The Ramblers (16 page)

My client informs me that you wish to settle this matter quickly and that this stock option amendment to the agreement shouldn't unduly stall our progress on this matter.

Sincerely,

RONALD
BERMAN

Attorney at Law

What the fuck? He checks his e-mail to see if there's anything from his lawyer about this but gets distracted when he sees the e-mail from Olivia. From late last night. Right about the time there was another girl in his bed.

He feels his pulse quicken as he clicks to read.

“You have every right to despise me.”

To: Pennington, Tate

From: Farnsworth, Olivia

Time: 2:36 a.m. EST

Subject: Thanksgiving

T,

Thanksgiving is Thursday. I'm going to my parents', but you won't be there and this isn't right. I'm having all of these doubts. I'm worried I made a big mistake. I think I was going through something. 13 years. Are we really just throwing that away?

Remember our good times? They weren't just good, were they? They were magical. I keep thinking about the night we met. At that silly corporate recruiting event at Union League? How we started talking about how scared we were to graduate?

And the day you proposed. How the world had suddenly stopped, how we were cuddled up on the couch, glued to the television, scared out of our minds. I remember the moment you turned to me and you had this fear in your eyes, but there was hope there too. And you walked into the kitchen and came back and got down on your knee and said that suddenly everything was clear, that life was short, and we, Tate, were what mattered. We. I loved that it was your mother's ring, that there was suddenly all of this history there on my finger. I am so glad you wouldn't let me give it back because the truth is, I don't want to let go of it.

Every time something happens now, little or big, I think to pick up the phone and call you and I know that I can't do this anymore, that I've lost this privilege. And so they are building up in me, all of these things. I loved how we were always able to talk about anything . . . everything. Like when we talked for hours about whether each of us was more like our mother or our father? Or that conversation we had about the afterlife and ghosts? Or remember that time we got in a fight about the meaning of that Whitman poem you love?

Your mom tells me you're pursuing photography and this makes me happy because I know you've always loved it. I apologize that I never took it seriously, this passion of yours. I think I was envious that you felt so deeply about something. The only thing I've felt so deeply about is you. I hope that you are finally leading the life that you wanted to, but I'm heartbroken that it doesn't include me
.

You have every right to despise me. You have every right to delete this e-mail without reading it. I know I told you I wouldn't contact you for a while, but it's been a while and I miss you, Tate. I am also writing because I'll be in New York in two weeks for work. And I would love nothing more than to have dinner with you. I want to see
your eyes and your smile and tell you something that I've been unable to say for some reason I'm still trying to understand.

I'm sorry.

These words are empty nothings, black smudges on a white screen, but I'm hoping that if I see you in person, there will be some life in them. Because I mean it, Tate. I've messed up in ways I know will haunt me. I know you are busy moving on and you should be doing just that, but please tell me you'll see me.

I saw this great quote the other day from Norman Cousins. He said: “Life is an adventure in forgiveness.” I believe this.

You might have gotten something by now from my lawyer. Look, Tate, my lawyer insisted on this amendment thing, that I should get part of the stock because I was your wife and because I reviewed your contracts and business plan, and I told him to hold off, that I'm having doubts, but he sent it anyway. I hope we can talk about all of this?

Happy Thanksgiving, T.

Googolplex,

Olivia

Fuck her.

Fuck her.

She runs around under his nose with this other prick, serves him up months of radio silence and now this sentimental saccharine manipulative shit?

They always signed their e-mails this way, with the world's second-largest number with a name, a one followed by a googol of zeros. He wonders now why they didn't use the largest number instead. What
was it called? Googolplexian? He can't recall, but he does remember every single thing she mentioned in the e-mail. The memories are cruel and endless.

As if it were yesterday, he can picture them standing together in their dark suits at a Goldman Sachs recruiting event. Twenty-one and clueless, she smiled at him, picked a dot of lint from the lapel of his suit. This was something his mother was always doing, grooming him, taking care of him.

She was from the Bay Area. This made sense; she had this breezy California coolness to her upon first impression, a bohemian, mellow charm. She was easy to talk to, artful in her self-deprecation about the predictable narrowness of her future plans. She'd recently taken the LSAT and done quite well. She was in the process of applying to handful of law schools—Columbia, Yale, Stanford—but her sights were set on New York. She wanted to spend a few years there before heading home.

She was also looking into banking and consulting. Covering her bases.

I'm boring,
she whispered.

Me too,
Tate whispered back even though he did not feel this to be true. He told her he was considering a career in finance because he needed a good paycheck, because he was toying with the idea of taking over his father's insurance business in St. Louis. But later that first night, he also told her that if he could be anything in the world, if money were no object, he would become a photographer. Back in his dorm, he showed her some of his pictures.

When Tate's father had a mild heart attack two weeks before graduation, Olivia insisted on flying home with him to St. Louis. She held his hand at the hospital, made his mother cups of tea. It was then, at some point during those blurry few days, that Tate decided he would one day marry this girl. Before flying back to school to graduate and pack up his dorm, Tate asked his mother for her ring. She cried when he asked, and smiled.

She is a very nice girl,
his mother said.

He held on to the ring and proposed on September 12, 2001, almost exactly a year after they got together. They huddled in bed watching the news coverage. She finished school, sat for the California bar. They traveled to Asia for her bar trip and then he quit his job and they moved to San Francisco, got married in a small ceremony by the water. She began work at the law firm and he got a job at a photo software startup. In 2010, he and his buddy from Yale started developing their app. When the company was acquired last year, he found himself holding a check for millions of dollars. This all happened after everything began to unravel with Olivia, and at the time, he hoped the news and the money would patch them back together somehow. Olivia's reaction was not what he expected and oddly, it made him respect her more. She said she was proud of him, that he deserved all the success in the world, but that the money didn't change the way she felt about him, and them. They were over, she insisted.

I am not happy. I have not been happy. I want to be happy,
she said that day, on the couch. She couldn't even look at him when she uttered this trio of sentences, these sentences that fell from her with a haunting, lifeless formality as if she were a child who'd memorized lines from a script. It struck him even then how slowly she spoke, enunciating each word, how she eschewed contractions.

I am not happy. I have not been happy. I want to be happy.

The words still mock him. They repeat on a loop in his head.

They are his words too now.

They sat at the dining table, an heirloom from her grandmother she'd take with her, and had a civilized chat. They agreed that they wanted to settle things quickly and amicably, that there was no reason for things to get nasty. They had each come into the union with not much of anything, just high hopes and the promise delivered by a fine education. They didn't own a house. Their possessions were commingled, but this wouldn't be hard to undo. It surprised him, and pleased
him, that Olivia made almost no mention of the funds he now had. Naively, it didn't occur to him that she'd retain a high-wattage attorney who'd put it in her head to get her hands on as much as she could. It should have.

And now it all makes sense. She doesn't want him back, but she wants to butter him up and drag this out so he considers forking over a fortune.

Fuck her.

“Not today.”

H
e's been wandering for hours now, stumbling along, lifting his lens again and again to capture things that strike him: an abandoned pacifier on a cracked square of concrete, an elegant old man reading
Moby-Dick
in the window of a coffee shop, a messy pyramid of trash bags waiting for collection. The details are endless and medicinal almost. They do the trick, anyway; he escapes thinking about Olivia for stretches at a time.

On Hudson Street now, he pulls out the list he made when he first got back to the city. It's a list of all the places he wants to see and photograph, places that are lesser known, tucked away, off the radar of most tourists and most New Yorkers even. Odd museums, specialty shops, secluded
gardens. For him, it's never been about doing what everyone else is doing.

One thing's clear as fucking day: he's spent too much time thinking about Olivia.
Not today,
he thinks. He will put her and the papers out of his head the rest of the day. He will distract himself with pictures and Smith.

With purpose, he heads to number six on the list: Poets House in Battery Park City, on River Terrace at Murray Street. From what he's read, it's a literary center with two floors of sun-drenched spaces overlooking the Hudson, a library of more than fifty thousand volumes, an archive of poets' recordings and videos, a program hall for readings, an exhibition space and a children's library.

After about twenty minutes of exploring, he finds himself on the third floor . . . he reads every little plaque, each small explanation. The poet Stanley Kunitz, one of the founders of the house, purposely left off the apostrophe on
poets
because “some things must never be possessed but shared.” The words spark something in him. He finds he wants to tell Smith about these words, to discuss them with her.

He looks down at his watch, feels a wave of anticipation that he'll see Smith soon. Ever since he got Olivia's e-mail, he's felt this almost physical urge to be next to Smith, because when he's with her, his mind behaves better. Is she just a diversion? He doesn't know yet, but he feels something.

How perfect that New York, the muse of so many, should have this place. He thinks of some of his favorite poems: Robert Lowell's “Central Park” and John Hollander's “West End Blues” and Amy Clampitt's “Times Square Water Music.”

Outside again, he pulls up his own PhotoPoet app on his phone and takes a picture of the sun glinting off the Hudson, a sliver of the house itself in the right-most edge. And then he runs a search for Howard Moss and finds what he's looking for, a quote about New York poems as “histories of desperation or hope; note-takings of the phenomenal; musings on loneliness, connection, isolation, joy.”

He loses himself in words, in ideas, in old volumes, in the familiar, in the new. When it comes time to leave, he snaps a few more pictures, pulls out his crumpling list and crosses it off.

He sets out for SoHo, with only a vague confidence about where he is going. He takes more pictures—of people on the street and in the windows of buses, of old, rusty bicycles and dogs tethered to streetlamps, of a cloud-mottled fall sky.

“Do you believe in second chances?”

A
t the store, a small, bespoke boutique called Seize sur Vingt on Greene, Tate waits for Smith. He read about the place in
New York
magazine, this menswear spot for the “young and well funded.” The space has a relaxed vibe to it and smells subtly of leather and exudes a hipster masculinity. He chats with a guy who pulls out thick binders of fabric samples with wild names (“Immigrant Punk,” “Can't Get Used to Losing You,” “Pontius Pilate”).

When Smith enters the store, the energy in the air palpably shifts, it literally does, and he feels himself come alive. What is it with this girl? He can't quite figure it out and the fact that he can't pin her down intrigues him. He's always been a quick reader, a swift and solid judge of character, but there's something exquisitely slippery about
her, about her contradictions, about the fact that she toggles between being a snob and being a hippie, a wild child one night and a demure intellect the next, a mixture of safety and risk.

“Tell me something,” she says by way of hello. “What is this place and why are there tits all over the walls?” She gestures toward the big photographs of women hanging throughout. She wastes no time, begins thumbing through square stacks of elegant, vibrantly colored dress shirts. There are indeed blown-up photographs of topless chicks everywhere.

Tits.
One word and he's lit. She could have used any other word; he'd have expected her to say
breasts
or something more proper, but
tits
. Fucking
tits
.
Yes.

“I read about it in a magazine,” Tate says. “Come. I have some ideas, but show me what you like.”

Smith makes her way through the racks of dress shirts and sport coats, a focused no-nonsense look on her face. He watches her movements, how she takes each garment in her hand and releases it and moves on to the next. Her brow furrows in concentration.

“What about this one?” he says, holding up a black-gray suit. “I can pair it with a skinny blue tie to match your dress.”

“I can't believe I tried the dress on for you,” she whispers as her cheeks grow pink. “Not sure that dress is going to be
the
dress. It's suffering at the moment.”

Tate laughs. Thinks of that moment when she appeared naked beside him, hugging a plastic-wrapped dress. As he helped her zip up the back, he willed himself not to get hard.

“How was last night?” she says. “Did you have fun?”

He laughs. “It was a standard-issue shit show.” He fights the urge to elaborate. It's strange, but part of him wants to go there, tell her about the girl who came back to his place, but he resists. He knows that the story hardly paints him in the best light.

With the help of the salesman, they pick several things for him to
try and he slips into the dressing room. When he comes out, Smith looks up from her phone.

“I
like
it,” she says casually. “Everyone else will be in a tux, but it's cool and it suits you.” She grabs a handful of fabric in the back. “That's better. Can we have this tailored by Friday?”

The guy from the store nods. “Sure thing. It typically takes a few weeks, but we'll rush it. Next time, leave yourself some more time and we'll do something custom and send it overseas for the cutting and basting.”

“Done then,” Tate says.

“What about the other stuff? Do you want to keep looking?”

“I'd rather get out of here and grab a drink with you,” he says.

Outside the store, Tate looks at his watch. “That took fifteen minutes, you know. When I shopped with Olivia, it would take hours. She would pick everything and perseverate over all the details. It was downright exhausting.”

“I like to think of myself as decisive,” she says, smiling. “I like what I like.”

“You do, don't you?” he says. Yes, shameless flirtation.

They walk together to Balthazar, a French brasserie on Spring Street. It's an odd time of day, between lunch and dinner, but they take a seat at the bar. He orders a beer and oysters. She orders a glass of champagne and a shrimp cocktail.

“I've never liked oysters,” she says.

“Why not?”

“The texture, I guess. I don't really know. Isn't it bizarre that there are things we do and don't do and we don't even know why?”

“Yes,” he says, looking around. He's always loved the restaurant's jovial, quasi-Parisian atmosphere, the feel of the place with its high-backed red leather banquettes, tall tin ceiling, colossal distressed antique mirrors, beleaguered tiled floor, bleached saffron walls and front full of windows.

“I used to come here for brunch all the time in the years right after college,” she says. “We'd gorge on fries and drink endless Bellinis. God, that was fun.”

“I came here a bunch then too,” he says. “I wonder if we were ever here at the same time. Bizarre to think about, right? Anyway, tell me something. Tell me about your work.”

“Really?” she says, laughing. It's a fucking sexy laugh too, deep and throaty. “I'm sorry,” she says, composing herself. “I just find it comical that I've burdened you with my deepest secrets, that you've witnessed me hunched over a toilet bowl, that we just speed-purchased formalwear and now we are dipping into the stiff get-to-know-you, tell-me-about-your-work chat.”

“And, footnote, I've seen you naked,” Tate says. “You forgot to mention that detail.”

“What?”

“Yes,” he says. “You didn't exactly sequester yourself to try on the dress. You just stripped down. I had no complaints. None.
None. Not a one.
”

Her face is red. Through her embarrassment, she simpers.

“Listen. You're totally gorgeous and you know you are, so let's skip the coy fretting. I'm just going to have to get that image out of my head as I fumble to have a serious conversation with you about our respective professional pursuits. Tell me this: The Order of Things? You a big Foucault fan?” he says, running his finger around the rim of his glass.

“Not really. Sure, I read the book. Not sure I understood a word of it, but I liked how he explored the relationship between power and knowledge. I pretty much just thought it was a fitting name for my business because, well, I deal with the order of people's things. And I figured it would impress the academic snobs like us who even know who Foucault is. I know that all of this still has something to do with trying to impress my father. He's never approved of my work. He thinks it's beneath me and horrifically noncerebral and he huffs and
puffs, but he's also the one who tossed some seed money at me so I could get things going. I know I'm lucky to have their financial support, but it has its strings. Every now and then, he asks when I'm going to throw in the towel and do something real and it just makes me want to work harder. It's fucked up. Thirty-four years old and I'm still on a quest for parental approval. And now I'm writing a book and the truth is I have no idea whether I really want to be writing a book, but I know being a published author will impress him. It's messed up.”

“Tell me about the book,” he says.

“Who knows if it'll ever really happen, but I kind of love it. There's something really cool about taking my laptop to a coffee shop and chipping away at it. Being in the mix of all of these creative, quirky New Yorkers. It's about chaos theory and cognitive dissonance. And the butterfly effect, applying these principles to questions of domestic order.”

“The butterfly effect?” he says.

“You familiar?”

“Barely.”

“Okay, so the idea is that small differences in initial conditions yield widely divergent outcomes for dynamic systems, rendering long-term prediction generally impossible.”

“Okay, Señorita Wikipedia, English please.”

She laughs. Tries again. “Okay, think about this. A hurricane's formation might be contingent on whether or not a butterfly far far away flapped its wings weeks ago. Or maybe you'll do better with a pop culture example? Did you ever see that Gwyneth Paltrow movie
Sliding Doors
?”

“About a dozen times. Olivia was marginally obsessed with Gwyneth.”

“Full disclosure: so am I. Anyway, think about it. A small thing like slipping through the sliding doors of the subway or waiting for the next train can make a huge difference in your life.”

Tate nods. Now he understands. What if he'd never caught Olivia in
the act with that bastard partner? Would he be sitting here right now? What if he never took that fateful surf trip to Malibu with Arun where they came up with the idea for PhotoPoet?

“I get it,” he says. “Like what if I said fuck it and didn't head to the game last weekend. This conversation wouldn't be happening.”

“Exactly. And I think there are really interesting applications in my work. People get so overwhelmed by all their stuff, by the clutter that accumulates, but what I try to teach them is that all they have to do is start very small. Pick one drawer or shelf and clear it. And then move to the next thing. Sorting through a pile of documents or clearing out your e-mail inbox can literally change your life. It's kind of interesting though because, sometimes, I have a hard time determining whether this book ambition is all fueled by an authentic desire to explore these things or whether I'm trying to convince myself, not to mention the parental units, that there is some academic merit to the work I've chosen, you know?”

“I do know,” he says. “The whole parental approval thing sounds very familiar. My folks are thousands of miles away and yet I find myself wondering if they will ever approve of this photography thing. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with my poor mom about it, trying to explain what I do each day, how important it is to me. But she's just a mom, worried that I'm lonely. Truth is, sometimes I am, but isn't that just the way it is?”

Smith nods. “I think so. I feel it too and I'm around people
all the time
. I wonder if it's all this social media stuff, you know? We feel like we're connecting, but we're really disconnecting, creating empty little dopamine rushes for ourselves.”

“
Yes,
” he says. “The truth is that I feel less lonely than I have in years because I'm actually out in the world, connecting with people, looking at them, into their eyes, speaking with them sometimes. And I have this guilt because I actually created one of these apps that take people away. I love the product, that people can marry images and words, but they'd be better off putting the phone down entirely. I bet your work is really about the people too.”

“Completely. I get this direct window into lives. It's never just about the home. There is heartbreak and happiness and love and loss. Just yesterday, I helped this woman sort through her husband's things. He died eight months ago. And we didn't just make piles. We talked. About her three sons, about Thanksgiving, even about Sally's wedding, and that was the perfect example of me being
affected
by my work, you know? I walked out of there being like, shit, even if you find the right guy, he might just die. Or here is this woman
my age
and she's already had a husband and three kids and I feel this stupid panic.”

“But isn't panic so counterproductive? I mean, if we flip out because time's passing, aren't we poised to miss it? That's what pisses me off, you know? I'm telling myself that I want to get on with things, stop thinking about the past and forge this healthy new existence here, but then I drown in drink and get all fucking nostalgic and then I just feel like all kinds of shit.”

“Cognitive dissonance,” she says, nodding. “You tell yourself you will behave one way and then you do the opposite and then you feel this toxic internal inconsistency plague you. Believe me, I'm familiar. What you can do is change your outlook and cut yourself some slack about the fact that you are in no position to move on yet and just keep doing what you're doing, or you can change your behavior so it's more consistent with your goal, right?”

He nods, trying to understand this. She's fucking smart, this one. He orders another round of drinks. Smith grows quiet and shifts on her stool.

“Tell me something,” she says, mischief flickering in her eyes. “Do you really like photography or are you doing it because you can?”

Who is this girl and how, in a few days, does she know just how to call him on his crap?

“What's that supposed to mean?” he says.

“You sold your company. You have money. You don't need to work. Trust me, I know the type,” she says. “And there's nothing wrong with taking time and having a hobby, but a hobby is different from
work
.”

“Shit, you sound just like my mother,” Tate says, sitting up straighter in his chair, taking a long swig of beer. “I've been pulling long nights working on these insipid grad school essays. Not sure I'd be doing that if I didn't give a shit, right?”

She shrugs. “People go to school all the time because they can't figure out what else to do. I'm just saying you should figure out your story. Because if you have money, some people might assume that you're just having fun, just doing something to fill time, and it is up to you to
show them
that you are serious and that you want to be taken seriously. My work, for example, is just that—
work
. It's not some cute little thing I do to occupy myself. Despite what my parents think. Despite what I sometimes think.”

He watches her get riled up and feels even more drawn to her. There is passion in this girl, anger of uncertain origin, vitality.

The waiter appears with the oysters, mumbles something about them, but Tate isn't focusing on the waiter.

“And as for the money thing,” he says, picking up an oyster, letting it slide down his throat, “I've promised myself I won't let it change me, but what I want to know is whether it's actually up to me. I mean, here I am, in the middle of the day with a knockout drinking and scarfing five-dollar oysters? I suppose I'm eating my words.”