Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  Eloise, who seemed to be in a really good mood, though her face was bright red from sunburn, was saying to the others that she planned to overcome her fear of aging by practicing gerotranscendence. It was a term coined by some Scandinavian academic as a way of looking forward to the ‘third age’ as a time of wonders hidden from the young until they’d earned the right to access them. The path to elderhood, Eloise said, was laid with as many experiential riches as the path to adulthood had been.

  Easy for you to say, Rowan thought. Eloise’s path to elderhood was laid with actual riches. So was Jomo’s, and so was Jules’s. Whereas his was laid with . . . what? Sure, he was rich in other things: love, meaning, purpose. But it would be nice to occasionally trip over a big chunk of gold, just lying there in his path.

  Rowan checked his phone for messages from Mariam. She’d had to stay behind in their suite in Kirkland House because Alexis had refused to let go of her leg when the babysitter arrived.

  They’d made up, sort of, earlier in the afternoon. Her first words on deigning to speak to him had been ‘I can’t believe you got Darwin’s sandwiches without me.’ Then she’d read to Alexis and Eva for a while, and afterward he’d taken the girls to the playground. By the time they came back, he and Mariam had to start getting ready for their night out, while also coaxing the girls into eating some dinner, and bathing them in between everybody else showering, and generally trying to distract them from the fact that they were going to be left with a babysitter for the second night in a row.

  Alexis had figured out what was happening the moment Mariam plugged in her hair-straightener.

  ‘Mommy, please don’t leave me,’ she’d said, in her most woeful voice, and the campaign to destroy her parents’ evening was on.

  Alexis attaching herself to Mariam’s leg was a new tactic of manipulation; she’d brought out the big guns. It had been impossible to prize her off – after some initial cajoling, Rowan had resorted to using physical strength, but she had not budged, like a barnacle on a rock.

  None of the usual bribes for good behavior had worked, though Eva had cunningly taken them up on every single one of them, since out of fairness they’d had to promise her the same. The overqualified babysitter had sat there on one of the beds, getting paid to witness their failure to influence or control Alexis, while Eva sucked on two lollipops and gorged herself on cartoons.

  By then, their blockmates had been waiting for them downstairs for a while, so Mariam told Rowan to leave – he wasn’t exactly helping the situation – saying she would follow when she could.

  There were no messages from Mariam on his phone, which could mean she was right behind them, already on her way, or that she was still shackled to Alexis.

  Rowan had fallen behind the others. As he hurried to catch up, he passed a smiling elderly gentleman, who was walking with a cane toward Eliot House.

  ‘Good evening, young man,’ the gentleman said to him.

  ‘Good evening,’ Rowan replied.

  ‘Make sure you enjoy yourself tonight,’ the man said, putting his age-speckled hand on the sleeve of Rowan’s dinner jacket. ‘Fornication and fuckery.’

  Rowan wasn’t sure if he’d heard him right. Maybe he’d said for the nation and for the key, some Harvard motto long forgotten by everyone else.

  ‘It’s true what they say,’ the man said in a non sequitur. ‘Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’ Rowan said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the man said with a grin. ‘I just told you – I’ve got good health and a bad memory.’ And off he shuffled into the night.

  Rowan caught up to his blockmates as they were passing through the arched entrance to Winthrop House. Similar to Kirkland, it was a white-pillared, four-walled fortress around a grassy inner courtyard. This was the house where the Kennedys (JFK and Ted) had once lived as undergraduates; JFK’s senior suite was still maintained as private quarters for high-profile guests of Harvard.

  Jomo led them all to the bar in the building’s basement, which the usher said was less busy than the one set up in the courtyard.

  Winthrop House had recently been renovated, but the new basement commons had the unfortunate feel of a mediocre ski lodge: shiny linoleum floors, stark overhead lights, walls printed with blown-up images of happy students at work and play that would date very quickly (the computers shown in the photos were already a model or two outmoded).

  Rowan and his friends paid no attention to the food buffet, laid out in warming trays beside the bar: overcooked fish, rice, plantain stew. Earlier in the week the organizing committee had sent out a baffling message to everybody planning to attend the reunion, saying the dinner-dance would be a themed affair (which seemed unnecessary, given it was a formal event), and then all hell had broken loose on social media when they announced the theme would be ‘Jungle Fever’. Other than the evening’s menu – wastefully printed on dozens of sheets of paper, stacked beside the buffet table – it seemed that the theme had been tactfully abandoned.

  Back upstairs, drinks in hand, Rowan and his blockmates joined the people milling about on the stone terrace. It was another warm evening – no late rain threatening like the night before, just clear black skies and a moon rising above the trees ringing the courtyard.

  Rowan and his friends stood in a huddle, happy to be together, surveying the scene.

  ‘I feel like we’re at the Last Chance Dance all over again,’ Jules said. ‘By the end of the night, I guarantee you people will be naked in those bushes.’

  Eloise laughed. ‘Well, if the past is any indication, it’s going to be you, Jomo.’

  Jomo looked sheepish.

  ‘Remember how in the cab to the venue in Boston, you were like, “I love you guys sooooo much, I can’t believe we’re graduating, I never want to be apart,”’ Eloise said. ‘Then as soon as we got inside the club, you turned to us and said, “Meet you back here at midnight,” and you disappeared into the hordes of waiting women!’

  Rowan had forgotten all about that story. He and Mariam hadn’t gone to the Last Chance Dance because they’d been doing last-minute wedding preparations, and anyway, the event was for all the single people in their year to make out with one another, their last chance before graduation, a final orgy before their responsible lives as college graduates began. Their year had behaved so badly, apparently – blow jobs in the bathrooms, everyone topless on the dance floor – that the nightclub had refused to host any future Last Chance Dances for graduating seniors. This had delighted all those who’d attended – Harvard students did know how to party! Probably these days the event was banned altogether. Too many chances for lawsuits in the aftermath.

  Rowan had already finished his drink. ‘I’m heading into the throng,’ he said to his blockmates. ‘Who wants what?’

  They all wanted another rum and Coke, except Jules, who never drank much.

  Rowan began to work his way through the crowd beneath the marquee, weaving his way toward the bar, where the lines were three people deep.

  There was ample evidence that, having guessed the bar service might be intentionally slow, many of the attendees had done some serious pre-gaming. One of the snacks laid out on the cocktail tables was truffled popcorn, which was leaving bits of blackened corn stuck in people’s teeth. It looked to Rowan as if everybody was succumbing en masse to an outbreak of dental cavities.

  A woman next to him in the crush struck up a conversation while they waited for their drinks. Their talk turned, inevitably, to children, and she told him she and her husband had named their daughter Lolita.

  ‘Wow,’ Rowan said. ‘You really went there.’

  ‘If you must know,’ she said defensively, ‘it was my great-grandmother’s name.’

  Rowan tried to wipe the horrified expression off his face.

  ‘Oh please,’ she said. ‘Just because one sick old guy used that name for a nymph in a novel, why should nobody ever use it again?’

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nbsp; Thankfully, the bartender at that point handed him three extra-stiff rum and Cokes (Rowan had made sure to slip him a good tip). He set back off, carefully carrying the drinks in three-point formation in his hands. Halfway back to the terrace, he stopped to take a break – his fingers were stiffening up from the ice. To make his job easier, he chugged his own drink so that he only had two to carry.

  Before he could reach his blockmates he was trapped in another conversation, this time with a guy who had also been in Kirkland House, which necessitated a ping-pong relay of questions. Rowan’s main memory of this guy was feeling jealous of him for being one of the two seniors chosen by the House Masters to carry a stuffed-toy hog on a silver tray through the dining hall for the annual holiday dinner (in the past, it had been a real roast hog).

  Rowan couldn’t recall his name, though they’d eaten many meals together in the Kirkland dining hall. He told Rowan he was retraining to be an obstetrician (after a first, unsatisfying career as a tax lawyer), and that he’d recently attended his one-hundredth birth.

  ‘It’s really something, right?’ Rowan said. ‘I was down at the business end when my wife had both our children.’

  This guy gave him a look that took Rowan a little while to interpret.

  It was similar to the look Mariam’s own obstetrician had given him while stitching up Mariam after Alexis’s birth. Rowan had been hovering nearby, holding the newborn Alexis to his naked chest for skin-to-skin contact like all the books recommended, and keeping a beady eye on proceedings – earlier in the birth, it had been Rowan who’d ensured the obstetrician didn’t give Mariam an episiotomy, reminding him that in their birth plan they’d said she would prefer to tear naturally rather than be snipped open like a turkey awaiting stuffing on Thanksgiving eve.

  This look, Rowan had realized, was a form of silent communication between men, some kind of unspoken acknowledgment that the whole birth thing was really, really real, that women were heroic ninja-warriors, and that sex would forever after be . . . different. Not worse, just different.

  It was safe to say that nothing in Rowan’s life experience up to that point in the hospital room had prepared him for the sight of a post-birth vagina. Nor had he ever believed, until the instant that Mariam’s obstetrician winked at him as he did the final stitch, that a ‘daddy’ or ‘husband’ stitch was something that doctors did. It had been awful for Rowan to be unwillingly put in a position of complicity with such a practice – no better, really, than binding women’s feet until they resembled ice-cream cones, or mutilating their genitals. Putting a man’s pleasure above a woman’s pain. He had never told Mariam about it, fearing that if he did, it would ruin their very satisfying sex life. If she knew about that wink, that last flourish with the needle and thread, Mariam would most likely have been unable to get the image of that obstetrician’s face out of her overactive mind. The doctor would have loomed above them in bed forever after.

  The budding obstetrician was now talking to somebody else. Rowan started drinking another of the remaining rum and Cokes, since the ice was melting; he’d have to get a fresh one for Jomo.

  He moved back toward the scrimmage at the bar. If he blurred his eyes, his classmates all looked the same, all decorous carbon copies of one another: the men in dark suits – a few in tuxedos – and the women wearing long formal dresses mostly in conservative tones of maroon, jade, and navy, though here and there a few rebels wore shorter, tighter dresses in adventurous colors.

  Rowan was, likewise, wearing a dark suit and tie, but now he decided to take the tie off. The alcohol was making him feel overheated. He took his jacket off too, and left it on the back of a chair near the empty dance floor, where the DJ, wearing giant noise-canceling headphones, was nodding his head to his own beat. Rowan felt bad for him, but what could he do? It was too early in the night for people to dance. They needed time to get drunker, or maybe they were already too old for this night to end the way it would have fifteen years ago.

  Thinking about Alexis’s birth – or maybe it was that third drink – had made him feel nostalgic about the past, not only for a time when Alexis was so young, but for when he was young, for when everybody under this double-peaked marquee was young.

  And then, as he sipped his drink, he was incensed that nothing had changed in fifteen years. They were still being served drinks in plastic cups! He looked around the room and tallied up how many would end up in landfill. Thousands of them, most likely, just from this one event, since each drink was being served in a new cup.

  Would their children ever forgive them for failing to save them from all the impending environmental disasters? Sometimes Rowan felt it was unfair he and his peers would be blamed for this by their offspring, since those children were not the innocent bystanders they seemed in these matters. After Alexis was born and the baby gifts started arriving, he had felt ill each time they’d unwrapped some new, pointless plastic consumer object for their child. The wrapping paper, ribbons, and bubble wrap had all piled up in the recycling and in the trash. It had been his first inkling that having a child was not going to help him save the earth: it was going to help him destroy it, one sheet of bubble wrap at a time.

  After they’d given up on reusable diapers because they always seemed to leak, he’d felt a growing sense of foreboding each time he unraveled the long, shit-filled boa constrictor of used diapers from the Diaper Genie, knowing the unnatural plastic creature would survive on earth beyond the life spans of even his great-grandchildren.

  He checked his phone. Still no reply to his text messages to Mariam. He’d give it another half hour and then head back to the suite to see what was going on, and try to give Mariam a turn to come to the party (if he could pry Alexis off her leg).

  Beside him, a couple was telling another couple about an unusual wedding gift they’d been given. They’d been late to the whole marriage thing, the husband said, so people had gone all-out in their gifts, and someone had sent them a voucher for a joint floating session in a saltwater sensory-deprivation tank.

  ‘I know it sounds kooky, but it is very relaxing,’ the wife said.

  Rowan’s first impulse was to laugh, but his second was to investigate if there was such a facility in Brooklyn. It would be a great gift for Mariam, maybe for Christmas, something new they could do together while her mom was staying with them for the holidays and could babysit the girls.

  They could pretend they were floating in the Dead Sea again, as they had on their honeymoon, which he remembered as one of the happiest days of their conflict-ridden trip. It had taken them a while to ease into the sensation of floating on the ocean as if it were partially solid, and the extreme saltiness had given them both itchy private parts, but after a while they’d adapted and let go. Rowan could still remember looking over at Mariam – her eyes closed, her face turned upward – as she lay suspended beside him in the oily water, amazed all over again that she was his wife.

  The husband in the second couple at the bar was now telling the others that he was seeing younger people overtake him at work – he was an engineer at a tech start-up – and that his company’s new slogan, graffitied onto the wall in the open-plan working space, was ‘Fresh Blood Forever’.

  ‘The time it takes for my skills to become obsolete has halved since I started in the job,’ he said. ‘And I only started last year.’

  ‘Maybe you should hire an 18-year-old blood boy for regular transfusions, like Peter Thiel does,’ one of the wives joked.

  Or at least Rowan assumed she was joking. None of the others laughed. Perhaps she was being serious.

  He kept listening as the first, recently married wife asked the second wife what she did for work. The second wife launched into a vehement diatribe about how the newlyweds should think very carefully before having children. She wasn’t even sure, she told the other woman, that it was worth saving up to send her own two daughters to college one day, because they’d most likely end up just like her: college-educated, raised to believe she co
uld do anything at all, and then – just at the moment when she’d been able to self-actualize, in her mid-thirties, and just as she was beginning to realize her potential – forced to truncate her career in order to be a good mother, dismantling the professional self she had worked so hard to bring into being.

  The first wife, cowed by this outpouring, said, ‘So you’re a stay-at-home mom?’

  ‘Oh no, I have a full-time job,’ the other replied. ‘But I can see that I’ll never again have a real career.’

  If Rowan listened to another word of this sobering monologue, the nice buzz he was beginning to feel would vanish fast. He moved away from them, feeling guilty as he did. This was a dilemma that he and Mariam faced too. But tonight he didn’t want his heart to bleed; he wanted it to pulse with vigor and exhilaration and possibility. He wanted to have some fun for a change!

  When he finally made it to the front of the line for the bar, Rowan had already drunk the third original rum and Coke, so he ordered another three from the same barkeep, tipping him double this time.

  As he waited for the drinks to be made, two women to his left discussed how organic milk was the most environmentally friendly way to get ink stains out of children’s clothing. He recognized one of them as having been the lead singer of an all-girl punk band, Plan B for the Type As, that Mariam had been really into in their senior year. He felt very pleased with his brain for retrieving this information on demand.

  On his right, two former math majors had been reunited and were discussing, with great excitement, contact invariants in sutured monopole homology. Or at least that’s what Rowan heard. The math majors were speaking in English, yet he couldn’t understand a word of what they were saying. This was something he really missed from his college days – being able to eavesdrop on other people’s universes of expertise. This had been the true gift of living in close quarters with other students for four years and being allowed to take so many different courses in so many varied fields. It was always humbling to be reminded of the incredible diversity of human endeavor.