by Mandy Berman
Liv did not make friends with other women easily; much as she tried, they were mostly wary of her, and the ones she did become friends with were often beautiful and vapid. She hated to use her looks as an excuse, but she had yet to find any other evidence to support it: most unglamorous women were intimidated by Liv.
Fiona wasn’t. She joked with Liv, poked fun at her, as if Liv were nothing special. She wore oversized blouses that hid her body, and no makeup, and she never brushed her hair; she often looked like she had overslept and was running late for class. She also had a giant, unhinged smile, and a too-loud laugh, and her seeming indifference to what other people thought about her actually made her exceedingly likeable. If Liv could spend time around someone unafraid of the opinions of others, maybe she, too, could learn to care less.
Liv was quick to claim Fiona as her new best friend, writing her letters when she went away for the summer to be a camp counselor in the Berkshires. Then, when Helen died, Liv suddenly found herself Fiona’s only actual friend from Buchanan. Liv was good at helping people in a crisis, and she felt it was her duty to stand by Fiona. She was happy to do it, really, though “happy” was perhaps a callous term for the circumstances. Liv had always thrived on being needed. She liked to cook for Fiona, or bring home bottles of Sancerre from the boutique wine store downtown, or even sleep in the same bed with Fiona on the nights she was afraid to sleep alone. Some weekends, they went to frat parties, Liv keeping one eye perpetually on her friend, making sure she always had a drink in her hand, a boy to dance with. Or she would get them weed from her boyfriend du jour—the joints always pre-rolled; Liv had never learned how to do that herself—and they’d stay in and smoke, order Chinese food, and watch Mean Girls for the eight hundredth time.
Once, Fiona’s drinking had felt like a reasonable coping mechanism—how else was she supposed to escape when the unthinkable had happened?—and Liv had never witnessed any over-the-top public displays of drunkenness. Liv supposed she had drunk more, too, during their carefree sophomore and junior years, when college felt like it had the capacity to last forever. Things felt different now. Fiona seemed to be getting sloppier, more unhinged. Liv worried about her, but also began to feel that Fiona didn’t want her help anymore. Just the week before, Fiona had gone home with Gabriel Benoit after Liv had warned her not to, but Fiona had been defiant when Liv tried to intervene. It was clear that Fiona didn’t want Liv’s input, didn’t appreciate Liv’s good intentions. If she didn’t want help, maybe Liv needed to stop offering it. Why waste so much energy in caring for a friend who spat it right back in your face?
Then, at the department party the other night, Liv watched Fiona down three plastic cups of cheap wine, one after the other, her cheeks turning pinker as she made irreverent comments in front of Oliver Ash and Professor Roiphe. It was embarrassing; Liv had wished she was talking to the two adults alone. Liv was trying to plan for her future in this horrible economy—she wished she could figure out how to telegraph to Fiona how important it was to start planning for her postgraduation life, too, and how cavalier she was being about her own future, but Fiona would immediately get defensive, using Helen’s death as a way to end the conversation, the way she always did. Because what, ultimately, could be said in response to that? What did Liv actually know about losing a sister? About losing anyone, for that matter?
She heard footsteps, and the faint sound of the front door shutting, two flights down.
She exhaled. The sudden silence both freed and scared her. She didn’t love being home alone; their house was old and rickety, and not in the safest neighborhood. The floorboards creaked when they weren’t supposed to. Her laptop was sitting at the edge of her bed, and she folded in half to grab it. She opened her iTunes and put on Fiona Apple, because she could never think of anything better to listen to.
Her browser was open already, and she went to check her email. No new messages. In her drafts folder, there was a (1). She clicked it.
Still an empty message addressed to [email protected]. She’d looked up his email the night of the department party, had written it out in the address bar, then found herself at a loss for words.
She looked across to the framed photographs hanging on the wall opposite her bed: Liv, standing between her parents on the football field, the night of high school graduation, a National Honor Society cord around her neck; Liv and her roommates, drunk at Waffle House late one night, sophomore year; Liv and Brandon, in a black-and-white photo that she recently had printed. It had been taken on a hot night in New York last summer; she was in a skimpy sundress, Brandon in his khaki shorts and boat shoes. They were on the sidewalk outside the bar they frequented on the Bowery, Brandon standing behind her, his arm around her neck like a vise, her hands tightly gripping his forearm. The pose gave the impression that she was holding onto him, but she knew that in that moment she had been pulling his arm away. Wasn’t the beginning of a relationship supposed to be fun and exciting? Or had she understood, even from the very start, that choosing to be with him was equivalent to a life sentence? They’d only been dating for five months. Why, then, did it feel like the relationship was going to last an eternity?
“He said ‘it’s all in your head,’ ” Liv sang along. “And I said ‘so is everything,’ but he didn’t get it.” The draft waited in front of her.
“Dear Oliver,” she began to write. Too informal. Delete-delete-delete.
“Dear Professor Ash,” she rewrote. As she typed, she found herself grateful to Marley. Marley’s escapade at the reading might have embarrassed Liv at the time, but it also gave her a reason to send this email.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Thursday, September 25, 2008, 10:26 P.M.
Subject: Tonight’s reading
Dear Professor Ash,
I don’t know if you remember me; we met last week at the English department back-to-school party. I have long black hair parted down the middle and I was wearing a black sweaterdress; we talked for a bit with Professor Roiphe.
Tonight, my roommate and friend essentially accosted you at your reading, and although I know she isn’t my responsibility, I felt somewhat obligated to email you anyway and offer my apologies on her behalf. I was mortified, not only because it was extremely inappropriate, but also because I think you’ve written two beautiful books. I also think that fiction, as you said tonight, deserves to be taken at face value.
Anyway, I really hope that I have the chance to study with you before I graduate. I have been working on a novel and would love to be able to workshop it in your fiction writing class in the spring.
Sincerely,
Liv Langley
She clicked Send, her adrenaline coursing, and picked up his book again. She kept the laptop open while she read. She knew he probably wouldn’t respond until Monday, if at all, but she found she couldn’t concentrate on the words in the book because she kept looking up at the laptop screen anyway, refreshing the browser every two minutes. When her phone vibrated she jumped; it was a text message from Brandon: “Missing you.”
After half an hour of trying to read, she got up to brush her teeth, the floorboards croaking in complaint as she walked to the bathroom.
She shared this bathroom with Fiona, and was glad to have it to herself tonight. She washed her face, moisturized, inspected her skin for any blemishes; there were none. She brushed her teeth, flossed, and inspected her teeth, too, in the mirror, with a wide, joyless smile.
Returning to her bedroom, she put on her pajamas and climbed into bed. As she went to close the laptop, it made a dinging noise. She reopened it to find a single white subject line in her inbox above the read emails.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Thursday, September 25, 2008, 11:53 P.M.
Subject: Re: To
night’s reading
Dear Liv,
Thank you for your thoughtful note. It was awfully unnecessary, but nonetheless kind of you to write. I can’t say I blame your friend. By all objective accounts, I am a scumbag, and I expected something of this nature to happen upon my return to the States. Buchanan has been very kind to me, and I can only hope that I’ll be able to prove myself again, somehow, to the community here.
And, yes, of course I remember you. As for the class: I’ve been told that entrance into my senior fiction workshop next semester will be by permission only. Why don’t you come to my office sometime next week and tell me a little bit about what you’re working on?
Best,
Oliver
“Of course I remember you”? 11:53 P.M.? Was Liv reading too much into this? Surely, he couldn’t be the one to make the first move, not with his track record. This would be up to her. With her heart racing, Liv responded: “Wonderful—I would love to come by your office. Monday okay?”
Two minutes later came his reply confirming the meeting: Monday at 1:30, after his class.
Liv ducked under the covers of her bed and let out an unabashed squeal. In the hours before she could fall asleep, she lay motionless with the lights on, clutching her teddy bear safely to her chest. When Brandon called for the third time, she unceremoniously turned off the phone.
* * *
On Monday, Liv got to Leviathan early, and the English department secretary told her she could wait in Professor Ash’s office until his class got out.
She sat in the chair across from his desk, crossed her legs and then uncrossed them, smoothed out her hair. She’d thought for a long time about what she could wear to this meeting, tried nearly everything in her closet until she finally landed on what she always ended up wearing: a dark turtleneck, a flannel schoolgirl skirt, and knee-high boots. A look that was professional, that would assert her seriousness about this class—because she did, in fact, want to study with him—but also a nod to the fact that she was interested in other ways, too.
The bookcase behind the desk was filled with books by Jewish men: Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth. Over a summer break a few years earlier, she had read Goodbye, Columbus, and found herself angry on behalf of the girl by the end of it, which probably meant that Roth was doing something right. The girl, Brenda, did everything she could to get the boy she loved to stay with her, including getting a diaphragm, which was illegal for unmarried women then—and she didn’t even want to, she only did it because he pressured her to—and still she ended up getting caught and in trouble for it, while the boy got away scot-free. Isn’t that life, Liv had thought, turning the last page of the novella. She’d been disappointed to learn that the short stories in the collection following the novella were male-centric and more heavily focused on Judaism, dry and unrelatable. She soon gave up trying to finish it.
“Hello?” Oliver said from the doorway.
She turned. Her stomach dropped in excitement at the sight of him: at his height, at his professorial blazer and glasses, at his hair haphazardly askew. He looked confused, and then had a moment of recognition. He’d forgotten about their meeting.
“Hi,” she said, with what she hoped was a shy, alluring smile. “Is this a bad time?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I’m just getting out of class. We went a few minutes over, got caught up in a rousing discussion about one of the students’ short stories.”
He rounded the desk and sat. She noticed again the pockmarks in his face, signs of age or acne scars. It felt strange trying to reconcile the crush she’d been working up in her head for weeks with the man in front of her now. Sometimes, in her fantasies, she’d forgotten what his face looked like and would need to look at the back of the paperback again to remember. Now he was in front of her, and he still looked radically different from the photograph. He was so much older now. There wasn’t quite a seamless way to marry her own image of him with his actual, real-life face.
“So, you’re interested in taking my course next semester?” he asked. “Is that right?”
“Yes,” she said. “You mentioned it’s by permission only? I guess you’re in high demand.”
“I’m at a loss as to why,” he said with what was obviously false modesty. He must know he was a name here, and that she wasn’t the only undergraduate to have a crush on him. “So why don’t you tell me about this novel you’re working on?”
“I’ve been writing it for some time,” Liv said, “but I’ve never shown it to anyone.” There was, of course, no novel.
“Okay,” he said. “Why don’t you send me a chapter? And I can take a look.” He paused for a moment, his brow furrowed. “I’d like to see, if that’s all right with you.”
Her lips pursed; this wasn’t the response she was hoping for. She’d foolishly thought the fact that they’d emailed before about this, close to midnight on Thursday, was entrée enough, and that talking about the novel was just a formality.
“Okay,” she agreed. “I can do that.” The novel lie had been a tactic to prove her seriousness, but clearly it had backfired. She would send him a short story from last year, backtrack and say she wasn’t quite ready to show the novel to anyone. She knew the story was good.
“Great,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to reading it.”
Liv’s eyes traveled again to the bookshelf above his head, a photograph now catching her eye. She pointed to the frame behind him.
“Is that your family?” she asked.
It was a picture of Oliver and what appeared to be his wife and son, sitting on a couch together. A picture of domestic bliss. He turned to look at the photo himself.
“Yes, that’s my family,” was all he said.
She was disappointed; she wanted more information about the woman and the boy. He had mentioned his wife and son during the lecture, but she was curious about details. Why wouldn’t they have come to Buchanan with him? Maybe there was some sort of recent break that would explain him being here.
He did not offer any more information, and Liv suddenly felt apprehensive. She was used to being the one pursued, and not the other way around. And how did one come on to a professor, a power figure—especially when that professor might still be in a relationship, when there was a family involved? And then she thought, sharply, of Brandon. Did she only want this because it was some rite of passage she felt she had to experience, a bucket-list item of sleeping with a professor? Was it worth hurting Brandon for an experience that would probably prove to be insignificant in the long run? Brandon wasn’t a bad person. He didn’t deserve to be cheated on. If it was to happen, the thought of him ever finding out made her feel queasy.
Oliver Ash stood and Liv followed suit. He offered his pleasantries, and promised that he would read Liv’s work as soon as she sent it to him. Maybe this was all for naught, she was thinking. Maybe she should let this go.
But in that moment, as she was thinking of dropping this entirely, she felt his hand on the small of her back. He held it there for a few moments, a beat too long for it to be accidental. She felt her heartbeat quicken and sank her lower back into his hand.
She turned, and he took his hand away, and looked at her.
“Goodbye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” she said, and he shut the door behind her.
6.
FIONA EMERGED FROM Franklin Hall after finishing her shift at the communications office and walked out into the central quad. It was finally, truly fall, and she was glad for it. Campus had more or less burst into flame: gigantic orange-leaved trees obstructed the views from the taller windows of the brick academic buildings; scarlet and yellow foliage littered the grass around burnt-red Adirondack chairs. Heat was no longer tolerable for Fiona: warm weather reminded her of camp, of what had been lost. Every summer now she longed for the day the weather would turn, and then
she could breathe again.
She worked ten hours a week in the communications office; although her father covered her tuition and her books and her rent, Fiona liked being able to have her spending money, however paltry, apart from his funds. This didn’t change the fact that every month he plopped another thousand dollars into her checking account for no specific reason. She lived modestly, only spending money on groceries and booze, and did her best not to touch what he wired to her. He’d gone back to work two weeks after Helen died. He had cheated on her mother, and now they were divorced. Fiona saw no need to maintain the emotional aspects of that relationship.
She checked her phone to find a message from Liam: “You still haven’t called Mom, have you?” It was probably two weeks since he’d last probed her. He was right: she hadn’t talked to her mother since the first week of school, when she was still settling in. Time somehow both expanded and contracted at college. The days went painfully slowly, and then one day you looked up and a month had gone by, and it felt like you had learned nothing new at all.
She parked herself in one of the Adirondack chairs and dialed home. Her mother picked up on the second ring.
“Well, hello,” Amy said, already on the defensive.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Did Liam tell you to call me?”
“He might have.”
“Whatever it takes, right?”
“You know the beginning of the semester is always a bit of a shit show.”
“Language.”
When Fiona and her siblings were younger, her family had a “language jar,” and every time any of them said a bad word they would have to put a dollar from their allowance into it. Amy had supersonic hearing—Fiona and Liam and Helen could be in the TV room without any adults, and one of them could say “fuck” or “shit” or “asswipe,” and Amy would call from the kitchen, two rooms away: “Language!” Now it was only a knee-jerk reaction. There were, of course, no longer any repercussions.