Life After Truth

by Ceridwen Dovey

  It was lousy, being judged like that – on the basis of your ability to make small talk, to make other men laugh at your jokes, to make the right ironic comment at the exact right time. But it had also given him a lot of confidence to make it through each stage, jumping through every lit hoop and getting to the other side unscorched.

  Jules had never lorded it over him that she was almost certainly, however, the real reason he’d been let in. She’d insisted that he take her along to the third punch, a date-optional event held at a castle owned by the club’s wealthiest alumnus, somewhere in Rhode Island. Knowing that he would never ask her to do something like that for him, she had, on the afternoon of the event, turned up uninvited at his bedroom door wearing a formal dress, having bought herself her own corsage. Though they’d made it clear to everyone at the castle that they were only friends, thereafter it had been a foregone conclusion that he’d be chosen as a member.

  The thing that a guy like Rowan would never understand – he hadn’t even considered punching any of the clubs – was that once you’d been let in, if you’d chosen the right club, and were lucky enough to have a cohort of members you liked and trusted, it could be a safe place where you could try out different versions of yourself, even different versions of male companionship. It was here at the Spee, at the Steinway piano in the upstairs living room, that Jomo had first started to lead singalongs – something he would never have dared to do in high school, when he would have been ridiculed for such cheesiness, or immediately assumed to be gay.

  He and his Spee friends had had their retrograde fun, too, of course, but the times he treasured most were not the blowout parties. It was the afternoons on the back porch, talking philosophy, religion, politics, hopes, dreams. And the timelessness of the setting – the ottomans and tapestries, the striped curtains and leather couches and chandeliers, which created the impression of ostentation to outsiders – in fact had given Jomo the reassuring sense of being in conversation with the past, of being part of a long tradition. Men like JFK and Bobby Kennedy had once sat in those very same armchairs before the fire, talking until dawn about how to change the world.

  Dozens of Jomo’s classmates – the lucky, unencumbered ones, who were able to stay out past midnight and hadn’t had to return to their quarters to relieve babysitters from their duties – were streaming through the Spee’s front door and heading upstairs, where the members had hired a DJ and bartender.

  He was going to suggest that he and his blockmates take a moment to regroup in one of the quieter rooms downstairs, but really they were long past the point of no return. Eloise had already gone home in Binx’s care, drunker than he’d ever seen her. Mariam and Rowan, meanwhile, were all over each other as if they’d just met.

  Jomo was relieved about this. Earlier in the evening, he and Jules had watched Rowan dance suggestively with another woman at Winthrop House. They had both been unsure how to handle such out-of-character behavior from him.

  ‘Is this the point where we should pull him aside and remind him of his marriage vows?’ Jules had said to Jomo.

  He’d understood what Jules meant by this. At Rowan and Mariam’s wedding in Memorial Church, the celebrant had turned to the watching guests in the pews and asked, ‘Do you, as witnesses, agree to support this couple in keeping their covenant of vows to each other?’

  They’d all called out joyously, ‘We will!’ Not ever thinking they’d have to act on it.

  The vows Rowan and Mariam had made had been the traditional, time-honored ones. The words were old-fashioned, Jomo had reflected as he listened to them, but also very beautiful. Those simple phrases conjured a whole lifetime, all the different seasons of living and loving that two people might experience together. To have and to hold (the physical delights and sexual infatuation of early married life), for better, for worse (the patience and endurance it took to keep making it work through the years of parenting), for richer, for poorer (the ups and downs of middle age), in sickness and health (the realities of old age), until we are parted by death.

  Before this weekend, the thought of making those vows to another person in the conviction that he could stick to them for the rest of his life had made Jomo feel as if he would be yoked like a beast of burden to a plow. Yet if he imagined standing opposite Jules, her hands in his, making those vows to her, he felt only joy.

  While Jomo and Jules had been trying to decide what to do about Rowan, Mariam had arrived at the dinner-dance and there’d been a minor scene, though not what Jomo would have expected. Other people’s relationships could seem extremely strange to an observer, he’d found himself thinking, yet they each had their own internal logic, obscure to everybody else.

  Now Mariam and Rowan were dirty dancing at the Spee. It was nice to see them having a good time for once. He knew their lives weren’t exactly easy, with the double demands of parenting and work, and not much money. It hadn’t occurred to him to cover the tab for his birthday dinner on Friday night until he’d seen the look on Rowan’s face as the check arrived and regretted his insensitivity in booking such an expensive restaurant.

  Jomo glanced over at Jules, who had sunk back into the comfortable brocaded armchair facing his own, near the upstairs bay window. In spite of Jomo’s efforts to shield her from unwanted attention at the dinner-dance, she’d been stopped for selfies by a few pushy classmates and spouses, and asked her opinion on the politics of the day several times, which was really a coded way of them trying to find out what she thought of Fred Reese’s decision to attend their reunion.

  Then she’d been cornered by a well-meaning but mad sculptor she’d known from the Signet Society, a student organization for artists to which she’d belonged at college. Jomo knew Jules so well he’d gauged the exact moment when she had reached what they always jokingly referred to as ‘peak extrovert’ – they both sat at the same spot on the sliding introvert–extrovert scale in the Myers-Briggs personality test – and he’d stepped in, expertly ended the conversation, and spirited her off to the most crowded part of the dance floor so nobody else could try to talk to her.

  Now, however, the classmates who’d made it as far as the afterparty were no longer tripping over themselves to try to speak to Jules. She had finally – thanks to the general inebriation, and the more mellow atmosphere of the afterparty – achieved what she always desired: to pass unnoticed among her peers.

  Even Fred Reese had managed to blend in by that stage of the evening, though this was probably not what he wanted. From where Jomo was sitting, he could see Fred leaning on the bar, holding court among his friends and subjects and sycophants. Svetlana was there, too. She seemed bored. It wasn’t easy to come to these things as a partner; all the Harvard-talk and reminiscing about things you hadn’t lived through.

  Svetlana caught Jomo’s eye. In plain sight of her fiancé, she made the motion of putting a gun to her temple and blowing out her brains. Then she smiled.

  Jomo looked away quickly. What a weird thing to do! Kind of funny. But strange.

  Fred didn’t seem to have noticed. He was engrossed in conversation with the third-most-famous person in their class, after himself and Jules – a guy who had become a media mogul while still wet behind the ears, after inheriting from his deceased mother every newspaper in America that still mattered.

  Fred had always instrumentalized relationships with powerful people, even before he was one of them himself. He’d done it to Jules in their post-college years – after graduation he’d styled himself as a screenwriter and producer, and kept trying to get her attached to projects he’d written. In these stories, she was always cast as the love interest to the hero, who was described in a way that made it clear this was how Fred saw himself: as a demigod with a few winsome internal demons (a mild drinking problem, a womanizing problem, a tendency to throw himself into life-threatening situations in the name of justice).

  Jules had soon realized that most of the characters and storylines were stolen directly from old He-Man comics. T
he hero, for instance, had a pet tiger who was a scaredy-cat but transformed through magic into a fearless predator. The main villain was called Skulldon, and there was a wise wizard sidekick. In most scenes, Jules’s character – Fe-ma – was described wearing a short white tunic and gold boots. Jules had been raised on a steady fare of this same cartoon on TV; she’d recognized She-Ra at once. When she’d suggested to Fred that he turn the screenplay into a modernized, more enlightened version of the cartoon classic, he’d pretended he had no idea what she was talking about.

  Still, she’d endured a half-dozen meals Fred had organized with shady potential investors, who were all there to get their kicks from meeting Juliet Hartley in real life. She was no novice to how things worked, but Jomo also knew that she’d never stopped feeling abased in these situations – and sometimes even menaced, when the Weinstein types didn’t take no for an answer and she had to charm her way out of bad situations in ways that allowed the men to save face. This had been long before #MeToo, back when even an actress as strong, smart, and respected as Jules was not allowed to voice what disturbed her about these meetings and encounters. Her agents used to say to her, earlier in her career, ‘You never know which hand will feed you next, so try not to bite any of them.’

  It was only once Fred’s father’s political ambitions had become apparent that Fred had pivoted away from film: he’d found a faster route to absolute power. He’d started out as his father’s social-media manager, and made a hagiographic documentary about him on the campaign trail (titled Red, White, and Reese). Once his father was president, Fred had been given the nepotistic appointment of ‘Senior Adviser’, whatever that meant. When Jules had called him up in the administration’s early days, asking to meet to discuss her concerns about the fate of children seeking asylum at the Mexican border, Fred had told her she should stick to art, not politics.

  Jomo looked over again at Jules. Her dress was the same color as Harvard’s crest, probably a sartorial nod by her stylist, not that Jules would have cared either way. At Winthrop, he’d spun her around on the dance floor and the crimson dress had billowed out around her, and it had taken all of Jomo’s willpower not to put his hands around her waist and kiss her.

  She hadn’t drunk nearly as much as the others, and he could tell that her brain was working away busily, though on what, he had no idea. It was one of the things he loved most about her: how much she always seemed to have on her mind.

  Once, during a lecture in the astronomy class where they’d first become friends, he had looked down at her notes. In his own notebook, he had written down exactly what the professor had said:

  From a planet 10 billion light-years away you would be able to see the earth’s light from that time.

  Whereas Jules had written something more poetic:

  The universe gives us a chance to look back in time, to see the past in the present. Our human desire for this is so strong.

  Gazing at Jules lost in her own thoughts, Jomo was glad that – after a short, sleepless night, tossing and turning, aware that she was just on the other side of the thin wall between their bedrooms – he’d decided not to say anything to her about his true feelings.

  Not now. The timing was wrong. She might think that his feelings were temporary or transient, a nostalgia-fueled flash in the pan while they were back on this campus, their senses alive to everything that might have been.

  He needed to wait. He would declare himself to her when she would be able to understand just how very serious he was about wanting to be with her. At least he had taken the first tentative step by breaking up with Giselle – a fact he’d mentioned as casually as possible to Jules earlier that evening. Perhaps he should suggest to her that they take a vacation later in the summer, depending on her work schedule, and go somewhere new to them both, a place where he might be able to get her to see that he loved her, and ask her to love him in return.

  Maybe he was imagining it, but the taxidermied bear mascot looked even more moth-eaten than the last time he’d been to the club. Its fur had fallen out in patches and a couple of its long, once fearsome claws were missing. On one side of its body he could see the old burn marks from when someone had accidentally lit it on fire. The bear was a remnant of the club’s nastier, fustier past, so perhaps it was appropriate that the creature rot and be thrown out. Or maybe, like all of them, the poor bear was just looking a little worse for wear in its middle age, and they should show it some mercy.

  Was there a term for the very particular yearning for the past that attending one’s college reunion invoked? The Germans would have an infinite-syllabled word for it, or maybe the Icelanders. Something like solastalgia, which was – or so he recalled – pining for a place you have never in fact left, that has been altered by environmental forces beyond your control.

  Collegesickness could work, with its echo of homesickness. Longing for a place that you couldn’t ever really return to, longing for a place that you wished would remain unchanged. Being at the reunion had made it so clear that their time in this place was long over, whether they had used it wisely or not.

  ‘Jomo?’ A large man, bloated and sickly-looking, was peering down at him.

  Jomo did not recognize him but tried to look friendly.

  ‘Thaddeus,’ the man said. ‘We were both selected for the Crimson’s fifteen hottest freshmen. Remember? There was a photo shoot on the steps of Widener Library.’

  Jomo remembered that day well. He had been so embarrassed to be one of the nine who’d turned up to the photo shoot, his ego massaged into agreeing by the Crimson reporter who’d called to say he’d been selected on the basis of his photograph in the freshman facebook. The Crimson’s weekend magazine, FM, had run the feature every year for decades – it was called ‘Freshmeat’ or something similarly objectionable. It was probably banned by now. He and Jules had not yet met and become friends at that point, or she would definitely have talked some sense into him (she was one of the no-shows at the shoot).

  The way that Thaddeus was speaking about the photo shoot made Jomo suspect that it had been – and remained – the greatest day of his life.

  He changed the topic and asked Thaddeus where he was living. He was in Minneapolis, he said, running a company that shredded confidential corporate documents. It was not doing so great now that nobody really printed stuff out anymore. He was divorced; his wife had left him after he lost several toes to gout.

  ‘Gout?’ Jomo said, surprised. It was a disease he associated with overfed kings in eighteenth-century novels.

  ‘Yeah, apparently it’s making a comeback as a disease,’ Thaddeus said, as if it were a badge of pride to be diagnosed with it. ‘Everybody drinks heavily to cope these days, not just the alcoholics.’ He lifted his empty beer glass. ‘Speaking of which, can I get you another?’

  Jomo declined this offer, not wanting to lose any of his own toes.

  Jules now had her eyes closed, but he knew from her furrowed brow that she was awake, and that something was troubling her.

  The last time he’d seen her, before the reunion, was when he’d hosted the wrap party for her latest film collaboration at his loft in Manhattan, on a cold night at the end of March. This had been for the movie that had been filmed mostly in New Zealand the previous December. He still didn’t really understand the project – in the scene screened that evening, characters who seemed to represent 1 per centers were slaughtered by a bloodthirsty pack of Occupy Wall Street protestors.

  He’d felt concerned for Jules that night. The producers, the director, and most of the crew seemed to consider themselves to be at the frontlines of the war on American fascism, and had fingers in every radical-progressive pie. He’d had the unsettling feeling that, for people supposedly so driven by ideals, they in fact had no real moral compass guiding their behavior. Yet he hadn’t found a way to say so to Jules without it sounding patronizing, as if he doubted she could look after herself, as if he didn’t approve of her taking those kinds of artistic risks.<
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  Jomo had tried instead to focus on why Jules liked collaborating with people like that – maybe because they paid her zero deference whatsoever, and made no secret of the fact that they were disgusted by the culture of celebrity from which she came, though they were prepared to harness it for their own purposes. They had their sights set on much more important things than money and fame, their every gesture signified: they were planning to start a revolution.

  At the party, the filmmakers had gone out of their way to be rude to Jomo, to show him that they did not consider him to be worthy of respect: he was too wealthy to be trusted. Yet they’d been happy to eat all the Nobu sushi Jomo had paid for, to drink the champagne he’d bought, to mill about on his rooftop terrace. Giselle had arrived later in the evening. ‘These people are taking advantage of you, and so is Juliet,’ she’d said to him in the kitchen, not realizing that Jules was getting supplies from the pantry and could hear every word. Jules had left the party early that night, looking unsure of herself.

  At sea, as the expression went. Like he felt now.

  Jomo recognized the voice of a guy who’d been in the Spee with him, Archie, who was standing behind his armchair, telling a woman he was trying to impress about the guided tour he’d recently taken to Bermuda, arranged by Harvard Alumni Travels; he did all his travel through them now, he was saying. They’d gained access through their study leader – a renowned Harvard historian – to the most majestic private homes on the island, Georgian buildings made of coral limestone.

  He’d already signed up for his next trip, Archie said. In September, he was going on the Russian Space Program tour. He would get to see cosmonauts training in Baikonur, Kazakhstan – known as Star City – and watch the next Soyuz spacecraft launch to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

  The woman, obviously fishing for information, asked if Archie’s partner would be accompanying him.