Lost and Wanted

by Nell Freudenberger

  Jack screamed an inquiry about ice-cream sandwiches from the kitchen, and I gave permission. I considered what I would tell Julia, if I could plausibly send her home with only an hour’s pay. My phone pinged and I glanced at it reflexively: maybe Sonja had changed her mind. But it was Terrence—he was wondering if Jack and I would like to meet them for Thai food in Central Square.

  Old friend having a party tonight.

  I wrote this without thinking. I wanted Terrence to know that my friends had parties, that we didn’t sit around all the time doing equations together. A moment later it occurred to me that Terrence was, in fact, the perfect person to bring to the party. He was much better-looking than Marshall, but no one could say I was bringing him out of defensiveness. I was spending time with the bereaved husband of my friend, a person who was soon to move in downstairs.

  I added:

  Physicist I worked with on big project—his engagement party.

  Neel?

  I was surprised. By the time Charlie met Terrence, my relationship with Neel was years in the past. Even if she’d mentioned our collaboration, she would hardly have bothered to go into detail about a friend of mine whose name wouldn’t have meant anything to Terrence.

  Did Charlie mention him?

  Y

  In what context?

  Gloucester

  Until Charlie died, I hadn’t thought about her aunt’s house on the North Shore for years. Now the weekend we’d spent there seemed like the fulcrum on which the past had tipped into the present. Of course there was no way to say that to Terrence.

  Right—he came up for the weekend once.

  I waited for a response, but none was forthcoming. I couldn’t help myself:

  Should be some interesting people tonight—if you want to come?

  The gray dots appeared, then disappeared, then appeared again. I was surprised by how much I hoped he’d say yes.

  Not free till 9.

  I gave him the details, and he said he thought he could be ready by 9:30. I said that I would pick him up. Then I stood in the bathroom with my phone for a half an hour, pretending to look at the news, worrying that Terrence would reconsider. Finally, at 8:45, I went down to say goodbye to Jack, who was watching a movie with Julia.

  “You look nice,” she said, with the condescending generosity of people her age. When I got in the car, it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked Terrence for the address, but I found that I didn’t need it. It had been twenty years since I’d driven to Charlie’s childhood home, but I remembered the way.

  3.

  As soon as we arrived at the bar, I saw that I’d made a terrible mistake. The restaurant was one of those Cambridge establishments that aspired to a more cosmopolitan style: Scandinavian in feeling, it had a black-and-white tiled floor, brick walls, and a beamed ceiling. Bottles shone behind the lacquered wooden bar. There was a sign on the door that said “private party,” but instead of elegant people in cocktail attire, it looked like a department happy hour. Even those I didn’t know were dressed like scientists, which shouldn’t have surprised me. Those who belonged to Roxy were likely to be in medicine or nonprofits. Why had I let my sister talk me into blue lace?

  “Do you want a drink?” asked Terrence, who managed to be both stylish and appropriately casual, in a black long-sleeved T-shirt with a sports jacket on top. I didn’t want him to leave me alone, but I also hesitated to take off my coat, which would be necessary when we left the vicinity of the door. I hadn’t yet said hello to anyone, and so I was thinking that it was still possible to leave.

  “I’m afraid this is going to be boring for you. We don’t have to stay.”

  “I go to bars all the time,” Terrence said, misunderstanding.

  I remembered Charlie telling me that Terrence didn’t drink, maybe in the context of my own habits, which are moderate. If I have more than two drinks, I inevitably forget to stop. Charlie, who took pride in being able to hold her liquor, liked to tease me about it.

  “I’m getting sparkling water,” Terrence said. “You want something?”

  I asked Terrence for a beer, then took off my coat and put it awkwardly over my arm. At least the room was crowded enough that no one was looking at me.

  “When did you stop drinking?” I asked when Terrence returned. I was scanning the room for Neel and Roxy.

  “I never started.”

  “Never?”

  “My brother went in for possession when I was eight, so.”

  I had been listening with less than half my attention. Now I looked at Terrence.

  “To jail?”

  “I was eleven when he got out, and he was all into being clean. All I wanted to do was be like him. For a while we went to this church with a girl he knew. Then that didn’t work out, and that’s when we started surfing.”

  “And he’s still okay?”

  “Better than okay,” Terrence said. “He sent me to college. Community college, not Harvard.”

  “It’s not necessary to go to Harvard.”

  “Yeah, well—my brother didn’t go anywhere. But now I work for him.”

  “He’s the one who owns the surf shop?”

  Terrence nodded. “He started by renting boards out of his truck. Selling weed, too, but only until he got Zingaro off the ground.”

  “I was thinking that wasn’t the same brother.”

  “Only have one.”

  Vicky tapped me on the shoulder, and I introduced her to Terrence. Vicky can be a little overpowering—her voice is pitched high, and she has a habit of standing too close when she speaks—but she’s excellent at her job in the development office, which involves soliciting alumni and other donors to MIT’s endowment. Charlie sometimes had a tolerance for my very nerdy friends—she found them so awkward as to be charming—but I suspected Terrence wouldn’t feel the same way. Vicky, in any case, seemed more interested in talking to me. She clearly assumed I knew much more about Neel and his fiancée than she did, and started asking me questions about the wedding. She was interested to know if I planned to have my palms painted with henna, and whether Neel was going to ride a white horse.

  It was while I was straining to hear Vicky, and Terrence was looking around the bar as if he wondered how he’d come to be there, that I saw Roxy for the first time. Naturally I had image-googled her. She was like those pictures, and also not. She was wearing a sweater with the sleeves rolled up, jeans, no makeup. She was talking animatedly to Mark from MIT LIGO, whose team Neel was now joining, holding not a drink but a package of tissues in her hand. Her long, wavy hair was pulled up in a rubber band. She looked like a student arriving for an early-morning lecture, except for her face, which was wakeful and bright, absolutely engaged in whatever she was discussing.

  She must’ve felt me looking at her. She turned and gave me a smile of recognition, excusing herself from Mark immediately, and making her way to our side of the bar. Had she looked me up as well?

  “You’re Helen!” she said. “I would kiss you if I didn’t have this rotten cold. Neel wanted to cancel, but I said no—everyone’s schedule is madness this time of year, and when will we ever manage to get all the people we love in one place again?”

  Her voice was British in pronunciation but Indian in warmth and tempo. I introduced her to Terrence and Vicky, accidentally furthering the impression that Roxy and I had a preexisting relationship.

  “You’re from Mumbai?” Vicky asked. “Are you also a physicist?”

  Roxy laughed. “God, no. I’m a doctor.”

  “What’s your specialty?” Terrence asked.

  “I’m a cardiologist,” she said. “I’ve been working with Doctors Without Borders for a bit now.”

  “Oh, I know someone in the office in Delhi,” Vicky said. “I’m in development at MIT.”

 
It turned out that Roxy knew him. “He’s a Parsi,” she said. “Like my family. Do-gooders.” She managed to say this in a self-deprecating way, as if she were slightly skeptical of her own noble impulses. “There are hardly any of us left, so we all know each other. Speaking of Parsis, some of the few remaining on the planet have just arrived—my aunt and uncle from New York. I have to say hello.” She put a hand on my arm. “It’s so loud here—would you come to our place afterward? Please? We’re having just a few people, so we can actually talk.”

  I glanced at Terrence, and said I’d have to check with my babysitter. As Roxy left us to greet her aunt and uncle, I saw Neel for the first time. He was crossing the room to say hello to his new relatives, wearing a dark green sweater with a collar sticking out of it. He looked as if he’d tried too hard, as I knew I had. His hair had been recently cut.

  “That’s your ex?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he hang out with you and Charlie much? I mean apart from that time in Gloucester?”

  “While we were dating, yeah. Then Neel and I worked together, but that was much later.”

  Terrence was watching Neel, who was talking animatedly with an elderly Indian woman wearing a raw silk tunic and a great deal of jewelry. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking from his face.

  “We built these two models,” I explained. “For some reason it’s what we’re both best known for, even though I’d say we’ve each done more interesting work since. That was when we were closest, actually—much more so than when we were dating in college.”

  I stopped myself; Terrence wouldn’t be interested in my relationship with Neel.

  “What’s a model?” he said.

  “It’s a sort of guess about the way something works—subatomic particles and forces, in this case. A way things could be.”

  “Like an alternate reality,” Terrence suggested. There were so many people that we had to stand very close to hear each other; he put his hand on my elbow, moving me out of the path of a boisterous man carrying drinks.

  “More like an explanation of a part of this reality that we don’t understand yet.”

  For some reason, Terrence nodded eagerly at this. “I think about that a lot.”

  I might have been more focused on this comment if Neel hadn’t been making his way toward us, having done his duty with Roxy’s relatives. Or, it occurred to me, maybe it wasn’t a duty; maybe he genuinely enjoyed Roxy’s family, who seemed to lead fascinating lives in Mumbai.

  “I’m going to get another soda,” Terrence said. I almost asked him to wait—I didn’t want to be alone with Neel—but I saw on his face that he didn’t want to talk to a stranger who’d known Charlie. I let him go, and then Neel was there. He gave me a hug that smelled like his old apartment: tobacco and Dr. Bronner’s. His sweater was cold, and I knew he’d been outside, smoking.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Thanks. But it’s a weird thing to get congratulated on. Maybe in twenty years someone should congratulate us—but now?”

  It was such a perfectly Neel type of comment.

  “Well, then, on the events at LIGO I’m not supposed to know about.”

  “That,” he said. “That deserves congratulations. But I’m not supposed to talk about physics tonight—I promised Roxy.”

  “We just met. She’s terrific.”

  “She is.” Neel had a habit of closing his eyes when he was uncomfortable. I only remembered it now.

  “Is it strange to be back?”

  “Not really. I’m on TeamSpeak with these guys every day. I’m going to be working with Martina on frequency dependent squeezing.”

  From the bar across the room Terrence met my eyes and lifted his glass, asking if I wanted another. I felt a rush of gratitude, not only for the drink. I nodded yes.

  “Is that guy—?”

  “That’s Terrence.”

  “Terrence—Charlie’s Terrence?”

  “He’s here for a bit, with his daughter. They’re staying with Charlie’s parents.”

  Neel seemed to search for what he wanted to say. “I keep thinking about this one night we hung out together.”

  “You mean the three of us?”

  “No. Just me and Charlie—maybe the only time we did that. At the Plough and Stars.”

  It wasn’t a place I’d known either of them to go. “When was that?”

  “Senior year—I just ran into her. I was taking Jazz, remember?”

  “Of course—with Graeme Boone. You were so into that class.”

  Neel nodded. “My TF’s trio was playing that night, and so I went. I asked Charlie if she’d come to hear them, and she said, no—she didn’t know anything about jazz. I said she should take the elective—I was always proselytizing about it—and she said she would take it if she were me, but she just couldn’t stand the idea of being a black girl learning jazz history from a white professor at Harvard.”

  “I can see that,” I said. I was almost sure that Charlie had never mentioned anything about that extremely popular jazz elective to me. “Are you sure she was by herself?”

  Neel nodded. “Absolutely. We ended up getting a bunch of drinks.”

  “Because normally she had a thing about not sitting by herself in restaurants. I think that’s why she liked meeting me places—I’m always on time.”

  “But she’d been there by herself for a while, that time,” Neel said. “I had to drink fast to catch up.”

  I looked for Terrence, who had gotten the bartender’s attention. She was young and blond, leaning in to ask him something—in spite of the crowd of scientists eager to be served. Terrence seemed to answer her courteously, but with little interest.

  “How’s he doing?” Neel asked.

  “Okay, I think, given everything. He’s moving into my downstairs apartment.”

  Neel turned to me. “In your house?”

  “Our kids are friends, and they needed something temporary. And my tenants wanted out.”

  “That was nice of you.”

  “They’re paying rent.”

  “Maybe ‘nice’ isn’t the right word—involved. That’s involved of you.”

  What did he mean by that? That I wasn’t involved in other people’s lives in general? That I was selfish or cold? I couldn’t keep the defensiveness out of my voice:

  “I miss her.”

  “Yeah.”

  He asked about Jack, and I told him how interested my son was in science now. I mentioned his ant farm, and also the snap circuits kit. I said that he was still playing soccer, and wanted to try out for the travel team. I didn’t say anything about his carelessness with homework, which I sometimes think is because the work is too easy, and other times worry signals academic struggles ahead. Nor did I mention the conversation we’d had in the bathtub, about my failure to provide him with a father.

  “I thought I didn’t want him to grow up, when he was little. But it’s more fun as they get older—harder, but also more fun.”

  Charlie once told me that she didn’t like the way Neel looked at me when I was speaking. She had said it was like I was “an interesting thing in a museum.” I thought at the time that she misunderstood him, because I believed that that expression (which I could recall as soon as she put it into words) was evidence of his serious desire to understand me. I saw that look on his face now.

  “Did Roxy tell you about later, at our place?”

  “I’m not sure I can.”

  “But maybe?” There was gray in the part of his hair.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I hope so.” He gave me another careful hug, and then released me. I went to find Terrence at the bar.

  “We can skip the after-party,” I told him. “This is bad enough.”

  Terrence shrugged. “Up to you. For me it’s tha
t or sitting in the guest room listening to my mother-in-law cry through the wall.”

  I looked at him. Charlie’s mother crying was a startling thing to imagine. “Addie cries?”

  “I put on headphones,” Terrence said. “But, yeah.”

  4.

  Neel and Roxy’s new apartment was across the river in Jamaica Plain, nothing like what I’d expected. It was a brand-new building (there was still a sign advertising luxury condos for sale) with a large, empty lobby, a doorman behind a shiny black desk. They were on the sixth floor, and the apartment itself was mostly empty, too, except for a black leather couch, a large flat-screen TV, a travertine dining table. Everything looked both plain and expensive, the light gray wooden floors, the blue enamel kitchen cabinets. The only constants from the Neel I’d known were the abundant books and the general scarcity of other possessions. There were large windows, through which you might be able to see the Arnold Arboretum during the day. Now the windows were dark, alternating with framed collages that combined vividly colored vintage Bollywood poster art with Chinese urban street scenes. The artist was from Singapore, Roxy told me. She was setting out dark blue porcelain bowls on the low table in front of the television: olives, almonds, candied ginger.

  I excused myself to get a drink, which I planned not to consume. If I had another, I didn’t trust myself not to reveal how uncomfortable I felt in Neel and Roxy’s new home. I made my way across the room and took the empty seat beside Terrence, whose prohibition on controlled substances seemed, inexplicably, not to extend to weed. He was sharing a joint with Neel’s old friend Dan, a molecular chemist. I felt a surge of love for Dan, who was over six feet tall and becoming fat. He had wild hair and terrible posture, but his expression was the same one I remembered from when I’d known him well. When Neel and I were working together, we would often go out for a meal with Dan. Neel and I would make passionate arguments on one subject or another, and Dan would sit there eating: tolerant and slightly bemused. Dan had always placed less faith in talking than Neel, and had lower expectations about people and the world in general; he was funnier than Neel, and it was more relaxing to be around him.