As someone had cynically remarked to Jomo at Eloise’s welcome drinks the night before, the general feeling seemed to be that it was always worth keeping powerful people on your side.
Jomo knew he had no right to judge others too harshly, given that in his own work – creating luxury jewelry for the highest end of the market – he was enriching himself by ravaging the earth. He could spin it otherwise, of course, if pressed, and describe himself as a niche scientist, a passionate gemologist who brought works of art to life. He had often, in a bind, quoted Pliny the Elder to elevate what he did: ‘For a great many people, a single gemstone alone is enough to provide the highest and most perfect aesthetic experience of the wonders of nature.’
It was official, Jomo thought gloomily, maintaining an even distance behind Fred: he was a hypocrite.
Take the way he was always an apologist and a booster for the existence of final clubs. In their years at college, the clubs had dominated social life on campus, doing whatever they liked within the secrecy of their ivy-strewn walls. The university had little sway over the management of the clubs. They were privately owned and endowed, run like independent fiefdoms by generations of Harvard men, the oldest of whom were now panicking over the university’s attempt to ban any clubs that refused to make their membership criteria gender-neutral. Some of the clubs were lawyering up and hiring PR firms to fight the university administration; others were grudgingly letting women in.
Jomo was always pointing out to his blockmates that the Spee had made the change without being forced into it at gavelpoint, but he knew that at its core the entire final-club system was fundamentally unfair. The slow victories over the decades of having Jewish men, men of color, openly gay men, and now women allowed in as members (to some clubs) did not mean anything of substance had necessarily changed.
Letting women into the Spee had not been smooth sailing, for instance; he’d heard that the first time sophomore women had ‘punched’ for membership alongside men, in 2015, many of them had felt they were being judged on their appearance and willingness to flirt with existing members. A Spee alum had recently commented to Jomo that the women should be grateful to be allowed through the front door instead of being forced to enter through the servants’ entrance, like at the other clubs. Which was not exactly something to brag about.
Even his relationship with Fred was more self-serving than Jomo cared to admit. He and Fred had been friendly at college. They’d punched the Spee together, had been seated side by side at the celebratory dinner the night they were accepted as members. There’d been some tension after the Eloise situation – though what exactly had happened between them was unclear – but still, Jomo had spent countless nights hanging out with Fred, loosely interacting with the same people. They had not been close friends, and he hadn’t voted for Fred when he ran for club president, but if he showed up at the Spee tonight, Jomo would feel obliged to greet him and shake his hand.
What was even worse was that Jomo owed Fred something – and owed President Reese something, too.
When Jomo had been applying to MBA programs, concerned that his inconsistent undergraduate grades might negatively affect his applications, he’d swallowed his pride and called in any favor he could, activating every possible node in his school and college networks. He knew he needed to include three letters of recommendation so glowing they were practically radioactive, from the most powerful people he could access.
Back then, Fred’s father had not yet become a hated man (by those in Jomo’s social circle, anyway). He’d been a buffoon, of course, but a rather beloved and indulged one – people had a soft spot for him and his eighties-era excesses; his gauche, gaudy hotels. He’d been well connected among businesspeople of a certain shady breed, and got a kick out of plugging his son’s friends into the circuit boards of power.
So one New York spring morning, metaphorical hat in hand, Jomo had gone to see him, the meeting arranged on his behalf by Fred.
Reese Senior had been on the phone when Jomo stepped out of the private elevator and into the hall of his Park Avenue penthouse. Reese’s booming voice had carried out to him, and perhaps he’d planned it that way; by keeping Jomo waiting for half an hour the objective of rubbing his nose in Reese’s importance had been achieved.
Jomo had vivid memories of their encounter after being let into the inner sanctum. The thick stalk of celery in the bloody mary Reese had offered him, though it was barely ten am. A large painting of Reese’s newest wife in nothing but a string of pearls. Broadway playbills with their iconic yellow and black lettering, framed and hung on every square inch of the living-room walls. Jomo had asked Reese which play had been his favorite. Reese had thought for a while, then responded, ‘Gem of the Ocean.’
It was a play Jomo happened to know well. He and Jules had gone together to Chicago for the premiere of August Wilson’s masterpiece, and Jomo remembered being struck by the fact that Wilson had been the child of a white German immigrant father and an African-American mother, just as he was.
Reese’s reply had thrown Jomo. Either he had better taste in theater than he did in most other things, or he was demonstrating that he knew a lot more about Jomo than it might at first appear. Awkwardly crunching on his celery-stick stirrer, Jomo had been impressed by this hint at a more complex inner life.
Yet when the duplicate letter of recommendation arrived, a month later, just in time for Jomo’s application deadlines, he saw Reese had been going for something else: humiliation. The instructions from Jomo had been for Reese’s secretary to email the letter directly to the schools to which he was applying, but Reese had clearly wanted Jomo to see it for himself:
We all know the struggles the black man of today must undergo to rise up from under the weight of family neglect and the temptation of a life of crime. Jomo is one of the most motivated, polite and ambitious young African-American men I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.
Jomo jogged faster as his outrage at this recollection grew.
And yet this toxic letter had done the trick. Jomo had been accepted into all of his top-choice schools. And when Reese Senior had later sent him a direct email, urging him to get in touch with an associate’s son also doing his MBA at Berkeley, Jomo had not only become friends with that guy, he’d made him his business partner.
As Jomo’s feet pounded on the path, the name of the main character in the August Wilson play returned to him. Aunt Ester. The soul cleanser. She helps a young man get to the City of Bones, aboard the slave trader called Gem of the Ocean.
Across the river on Storrow Drive, the traffic was speeding along the highway toward Boston’s city center, everybody in a rush to get somewhere. Thoreau’s immortal words came to Jomo’s mind. ‘It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?’
Early on, when Reese was first elected president, and Fred was appointed as one of his senior advisers, Jomo had chosen to believe that Fred was aware of the threat his father posed – maybe more aware than anybody else – and was getting involved to try to minimize the damage. It had been no secret, during his college years anyway, that he and his father did not see eye to eye. Yet at some stage, Jomo had realized he was wrong. Fred’s presence beside his father, as a supposedly intelligent and respected Harvard graduate, did not act as a corrective – it legitimized the reign of a bully President.
Jomo increased his pace. He was going to catch up to Fred Reese, and he was going to overtake him. It began to feel like a quest of mythic proportions. If he could just run fast enough to pass Fred, maybe he could find the courage for other acts of insubordination, though he was too out of breath right then to decide what they might be.
His legs burned, his lungs protested. A stitch began to form just under his rib cage. His shins ached with each footfall. But it was worth it, because Jomo was gaining on Fred, who had taken off his shirt, his pink back glistening with sweat. Jomo ignored the pain he was in and put his head down for a final push, launching into
a full sprint.
He was hit suddenly from the side by a solid, vicious blur. Some sort of beast lifted him up and off the path and toward the grassy shoulder.
While he was airborne, he experienced, for a few milliseconds, the fabled elasticity of time, and it seemed to him that he had forever to figure out a way to land that would result in the least amount of bodily damage. He also noticed – as if he were in zero gravity and it had simply floated out of his pocket – the ring moving in its own, separate arc, on a different trajectory from his own. The light catching the gem reminded him of the otherworldly, violet-gray hue of storm clouds at sunset.
He landed hard.
It took him a moment to figure out that one of Fred Reese’s Secret Service men had tackled him to the ground. This man and Fred’s second bodyguard now loomed above him.
He decided to lie very still. He spoke to the men in a calm voice, reassuring them he was on a recreational jog, nothing more, that he was here for his college reunion, that he and Fred had been classmates. That he’d been trying to catch up to him so that he could say hello to his old friend.
Finally, Fred approached, his footsteps heavy on the path; he must have turned around, or been summoned by his men. Jomo tried to paste onto his face the most non-threatening expression he could muster, but in that instant, he wanted to tear Frederick P. Reese II apart with his own two hands.
At first, Fred’s eyes were blank. Then, as recognition dawned, Jomo saw something else pass across Fred’s features. Amusement? Satisfaction at having put Jomo in his place? At demonstrating, once again, his power over him?
Fred nudged past his security detail and leaned over Jomo, offering his hand. It was the very last thing that Jomo wanted to do – touch this man’s damp flesh, let him pull him up from the ground. But he took Fred’s hand and was lifted up and onto his feet.
Fred tried to make a joke of it. ‘You’re too fit, man,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t have you catching up to me, now, could we?’
He slapped Jomo on the back, in the same place where his bodyguard had slammed Jomo’s body into the grass. ‘See you later. Maybe at the Club?’ he said, and jogged off, easily falling back into his regular pace, his men following in formation behind him.
Jomo stood there, silently watching them until they had become nothing but miniature figures in the distance, as insubstantial as a child’s drawing. Once they had disappeared from view, he brushed the dirt off his knees and elbows, checking for injuries.
He walked over to a bench beneath a cherry tree and sat down to stare at the slow-moving water of the Charles River.
Even if he didn’t say a word about this to Jules later, she would sense his distress and be present with him in a way nobody else in his life was. She had always been prepared to meet him halfway emotionally, wherever he needed to be met.
The shock of what had just happened had knocked a strange new thought into his head.
Why had he not seen it before? He was in love with Jules, and had been since that very first night on the roof of the Science Center, when she’d recited the message her mother had written from Jimmy Carter to the aliens.
Yet he’d never been able to admit it to himself, let alone to her. He had been afraid she would think he was in love with her because she was a famous actress, not because of the way her mind worked or her search for a bigger cause she could give herself over to. Her endearing brittleness when she was tired. Her laugh. Her smell. The shape of her soul.
For so long – for too long – he had believed that fame had put Jules on the other side of the river of life. While she could wave and shout to him from the opposite bank, and try to tell him what it was like, he would never really know unless he swam across and joined her there, which was impossible. But now he realized he had been an idiot to assume it was a gap that real love could not close.
Over the years, as he had become more and more committed to being her best friend, he had actively snuffed out every erotic spark between them before it had the chance to burst into flame.
He gingerly stood up from the bench, testing his body.
The ring.
He made a bargain, right then and there, with Fate: if he found his grandmother’s ring, he would accept it as the final sign he’d been waiting for that he and Jules were meant to be together.
Chapter 6: Mariam
Friday morning of Reunion Weekend
(May 25, 2018)
Mariam was starting to worry, as she pushed Eva in her stroller and Alexis scootered beside them, that none of the other mothers among her classmates would want to talk to her at the children’s festival in Radcliffe Quad.
Earlier that morning, in the few minutes she’d had to herself, she’d taken a quick look at the Red Book and been horrified to discover that Rowan had boasted in his entry about her natural births. Why hadn’t she checked what he’d written before he submitted it? She should have learned her lesson after the disaster of his entry for the tenth-anniversary report, which had been a stream-of-consciousness witnessing of Alexis’s birth, replete with details about Mariam’s ‘ring of fire’ as the baby’s head crowned. Mariam flushed with shame at the thought of it.
Rowan had not paid any heed to the scorn his entry might attract from other women in their class, who might feel their own choices were being undermined. As with the feeding question, Mariam had worked hard to stay neutral on the topic of birth, on anything to do with mothering.
Outwardly neutral, that is. When it came to her private opinions on these topics, it was a bloodbath of no-holds-barred judgment. So long as she didn’t say what she was thinking out loud, she felt she was doing her bit as a good, non-judgy feminist.
Mariam’s saving grace was that the Class Report had the weight and girth of the Bible, with text about that small, too. It was probably safe to assume that very few mothers of young children had found time to crack open its spine.
It was only mid-morning and already it was hot. She stopped to put sunscreen on the girls, which Eva resisted with every fiber of her being, and to make them drink from their water bottles, which elicited protests from Alexis: she wanted apple juice.
Mariam felt a niggling irritation at having to solo parent for the morning. Normally, Fridays were her day off from parenting. Rowan had negotiated a four-day workweek, leaving the school in the capable hands of his deputy on Fridays, so that Mariam could do one day as an educator at the Rising Dough Collective.
She knew the gig was beneath her skills, but it didn’t matter. She treasured every moment there. In the collective’s kitchen, teaching hapless teenagers how to bake bread and pastries, she felt connected to the best parts of her pre-kids career, when she’d worked with a talented group of women in the test kitchen of the domestic goddess then conquering Manhattan, Ursula Burton-Hughes.
After Alexis was born, Mariam had not gone back to that job. By choice, technically. It had been unthinkable that she would leave her six-week-old baby with someone else all day. So in fact it wasn’t really by choice; she was just wired that way. She understood that for women who went back to work, even if they didn’t desperately need to for financial reasons, it must feel the same: unthinkable that they would give up a career in order to hang around all day in the company of a baby. The goal of feminism, surely, had been to give women the ability to act on these individual preferences and predilections.
But with Eva she’d felt different. By the time she came along, Mariam had been full-time parenting Alexis for almost four years, and she wasn’t sure she could do it all over again, not at the same voltage. When Eva was six months old, Mariam had applied for the one-day-a-week position at the collective. She had set herself the goal of making it to Eva’s second birthday, and then she planned to send her to day care at least two days a week and ask for more work.
The problem was, with her low wages, she would essentially be paying for the privilege of working: the day-care fees would be higher than her monthly pay. Maybe, by the time Eva was two, there’d be f
ree universal preschool in New York City, as the mayor kept promising.
For high-minded reasons that now felt ridiculous and masochistic, she hadn’t sent Alexis to free pre-K when she turned four, because of a study that had done the rounds among the mothers she knew, citing evidence that staying home with an engaged parent had better long-term outcomes for the child. But the moment somebody offered her free any-kind-of-childcare for Eva, she’d be grabbing it with both hands.
Mariam took a long drink from Alexis’s water bottle. She knew it wasn’t fair for her to be bitter about doing the childcare for a few hours. Rowan was getting the morning off so he could go to the Phi Beta Kappa meeting with Eloise, and then to the memorial service for two classmates who had died since the last reunion.
Mariam was getting the afternoon off. She would take a nap, get her nails done with Jules and Eloise, and maybe fit in a round of drinks before their blocking-group dinner at the Charles Hotel.
Eyes on the prize, she counseled herself, sweat trickling down her back, as they set off again down Garden Street toward the Quad.
She knew exactly why she hadn’t checked Rowan’s entry for the Red Book – she was trying to give him space to do his thing, to be himself. In their first years as a married couple, she had sometimes felt nervous about what Rowan might say publicly about his love for her. Once she’d even kicked him under the table at a dinner party while he was deep into his favorite topic (how they’d met), because she’d noticed the invisible hackles rising on all the other people there.
To balance things out so that people would still like them – to deflect the evil eye of envy and resentment, in other words – Mariam had tended to take a sardonic tone whenever she spoke of Rowan or their marriage, falsely portraying them as mildly antagonistic spouses.
But at some stage in their relationship, around the time she reached her thirties, she’d realized, thankfully, that he wasn’t the problem. She was the problem. Why should she care what other people thought of him, of her, of them as a couple?
Life After Truth Page 12
