“Where are you—?”
“Don’t. It’s best that way. Just do exactly what I told you and you’ll be on the Today show before the week’s out. Now, do you have any questions? Because it’s important you get the facts right.”
“No.” I had a million.
“Okay, then.” She put her hand out and I shook it. It felt more like a dare than a deal. “I’m going now.”
“Wait,” I said. “You can spend the night. Take the bed, I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“Thanks, but I need to keep moving.”
“Come on. It’s getting late. You’ll be safer here than anywhere else. I’ll write your story first thing in the morning, and you can proof it yourself. Plus, I’m renting a car to drive up to Connecticut tomorrow, so I can give you a ride out of the city.”
She cocked her head to the side. Had she hoped I’d ask her to stay? I couldn’t tell. “You’re really not expecting anyone?”
“Now? No. This isn’t a hotel.”
I could see her thinking, weighing risks. The scale hung low on both sides.
“I need a cigarette.”
“I’ll get you some.”
“And a shower.”
“Go right ahead.”
She rubbed her eyes, then brushed her bangs back again.
“You won’t fuck me over?”
“I won’t, I promise.”
Maybe she believed me. Or maybe she had nowhere else to go. Either way, her demeanor changed. She sank back into the couch and drew her legs up under her.
“Do you want some wine?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I walked over to the kitchen, opened a bottle of red, and poured two glasses. Then I scanned through iTunes and landed on Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” Applicable, I thought, clicking PLAY.
I brought the wine over, handed her a glass, and retreated to my side of the couch. We sipped in awkward silence. What, I wondered, had led her so astray, this perfect daughter of America? She’d glossed over that part—the beginning, the idyllic before. I was about to ask about her childhood, but she beat me to it.
“It’s your turn to talk,” she said.
“What do you want to know?”
“Whatever you want to tell me. Start with your family.”
And so I did. Like Shakespeare, I began with the secondary characters—my parents’ current spouses and lovers—and went from there, working backward through time. It seemed easier that way, and less complicated. Julie and my father, Simon and my mother. Paige gazed back and forth between me and the window, through me and the window, but I had the feeling she was listening intently. At some point on the reverse time line, I arrived at my city childhood, that liberal-family ideal, then further back still, to my parents’ early activism, hoping it might stir Paige. But it didn’t. The gap was too great, the past too far away.
I got up and changed the music. A Brooklyn band she’d never heard of. I floated the idea of ordering food, and Paige responded enthusiastically, even perching beside me on the couch as I shuffled through a dozen menus (we settled on a down-market pizza place because they also sold cigarettes). It was the first time we’d been together for more than a few seconds without something between us—cushions or a countertop. She was feeling more comfortable.
The buzzer rang a half hour later. I went down to intercept the deliveryman, and when I got back, Paige was scrolling through the music on my computer.
“I can’t remember the last time I went to a concert,” she said.
“Well, you can’t go now.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Crowds can be the safest places.”
“You wouldn’t even let the pizza guy come upstairs.”
“Fair enough.” She smiled, mouth wide, teeth so white, so American.
I brought two of my three existing plates over to the coffee table and we ate. For a while we talked about what everyone else talks about, books and movies, who’d gotten married, who’d died. She knew a lot, her long days online more than compensating for her off-the-grid seclusion. I poured more wine, and when she went to the bathroom, I dimmed the lights just a bit. If she noticed—of course she noticed—she didn’t say anything. The conversation slowly devolved, from the uptown of my youth to the downtown of the present, and that’s when she began retreating, her eyes glassing over—that thousand-yard stare in a three-hundred-square-foot room. When I asked a question and she didn’t respond at all, I put my glass down and said her name.
“Sorry,” she said, snapping out of wherever she’d been.
“It’s okay. We can talk later.”
“No, no. It’s just . . . God . . . you must think I’m crazy.”
“Not crazy. But I can’t pretend to understand. Why, I mean.”
“I don’t expect you to,” she said quietly, as if it were all too much to articulate.
“Fine. We can keep talking about nothing if you want. I’m good at it, believe me. I can go all night.”
“But what would you understand? What do you want to understand? I’ve read Roorback, Aidan. You don’t see the world I see. Our experiences are so different—what we’ve lost, and loved. And still love. Do you really want my worldview? Because it’s pretty bleak these days. Everything I once saw as a problem with others—the numbness, the detachment, the disillusionment that came with being American—everything I once sought to fix . . . I’m coming now to feel myself. The horrible realization that you really can’t change anything or trust anyone. We’ve become a nation that buckles down and endures instead of rearing up, instead of revolting against unacceptable circumstances. And why? Because no one will lead the way: the poor are too weighed down by the task of survival, and the wealthy will never challenge a system that’s taken such good care of their interes—”
“Come on, seriously, not that old argument. The rich do plenty.”
“They marry trophy wives and move to Connecticut.”
“And what, besides the obvious, is the problem with that?” I asked. “My father’s allowed to do what he wants. He worked his whole life to earn the privilege. You can’t just invent a revolution because people are complacent. Tell me, what’s so bad out there? Most people actually get by. Sure, they’ve got their meth labs and their shitty mortgages, but they manage. Christ, America’s one big sprawling suburb, and it’s hard for me to look at it and conclude that the system—capitalism or democracy or whatever you’re fighting—doesn’t work for the majority of the people.”
“And a majority is enough?”
“In a strikingly imperfect world? Yes, a majority is fucking great. Look, I’m not saying we’ve perfected anything here, but, hell, half the rest of the planet’s in flames.”
Paige lit a cigarette and leaned forward, into the argument, as if trying to swallow it. Did I sound as stupid as I feared, spouting watery platitudes straight out of freshman poli-sci? But how else to talk politics with a stranger, or present a middle ground to a fanatic? Yet, in truth, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a conversation like this. Thousands of hours huddled over drinks in bars, thousands more serving them, and all that time talking . . . but about what exactly? Sure there’d been a groundswell of hope surrounding Obama a few years back, visions of a fresh start and all that, but hope always ended badly in America, or at least got bogged down in Congress. Really, I wondered—indeed had adopted as a mantra—what was the point of getting involved at all? If the American game wasn’t rigged, per se, it was certainly out of our hands.
“Look,” I said, “systemic change is an earned thing, fought for over decades. That way, the big victories—civil rights, say, or legalized abortion—are nearly impossible to overturn, and major policy mistakes, like Prohibition, or Vietnam, or, to some extent, Iraq, don’t come along that often, and don’t cripple us when they do.”
“To some extent?”
“Well, recognizing that there are viable arguments for and against. Not that I was pro-war”—Paige had stubbed out her cigarette and was getting up
, brushing off her jeans—“I mean, Afghanistan, obviously, we should have, but . . . where are you going?”
She’d grabbed her duffel bag and started looking around the room for anything else. Evidence of her presence in such contemptible company. There was none.
“I’m sorry. I can’t do this, can’t stay here. It’s my fault, I should never have come.”
“Wait, what did I say?” I stood up, dumbfounded.
She was moving toward the door. “I was trying to understand, on your level, on any level, but—”
“You can’t go out there. They’ll find you and—”
“—it turns out you’re just like everyone else I’ve met in this city, in every city, completely oblivious until it’s too late—”
“—that’ll be it. You don’t have a car now or any place to stay.”
“—and only then do you wake up and see the empty horror of the whole thing—”
“Paige.”
“—only when it’s you they bankrupt, only when—”
“Paige!”
“—it’s your brother they kill.”
We were both standing by the door. At some point, as we’d spoken over each other, I had grabbed her wrist, and now I let it go. She looked at the reddening marks on her skin and said nothing. Her hair was hiding her eyes, her tears.
“Will you . . .” I started. “I’m sorry . . . I . . . your brother died?”
She didn’t answer. I reached for her, but she raised her arms protectively.
“Please,” I said, as softly as I could. “Come sit. There’s nowhere to go. Not tonight.”
She shifted her weight, one leg to the other, and sighed, long and heavy. It was the saddest sound, the sound of a person who’d reached the end, then realized she had to continue. And so she did, one step at a time, back to the couch. She put her face in her hands and let the tears flow freely. I poured her a glass of water, rounded up the rest of the napkins that had come with the food (of course I had no paper towels), and brought them over. I’d have left her alone, but there was no place to retreat to, so I just sat down next to her and tried not to cause more damage.
“I’m sorry,” she said, managing an embarrassed smile. “This is the first time I’ve cried in ages, but . . . it’s been such a long year.”
And I said, “I know.” I wanted to tell her to just let it out. But how do you say that to someone like her? Anyway, she was starting to laugh, in that wrenching female way that can come after tears, opposite emotions following one another so brutally quickly.
“I don’t suppose you have any hair clips,” she said, pushing her bangs back off her forehead again. She picked up a napkin. “I shouldn’t have said any of that. About you. About my brother. But he’s why, Aidan.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“Do you really want to know? Do you really want any of this? Me, here? Because it’s not too late. I can still . . .” But it was too late, and she knew it. She took a sip of water, slipped off her shoes, and this time, when she began to speak, she started at the beginning.
With her father. And her mother. He was a soldier back from Vietnam. She was a wife who had waited. Paige’s parents had grown up in the mountains, and after the war they settled down there. They had a son, then a daughter, both bouncy and curious, test cases for a developing theory of how to live. Paige’s father was no radical—he would end up working for years as a floor manager at the BorgWarner plant in Asheville—and yet he felt America had somehow let him down, in wartime and peace, its shortsighted policies steering the world toward some not-too-distant cataclysm. So he focused his family on what could be known and understood—the land itself—and brother and sister, a year apart but together in all else, spent their youth outdoors, the boy a champion of the physical world, the girl capable, too, but shy, and more bookish. . . .
Paige was lapsing into a Southern accent, and I told her so. She smiled as she caught the insinuation: that the layers were beginning to peel.
“Keith was big on stamping out our roots,” she said. “It was another way to blend in, become some formless other. Accents, habits, hobbies. We even had different names, though Lindsay’s the only one who actually had to use hers. Mine’s Isabel Clarke, which is what you should call me if we’re ever in public.”
“Isabel Clarke,” I repeated. The words produced a thrilling shudder.
Paige filled me in on Isabel’s San Francisco backstory, then returned to her own, which had entered a phase familiar to me: a series of unfocused college years, followed by a move to New York, where she rented an apartment on the hip and vulgar Lower East Side—my town, my people.
“This was the year after 9/11,” she said.
“I was living in Brooklyn back then. Williamsburg.”
“I could have guessed.”
“But I was in your neighborhood a lot, too,” I told her. “Luna Lounge, Motor City, Casimir.” The idea that we’d been circling in the same spheres, that in previous incarnations we might have brushed past each other in a restaurant, on a sidewalk—except a previous incarnation assumes some kind of metamorphosis. And I’d just been carousing on Rivington Street a few nights before.
“I didn’t go out much,” Paige said. “Or I did in the beginning, but . . . I don’t know, I was working a lot.”
“Where?”
“At the Earth Initiative. It’s a research institute funded by a group of billionaire entrepreneur-turned-philanthropists.”
“The Gang of Six,” I said.
“Well, then, you know.”
“It’s in the news all the time.”
“Exactly,” Paige said, smirking. And now it was my turn to pick up the insinuation. “I read an article about their global-warming campaign when I was a senior at UNC and then wrote to the director, Carl Cleary, asking for a job. When I didn’t hear back, I called his office and pretended I was Angelina Jolie’s assistant. I guess I knew even then what these people responded to, because a minute later I had Cleary’s private e-mail, which I then used to let him know he shouldn’t be blowing off politically engaged twenty-one-year-olds. He should be meeting with them, talking to them . . .”
“Let me guess: he hired you on the spot.”
“Yup. To be their Web researcher, scouring blogs, videos, articles . . . anything pertaining to the causes we championed—alternative fuels, poverty reduction, disease control, debt cancellation. It was the dream job. Suddenly, instead of sex-crazed college kids, I was surrounded by these brilliant young people with a very different kind of energy, people who not only thought about the future, but believed it was malleable: if we just worked hard enough and shouted loud enough, the rest of America would come around. We armed ourselves with statistics and projections and wrote brilliant position papers that became keynote addresses in Davos, in Aspen, anywhere that money met with good intentions. But our timing was off. The world after 9/11 had more immediate concerns, like self-preservation, like revenge. It’s hard to fight smallpox in Africa when you’re worried about anthrax coming in the mail or dirty bombs detonating down the street. And then, of course, there was Iraq . . . and still there’s Iraq . . . and it was just so hard to be heard, through the war and all it bred, the patriotism and cynicism, half the nation jumping feverishly on board, the other half turning shamefully away. Or not shamefully. Just not caring at all. The worse the war, the better the mood! Americans stuffing themselves on food and pleasure, on voyeurism and celebrity. So I guess it was inevitable that Carl Cleary would hit the road with Bono, with Beckham—”
“With Angelina Jolie.”
“Indeed,” Paige said. “We need sex to sell even poverty initiatives.”
“Well, you were doing a lot more than the rest of us. I spent my first decade in New York making drinks and banner ads. I couldn’t even get through journalism school.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Right?”
“But, Aidan, I wanted those things, too. Or not those things exactly, but something like th
em. A life I could recognize, slip into. Normal stuff: dating, dinners, shopping. Don’t get me wrong, I had boyfriends—a painter, a city planner, even a banker—”
“Brendan Carlyle. I met him.”
“That’s right. I can’t believe you tracked him down. Anyway, I kept trying, but I just never quite fit in. Story of my life, I guess. I wasn’t glossy enough, and when I was, it was an act. The Pucci dresses. The skinny jeans. See?” She rubbed her thighs. “I’d go to dinner parties and pick at them under the table, like the denim was the problem. And above the table all the talk was about work: fashion and real estate, publishing and PR. I felt like I had to keep my job a secret lest I bore people. And so I gradually built up this animosity toward everything. I stopped going out. What was the point? Just to get laid? My neighborhood had become a film set, and my generation, all these kids skidding and stumbling through the time of their lives, had let the decade get away. Or maybe, I finally decided, the problem was me. Which is when I left for grad school in D.C. The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. It’s full of aspiring diplomats and spies. But they had a good development program, and I wanted to work on third-world environmental problems.”
“Did you?”
“Eventually, yes. After two years in school—and fifty-five thousand in student loans—I found a job at an environmental-policy think tank called the Carver Institute. My business card read DEVELOPING NATIONS INITIATIVES ANALYST, and yet I never got to leave the country. I could speak for hours about the seasonal air quality in Bangladesh, but not a word about the place itself. What it looked like, smelled like. It took me six months to figure out that think tanks were really just retirement homes for history’s political also-rans, and still, I stayed three years, working twelve-hour days, just giving myself over to causes. But no one was paying attention—not the U.S. government, and consequently, not the rest of the world. I mean, how could the Bush administration sit there with a straight face and ask the Chinese to burn less coal? Or demand that India raise emissions standards?” Paige paused. “Bobby was stationed overseas by then, and I used to come home to my shitty Dupont Circle apartment and watch the news and . . .” She turned her palms faceup—a reflexive pleading, an unwitting prayer. Her soft, dark eyes, glassy ponds again, threatened to spill over with every rippling thought.
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