“I have no idea,” she replied. “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me.”
seventy-three
Hope and I returned to the Cupcake. We climbed into our bunks, turned out the lights, said good night, and pretended to go to sleep. Our eyes were closed and our bodies were still, but I knew we were both wide awake, betrayed by the erratic breathing of those only feigning peace. Hope knew, too.
“I wasn’t hallucinating, was I?” Hope asked suddenly. “That was Shea on her knees, scrubbing our toilet.”
“No, I saw her, too,” I replied. “And as further evidence, the bleach she was using singed my nostril hairs.”
“Mine too!” she said. “So you also heard the part about how we’re the nastiest bunch of squirrel-blowing cuntdrips she has ever met….”
“Yes.”
“And now that she’s made up with Manda and is moving back in, she expects us to pick up a grannyfucking toilet brush every once in a while.”
“Yup.”
“Okay.” Hope sighed. “Just checking.”
I listened to the traffic through the open window before speaking. “I feel sorry for Shea.”
“Why?”
“I think she really loves Manda.”
“And Manda?”
“I think Manda loves Manda, too.”
And then there were a few sheet-shifting moments of nonsleep before Hope swung horizontally and peered over the mattress to look at me. Her red hair hung like a cape behind her.
“What if he fell in love with Ursula?”
I laughed at the idea of you falling for our landlord before I realized she was not kidding.
“I’m totally serious, Jess. Imagine you let him go, and he falls in love with Ursula.” Her eyes lit up with an even better idea. “And she’s pregnant. With Scotty’s baby.”
“Oh, come onnnn.”
“And Marcus wants to be the father of the child, even though the kid isn’t is. That’s how blindly devoted he is to her.”
As she swung back into the top bunk, I imagined Ursula, tumescent with child, blowing a cloud of smoke into your face. What? Dah baby is cooked. Dah New York city air is vorse than this cigarette.
“You have to imagine the worst that could happen,” Hope said. “How would you feel if you found out Marcus had fallen madly in love with someone totally unlike you?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it just as quickly. I didn’t have the nerve to tell Hope the truth about her hypothetical. That I had already, in fact, imagined the very worst thing that could happen. I had already imagined you falling madly in love with someone totally unlike me.
I had imagined you falling in love with her.
“Let Marcus go,” Hope said softly. “Say no.”
Hope is the first, the only, person brave enough to say it.
“Let him go without assuming he’ll come back anytime soon, or that you’ll even want him if he does. Because clinging to each other is only making both of you unhappy. It’s preventing you both from living the lives you want to live right now, and being the people you want to be.”
“But we let go of each other in college,” I tried. “We didn’t speak—”
“No you didn’t,” she interrupted. “He might have left, but you never let each other go.”
“But—”
“The postcards, Jess. Him sending them. You receiving them. That was not letting go.”
She’s right. I never let you go. I never stopped thinking about you. My mind was with you, three thousand miles away, and not in Manhattan. It’s no wonder that my most significant relationships predate my college years—I was never fully committed to creating a whole new life for myself at Columbia. And you don’t need a psychology degree from an Ivy League university to tell you that those unpacked boxes in the corner now reflect an unabated ambivalence toward Brooklyn.
“I’ve been thinking about those postcards a lot lately,” I said, running my finger along those images—the medical eye chart, the starry sky, the globe, the Parisian lovers, the hourglass, the ©, the National Organization of Women—pinned to the corkboard next to my bed. “I thought for sure Marcus would send me one while he was away.”
“‘Forever,’” Hope said.
“What?” I asked. “Did I tell you about that?”
“No,” she said. “But it makes sense. ‘Forever.’ That’s what he said when he proposed. It’s just so…”
“Marcus,” I said.
A car alarm suddenly whoop-whoop-whooped outside our window and was silenced just as quickly.
“He really hasn’t changed since I’ve known him,” Hope said. “None of us have.”
“I’ll try not to be insulted.”
“Think about it,” she said. “You’ve always had the cynical eye of a skeptic, but the optimistic heart of—”
“Of a fanny-packing tourist.”
We laughed into our pillowcases for a moment or two.
“You don’t think Marcus has changed? Even though he’s been clean for six years?”
“I know Marcus is drug-free,” she said, her voice rising slightly. “His behavior has changed, but I don’t think he has changed.”
“How can you say that?” I said, getting all twitchy and hot. “All Marcus does is change!”
“Right! He’s always changing,” she said with an emphatic kick of the mattress. “He’s constantly changing.”
“That’s an oxymoron,” I said.
“One that applies to his need for peak experiences,” Hope said simply.
“What?”
“Marcus is always chasing peak experiences,” she said. “The high of the good-bye, the rush of the reunion. He doesn’t do well with the mediums or the in-betweens. He never has.” She exhaled deeply. “When we were kids, months would go by when he would suddenly stop coming over my house. He wouldn’t even talk to me in school. And just when I would give up and think our friendship was over, he’d be on our front-door step with a crushed daisy in his hand, begging me to come out and look for dead bugs for his Venus flytrap.”
A few days ago, such a comparison would have sent me into a rage. How dare Hope equate your playdates to a proposal. But now I can see it’s all part of the pattern, one your own brother had warned me about:
CONNECTION
SEPARATION
CONNECTION
SEPARATION…
“You don’t have to agree with me, but I think the heart of who we are stays pretty much the same,” Hope said. “What changes is how these core traits manifest themselves over time.”
“The heart?” I asked in a more doubtful tone than I had intended.
“The heart or the soul or whatever you want to call it.” She yawned loudly. “Whatever you want it to be…Whatever…”
She didn’t say it with the disaffected inflection, the trademark ambivalence that makes a laughingstock out of our generation. She said it in an optimistic, inclusive, open-ended way that could turn the most hardheaded cynic into a believer.
Hope brought to mind the “Whenever/Wherever” postcard I’d swiped from the W after my disastrous interview with Dr. Kate. If I were as clever as you, I would have sent it days ago. It would be waiting in your post-office box right now. WHATEVER could have been the ideal substitution for FOREVER. But I didn’t send it. I didn’t even think to send it because such flimsy ambiguities cannot hold up under the weight of real life.
Just when I thought she had fallen asleep, Hope whispered, “Jess?”
“Yes?”
“Would you rather see Marcus only on weekends or not at all? Move to Princeton or stay in New York City? Break up now or later…?”
All week long, my instinct was to shout, “Can’t be answered with the information given!” Because there’s never enough information. There’s always the unknowable. Other options. Opportunities. Counterfactuals.
But you’re returning to campus tomorrow. And I can’t let too many choices become an excuse for not choosing anything at all.
saturday: the ninth
seventy-four
I’m on the train from Penn Station to Princeton, and there’s only a pinch of pages left in this notebook. I’m running out of space. And time.
And like a minor winner at the Oscars (for Makeup or Art Direction), I’m hearing the quiet strains of the orchestra, and I’m starting to sweat through my awkwardly fitting floor-length gown bought off the rack and in a color that doesn’t show well on TV (a queasy green, burst-blood-vessel purple) because no designer is jumping to outfit the nominees for Makeup or Art Direction (it’s swelling) and I’m feeling the pressure to hurry up and finish my big moment already (louder), to hurry up, to hustle through the joy (I won!), hurdle through the gratitude (I won a category that is televised and not shunted to the daytime awards presentation of technical achievement!), and bring this once-in-a-lifetime moment to a satisfying and memorable conclusion before the full orchestra drowns me out (blaring now), before I’m dragged offstage by the sequined Amazon serving as the official arm and eye candy of the 78th Academy Awards, and the briefcase-clutching goons from Price Waterhouse Coopers, having thanked my agent, and the studio head, and my other agent, and my business manager, and of course the whole cast and crew in New Zealand and in Toronto, and even my third-grade art teacher, who always believed in me, but not (I suddenly realize, with a dramatic cymbal crash) my beloved husband in the audience, nor my mom and dad, who are staying up late, watching from home, and who have waited their whole lives to be thanked by their child on live TV in front of a billion people…
WHAT THE HELL AM I EVEN RAMBLING ABOUT?
See? I’m panicking here. Let me try again.
seventy-five
For the past seven days, I was compelled to write. I can’t explain why I surrendered to this drive, though I suppose it’s similar to the compulsive need others have to indulge in food, drugs, sex, art.
You understand this.
It would be misguided to attribute any deep significance to the past seven days. Everything takes on greater weight when written down. It changes from ephemera in my mind to something tangible. Something meant to be preserved. Remembered.
And in retrospect, I probably went about this all the wrong way.
I’ve kept a journal, on and off, for about six years now. In those notebooks I was wholly uncensored. I never intended for anyone else to read them. This notebook is addressed to you, and written with your eyes in mind. And though I repeatedly strove for that same level of candor, how was that even possible when I knew all along that you were going to read it? Writing for an audience turns it into a form of performance art, no matter how guileless I claim—or even strive—to be. Can there even be such a thing as an unmediated experience these days? Every storyteller is biased, sure, and we both know I’ve been a bit of a show-off for you. You want my stories? I’ll give you some stories, buddy! I didn’t try to create the illusion that I’m a better or more compassionate person. On the contrary. If anything, I might have blown up my flaws to help prove a point: You don’t want to marry this mess.
Furthermore, there were countless sins of omission. Many were harmless, such as any conversation that went like this:
Not me: What are you doing?
Me: Writing.
Not me: Writing what?
Me: I’m writing to Marcus.
Not me: Why?
Me: Because he asked me to.
[Pause.]
Not me: Are you almost finished?
Me: Not yet.
Not me: When will you be finished?
Me: I’m not sure I’ll ever be finished.
Not me: Oh.
Me: No matter how much I write, there will always be something else I should have said.
seventy-six
Perhaps this is something I should have said earlier:
Last Saturday I left your room and walked the twisty, half-mile path that led to the Dinky train that led to the bigger Northeast Corridor train at Princeton Junction that led to Penn Station, NY, that led to the 2/3 subway that led to the Grand Army Plaza stop that led to the ten-block walk that led to my home sweet subterranean home. More than two hours, point to point.
As I sat alone on the Dinky train, I thought about all the smart people in this town, in the world, and wondered when someone would use his brilliant mind to invent a teleportation technique that could reduce the Princeton–to–New York travel time from two hours to the blink of an eye. The very notion of the long-distance relationship wouldn’t exist. If I had instantaneous access to you, and I didn’t have to give up my life in New York, would I have tried to end it? Would you have asked me to marry you?
I looked at the ring on my finger to confirm that this had actually happened. I wiggled my fingers in front of me, as countless brides-to-be have done with blindingly new platinum-and-diamond showpieces. Only my ring was hammered by your hands out of an old quarter. I used to wear this ring on my fuck-you middle digit. It was too big for my ring finger on either hand, and yet now it fits perfectly. This was not a miraculous sign. This was nothing more significant than hot weather and water retention. Or so I’ve been telling myself for the past week.
I was about to take it off when a five-pack of young men and women came staggering through the train car. At first I thought Dude and his preppy posse had met and mixed with Marjorie (how’s Marjorie?) and the volleyball groupies, and I squirmed at this unnerving coincidence. Then I breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that this was an altogether different but totally identical group of Princeton undergrads. They were very intoxicated, and Ivy League intellectual drunk tends to be a very pretentious form of drunkenness. That is, when it isn’t a totally imbecilic kind of drunkenness.
“I’m telling you,” said one of four guys wearing fitted polo shirts, long khaki shorts, and flip-flops, “everyone wants to be happy, but no one even knows what happiness means.”
“Happiness is a warm gun,” interrupted another guy, who distinguished himself from the rest by the radical degree to which he was red and gleaming with perspiration.
“Happiness is a warm puppy!” chirped the cutest girl. She was also wearing a polo shirt collar up.
“Happiness is a warm body!” shouted Red-N-Sweaty as he grabbed the cutest girl, who shoved him off just because she could.
“Happiness is a cold beer!” the other, less cute girl suggested. And they all cheered.
Then the tallest male with the thickest neck said, “Happiness is not having to listen to you fucktards wax pseudo-philosophical about happiness.”
I quietly nodded in agreement because Thick Neck was sort of right. Studies have shown that happy people do not spend their hours contemplating the nature of happiness, because they are too busy being happy. The unexamined life, apparently, is worth living. Very much.
“Seriously,” said Pseudo-Philo Fucktard. “Why are we all trying to achieve this state of happiness when no one can even define what it means?”
Red-N-Sweaty placed a firm, friendly hand on his shoulder. “I can’t tell if you’re too drunk or not drunk enough.”
“The latter!” said the rest of the group in unison, which sent them into paroxysms of laughter.
Their conversation was interrupted by a cell phone. The ring tone wasn’t a tone at all, but a young woman’s voice chirping, “Jeff is so hawt right now. Jeff is so hawt right now…” And the conversation that commenced was not unlike any number of overheard cell-phone conversations in which the overheard half is a priceless parody of postmillennial conversational strangulation, in which the speaker seems incapable of putting together a single sentence in the subject/verb/object tradition.
“Yeah…The fuck?…Aw shit, dawg…”
This was the guy who was just waxing philosophical about the nature of happiness? As inarticulate and seemingly pointless as it was, the call lasted for the five-minute duration of the ride to Princeton Junction. I hopped to my feet before the train even screeched to a stop and I was the first passenger out the sliding
doors. I strode quickly through the dim underground tunnel that brought me to the eastbound side of the tracks, where there were already clumps of passengers waiting to board the next train to Manhattan, mostly middle-aged couples heading into the city to catch dinner and the latest must-see Broadway show. They were paunchy, gray-haired men in rumpled suits talking about golf and the stock market. Their well-preserved wives wore too much makeup, shiny evening fabrics, and showy gold jewelry. They discussed sending the kids back to school and what the humidity does to their hair.
This second group reminded me of my parents, so much so that I suddenly got this strange idea that any two of these anonymous fifty-somethings could have been my parents out on a date. I had actually looked forward to presenting this as evidence to my sister that my mother wasn’t going to leave my father after all. I did a double take, and my heart sank when I realized that I could do a triple, quadruple, and quintuple take and I still wouldn’t see them actually socializing together in public because they never do.
“OW!” squealed Other Girl after a skin-on-skin smack. “You suck!”
The Princeton Tigers had made their way to the platform, and they were passing the time by playing slapsies.
“If I suck, then why”—slap!—“do”—slap!—“I”—slap!—“win”—slap!—“every”—slap!—“time?” Slap! Slap!
“The alcohol has dulled my reflexes!”
“Admit it,” Thick Neck said, “you are the fairer but weaker”—slap!—“sex….”
Other Girl lived for stealing attention away from Cute Girl. A lopsided smile was barely hidden behind her fake frown. I started to feel sorry for Other Girl.
“I’m telling you, no one even knows what happiness means,” insisted Pseudo-Philo Fucktard, still not giving up.
Then the Northeast Corridor train pulled in with a piercing squeal that mercifully drowned out the rest of the undergraduate conversation.
I could’ve helped them out if I had wanted to. For Think, I kept up on the science of happiness because most people, but Americans in particular, want to be happy. I know that people are unhappier about the opportunities they pass up (saying no) than those they accept (saying yes), even if the opportunity doesn’t turn out the way they hoped it would. I also know that people are happier when they set a short, strict time limit for decision-making (one week) and that married couples are happier than singles. (Well.)