by Mandy Berman
“I’d like to do women’s health, I think,” she said. “And be an ob-gyn. If I can hack it.”
“Really?” Liv said. “You never told me that.”
“You never asked.”
“I’m so awed by the number of students here who end up in professional schools immediately following graduation,” Professor Roiphe said. “I’ve had several English majors over the years who have gone on to become doctors.”
“I’m sorry to break it to you,” Fiona said, “that I will not be one of them.”
She smiled kindly at Fiona. “And what about the rest of you? Any plans shaping up for next year? Or maybe it’s too early.”
This was a sore subject. Liv and Lula had interviews scheduled—Lula at the Natural History Museum and at the Smithsonian; Liv at a couple of publishing houses in New York—but Fiona would, of course, be back to school in the fall.
“Oh God,” Lula said, graciously sparing Fiona this discussion. “Absolutely not.”
She leaned forward and waved across the line of them to Professor Ash, who had largely remained silent. “Hi! I’m Lula!”
“Oliver.” He waved back.
“What’s your plan, Professor Ash?” Liv asked, turning toward him. “You’re only here for the year, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m headed back to Berlin in May.”
“Are you writing a book there?” Lula yelled down to him. With six of them in a straight line, and the bar beginning to fill up, it was getting harder and harder to hear.
“Sort of,” he called back, and left it at that.
“What’s it about?” she called. She pointed to Joseph for a refill on her champagne. He refilled hers and then Marley’s, finishing the bottle.
“Another?” Joseph asked her.
Lula nodded.
“You know what, I’m gonna come over there so I can hear,” Lula called to Professor Ash.
Marley stayed where she was, and Fiona noticed that while Professor Ash began to give a roundabout description of a family epic, Joseph brought the new bottle of champagne to Marley and filled only her flute. He leaned across the bar then, and they began to chat, just the two of them, their faces closer than Fiona’s had ever been to his. Meanwhile, to her right, Lula, Liv, and Professor Roiphe were listening intently to Professor Ash. All three of them had looks on their faces like he was saying the smartest thing they’d ever heard.
“So it sort of probes into this idea of what constitutes a ‘survivor.’ Did one have to go to a camp, or be in hiding, or do the European Jews who fled count, too? So there’s some research there, about the narrative of the Jews who escaped in time, and how they fit into the question of survivorship, tied in with the notion of inherited trauma and framed by a more personal story of the relationship between this narrator and his father.”
“Is the father a survivor?” Liv asked. They were discussing this narrator and father like they were fictional, but Fiona, who had read Professor Ash’s second novel, knew it had to be inspired by his own life.
He took a sip of the champagne before answering. “That’s the question, I guess. Who gets to call themselves that?”
“My grandfather fled Poland when he was a baby,” Lula said. “1937, I think.”
“Are you Jewish?” he asked. Lula was black, and it’d be hard to guess that she was half-Jewish if you didn’t know that her last name was Rosenberg.
“Sure am,” she said. “Well, not technically. Wrong side and all that.”
“Same here,” he said, seeming particularly touched by this information.
“I’m also a halfie,” Liv chimed in, and Lula turned to her, perplexed. “Half-Japanese,” she clarified.
“Oh,” Professor Ash said, “I see.”
Fiona felt suddenly out of place in this conversation. She had nothing at all to say to him in comparison with these two, who were urbane, sophisticated, worldly. She felt provincial in comparison. She checked on Marley, to find her still talking closely with Joseph, whose forearms were now on the bar, his head close to hers. A customer a few seats down from Marley was trying to get his attention. Neither of them noticed; Marley laughed in response to something he said.
“Joseph!” Fiona called to him, and he turned slowly, both surprised and annoyed to be interrupted. When they locked eyes she pointed at the middle-aged woman lifting her empty glass of wine to be refilled.
“Thanks,” he mouthed, though he didn’t seem particularly grateful, and she swore she saw him roll his eyes in Marley’s direction before removing his forearms from the bar and attending to the woman.
“Well,” Professor Roiphe said, replacing her empty champagne flute on the bar and looking at her watch. “I actually should be going.”
“Seriously?” Fiona said. “It’s only nine! You old lady.”
“Guilty,” Professor Roiphe said, putting her hands up. “It was so nice running into you all.” She looked over at Marley—Joseph was still chatting with her while he refilled the glass of wine—and saw that this wasn’t a moment to interrupt. “Please tell Marley I say congratulations again.”
“I’ll walk with you, Joan,” Professor Ash said, also standing. “Fridays are my writing day, and I’m afraid I would stay out far too late chatting with you lovely people if I didn’t leave now.”
Lula gave both professors air kisses on the cheek, and Liv, as if taking notes, followed suit. Fiona did the same. She tried to hide her disappointment that Professor Ash wasn’t staying and drinking more. He’d held tight to his formal, teacherly persona.
“I’m gonna go, too,” Liv said, checking her phone after the professors had left.
“What?” Fiona said. “Already?”
“Yeah, I’m gonna head over to Zeta.”
“Is that safe?”
“Totally,” Liv said. She took forty dollars from her wallet and put it on the bar.
“That’s way too much,” Lula said, pushing a twenty back across to Liv. “The champagne was on me.”
“No way,” Liv said. Liv did this sometimes; even though Lula was impossibly rich, Liv had to assert that she had money, too. Lula shrugged and took the bills.
“Bye, Mar!” Liv called to her friend, then smiled, because Marley didn’t hear her.
Lula reached across the bar, took the champagne from its ice bucket, and finished off the bottle, filling her flute and Fiona’s to the top. Joseph didn’t notice. Lula clinked her glass with Fiona’s once more.
“To us,” she said.
“To us,” Fiona repeated, and took a sip. She didn’t need this last drink, but she wanted to keep drinking, for the ritual of it, for spending more time out with her friend.
“It’s so rare we do this,” Lula said. “Just the two of us.”
“It is,” Fiona agreed. “I can’t believe it’s almost over.”
“It is not,” Lula said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Oh, don’t be gloomy. Let’s enjoy it while we can.”
“Okay,” Fiona said.
“That Oliver Ash is quite a specimen,” Lula said, raising her eyebrows.
“Tell me about it,” Fiona said.
“How do you concentrate? Those shoulders.”
Fiona sighed. “Don’t do this to me. It was hard enough to turn it off in the first place.”
“So you did have a thing for him.”
“Who wouldn’t? I’ve never even heard you express your attraction for a man before.”
“That’s…yes, that’s probably true.” Lula laughed.
“I won’t tell,” Fiona said. “I wouldn’t want them to take away your gold star.”
“But, Fee,” Lula said. “The way he was looking at you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t see it?”
“
I don’t see it because you just made it up.”
Lula shook her head, held her champagne flute aloft.
“He was staring at you. Everything he was saying, he was saying it to you, fishing for your reaction.”
“No way.”
“Yes way.”
“He’s married.”
“Like that’s ever stopped a man from getting what he wanted.”
At this, Fiona thought of her father, then felt uncomfortable at the perverted train of thought. She thought back to her conversation with Liam at Thanksgiving, how he’d said the situation between their parents was “complicated.” That their mother wasn’t totally blameless. It was true that Fiona knew little about Professor Ash’s home life, about his marriage. Certainly it couldn’t have been rock solid, given that he’d decided to be here all semester. But he was a father, too. In all of this fantasizing, she had not once put herself in the child’s position. Moreover, she had not thought about the fact that she was the child in this position, that her father had cheated with a perhaps unknowing woman, or several women. She didn’t know the specifics. Things were bad between their parents, according to Liam, before Helen had died. And then Helen blew it all open. How possible was it that the woman her father had an affair with knew anything about his home life? Fiona suspected she knew very little, that she was just an outlet for the issues in his real life, a person he could go to who knew nothing about him at all.
Lula’s father, too, had been a cheater, though they rarely talked about the similarities in their home lives. Fiona wanted to ask Lula if she was talking to her dad these days, but she thought perhaps it was best to keep the train of thought, from sex to fathers, to herself.
“Did you really think so?” Fiona said, looking over at Marley and Joseph again. Now their hands were intertwined over the bar.
“I think you could fuck him tomorrow if you wanted to,” Lula said, draining her champagne. “Come on, let’s go.” She stood up, and Fiona finished her own drink and followed suit. “Bye, Marley!” Lula singsonged. Marley didn’t even look up.
18.
LIV WRAPPED HER arms around herself, underdressed for the chilly April night. She walked down Phillips Avenue, well lit by the street lamps, past the admissions office, the registrar, and other administrative offices—two-story stone and slate houses, matching brass nameplates out front—lined up in an official row between centuries-old elm trees. The light cast eerie shadows of the trees, which still had no leaves on them, and their silhouettes looked like twelve-foot-tall men, the long prickled branches like translucent black arms reaching out to one another. She walked a few blocks down the avenue—past the International House, where she once accepted an award from the French Honor Society; past the Writing Cottage—and turned onto her street. The houses grew smaller, cheaper, and the streetlights were decidedly less bright. The sidewalks were littered with bottle caps and cigarette butts.
When she got to their house she was startled, at first, to see a woman sitting on their stoop. As she got closer, she realized it was June.
“Hi, June,” she said to their next-door neighbor. She was sitting on the top step with her tabby cat in her lap.
“Hi, honey,” the woman said in her raspy voice.
The two-family house that Liv and her roommates lived in was split down the middle; June, her daughter, and her granddaughter lived on the other side.
“You all right, hon?” June asked. Liv realized that she had stopped in front of the house, not planning to go inside, but was standing on the sidewalk contemplating it.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m actually going for a little walk.”
“Careful,” June said, patting the cat.
“I’ll be fine,” Liv said, and she turned on her heel and kept going.
* * *
—
The Zeta house was still a ten-minute walk from her house; it was far away from the rest of the frat houses, which were closer to campus, though it was the oldest and biggest of them all, and farthest from campus public safety, and therefore—though she was partial—threw the best parties. She turned right when she hit West Pine, passing brick townhouses all in a row, connected to each other, the porch lights yellow and dim.
There was no one out; this was the block where that student had been shot Liv’s sophomore year. It was past nine. She knew the pledging event had started at seven, and she figured the boys would be almost done by now. Brandon was supposed to call her when he was done; she hadn’t heard from him yet.
Things between them had been tense over the past month. Liv had gone to the Bahamas over spring break, with her parents and without him. As she had hoped, her father was placid and quiet, on good behavior, and it made her angry with Brandon for making such a giant deal over what turned out to be nothing. Nonetheless, she was putting in an effort at making things good again between Brandon and herself: bringing him snacks at the library when he was studying, delivering six-packs of fancy beers to the house when he was spending the night with brothers, or—like now—surprising him. All in an endeavor to forget that day at the ski mountain. He was the one who continued to be distant, who’d barely texted her while she was in the Bahamas and didn’t even ask how the trip was when she got back. He didn’t seem to want to have sex with her anymore, either, always putting it off or saying he was too tired.
Brandon had officially accepted his place at Columbia Law, while Liv had secured an editorial assistantship at a publishing house in midtown. Even though before spring break they had both been gung ho about the idea of living together, Brandon hadn’t brought it up since it became clear they were both going to be in New York. Liv worried, though she wouldn’t say so to Brandon or to anyone else, that he was having second thoughts. There were only two months until her move to the city, and time to find an apartment was running out, but she was afraid to bring it up with him, for fear that he’d changed his mind.
West Pine sloped sharply downhill, and she crossed at a traffic light, arriving at the Zeta house on the corner. The houses were bigger over here. The frat house itself was three stories, with an overhang above the front porch connected to the second floor and held up by staid brick columns. The porch lights were off; she opened her cellphone and used the blue light from the screen to guide her up the front steps, concave with decades’ worth of foot traffic from frat brothers and partygoers. At the heavy front door, she rapped on the brass knocker three times and waited. She peered in through the slim window beside the door; the main entrance, too, was dark and empty. They must be in the basement.
She called Brandon; his phone went straight to voicemail. Rather than being concerned about standing on an unlit street alone at night or considering that perhaps she should return home and wait for Brandon’s call, she found herself indignant. How dare he not be available? What were boyfriends for, if not this?
She knocked again, in vain. Called again and left a voicemail: “Hey, B. I’m standing here outside Zeta, and it’s really fucking cold.”
After she hung up, it dawned on her to try the door. To her amazement, it opened.
She walked through the dark entryway where she’d attended many a cocktail hour. The main stairs were ahead, a wide staircase with wooden banisters on both sides. She could go up to Brandon’s room and wait there. Though she had no right to go down to the basement—pledge rituals were of the highest secrecy, Brandon had stressed, many times—she had to admit she was curious. She assumed that whatever they were doing was stupid, and secret for the sake of secrecy but not out of any particular need to obscure the inappropriate or unlawful. They were probably just forcing the poor freshman boys to binge-drink and run around in circles until they puked.
So she tiptoed just to the top of the basement steps, where she began to hear yelling and cheering, and as she got closer it was an immense roar, as if seventy-five college-aged boys were watching a horse race in wh
ich they all had money at stake. The door to the basement was closed; she attempted to see if that, too, was unlocked. The knob didn’t budge when she tried to turn it.
She went up to Brandon’s room, the door to which was also unlocked. The lights were on, and the bed was unmade. There was a recently smoked bowl on the bedside table. She sat on the bed, propped a pillow up behind her head, checked her phone. It probably wouldn’t be much longer; he would be happy to see her. She opened the drawer of the nightstand—condoms, a big bottle of Lubriderm lotion, a lighter, and the thing she was hoping to find: a Ziploc bag of weed.
She emptied the burnt remnants in the bowl onto the nightstand and packed a new one. She had never done this herself, wasn’t even really much of a smoker, but she’d seen Brandon do it a million times, and what else was she going to do right now?
She pinched a few pieces of the weed between her fingers and pressed them into the round part of the bowl until they were packed tightly. She cocked the lighter back with her thumb, and held the flame to the weed, trying to get it all lit. She burnt her thumb three times before she succeeded, the embers glowing orange. She went to take her first hit, and sucked in far too hard; a giant whiff of smoke entered her airway and filled her lungs so fast that she coughed dramatically, repeatedly, beating her chest to get it all out. Immediately high, she looked around for water, or a glass to fill; in the mini-fridge by his desk, there was only beer, so she cracked open a can of Budweiser, taking a long sip, and then returned to the bed. Her coughing abated. Normal Budweiser was actually pretty good.
The moment she sat back and brought the beer to her lips to take a second sip, the door creaked open.
Brandon was shirtless, in basketball shorts, and covered from head to toe in a rainbow’s array of paint. Liv burst out laughing.
“That’s what your secret ritual is?” she said when she caught her breath. “Paintball?”
He looked angry in the open doorway. It was hard to take him seriously when his face was splattered with hot pink and electric green.