by Paloma Meir
I opened the door to find it much like it had been when I left all those years before. The only noticeable change was a framed picture with the words 'One Day at a Time' in needlepoint, and the room had a very subtle rose scent. I assumed the scent was leftover from Suzanne. I didn’t mind. It was familiar in a way I couldn’t place.
I sat down on my bed, not at my desk because comfort was going to be key in my new life, and opened my computer to a spreadsheet. I hadn’t made one in years but the format was easily remembered. I saw the fatal flaw in my plan and closed it. Exactly how was I going to attain this money?
In my mind the three paths to wealth were entrepreneurship, finance or law. I did not have a big idea or a background in computer technology, so out went entrepreneurially pursuits. Finance was too close to math, which was a huge part of physics. I would not drive myself that way again. Law it was.
That was all the thought I put into my life path, and I liked it, decisive. I would not go back to pondering. The thought of it sent a chill down my spine. Law was simple, by design of it being composed of firm rules. I would not get lost in minutia as I had done with science.
I nodded my head confidently and opened my computer to check for the dates of the next LSAT and law school application dates. Two weeks until the next LSAT before the deadline dates. I closed my computer again and thought of which law schools to apply to.
Los Angeles. I wanted to stay home, spend time with my mother, and see my father. Maybe repair what ever had been lost in our relationship. I didn’t see that happening with the timid almost embarrassed way he had greeted me, but it was worth a try.
UCLA or USC were the only law schools in Los Angeles that would get me in the door of big law. I favored USC because of its proximity to the Science Center I had been to many times as a child. I knew I would need a close to perfect score on the LSATs. I did not worry. Try as I had to in Peru to let it all go, my brain still functioned at the absurdly high level it always had done before. On starry nights in Lima, I would effortlessly name all the stars in the sky and their position in mathematical terms, amusing or boring the people around me.
A vision of Alpha Centauri filled my mind as I realized the choice I was making would be expensive. My education at a top tier law school would cost money, over $150,000.00. I shook the night skyline out of my head, wanting to forget it but being unable to do so. I felt a little haunted as I opened my computer back up to organize my budget.
I had $56,000 in my bank account. I had managed to save $10,000 a year from my meager by American standards, but upper middleclass by Peruvian standards, salary from the soccer league. I had lived rent free in the off-seasons with the Zarate family, at their insistence. Very nice of them, but not a position I wanted to be in again.
I made a line on the spreadsheet for the car I would be buying. Rent would be cheap. I could live comfortably in a hovel after my time traveling with the league. A line for food. I gave myself a big budget because I would not be cooking. A line for clothing. A very small budget because my down and out look projected the correct image. I did not want anyone to expect anything of me because they wouldn’t be getting it.
Law school was a three-year program. I could change my look when I graduated. I would work like a sociopath and earn my money. I arbitrarily picked $5,000,000 as my goal to earn before I fled the profession and lived the life I wanted, whatever that would be.
My savings would not get me through the three years if I worked to cover the tuition. Finance it, I thought to myself, going against my philosophy about student debt. I would be rich. I could pay it off. I could go back to work a couple of hours a week at the SAT Prep center to cover my basic living expenses while attending school.
Danny’s favorite phrase of “go big, or go home” echoed through my head. I began to wonder if my room was actually haunted. I looked at my phone and thought of calling him. I hadn’t spoken with him since my first year away. A combination of his fake happiness and the fact he never even bothered going to medical school bugged me. I knew from Brendan he had made a lot of money on the stock market and lived out in Malibu.
I picked up my phone and pulled up his contact information and almost selected the icon. We probably wouldn’t have anything in common anymore anyway. I put the phone down.
I took a deep breath and the rose scent of my room filled my mind with thoughts of Zelda. The olfactory sensations brought back memories of my first year away when she had sent me a letter on my birthday. The note did not offer a greeting or an explanation of why her return address was in Madrid.
The letter, if you could call it that, was an essay on why the EU should adopt French as their national language. She made some great points, but still a rude letter, almost offensive. In my crossness with her, I sat down and wrote her a three page letter in Spanish about the history of soccer in Peru with no instruction other than she could not write me again until she had translated it by hand and no cheating with language apps.
The worst of what I had done with my letter to her? I had enclosed as her birthday gift a pair of ear buds I had bought for myself at the drugstore in Miraflores. Even worse? I wrapped it in tin foil and used dental floss as a bow. I felt righteous in this rash heartless decision for two days.
Why two days? Because two days later, I received a birthday present from her in a mangled box I could see from the shipping receipt it was supposed to show up the same day as the first letter. The present you ask? A soccer ball that had been autographed by Pele in the 1960s. A very thoughtful gift, a card was even enclosed. I opened it with a sick feeling in my stomach over how I had treated her over her letter. I finally saw the letter for what it was fear of living in a new city, learning a new language, and of her not understanding her choices.
The card didn’t offer much information, but was warmly written. I read between the lines as I should have done with her first letter and saw she was worried I would be upset with her in someway. She was dipping her toe in the water, so to speak with the birthday card. I made a vow to write her the letter of a lifetime the next day, reassuring her, comforting her, apologizing for the heartlessness of sending her cheaply wrapped ear buds after all the years of our lives spent searching out the perfect gifts for each other.
But I didn’t do it the next day, or ever. Everything took off with the traveling with my league. I too was living a new and different life that required adjustments. Our gifts after that became tokens, hastily selected, with short notes wishing each other a good year. Months and months would go by without a thought of her going through my head. If it weren’t for Carolina and her occasional updates, I doubt I would have thought about her at all.
I got up off my bed and opened the windows wide, wanting the rose filled Zelda scent out of my room. I took a deep a breath of the cool fresh air outside, went back to my bed, opened up my computer, downloaded an LSAT prep book and studied as if my life depended on it because it did in fact depend on it.
Chapter Twelve
I was feeling pretty good the first day back after the winter break in my second year at USC. I went to the cafe to pick up my usual lunch of a vegetarian panini and a fresh squeezed orange juice with a shot of soy based protein powder. My life had unfolded as planned into a good routine of getting maximum results with minimum effort.
I had left the SAT prep center a few months after coming home to be an independent tutor specializing in the sciences. MIT had paid off although not in the way intended. The parents were impressed and paid top dollar for my services. I worked six hours a week, another sixteen hours in class, maybe ten hours studying. I lived in the cramped backhouse of a sprawling untended estate in Silverlake. The rent was minimal. In fact all of my life costs were minimal. I lived on vegetables and tofu. My carnivore diet in Peru was cast aside as my dietary needs adjusted to a life where I was not going hard athletically with all the practice and games. I ran five miles every morning, but that was about it.
My free time, women. It was as if I we
re making up for the lost years in Peru. They were all my friends, not expecting much more than fun and a good ear from a penniless law student who couldn’t be bothered to change out of his pajama pants in the colder months.
I pulled my silver duct tape wallet out of my pocket with a laugh as to how far I pushed my down and out look and handed the cashier my debit card. I thanked him, turned the corner, and ran right into my old friend.
“Danny?” I asked unsure if the bronzed, shaggy, board short wearing fellow standing in front of me was actually him. If it had not been for the bright blue eyes, I would have ignored the resemblance.
“Serge?” We put down our trays and gave each other a big manly hug, “Where have you been my man?” I felt instantly guilty.
“Playing soccer in Peru. I’ve been home for a little over a year now. Law school." Closer to two wasn’t something, I could say as we sat down at a table.
“Physics, soccer, now law, how does that happen?” he laughed and though he looked genuinely happy to see me, something seemed off beyond his ragged look, which if you were going to get technical wasn’t that different than mine.
“MIT... a little too intense for me in the end. Peru would take all day to tell you about. Law? Money, that’s it.” I laughed because I had summed up my life in less than twenty-five words.
“You’ll have to wear a suit.” He looked me up and down, focusing on my battered black canvas sneakers. I almost laughed again at the thought that he, of the inside out t-shirt, was judging my sartorial choices.
“I have two more years to get that together. Live for the day man.” I had an urge to offer him a high five and the bro speak, a language I had forgotten came back strong. “What have you been doing?”
“Same as you. Back to school for a reason that doesn’t mean much. Business school. Getting my MBA. Didn’t do medical school.” He looked away for a moment. “Surfing mostly, you surf?”
“A few times. What are you doing this weekend? Could you get me back up on the board?” I did not thank him for declaring my goals meaningless.
“Come out for the weekend. I’ll teach you. How’s Carolina?”
“She’s teaches British Literature at Thornton. She’s happy, never comes home. Those two took off, Carolina, Zelda boom out of this world. Did you hear Zelda’s having a baby?” I had only learned of it the day before from my sister.
“I heard.”
I took a bite of my sandwich that had grown cold. “She’s due end of June. Carolina is flying out for the birth. Come home to visit her parents? No. Fly around the world to sit by her friends’ bedside? Yes. Zelda still with that old man? Predictable.” If I hadn’t been so hungry perhaps I would have sensed my words were unwelcome. I took another bite of my sandwich.
“How was that predictable? She was with me for five years. I’m only a year older than her.” If I hadn’t been drinking my juice I may have heard the tremble in his voice. But no I carried on, chattering away.
“Your answer was in your in your statement, “She was with me." She liked being led around, so she could think her big important thoughts like “which shade of black is the true black.” I was on a roll. “Kidding man. She wondered which translation of Madame Bovary was truest to Flaubert’s original version. I could do this all day... That’s not really fair to her.” I suddenly felt embarrassed, remembering her was fine, roasting her delicate nature was not. “The two of them... their books were more real to them then their own lives. I miss them.” And I did, I missed them a lot.
“I miss them too.”
“Dude, you’re not still hung up on her?” I don’t know why I asked. It was plainly written in his face and wet eyes that yes, he was still hung up on her.
“No way. Done with that.” He took a huge bite of his roast beef sandwich.
“Liar,” I said and moved quickly on to a game of “remember when” featuring our favorite borderline delinquent/best friend Brendan Romovich.
I retold apparently Danny’s favorite story of Brendan based on the way he was laughing. It was about the time Brendan thought it would be funny to text Cara and tell her we told him to break up with her because she was taking up too much of his time. He set the timer on his phone to fourteen minutes, the exact amount of time it would take for her to get from her house to Danny’s where we laying on the floor exhausted after a long practice session.
The buzzer went off as she ran into Danny’s room with a hysterical look on her face, only to find Brendan on the ground laughing. She laughed too because the two of them were absolutely bizarre at times with how connected they were to each other. Brendan got up off the ground, put his arm around her, and they left together, laughing all the way out into the street.
I took a good look at Danny. He laughed unable to catch his breath over a funny story though not that funny. I knew I had been the worst friend. I could see he was lost, untethered since Zelda had left almost six years before. Zelda in Spain, me in Peru, and Brendan, his rock, had never come back from North Carolina where he had gone to Duke, and stayed for law school. He was a civil rights lawyer, if you could believe that.
Danny, the golden boy, the one who had everything, was a lonely man. Actually, more of a boy despite being twenty-eight, and perhaps in some ways so was I. I took him back on in my mind. I would not let him down this time.
…
I can’t even begin to explain how I ended up living with him out in Malibu. I went out for a surf with him that weekend, and I don’t know, we were out in the water too long. The sport came back quickly to me, and he didn’t want to head to shore either. All of his emotional coolness, or maybe deadness, evaporated in the waves. He was the real Danny again.
The sun went down, and we swam back to shore. We dried off and the brittleness of him came back. It was as if he needed the saltwater to be whole. I didn’t want him to retreat, so I stayed, perking him up with old stories and making him laugh until the spark came back. We fell asleep on the floor, pizza boxes from ordering in all around us. I hated to leave him the next morning, but I had students to tutor.
He had an early morning class the following Wednesday and texted me non-stop from 6:00 AM on telling me how good the waves were, asking me my class schedule, telling me to come down to the beach.
I had made it a point to schedule my classes late in the day so I could sleep in. I had fallen asleep the night before texting with a waitress from the coffee shop down the road. Her boyfriend had broken up with her, suddenly in her eyes, but I knew it was coming. I chatted with her late into the night, until her messages became smiley faces instead of half finished sentences. I felt pretty good about that.
Sleepy as I was, the buzzing of the phone did not bother me. I felt like a teen as I confirmed I would be down by noon. I set my alarm and fell back to sleep for another hour before waking up to shower and get some studying in before heading down to the beach. I bought a wetsuit on the way.
I hadn’t paid much attention to his house over the weekend, so the dilapidated state surprised me as he opened the door to let me inside. In the bright light of day, I could see that it hadn’t been updated in thirty or forty years. Run down is what it was evidenced by the wooden floors buckling by the kitchen, the avocado colored appliances that hadn’t been popular since the seventies, and the swinger style bar that also served as the kitchen counter. Looking around, I couldn’t believe he hadn’t fixed it up.
Still the house sat on the beach in Malibu and no matter how small it was, and I judged it to be a little over nine hundred square feet, including the balcony that overlooked the ocean, it must have cost millions of dollars. He told me he had gotten a good deal on it because the previous owner was a good friend and patient of his father’s. Even knowing that, I was sure that it had cost close to my monetary goal.
He joked, while surfing over the previous weekend, that the house was the only thing that being pre-med in college had paid off. He had kept up with the medical journals when he had come home from Boston on the o
ff chance he would go to medical school. He read of a genome therapy trial coming up. The article was pure research, but he could see the practical purpose. He put down the magazine, researched the pharmaceutical company backing the study, and invested half of his trust fund. Within eighteen months he had tripled his investment, as everyone else saw what he saw, but by that time, he saw that the practical uses for the gene were at least a decade away. He rode the market down only doubling his original investment that time.
He told me he still day traded, but had recently started buying up foreclosure properties in East LA, thinking the areas would come out of the recession doubling possibly tripling in value. I asked him when the recession would end, he said five to six years. Who was I not to believe him and his long-range thinking?
He didn’t have much furniture either, a sofa, TV, and a small glass dining table with only two chairs. Cheap furniture too, a far cry from his luxurious life with Zelda in Boston. It looked as if he were waiting for her to come back and make everything all right again.
“Spirited game of Mrs. Havisham you’re playing here,” I mumbled as we walked through his living room out towards the balcony.
