Half a Life

by Darin Strauss

  But everything for me seemed charged, sharpened; every conversation that never departed the shores of “Awesome” and “Good times, buddy—good times” was a relief.

  It had taken me days to prepare, and the night before the reunion had been all choked stomach and thoughts that no one would be upset if I didn’t show because I hadn’t promised anybody. I went because I hadn’t wanted to go: it was the strongest, best reason to go. And because Celine wouldn’t get to attend hers, and we were in this together. Also, the part that hated being tied to Celine (the part thrilled by the collapse of the court proceedings, the part that read response-time library books and memorized a sentence from Celine’s journal, something she would never have wanted a boy in her high school to see)—that part needed to know if, after thirteen years of side-by-side desks and water fountains and time on the school lawn, these people thought of me as just some guy whose car killed a girl in the final bend of the school year.

  Yes—another self-involved question. But a tragedy turns a life into an endless publicity tour, a string of appearances where you actually think in words like “tragedy.” I must admit that my having showed at Celine’s funeral and at her parents’ house had been in some measure marketing decisions. This endless focus group, trying to get my Q rating high enough, all to prove that I was acceptable.

  There was also a little magical thinking at work here. I’d been able to convince myself lately that I’d begun “moving on.” If I’d paid a price for my role in Celine’s death, I’d paid with the wooden nickels of self-pity (in high school) and the rubber checks of denial (until this moment). So I showed up here thinking that maybe I could retype my high-school life entirely. As if one nostalgic evening could give my puberty an ending without drama, a calamity-free changeover to college: as if I could turn my memories into something like yours.

  I walked through the murmur of reunion; it was like passing a long reel or frieze of hugging. Everywhere I turned, someone’s elbow was poking out from around someone else’s shoulder, a woman’s hair was bunched over a guy’s forearm. Women had taken one another’s hands by the fingers and just looked. (Women were so much better, still, at touching each other than men.) Ex-bullies chatted up their ex-targets. The jokes and grudges, the gossip and the forgotten social calamities: all these phantoms—in the face of time and change—simply dissipated for most people. At this last realization, my cringing nerves almost stopped me short and sent me home.

  It seemed for me, and just me, that high school was still fresh: that a few minutes were in a Groundhog Day loop, were endlessly happening. That I even had the freedom to walk among these people amazed me.

  “I’ve heard about lots of these,” a former wrestler (low center of gravity) was telling a former mathlete (elongated head poking above the crowd and somehow into gray equations). “And I’d say this is one of the best examples of high-school reunions I have ever heard about in all the years I have been hearing about them.”

  “You’d need a bigger sample.”

  “That makes zero sense whatsoever,” the ex-wrestler said. “Because who’s missing? Nobody. We were a tight class, is all. Everybody decided to drop what they’re doing and fly the flag, show their face. I’m seeing everybody I want to see. That’s a beautiful thing.”

  “I’m only saying we’d need a statistical mean, for comparison.”

  “Yeah, right on, nobody mean. Just good people you love.”

  The evening resisted my taking its pulse. There was no way to get an accurate reading.

  Up the flowered walkway, tug open the banquet door, enter the hall, and watch people’s nostrils stiffen as they catch sight of you. See their eyes double blink as they catch themselves about to give voice to the thoughts they aren’t supposed to say. All of this blew fresh life into the memory of my guilt. But how did I expect people to respond to me? I am the accident guy, after all. I circled the hall. Not as if I were a participant but a sort of avuncular, freelance referee: uninvolved, just making sure traffic was smooth. But then, wait; everyone was staring at everyone. This was just the Reunion Experience. You were seeing if time had cut you a better deal than it had everyone else. That’s all anyone was doing. And then everyone felt the helpless human tug toward nostalgia, convincing ourselves that something mattered because all of us had done it together.

  Driving here, I’d found my hands and feet making certain decisions—figuring what I could and could not accomplish—before I was even aware of it. I’d taken certain back streets, going out of my way to keep from learning whether the quicker route had retained Celine’s vacant stare.

  There was a mirrored wall. James Harmon and I stood just nodding at each other in front of it. We’d been pretty chummy back in the old corridors; it made this glass wall a desert’s covered tent, a safe spot to rest. We smiled. We each asked how the other was doing. (James’s skin had cleared up.) We smiled again. Drops of light twinkled in James’s glass. The cracks in old friendships are measured in awkward pauses.

  A little later (after catching up with Jim, joking with Eric), I stood in front of the banquet hall’s sound system, next to some balding dude. We hung out there without speaking for a while, each not revealing that he didn’t know the other’s name; instead we just acknowledged that we were mutually experiencing something.

  The dude leaned to me. “I hear that people are going to go to a bar that’s around the corner, that’s supposed to be a fun place.”

  I showed agreement by raising my eyebrows. “The Clark Tavern,” I said. My hands I kept tented in front of my chin.

  The dude’s baldness seemed to come from powerful thought: the hair slipping down the sides of the head, the brain pushing up on the skull like a fist stretching a balloon.

  “I’ve thought about you sometimes, yo,” he said. “You’re the one who ran over that girl? This’ll sound weird. I’m just talking out loud here. But I worried about you. Everyone was very hard on you.”

  Really? That wasn’t how I remembered it. I remembered what had seemed to be a big wave, and once I’d pushed through it, only flat calm sea, and people wanting to make sure I was floating all right.

  “Were they hard on me?” I said.

  “I really did, man. I thought about you a lot. Like a, What’s this guy going to do with this, kind of a thing. I was hoping I’d see you here.”

  My face was burning. Or not burning, just suddenly huge and gawky. I needed to get this gawky thing away before I bumbled into somebody. So that’s what I tried to do now, with this dude: “Okay, then.” Nod, handshake, bye.

  After that, every conversation was a swerve. I’d see people I recognized, move close, my courage would conk out, so I’d walk past. Their faces would form into a greeting and then congeal a little as I glided by. Was that Darin …?

  I’d been wrong. Maybe these people could lay sprawled in their own nostalgia. But I couldn’t join them. My thoughts kept flying head-first into the pane of glass that kept me outside of everyone else.

  “Oh, I don’t associate you with that,” a woman named Kim told me a few hours later. By now the night was huffing and puffing toward the finish line.

  She and I had stepped out onto the lawn. I had always really liked Kim in school, when she’d been the fluent, prim girl dating Jim. Kim had become a smoker—so there was that gentle distress of seeing people from high school practice adult vices without calamity—and it was because she’d headed outside to burn a cigarette that we now stood here in the cold, just beyond the door, where people expelled long, sighing, dry clouds.

  “Thanks,” I said, “for saying that.” I was obliging too much. “Yeah, I remember you from a lot of different years, as well.” This was a case of my deliberately misunderstanding: and why? To make her clear it up. To make her say it again. Guilt makes you behave in ways that get you to dislike yourself, that make you go through more guilt.

  She fired up another Marlboro Gold: match crack, instant light on lips, her bunched chin. “I mean, people I think
know it wasn’t your fault.”

  “Oh.”

  “—or even think about it when they first see you,” she said.

  “Well, good.” I nodded, only now recognizing the indiscretion of having brought it up.

  She waved at the cigarette smoke in front of my face until it was gone.

  At my most confident, I blush and my gaze veers. But when feeling unrecognizable, I’ll make sure to look you right in the eye.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  The whole wistful mass of us migrated to the Clark Tavern—carpooling in big noisy departures, that zip and lurch of a family van filled with high-schoolers who’d put on years like weight, but who remained their juvenile selves, after all: hooting out windows, greeting and upending the night. It was like rehashing graduation. We’d left a place that was only us, and entered the world’s tricky spots, where people didn’t know our stories and had to be approached with suspicion.

  But hadn’t Kim said exactly what I’d wanted her to say? Why had there been no quick-focused humidity around the eyes, no stinging grateful rush? That my ex-classmates didn’t think about Celine even when they saw me scattered other ideas in my head. It was as if I knew less than I had when I’d left Manhattan to come back out here.

  Inside the bar, everyone kept snapping photos, or they stared at one another, stares of real intensity—drawn out, blatant, ex-friend to ex-friend. They were hoarding new memories, images to last the decade until next reunion.

  Kim had gathered some friends, women. We were all leaning forward—in the way of people at bars—straining to hear over music. (Mullet-rock, thudding from nearby speakers.) I was aware of other people’s hair very near my face, that warmth. Everyone was nodding.

  “And nobody, nobody here anyhow”—Kim drew a little sundial in the air with her finger—“really knew what’s-her-name, the girl, since she wasn’t in our grade. Celine. So anyhow, our sympathies were with you.”

  And nodding went around the circle again.

  Part of reunions is reenacting the whirl of departure over and over. Every few minutes at the bar somebody would make a sloshy toast and then a dramatic exit: hugs, complicated handshakes, punching email addresses into cell phones. We’d become used to one another again and were saying goodbye again.

  I don’t even know how I’d gotten Kim and her friends discussing the accident. Ten years on, talking about it remained a crackling horror. Probably, just by acting weird, I’d shown myself stained by the blemish of it. Whatever private anxieties we endure are, of course, never really private. Our own dissembling behavior guarantees their eternal, public return.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But it’s just—” And why couldn’t I let it drop? All they’d done was agree to try to buck me up. I wanted to shout: Come on, someone died!

  “Okay!” one of Kim’s friends said, clapping once to ring in a change of subject.

  The nodding petered out. I was aware of people’s hair no longer being near my eyes. And it felt as if the music suddenly got louder again. The moment had lifted its gates from around us.

  “Thank you,” I said, “all of you.”

  “Don’t sweat it.” Kim tilted her thin, savvy face. I never want to talk about this again, her expression said.

  The social-approval me—like the smoke that Kim had earlier waved from my face—seemed to just go poof!

  And now I was the one gushing my way down the bar, handshaking, hugging, giving out my business card, getting it confused with other people’s, so that a few times the card I gave out was someone else’s and we had to reexchange. Maybe some friendships had been relit here, but I doubted it. What was said between this group who had been the stars of each other’s lives had been said already, or wouldn’t ever be said.

  The bald dude I’d stood next to in the reunion hall was moping in a corner: hand around a plastic cup, beer slobbering down his knuckles. This guy looked handsome in a diminishing way. Ignore all the scalp and some excess under the chin and he could still have been eighteen. He kept staring at the mirror behind the taps, and that’s where our eyes caught.

  He raised his nose, a quick and wordless What’s up. He was one of the people who’d been remembered by no one, and I thought to give him a backslap, learn his name, but that felt false to me, too. We face-gestured at each other a second time. And next (because life isn’t any more afraid of cliché than we are) I jostled out the door and saw a good friend of Celine’s. This guy had maybe even been her boyfriend: part of Melanie Urquhart’s clique.

  He was talking close with arrogant lips to some people I had barely known even back when. His hair was neat as a haiku. And everything seemed just as it had with Melanie ten years before. The guy showed me a rigid, squint-eyed nod. I paused, my cheeks went warm; I scuttled off to my car. I hated that moment: I was angry at the pause, angry at my legs. I had neither sauntered right over to say hi (This is behind me) nor kept moving with my head up (You think the wrong thing about me, and it doesn’t matter). Maybe this is as near to time travel as we can know. Not the sort that undoes events, but the situations (the same faces, words, and gestures; the same internal responses) that bring back former selves. Everything between past and present hadn’t disappeared but grown incredibly slim, a wall between now and before that seemed to occupy no space at all. I was the person I had been. This guy was who he had been. Someone all of us used to know was long dead. And the person who’d killed her was making his way home, after pointedly not ordering a single alcoholic drink because he didn’t want anyone to see him and have DUI thoughts.

  Four years later. It was after 1 a.m., the window cracked open. Breeze and quiet. The empty platform of a night, waiting for the next day to roll in.

  “What’s on your mind?” Susannah was asking.

  We’d just moved in together. I’d climbed out of bed, walked to the kitchen.

  Susannah said, “How often do you think about it?” She was rubbing her cheeks awake. “So I’m right, aren’t I? The car crash.”

  “Probably less than once a day,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  The accident still turned me shy. She came up to face me. I said, “I guess once a week, maybe.”

  We’d been together a pretty long while, and by now could decipher the intonation of the glance. “I’m just asking,” she said.

  “That’s a lot less than I used to think about it,” I said. It was shyness not unlike the feeling you get in classroom dreams about being unprepared for the surprise oral exam. I said, “Why ‘just asking’? Do I sound touchy?”

  “You still use ‘once a day’ as a point of reference? How often did you used to think about it?” She moved to the kitchen table. “Not touchy, Darin—it’s just, you never bring it up.”

  Susannah’s mix is innocent and hardheaded; she settles on a position without worry, and stays put.

  I squinted and grimaced my authentic surprise. “I can’t believe it’s down to once a week now.”

  A garbage truck blustered past: clang and rattle across a sleeping street.

  Relationships are physics. Time transforms things—it has to, because the change from me to we means clearing away the fortifications you’ve put up around your old personality. Living with Susannah made me feel as if I had started riding Einstein’s famous theoretical bus. Here’s my understanding of that difficult idea, nutshelled: if you’re riding a magic Greyhound, equipped for light-speed travel, you’ll actually live through less time than will any pedestrians whom the bus passes by. So, for a neighbor on the street with a stopwatch, the superfast bus will take two hours to travel from Point A to Point B. But when you’re on that Greyhound, and looking at the wipe of world out those rhomboidal coach-windows, the same trip will take just twenty-four minutes. Your neighbor, stopwatch under thumb, will have aged eighty-six percent more than you have. It’s hard to fathom. But I think it’s exactly what adult relationships do to us: on the outside, years pass, lives change. But inside, it’s just a day that repeats. You and your partner age
at the same clip; it seems no time has gone by. Only when you look up from your relationship—when you step off the bus, feel the ground under your shoes—do you sense the sly, soft absurdity of romance physics. It had been four years since my ten-year reunion. I did math in my head about Celine all the time. I’d struck her bicycle when I was eighteen. I was now thirty-two: closing in on a decade and a half since the accident. I’d entered adulthood sensing Celine with me. I’d entered romantic life sensing Celine with me. The person inside the bus, ignoring the stopwatch that measured years, had my teenage face.

  Discussing the accident with Susannah now, I felt the brain-hesitation, the sudden focus you get before a life shifts.

  “I think,” she said, dropping into a seat at the table, “we need to discuss it.”

  I sat, too.

  Susannah kept talking. Asking did I think of going to a therapist ever—is there something you need that I can do? We’d recently ratcheted up our commitment, and this was night-speak, pledged allegiance; it hardly mattered what she said, more that she was taking the time to say it. Really, honey, have you considered therapy, which is something I can help you with.

  “Hard to believe that it’s down to just once a week now,” I repeated. Was the decreased frequency of my thinking about Celine a good thing or a bad thing? “It sounds shitty out of my mouth,” I said.

  “Not at all,” she said, lowering eyelids, talking fast, crumbs of reticence.

  Whenever I got tired of—not tired of; self-conscious and immature about—examining my own motivations, an untrusting part of me examined her motivations. I could see calculation in Susannah that she was unaware of. (Or could I?) It was in her interest, as well, not to linger at a moment when I questioned my goodness. Maybe it would start up her doubts about me. And nobody wants to go through that.

  “Well,” she was saying, “it’s like what’s the name of that term? No, it seems strange you’d want to deal with this by yourself.” Her forehead made its crinkles; she crunched her eyebrows together. There was something both fussy and loving in this. “Survivor’s guilt. That’s the term,” Susannah said.