“Excuse me,” he says, and I look up. I’ve decided in the brief moments since I’ve seen him that I’ll pretend at first not to recognize him. Admitting that I remember him right away will put me in a weak position, particularly since I’m alone at his party. It could much too easily look as if I had contrived this meeting. I feel somehow that I unknowingly have contrived this meeting, perhaps only because I knew about it before he did. It suddenly occurs to me that he might also have known, that he might have been sent a guest list with my name on it, seen that I would be here.
“I have to ask. What did you find so funny just now?” My stomach flips. He looks the same. How can that be? Ten years have passed, but he has the same beautiful eyes, same thick, dark hair, only the attractive sprinkling of gray at the temples is new.
“I was just wondering how long it’s going to take those two women to claw each other’s eyes out over you.”
Laughing, he runs his fingers through his hair with a shrug; overt flattery was never lost on him. “They’re throwing me this party. A fight would certainly get them some press coverage. Maybe not the kind they want.”
“What’s that saying? No publicity is bad publicity?”
“Are you in PR?”
I shake my head. “Freelance copy editor.”
“You’re far too beautiful for that kind of job; quel dommage, as we say in Paris.”
I smile and stare at the remaining champagne bubbles in my glass; they’re moving more slowly now.
“What’s your name?”
“Brooke,” I say, watching his eyes. Nothing, not even a flicker of recognition. I feel sick and empty, as though I’ve drunk too much without eating first.
Ten years. Unlike Alex’s, my appearance has changed. The hair that once fell past my shoulders is now cropped just beneath my chin in a serious bob, with blunt-cut bangs that hang low over my eyebrows. One of the editors at Vogue suggested the style—saying it would make me look like a young Anjelica Huston—and I’ve kept it ever since. I’m thinner as well, which I can probably also attribute to my time working at fashion magazines. But is that really enough—different hair, slightly sharper cheekbones, better clothes—to render me unrecognizable to a man I’d once been with?
“Alex de Persaud,” he says, shaking my hand, something he would never have done back in France, something he must have picked up in the States. Plenty of pretentious kissing of cheeks goes on among this crowd, but maybe he has deemed, correctly, that I am not one of these people.
“So this party is for you, then?” I ask helplessly, given no choice but to follow his lead.
He sighs and nods. “Yes. It’s for my new book. My agent won’t let me get away with turning things like this down, I’m afraid. How, may I ask, did you end up here?”
“My friend Kate works for the company. I don’t know where she is now.” I look around, suddenly desperate for Kate to appear and validate my story. “What is your new book about?”
He rolls his eyes as though embarrassed by the whole thing. “It’s a book of photographs I’ve taken. Mostly at parties; it isn’t exactly what I would consider my real work, but it’s what keeps me in champagne and radishes. It’s called GFY: Paris and New York by the Night—catchy, no?”
I note that he maintains that his paying work is not his real work. “Very. And what does GFY stand for?”
“Can I tell you a secret?” He leans in so close to whisper in my ear that I can feel his breath on my neck.
I nod.
“ ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what GFY is for.” He grins. “Not what I told my publishers, of course. I told them it stood for a ‘generation of fabulous youth.’ Can you believe I sold them on that bullshit?”
“That’s bold. What do you have against your publisher?” So that much hasn’t changed, I think. He always claimed to be bothered by people like this—the people in his book, the people at this party—and yet here he is.
He turns his shoulder toward me so that we are mostly hidden from the rest of the party by a nearby pole. I know that these moments alone with him cannot possibly last; my mind reels wondering what to say next.
“You see, chérie, everyone wants these photographs to be something more than they are. Everyone talks about how they capture some ineffable moment, some excitement, but in reality they are pictures of pretty, young people, pretty, young, rich people mostly, doing what they do—which is party. They dance, do drugs, and prepare to fuck each other. When I see these pictures, I see the emptiness behind them, the unhappiness, but that’s not what people want to see. In any case, my publisher kept asking me, ‘What is the concept?’—so there you have it.”
“And they can go fuck themselves.”
“I knew you would understand. I can see you’re not one of them. You don’t think this kind of thing is art, do you?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t presume to say.” He was a bit cynical when we were young—so adamant about who was real and who was not—I suppose it makes sense that he would be even more so now.
He laughs again, and the uninhibited moment triggers in me some long-lost and yet familiar yearning. Mercifully, a waiter approaches with glasses of champagne, and Alex grabs two and hands me one, taking the empty one from my hand and setting it on a nearby table.
“Can I tell you another secret?”
That you knew me in another life? That you haven’t entirely forgotten those events that were so important to me?
“I want to leave this party with you right now.”
“But it’s your party. You have to stay.” How can it feel the same to stand next to him after all these years?
“This is true. One of those formaldehyde blondes is bound to come and take me away at any moment, aren’t they?”
“I think you mean peroxide.”
“Ah, non. I was referring to what keeps the rest of them intact, not just the hair.”
I laugh and give him a rueful look. His English is much improved to make a joke like that.
“In any case, before this happens, you must give me your phone number. I have to go to Paris next week to promote the book, so you must agree to meet me for a drink before then.”
My mind races. He’s right that someone will swoop him away momentarily; the party’s filling up around me. I can’t blurt out everything I need to say in the next two minutes—what all that might be, I don’t yet know, but I do know I need more time.
“Be brave, chérie”—he pulls a phone out of his pocket and awaits my number—“take a chance with the mad Frenchman.”
I tell him my number.
“Good. I will call you.” Those immortal words.
“I really should go find Kate.” I need to be the one to walk away first this time. “Bisous.” I lean in to kiss him on his cheek. Blushing as I do so.
“Ah, tu parles français?”
“Yes, a little. I studied there when I was in college.”
I wait for something to register. Nothing does. I can see it in his eyes, he doesn’t remember. I know now that this isn’t a game; he has gone on with his life and doesn’t remember my ever having been in it.
“It’s so charming when Americans speak French,” he says.
“À bientôt.” I turn on my heel. Looking back over my shoulder, I see that he’s watching me walk away. I admit that I am somewhat gratified by this.
There’s no way I can stay at the party now. I’ll find Kate and make my apologies. I also feel an urgent need to see James. I tell myself that what I’ve just done is in no way a betrayal. I don’t want Alex, I just want some answers to the questions that have been haunting me all these years. And after tonight’s strange interlude, to some new questions. Does he really not remember me? Remember us? Does he comprehend the impact he had, purposefully or not, on my young life?
More champagne certainly isn’t the answer, but as I pass yet another waiter with a full tray of glasses, I pluck one off to accomp
any me on my search for Kate.
I try to look purposeful instead of desperate as I navigate the crowd. Then I see them, the prints of Alex’s photographs that have been hung on the back wall. I momentarily forget all about leaving as I’m captivated by the images. They’re tastefully small and depict something aspirational and untouchable: beauty disguised to look ordinary, waifs peeking out from under large hats and wound up in impractical scarves, modern dandies with elaborately manicured beards and full sleeves of tattoos. The people in the photos are posed to look approachable and relaxed, but it’s impossible to imagine any of them at the DMV.
Then, there she is, like a shot between the eyes. I feel as if I’ve stumbled on something illicit and my cheeks burn.
Girl, ocean, reads the caption beneath.
I might not have known it was her if I hadn’t been standing right beside Alex when he took the photo all those years ago. Her lower half is submerged in the water, her bare back to the camera, wet hair snaking across her shoulders, only a whisper of her face visible in profile.
Sophie.
Does he even know that she’s dead?
I GREW UP on a dusty street in a small house in Chino, a part of Southern California that outsiders don’t visit unless they have a good reason. It lies in the vast expanse between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, misleadingly referred to as the Inland Empire. It’s a place so choked with smog that it seems to be fading right before your eyes, filled with palm trees that look as if they’d rather be anywhere else.
Thanks to my mother, our house was immaculately clean, with a picture of Jesus above the toilet in our one full bathroom. From the time I was little, she was employed as an admin in the registrar’s office of the university where I would one day be a student. Since she had started out on the cleaning staff, she was proud of working her way up into a professional job. She tended to win people over if they knew her for any length of time, endowed as she was with a sort of slightly beaten-down enthusiasm that made people want to do things for her, that made people feel especially good about helping her.
We had always gotten along, she and I, but by the time I was preparing to go to the university—on a scholarship that was the result of my good grades and her goodwill—I was saddled with the uncomfortable knowledge that she had spent the last decade of her life scrimping and saving to give me this opportunity. My dad lived in San Diego with a second wife and two small children, and I spoke to him a couple of times a year. By the time I was eighteen we didn’t seem to have much to do with each other anymore, given that he was relieved of the burden of his child-support payments and I the burden of his palpable absence, which I had long since gotten used to.
Instead, it was my mother who selflessly and tirelessly worked so that I could go to college with a bunch of rich kids who’d grown up with swimming pools in the backyard and stables nearby where they boarded their horses. And here I was with a shot at the same education they had; naturally I would try to sabotage a thing like that.
I felt in control when I embarked on an affair with my Contemporary Literature professor, Regan Douglas, during my sophomore year of college. Perhaps other women figure out much earlier how to tell when a man thinks they’re attractive, but I hadn’t needed this sixth sense until I was closer to twenty. It wasn’t that no one had ever flirted with me before, but I’d had a jealous boyfriend all through high school, so I didn’t interact with other boys much. Kevin was the kind of guy who never leaves Chino, even though his every sentence about the future was preceded by “When I get out of this shithole . . .” Besides his jealous streak, he wasn’t very nice to me in general. He only told me I was beautiful twice over the three years we dated, and both times he was blackout drunk. Luckily, he did me the favor of breaking up with me when I went to college. I was getting way too full of myself, he said.
Since I’d had such limited experience with men, I would probably never have taken any particular interest in Regan if I hadn’t noticed the ways his eyes clung to me for a split second longer than they needed to, the way they would flicker to me for an infinitesimal moment even when other students were speaking. Aware of his glances, I couldn’t stop watching for them and would feel a small thrill of vindication every time I caught him looking. He always seemed a little startled when he looked at me, as though my features were a puzzle that he was attempting to solve.
Once I realized what was happening, I was unstoppable. It wasn’t that Regan was so very attractive. The fledgling half men who were my classmates didn’t interest me much, and the sentiment seemed to be mutual—with my prominent nose and my dark hair, my curvy but solid frame, I was not the California boy’s type. Older men had always paid me a bit more notice, and there were other professors around who were much better looking than Regan. Still, I liked his longish, sandy hair and his intense blue eyes magnified by his glasses. I liked his delicate-looking bones, the angles of his elbows. I’d probably look better with a burlier man, but I’ve always preferred this elegant, whippetlike build. Here was a man who could never have been anything but a professor of English literature. He would have looked pathetic in a suit sitting in a swivel chair in some corporate office with his narrow shoulders and slightly hunched neck, but here he was lovable and even noble.
As you get older, you have fewer and fewer of the kind of crush that I had on Regan, the kind you organize your day around, where a flitting glance or shoulders nearly brushing against each other can make your afternoon, where every action, no matter how small, is an indicator of the waxing or the waning of feelings, of possibilities.
I found many reasons to go to visit Regan during office hours; never had my appetite for knowledge been so fierce. I would latch onto anything he said in class that could be construed as warranting further discussion. My interest in the subject matter was genuine. Always a voracious reader, I had started experimenting with writing short stories after spending my teenage years filling up my notebooks with fraught poetry about Kevin.
Regan’s office was like an outward extension of his mind: cluttered, shabby, and disorganized, but charming all the same. We would spend a cursory twenty minutes or so discussing whatever issue I had ostensibly come to him with and then inevitably veer off, usually onto something in our personal lives tangential to the text we’d been discussing. The inventiveness of these leaps of logic was surely good for my cognitive development, so it can’t be said he did nothing for me as a teacher. Before long, I was talking about my mother and he was talking about his young marriage, how it was faltering.
At first I was always the one to make excuses to leave, feeling that if I sat for too long, I would appear pathetic, but as our meetings became more regular, I grew bolder. Our good-byes became longer and more drawn out. First he would rise from his chair, say he should be leaving since the end of his designated office hours was long past, but instead linger by the door for another ten minutes.
Then one day after a ninety-minute discussion of Of Human Bondage—one of our favorite topics, as much for its easily mined sexual undertones as for its literary value—he began to go through the motions of ushering me out the door. He got up from behind his desk to walk me the couple of feet from my chair to the door as was our usual routine. The physical contact had progressed during these send-offs, but not in any way that would seem untoward to the casual observer, if this casual observer saw nothing untoward about my spending so much time there in the first place. Reaching for a shoulder to squeeze, he would sometimes pat me lightly on the back or take me by the elbow and gently steer me toward the door, but that day he took my hand. The hand is fraught territory, partly because it seems so innocuous with its relative distance from any of the textbook dangerous places: breasts, thighs, ass. Still, someone taking your hand is crushingly intimate. He held on to my hand a moment too long, enough to be fairly described as lingering, and I tightened my grip, fearing he’d pull away.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, unsure why. But our hands stayed clasped, and after what seeme
d like an eternity, he took a step closer to me and shut the door. Another interminable silence followed.
“Brooke,” he said, his eyes downcast, and for a moment I feared he’d reject me. Dropping his hand, I stared at my feet. I had an entire fantasy built around Regan, and I could feel it unraveling at a breathtaking speed. But as if in a dream, he put his hand to my face and kissed me. I was so shocked my knees nearly buckled.
After the first kiss, the rest unfolded quickly. I had to suffer the burden of Regan’s conscience, which ebbed and flowed. One minute he was brazenly screwing me on his desk (more his fantasy than mine, as it was my back and not his that had to endure it), the next he was sobbing in his car at the end of the dark road blocks away from my mother’s house about his wife and his job and how he was ruining me, an innocent, a girl not even old enough to join him for a cocktail.
I wished he wouldn’t talk about his wife; I didn’t want her to be my concern, and as long as she remained abstract enough, I could tell myself that we had nothing to do with each other. As far as my age, I thought he was making too much of it. At twenty I considered myself fully in and of the adult world, and I resented being treated as though I weren’t. What was also true but that I didn’t tell him—or that I tried once to tell him but retracted when I saw that it only made him cry harder—was that I wanted to be ruined. My innocence, as I saw it, wasn’t of any use to me. I felt that I had the right to screw up. After all, for a girl whose dad had left her to start another family elsewhere, I’d never done much acting out.
The affair doesn’t bear telling much more about. It’s notable, like so many romances, only for its beginning and its end, and in this case the unexpected direction in which it sent my life.
It ended in his home on a hot day near the end of my sophomore year. Despite my growing boredom, which I couldn’t have articulated at the time, I was still waging a minor campaign to get Regan to leave his wife. Regan seemed to expect me to comfort him whenever he was feeling guilty about her, to remind him that he was still a good man despite his indiscretion. But my conviction on that point was weakening, and I suggested that if he was really so unhappy in his marriage, perhaps he should leave it; then we could be together without all of the drama. The thought of their marriage made me a little sick, partly because I was intruding upon it and felt guilty, partly because I was horrified by the idea that this was what most marriages were actually like, that this could be my eventual fate too. Yet Regan seemed aghast at the suggestion of his leaving. Wounded by his reaction, I curled myself on one end of his couch, refusing to look him in the eye as I spoke.
Losing the Light Page 2