Prologue Commencement Day
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t’s your mom, of all people, who gets the perfect photograph of you and your two best friends the day you graduate from Amherst College in Massachusetts. Your mom is famously lousy with a camera and hates to be called on to snap a picture, but, channeling some final mommy voodoo before full adulthood sweeps you away forever, your mother comes through when all the vast lightning storm of flash shots falls short. Remarkably, it’s not one of the thousand shots that the parents demand, not one on the way to the stage, not one of you, all three—young, the world ahead, the gowns lifting in a soft New England breeze, the green Amherst oaks aching into the sun, your fake diplomas raised above your head—that are a must at commencements everywhere. None of those. Not the one with your parents, or the one with your friend Constance’s little girl cousins who are dressed sweetly in sundresses. Not the degree-conferral shot, not the staged handshake with the college president, not the final moment when people chuck their
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stupid mortarboards into the air and almost blind people with their whirling square Frisbees. It’s something both smaller and bigger. It’s a profile shot, all three of you sitting in folding chairs, your faces tilted up slightly to hear the speakers, the sun making you squint the tiniest bit. People pretend to be unaware of a photographer, of an about-to-be-snapped photo, but in this instance it is real. Your mother got the shot like a ninja, you still don’t know how, but it captures Constance first. She is blond and hopeful, her expression so kind, so innocent, that you feel a swell in your throat every time you look at it. Then Amy, dark and broody, but the center of every thing, the fun, the joke, the loud talk and the wild energy, the screw-yous, and the up-yours, and the sweet, always-kindness that rests behind her eyes. Yes, she is looking up, too. And then you. You look at that girl, your image, a dozen times, a hundred times, to see what it is that lives in that face. Who is this girl, this marketing major, this two-time summer intern, the girl with a fancy, lucrative job as an investment banker waiting for her at the end of summer? You hardly recognize her; she had changed over these last four years, grown deeper, perhaps wiser, a woman in place of a girl. In the same instant, it is unbearable to look at her, because you see her vulnerability, her shortcomings, her struggles. You are the third in a line of three friends, the one who gets things done, the one who is a bit obsessive about control, the one who will always be sent to herd Amy to wherever she needs to be corralled, to lend substance to Constance’s ethereal drive for beauty. Your color is halfway between Constance’s blondness and Amy’s wolf hair, the final ingredient in whatever combination you three form. You are bone to their cartilage, gravity to their flight.
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One moment in four years. It captures every thing. In a matter of weeks, you will all be in Europe for what used to be called the grand tour; you will be traveling and kicking ass all across the old countries, but for now, in this instant, you are on the verge of every thing. And your mother saw it, and caught it, and you cannot glance even once at that picture without knowing your three hearts are linked together and that in a crazy world each of you has two things—two pure and limitless things—that she can count on for today and every day forward. It is the last great minute before he walks into your life, but you don’t know that, can’t know. Later, though, you will try to imagine where he was in this exact instant, when he had turned and started to travel toward you, you to him, and how the world around both of you took no notice. Your life would not be the same, but that was all waiting, all up in the air, all fate and chance and inevitability. Jack, your Jack, your one great love.
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Part One
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Q
Q
Q
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Amsterdam
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H
ere’s the thing: the rest of it wouldn’t have happened if the train to Amsterdam hadn’t been crowded. It was that kind of obnoxious crowded, with everyone greedy for space, everyone annoyed that the train was overbooked and jammed, so I kept my head down once I had a seat, and I tried not to look up. I was reading The Sun Also Rises, which is a cliché, of course—recent college grad reading Hemingway on her first trip to Europe with her two friends—but I didn’t care. I had already made Constance and Amy drink coffee and cognac at Les Deux Magots, and I had walked the Left Bank in Paris and sat with the pigeons alone in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I didn’t want to leave Paris. I didn’t want to leave its wide boulevards, the men playing boules in the Tuileries, the cafés, the harsh swallows of strong coffee, the funny little horns on the scooters, the paintings and museums and the rich crêpes. I didn’t want to leave the early mornings when the café workers swept the cobblestones and rinsed down their areas with black hoses and silver water, or the evenings, either, when
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sometimes you smelled smoke, or chestnuts, and the old men with the long fishing poles sat on their three-legged stools and threw their lines baited with maggots into the Seine. I didn’t want to leave the booksellers along the river, the moldy stalls lined with old, yellowed books, the landscape painters who came and spread their oils across stretched canvas, attempting to capture what could never be captured but only hinted at, turned into a ghost of what the city held. I didn’t want to leave Shakespeare & Co., the English bookstore, the echo, the long, long echo of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of nights splashing in the Ritz fountain, or squintyeyed Joyce nibbling through his prose like a mouse hungry for print. I didn’t want to leave the gargoyles, either, the surprising, watchful stone eyes staring down from cathedrals, from Notre Dame and a hundred other churches, their white faces sometimes streaked with mysterious black, as if stone could hold tears and release them over centuries. They say you can never leave Paris; that it must leave you if it chooses to go. I tried to take Paris with me. In Paris, I had read The Moveable Feast, and A Farewell to Arms, and Death in the Afternoon. I had them all on my iPad, a mini-Hemingway portable library, and although I was traveling with Constance and Amy, I was also traveling with Hemingway.
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So I read. It was late. I was in Europe and had been for two and a half weeks. I was on my way to Amsterdam. Constance fell asleep next to me— she was reading The Lives of the Saints and was on her own spiritual journey to read and see every thing she could about saints, and to see every statue or representation of saints,
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which fed her special passion and the subject of her senior thesis, hagiography—and Amy stuck her head over the seat behind me and began chatting up a Polish guy named Victor. Victor smelled like sardines and wore a fatigue jacket, but Amy kept elbowing me a little when he said something she thought was cute, and her voice got that singsongy flirtatiousness that meant she was roping a guy and tying him up. Victor was good looking and charming, with a voice that made him sound vaguely like Dracula, and Amy, I saw, had hopes. That’s where every thing stood when Jack appeared.
“Could you hold this?” he asked. I didn’t look up. I didn’t understand he meant me. “Miss?” he asked. Then he pushed a backpack against my shoulder. I looked up. I saw Jack for the first time. Our eyes met and didn’t let go. “What?” I asked, aware one of us should have looked away by now. He was gorgeous. He was actually more than gorgeous. He was big, for one thing, maybe six foot three and well built. He wore an olive fleece and blue jeans, and the way they hung on him made the combination look like the most interesting outfit anyone had ever thought to wear. Someone or something had broken his nose a long time ago, and it had healed in an apostrophe shape. He had good teeth and a smile that started in dimples just an instant before he knew it was going to start. His hair was black and curly, but not ’Fro-ish, just Dead Poet-y. I noticed his hands, too; they were large and heavy, as though he wasn’t afraid to work with
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them, and he reminded me—just a little bit, just a bit, because it sounded silly to say it even to myself—of Hugh Jackman, the freaking Wolverine. Th is fellow looked insouciant— a stretch of a word but accurate nonetheless— a man who lived behind a wink that indicated he got the joke, was in on it, didn’t take it seriously, but expected you to go along with it. What that joke might be or how it counted in your life wasn’t quite clear, but it made the corners of my mouth rise a little in the ghost of a smile. I hated that he drew a smile out of me, even the reflex of a smile, and I tried to look down, but his eyes wouldn’t permit it. He dog stared me, humor just on the other side of his look, and I couldn’t resist hearing what he wanted next. “Could you please hold this while I climb up?” he asked, extending the backpack again. His eyes stayed on mine. “Climb up where?” “Up here. In the baggage rack. You’ll see.” He plunked his backpack on my lap. And I thought, You could have put it in the aisle, Wolverine boy. But then I watched him roll out his sleeping bag in a space he had cleared on the baggage rack across from me, and I had to admire his skill. I also had to admire his hindquarters, and the V of his back, and when he reached for his backpack, I looked down out of shyness and guilt. “Thanks,” he said. “No problem.” “Jack,” he said. “Heather,” I said. He smiled. He put the backpack into the baggage rack as a pillow, then climbed up. He appeared too big to fit, but he wedged himself in and then took out a bungee cord and roped it around
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the supports so that he wouldn’t fall out if the train went around a bend. He looked at me. Our eyes met again and held. “Good night,” he whispered. “Good night,” I said.
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t sounds crazy, but you can tell a lot by the way a person looks when he or she sleeps. It’s a little bit of a study with me. Sometimes I take pictures of sleeping people, and Constance calls it my nightscape series. In any case, I watched Jack in small glimpses, like a movie, because the train sped along and the lights from outside came in every once in a while and illuminated his face. You can tell if someone is a worrier or not, a frightened or brave person, a clownish type or a serious person by his or her sleep expressions. Jack slept peacefully, flat on his back, his eyelashes thick—he had good eyelashes, caterpillar eyelashes—and now and then I saw his eyes flicker in REM cycle under his lids. His lips parted slightly so that I could see glimpses of his teeth, and his arms stayed folded on his chest. He was a beautiful man, and twice I stood to stretch my back and snuck looks at him, the flashing lights turning him into a black-and-white fi lm, something out of a Fellini movie.
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I was still watching him when my phone rang. It was the Moma-saurus.
“Where’s my adventure girl now?” Mom asked, her voice coated with morning coffee. I pictured her in our kitchen in New Jersey, her outfit for the day waiting on a hanger upstairs while she had her coffee and non-carb breakfast on a tiny plate in the kitchen. “On the train to Amsterdam, Mom.” “Oh, how exciting. You’ve left Paris. How are the girls?” “ They’re fine, Mom. Where are you?” “Home. Just having my coffee. Daddy’s gone for a couple of days to Denver on business. He asked me to give you a call, because there are tons of letters here for you from Bank of America. They look like human resources things—you know, insurance, health plans, but I guess some of them need your attention.” “I’ll get to them, Mom. I’ve already been on the phone to the HR people.” “Listen, I’m just the go-between. Daddy has his ways, as you know. He likes things covered, and you’re going to work for his friend.” “I know, Mom,” I said, “but they wouldn’t have hired me if they didn’t think I could handle the job. I graduated with a 3.9 from Amherst, and I was offered three positions besides this one. I speak French and a little Japanese, and I write pretty well, and I come across in an interview when I need to, and—” “Of course,” Mom interrupted because she knew this stuff, knew everything, and I was being defensively dogmatic. “Of course, darling. I didn’t mean to imply anything different.” I took a deep breath. I tried to be calm when I spoke again.
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“I know there’s probably paperwork, but I’ll leave time before I have to start in September. Tell Daddy not to worry. It’s all going to be fine. I have it all under control. You know I’m the type to get those things done. He doesn’t need to worry. If anything, I’m a tad obsessive about details.” “I know, honey. I guess he’s a little divided, that’s all. He wants you to explore Europe, but he also knows this job is pretty big. Investment banking, sweetheart, it’s—” “Got it, Mom,” I said, seeing her with her T. rex head, slowly lifting me from the ground in her mouth, my legs wiggling. I changed the subject and asked about my cat. “How’s Mr. Periwinkle?” “I haven’t seen him this morning, but he’s around here someplace. He’s very stiff, and he has lumps, but he’s still eating.” “ Will you give him a kiss for me?” “How about if I pet him for you? He’s filthy, sweetheart. Just filthy, and I worry about what’s on his skin.” “Mom, he’s been in our family for fifteen years.” “You think I don’t know that? I’m the one who has fed him and taken him to vet visits, you know?” “I know, Mom.” I turned my iPad over. I didn’t like seeing my face reflected in the glass as I talked into the phone. Was I really getting annoyed with my mother over my cat while sitting on a train on the way to Amsterdam? That felt a little bit insane. Luckily, Amy came to my rescue by standing and slipping past me. She wiggled her eyebrows in a little signal. Victor, I saw, followed her down the aisle toward Lord knows what. Poland was about to be conquered. “Listen, Mom, we’re getting ready to pull in to Amsterdam,” I fibbed. “I need to get my stuff together. Tell Daddy I will get to
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the paperwork the instant I get home. I promise. Tell him not to worry. I’ve e-mailed with people at the office, and I’m all set to start in September. It’s all good. They actually seem happy to have me, and they’re glad I’m taking this trip. They encouraged it, remember, because they know I’m going to be working flat out when I start.” “All right, sweetheart. You’re the boss. You stay safe now, okay? You promise? I love you. Give a kiss and a hug to the girls.” “All right, Mom, I will. Love you.” The connection closed. The Mom-a-saurus lumbered off into the Jurassic Age, her feet making indentations into solid rock as she walked. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
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