“I’m so miserable,” she said. It really was that bad, or maybe it was because we’d been laughing, acting silly, free of our frozen resentments. “I’ve been this way for years.” Then she groaned like she’d been punched in the gut and said, “I never wanted this,” and I figured she meant all of it, not just him and their heavy contract and those obligations that required such obliterating concentration, but also us, this cheap plastic fantasy that got us through our days.
It was the loneliness of her first pregnancy, nights alone in their overbuilt house in the woods, nursing at all hours, waiting for him to appear. “Staff up,” he’d said, refusing to lift a finger when she asked for help. It took a year or two for her to figure it out, to give up, wondering when he’d notice. Sharing the joys and heartbreaks—someone’s first tooth, someone’s first cartwheel or dance recital—with her nanny or cook or the guy who mowed the lawn. Shoved between meetings and vacations, cringing when he spoke, taking it. His adolescent tries at humor were lame, sexist, sometimes revolting. It was like life in the old days, before cassette tapes, when telephones had bells inside them that rang and rang, and ChapStick came in a metal sleeve, when a man spent his days how he liked, and a woman hoped he’d behave and show up for dinner. “Remember what I told you,” she said one night, covered in goose bumps, prickly with hatred, speaking to her daughters, who sat dumbstruck as her husband started to laugh.
In the rain the bay looked frozen. To the east, three heavy gray military planes from the air base an hour south roared up the coast. I got in line for breakfast. Eva Rotmensch, the dancer turned actress I’d met at softball, was standing so close I could smell her. She wore her same tiny pink corduroy shorts and a purple rain slicker. I smiled and she said nothing as I reached across her for a miserable slice of Irish soda bread. She stepped around me but I couldn’t make eye contact. I felt invisible, historical. She had a thin body and breasts so high you could cup them in your hand like a firefly. The young man with the tattoo on his neck and fine golden skin, Ryan, the actor, stepped up behind her, and leaned over her shoulder as, together, they scanned the tent for a place to sit. They were groggy and beautiful, lean and muscled, and had obviously been screwing since the minute softball ended. I hadn’t actually seen Ryan in a shirt until now. Of course it had the sleeves cut off and showed his smooth shoulders. It might’ve been the first shirt he’d ever worn in his life. You could sense in them a kind of psychic unity or harmony that comes when two people form that radiant bond. I stood there, wretchedly buttering my toast, cautious, middle-aged, middle-class. I wanted to apologize to the generations that followed: You don’t have to get old. This was my mistake. I stepped past them carefully, eyes on my tofu scramble.
It hurt to wait patiently at the coffee table. I wanted to merge. We had somehow known just when to push, when to grind, and when to be still, locked together. A sadness came over me, then the whiplash of guilt. God, what screwing we’d accomplished. I wanted her in a terrible way, wanted to curl up in a ball and cry for what couldn’t be. Rain spilled off the edge of the tent, splattering into mud.
Farther down the breakfast line they were talking about who vomited last night, at what hour, and the funny thing someone named Kaitlyn had said. Sadness gutted me. Chris from the office made announcements in his slicker. I sat at a table of familiar faces and couldn’t help thinking they were such awful people. Tom imitated the German accents of the TV crew from Sunday, annoyed by the demands of his fame, working it into a routine that got old. Roberta was feeling youthful, and wanted to try ecstasy, and wondered if there was anything to it. We all agreed that we needed to lose weight. Heather explained that her dad had died of alcoholism. He’d died bad. Only by writing about it did she find some peace. This sounded canned, like a line from a lecture. The rest of them had gone drinking last night, and stayed out late, and looked fragile and bloated.
Ryan and Eva walked by. We had been young once, too. Vicky sat beside me, scowling at her coffee, wondering where I’d disappeared to last night after the slide talk. Winston Doyoyo sat silently on the other side of me, frowning up at his wife, Ingrid, a tall Scandinavian woman who walked back and forth across the tent. At last, she put down a plate of food in front of him and sat, exhaling loudly.
Tabitha confessed that there was no director, no financing or stars attached. She wanted to close the TV deal so she could get paid, and went on humble-bragging, repeating the producer’s name, Kevin this, Kevin that, which infuriated Dennis. He wore a starched white linen shirt, the collar sharply pressed. His face looked pink and cold.
Ingrid spoke in a flat, administrative tone, with almost no accent, explaining that the money from these conferences came in handy, that the Nobel Prize Winston had won ten years earlier had gone into the houses of his children and a hotel in Pretoria that had burned to the ground. Winston watched her. She wanted us to understand that there was nothing left, that they lived off his appearance fees. He had an omelette in front of him, with watercress heaped on one side, and sat, incredulous, with something sadistic going on in his face, stronger than interest, more like disgust. Then he turned to me. “How old are you?” he asked.
“Forty-two.”
“I’m seventy-eight. Get me a fucking napkin!”
I did, and noticed Frederick and Ilana at a table in the corner, at the far end of the tent, both with freshly wet hair. A few minutes later, we all got up and headed to class.
Up ahead, Vicky made her way across the field, with a cigarette in her mouth and a cup of coffee in each hand. Smoking in the rain seemed especially morbid. There were years when she and I had eaten every meal together, sat beside each other at slide talks, tramped on the beach late at night. Last year, until halfway through the conference, when I met Amy, Vicky and I had been close. There was that feeling of knowing what the other one thought, while Dennis ruined our meal, or in the middle of a particular moment at a reading or a play, like the one about a giant baby, played straight by a grown man in a diaper who needed a shave and was doing, essentially, Reverend Jim from Taxi.