portraits, concert photos, after-party candids with Bethany standing next to some wealthy donor smiling and hugging—it’s as if all you have is that memory of her practicing the violin in her room when she thought she was alone and you were peeking around the corner and you were a child and you were in love. And how much she resembles that vision here in her apartment, that same self-contained, self-possessed, easy confidence—so formal, even now, as she strides toward you and embraces you with a platonic hug and kisses your cheek in the way she’s kissed the cheeks of a thousand friends, fans, well-wishers, where it’s less a kiss than the suggestion of one in the atmosphere around your ear, and how she says “Samuel, I’d like to introduce you to Peter Atchison, my fiancé,” as if there’s nothing at all odd about that. Her fiancé?
Peter shakes your hand. “Pleasure,” he says.
Then Bethany gives you a tour while your heart plummets and you feel like the stupidest man on earth. You do your best to listen, to
act like you’re really interested in hearing about the apartment, which is windowed on all sides so you can see the construction equipment over the World Trade Center site to the west, and Wall Street to the south.
“This is my father’s apartment,” she says, “but he doesn’t come here anymore. Not since he retired.”
She spins on her heel and smiles at you.
“Did you know that Teddy Roosevelt used to work here?”
You pretend not to know this fact.
“He was a banker at the beginning of his career,” she says. “Like Peter.”
“Hah!” Peter says. He slaps you on the back. “Talk about great expectations, eh?”
“Peter worked with my father,” Bethany says.
“Worked for your father,” he says. Bethany waves him off.
“Peter is really very brilliant at finance.”
“Am not.”
“Are too!” she says. “He discovered that a certain number, a formula, or algorithm, or something—anyway, it was this thing people were using and he realized it was wrong. Honey, you explain it.”
“I don’t want to bore our guest.”
“But it’s interesting.”
“Do you really want to know about this?”
You absolutely do not want to know about this. You nod.
“Well, I won’t go too much into it,” he says, “but it’s about the C-Ratio. You heard of it?”
You are not sure if he meant C or see or sea. You say, “Remind me.”
“Basically it’s a number investors use to predict volatility in the precious metal markets.”
“Peter realized it was wrong,” Bethany says.
“Under certain circumstances. Under very specific circumstances, the C-Ratio stops being a useful predictor. It lags behind the market. It’s like…how do I describe it? It’s like believing the thermometer is the thing that’s making it hot.”
“Isn’t that brilliant?” Bethany says.
“And so while everyone was betting with the C-Ratio, I bet against it. And the rest is history.”
“Isn’t that so brilliant?”
They’re both looking at you now, waiting.
“Brilliant,” you say.
Bethany smiles at her fiancé. The diamond on her finger might best be described as protuberant. The gold band seems to lift the diamond up like a baseball fan who has just caught a foul ball.
Throughout all this banter you’ve found yourself barely looking at Bethany. You’re focusing instead on Peter, because you don’t want to be caught staring at Bethany, by Peter. Looking at him and ignoring her is your way of telling him you’re not here to steal his woman, is something you realize you’re doing after you’ve been doing it already for several minutes. Plus every time you look at Bethany you’re jolted by surprise, how none of those photos prepared you for the actual person. Like how photographs of famous paintings always lack some essential beauty that’s startling when you encounter the painting in real life.
And Bethany is really, terribly beautiful. The catlike features of her childhood have resolved themselves sharply now. Eyebrows like check marks. Stern jaw and liquid neck. Eyes green and cool. Black dress that manages to be both conservative and open-backed. Necklace and earring and shoe combo that is the very definition of well put together.
“Too early for a drink?” Peter says.
“I’d love one!” you say, maybe too enthusiastically. You’re finding the more attracted you are to this man’s fiancée, the more ingratiating you become toward him. “Thanks!”
He explains that he’s pouring you something special—“It’s not every day that an old pen pal comes to visit!” he says—a whiskey they bought on a recent trip to Scotland, a bottle that won certain awards, that a certain magazine gave its only perfect score in history, that nobody can even buy anywhere but at the distillery itself, where the technique and recipe is a guarded secret passed through like ten generations—all the while Bethany is beaming at him like a proud parent—and he hands you a tumbler with an inch-deep pool of straw-colored liquid and explains something about the way it clings to the side of the glass and something about the patterns it makes as it swirls and how you can tell something about the quality of the scotch that way, and also something about the opacity too, and he has you lift up the glass to watch how the light filters through it and the view you get, unexpectedly, is the wobbly lines of cranes over the World Trade Center hole as seen through the liquid’s curvy distortion.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Peter says.
“Sure is.”
“Drink it. Tell me how it tastes.”
“Sorry?”
“I’d like to hear a writer describe it,” he says. “Because you’re so good with words.”
You try to figure out if he’s being sarcastic, but cannot. You taste the scotch. And what can you say? It tastes like scotch. It has a very scotchlike quality. You search your memory for words that are used to describe scotch. You come up with peaty, a word you don’t really know the definition of. The only word that pops into your head as accurate and defensible is strong.
“It tastes strong,” you say, and Peter laughs.
“Strong?” he says, then laughs again, harder. He looks at Bethany and says, “He called it strong. Hah! I’ll be damned. Strong.”
The rest of the morning goes something like this. Bethany regaling you with factoids, Peter finding reasons to expound lavishly on some exquisite purchased thing: the coffee they buy, for example, the rarest in the world, coffee that has actually been eaten and excreted by a kind of catlike Sumatran mammal that has a gift for selecting only the best coffee beans to eat, plus the digestion process aids the flavor when the beans are roasted, Peter insists. Or his socks, sewn by hand by the same Italian seamstress who makes the pope’s socks. Or the sheets on the bed in the guest room with their four-digit thread counts that make Egyptian cotton feel like sandpaper in comparison.
“Most people go through life not paying attention to the small details,” Peter says, his arm around Bethany, leg kicked up on the coffee table, the three of you sitting on the leather sectional sofas that take up the center of the astoundingly sunlit apartment. “But I can’t imagine going through life that way. You know? I mean, what’s the difference between your average violin player and Bethany here? It’s the small details. I think that’s why she and I understand each other so well.”
He gives her a squeeze. “That’s right!” she says, smiling at him.
“So many people live their life so fast and never slow down and enjoy themselves and be thankful. You know what I believe? I believe you should live in each season as it passes. Breathe the air. Drink the drink. Taste the fruit. You know who said that? Thoreau said that. I read Walden in college. I realized, yeah, live life, you know? Be in the world. Anyway”—he checks his watch—“I gotta go. Meeting in D.C. in a couple of hours, then London. You hippies have fun at your protest. Don’t overthrow the government while I’m gone.”
They give each other brisk kisses before Peter Atchison throws on a suit jacket and rushes out the door and Bethany looks at you in this, the first moment you are alone together. And before you can ask What do you mean pen pal? she says “I guess we should get going! I’ll call the driver!” in this manic way that blunts any thought of actual conversation. And you hope to have a real one-on-one, heart-to-heart kind of experience with her maybe in the car on the way to the protest, but when you climb into the back of the Cadillac Escalade and get under way Bethany spends most of the time making small talk with the driver, an older and intensely wrinkled man named Tony, who is Greek, you learn, and whose three daughters and eight grandchildren are all doing fine, just fine, you learn, after Bethany insists he go through them all one by one giving little updates for each of them: where they are, what they’re doing, how it’s all going, etc. This takes you roughly to Thirty-Fourth Street, whereby the Tony conversation naturally runs its course as Tony runs out of progeny to talk about, and there occu
rs a blip of silence before Bethany turns on the Escalade’s overhead television screen and turns it to a news channel already very deep into its daily coverage of the Republican National Convention and associated protests, and she says “Can you believe what they’re saying about us?” and spends the rest of the trip either complaining about the news or typing messages on her cell phone.
The news is, it’s true, dismaying. Reporters saying you and your ilk are all marginal protest types. Coming out of the woodwork. Malcontents. Provocateurs. Clouds of marijuana. Playing footage from Chicago, 1968: some kid throwing a brick at a hotel window. Then speculating on the protest’s effects on heartland swing voters. Their opinion? Heartland swing voters will find it all rather distasteful. “Your average Ohio voter is not going to respond to this,” says one guy who’s not the anchor and not a reporter but rather some middle-type person: the opinion-haver. “Especially if it gets violent,” he continues. “If what happened in Chicago in ’68 happens here, you can bet it will once again help the Republicans.”