“I came out here all the time as a little kid. Once, the remote control broke and my sailboat got stranded in the middle of the lake and my father said, as I cried, ‘If you want it, go get it.’ I had to wade out there and retrieve the thing. Clearly it was some survival-of-the-fittest, free-market personality test he’d learned in business school and— Hey, what’s wrong?”
He spun me around to face him.
What’s wrong? How can I begin to answer that question?
“Look at me.”
I opened my eyes.
The sight of Jim Mason inches away from me—sun blazing behind him, birds chirping, kids squealing in delight—was so unfeasible, my head turned inside out.
This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
But it was. It was Jim. He was the same, but he wasn’t. As I stared up at him, it struck me how no one ever really sees anyone. Memory turns out to be a lazy employee, intent on doing the least amount of work. When a person is alive and around you all the time, it doesn’t bother to record all the details, and when a person is dead, it Xeroxes a tattered recollection a million times, so the details are lost: the freckles, the crooked smile, the creases around the eyes.
“Come,” Jim said. “We can’t be late.”
He tucked my hand into the crook of his arm. I’d forgotten how he always did that. He escorted me down the path, past women wheeling babies in strollers—all of whom glanced at him with varying degrees of admiration—and a man pushing a shopping cart filled with plastic bottles.
It seemed the wake had brought me to one of the occasions when I’d visited Jim’s family in New York.
It wasn’t Christmas. And it was too chilly for spring break.
So when was it?
I could ask him what we were going to be late to, but it was a daunting prospect to speak. Every time I looked at Jim, I felt jolts of disbelief. I wanted to annotate everything about him, every blink, sniff, and sideways grin. I was terrified too. There was a lump in my throat like a giant wad of gum, threatening to dislodge. If it did, I’d end up crying or rambling on madly about the Neverworld, the fact that he was dead now.
You’re dead, my love. You have such little time.
Biting my lip, I let him escort me across Fifth Avenue. We rushed into his building—944 Fifth Avenue read the elegant script on the green awning—its lobby pungent with hydrangea and roses from the colossal flower arrangement on the table, asteroid-like and silencing. Jim casually waved at the doorman.
“Hola, Murdoch.”
Then we were alone in the elevator. Jim leaned back against the wood-paneled wall, surveying me. I had forgotten the way he studied people as if they were priceless pieces of art.
“Don’t be nervous,” he said.
He was clutching my hand again, grazing his lips against my knuckles as he pulled me, walking backward, into his apartment. I had forgotten how grand it was, echoing like a museum, iron sculptures of birds and oil paintings of stark faces, spindly furniture more giant praying mantises than viable places to sit. Looking down, I noticed the scuffs on my Mary Jane pumps, the lint balls on my old stockings, and felt that familiar cringe of embarrassment. As we moved into the living room, slipping through the crowd, I noticed everyone was wearing black—black dresses, black and white and red silk scarves, blue suits—and I understood where I was.
Freshman year at Darrow. Five years ago. A weekend in late September.
Jim had invited me to come home with him for his great-uncle Carl’s funeral. I barely knew Jim back then.
He’d only introduced himself a week before.
“Jim Mason.”
He was sitting behind me in English. He pulled his chair over, so close I could feel his peppermint breath on my cheek as I tried to work out a rhyme for a song I was writing.
“Whatcha doing?” He frowned at the notebook I was scribbling in. “What’s Fenfang’s Chinese Laundry Meltdown: An Original Soundtrack?”
Embarrassed, I slid the book under my laptop.
“Nothing.”
“That didn’t look like nothing.”
I cleared my throat. It sounded like a swamp.
“I create fake album soundtracks for movies that don’t exist. It’s just something I do. Don’t ask me why.”
“I see.” He nodded matter-of-factly. “So, when’s the commitment to the mental institution happening? Next week? Next year?”
I laughed.
He extended his hand. “Jim Mason. Really delighted to make your acquaintance before they cart you off to your padded cell.”
“Beatrice Hartley.”
He winked. “I’m a mad poet too.”
I smiled. There was a stretch of awkward silence, during which Jim did nothing but sit back and survey me. I turned to my laptop, trying to stop blushing, pretending to type something important. I assumed he was about to return to his desk and leave me alone.
Instead, he started to beatbox, not even trying to be cool about it.
“There was a fetching girl in my English class Wary as a bluebird, radiating class I’m scared to look away from her, in case she flies away / Congress needs to declare her a national holiday.”
Everyone in class went silent, a boy behind me snickering.
Little did I know that this was how it would always be, that being the subject of Jim’s attention would be like having a bomb go off in my face: unexpected, shocking, accompanied by a fallout of popular girls suddenly approaching me with long, swingy mermaid hair and doubtful glances.
“How do you know Jim Mason?”
“You’re from New York?”
“Did you go to Spence?”
“I’m from Watch Hill. No, I went to Watch Hill East. I—I don’t know Jim.”
That was how I met Whitley. She was friends with Jim from some exclusive Native American camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Jim Mason has a crush on you.” It was the first thing she ever said to me.
I hurried along the hallway, clutching the strap of my backpack like it was my floatation device and I was drowning.
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Yes, he does.” She peered at me, frowning. “He calls you ‘haunting.’ He said you’re old-fashioned. And innocent. Like you’re from the 1940s or something, and have been transported here by time machine.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s a compliment.”
The next day, suddenly Jim was strolling beside me down to the athletic fields. My heart flopped like a freshly caught fish.
“Did you grow up on an Amish farm milking cows at sunrise?” he asked.
“Um. No.”
“You look like you did.”
“Okay.”
“Want to come home with me this Sunday?”
He asked it like he was offering me a bite of his sandwich.
I said no. Sunday was Family Sunday, which meant Darrow’s students either went home for the day or signed up for a field trip to a museum. I hadn’t seen my mom and dad in a month, and they’d planned an elaborate lasagna dinner. Of course, the truth was I said no because I was terrified by Jim’s attention, the brash, drenching spotlight of it, both blinding me and causing everyone else to stare.
Little did I know, no to Jim was simply a yes that hadn’t happened yet.
“Beatrice!” he shamelessly rapped at the start of English, causing our teacher Mrs. Henderson to regard me with irritation. “She’s a realist. With secrets. A conscienceless realist who leaves me sleepless. And speechless. Oh, Beatrice.”
He left notes in my locker. Say yes (jump off a cliff with me). He recorded a theme song about me. It got passed around the entire school.
“?‘The Queen’s Neck’? Please,” I heard a girl hiss during chapel.
“Say yes!” Jim blurted when he passed me in the hall. (“Yes to what? Having his babies?” the varsity volleyball captain snarked to her friends.) Jim called my parents to formally introduce himself, discuss train times to and from Penn Station, give them his word that I’d be safe with him, that he was a gentleman.
This deluge of attention would have been too much coming from anyone who wasn’t Jim Livingston Mason, Jim of the thick, tangled black hair, the chocolate eyes, the sideways grin.
“He sounds so adorable and kind of quirky, actually,” said my mom.
Back then she’d been na?ve about the old-moneyed jungle of Darrow and Jim’s lionlike position inside it.
“It’s wonderful you’re already making some interesting connections,” said my dad.