Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Their guide had told them chilling stories about the crusader Reynaud de Châtillon, who had been Governor of Karak at the time of Salah Eddin. When he wanted to kill somebody, de Châtillon put a wooden box over the man’s head and forced the family members to push him off the wall; the victim could not die from a heart attack on the way down because he couldn’t see when he would hit the ground. Sometimes, their guide said, instead of pushing their husband or father off the wall, the family members would take hold of his hand and jump.

  Rowan still didn’t really understand what had happened on that trip. As soon as they’d resumed their normal lives back home, the honeymoon had taken on the quality of a half-forgotten nightmare.

  Now he wondered if he’d internalized Mariam’s silencing of what he felt had been valid observations about a foreign culture. Surely real respect for a person – a people, a place – meant being prepared to see the good and the bad, the wondrous as well as the disturbing.

  They had married young. He’d always known there would be many different phases to their life together. He had promised himself that he would always shapeshift for her. But it was sometimes exhausting, toeing the line, following her lead.

  Nobody at the dinner table – not even Mariam – noticed him crying. He was persona non grata. He wiped his face with the starched napkin, and drank some water.

  Jules and Eloise returned from the bathroom. Eloise’s eyes were red but she looked unburdened, whereas Jules seemed weighed down. That’s what we do for our friends, Rowan thought. When the load gets too heavy, we take their woes and carry them for a while.

  That was what he had tried – and failed – to do for Jomo. Who was, by the looks of it, still aiming to drink himself to death. His eyes had gone droopy. Earlier in the evening, he’d talked a big game about dancing all night, but it seemed increasingly likely that Jomo was not going to end up anywhere after dinner except passed out on a comfortable couch at the Spee.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jules said to the table.

  Rowan dug for his wallet, trying to suppress his anxiety at the impending tab. Then he saw that Jomo had already tossed his credit card to the waiter and shooed him away. Rowan’s mood lifted, even as he felt jealous that Jomo had so much money he could decide on a whim to pay for everyone’s dinner in a place like this. He and Mariam had budgeted $300 for this meal, and it turned out it had cost them nothing. This meant tomorrow they could justify a splurge on Darwin’s sandwiches with the girls!

  But would Mariam even want to speak to him after how he’d behaved tonight?

  The others had already gathered their jackets and bags and belongings, and were following Jules in single file through the main seating area of the restaurant, winding between tables.

  Rowan rushed to catch up to his friends. As he reached them, he saw that they’d all stopped in their tracks beside the table where Fred Reese was seated, his arm draped over his fiancée’s shoulders. The Traitors Three were there too, and a few guys Rowan didn’t recognize. From the size and shape of them, he guessed they’d rowed crew with Fred at college, at least during their freshman year, when much had been made of Fred’s talents (the university had to come up with some excuse for why he’d been admitted). Now these men were not so much chiseled as large and going to seed.

  ‘I take it you enjoyed the champagne,’ Fred said to their group, his eyes on Eloise.

  Jomo was swaying slightly, holding on to the back of a chair for support.

  ‘Clearly someone did,’ Fred said.

  The room had begun to spin around Rowan – all the emotion of the night had coalesced into something that felt like drunkenness. He was drunk on rage. This was his moment to speak truth to power!

  He took an unsteady step forward, adrenaline flooding his body.

  ‘Do you have something to say?’ Fred said, in a mocking voice.

  But Rowan could not speak.

  The Traitors Three began to titter, and that was when Binx came to Rowan’s rescue. In one fluid movement she picked up a dessert fork and stabbed it right through the roast artichoke heart that Fred had on his plate.

  The violence of the gesture galvanized Rowan.

  ‘Shame on you,’ he said to Frederick P. Reese II, more meekly than he’d planned.

  And then, because he didn’t know what else to do, he went up the stairs, and through the hotel lobby, and out into the warm rain of a sudden spring downpour.

  Chapter 9: Mariam

  Saturday morning of Reunion Weekend

  (May 26, 2018)

  The SoulCycle workout room was packed. As far as Mariam could see from her spot in the back row, there was not a single empty bike, and everybody – whether they were bed-headed fifth-year reunionees or silver-haired fiftieth-year reunionees – was getting really amped, warming up with standing cycling sprints.

  Mariam had never done SoulCycle before. She began to feel nervous.

  Earlier that morning, she’d left Rowan in their suite with the girls, without giving him any indication of when she would be back to help out. She was hoping an endorphin rush could help her push reset on the weekend, which she’d been looking forward to for so long but now felt was slipping out of her grasp.

  In the mirror, she could see the intense, drank-the-Kool-Aid look on Jomo’s face as he geared up on his bike. She’d bumped into him on her way into the MAC gym, and he’d told her he did SoulCycle classes regularly. Jomo had always been a sucker for enlightenment exercise fads. She remembered him getting really into hot yoga when it first became a thing, and then tai chi, and then tae bo – which wasn’t even a real martial art, just some guy called Billy’s meld of boxing and taekwondo moves.

  The MAC had been majorly upgraded since she’d last been inside it. She hadn’t spent a lot of time here as an undergraduate; she remembered occasionally doing sit-ups on filthy old mats on the stair landings – space had been an issue, especially at peak times. She’d always felt intimidated by the determined, skinny girls who worked out so seriously on machines that made no sense to her. Some of them had even mastered the complex art of studying while exercising, their coursework books propped on shelves above the treadmills.

  Once, Mariam had used the StairMaster for half an hour without even realizing the thing wasn’t turned on, and nobody in the line waiting for the machine had felt any compulsion to point this out.

  Rowan, too, had disdained gym culture as a student. Back then, he’d been a purist, jogging outside for hours even in sub-zero temperatures, through snow and fog and sleet, returning home in a state of mushin no shin, the Zen expression for ‘mind without mind’. These days, he was as unfit as she was. There were too many chores on weekends, and they both prioritized their time with the girls over time for themselves.

  Maybe SoulCycle could become their new thing. Now that Bushwick was a haven for millennials, there were probably a dozen SoulCycle studios in their area; she just hadn’t been paying attention. She almost sent Rowan a funny text proposing the idea, but then she remembered she was angry at him.

  The instructor had put on a headset and was shouting a welcome that had the vocabulary of a benediction – inhaling intention and exhaling expectation – and then she pumped up the music so high it hurt Mariam’s eardrums.

  The overhead lights went out and a disco ball was lit up by strobe lights, which turned out to be an actual blessing, because it meant that the room was dark enough that nobody could see Mariam trying to stand-up pedal while simultaneously tapping her butt back onto the bike seat in graceless squats.

  At some late stage in the workout, faint with overexertion, she spotted the woman with the white streak in her hair, whose breastmilk she’d poured down the sink. She was hard at work on her bike, seemingly fit as a fiddle. Mariam hadn’t exercised at all for six months after having each of her babies, and after that all she’d been able to manage was a stroll in the park. She was about to think something spiteful when suddenly all her negative thoughts disappeared.

 
Had she achieved mushin no shin?

  As if in answer to her question, the instructor shouted, ‘You are on a journey to change your life! You can do this!’

  Mariam whooped along with the rest of the cyclists at their final peak, and applauded louder than anyone else at the end of the class, basking in the instructor’s praise for their physical and spiritual super abilities. Apparently she was still an affirmation junkie, just like the rest of them.

  Leaving the MAC with Jomo, Mariam’s legs were shaky, but she felt great. Content, emptied out.

  ‘Was Jules awake when you left the suite?’ Jomo asked her.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Mariam said. ‘Her door was still closed.’

  ‘I hope I didn’t wake the girls when I got in last night,’ he said.

  ‘No, not at all,’ she lied. In fact he had woken Eva when he’d tripped on the suitcase lying open in the middle of their room, on his way back from the bathroom.

  ‘How was the Spee?’ she asked.

  ‘It was dead. I think everyone went too hard on Thursday night,’ he said. ‘But tonight you’re all coming with me, no excuses. The afterparty is open to everyone in our class.’

  ‘That’s if I’m still awake after the dinner-dance,’ she said, thinking, There’s no way I’m going to the Spee tonight.

  Mariam paused as they approached the Kirkland House entrance. She wasn’t ready to show Rowan mercy. ‘You want to get something to eat?’ she asked Jomo.

  He hesitated – Mariam guessed that he was eager to see if Jules was up – but, to his credit as her friend, he said yes.

  Being part of a web of blocking-group friendships meant that – as with siblings in a big family – the configurations of allegiance and intimacy changed regularly, in subtle ways. Mariam had grown up with two sisters, but even for her it had taken a while, once they’d formed their blocking group at the end of their freshman year, to adapt to these cyclical rhythms of friendship and to know where she stood with each of the others.

  She and Jomo, for instance, had both liked to eat dinner early at college, as soon as the Kirkland dining hall opened at five-thirty pm, while the others generally arrived later. This meant that, back then, they’d known a lot of the details of what was going on in each other’s lives and studies. There was more personal give-and-take over a meal shared by two in comparison to the jokey, nonsense conversations they tended to have when eating as a group.

  It was during these early dinners that Jomo had encouraged her to pursue an idea she had for her senior thesis topic, for her major in Folklore and Mythology: the symbolic use of desserts in famous folktales such as ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘The Gingerbread Man’, and ‘The Magic Pudding’. It was something she’d always liked about Jomo – that the most popular guy in their class was as comfortable getting excited about her interest in fictional desserts, or about the field trip he and the other Earth and Planetary Sciences majors were doing to study ‘fold-and-thrust’ belts in the Canadian Rockies, as he was about holding the record for longest ever keg-stand at the Spee.

  She’d gone on to write about the lesser-known Italian folktales collected by Giambattista Basile in the sixteenth century, which featured blancmange and cassata and syrup-honey floods. Mariam’s favorite Basile story, later adapted by Calvino, was about a woman molding a husband for herself out of sweet dough, only to have him stolen by another woman on the day of their wedding. ‘The Handmade Man’, it was called. For ages she’d dreamed of writing a recipe book that was also a modern retelling of these fairytales. But she had never found the time to do it, or the confidence.

  ‘How’s your mom doing?’ Jomo asked in a cautious tone, as they walked toward the cafés around Brattle Square.

  Mariam understood he was trying to be respectful, not digging for details of her family’s mourning. ‘She’s okay. I think she’s enjoying being selfish for once,’ she said. ‘Caring only for herself.’

  A story her mom used to tell came to mind, about the day that Mariam, the youngest in the family, had started school. Anticipating her new freedom, Mariam’s mother had returned home after school drop-off, squeezed lemon juice onto her hair, put on her swimsuit, and sat for hours next to the pool, eating grapes, hoping to end the day with her dark hair streaked with blonde. Nobody pulling at her hem or needling her. Just silence and sunlight.

  She had been younger that morning than Mariam was now, a strange thought.

  Yet it had turned out to be a false freedom. School had meant ever more intense demands on their mother, and their father had never taken up any of the slack. And later there’d been the misery Mariam and her sisters had visited upon their mother during adolescence, as they’d tried to individuate, rejecting her model of womanhood to establish their own. They’d never once thought of things from her perspective. Now Mariam knew that her mother had been going through her own hormonal changes in those years, perimenopause and then menopause. The four women in the family had been at opposite ends of the hormonal roller-coaster, all taking it out on one another.

  What would she do the day that Eva started school, several years from now? Mariam had a sneaking suspicion that though she often wished that milestone would hove into view sooner, she would spend that first day of freedom crying into her pillow at home, or lurking outside the school, trying to catch a glimpse of her youngest daughter in the playground.

  ‘Does it get any easier?’ Jomo asked her.

  ‘Grief? I suppose so,’ Mariam said. ‘What helps the most is that Dad made it so clear by the end that he wanted to die. He read a lot of philosophy in his final months, and would send long emails to me and my sisters. I didn’t read them at the time, it was too painful. But I went back and looked at his last emails to me, and I was struck by something he’d quoted. That sickness is useful because it makes us look at death with less frightened eyes. I think Dad took a lot of comfort from that, and he wanted us to as well.’

  She and Jomo chose an outdoor table at an organic café and ordered egg-white omelets and kale juice with wheatgrass shots – not something Mariam ever normally had for breakfast.

  The guy serving them looked to be in his seventies. It was something she was noticing more and more these days – people forced back into menial jobs (or forced never to leave those same jobs) at the time of life when they deserved to be putting up their feet, taking it easy for once.

  The café made its employees wear name tags, probably in an attempt to establish a connection between customer and server. But all it did, in Mariam’s opinion, was humiliate the staff. My name is: TONY, his name tag read. My favorite food is: NOODLES.

  ‘How’s your mom doing?’ Mariam asked Jomo. The juice wasn’t as bad as she’d expected.

  ‘Really great. She’s in full remission now,’ he said. ‘Thanks for asking.’ He was silent for a bit. ‘It’s been good for my parents’ marriage. Small blessings, right?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It changed the dynamic between them,’ Jomo said. ‘Maybe it’s not her getting sick – maybe it would have happened anyway as they got older. Mom used to be meek and mild, and Dad was more dominant. But now he follows her around like a puppy. She rules over him and they’re both happier for it. Last year we went on a family vacation to Hawaii, and they came skipping out of their hotel room and told me they’d just taken a bubble bath together.’

  Mariam smiled. ‘It’s nice to know things can get better as well as worse.’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah. Happy couples, like you and Rowan, seem to figure out how to fall in love with each other all over again at different times in your lives. I guess that’s what it takes.’

  Mariam felt irritated by this comment, though she knew Jomo was trying to be nice. He had no idea what it took to keep a marriage alive, let alone happy, over years of being together. She decided that the day he actually found the courage to get engaged, she’d mail him her copy of Alain de Botton’s portrait of a modern marriage, The Course of Love. It was so bluntly accurate about
how marriage could feel, day to day, and how in just a few hours the emotions passing between spouses could go from lust to rage to boredom to tenderness to indifference and back again to love.

  When the check came she insisted on paying. ‘The dinner last night must have cost you a small fortune,’ she said, as they got up to head back to Kirkland. ‘And Rowan ruined it. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘We all played our part in the disaster,’ Jomo said. He cleared his throat. ‘Did Rowan say anything to you about me?’

  ‘About you? No. He may have tried to as we walked home, but I very quickly made it clear that we are on a no-talking basis until further notice.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on him, Mariam.’

  ‘I just wish he’d let me fight my own battles occasionally,’ she said. ‘I don’t really have any problem with what Binx and Eloise are planning to do. He thought he was speaking up for me, but he was speaking for me.’

  She’d been thinking about this as she lay awake in the night, stewing in her anger, having exiled Rowan to Alexis’s single bed on the other side of the room.

  What Eloise and Binx were proposing was on the more extreme end of the scale, but she understood why they were doing it. She’d known couples who had, by choice, exclusively formula-fed their babies, and pioneered a different model of parenting as a result. No matter how supportive Rowan had been when it came to getting up to do the night settling and changing, the buck had always stopped with her boobs. She’d loved being pregnant and breastfeeding (most of the time), but she’d also been aware that they were the final things standing in the way of a truly egalitarian split in the parenting labor. So she could see what was appealing about unhitching the work of producing a baby from just one person in a partnership.

  Mariam decided to keep complaining about Rowan, while she had a captive audience.

  ‘He did the same thing earlier this year, when my mother offered to help out with private-school fees for Alexis,’ she said to Jomo. ‘He just assumed I would be on the same ideological page as him, and he told her that we were choosing to send her to the local public school where he’s principal because we want her to experience hardship firsthand. And because if we sent her to private school she’d be among the children of our enemies. “The children of our enemies”! Can you imagine me ever using such a phrase?’