Behind him someone was talking at length about the etheric decluttering course they’d recently taken, and how it had changed their life. From the sublime to the ridiculous, Rowan thought.
‘It’s clearing the spaces we can’t see,’ this man was saying. ‘It’s more important than ever because of all the negative political energy floating around at the moment. If you don’t neutralize that energy, it brings chaos into your life. Mostly that dark energy collects on mirrors and mirrored surfaces. So you have to hang dried sage above them, to deflect it.’
Rowan eventually made it back to his blocking group with all three drinks unspilled, expecting them to rejoice at his return, only to discover that Jomo had long since been down to the basement bar and back to get more drinks because Rowan had been absent so long. The three of them were, like him, definitely already edging toward being drunk.
They were engaged in an intense conversation about what to do with all the photos and videos of their lives, since they never had time to re-watch any of the footage, and the digital formats changed so fast that most of what they’d recorded, even five years before, was no longer compatible with newest-model phones.
Rowan was tempted to interject that this was a constant debate between him and Mariam, what to do with all the footage they had of their girls. They’d basically recorded their daughters’ lives in real time, and if the girls were ever to sit down and watch the footage, it would take them years. Other than the much-discussed narcissism of younger generations, he wondered what else it was doing to his daughters’ little brains to be made aware of time passing as it actually passed. They had instant replay on so much of their lives. Maybe his daughters’ generation would grow up to be indifferent to this overstocked archive; they would see no value in something so abundant.
But he stopped himself from speaking up, for he tried not to talk about the girls too much when he was with his blockmates, since none of the others had children and he didn’t want to bore or annoy them. He sipped his drink contentedly and listened in to their conversation as it meandered – the way drunken conversations do – all over the place.
In his opinion, though he kept this to himself too, some apocalypse would one day wipe out all the data on the servers, or wherever it was kept by then – up in the cloud or down in the pots of gold at the end of rainbows. A whole generation’s childhood would then be left as undocumented as their grandparents’ had been, a gaping void where once there had been so much.
His friends had moved on to listing old technologies that would only be remembered by people in their micro-generation – born between 1979 and 1982, though he didn’t understand why those were the parameter years.
Jules was talking about how movies used to be projected onto a pull-down screen at the front of airplanes, with everybody onboard forced to watch the same film at the same time – now unthinkable. (On the train to Boston, Rowan had spied on all the little handheld screens of the passengers sitting nearby: a panorama in which people were dying, shooting, laughing in dozens of permutations.)
Eloise mentioned the sound of a dot-matrix printer, accreting ink, line by line, on hole-punched paper. And sitting beside her boom box for hours, with a cassette tape in and ready to go, waiting for her favorite new song to play on the radio so that she could record it.
Jomo came up with the long-disappeared trial of calling a girlfriend on a landline and having to speak to her mother or father first, trying to sound polite enough to earn the right to get past their gatekeeping. (Rowan could still remember the tightly curled landline cord unwillingly stretching as he pulled it into the bedroom of his childhood home.)
They all turned to him expectantly. His contribution didn’t really fit the specs of the discussion, but nobody minded. ‘Nostalgia for catastrophes that didn’t end up happening. Like Y2K. And all those doomsday predictions about 2012.’ Both of those now felt like such minor, harmless catastrophes compared to the ones presently possible in a world ruled by President Reese, Rowan thought. But maybe that was how all near-misses felt; you became almost fond of them. Why else would American hipsters now think it was okay to display self-consciously kitsch wax candles of Stalin in their homes?
He needed to pee and told the others not to move from the patio until he got back. In the bathroom, he texted Mariam again. U ok? Want me to come take over?
Her immediate response: No and no.
Well, she couldn’t say he hadn’t tried. And why should they both be miserable tonight?
His blocking group had, of course, dispersed by the time he got back. He finally found Eloise, her face even redder than before. She had a bottle in one hand and was trying – not very skillfully – to hide it in the folds of her dress. ‘Look what I smuggled in,’ she said to him.
It was a bottle of Jose Cuervo Especial.
He wondered if this was a good time to apologize for the night before. ‘Eloise, I wanted to say that . . .’
She put a finger to her lips. ‘We’re not going ahead with it anyway.’
Rowan was alarmed. ‘I didn’t mean it, Eloise. You and Binx should definitely have a baby. You’ll be great parents.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself that we changed our minds because of you,’ she said. At least she was smiling as she eviscerated him. ‘We have our reasons. I don’t want to go into it now.’
She led him to a corner of the marquee, where they hid behind one of the tables laden with food. They each swallowed two shots straight from the bottle.
‘You look . . . different,’ Eloise said.
Rowan had, in fact, thought the same thing when he’d caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror after taking the world’s longest piss. He’d got some sun the last couple days. For once, he’d put in his contacts instead of wearing his glasses by default. With his tie off and his top two buttons undone, he didn’t look so much like a middle-aged, overworked, straitlaced, underpaid dad. He looked kind of sexy.
After the fifth shot, sensing he was about to lose to Eloise, he decided to go out in a blaze of glory. He persuaded someone who was trying to smoke a surreptitious cigarette nearby to lend him her lighter – his sixth and final shot was a half-flaming tequila. He couldn’t remember the trick to keeping it alight; he also didn’t remember it ever hurting as much on the way down, but then his tolerance for everything – pain, alcohol, swallowing open flame – had been so much higher back in college.
Eloise probably would have kept going if Jomo and Jules hadn’t discovered them in their hiding place and confiscated the bottle.
The foursome, reunited, began to nudge their way into the center of the crowd, their energy no longer diverted by searching for drinks, wanting to feel caught up in the night’s flow.
Rowan noticed that Jomo had taken Jules’s hand as he pushed forward through the knots of people gathered in pairs and triplets and quadruplets, everybody by now talking shit with great sincerity.
Usually, at this stage in any social occasion, especially one where Jomo was newly single, he would be surrounded by women hanging on his every word. ‘A gem hunter!’ they’d purr, after he just happened to mention he’d recently seen a chunk of rhodochrosite being carved from the bowels of the Wah Wah Mountains and fashioned into red beryl gems the color of pigeon blood. Jomo’s profession was like catnip to a certain type of woman, and much of Jomo’s romantic life up to that point could be characterized as a series of absorbing games of cat-and-mouse (though who was the prey and who was the predator was often unclear). Rowan had sometimes wondered if Jomo could even imagine what living his love life to a flatter, more constant rhythm might feel like – one without the sharp highs and lows of seduction and intrigue.
But of course tonight Jomo only had eyes for Jules.
It would have been funny to see him fending off the waves of single ladies trying to get at him, if it weren’t so sad that he was fighting a losing battle of his own. Jules seemed happy, as she always was, to be in his company, but she did not look as if she were waiting w
ith bated breath for him to declare his undying love.
The DJ had turned up the volume and, while the dance floor was still empty, Rowan could sense that its magnetism had begun to draw people closer to its edges. Every song being played, he realized, was a form of blatant youth worship: they were all about wanting to have sex, having sex, or remembering having sex with the youthful object of one’s desire.
All that lust, pumped into their ears, the enforced soundtrack to their everyday lives – in the car, in waiting rooms, in the gym, in airports, elevators, wherever there was music playing that you could not escape. Even Rowan’s mom, these days, seemed to listen only to the pop hits on the radio, even when she was at home in her air-conditioned house in Phoenix. No wonder most people were dissatisfied with their lives, lovesick for something or someone they couldn’t name. It was population manipulation, really, like putting fluoride in the drinking water.
Rowan wished Mariam was there so that he could whisk her out onto the dance floor. They were often the first couple to venture onto it, or they used to be, back in the days of regular parties and weddings. Even the weddings had dried up by this stage in their lives. They’d have to wait for the round of second marriages to get a chance to dance again.
Mariam was not a natural dancer – even after all these years, she remained somewhat stiff in his arms, a slight resistance in her upper body that she was probably unaware of – but with his skills he could still make them look good out there.
He should disregard Mariam’s text and go back to Kirkland House to rescue her from whatever bondage Alexis was still subjecting her to. He really, really should. But he found himself immobile, unable to take another step away from the beckoning, shiny rectangle of the dance floor.
The next night, Sunday night, they would be back at home in Bushwick. After the long evening shift of getting the girls fed, bathed, read to, sung to, and then patted to sleep, he and Mariam would be prostrate on the couch in front of their TV with a slab of chocolate, each of them clutching one of the many remotes controlling their streaming devices.
There was a commercial for Lindt chocolate that always came on around eight-thirty pm, pitched exactly to their demographic: it showed a harried-looking woman falling, in slow motion, onto her couch, as she savored a block of cocoa goodness with a smile of relief and gratitude. ‘When the evening belongs to you . . .’ the voice-over crooned.
It was the least sexy tagline ever. Not the more erotically suggestive ‘when the night is yours’, which conjured visions of hours of Tantric sex by the light of the moon. No. ‘When the evening belongs to you’ reflected how he and Mariam felt as they sank into the cushions of their old couch. No more demands being made on them, no more physical labor, no more communicating, no more anything. Just consumption: of television and chocolate.
He looked around the marquee, feeling a rush of love for his classmates, all of them fraying a bit at the edges but still there, still standing. There was a grainy quality to the evening, the feeling of something coming to an end. They were all there to bid farewell to youth. One final hurrah. In the morning, he would shapeshift once more for Mariam and become whatever she wanted and needed him to be in this next, natural phase of their marriage.
But right now . . . the night was his.
Eloise must have had a similar epiphany, because she had climbed onto one of the cocktail tables to dance. It was wobbling precariously.
Rowan couldn’t let her suffer alone. He climbed onto another cocktail table and, instead of the pitiable spectacle of a drunk woman ill-advisedly dancing on a table alone, it became an impromptu dance-off.
Near the end of the song, Rowan decided it was worth the risk of ending up in the ER. He leapt over the heads of the people who had gathered around his table and slid across the dance floor on his knees, like Bruce Springsteen in his heyday.
He skidded to a halt beneath Eloise’s cocktail table. For a terrible moment he thought she might try to match him by leaping off the table herself, but luckily she seemed to think better of it.
From ground level, he looked up at the faces of the women who had gathered around Eloise as she danced. All of them were taking in the sight of him at their feet with something soft in their eyes, a flicker of admiration lit by his confidence, his willingness to go all-out for everyone’s benefit. He had taken one for the team to get the party going, and it had worked. The DJ, expertly reading the atmosphere, cranked up the latest reggaeton hit, one that had been on the airwaves constantly the past few months, with an irresistible beat. And just like that, the dance floor was packed with bodies.
This was when Rowan realized that one of the women he was kneeling before was Camila Ortiz. Gone was the milk-soaked t-shirt from the Thursday-evening welcome drinks. She was wearing a short black dress and gold stilettos, and her hair – with that distinctive white streak – was pulled back into a high ponytail. Without really thinking about it, he jumped to his feet, grabbed her hand, and pulled her onto the dance floor. There was no harm in just one dance with a woman who was not his wife.
As soon as their bodies were pressed together, he was teleported back into his 20-year-old body, when he and Camila had been dance partners at CityStep workshops, demonstrating moves to their high-school student charges. He had never told her, back then, about Mariam. A lie of omission, perhaps not one that really mattered, since he’d never acted on his crush (never even thought about acting on it).
He had so little experience with other women that he didn’t know if all men felt this way. Was there something about an unconsummated crush that never let you get out from under it? Would he still feel this when he was 50, when he was 60, 70, 80? Would he see Camila at the sixty-fifth reunion and feel his old heart beat faster if she agreed to dance with him again? Would he feel then what he felt now, as if the earth had shuddered open beneath his feet and he had fallen through it to another time and place?
It was as if he and Camila were carved from the same mound of butter, melting against each other. She was anticipating his moves a split second before he made them. He could feel one of her legs between his, her hipbones against his pelvis, one of her hands clasped tightly in his. His other hand was on the small of her back, where the fabric of her dress shifted against her skin.
Something was passing between the two of them, tightly wound together in the vertical embrace of dancing. It was the crushing yet also – somehow – affirming awareness that in another life, an alternate universe, this person could have been yours. But in this life, in this universe, all you would be granted was a single dance at your fifteenth reunion.
He let himself sink into her, and for a brief moment near the end of the song – how he wished it would never end! – he closed his eyes.
When he opened them, he saw Mariam near the bar, staring at him dancing with Camila.
His worst nightmare, the recurring nightmare he’d had every few months since she had agreed to marry him, was going to come true.
Mariam was going to leave him.
But then, unexpectedly, she smiled.
It was a smile like the one she had given him almost twenty years ago, on the night of the freshman ice-cream social, when he had spotted her from a few yards away and she had held his gaze for longer than was polite, or decent, or normal. Back then, it had given him the out-of-body sensation of being seen for who he truly was.
The song ended and a new one began. Camila slipped away and disappeared into the crowd of people dancing around them, back to her husband or into the arms of another man who had once had a crush on her at college.
For Rowan, there was only Mariam, looking at him with that smile on her face, beholding him in three dimensions. I see you.
And suddenly she was moving toward him, past the people nursing drinks at the edges of the dance floor. With a few running steps, she met him halfway, in an embrace so violently passionate that the couples around them instinctively averted their eyes.
Chapter 12: Jomo
The early hours of Sunday morning of Reunion Weekend
(May 27, 2018)
It had taken him all weekend, but Jomo had finally managed to convince his blockmates to come with him to the Spee Club.
The club was hosting the fifteenth-reunion afterparty, which was open to all ’03 classmates, whether or not they’d been members of the Spee – which, as he’d tried to point out to everyone on the way there, was pretty inclusive – but they’d shut him down, sick and tired of hearing him go on about it.
Yet Jomo could not help feeling happy at the sight of the Spee mansion’s red door on Mount Auburn Street. It was past midnight and, from the dark street, the lights inside the two-story building glowed, making it seem like a place of refuge, welcoming any travelers who might need to stop and rest for a while.
He had spent some of his best hours at college in this building. In spite of all its problems, he felt a fealty to the Spee that rivaled even the loyalty he felt to Harvard itself.
When he’d punched the club as a sophomore, it had been an invite-only gathering (these days, even the clubs resisting the gender-neutral enforcement held Open Punches for any sophomore interested in joining). He’d worn his best blazer and nervously waited for what had felt like an eternity for that red door to be opened to him.
Upstairs, he’d accepted a Sprite and tried to pretend he wasn’t intimidated by the older guys. The fanged, taxidermied bear – the club’s mascot – loomed above him, ready to eat him up if he made a wrong move.
He knew the drill. He was there to charm the current upperclass members, so that he would get invited to the next punch event, and the one after that – while along the way the undesirables, those who had not made a mark, fell by the wayside and were struck from the register. The numbers of sophomores at the punch events had gradually been winnowed down and, each time he’d received the subsequent invitation, he’d felt great relief at not being rejected.
Life After Truth Page 24
