As she spoke her green eyes no longer blazed in half fury as they had at the start of her story. Their lids sloped down a trace like opposing accents in a tangle of foreign handwriting. Jeremy had not exaggerated: her forehead’s centerline was very pronounced and told a story of accumulated frustrations and disappointments. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles southwest of us in New York, he was no doubt struggling on, contrite, shaking, overheating—desperate from the prior night’s explosion. As Belle’s story ended, a feeling of pity came over me like a lukewarm cloth. And I knew that same film would have covered Belle the night before as soon as Jeremy unleashed the rust-colored shower of his debt upon her, but it would have been thicker and damper and it would mean that things might never again be the same between them. Something might have been lost. She might now love him less.
I needed to intervene. I felt responsible, because I was there and Jeremy was not and he did not have the benefit of knowing the mystery maternal op-ed had been printed in our College paper to twist his girlfriend’s mind into a curious pretzel of insecurity and unreason.
With another check of her watch, Belle said she needed to leave to head over to an alumni tour at the Hood Museum of Art. She pointed to a panel in our Reunion Weekend brochure that advertised the exhibition Follow the Money: Andy Warhol’s American Dream. (She had always loved her Warhol.) Belle didn’t implore me to come with her this time; she seemed too drained from our conversation to issue an invitation. So at my suggestion we agreed to meet up later for the afternoon of white-water rafting I had taken the liberty of signing us up for in advance. I left Rosey Jekes in a bit of a stupor and walked north on Main Street, straight out to the center of the campus Green to dial Jeremy.
“Hullo?” an unrecognizable voice croaked.
“Jeremy, it’s me,” I hurried out, sitting myself down on the grass to take shelter from the beelining discs of a nearby Frisbee game. “What the hell happened last night?” There was a prolonged silence. Though it was Friday, I was quite certain he wasn’t in the office—that I woke him and the buzz of the phone startled him into the surreal and bleak haze that descends the morning after a drunken and regrettable tirade. “Why were you drinking, anyhow? You never drink.”
“Chase,” was his solemn, one-word answer.
“Oh, for crying out loud, Jeremy—what did he do to you?” I knew Chase had spent the week in the New York office for his Managing Director orientation and a string of planning sessions with Piggelo that he made conspicuous references to before leaving in order to dial up his perceived importance. His words of warning way back at the December Bender returned to me then: Watch yourself with the Yak-Yak, Kirby—it could knock a girl like you over. “What did he make you drink? And since when do you go drinking with Chase?”
“I didn’t think I had a choice … Drewe corralled a few guys in the office for a pint down at Ulysses. I saw Piggelo eyeing us from her office so took it as one of her bizarre social tests that I couldn’t say no to. Who knows—maybe it wasn’t Piggelo. Maybe it was part of Drewe’s personal branding campaign. Either way, you know how it can never be just a pint with Chase. It all got carried away. It all got completely carried away,” he repeated, sorrowfully. I had witnessed Chase’s grandstanding all too often over the years to know how easily people and things got carried away in his presence. How naturally he was able to swing an evening’s shenanigans to a whole new stratosphere of debauchery.
It would have started with a trip uptown to one of those tragic tiki bars on Park Avenue South, jam-packed with heavily starched shirts and the stilettos that stalk them. Chase was a great believer in bottle service diversification, so would have hedged his libational bets with a basin of rum punch served in an oversized plastic flamingo ($250), a nondescript bottle of vodka ($425), and an eight-foot palm tree offering up coconuts splashed full of exotic libations ($2,000). He was also an enthusiastic supporter of leggy waitresses and coconut bras so might have even let one of the ladies decorate him with tribal face paint, reinforcing his role as the blood-lusting head choirboy in Lord of the Flies. When, how, and how badly he put Jeremy in a compromising position was anyone’s guess. Maybe he had insisted on a game of credit card roulette, banking on Lady Luck siding with him as she always did and heaping all of the misfortune on the one man present who was least able to cover the tab. Ceremoniously presenting Jeremy with the five-figure bill, he’d say something like Gambling is the self-imposed tax of the poor and the stupid, tossing a contraband cigarette to the floor and grinding it down to dust with his embossed leather sole. Regardless of the grim details, I sensed there was a darker, self-interested strain to Chase’s rabble-rousing that night—a more sinister agenda behind it all. Of course Chase would have never admitted to a campaign to win Belle Bailey back. But he was an eligible bachelor of what his parents must have believed was the appropriate age to marry. And he would not stand to lose anything—or anyone—to a hot air ballooning fellow who worked in Compliance.
“How did he get you so riled up? Why did you go home so angry?”
“It was everything,” Jeremy said, categorically. “Everything out of that man’s mouth was a provocation.” Like one of his bespoke Jermyn Street shirts, each of Chase’s blaring sentences would have been tailor-made to bait Jeremy.
“Did he mention anything about an engagement ring?” I asked, pointedly. Silence hung morbidly on the line.
“My God, M.,” Jeremy wailed. I pictured him clutching at his mop of sandy hair as the full horror of his eruption materialized before his bleary eyes. “What did I actually say to her?”
He said he could hardly recall; I said I did not think it was good. Baker Library’s bells struck noon behind me, sounding oddly funereal. We both held quiet on the line, the last clangs ringing out into the stark daylight, knowing with certainty that whatever he had said to Belle, it would be irreversible.
* * *
Belle and I were signed up for an afternoon of white-water rafting in the Hartland Rapids along the Connecticut. It was a long shot but I held out hope that returning to ride the pristine waters of a New England river could clear the palate of Belle’s mind, reminding her of the pure, fundamental things in life and renewing her faith in an honest future with Jeremy. These were the same waters we had splashed carelessly in, rode the rickety rope swing into, and paddled our canoe down as Lost Girls who wouldn’t yield to cliques and categories.
Now that the bomb of that godforsaken op-ed had dropped, I had downgraded my expectations and was just hoping Belle would turn up. She was late, which was typical, and I waited for her inside the bus that would shuttle us into Vermont for our rafting, peering out the window and chewing nervously on a fingernail. To my relief she hopped on board a few minutes later, against all logic sporting an old-fashioned red swim cap covered in floral decals and fitted with a chin strap.
“I’m sorry, this isn’t the 1950s synchronized swimming revival bus,” I joked as she slid herself onto the seat next to me. I stuck a thumb out in the direction of east. “That’s the next bus over.”
“Don’t you dare belittle me,” she snipped back, waving my thumb away and neatly fastening the strap of her cap. “You know I live by Oscar Wilde’s mantra that a person can never be overdressed or overeducated.” Belle referenced the quote as though she had dedicated her life to academia, robing herself in Oscar de la Renta as she toiled away toward her Ph.D. I didn’t mind. What mattered was that she was there and her mood had brightened, presumably with the help of her retro swim cap.
The bus pulled away and journeyed up and down pastoral dales into the emerald heart of Vermont. We were deposited by the river at the starting point of our adventure and sectioned off with a young bruiser named Thad who would be our boat leader. After six years as an undergrad, and twice as many concussions on the football field, Thad explained he was switching gears and restarting his degree to give it one last shot, this time as a premed student so he could really start giving back.
“You ladies up f
or riding the rapids?” he asked us as we piled into the raft with a handful of others.
“Whatever does it mean?” Belle breathed, eyes widening at the prospect of danger. She had always been useless with a paddle; it looked borderline ridiculous clasped in her long hands and tangled up with her narrow arms, as though a red-hatted daddy longlegs was unhappily attempting a water sport.
Thad pointed to a churning and fizzing section of white water some distance ahead of us down the river.
“It means we clear that rough section of water—then we’ll turn the raft around past those rocks and head straight back into the rapids. When I say the word, we’ll all paddle like hell against the current and before you know it, it’ll feel like we are rafting on air. It’s the raddest way to raft.”
“Let’s do it!” I shouted with gusto. Rad wasn’t usually my thing but, for whatever reason, Thad’s description of tackling the current head-on had me all geared up.
“Well, hello, Miss Adventuress,” Belle snarled, trying in vain to get a firm grip on her paddle. “What have you done with my friend M.?”
A few minutes later, we were journeying down the river, green horizons cutting in at idyllic angles from both banks like a child’s pop-up book opening toward us page by cardboard page.
“Now, left-hand people, forward! Right-hand people, back!” Thad shouted. We obeyed in harmony and the raft yielded to his will. “Good, good! Okay, now everyone forward … and when I say go, give it everything you’ve got!”
The white rapids were only a few feet ahead, foaming angrily and ready to engulf us.
“Are you sure?” Belle cried in trepidation. “Shouldn’t we have signed a special waiver for this?”
“Just paddle!” Thad and I yelled at her in unison. It was a surreal moment—one in which Belle and I appeared to have traded spiritual places. She was the worried one, the overly cautious one, and I was suddenly delighting in going against the grain. I didn’t possess an elegant certificate but suddenly I had assumed the spot of Certified Beautiful Adventurer©. Despite our best efforts, our paddling wasn’t strong enough. Our raft was propelled back into a giant boulder protruding on one side of the river, hitting it with enough force to send Belle—with the help of her misplaced paddle, which acted as a levering springboard—careening off the side of the raft into the water. Her figure was surprisingly elegant as it soared over the rapids and disappeared without a trace.
“I told you ladies to paddle!” Thad roared, using an oar to try and heave our raft off the rock. With the rivaling roar of the water and the muddying effects of his concussions, he hadn’t clocked the red form of Belle sailing into the water.
“We’ve got a woman overboard, you damn fool!” I screamed at him, scouring the foaming water for any sight of her. “My friend Belle is overboard!”
I looked around the raft frantically for any sign of a floral swim cap breaking through the surface.
“Oh, she’ll pop back up in a few seconds,” Thad answered, a bored look washing across his eyes—pronouncing just how much he would have rather been reveling in the sticky stink of his fraternity basement than managing a boat of incompetent older women.
“Are you sure? Shouldn’t her life vest have kept her floating? I see a lot of rocks down there … and she definitely went in headfirst!”
The seconds ticked on, undeterred by our on-river drama. Thad had unwedged us from the rock and directed us to paddle over to the left bank where we could more easily survey the water for Belle. It was a wild and unrealistic thought but I suddenly wondered if Belle had simply decided to swim away—leave her problems in her wake and simply escape into the rapids in the hopes of surfacing somewhere far downstream, fresh aired and free of recognition and complication. She could have assumed a rosy-cheeked role as milkmaid for a Vermont dairy farmer. Or found a sleepy village to start up a delightful little organic farm-to-table bistro called Belle’s. None of this seemed far-fetched to me—she had seemed that distraught back at the café.
“We can’t just stand here like stooges!” I cried. “We’ve got to find her!”
Thad looked many shades beyond vexed—with Belle and me and the entire situation—as I unbuckled my life jacket and jumped into the river.
“Hey, lady, are you nuts? Get back here! Put your goddamn jacket back on!”
I ignored Thad and front-crawled as fast as I could toward the rapids. Lifting my head left to take a giant breath, I heard a voice pealing out into the wilderness.
“Look, over there!”
I shot up in the water and saw a fellow rafter onshore pointing at the long body of Belle that was executing a head-up breaststroke alongside the opposite bank of the river. She lifted herself onto the edge of the bank and determinedly shook water out of one ear.
“That’s why they make these things with chin straps, M.!” she called over to me. I was vigorously treading water to keep my head above the water line and gazed at her in amazement. She leapt up from the grass and stood tall then motioned proudly at her antiquated bathing cap, unfastening its strap. “I’m far more practical than you’ve ever given me credit for, you know!”
* * *
The next evening, the culminating Saturday night of Reunion Weekend, we all gathered for the presidential address staged poetically in front of the white-brick-and-black-shuttered quaintness of Dartmouth Row. Our class gift would be presented to the College president, a particularly auspicious occasion since our donations had apparently shattered all previous class giving efforts. Behind us, a green light atop Baker Library burned fiercely through the waving, pastel strands of dusk. It was jokingly referred to as the “money light” as it only shone when weepy alumni returned to gaze up at it, investing its emerald glow with wistful meaning that may or may not have all been in our heads.
“Though ’round the girdled Earth you roam, every five years the hill winds call you back,” our president sang out to the sea of alumni swaying sentimentally before him. “And your College is here waiting for you. It always will be. You are its old, faithful friends who have gone forth to add righteousness to the greater world sprawled out beyond this green campus.”
I was sinking back into the hypnosis of the heartwarming remarks when I heard the approaching racket of Belle and spotted the shining yellow of her head making its way through the crowd to find me. She couldn’t proceed discreetly, or resist issuing giddy waves and startled cries to fellow classmates such as “Oh, hullo!” or “You must call me!” or “You look fabulous!”—leaving a trail of flattery, letterpress calling cards, and thumping hearts behind her. In the three seconds she devoted to each person, they would have felt she had singled them out in some special way. Her presence would leave a faint afterglow—though at that stage she was only considering the launch of La Belle Époque, a branded perfume—hovering around them like an incandescent, pale-gold ring circling an angel’s head. When she finally reached me, she took my hand in hers and squeezed it, sending me a nonverbal message I couldn’t begin to decode.
“I feel so refreshed,” she leaned in and whispered in my ear, giving my hand a second, excited squeeze then letting go. “You were so right to sign us up for the rafting. Taking that plunge was exactly what the doctor ordered.”
I felt a wave of happiness at hearing this—being back in the crisp river water had cleared her emotional palate just as I hoped it would.
“The water was so cold, you see,” she continued, uninterested in the happenings onstage or the ability of fellow alumni to hear what was being said. “It’s as though it shocked everything into clarity.” Belle jostled her lengthy limbs around in an off-the-mark impression of a patient getting rocked by electroshock therapy. I knew what that sort of physical silliness meant. She was giddy—thrilled, even. My face had half-melted into a gratified smile until I looked back to the stage to see the pastel-clad mass of Chase Breckenridge grinning broadly as he stampeded toward the president, carrying a giant check across his vast chest. Though the check actually was the sum
total of our class’s combined giving efforts that year, he brandished it like a billboard advertising the limitless expanse of his personal net worth. It certainly looked at home balanced on his mighty torso: Chase was fourth-generation Dartmouth and the campus was littered with Breckenridge Family donations including The Breckenridge Family (’02, ’38, ’66, ’06) High-Definition Video Scoreboard at Memorial Field and the Breckenridge Visual Arts Center and an endowment ensuring a legion of trumpeters would blare a sufficiently inspirational fanfare at every Commencement until the end of time.
A giggle—yes, it was the girlish skip of a giggle that I heard escaping Belle’s lips. I looked at her to confirm that it was the sight of Chase and his giant check that had done it. My smile froze. Belle had always been the sort of girl who couldn’t cut the cord, sever the last sinew of a relationship until she had an eligible boy, wild-eyed with bouquet in hand, waiting in the wings to escort her away. Chase didn’t have a bouquet, nor did the wild look in his eye have anything to do with loving her, but he did possess an oversized method of payment. Something flickered across Belle’s eyes as she watched him plant himself alongside the president onstage and her future as Mrs. Breckenridge clicked mechanically into place.
The formal ceremony wrapped up shortly after that and I felt a sick pit sitting like a deadweight at the bottom of my stomach. More than anything I wanted to escape back to the mid-Fayerweather dorm room I was staying in—to be as far away as possible from the disingenuous farce that was Chase and Belle. But Belle tore through the crowd and yanked me along with her using physical force that was surprisingly powerful for her thin frame. Chase saw us on the approach but stood fixed and rakish with his jaw locked and his collar popped, letting us climb up the stage stairs to meet him.
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