Life After Yes

by Aidan Donnelley Rowley

  “What does that mean?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Speaking of delusions, I had another dream.”

  Victor pulls a knot out of a rubber jump rope. His eyes light up. “A sequel? Do tell.”

  “Don’t get too excited. You don’t have a surprise role in this one,” I say.

  So, I tell him about the dream. We were back in Paris. Sage and I sat across from each other at a small table covered in white lace. We waited for more champagne. But the waiter wouldn’t come. Finally, he came by but it wasn’t the waiter. It was Phelps. He smiled big when he saw me. His teeth were whiter and straighter. Phelps studied me, then Sage, and then laughed a shrill laugh. He kept bringing new bottles of champagne and refilling the basket of croissants. Sage kept saying how efficient the service in France was. Each time I took a bite, my thighs tingled and expanded slightly. And each time I took a bite, Sage slumped down in his chair, appearing to shrink the littlest bit. Each glass of champagne had more bubbles than the last, and every time I took a sip, Sage’s face grew blurry. His features softened. But I kept eating and drinking. Couldn’t stop. Finally, I blinked and Sage was gone. The seat was empty and Phelps sat down. He said it was nice to see me. I told him I was engaged. He said he didn’t see a ring. I looked down and my finger was bare. I panicked. Looked around. At the edge of the table, I saw the stone. It rolled away from me, off the table and onto the floor. And then I was under the table, feeling around in darkness, fumbling with carpet for my lonely diamond. There were four legs, not two. Phelps’s legs were intertwined with another pair. I heard laughter above.

  And then Phelps said to someone: “Always pay attention to dreams.” I came out from under the table without my stone and found my seat. There was a girl on his lap now, facing him, ringlets of red snaking down her back. She cupped his broad jaw with her thin fingers. They kissed, but only for a minute, and then the girl turned around. It was Kayla. She was made up like a 1940s housewife with bright red lipstick and a candy cane smile. “We’re engaged,” she said, and held out her porcelain fingers. And there was the ring, my ring, nestled snugly on her finger. She shifted her weight and moved, lifting the shadow from Phelps’s face. But it wasn’t Phelps. It was Sage.

  “That’s an easy one,” Victor says. Insinuating that, duh, I’m fat. Ergo, reveries about fat.

  “What the hell is it with you today? Bad one-night stand this weekend?” I ask. Guys like Victor make me relieved I’m in a committed relationship. He sleeps with women as casually as I shop.

  “Things with the ladies are just fine,” he says. “Better than fine. You know that.”

  “What then?”

  “It’s just that…I’m not a miracle worker, Quinn.”

  “Miracle worker?”

  “I can’t wave a magic wand and poof—get you in the best shape of your life. You’ve got to work with me. Why do you think you are having panic dreams about expanding thighs?”

  Oh, I’m fat.

  “Fuck you. I’m sorry I canceled last week; I was at the office until almost 2 A.M. every night. Toning my biceps didn’t seem quite as crucial as getting some sleep, and my mom is coming to town and his mother is coming too,” I say, blaming the job like I always do, scattering excuses like seeds. He hands me the jump rope and I contemplate boycotting. “And don’t you think that dream is about a bit more than thighs?”

  Victor doesn’t bite. “What about the diet? How’s the diet been? I’m hoping those croissants are only in your dreams.”

  “The diet’s fine.”

  “Do you want to look fine on your big day or perfect?”

  “Let me sleep on that one,” I say.

  “What about carbs? Nothing is going to happen unless you reach a ketogenic state.”

  “I’ve been limiting them,” I say.

  “Drinks?”

  “Sure. When?” I say, but he doesn’t smile. “What about them?” I ask. Victor doesn’t drink. I can’t fathom how he swings these one-night stands when sober.

  “You’re not going to lose weight if you keep boozing,” he says.

  “You’re not going to be a world-famous photographer if you keep spending your days training delusional and fat and spoiled souls like me. Souls who spew excuses and profanities. I haven’t been drinking much anyway,” I say.

  “Well, you smell like alcohol this morning. Your body is sweating it out because it is toxin.”

  “I think you’re the toxin,” I say. “Maybe you should try that sometime—have a few, it’ll loosen you up a bit. The ketogenic state is overrated.”

  “Protein is a better crutch than booze,” he says.

  “Last time I checked, I am paying you an arm and a leg to tone my arms and my legs, not lecture me on my extracurriculars,” I say.

  Victor punishes me; I lift impossibly heavy dumbbells, but still he stands behind me while my shoulders begin to quake on my last few reps. I run suicides down the slender walkways between treadmills. I sweat in embarrassing places.

  After a long and uncharacteristic silence, Victor stuns me with a simple question. “Are you happy, Quinn?”

  I don’t answer him. Because I’m not sure I know the answer to this one. Maybe happy people don’t drink every night and let colleagues seduce them. Maybe happy people don’t pay muscled strangers to listen to their problems. Maybe happy people don’t begrudge mothers who pick rings and send flowers and love their sons.

  “Are you happy?” I ask.

  He looks at me, sarcasm and pride missing from his eyes. I wonder how often he’s asked this question, this scary and simple question, no one who is honest really knows how to answer.

  “As a clam,” he says, nodding, looking away. “Happy as a clam.”

  Silence.

  “Why do people think clams are happy?” I ask. “Because they’re always smiling?”

  “No, that’s not it.”

  “Does Mr. Trivia have an explanation for that phrase?

  How do we know if clams are happy? It’s hard enough to tell if people are.”

  Victor’s eyes light up because he knows this one. He’s a trivia guy. Which to me has always been a sad sign. What is trivia but a distraction from what matters? Who appears on Jeopardy!? Middle-class folks who focus on random tidbits, study useless information to distract themselves from predictable lives, the mortgage payments, the birthday parties, the sexless marriage, the thinning hair. Or maybe trivia is an antidote for those who feel insecure about their intelligence. They stock up on trivia as a defense, as ammunition. Sure their grammar might be shaky, their spelling atrocious, their common sense off-kilter, but they know how many yards there are in a mile, how many species of bats there are in North America.

  “The real expression is happy as a clam at high tide,” Victor explains. “Clam digging must be done at low tide. At high tide, clams are relatively safe from hunters and able to feed because they are covered in water.”

  “I guess you could just say everyone’s telling me it’s finally high tide, but I’m still scared,” I say.

  He nods and smiles and stretches my left hamstring.

  “Well, if this dream thing turns out to be a trilogy, I’ll be very disappointed if I don’t reappear. I could wear some colorful Lycra and show off these goods,” he says, stroking his abs and chest. “I’d be the superhero trainer who saves those thighs of yours,” he says, and laughs.

  “Oh Victor, you already are.”

  He smiles, pinches my thigh. “That, my dear Prudence, remains to be seen.”

  Chapter 14

  Never set foot in a heart-shaped hot tub,” Phelps said once. We were both nineteen and had just finished our freshman year of college. His hair was longer that summer, losing his mother’s blondness and gaining his father’s curls. His skin neared that caramel brown of summer. My guess was he had grown at least an inch or two over the past year.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Who was talking about hot tubs anyway?”

&n
bsp; Our parents sat only a few feet away, conversing in hushed, civilized tones. They sipped martinis. Dad said something about his martini being “dirty,” and Mom and the others laughed.

  “No one was talking about hot tubs, Quinn. That’s not the point.” Phelps sipped his Bud Light slowly and dramatically, concentrating on each drop, as if it were potential poison. Our parents decided that this summer it would be okay if we drank. If it was okay for kids our age to fight in combat, then certainly it was okay for us to have a beer or two, they reasoned. A logical thought indeed.

  My parents knew I drank. I’d spent a year at college and they weren’t clueless. But condoned public drinking was another thing. The funny thing is that Phelps’s parents were Lake Forest WASPs through and through; no one doubted that alcohol flowed like water in that household and that little Phelps had been drinking for some time now.

  But appearances were big.

  “Why the non sequitur warning then?” I asked. Phelps and I had been talking about college, the ubiquity of marijuana and Ecstasy on our respective campuses, whether each of us would go Greek, our potential majors. What we didn’t talk about: the dance-floor kisses, the hookups and crushes. This was our rule. It wasn’t prudent to put life on hold, especially during our formative college years. But when we were together, we were together.

  Only a nineteen-year-old would think this could work.

  “Non sequitur? Good to see you’re getting some mileage out of those SAT words,” Phelps joked. “The point is that predictability is a plague.”

  “Huh? Now you have lost me,” I said. Phelps’s eyes glinted with the setting sun. Birds chirped lethargically. Bullfrogs gulped.

  “All I mean is that…” He paused, took a big, bold swig of his beer. “We have to make sure not to become one of them.”

  “One of them?” I said, motioning to our parents, creatures who guffawed with practiced laughter, legs politely crossed, swirling colorless drinks with pinky fingers.

  “No, Quinn. One of them. Part of the crowd. The cliché. What’s expected of us.”

  “What is expected of us?”

  “No, what’s expected of us.” Phelps said, motioning his beer-less hand between us, quietly like a secret.

  I nodded.

  “Why do you think they drink like that?” Phelps said. And then he did something he often did. He answered his own question. “They drink because they’re bored. Booze adds spice.”

  I nodded again.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it,” he said. “It’s simply adaptive behavior. Darwin’s ideas in action.”

  And I didn’t realize it then because I was young and blinded by his undeniable glow, but Phelps had a pathological fear of boredom. It manifested in a spoken reverence for paths dark and difficult. He had a taste for rebellion, for originality. He was determined to dodge the clichés that litter life’s path. But the irony (and I’m never sure how to use that word) was that in his steadfast efforts to avoid predictability and prudence, that’s what his life would become: predictable and prudent. And that’s who he would become: a hardworking doctor, a predictable and prudent soul.

  “Did college transform you into an intellectual big shot?” I asked. “Maybe you should contemplate the philosophy track too.”

  Phelps shook his head. “I’m not going to spend my days digesting the pretentious musings of bearded men whom history has arbitrarily chosen to revere.”

  “History hasn’t chosen anything. People have chosen. People like us. And history can’t choose anything unless you are speaking of the poetic device metonymy.”

  “Poetry, Quinn?” he said disapprovingly, dragging out the simple word, enunciating each of the three syllables. “Po-et-ry?”

  “Yes, Phelps. Poetry.”

  “Why bother? Life is about more than iambic pentameter and rhyme. There are plenty of disciplines that actually have some consequence, some practical consequence, but poetry isn’t one of them. It’s an indulgence.”

  The vast majority of our conversations were like this one: undeniably intelligent, unabashedly indulgent, both predictable and youthfully profound. A competitive, passionate pulse throbbed beneath these exchanges, one that would unite us at the time and divide us down the line.

  “Poetry is art,” I corrected him. “It’s daring. To capture everything—and nothing—in a few chosen words.”

  “Impossible,” Phelps said, drinking his beer.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  Our conversations were everything we were: smart, pretentious, smacking of privilege and naïveté. Full of a shared and practiced cynicism only college could polish. Full of fancy words we used for the most part correctly. Full of nascent confidence and inchoate insecurity.

  But if you listened closely to our words, the ebbs and flows of our own brand of flirtation, if you took the time to trace the flimsy contours of our banter, you’d realize that every conversation we had was really the same. Over and over, we talked, debated, dreamed aloud and together, about one thing, one impossibly nebulous thing: who it is we’d become.

  Because for the most part, we knew who we were up until that point. Or we were foolish enough to think we did anyway. We were two kids. Good kids. Smart kids. Kids who liked learning and fishing. Who loved each other. Because love each other, we did. I’ve come to doubt many things, arguably everything, but this I’ve never doubted.

  I loved him for his smile, for his abundance of confidence, for his arrogant displays of control. I loved the way he took something complicated—like fishing, art, love—and rendered it in simple strokes. Fishing was sport. Something to be good at. Art was beauty, impracticality. Love, according to his gospel, was what we had.

  Some things defy articulation, Prue, he said. When shrouding me with his most lofty musings, he called me Prudence or one of its diminutives. You can’t capture it in words. And it’s not worth trying.

  And at the time, this was nothing short of bliss. Of romance. But as time went by, I wanted him to try. I wanted the words even if they were clumsy or insufficient. I wanted him to attempt the impractical. Do the impossible.

  But, alas, he was a fan of efficiency and prudence and possibility. It never shocked me when he declared ambitions to be a doctor. To leave a stamp. To make a mark on this world.

  And, at the time, this was heroic and responsible and lovely. I imagined the sandy-haired boy in a white coat with all the trimmings. I imagined him gripping hands of sick people, sharing that winning smile with those who were losing life.

  When I thought about the future, my future, he was in it. His white coat flung on an armchair by the door. His stories of pain and perseverance relayed over home-cooked meals like the ones I’d relished growing up.

  Phelps and I spent many long, languid, wine-soaked nights, talking about my future. When I mentioned going to law school, his eyes lit up as if I had uttered something deeply genius and not utterly predictable. I reminded him that many people, too many people, went to law school because of concurrent uncertainty and desire to achieve paradigmatic success.

  But he swatted my doubts away like mosquitoes and told me there was nothing wrong with success. That success is what makes the world go around. That people like us were bred to be successful and there was nothing wrong with that. And as he said these things, I nodded. In part because he had an intense and intangible power over me and I believed him. In part, because I wanted to believe him. But even then I knew that this man, this smart-thinking, success-bound man, was worlds different from the boy on that old porch swing.

  But I chose to believe him. And that deep in this ambitious creature lingered the dreams of youth. And I went to law school.

  “It’s just too easy,” he said, seeming to enjoy his newfound cryptic aura.

  “What?”

  “Doing what our parents want. We go to school, we get good grades. We send our grandparents birthday cards. Being good kids. It’s just too easy.”

  His words were laced with fear. Fear that ou
r parents had blueprints for how they wanted us to turn out and that it was up to us to fight this, to be ourselves.

  “What’s so wrong with being good, Phelps?” I asked.

  “Nothing is wrong with being good. But being good can be boring. Before we know it, we’ll be engaged, get married, honeymoon in small town, U.S.A., make love in a heart-shaped hot tub infested with germs of mediocrity, wake up with three blond-haired kids who eat only Cheetos and Wonder bread, and have a lease on a minivan.”

  At the time, I nodded, swallowing his musings whole. If only I could go back and say: Chances are we will get married, honeymoon in Asia, and make love in a private plunge pool infested with germs of privilege, wake up with three blond-haired kids who eat only edamame and soy crisps, and have his and hers Range Rovers.

  “We will be engaged?” I asked. My heart danced, a rookie ballerina, bouncing softly, uncertainly.

  “No, Quinn. Don’t be silly. We will be engaged, though. Both of us. In a matter of years. And our mothers will phone each other up to talk about centerpieces and ceremony music. About whether to serve mint juleps with the lemonade during the procession.”

  “Oh.”

  Phelps finished his beer in one proud gulp as if it would make him seem more of a man. Mine was still halfway full.

  “Well, my kids aren’t necessarily going to have blond hair. And who knows if I will even give them Cheetos or Wonder bread. Did you have a bad experience with a heart-shaped tub, Phelps? You’re being weird.” It was a soggy comeback, but honest.

  “No.” He smiled and took a swig of his beer that was already empty and blushed.

  “Spill it.”

  “Spill it?” he said, shaking the empty bottle.

  “Spill it. Where is all of this ridiculous hypothesizing coming from?”

  “Okay, okay…” he said. On the lake a mother loon swam, her five babies trailing behind.

  “Yes?”

  “Okay, I admit it. I heard my parents talking on the ride here. They were talking about the heart-shaped tub in their hotel room when they went on a road trip in college.”