“Well, they will be if you get back in touch with them,” Jeremy offered, hearteningly. “And if that fails, which it won’t, I have some good news to cheer us up. I’ve found a wonderful apartment.”
“An apartment?” I repeated. “But you vowed never to leave your palatial Murray Hill cubbyhole. Original prewar Murphy beds are very difficult to find these days!”
“I didn’t think I’d ever need to move…” His voice faded out then gathered steam again. “… but circumstances can change.”
“Where is the new apartment?”
“Brooklyn. A one bed on a nice little tree-lined street in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It’s a little further inland than Belle might like but I think it will be a good way to get onto the ladder.”
“You mean the ladder of New Yorkers burning bigger and bigger wads of cash on their monthly rent?” I spat out, not even trying to mask my confusion.
“Oh no, not to rent.” His voice trailed off again, and I couldn’t hear much authority in it even when he added: “I’ve put in an offer to buy the place, you see…”
“Wait, what? You? Buy?” I shook my head frantically. “I’m sorry, I’m just not understanding you, Jeremy.”
But it was all very easy to understand. He was orchestrating his existence, morphing his life plan, all for the sake of Belle.
“Circumstances can often change,” he repeated, sounding even less convinced than the first time.
When we said a more-muted-than-usual good-bye and I hung up my BlackBerry, I stared ahead of me for a very long time trying to determine which one of us deserved the top spot in the International Chump Stakes.
* * *
The London Eye swooped its futuristic Ferris wheel pods—and the oohing and ahhing tourists inside with outstretched palms pressed against clammy protective glass—in oddly confident circles on the murky banks of the Thames. Just next door, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament bled beautifully in the gloaming, running in rivers of gray and pink and blue, like an Impressionist painting being rained on by a passing shower. I was inside one of the pods and reached forward to trace a finger down the perspiring glass, following a river of indigo.
“Be honest, V. Am I a complete idiot not to have seen it coming?”
Vitus Ostrauskaite stood beside me in the pod, holding a red-and-white-striped bag of popcorn and munching thoughtfully on a handful of kernels. Beneath his fitted leather jacket he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with an oversized Rolling Stones logo uncomfortably echoing his own full lips.
“It’s a trap we all fall into, M. In our work and in our life.” His Lithuanian accent made his voice sound oddly formal, as though he were issuing a critical decree with every sentence.
After the debacle of Chase’s promotion and the wretched way the firm had relayed the news to me, I surprised myself by reaching out to Vitus. Maybe Jeremy’s revelation of his apartment purchase had left me too exasperated to know how to handle him, leading me to seek friendship and reason elsewhere. After two more sessions with Polly the real estate agent that rivaled the tortures of root canal, I settled into a small but tastefully refurbished studio flat off a garden square in Marylebone. This positioned me in striking distance of Vitus who lived just across the Edgware Road in Connaught Village. Once I moved, his pop-bys were not infrequent, and on more than one occasion, at the sound of his signature quadruple knock, I tiptoed silently into my kitchen to stand like a petrified animal frozen in its den hoping its prey would grow bored and leave. Other pop-bys were more productive: Vitus and I both cherished a spicy tikka masala curry and there was a top-notch Indian joint equidistant from both of our flats near Marble Arch. His fitted leather jacket and insistence on traveling by Vespa and tendency to wear a mammoth Bluetooth earpiece and chomp at soggy cigar ends would always be foreign to me. But, in what felt like my highly random London life, Vitus became a bit of a safe haven in his own right—an impartial and judicious figure who had also devoted the last five years of his life to a bank. He was a mathematical warlock. And I appreciated his directness and complete inability to sugarcoat reality even if it meant offending a person to her face. Surely he of all people could give me honest advice about the logical way forward for me professionally. And in the process he could make me feel a little less alone.
“You don’t give yourself enough credit, you know,” he added, as our pod cycled us forward to the prime twelve o’clock position of our London Eye rotation. “Really, M.” If London were a great, smoky sundae, our pod was, for a shining minute or two, the steel-and-chrome cherry on its top.
“What do you mean?”
“The attrition rates at Barts are the highest in all of finance.” Leave it to Vitus to recite the latest and greatest industry stats from memory. “Only two percent of new hires make it to five years. You are part of the two percent and you should be very proud. You made it to five, now you can do what you want.”
Now I can do what I want. Now I can do what I want? Well, of course I could. I was a strong-willed, capable person with the desire to do good things. Then why did those words spiraling out of Vitus’s full-lipped, popcorn-filled mouth sound like dawn breaking on a radically new tomorrow?
“Can I ask you a personal question, V.?”
“Shoot,” he answered, turning one hand into a revolver that he aimed at me in a disconcerting impression of a sharpshooting 007.
“Have you figured out what it is that you really want to do?”
He looked across the river to Big Ben with narrowed and determined eyes.
“Back home in Klaipėda, my girlfriend used to tease me about how much I loved math. You and your silly numbers. You and your pointless formulae. By age fifteen, I was poring over books on the philosophy of mathematics and I tried to explain to her the thing about them that fascinated me most. In mathematics, one can always find an elegant solution. There is always a beautiful way forward, a graceful finish to be found. But it doesn’t just happen. You need to find it. You may go to hell and back to do it but you are in control the whole time … as long as you have conviction.”
“I don’t think you’ve answered my question.…” Our pod had ticked past the midnight mark and we were now on our clockwise descent.
“I am not finished.”
“Oh—sorry, V.”
“I am still fighting my way through the formula. Being a credit analyst at this big bank is only one step. It is not the end result. But I know why I am fighting and that gives me the conviction I need to keep up the fight. To give me confidence that one day I will find the elegant solution. It will take time, but I know I will.” He set his popcorn bag down and, reaching into a back denim pocket, retrieved a well-worn paperback, written in his mother tongue. As he opened the front cover, a glossy photo slid out into my hands. I looked down to see it was the overly staged picture-portrait of a voluptuous young woman, with long brown hair cascading over her synthetically enhanced and partially exposed bosom. A dewy red rose rested against her left shoulder casually, as if it had fallen there from the sky by accident. “She was my First Love and I have always known she will be my last.”
“Miglë,” I said, in semiwonder.
“You remember! Yes, it is my Miglë,” he confirmed, so pleased that she had stayed with me, too, through all of the years. “She is a great beauty, is she not?” Apparently even quant jocks like Vitus were raging sentimentalists at heart.
“Yessss,” I answered, extending the word in the hopes of convincing him, but only managing to sound predatory.
“Do you have that conviction, M.?”
Parliament’s dark silhouette was still bleeding into the water against the flamingo-feather clouds in front of us. It really did look like a Monet masterpiece stolen from an inner room of the National Gallery had been magnified by a celestial slide projector to take up half the sky. I thought about how, for a short time, Scott had projected all sorts of things for me to see—things I had otherwise chosen to ignore. He had made me happy, and my loyalty to The Brothers was
nothing but a lead weight dragging me into the depths, away from all of that light.
“Yes, I think I do.”
“You can’t think you do, you need to know you do.”
“Yes, I know I do,” I corrected myself, flustered that a man sporting an earpiece and a formfitting leather jacket could sound so resolute.
“Then you can keep fighting,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Don’t get down. Just remember that the easiest problems are always the least satisfying to solve.”
“I’ll keep fighting,” I promised him, and this time it was me who was issuing the formal decree.
Vitus nodded in satisfaction, then shifted his attention back to Miglë—releasing a gentle sigh and carefully stashing her picture back into the protective folds of his paperback as we completed the final descent of our London Eye rotation.
MARRY A DARTMOUTH BOY
Just as young adulthood was lulling me back into static and sleep-deprived submission, it was June, and Belle, Chase, and I were summoned back into the tangles of New Hampshire for our Five-Year Dartmouth College Reunion. Though I wouldn’t be escaping Chase there, it didn’t really matter; I knew he would revert to his secret-society persona of “Thor” as soon as he stepped across the periphery of campus, leaving all traces of his polished banker self behind like an overgrown lizard shedding its skin. More than anything, I felt charged up at the prospect of skipping back across the pond to trade the gloomy exhaust of my London life for the lung-expanding freshness of my former New England stomping grounds. When I landed in Boston and the Dartmouth Coach chugged me north on I-89, I had the peculiar sense I was positioning myself closer to some all-important spiritual center of gravity.
Once I arrived, it was impossible to deny the effects of time. Many of our female classmates had morphed from unfortunate ducklings into elegant swans—trading their flannel pajama pants for Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses to reveal slimmed waistlines or the delighted puff of a pregnant belly. Many of our male counterparts hadn’t fared as well. Hair was thinning, hairlines retreating, complexions paling, and patchy beards growing in mossy attempts to hide the beginnings of a double chin. A handful of totally unsuitable people had become young parents. A guy who had once dominated the lacrosse field along with his fraternity’s quarterly toga party was seen with hair tied in baby barrettes scrambling over campus lawns chasing an unruly toddler and shouting inconceivable things like: “Do you have poo-poos in there again? I just changed you. Jesus.”
The exclusion that stung Jeremy wasn’t that he didn’t share our alma mater—he was perfectly content with the peripheral college where he had excelled—it was the fact that Belle didn’t invite him to go back with her to the reunion. I viewed the snub as yet another confirmation of where things were headed—or rather where things weren’t headed—with them. Though Chase had relocated to London a few months earlier and was running our team with all the know-how of a cocky preteen at the wheel of his father’s new Porsche, I hadn’t heard any hints of Belle moving to London, nor had Jeremy confirmed that the bottom had finally fallen out of their relationship. Though I never managed to find a replacement squash bracket to distract myself with, and though I was acutely aware of how unsustainable my situation at The Brothers had become, I’d made limited progress with my professional game plan. All the same, Vitus’s pep talk had sparked something in me. I wasn’t carrying Scott’s picture around in a paperback, but I was devoting more of my spare time to wallowing in visions of him. I started imagining him in unreasonable scenarios—climbing out of the back of a black cab I had just hailed on Cheapside, high-stepping toward me through a damp and feathery maze of pigeons blanketing Trafalgar Square, nervously awaiting me at the top of the never-ending Marble Arch Tube escalator on my commute home—in all cases just arrived from New York with bouquet of grocery store daisies in hand, on the brink of telling me that being away from me had driven him close to mad, that he needed me, that all was completely forgiven. As the year wore on, an overall sense of impermanence loomed. Everything clung together in a fragile status quo.
Jeremy disguised his disappointment over the reunion with the excuse of needing to head back to Schenectady to check in on his mother who was recovering from her latest eye operation. He called me to say he was sorry he wouldn’t see me when I was back in the States, and to share some disturbing news.
“I’m standing on East Sixty-Ninth Street just off Fifth,” he explained to me.
“East Sixty-Ninth Street…,” I mumbled, searching my memory banks until I came to a screeching halt at: ALERT! ALERT! SITE OF THE DECEMBER BENDER! “Oh, you’re at the mansion.”
“Yes, the mansion,” he confirmed. “Or at least what was the mansion.” He paused for three beats, searching for a way to articulate the unthinkable. “It’s been bulldozed to the ground.”
“It’s gone?”
“Razed. I’m staring at a fenced-off empty hole. Like it never even existed!”
“Don’t read too much into it, Jeremy,” I told him, despising myself for not advising him to do the exact opposite—the universe was sending him a blunt message and he should have read all of the awful pretense he was spotting in that gaping crater. “This call must be costing you a fortune on your cell phone.”
“Just one more thing, then. Please don’t let Belle get too carried away this weekend,” he entreated, a trace of madness stitching his voice. “I know how emotional she gets being back there.”
Our alma mater was green and enchanted and Jeremy knew many of us—Belle included—loved the College with an unhealthy insistence that made everything that happened in life after Commencement taste vaguely of aftermath. For Belle, it was a place steeped with even more dangerous significance, the one place on Earth that straddled her Before and After—her pre- and post-lapsarian selves. After our Empire State Building blowup, I hadn’t planned on spending any time with her at the reunion, let alone chaperoning her as Jeremy was asking. But, in classic B.B. form, a month before the big weekend, a white flag sailed across the Atlantic on heavy eggshell card stock asking for my forgiveness:
My dearest M.,
Our last meeting has hung heavy in my heart and I want to make things right. And finally explain everything to you. The fact is, I didn’t want to hear it, but you were right about so many things. College always makes me think of Dr. Seuss. And you. How did it get so late so soon? It’s so funny how the time has flewn. There are a great many things I would rewind and redo if only I had the chance but our friendship is not one of them. There is importance, there is weight in history, M. I don’t want us to start from scratch. I want us to look ahead. Let’s meet at the same place it all began back on campus— the Rosey Jekes café, 10:00 a.m. on the Friday of Reunion Weekend?
Always yours faithfully,
B.B.
As Lost Girls, our reunion calendars were, thank God, clear of bagel breakfasts and tea talks and wedding boasting back at a sorority house. I didn’t want the weekend to be tainted by our sidestepping around each other in cocktailing tents or on campus tours or amidst table rounds at our class dinner on Baker Library’s twilit lawn. Belle had expressed contrition and promised an explanation in her note, after all, so I agreed to meet her back on our old turf, sending her a friendly acceptance e-mail at [email protected]. An optimistic part of me thought spending time with her back in New Hampshire would remind her of the girl she used to be, five-plus years before. Maybe I could help her initiate a sort of personal reawakening. I was sure she was in there somewhere, deep down, temporarily lost but longing to be found.
It wasn’t a totally unreasonable idea. Being back on campus unleashed all sorts of wild behavior for alumni. People stayed a little bit too long on the beer pong table and made gratuitous purchases of paraphernalia at the Co-Op that looked mildly tragic off campus and out of context. (Wearing a “D” varsity sweater to a Yankees game or an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Central Park, for example.) It also filled you with resolve as you strolled between the old bu
ildings that had once signposted your life and saw the carefree and young, oh so young-looking things darting past you—that you were that same person, and maybe an even better, sager version of that person. You half-expected the twenty-year-old ghost of yourself to come charging around a corner, a bundle of textbooks underneath one arm, flagging you over with the other as an invitation to step back into your glowing body and do it all again with the correcting wisdom of twenty-twenty hindsight. And you honestly thought, for a dizzying moment or two, there was a chance that could happen until—
“For the love of Christ, I was born in that year!” an underclassman would guffaw, pointing at someone’s alumni class sweater displaying an offending year darned across his chest like a banner of tragedy. “Do the math! That guy is almost twenty years older than the Internet.”
You were becoming a rampant user of the past tense, starting to spend more time boasting about the great times you’d had instead of the great things you’d go forth and do. All of this made you feel your mounting age and your mortality—was there sufficient time left to do everything you should have done when you had had the chance, like learning how to speak Cantonese and properly portage a canoe? Everything did start falling to pieces once you hit your thirties, didn’t it? As an appalling foil, you watched the undergraduates around you happily ignoring the urgency of the situation. They looked so damn blasé about it all. Of course their bored ease made their youth seem perfect and eternal—so you felt an injustice that they had won some magical lottery and would be sealed within those mystical gates forever, hours passing then rewinding like an eternally recycling daydream, when in reality it would play out the same way for them as it had for you. It was all passing for them, too. And, one day very soon, they would begin chasing the unchaseable, just like you. But for the time being, they still had their beautiful first crack at it all, while your first crack had long since come and gone. Everything you’d do from there on in would be an attempt at recapturing, reclaiming something—taking a second swing when you knew the real magic in life was hitting that first pitch straight out of the ballpark.
Fake Plastic Love Page 29
