Friday Mornings at Nine

by Marilyn Brant

  Jennifer and David wandered the long corridors of the rec center for a few minutes, peeking into the rooms set aside for the larger lectures or student gatherings.

  “You could host a wedding reception in this one,” David said, pointing through the open door to a “lounge” that could easily seat two hundred.

  “If we’re going to have less than twenty people, maybe we should look for something more, um—”

  “Intimate,” David finished for her.

  “Well, yeah. The Center is just too big.” And they hadn’t even bothered to trek through the lower level where the dances and performances were held. They already knew those wouldn’t provide any kind of cozy, chat-with-old-buddies atmosphere.

  “I think we should give TJH a chance,” he said. “I don’t know if they still have those party rooms on level three, but they’d be about perfect for what we’re looking for.”

  TJH, or Thomas Jefferson Hall, was the upperclassmen dorm. The dorm she and David had lived in, just one floor apart, during their junior year. Every hallway housed a memory. Every study room a recollection of their relationship. Jennifer wasn’t sure she could handle being in there again. Of course, anything was better than the Vat Building, which David also had on his list.

  “Okay, let’s go there,” she said, resigning herself to the lesser of two evils.

  But unexpected news befell them before they ever got out of the Weaver Center.

  They passed by a campus information booth, manned (womanned?) by a perky blond thing, a student guide whom David, apparently, couldn’t resist questioning. “Hi, there,” he said. “Perhaps you can help us.”

  “Sure!” Perky Girl said with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. Jennifer tried not to scowl at her.

  “We were interested in renting out one of the party rooms in TJH. Who on campus should we speak to? The dean? The dorm director?”

  The girl regarded them blankly. “Um, party rooms?”

  “Right. On the third floor. You know, those large rooms where people gather?”

  Jennifer could hear the polite condescension in his voice, something a typical eavesdropper might miss. He looked so pleasant, but the glint in his eye, the measured enunciation and the marginally terse tone gave away his impatience and irritation. Good to see that one of his core traits had remained unchanged through the years. And that, no matter how nubile the woman, David still didn’t suffer fools cheerfully.

  Though there were exceptions. He’d married Marcia after all.

  “My friend lives in Thomas Jefferson Hall,” the girl said, squinting at them. “They have a few kinda small lounges up there for residents, but I’ve never seen big party rooms. I mean, some guys live on level three and they, you know, have parties”—she blushed prettily—“but not, like, officially.”

  “They must’ve converted the space to dorm rooms,” Jennifer said, the tension in her chest loosening at this news. Now they wouldn’t have to go there.

  David nodded, bit his lip, turned back to Perky Girl and slowed his speech even further. “Is there anywhere on campus that might have rooms alumni can rent out?”

  Perky Girl batted her eyes as she stared, unfocused, into the distance. Thinking, presumably. “Um, maybe somewhere in the Vat? I think they have, like, places just for responsible adults and stuff.”

  “Responsible and practical adults,” David murmured in an aside to Jennifer. “Dependable, sensible, respectable adults.”

  “Acceptable, presentable adults. A vegetable,” she murmured back with a grin, parroting a mixed-up version of the famous Supertramp lyrics from verses they’d once had memorized. Words they’d danced to in that very building.

  Perky Girl looked confused. “A vegetable? You mean, like, you wanna bring food in there?”

  “Not necessarily,” David said with feigned sweetness. “We just want a room where we can joyfully and happily be intellectual, logical, clinical and cynical, uh, adults.”

  “That would be a magical miracle,” Jennifer contributed in her most serious voice.

  David snickered.

  Perky Girl no longer looked so perky. “You’ll have to ask the dean,” she said with a sniff. “I totally don’t know.”

  “Thanks, anyway,” David said, pushing Jennifer away from the booth before they both started laughing.

  “That was mean of us,” Jennifer said once they were outside, even though she couldn’t stop giggling. “Funny, but unkind.”

  “She was a dope,” David said with a dismissive shrug. “But I think we may have to go over to the Vat and see what’s available in person.”

  Jennifer sucked in some air. She knew she couldn’t express to David how very much she didn’t want to go back there. Not with him. Not with anyone, really. The words she wanted to say got stuck in her throat, however, and all she could do was nod mutely. A gesture that he, of course, took to mean acquiescence.

  “It’ll be kind of strange to walk around in there after all these years, don’t you think?” he asked.

  Strange didn’t begin to cover it. Again, she sort of nodded at him.

  “God, the hours we spent in that lab…”

  No kidding. The Vat Building housed the university’s main computer lab. She, David and their friends had treated it like their true campus home. If the rooms in TJH presented painful flash-backs, every nook and cranny in the Vat caused the equivalent agony of a two-hour-long torture film.

  Nevertheless, to the Vat they went.

  Bizarre how someplace could be altered—room elements switched around, new equipment incorporated, even additions put on the building—and, yet, two decades later, still look and feel exactly the same.

  The room that was the hardest for her to walk into was the Techie Lounge. It had the ancient familiarity of her childhood bedroom, and despite its emptiness, or maybe because of it, she felt teleported through time when she crossed the threshold. There were new vending machines, of course (though they still were stocked with Coke, Snickers bars and bags of Doritos), a few pieces of different furniture (old and moldy, but not as old or as moldy as the ones that’d been there when she and David were students), a marginally less horrible valance above the window overlooking the quad (but still very ugly).

  Even David paused, speechless, by her side. They gaped in stunned silence at the room—one that was “just right” for their gathering, whereas the Weaver Center had been too big and Thomas Jefferson Hall too small.

  She was thinking about this for several seconds before she became aware of David’s breathing. It had turned hard and labored, his eyes becoming glassy to the point of wateriness.

  What the hell? Was he having a heart/asthma/panic attack? She stared at him in alarm. “David? Are you all right?”

  He shook his head.

  She grabbed his wrist and felt for his pulse. It raced beneath her fingertips, but he just stood there, immobile. “David?” she said again. “Talk to me. Tell me what you’re feeling.” She fumbled for her cell phone. “You need to sit down. I—I can call for an ambulance or at least get a doctor out h—”

  He turned to face her, twisting his wrist out of her grasp and, instead, taking her hand. Gently. “What I’m feeling,” he said, still panting more than breathing, “is regret. That I’m sorry, Jenn. So sorry I left our life together. So sorry I left…you.”

  Jennifer, held fast by both his grip on her hand and by the circle of magnetism he always seemed to create around himself, gazed at him. She realized with shock that the water in his brown eyes stemmed from tears, not pain. Well, at least not physical pain.

  “It was a long time ago,” she whispered, again wanting to ask him for the details of his departure but unable to voice her question for fear of setting off in him some kind of relapse.

  “Doesn’t seem so long.”

  “No,” she said. “Not in this room. But it was.”

  He pulled back then, released her hand, looked away. She heard him mumble something that sounded like “Maybe. Maybe not.” She
wasn’t sure, though, since he’d walked away from her and toward the window. He seemed strangely fine again.

  With an abrupt motion, he snatched at the dangling cord and pulled, opening the blinds until they smacked the underside of that ugly valance. “Let’s get some light in here, huh? Take a look around.”

  She figured they had already had plenty of time to look around, but since color had begun seeping back into his lips and cheeks, she humored him. Still, she couldn’t help but say, “Are you sure you don’t want to check out any of the other rooms? They built that new wing in the back—”

  “Nope. This is the spot. Everyone in the club knew it well.” He met her gaze directly. “Dreams were formed and abandoned here. People met each other, then moved away. And isn’t that what reunions are all about? Returning to an influential place and facing those dreams, and those people, again? Seeing if the present reality in any way mirrors the hopes of the past?”

  How poetic, she wanted to say, feeling the anger bubbling inside her at his words. How easy to speak of abandoned dreams like they were a figurative concept. And blithely pulling out the phrase “hopes of the past,” as if he were giving some valedictory speech meant to be inspirational and not merely trying to excuse his own lousy behavior.

  Instead, she glanced at her watch. “I have to go soon.”

  His eyes widened. “Really? But it’s nearly lunchtime. I was hoping we could grab a bite at the Winter Palace.”

  She pressed her lips together. “I don’t think—”

  “Just wait.” He moved toward her, shooting her one of his Gimme-A-Chance-And-I’ll-Charm-You looks. Funny. He could still pull that off. “Let’s see if we can secure a reservation on this room, and then we’ll talk about lunch, okay?”

  She shrugged. He’d have to drag her in there, North America’s Best Chicken Kiev or not. As for the Vat, maybe they’d get lucky and be told by the university administration that the chosen location was unavailable. Then they’d have to hold their CPU reunion in the psychology building or something. Somewhere she could feel numb and indifferent.

  But it turned out to be no problem for two alumni to rent out the Techie Lounge for a night—given a couple of months’ advanced notice, given the purpose was for a former campus club’s reunion and given their readily available $150 deposit check written out and handed over to the C-IL-U treasurer.

  The Winter Palace was, to Jennifer’s relief, not so easy a place to secure a reservation, however. Not for lunch. Not for anything. The building was gone.

  “Aw, crap,” David said, staring at the empty lot just off campus where “their” Russian restaurant had been. “They tore it down.” He craned his neck to scan up and down the block. “Maybe they just moved to a new location.”

  But when they asked a college boy on a bike, and then an elderly lady with a dog and, finally, some businessman in a dark blue suit if any of them knew what had happened to it, they all said, “No.”

  A store owner in the mini strip mall next door explained the rest. “Tore the place down, ’bout three years ago now. Owners moved to Florida.”

  As the man answered a few more of David’s questions, Jennifer’s cell phone rang. She backed away several feet, recognized the number and answered. “Hi, Michael. What’s going on?”

  Her husband could not, thankfully, see her grimace or spot the tremors in her hands, but David missed nothing—not even while finishing up his conversation with the store owner. Jennifer could feel his eyes on her—watching, waiting, analyzing.

  Michael, who sometimes called on his lunch break, babbled on about the school’s standardized testing, some student-adviser meeting he had that afternoon, the grading he needed to finish up that night. She mostly murmured, “Oh, okay,” to anything he said, including his suggestion that he could pick up a pizza on the way home if she and the girls wouldn’t mind eating an hour later.

  She sighed. What did it matter?

  Michael wasn’t a bad man, despite his cluelessness, nor was David purely evil, despite how he’d hurt her once. Being sandwiched between them—Michael jabbering in her ear and David scowling in her line of vision—she couldn’t help but wonder how she was to have been attracted to (and to have, at one time, attracted) these two very different men. These two sides of her. Did either of them really know her? She doubted it, but perhaps that was her fault. Perhaps she had never been fully honest with either of them about herself. Perhaps she had projected just enough of what they had wanted to see and hear that each man assumed she was who they had wanted her to be.

  When Michael finally rang off, she snapped the phone shut, only to have to deal with David, who had finished his conversation with the store owner and moved to within a foot and a half of her, the intensity of his gaze always startling at so close a distance.

  “He doesn’t know you’re here, does he?” he asked her point-blank, his tone a mix of accusation and curiosity.

  She shook her head, surprised by his surprise. “But,” she fired back, recognizing the probable source of his insecurity and consequent attack, “I’ll bet Marcia doesn’t know you’re here either.”

  He didn’t immediately answer, but she saw she’d struck at the truth. “In the ways of sneakiness we always were well matched,” she whispered, a torrent of memories accompanying her words. She and David, lying convincingly to the resident assistants about their whereabouts in the dorm during a series of unnecessary fire alarms. Blatantly cheating on their end of the year Spanish project. Stealing a couple of programming tests off the professor’s computer—not that they’d needed help with the class. Just to do it. Stuff she probably wouldn’t have even thought of doing had she not been following David’s lead. But, nevertheless, she had pulled off those pranks without a hitch, which said something about her, didn’t it?

  David had enough sense not to challenge her or question her meaning. “The Winter Palace is gone,” he said instead. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t grab a quick lunch somewhere else. You up for burgers or something?”

  “Thanks, David, but no.” She glanced pointedly at her watch. “I’d like not to have to rush home. If I leave now, I’ll get there about fifteen minutes ahead of the girls.”

  He nodded, but she knew David never gave in easily. She could almost see the board game behind his eyes, the strategy in his moves, as he said, “See you on November thirteenth, then? It’ll be here before we know it.”

  “True.” She broke away from his magnetic circle and took a few independent steps in the direction of her car. He motioned to follow her, but she waved him off. “Until November.”

  And even though he got in the last word—“We’ll be in touch, Jenn,” he called after her—she felt relief bordering on euphoria that she was the one who got to leave him behind this time.

  11

  The Trio, Reconfigured

  Late September through early October

  For the three consecutive weeks that followed, the Glendale Grove trio did their best impression of Shell Game Friendship.

  Tamara would run into Bridget and both would quickly scoot away. Jennifer would slide into the middle of the other two but, after a momentary pause, would soon be elsewhere herself. There was a great shuffling of insincere greetings and relieved departures, their biggest problems remaining hidden beneath an impenetrable bowl—like a tightly cupped palm over their hearts—with no one admitting to what lurked, alone and hard, underneath the smooth veneer.

  The day after Jennifer’s face-to-face encounter with David, she left a message on Bridget’s home voice mail (when she was certain the other woman would be showering), pleading illness and her inability to make it to the Indigo Moon that morning. In truth, she needed time to herself, time to think, the lack of which had caused a particularly painful malady that Jennifer reasoned could surely fall under the subheader of Sickness.

  Thus, considering Technology Avoidance to be her Rx for the day, Jennifer did not respond to Bridget’s phone call of concern, Tamara’s e-mail asking h
ow “the event” at the university went or even David’s follow-up text message saying: Thx 4 the visit. Really, they all just needed to give her a damn break.

  In light of Jennifer’s absence, Bridget considered cancelling out on the Friday coffee date herself. But she knew it would be a cowardly reaction, and she’d been practicing boldness in cooking (amazing what curry could do!) and wanted to extend the experience to life.

  However, the visit itself proved dissatisfying to both women, though Glendale Grove onlookers would have noticed nothing amiss, except the notable lack of one regular member of the threesome. Not so unusual considering their several years of get-togethers. Even inevitable, one might say. But the morning’s omission really threw the remaining two off course.

  Bridget’s resolve of boldness was doused by Tamara’s strained demeanor. For once, the latter was cagey and nearly introspective. She answered Bridget’s inquiries about her aunt’s funeral with measured civility and only one brief instance of moist emotion, but she divulged little else of a personal nature.

  Bridget, having already learned her lesson about sharing her fears with Tamara, wouldn’t give away anything either. She merely deflected Tamara’s halfhearted questions back to their speculative discussion on Jennifer and how the meeting with her ex-boyfriend the day before might have gone.

  With focused effort and forced graciousness, the pair managed to stay at the Indigo Moon all by themselves for one hour and seventeen minutes. Not that either was counting.

  Tamara, acutely aware of the slipper of mistrust that had wedged itself in the door between her and Bridget, could not, nevertheless, work up the energy to yank it loose, let alone remove it altogether. She had too much on her mind anyway to be playing junior high clique games. She didn’t blame Jennifer for canceling out, and she couldn’t bring herself to feel hurt by their friend’s avoidance.