The light outside was beginning to fade. He switched on the lamp. It was exactly the same as the ones in the rooms when he was at college, black metal and a silver dimmer knob; maybe it was the same one. The bulb threw a wide circle on the ceiling that transported him right back to those evenings he’d spent in this common room, studying late beside Mariam at the desk, while down the corridor Jules and Eloise slept or studied in their own rooms.
The room smelled the same as it did back then too. He parsed the different notes: steam and wood and something funkier, from generation after generation of hormonal young adults living and breathing this air. It was the smell of youth, and hard work, and sex, and passion, and despair; the exertions of the mind, the ministrations of the body. In these rooms, life had been lived at a very high pitch, and something of that must have soaked into the walls and floors and ceilings.
Maybe they still used the same brand of floor polish and the same paint for touchups between each wave of incoming students. The hissing steam radiators, always abruptly turned off on the first warm day of spring, were unchanged, as was the blocky furniture used and re-used by all who lived here, clothes packed into and out of the same chests of drawers, books stacked on the same shelves.
Rowan settled his head deeper into the pillow and tried to visualize every room he’d lived in during his four years in the college dormitories.
First there’d been his double in Canaday, one of the worst freshman residences in the Yard because of its infamous ugliness (built of cinder block in 1974), but convenient in the coldest months because it was close to Annenberg Dining Hall.
Then, at the end of their freshman year, their blocking group had won the jackpot in the housing lottery. They were assigned to live the next three years in Kirkland House, most desired of all the upperclassmen houses built along the Charles River. They’d been given special dispensation (thanks to Jules) to form a mixed-gender blocking group of eight, though at the time single-gender blocking groups were the norm. It was one of the few times Rowan had ever known Jules to be willing to play the celebrity card to get something she wanted, which in this case was making sure that she and Jomo were put in adjacent suites in their entryway, since by that point they were inseparable as best friends.
How joyfully he and the others had followed the Bedford Minutemen troupe, who were dressed up as officers in General Washington’s army and playing drum and fife to lead them from the Yard to their new place of residence! It had made them feel even more special to be given the chance to live in a house with such a storied past, near the ground trod by Washington’s soldiers in the Revolutionary era.
And each year after that, they had moved up the internal Kirkland housing ranks, until finally they had found themselves in these top-floor senior suites, up a stairway so steep it had left him breathless, even back in his days of regular half-marathons.
From up here, they had ruled as the kings and queens of Kirkland House. Jomo had started the beer-brewing club in the old darkroom in the basement, and Mariam and Rowan had organized the house-wide Secret Santa, and even Jules had been persuaded, once, to perform at the annual holiday pageant, where she’d sung Janis Joplin’s ‘Cry Baby’ to Jomo’s piano accompaniment, and brought the house down.
Rowan tried to remember what he’d put up on his walls in each room he’d lived in through college and came up empty. Jomo’s choice of decoration, however, he remembered clearly, because he’d kept to the same theme all four years: a large Tanzanian flag stuck to the ceiling above his bed. He’d told them once at breakfast that the flag had come loose in the night and floated down over his face, and he’d dreamed he was being buried in the red earth of the Serengeti. (He’d not been there, yet it seemed to occupy a lot of space in Jomo’s youthful dreamscapes.)
Rowan tried again to remember what he had put on the walls of his freshman double in Canaday.
Still nothing came to mind.
Yet he could remember every inch of the decorations in Mariam’s prized single room in her freshman suite in Weld Hall. Pictures of cakes and pastries torn from magazines – ‘food porn’, she’d called them, which was the first time he’d heard that term – and framed photographs of her parents, grandparents, sisters, high-school friends, childhood friends. A perfect web of love and affection, which had made Rowan wonder if he could offer her anything more. It had taken a long time before Mariam had been able to admit to him that her relationship with her father was far from easy, that she’d never felt his love was unconditional but had also never had the guts to really test this supposition by failing in any of her endeavors.
Rowan realized he couldn’t remember any decorations in his own room because he hadn’t put any up. That double in Canaday had been nothing but a place to store his clothes, because he’d pretty much moved in to Mariam’s room the moment they started dating. He had spent the best nights of his life in Mariam’s room. He hadn’t needed to decorate his walls because everything there was to say about himself he’d said by crossing the Yard holding her hand, the fall sunlight slanting through the orange leaves.
I am because you are, he’d said to her one night, when they were coming home from the library together. He had just learned the phrase in a class on world philosophies; he couldn’t recall now where it was from. But it summed up how he’d felt about her then, and how he still felt about her so many years later.
The inane chatter of the cartoons Alexis was watching pierced his reverie. How long had she been sitting on the toilet? Her legs were probably already numb; she was still so little that her feet didn’t quite reach the floor from the seat. She was still so small in every sense, and yet so much was expected of her already. It was inconceivable that, in a few short months, she would be starting school.
During her kindergarten orientation, he had tried to resist the urge to keep checking in on her, aware it would look unprofessional as the principal, and also not wanting her teacher to be able to read his thoughts: Am I putting my social conscience before my child’s needs? Will she pay for my high-mindedness?
He knew some of the other parents with kids also starting kindergarten, the ones who already had older kids at the school. He knew what they were dealing with in their lives and, in his work identity, felt full compassion for them. But in his role as Alexis’s father, he was severely prejudiced against anybody who might get in the way of his daughter’s happiness. He had never told Mariam the truth about that day: that during recess he’d spotted Alexis sitting all on her own in the canteen, staring down into her lunch box filled with chopped carrots and a wholegrain sandwich while, at the next table over, a raucous bunch of her peers showered each other with Cheetos.
He looked up at the clouds drifting across the twilit sky. We’ll give it a year, he said to himself. And then we’ll see.
Before getting on the train at Penn Station that morning, Mariam had bought a copy of Eloise’s latest book, The Pursuit of Joy. She had tried to speed-read it on the train, and Rowan had pretended to be not the slightest bit interested in whether it was any good. Now, searching for a distraction, he picked up the book from where it lay on the floor next to the bed, beside their suitcases, which had already disgorged clothes and toys all over the room.
He flipped to the back flap. There was a large color photograph of Eloise, her red hair styled in an updo, her freckles tastefully showing through her foundation. The author bio was short and fairly restrained:
Eloise A. McPhee is a Professor of Hedonics at Harvard University. She and her wife, Binx Lazardi (founder of Who-Min-Beans.org), enjoy hiking, historical fiction, and hanging out with friends. This is Professor McPhee’s second book, expanding on her New York Times bestseller, Seeking Pleasure.
Her best sellout, Rowan thought cruelly. He’d heard about the gargantuan size of Eloise’s book advances. Like everybody else, she had, in the end, gone for the big bucks, churning out these mass-market self-help books. How was that any different from peddling opiates to poor, depressed people? Peopl
e got addicted to self-help books. If you read enough of them, you began to think you couldn’t live without them. Eloise was profiting from hoodwinking the masses.
He opened the book at random and began to read, expecting to be turned off by the falsely confiding tone and dumbed-down language he felt sure would be used in such a book.
Instead, completely against his will, he was gripped by it immediately.
The chapter he’d dipped into was about the ‘pleasure-pain’ of parenting young children, how it was the most rewarding emotional labor while simultaneously being, at times, mind-numbingly boring or kill-me-now hard. He was surprised that Mariam hadn’t mentioned this was one of the topics Eloise tackled; maybe she’d skimmed over it entirely.
Eloise had written frankly about one of the added difficulties of modern parenthood: that couples know all too well what they are missing – losing – once they have kids, since by that point they’ve usually had many years as individual agents, and a few more as a gooey-in-love party of two.
He and Mariam had had an especially long time to relish life as a married twosome before they had kids. A whole ten years. There were so many stupid little things he missed from that time. Their Friday evening habit of eating smoked mussels on crackers when they got home from work, and then going out for a long walk around the neighborhood, before finally settling on a restaurant for dinner around nine pm.
Rowan had always told himself that this extended time as a couple had made it easier for them to adapt once Alexis arrived – they were ready for a change by then, and had already knitted their lives together such that the stresses and shocks added by parenthood would be better absorbed. Yet reading this passage in Eloise’s book, he thought back to the staggering grief they had both felt after Alexis was born, but only confessed to each other years later. In those first months with a newborn, they had both privately thought, Why did we ruin the paradise we had created for ourselves?
Not that Alexis was the serpent who destroyed their idyll, but she was the first sign that their carefree bliss was over. As somebody else had put it – perhaps Christopher Hitchens? – once you became a parent, you were forced to exist for the rest of your days with your heart torn out of your chest and free to walk around (in the form of your child) in a world that conspired to hurt as many hearts as possible. Before Alexis, he had sometimes imagined what he would do if he lost Mariam. But that fear had paled in comparison to his terror of something bad happening to his daughter. His tactic to keep Alexis safe was to imagine the worst, so it would not happen to her. This was no better than peasant superstitions, but – as someone who no longer believed in God – it was all he had.
That feeling, the way that his pure joy in Alexis and Eva so often shaded into terror at his vulnerability to loss, Eloise very helpfully named in the next paragraph: it was called joyful apprehension. And it was okay to feel it – all parents did. It was part and parcel of opening yourself up to the risk of loving another person so intensely.
Most feelings of joy, Eloise wrote, were in fact ‘grief inside out’. This was a quote from her colleague, the legendary psychiatrist George Vaillant. He’d led the decades-long Grant Study of male Harvard graduates from the classes of 1939–44, charting the contours of their lives after college and into old age to understand what made them happy, or unhappy.
So it was natural, Eloise claimed, for a couple filled with joy by their new baby to also feel some heartache about what they’d lost. Some people said the nine months of pregnancy were exactly that, not just anticipating what you’d gain but a slow learning to let go of what you’d had before; the woman’s belly growing month by month into a physical barrier between a couple, a very literal sign of things to come.
Eloise recommended that new parents should not hide these feelings from each other, and could hold a ceremony for themselves to make friends with their new fear of loss, lighting paper lanterns like the ones people light for the Thai New Year and letting them rise into the night sky.
Rowan wondered what it signified that Eloise had included this chapter on the joy-grief of parenting in her book. He was pretty sure she didn’t want kids herself. Banning children from her welcome party that evening was a sign she wasn’t even prepared to make accommodations for her friends who did. He remembered a conversation they’d had over Memorial Day weekend, a couple years back, when Jomo had invited them out to his summer rental in the Hamptons.
Looking at Mariam, then pregnant with Eva, as she floated in an inflatable tube on the pool, Eloise had said to Rowan, ‘You know what they say about being a parent . . . you will only ever be as happy as your unhappiest child.’
It had not been the most charitable thing to say to a sleep-deprived father still adapting to the reality that he was going to have a second kid.
And yet, in her book, Eloise was nothing but consoling to parents. She assured them that it was normal to sometimes feel unhappy while spending time with young children. After all, young kids were mildly insane creatures with no reasoning abilities, who broke time up into very small chunks so that you – the adult – could not experience flow. It was true, Rowan thought with a smile, that every time he was starting to enjoy an activity with the girls, one of them would make a request (demand) that would disrupt his ability to enjoy himself.
Through all of human history, childminding was known to be repetitive, a strain, a chore, a bore. Socializing a miniature wild human so that they eventually became a useful member of society was the hardest work on earth, and was designed to be done in community, not by one person alone, or even two people. But for better or worse, Eloise said, this was how it was expected to be done now. Her advice to modern-day parents was to get rid of the guilts and, instead of fretting all the time about whether they were doing a good job, try to put parenthood itself in context.
These were feelings Rowan had hardly acknowledged having, even to himself. How could he find the words to express something so contradictory: that he absolutely adored being a dad, while at the same time abhorring certain aspects of it? It was the first time he had felt validated as a parent.
By Eloise. The irony!
Their academic rivalry at college had been legendary, the source of much entertainment for their blocking group.
Their paths had diverged after college, which had helped calm their competitive urges: she had gone into academia, he had gone into elementary-school teaching. He’d even begun to feel a respectful camaraderie with her, post-graduation, since both of them had stayed true to their values by choosing a life of the mind (in her case), or a life of service to others (in his case), over any of the more lucrative opportunities available to them.
During their senior spring, for instance, Rowan had been perplexed to find himself fielding phone calls almost every day from investment banks in New York City wanting to recruit him because of his perfect GPA; he’d even been tempted to take one of the jobs to pay off his substantial student loan as fast as possible. But Eloise had talked him out of selling his soul, and Mariam had talked him into doing Teach for America with her after graduation.
Mariam must occasionally regret giving him that pep talk, he thought. It had been fifteen years since they graduated and he was still paying back that student loan. On a public-school principal’s salary. It was part of the reason they were still renting, why he couldn’t imagine them ever being able to afford to buy a place of their own.
Whenever he got mail from Harvard Alumni & Development Services asking for donations and ‘gifts’ and bequests, he viciously tore the envelope into little pieces without even opening it. In the lead-up to the reunion, the Class of 2003 Organizing Committee had asked for donations toward the cost of printing the Red Book, and for the Class Gift (it was always their goal to raise more than they had for the previous reunion), and he’d considered writing an open letter to his classmates detailing exactly how much he ‘donated’ to Harvard every month, in the form of his loan repayment plus interest.
It sucked balls
that he’d missed out by a few years on the university’s initiative to reduce the financial burden on middle-class students at Harvard, whose parents wiped out their entire life savings in order to send them there (as Rowan’s had, and Eloise’s too), and who took on heavy student debt that dogged them well into their professional lives.
In a recent email with highlights from Harvard Magazine, he’d read a headline about a woman from their class who had just donated millions to the university, to develop an innovation lab to rival Stanford’s. He’d clicked on the article, to find out how she’d made all that money, and discovered she had made it by selling ‘smart’ pet rocks. ‘Like Siri or Alexa,’ she’d said in the interview, ‘but in pebble form.’
He had pulled out a handful of his thinning hair. Smart pet rocks!!! She’d probably denuded hundreds of beaches and lakeshores of pebbles so that friendless idiots could have heartwarming chats with their talking rocks and pamper them with expensive accessories – like lamb’s-wool bedding and hypoallergenic straw – and yet here she was being celebrated by the most prestigious university on earth.
Mariam said he was beginning to have frustration management issues.
Mariam also said he needed to keep his powder dry, that he was going up like firecrackers here, there and everywhere, wasting his righteous anger on trivia.
He blamed President Reese. For all of it. Those who were with Reese were enraged, those who were against him were outraged. Either way, there was no escaping it.
Being back on campus, Rowan could feel his old insecurities being churned up, reminding him of how he’d felt on arriving as a freshman, how hard he’d worked to prove he deserved to be there.
No. That wasn’t the truth.
‘Insecure’ wasn’t even in his vocabulary when he’d arrived on this campus as an 18-year-old, with so many experiences his for the taking. His college years had been genuinely happy ones, mainly because of Mariam, but also because of his great fortune in forming satisfying friendships with his blocking group. He’d vacuumed up every idea he’d been exposed to in his classes, expanding his mind to its outer limit. He’d signed up for every extracurricular on offer.
Life After Truth Page 6
