The Red Book (27 page)

“Um, this one?” she says hesitantly. “For a student production. My senior year of college.”

“And that was . . . ?”

“Uh, 1989.” She can hear a smattering of stifled chuckles. That’s okay, she thinks. Let them laugh. They’ll be old someday, too, and then it’ll be less funny. She imagines the director doing the math: twenty years plus a Harvard senior. . . .

“Ah, got it. So you haven’t done anything since then?”

She pictures the homey set of the Preparation-H commercial she landed a few months out of college; the satin-lined coffin in which she played dead, for ten hours straight, for that CBS pilot that never aired. “No, not onstage.” She blocks the harsher rays of the spotlight with a palm to her forehead. She can just make out the faint outline of the director, scribbling God-only-knows-what onto his clipboard. “Look, I’m sorry for wasting your time. I just . . .” She’s not really sorry, but apologizing has become such a habit, she can’t help it.

“No need to apologize,” he says. “In fact, you’ve raised the bar in here, which is good, but just so we’re clear . . .” He pauses. Lets loose a nervous cough. “The character of Nora Helmer really should be played by an actor in her late twenties to early thirties. At the most.”

“Of course,” says Mia. “I totally get it.” She’s middle-aged now. Which means she can’t play Nora anymore, or Juliet or probably even Hedda, but if she’s lucky, she still has another half of her life to traverse and at least a dozen or so excellent characters she can still play: Mary in
A Long Day’s Journey into Night
; Blanche in
A Streetcar Named Desire
; Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Great roles, each one of them, and then she can graduate to the cranky grandmothers, like Violet in
August: Osage County
, a part that any actress worth her salt would kill to play. All is not lost. It never was. She feels the cavity behind her eyes now filling, her breasts overflowing, sweat now dripping from every pore. “Thank you,” she says.

Then she exits stage left.

L
UDWIG
G
ERHART
V
ON
A
RNHEM.
Home Address:
14 Jubilee Place, London SW3 1AW.
Additional Home Address:
Untere Tuftra 11
,
Zermatt 3920
,
Switzerland;
Additional Home Address:
12 Via G. Orlandi, 80071 Anacapri, Isle of Capri.
Occupation and Office Address:
Partner, Aurora Partners
. E-mail:
[email protected].
Graduate Degrees:
M.B.A., Wharton ’95.
Spouse/Partner:
Eloise Marder Von Arnhem (A.B., Oxford ’97
)
.
Children:
Ernst Foxhall, 2001; Delphinia Cleo, 2003; Ossian Arthur, 2005.

Life is busy and rich. I run a hedge fund in London, where I live with my wife and three children. We spend our winters skiing at our house in Zermat, our summers in Capri, or rather, my wife goes down to Capri with the children, and I do the weekend commute back and forth. Exhausting, but worth it! Stop by if you’re ever in one of our cities!

S
TEVEN
J
OSHUA
K
RAMER.
Home Address:
8220 Lincoln Terrace, Los Angeles, CA 90069 (310-754-0078).
Occupation and Office Address
: Writer,
Superdigger
, NBC Studios, 3000 West Alameda Avenue, Burbank, CA 91523.
E-mail
: [email protected].
Spouse/Partner:
Lisa Renfrow Kramer (A.B., Harvard ’91).
Spouse/Partner Occupation:
Writer,
The Goonies
.
Children
: Riley Renfrow, 2003; Angus Renfrow, 2006.

After a brief stint as a faith healer in Nepal, I realized I was the son of God and spent the next seven years wandering the globe in search of disciples and a skilled plastic surgeon. When those plans fell through—I only found two disciples, and neither of them knew how to crush noses—I decided to embark on a secret mission to Pluto. Problem was? By the time I got my rocket ship all gussied up and loaded with all the latest doodads (iPod dock, hamburger grill, condom dispenser), Pluto was taken off the list of planets. Scientists! That’s when I decided to open up a combination bikini wax/grilled cheese emporium, until the health department had to go and shut us down for reasons I’m not at liberty to disclose. Somewhere in there I met my wife and spawned a couple of kids, and they are way smarter, cooler, and more perfect than all of your spouses and kids combined. How do I know this? Easy. I am the son of God. Anyone want to buy a used rocket ship? I’ll throw in forty pounds of cheddar and a tweezer.

C
HARLES
R
ANDALL
P
OOLE.
Home Address:
602 North Locust Street, Muncie, IN 47303 (765-908-7745).
Occupation and Office Address:
Assistant professor, Ball State University, 2000 West University Avenue, Muncie, IN 47306.
E-mail:
[email protected];
Graduate Degree:
Ph.D., Duke ’96.

Here’s the crazy thing: I love what I do. I teach classics at a small university in Indiana, and I wake up every day loving my job, my students, my life. The problem is I don’t really care about publishing scholarly work or completing all the administrative tasks that go along with being a college professor, so I’ve spent the past twenty years hopping from school to school, never getting tenure. I feel like a bit of a gypsy, and it hasn’t been great for my love life either. Most of the women I date end up deciding that my lack of ambition is appalling, but I feel like I
do
have ambition, just not in the traditional sense of the word. My ambition is to teach the classics to students eager to learn, and from all accounts, I do an admirable job of this. After my stint at Ball State is up, I’m thinking about leaving Indiana and taking an on-campus, free-housing position at one of the northeastern prep schools. It’s probably what I should have been doing all along, but I’m stubborn. I thought I could carve out my own little niche in the university system, which frankly seems kind of broken to me. Isn’t the point of being a teacher . . . to teach?

I have some hobbies, which keep me sane. I’m an avid biker until the first snowfall; I love to ski, and I’m now learning how to snowboard; I’ve been getting into rock climbing; I read a ton of fiction and nonfiction; and I love going out to see movies, music, plays, anything that moves me. Obviously, I get particularly excited when a play by Aeschylus or Euripides comes to town. This happens often enough, and I always turn it into an event, inviting my whole class to the performance. I get letters every now and then from former students, who tell me I was the one who made them love the classics or become a classics professor or write modern-day versions of classic plays. These letters are, to my mind, life’s true currency.

Still no kids, although I’d like to have a couple one day. Until then, it’s just me and my golden retriever, Antigone.

G
ITA
S
ENGUPTA-
J
ONES.
Home Address:
1442 Hampton Ridge Drive, McLean, VA 22101 (703-556-2265).
Occupation and Office Address
: Mom.
E-mail
: [email protected].
Spouse/Partner:
Alex Jones (A.B., Princeton ’87; M.B.A., Wharton ’91).
Spouse/Partner Occupation:
Marketing Director, AOL;
Children
: Sumina Frances, 2004; Sanjay Graham, 2006.

My husband Alex and I met when we were both working at AOL. We were always the last two people in the office, and one day he invited me to share a yogurt with him in the cafeteria, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I kept working after each of my children was born, but last year our daughter Sumina was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and I took a leave of absence to care for her full-time. I know other things must have transpired during these last five years, but really it’s Sumina’s illness that occupies all of the space inside our brains and heart. As of this writing, her prognosis is not great, but we are trying to keep a positive attitude. Sumina is old enough to understand that she’s sick, but not old enough to understand the ramifications of her illness, so we try to keep it light, both for her sake and for the sake of her little brother, who’s gotten a bit of a raw deal being the younger sibling of a critically ill child. I know this experience will make him stronger, eventually, but right now he just seems confused and a bit lonely, since he’s always being left with a sitter when Alex and I are at the hospital with Sumina.

I don’t understand why God makes a world in which children get so sick, and yet I pray to whatever gods I can, every day, for her survival. If any of you are in the habit of saying prayers, no matter your denomination, no matter your beliefs, please add Sumina to your list.

T
HOMAS
A
LLEN
W
OLFF.
Home Address:
1121 Alice Street, Oakland, CA 94612 (510-445-0787).
Occupation and Office Address
: Teacher, Oakland Unity High School, 6038 Brann Street, Oakland, CA 94605.
E-mail
: [email protected].
Graduate Degree:
J.D., Harvard ’93;
Children
: Bruce Jared, 1999; Drew Emmons, 2001.

I got divorced, left New York, and quit my job as a partner at Davis Polk, where I’d been toiling away miserably since law school, to start a new career as a high school history teacher. Both the job and the climate in Oakland suit me much better. My boys spend their summers and holiday breaks with me, which isn’t ideal, but that’s what I got in the settlement.

I keep up with some of my former roommates from Leverett House, and I look forward to seeing everyone else at reunion.

J
ANICE
E
LAINE
H
OWARD.
Home Address:
1401 Northwest 15th Avenue, Miami, FL 33125 (305-325-6675).
Occupation and Office Address
: Physician, Internal Medicine, University of Miami Hospital, 1400 Northwest 12th Avenue, Miami, FL 33125.
E-mail
: [email protected].
Graduate Degree:
M.D., University of Chicago ’95.
Spouse/Partner
: Malcolm Alvarez (B.A., University of Michigan ’87; M.D., University of Miami ’92).
Spouse/Partner Occupation
: Oncologist.
Children:
Timothy Howard, 2005.

I consider myself lucky to be one of the few blind doctors in the U.S. It was definitely challenging learning how to intubate, locate an aorta, and diagnose a rash without the use of my eyes, but I had a lot of wonderful teachers who believed in showing rather than telling, to the point where sometimes it takes my patients a few minutes to realize I cannot see.

That being said, I mostly do lab work and lobbying these days, trying to convince the U.S. government to support stem cell research, which I feel is the key to curing so many illnesses—Parkinson’s, MS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, spinal cord injury, burns, heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis, just to name a few—it’s nearly criminal not to move forward on that front.

In 2005, my husband Malcolm and I became the proud parents of little Timmy, who was born uneventfully and brings us untold joy every day. Miami, where we live, is warm and lovely, and I try to take a swim every morning.

Three years ago, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I have good days and bad days, but mostly I try just not to dwell on it. If I’ve learned anything in these past twenty years it’s that life never works out as you planned, but you take what you’re given, and you run with it.

Can’t wait to meet up with everyone at reunion!

Chapter 7
Evening

It was Addison, feeling restless and untethered without Gunner, who suggested they all leave the boring dinner dance and head to the Spee Club, and then Bennie said, “You know what? It’s about time I saw the inside of a Final Club,” checking first with her wife (who was chatting up some curator from the Tate) before calling the hotel babysitter to say they’d be back probably closer to midnight, not eleven, and then Bucky, who’d initially suggested the Fly Club garden until he was told it’s now a Hillel, said he’d get the key from Ludwig Von Arnhem, who used to be in the Spee and was itching to ditch the dance, too, after his girlfriend of three months, a former Victoria’s Secret model with whom he took up—officially, that is—after separating from his second wife, complained she was bored and no one speaks Russian and aren’t there
any
drugs around here, and then Clover joined in because some unhinged husband of a classmate she could barely remember tried to blame her for the recent foreclosure of his home (“You should be ashamed of yourself !” he’d said, drunkenly spilling a drop of seven-dollar Merlot on the tip of her $800 Manolo, and for a flash she thought he’d somehow found out about her having misappropriated Bucky’s sperm, not the American dream), and then Jonathan and Mia, who were glad to have an excuse to get away from motor-mouthed Luba, who’d cornered them by the dessert trays to tell them more about her latest trial than they’d ever care to know, even if they’d been judge and jury both, said yes, please, get us the fuck out of here, and then Jane was located off in the far corner, away from the blare of the DJ and his speakers, spinning 1980s nostalgia in the form of Chaka Khan, Estefan, and “Too Turned On,” Simple Minds, “Red Red Wine,” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” having an intense conversation with Ellen Grandy, whom she barely knew back in college, but man, from the outside looking in (thought Addison), the two might as well have been lovers tearfully reuniting after years spent apart, and Jane said sure, she’d love to come, as long as Ellen, who was also crying—Jesus, what the hell could those two have been yammering on about?—could join, and then Mia went to find Clay, who wondered aloud whether his hillbilly pansy ass would even be allowed inside the Spee, to which Mia said c’mon, all those friggin’ Final Clubs—Finals Clubs, whatever they’re called, she could never remember if there was an
s
or not—are paeans to latent homoeroticism, and before they knew it, the four ex-roommates, Addison, Clover, Mia, and Jane, along with a dozen or so hangers-on, were making their way up Dunster Street in their natty dresses and suits, the women trying to avoid catching their heels in the cobblestones, the men anticipating cigars, yanking ties loose, and for the first time that weekend, it finally felt like old times: the flash mob, the random destination, the anticipation of youthful debauchery.

“In a weird way, I’m actually glad you let it slip,” Jane says to Ellen, keeping themselves several paces behind the rest of the group. “Canonizing him, as I’ve been doing, hasn’t served anyone well. Know what I mean?”

Ellen is blown away by the mature, acrimony-free manner in which Jane has chosen to handle the news. She feels like putting an arm around her but doesn’t risk it. Yet. “I know exactly what you mean, but it was still wrong of me,” she says. “I’m sorry. Really sorry.”

“It’s . . .” says Jane. She spots a homeless man off in the distance, fishing a half-eaten sandwich out of a public trash can. She’s struck by the same sense of pathos she frequently encounters when bearing witness to similar scenes: We are all one minuscule step away, she thinks, from sifting through trash. How many kids had she seen over the years, climbing mountains of rotting refuse in their bare feet, fighting for scraps with the dump birds? How many families had she seen, squatting over open sewers on the borderlands of conflict, who once had private places to relieve themselves, however humble? Hell, how many Americans who bought trustingly into the dream were now bathing in public restrooms, sleeping in cars? Jane stops in her tracks ten feet from the homeless man. “Wait,” she whispers to Ellen, “isn’t that . . . ?”

“Lytton Hepworth,” says Ellen. “Yeah. I think it is. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

Ellen runs across the street into a convenience store and emerges, a minute or so later, with a bagful of food: a bunch of bananas, three cheeses, a couple of apples, a loaf of bread, and two boxes of granola bars, which she casually slips to Lytton. He takes the groceries with a quick nod; Ellen crosses back over Mount Auburn Street to catch up with Jane and the group. “Right. So, where were we?” she says.

“You were apologizing for having sex with my late husband,” says Jane.

“I really am—”

Jane cuts her off. She doesn’t need to hear the apology twice. “And I was about to forgive you.”

“You were?”

“I was. I do.”

“Thank you,” says Ellen. “I’ve been feeling guilty about it. For a long time.”

“Good. You should feel guilty. Now let’s move on.” Within the first half hour of her now three-hour chatathon with Ellen, Jane immediately understood what Hervé must have found irresistible about her: an unaffected intensity, a sharp intellect utterly indifferent to its sharpness, an ability to laugh at herself, a passion without pedantry. Not that the betrayal feels any less painful than it did during the moment of its discovery, or during Jane’s hour of hyperventilating shock afterward—if anything, now that the jolt of the revelation has worn off, she feels the sting of it even deeper—but with Hervé dead, any anger she feels toward Ellen seems beside the point. Or at least not worthy of the energy needed to stoke it. Hate, as she knows only too well, requires not only a depersonalized object of one’s hatred but also constant fuel and kindling, creating nothing tangible, nothing enduring aside from a pile of ash and the need for a broom. Plus (and this surprises Jane) she finds it oddly comforting to reminisce about Hervé with someone else who once loved him. Their shared affection reanimates him.

When she covered Mitterand’s funeral back in 1996, the year after she and Hervé were married, she was simultaneously appalled and fascinated by the stoic image of Mitterand’s grieving widow Danielle, standing side by side with his mistress Anne Pingeot, and the illegitimate daughter of that union, Mazarine. “I don’t get it,” she’d said to Hervé when she arrived home that night. “If this were an American president, there’d be screaming pundits. Riots!” (In two years, Bill Clinton’s extracurricular activities with a certain stained-dress-saving intern would prove her prescient.) “How can she just stand there like that, next to her husband’s mistress? At his
funeral
?”

“
Qu’est-ce qu’il y a à comprendre?
” Hervé had said with a shrug. What’s there to understand? “Mitterand loved his mistress and his daughter, and he loved his wife, and he wanted them all to be at his gravesite, so they were all there together. No big deal.” Jane accused Hervé of being callous and insensitive that evening, of not understanding how bonkers it all seemed, but the next morning she scoured every single French newspaper in search of the adulterous outrage she was certain would help prove her point before realizing the entirety of France—left, right, center, it didn’t matter one’s political affiliation, age, or religious beliefs—felt the same yawny way about the public juxtaposition of wife, mistress, and illegitimate daughter as her husband: big shrug; no big deal.

She grew to accept the reaction, culturally, but she never really understood it on a visceral level. Until today. At this very moment. Chatting with her late husband’s mistress. Maybe France has rubbed off on her more than she realizes. “Don’t leave just because I fucked up,” Bruno keeps telling her. “This is your home. You two are my life. I
love
you.” This last phrase he always delivers using the formal
vous
rather than the familiar
tu
: “
Je vous aime
,” he says, with deliberate deference and politesse, because he thinks it sounds more beautiful.

She wonders how Bruno is coping with her and Sophie gone. He called last night and left a message on her cell, telling her how much he misses them both, how much he wants to be here with her, how, if she’ll just say the word, he’ll be on the next flight to Boston. She pictures him in their wood-beamed apartment on the rue Vieille du Temple, sleeping on their low-to-the-ground bed on the sloped oak parquet, hugging Jane’s pillow to him, as he always does when she’s away or when she arrives home late after he’s already gone to bed. Even in his sleep, he’ll sense her crawling under the covers, and he’ll release his tight grip on her down-filled substitute and pull the real thing toward him, breathing in the scent of her neck. “
Je vous aime
,” he’ll whisper in her ear, and she’ll assume he’s awake, but she’s always wrong. It’s become instinctual by now. He just says it, subconsciously, without even opening his eyes. And she’ll lie there, enveloped, drifting off, and it will remind her of her earliest years in Nha Trang, all of her siblings snuggled up next to one another on two thin mats pushed together on the floor, the ocean air masking the stench of chemical deforestation, the chorus of crickets drowning out the occasional burst of gunfire outside their open window until neither breeze nor chirps could mask nor drown it out any longer. It will remind her of the year after Harold died, when Claire, thank God, refused to listen to all those people who told her she shouldn’t let a mourning nine-year-old sleep in her bed. It will remind her of her weekend mornings with Hervé on the rue Monge, on those rare occasions when they were both in town between assignments, and she’d wake up with the sun to buy some cheese and pâté on the rue Mouffetard, and when she’d get back, he’d still be sleeping—Hervé could sleep through anything, on anything, a trick that served him well when his bed was a ditch in a mine-strewn desert or the icy floor of an unheated, ethnically cleansed house—so she would put the groceries in the refrigerator and crawl back into his arms to wait for him to wake up and make love. It will remind her—quite simply and for lack of an actual place to visit, either physically or mentally—of home.

If she’s still awake at 2
A.M.
, she decides—and at this rate she will be—she’ll call Bruno in Paris, just as he’s getting up, to tell him she’s decided to sell her mother’s house. If the
Globe
can no longer afford its foreign correspondents, so be it. She has no desire to move back to Boston. To begin life from scratch for the fourth time in as many decades in a country where income disparity between the wealthiest one percent and everyone else outrivals that of even traditional banana republics. Her standard of living as a working journalist in America, versus France, would plummet to the point where she and Sophie might have to choose between going to the dentist and buying groceries, and really, what kind of a life is that?

Amazing the middle class isn’t rioting at this point. Where is the outrage? Or is everyone just too busy surviving on scraps from the trash heap and looking for work? She should do a story on that. The invisible bleeding. But for whom? Does anyone even still read the
Globe
? If you’d told her when she was graduating college that, twenty years later, journalism would be a dying industry, she wouldn’t have believed you. Newspapers stand at the very foundations of a democracy. Or at least they used to. Or at least they should.

The British papers are still surviving, Jane thinks, covering news both foreign and domestic. Maybe she’ll go to London and meet with editors at the
Guardian
or the
Financial Times
. Plus her French is fluent enough now that she can probably write for a French newspaper or a magazine or an online something-or-other if she can find an open position. Or she could translate English books into French, like her friend Sabine, who makes a decent living at it. Sophie would love that, having her mother home more often; she herself might even love it, too: a regular life with regular hours. Or maybe she can get a job in the press office at the American Embassy. Or, it suddenly hits her, she can skim off some of the proceeds of the sale of her mother’s house and trade it for the chance to stop making excuses (
I can’t, I couldn’t, I shouldn’t
) and write something totally her own. Something long, meaty, worthy of that most precious of commodities: a reader’s time.

“I have an idea,” she says to Ellen. “Why don’t you and Nell come for a visit to Paris? She and Sophie seemed to really hit it off today.” Sophie, in fact, was furious at her mother for having pulled her away from Nell, the one American girl at the whole reunion, she’d stated with the requisite melodrama of a seven-year-old, whom she actually liked.

“That would be amazing,” says Ellen. “Nell is crazy about all things
Madeline
.”

“Sophie’s a
Madeline
freak, too,” says Jane. “She even went so far one night as to pretend she had appendicitis, just to get the toys.”

“Tell me about it,” says Ellen. “I just rushed Nell to the hospital last month with a
Madeline
-inspired appendicitis.”

“You did not.”

Ellen smiles. “I did so. You’d think being a pediatrician I might have known better, but no. The doctor on call that night said they even have a name for it: Madelineicitis.”

“I love it.”

A few blocks ahead, Clay is yucking it up with Jonathan and Mia. “You should have seen your wife this afternoon,” Clay says to Jonathan. “She blew those other ladies out of the Charles River.”

The deep flush of Mia’s cheeks had been so noticeable when she came rushing back from Harvard Square to feed Zoe that afternoon, Jonathan had wondered whether Clay was, in fact, a closet heterosexual until Mia told him what had happened at the Loeb. “I felt alive again up there,” she said, “vital.” After Zoe passed out, she’d yanked down her husband’s jeans and taken him in her mouth with more passion than she’d exhibited in years, before throwing him down on Jane’s Aerobed.

“Sweetheart,” says Jonathan, reaching proprietarily for Mia’s hand, “why didn’t you ever tell me you missed being on the stage?”