I walk the entire length of the train but don’t see anything out of the ordinary. These days, the trains are packed at all hours with tech workers commuting between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. They’re mostly young, mostly thin, mostly entitled—white and Asian newcomers who, as a group, have driven rental prices through the roof and have shown little appreciation for what is unique and cool about San Francisco. They don’t seem to care about the great bookstores, the iconic record stores, the grand old theaters. Maybe it’s unfair to lump them all together, but they seem to care about only one thing: money. They have an air of dull inexperience, as if they’ve never traveled or read books for pleasure or gone to bed with some girl they met in a Laundromat. And right at this moment, they’re taking up the handicap seats, laptops spread across their knees.
At the Hillsdale station, I get off with about twenty other people—locals, mostly, because the techies don’t stop here, at least not yet. I linger in the station until everyone else has moved on. There’s one woman in a tailored black suit who keeps hanging around, looking out of place, and I’ve pretty much decided she’s spying on me, but then a Mercedes pulls up, a younger man inside. She tugs at her skirt in a way that suggests she’s wearing garters under the business suit, walks to his car, and climbs in. They drive away.
I walk across El Camino and up toward the mall, feeling slightly foolish, like a kid playing spy games. I tell myself none of this is necessary, but then I think about the bracelet, the collar, Alice’s harrowing trip to the desert, and I realize once again that it is necessary.
I stop into Trader Joe’s, killing time, watching for anyone suspicious, and end up walking out with only a bottle of water and three chocolate bars. Of course, now every time I eat sweets I instinctively think of the next weigh-in. Is this the ounce of fat that might put me over the limit? Is this the calorie that might land me in the desert? I hate The Pact for that.
I wander into Barnes & Noble and pick up the new issue of Q for Alice. Paul Heaton and Briana Corrigan are on the cover—she’ll be happy. I cross the street and enter the mall. I still have thirty minutes to kill, so I wander around the shops. I’ve been having an inexplicable longing for a comfortable plaid flannel shirt—Freud would probably say it comes from a nostalgia for youth—so I do a speedy walk-through of all of the usual mall places. I find something on the sale rack at Lucky Jeans and walk out with a bag, now looking like everyone else in the mall, only older.
Over at the food court, I’m still seven minutes early. I hang out at the far end, just watching the people come and go.
I see JoAnne enter the food court through the side door that leads out to the parking lot. Her furtive glances, like a deer in a wide-open field, make me nervous. Do I really want to go through with this? I stand back, watching her. She sits across from Panda Express, at a table by the window. I wish she’d chosen a more discreet spot. She pulls a phone out of her purse and begins to fidget. I wish she hadn’t brought her phone. The words she whispered to me at the party echo in my head: Don’t fuck it up. Until now it hadn’t occurred to me that she might be the one to fuck it up.
I continue watching her, scanning the space to see if she was followed. She makes a call that only lasts a few seconds. Unlike me, she seems oblivious to the crowd in the food court. She pulls something out of her purse—a granola bar—unwraps it, and eats it with tiny bites, head down. Occasionally, she looks up abruptly, but never in my direction. She’s paranoid, it seems, but not thorough. She acts a little manic, a little edgy—nothing like the JoAnne I knew in college. That JoAnne was remarkable for her incredible calmness. Even in the most difficult situations, she seemed uncannily mellow. She was never beautiful or even striking, but it was this placid confidence, this utter lack of insecurity, that made her stand out in a crowd.
The woman across the food court from me now is unrecognizable. Although I would never say this to my clients, deep down I’ve come to believe that most people don’t change. Maybe they are able to accentuate some parts of their personality over others; there’s no doubt that good nurturing in childhood can guide one’s natural inclinations in a positive direction. I’ve spent a great deal of my professional life searching for useful tools to help people direct their personalities in a positive way. However, for the most part, I believe that we all have to work from the hand of cards we are dealt early on. When I see people who have undergone extreme personality shifts, I’m always curious to know the root cause. What is the button, the push point, the inciting action that overrides someone’s nature? What makes people appear, to those who know them well, so different?
As I said, over time stress, anxiety, and psychological difficulties always show in a person’s face. I’ve seen signs of trouble in JoAnne: the pronounced vein snaking from her left brow into her hairline, the downward tug at the corners of her mouth, lines near the eyes. Something tells me she needs help, but I’m not the one to offer it. Something tells me to walk away, but I can’t.
Because here’s the thing: I still want to hear what she has to say. I want insight into The Pact. I refuse to give up hope that there is some way out for Alice and me. Maybe JoAnne’s anxiety, the changes in her face and body, her voice, are a perfectly logical response to The Pact. If so, I don’t want to see that happen to Alice.
At Hot Dog on a Stick, I order two hot dogs and two green lemonades. I walk to JoAnne’s table and set the tray of food down in front of her.
She looks up from her phone, and the vein in her forehead throbs. “Jake,” she says. Just “Jake,” not “Friend.” There’s a weary softness in her voice. I see beyond the exhaustion in her eyes to something else—warmth—and it relaxes me.
“Hot dog on a stick?”
“You shouldn’t have,” she says, but she grabs one and takes a big bite. Then she stabs the straw through the hole of the plastic lid and takes a long drink.
“I was thinking you might not show up,” she says.
“Have I ever not shown up?”
“If you knew what was good for you, you wouldn’t have. But I’m glad you’re here.”
She puts her hands on the table, pointing in my direction. I’m tempted to glance under the table and look at her feet. It’s the direction the feet are pointing—not the hands—that indicates a person’s true interest. She has long, shiny pink nails. I remember her short unpolished nails from college. “What have we gotten ourselves into, Jake?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
“When I saw you at Villa Carina, I wanted to whisper in your ear, ‘Run, don’t come back,’ but I knew it was already too late. At the same time, and I apologize for saying this, I was happy to see you—for my own selfish reasons. I’ve felt so alone.”
“You said I shouldn’t be here—but why?”
JoAnne plays with her phone. I sense she’s deciding what to tell me. I can almost see her editing the sentences in her head.
“The Pact doesn’t trust me, Jake. If they saw us together it would be bad. Bad for me, bad for you.”
“Bad how?”
“I heard Alice was at Fernley.”
“You mean the place in the desert?”
“I’ve been there.” She shudders. “The first time wasn’t so terrible—confusing, embarrassing, but manageable.”
“And then?”
“And then it gets worse.”
Her evasiveness is frustrating. “How much worse?”
She sits up straighter. I can see her editing in her head again. “Just do everything you can to keep Alice from going back.”
“Jesus, JoAnne, how did you get sucked into this?” But even as I ask the question, I imagine someone else—Huang, maybe, or Ian, or Evelyn—innocently asking me the exact same question.
“The real story?” JoAnne’s voice is sharp, and the anger seems directed at herself. “It started with a stupid car accident. I was in a hurry to get back to work. It had just started to rain, the road was slick. A Porsche cut over into my lane, clipped the
bumper of my car, and I started to fishtail. I woke up in the hospital. When I came to, I’d been having such an intensely vivid dream—not vivid in a colorful, acid trip sort of way, but rather in an idea sort of way. You know how sometimes something happens and all of a sudden you see everything in your life from a different viewpoint? And the solutions, or at least the direction forward, seem so clear? Anyway, I suddenly realized what a joke the past few years of my life had been. All that schooling, the dissertation I couldn’t finish, my stupid condo—it all seemed wrong. Like I’d wasted all that time…”
“Were you hurt in the accident?”
“Concussion, stitches, broken rib, broken pelvis—something with the steering wheel. I was very lucky. Did you know that there are only two bones in the human body that, when broken, can lead to death? The pelvis is one of them.”
“Really? What’s the other?”
“The femur. Anyway, I was trying to recall the vivid dream when this doctor walked up. He introduced himself as Dr. Neil Charles. Then he started asking me all of these questions, really personal questions. You know, stuff to gauge the concussion and whether I was in shock. Everything was still pretty hazy at this point, with all the medication. He started filling out forms, asking me about my medical history, do I smoke, do I drink, am I allergic to anything, how much do I exercise, am I sexually active. Then a nurse carefully removed my gown. She stood by my bed, holding my hand, while Neil examined my whole body for bruises, scrapes, cuts from the crash. I had this incredible sense, as he touched me with these big, warm hands, that he was also analyzing all of the big and small scars of my life. He touched nearly every part of me. I was all wired up with IVs and who knows what, and I felt as if I couldn’t move, couldn’t escape—but I kind of liked it. I felt safe. I won’t bore you with the rest, Jake. Let’s just say we got married, Carmel-by-the-Sea, big crowd, string quartet. I did a one-eighty; my entire life changed.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
“No. Not so wonderful, Jake. It turns out that my super-vivid dream was nothing more than a false epiphany. In hindsight, I can see that I was already on the right path. I had made the right decisions, the right sacrifices. I was working toward my PhD in psychiatry. It was taking longer than I planned, and I was going into debt on the condo, but I should’ve stuck with it. It was Neil’s idea that I was ‘too smart’ to be a psychiatrist.”
I grin. “Thanks, says the lowly therapist.”
“Neil doesn’t have a clue. He’s the one who convinced me to get an MBA and take the job at Schwab, but I didn’t realize until later that it was because he had a really strong bias against psychiatry. Long story short—a few months after we met, I dropped out of my PhD program and started business school.”
“What a waste. You were so good at what you did.”
“It would have been nice if you’d been around back then to tell me so,” she says. I sneak a glance under the table. Both of her feet are pointed straight at me. “You remember I wanted kids, right?”
“You used to say you wanted a whole brood.”
“Well, it’s not going to happen.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, not sure what she’s getting at.
“Me too. Here’s the thing, Jake. I’ve been pregnant. I can have kids. I probably still could, if I weren’t trapped with Neil. But Neil never wanted to talk about it, and then when we got careless and I got pregnant, he said it wouldn’t be a good fit for our life in The Pact.”
It occurs to me, for the first time, that no one at either of The Pact parties ever mentioned kids.
“Are you telling me that none of the members have children?”
“A few do. Most don’t.”
“Is it against the rules or something?”
“Not exactly. Orla has said, however, that children can be an impediment to marriage.”
“But wouldn’t children ensure more future Pact members?”
“Doesn’t work that way. Just because you grew up in The Pact doesn’t mean you automatically receive a nomination. Anyway, it’s about the marriage, not about kids. You must love your husband—with the kids you’re supposedly free to choose.”
“Have you ever tried to quit?” I ask bluntly.
She laughs bitterly. “What do you think? I got my courage up after the abortion and went to see a divorce lawyer. Neil reported me to The Pact. They called me in, showed me a long list of my failures. If I went through with divorce, they threatened, I’d lose the house, my job, my reputation. They said it would be easy to make me disappear. The crazy thing is, Neil didn’t even want to join The Pact. He’s not a joiner. By the time we received the package from an old flatmate of Neil’s, I was already regretting my decision to get married. The Pact seemed like a lifeline. Long story short, I talked Neil into giving it a try. We did, and for whatever reason, everything went sideways for me. Neil, on the other hand, the golden child, was loved by all. It wasn’t even surprising when he got the call from Orla, when they asked him to chair the North American Regional Board.”
“Regional Board?”
She swirls her half-eaten hot dog on a stick in a pool of ketchup, and I can’t help noticing that, despite the fancy nails, the cuticles around her thumbs are torn and bleeding. “There are three regional boards, each composed of seven people. All three boards report back to a small group in Ireland. Every three months, they meet.”
“Where?”
“It changes—Ireland at least once a year, sometimes Hong Kong, occasionally out at Fernley.”
“And what do they talk about?”
“Everything,” she says grimly. Then, leaning close, “Everyone. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I think of the bracelet, the collar. The way Vivian and Dave always seem to know so much more than we tell them.
“They make new rules,” she says. “They draft the yearly appendices, review the judges’ decisions, hear appeals. They manage the finances and the investments. They review the files of problematic members.”
“But why?”
“According to Neil, the purpose of the boards is to ensure everyone’s marriage succeeds. No matter what.”
“And what if a marriage fails?”
“That’s just it—they don’t.”
“Some must,” I insist.
She shakes her head wearily. “You know how they told you that no one in The Pact has ever gotten divorced?” She’s in my face now, whispering. I can smell the ketchup on her breath. “Well, that’s true, Jake. But what they don’t tell you is that not all The Pact marriages last.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Fernley crap is bad, really bad, but I can take that, as long as I get myself in the right mindset. I even like the rules—I like the mandatory dates, the gifts.”
“But?”
She seems overwhelmed by an impossible sadness, a cloud of hopelessness. “I have no facts, and even if I did I shouldn’t say anything. But one time, when a board meeting was being held in San Francisco, we had dinner with Orla. Just her, Neil, and me. I’d never met her before. Neil insisted on picking out my outfit. He made me promise not to ask any personal questions. Over the years, The Pact had sure asked me a lot of personal questions—in the forms I’d filled out, the counselors I’d had to see, the recorded interviews at Fernley. Integrity Checks, they called them.”
“They recorded you?”
JoAnne nods. “When I told Neil I was worried Orla might have heard the recordings of my Integrity Checks, he didn’t deny it. He told me to be on my best behavior. Let Orla lead the conversation.”
“So, what’s she like?”
“Charismatic, but also strangely removed. One minute she’d be so interested in me, and the next minute she just looked right through me—it gave me shivers.”
The more JoAnne talks, the more she seems to lose the thread. In the stuff I found about Orla online, she didn’t seem like the person JoAnne is describing. In photographs, she looked friendly, intelligent, and nonthreateni
ng, like a great-aunt or the high school English teacher you always remember fondly. “You said that not all Pact marriages last. What did you mean?”
“The Pact has no divorces, but it also has more widows and widowers than you would expect.”
“What?” My throat goes dry.
“It’s just that—” She glances around nervously. Sweat appears on her forehead, and suddenly she starts to backtrack. “It’s probably nothing,” she evades, toying with her cellphone. “Maybe I’m thinking too much, like Neil says. Maybe my time at Fernley got me turned around. I don’t always think straight, you know.”
“The JoAnne I remember always thought straight.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but then you always put women on a pedestal.”
“I do?” I ask, temporarily sidetracked by this odd accusation.
“Girlfriends, friends, colleagues. I don’t mean to sound rude, but you probably think that wife of yours hung the moon.”
There’s something in her tone, something I don’t like. Anyway, I don’t think that’s accurate. I admire Alice, because there is much to admire in her. I love her, because she is easy to love. I think she’s beautiful because—well, because she is.
“JoAnne,” I say, trying to reel her back. “Tell me about the widows.”
“There’s probably a lot of reasons.” Her words spill out in a rush. “Pact members travel more, do more, than most people.” Her gaze skitters around the room. “We probably all lead riskier lives. I mean, if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have joined The Pact, right? The Pact attracts a certain kind of person?”
I think of Alice being forced into a straitjacket and carried off to Fernley with strangers in a black SUV. I think of the pilot in his flimsy Cessna. “There could be a hundred different reasons,” JoAnne says, as if trying to convince herself.
“Reasons for what? What risks?”
“Freak accidents. Drownings. Food poisoning. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but an unusual number of Pact members seem to die at a young age. And as soon as someone loses a spouse, there’s almost always a new relationship, fostered by The Pact, that leads pretty quickly to marriage.”
The Marriage Pact Page 19
