Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  How could Eloise take the risk of bequeathing that sort of sad thirst to her own child? For it was unquenchable, a thirst for something you could never get back. She did not want her child to feel as she had: abandoned by somebody who, by the laws of human bonding, should have chosen never to leave her side.

  A couple weeks previously, Eloise had managed to trick the receptionist at the fertility clinic into giving her Ana’s home address – even though they had not yet signed the final paperwork to reserve their place in her womb. She’d driven out there on a Saturday morning, hiding for two hours in her car outside Ana’s house near Hyde Square, in Jamaica Plain, before she felt brave enough to ring the doorbell.

  Ana had answered the door, heavily pregnant.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she’d said wearily.

  Clearly Eloise was not the first fertility client to have surprised her with a visit. And clearly Ana had not revealed during their interview all those months ago that she was already pregnant. Now it made sense why the paperwork had stated that the surrogacy could only begin in the fall. Which gave Ana about three months to recover between pregnancies.

  ‘Is your husband home?’ Eloise said.

  ‘No,’ Ana said, wiping her hands on a dish towel. There was no ring on her finger anymore.

  ‘You don’t really have a husband, do you?’

  ‘You don’t have a husband either,’ Ana said, with a note of challenge in her voice. ‘And nobody seems to have a problem with that.’

  A young boy of about 4 or 5 had come up behind Ana, and looked shyly at Eloise. ‘Is this your baby?’ he’d said, putting his hand on his mother’s large belly.

  Eloise, speechless, shook her head.

  He’d looked closely then at Eloise’s stomach – she was wearing a loose top over jeans, which was meant to hide her weight gain but had in fact accentuated it.

  ‘Do you keep your babies?’ he’d said. ‘Or do you give them away, like Mamá?’

  Eloise had turned and fled.

  But she could no longer avoid facing her feelings. The paperwork for the surrogacy had to be signed this Monday.

  In all their discussions about the surrogate, somehow she and Binx hadn’t ever really asked themselves the question that should have come before all others. Do we really want to have a child?

  Elly+ had helped Eloise answer that question truthfully for the first time. Her answer, she had realized at two am, sitting across from her avatar in the basement, was no.

  Chapter 8: Rowan

  Friday evening of Reunion Weekend

  (May 25, 2018)

  The private dining room of the restaurant within the Charles Hotel, one level beneath the hotel lobby, was even more lavish than Rowan had imagined. The decor made him feel as if he were in the lost underwater city of Atlantis. Instead of windows, there were fish tanks built into the walls, filled with psychedelically colored fish. The backlit tanks sent ripples of bluish light across the room. Before the endless platters of food had started arriving, there’d been an arrangement of marine coral on their table, which the server had spirited away like a merman.

  It was the first official night of reunion weekend, when friends from all classes – though tilting toward an older, wealthier crowd – met here for an early dinner before going to their respective cocktail parties, each held at a different venue around the university. Jomo must have pulled some strings to reserve the private room for one of the most sought-after slots in the restaurant’s calendar, Rowan thought. Jules’s name would have done it, but Jomo would never drop her name, as a matter of principle.

  The fifteen-year cocktail party later that night would be held in the Barker Center, which reflected how low they still were in the hierarchy of reunions. The building had an attractive outlook but it was a far cry from, say, the main reading room within Widener Library, which some historian or other had described as the most ostentatious interior space at Harvard: mint-green inlaid panels on the high, curved ceiling, and gold lampshades. For that privilege, they’d have to wait a couple more decades.

  The tenth-reunion drinks had been held at the Woodberry Poetry Room within Lamont Library. Though small, it was a nice space made colorful by the jackets of the vinyl records stacked on its shelves. Rowan had spent a lot of time there as an undergraduate, listening to the scratchy recordings of poets reading their work aloud, enraptured by the sound of their voices. ‘It’s a curious place, Harvard,’ his favorite poet, Robert Creeley, had once said in his ear, as if he were in the room beside him.

  He’d been 20 years old when he took that course on Creeley and the other 1950s Black Mountain poets. Creeley had never graduated, put off by the ‘sardonic stance’ of his Harvard professors. Rowan had been luckier; his teachers had been the opposite of sardonic. The wonderful professor teaching the class had encouraged them to memorize ‘Myself’, a famous Creeley poem about getting older, but Rowan could recall exactly none of its lines, only that he’d liked the poem as a student because it implied that middle age did not bring with it any special wisdom. Yet it was one thing to celebrate, while he was still young, that age would not bring clarity about how to live; these days he would prefer to believe that it would. The poets who extolled this as the truth were the ones he now wanted to read.

  But who were they? He couldn’t think of any. The ancients, perhaps? No. The Greek lyric poets were damning about middle and old age, he knew that much. They classified the young and the old into two separate species – all the good things belonged to the heroic young. Once you were old and ugly, they believed, the only possible figure you could cut was tragic.

  Rowan ate too much, too quickly. Arancini and burrata and roast artichokes and pasta. The only dish he didn’t touch was the vitello tonnato. Eating veal bathed in tuna sauce in front of so many watching fish felt sadistic.

  In a food coma, Rowan’s energy dipped, and he was sort of relieved to be the odd one out in the conversations around the table. Mariam was showing Eloise photos of something on her phone, and Jomo, Binx and Jules were debating whether cryptocurrencies were a Ponzi scheme or the start of a brave new world order.

  Rowan gazed at the fish in the tank set into the wall. He recognized a few of the varieties: minuscule neon tetra, firemouth cichlids with red underbellies. He’d done copious research on these varieties before venturing to the pet store to buy Alexis some fish for her fifth birthday. She’d initially wanted a dog (‘No way,’ Mariam had said), and then they’d tried to talk her into stick insects or a few hermit crabs with numbers cutely painted on their shells, but apparently they had a high risk of dehydrating and didn’t live long.

  As the pet store attendant had explained how to care for the more interesting varieties of tropical fish, it had become evident that they were a shit ton of work to keep alive. So Rowan had deftly drawn Alexis’s attention to two goldfish, one big, one small, that were hiding in some waterweeds. ‘Look, honey!’ he’d said. ‘It’s a daddy fish and a daughter fish, like you and me!’ His enthusiastic ploy had worked: they had returned home with the two goldfish in a bag and instructions on how to set up the smallest tank the shop had for sale.

  Alexis had named the big one Mr. Webster (for him) and the little one Lexie (for her).

  What Rowan had not anticipated was how much he would worry over the welfare of these two dumb creatures – in particular over Lexie – once they were in his care. He’d begun to dread going into Alexis’s room in the mornings, convinced that Lexie would be floating on the surface while Mr. Webster, fat and happy, would still be alive.

  It wasn’t for Alexis’s sake that he was concerned – it would be good for her, he knew, to experience death on that scale, with low-stakes grief. It was for his own sake. He’d so successfully anthropomorphized the two fish that he’d begun to harbor a superstition that whichever goldfish died first would foretell how it happened in real life. Him or Alexis. Mr. Webster or Lexie.

  So one Saturday morning, while Mariam was out doing the grocery shoppi
ng and the girls were watching TV, he’d taken matters into his own hands. He’d scooped Mr. Webster out from the hollow underwater pineapple he called home and flushed him down the toilet.

  The relief he’d felt afterward was terrific. A father should always, always die before his child. It was the natural way of things.

  He’d kept his explanation to Alexis fairly vague – death had not been mentioned, but Nemo’s escape from the dentist’s fish tank and into the great wide ocean at the end of Finding Nemo had given Alexis hope that Mr. Webster had decided to go on some exciting adventures of his own.

  When a replacement goldfish was purchased, Rowan had closely supervised Alexis’s naming choice. She had settled on Fishtastic. Now he felt absolutely nothing when he went into her room in the mornings to feed the fish, even when Lexie seemed to recognize him, coming up to the surface with her mouth open, eager for breakfast – or for information about what fate had befallen old Mr. Webster.

  Thinking about Mr. Webster, and Alexis’s innocent acceptance of his disappearance, made him miss his daughters. That was another thing about parenting that he’d been unprepared for: that you could long, desperately, for some time away from your children, and then, as soon as you got it, long to be with them again. He wondered if he should call the babysitter and make sure everything was okay – but it might break whatever spell she’d cast and remind the girls of his and Mariam’s absence.

  From his seat, he could see out from the private dining room to the restaurant beyond. At one of the tables there were twins, who looked to be around 10, seated with their parents, eating with knives and forks, drinking out of real glasses. Capable of civilized conversation.

  It seemed unimaginable to Rowan that this would ever be possible for his family. Just as it had once seemed unthinkable – when Alexis was a newborn – that she would ever walk and talk, read and write, make jokes, sing songs. Whenever they tried to go out for a meal with the girls, he would end up cleaning mounds of spaghetti from the floor, or mopping up spilled juice, or acting as referee in their fight over the iPad – while Mariam inhaled her meal and chugged down her glass of wine. Then they’d swap roles so he could do the same. A few months would pass and they would forget what a nightmare it had been, and they would venture out to the local Italian place once more only for the same disaster to play out.

  Rowan scanned the restaurant. All these rich people stuffing food in their mouths. He had been intending to register as a card-carrying socialist – a Marxist, even – for a while now, and he decided he would, as soon as they got home. What was the point of being poor if not to be belligerent about forcing rich people to share, threatening to burn down the world if they didn’t? Only the poor had nothing to lose if the existing structures imploded.

  Across the room, twirling squid-ink pasta onto his fork, was Frederick P. Reese. Rowan eyed him spitefully. What did the P even stand for? Some WASPy name like Philip, or Petersham, or Prendergast. Frederick’s fiancée was beside him, the one with the Russian name Rowan couldn’t now remember, and the eyes of a cat. She was not eating any of the feast Fred and the others at the table were lustily enjoying.

  Rowan watched as Fred chewed on the pasta and wished that, like Roald Dahl’s Matilda, he could make things happen – make objects move, energies shift – through the intensity of his feelings.

  Hatred was a bizarre emotion. When it was really upon you, in you, as it was in Rowan right then, it felt almost cleansing. Like love, it was a hot emotion; no wonder the common expression for it was that hatred bubbles, like oil in a pan. Perhaps that’s what it felt like to murder someone out of pure hatred. Like spontaneously combusting.

  In retrospect, it was so simple to identify what might count as a necessary evil. Anyone in their right mind, for instance, if given the chance to time travel, would gleefully murder Hitler. But would the people of the future imagine time traveling back to this moment to murder Fred Reese? Would they wish they could stand in the center of this underwater room and shout ‘J’accuse!’ to every single person in it who was nibbling on arancini instead of slitting Fred Reese’s throat?

  He was about to indulge this murderous fantasy even further and plot how, having dealt with Fred, he would somehow get close enough to President Reese to off him, too – they were a hydra, after all, and both heads needed to be cut off – when Jomo interrupted his thoughts by tapping his wineglass with a fork.

  Jomo had his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. While he waited for the others to stop talking, he refilled his glass with the wine he’d ordered for the table – one of the most expensive, Rowan had noted with a wince. It was made, according to the description in the wine list, using a method called skin-contact, which involved leaving the grape skins in during fermentation, making a white wine that was, in fact, orange. Go figure.

  The dinner was meant to be a celebration of Jomo’s birthday, though Rowan hadn’t remembered this until Jules mentioned it on the way to the restaurant. Rowan realized, as Jomo got ready to speak, that he should have got in there first to make a toast – he’d been wrapped up in his own thoughts instead of focusing on his friend. Now it was too late.

  ‘Today I turned 38,’ Jomo said. ‘And while I was out running this morning, I realized something for the first time.’

  Rowan’s pulse began to race. Jomo was about to say something he would regret forever.

  He thought he’d managed to coax Jomo down, off the proverbial ledge of this insanity, earlier that evening, while they were waiting in the Kirkland courtyard for Mariam and Jules to finish getting ready.

  Jomo opened his mouth to keep speaking, then seemed to change his mind and fell silent. Rowan knew he should interject. But before he could think of what to say, Jomo started his speech afresh.

  ‘When I was making my way through the labyrinth of Heathrow Airport after landing in London,’ he said, ‘in one of the byways, I passed a grand piano. It had Play me written on it in different languages. There was a very, very old man sitting on the stool, playing Chopin from memory. Nobody paid him any attention. We were all tired, and in a rush to get through the final hurdles after the flight, to be let out of the holding pen of the airport.’

  Jules was smiling up at Jomo. She had no idea what was coming. Rowan had to do something.

  ‘I didn’t stop to listen,’ Jomo continued. ‘I felt resentful that he had so much time to spare. I just kept walking. But as soon as I was outside the airport, I wished I could get back in and sit by his side, listening to the beautiful music he was making. He was old enough, that man, to be in death’s waiting room. For all I know, that was how he’d chosen to spend his last few hours on the planet. It made me think – how would I want to spend my last days, my last hours?’

  Across the table, Mariam caught Rowan’s eye and raised an eyebrow.

  In the group’s scramble to get to the restaurant on time, he hadn’t been able to tell her what Jomo, jittery and jumpy, had said to him in the courtyard. That he was in love with Jules; that he’d been in agony all afternoon, touring the Museum of Natural History’s gem collection, over whether and when to tell her. Jomo had been about to declare his feelings as they stood looking into the glittering maw of a geode sliced in half, revealing amethyst crystals lining its insides, like an opening to another, better reality. But then Jules had rushed off to meet up with Eloise and Mariam at the salon. Jomo had told Rowan he’d spent the rest of the afternoon in his room, breaking up with Giselle over the phone, a really shitty thing to do, he knew, but better than many of the alternatives.

  Rowan had felt flummoxed about what to say in response. Of all people, Jomo should know that almost everybody in Jules’s life, except for her parents and the four of them, had at some stage asked her for something beyond what she wanted to or could give them. It was the unforgivable sin with her.

  It had always been obvious to Rowan that Jomo was in love with Jules, though he had faithfully kept to the omerta code of saying nothing, resisting t
he temptation to speak with innuendo about Jules and Jomo in the early days of their friendship. All of their blockmates had done their best to give them space and time to build a platonic relationship, when it was clear to Rowan that, on Jomo’s side anyway, the only thing that should have been built was an edifice to undying love.

  Yet Jules’s feelings about Jomo were a mystery. She adored him, that much was obvious, but could she ever be in love with him? Rowan doubted it. She was too self-sufficient. She had learned very young – thanks to her fame as a teenager – to depend first and foremost on herself. Unlike most people, Jules did not seem to be searching for a soul mate; she certainly had never given the impression of needing one.

  So that was what Rowan had focused on in his response to Jomo’s confession. He had tiptoed around the issue, throwing up subtle warnings about whether Jomo’s feelings for Jules were – or could ever be – reciprocated. He’d counseled Jomo that perhaps he should wait until he’d seen Giselle again in person before making a decision. He’d gone on at length about how being back on campus made it hard to think straight, that it was easy to get confused about which strong feelings belonged in the past and which should be given expression in the present.

  This had been very unsatisfactory advice, Rowan realized now. And Jomo, apparently, had ignored it, which meant the bonds between everybody sitting at that table were in peril. Whether they acknowledged it or not, their group was held together by Jomo and Jules. They were its center. If Jomo destroyed the delicate emotional balance between him and Jules – and perhaps even their friendship – he would be destroying their blocking group as a whole.

  At the head of the table, Jomo, looking increasingly disheveled, continued to speak in metaphors that weren’t making much sense to anybody except Rowan. There was still time to derail him.

  Rowan stood up, pushing his chair back so suddenly it almost toppled over. ‘No man should have to make a toast at his own birthday celebration,’ he said. It wasn’t the world’s greatest intervention, but it was the best he could do. ‘Please, raise your glasses . . . happy birthday, Jomo!’