“I’ll be frank.” Vivian let go of my hand, and the warmth in her eyes died. “I will not let you give up on The Pact. And The Pact, quite assuredly, is not going to give up on you. Not during good times, not during times of difficulty. Many of us have been in your position. Many of us have felt what you and Alice are feeling right now. Fear, anxiety, a lack of clarity about what the future might hold. And all of us have pushed through. All of us have—in the end—been the better for it.” Vivian smiled, totally calm. I realized that she had been through this identical conversation with others in the past. “Jake—hear my words—you need to make your peace with The Pact. That is what is best for you, best for your marriage. The Pact is a river, strong and powerful if one resists but peaceful and serene if one is willing. If you move with it, it can transport you, Alice, and your marriage to a place of perfection, to a place of beauty.”
I forced myself to remain calm. And as I do when therapy sessions suddenly get intense, I began to speak more quietly. “Vivian, Alice and I will be okay without this place of beauty. We need to find our own way. We will find our own way. The Pact is scaring Alice. It is scaring me. In all honesty, it sounds like a cult. The veiled threats, the fake contracts.”
“Fake?” She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I assure you, Jake, there is nothing fake about any of it.”
I thought about that first day, when Alice and I had signed our names, imagining that it was all just a fun game with no real consequences. Those damn pens. The slide show. Orla and her cottage in Ireland.
“You’re not the law, Vivian. You and Dave and Finnegan and the others. The Pact has no authority of any kind. You do understand that, don’t you?”
Vivian sat motionless. “I’m sure you recall who invited you into The Pact,” she told me. “Finnegan is the biggest client your wife’s firm has, is he not? Truly a man of global stature, a man of influence. I believe he is worth a great deal to the firm, and it was his good word that prompted Alice’s assignment to her big new case. Jake, as I’m sure you’ve seen by now, The Pact isn’t just me and Orla and Finnegan. The Pact is a thousand Finnegans, all brilliant in their own way, all wielding their own unique brand of influence. Lawyers and doctors and engineers and judges, generals, movie stars, politicians—people whose names would make your head spin. Jake, your thinking is small, shortsighted. You need to take a moment, look carefully at the big picture, understand the road ahead.”
I felt light-headed. I reached out for my hot chocolate, but somehow misjudged the distance. The mug crashed onto the concrete below, spattering brown spots all over Vivian’s bag. People around us turned to stare. Vivian dabbed at her bag with a napkin, unfazed. I began picking up the shattered pieces.
A waitress came over. “Leave it. I’ll get Anton to sweep it up.” She had rings in her nose and her lip and tattoos on her arms and neck, and she gave off a faint whiff of wet dog, as if she lived with a lot of animals. I suddenly wanted to reach out and put my arms around her, as if she were some kind of life raft. I felt intensely jealous of her, jealous of the normal life she was living.
“I want the best for you,” Vivian said coolly after the waitress walked away. “I am here to help you reach that destination.”
“But you’re not fucking helping us, Vivian.”
“Trust me.” Vivian was almost robotic in her persistence, her utter refusal to hear what I was saying. “Trust The Pact. What I’m saying is this, Jake: You need to step away from this small thinking, this wrong thinking, and see the big picture. You and Alice must accept the message that Dave communicated.” Vivian put her large sunglasses on. “You must accept the strength The Pact can bring to your marriage, to your careers, to your lives. Like so many things—like earthquakes, tidal waves, tsunamis—The Pact will happen for you. It is unavoidable. The only question is how you will respond.”
“You don’t seem to have heard me. Alice and I are finished.”
“No.” Vivian stood, picking up her bag. “Go home. Go be with your lovely bride. You are my friend, Jake. Forever.”
With that, she turned and left.
30
Alice is stretched out on the couch, books and legal research scattered around her. Her laptop is open on the table, but she’s preoccupied with her guitar, playing that Jolie Holland song I love, a beautiful acoustic piece she sang at our wedding. Her guitar playing is so nice, her voice soft and gentle. The house seems to be soaking it up, straining in silence to hear. She looks up and smiles at me, then sings, “I’m still dressed up from the night before, silken hose and an old Parisian coat. And I feel like a queen at the bus stop on the street. Look what you’ve done to me.”
My heart aches at the purity of her voice, at the sight of her sitting there. I hate that I failed her in my conversation with Vivian.
It has been a long time since Alice picked up one of her instruments. The song is so gentle, and in an instant it seems to strip away the layers from Alice, the invisible walls that are always there. How many times have I wondered about the Alice who rests beneath the veneer of her lawyer persona, the Alice underneath the conservative navy suits? Even as a child, Alice dreamed of being a musician. Her mother taught piano and guitar to the neighborhood children, and there was always music playing in their house. I can’t imagine the childhood Alice dreaming of one day becoming a lawyer, but when I met her she was in her second year of law school. Although she was still recording songs, still playing shows, still updating her website, answering email, even producing occasional records for other musicians, I could tell she had already veered onto a different road. She started law school the year she turned thirty, “derailed by the passions of my youth,” she said, and as a result she was one of the oldest members of her class. She felt she had a lot of catching up to do, a lot of lost time to make up for. But how could those years doing what she really wanted to do ever be considered lost time? They were the opposite of lost time, it seems to me.
“I wasn’t happy,” she told me once, a few months into our courtship. “Things had gotten out of control with the band. With”—she hesitated—“my relationships.” I knew from articles I’d found online that difficulties in her relationship with the bass player, Eric Wilson, had caused problems for the band. The ugliness of their breakup made its way into the music, she said. The whole thing felt tainted. She decided it was time to grow up. That’s why she started law school.
The melody is haunting, and it’s nice to hear her voice echoing through the living room. When she finishes the song, she doesn’t say hello or tell me about her day, she simply picks up the keyboard at the end of the couch and starts in on Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.” Throughout the song—a hymn to love and loss written when Cohen was well into middle age, at the height of his lyrical power—she is looking at me, flashing her wry smile.
I drop my bag onto the table, take off my coat, and curl up at the other end of the couch. Watching her—so clearly in her element—I can’t help but think what she’s given up. Did she do it for herself? Or did she do it for me? Eventually, she puts the keyboard aside and slides down to my end of the couch.
“You’re so warm,” I say. I can’t bring myself to tell her about the conversation with Vivian. This moment is so perfect. I just want it to last. I just want to go back to the time before The Pact.
We sit in silence. And then she slides her hand into the pocket of her sweatshirt. She pulls out a crumpled piece of paper.
“What’s this?”