The Red Book (40 page)

So Jonathan, hoping to lighten the load on his amygdala, met with a meditation coach. He made it through the first few steps—sitting up straight, choosing a mantra, breathing—without a hitch, but when it came time for the next few—detaching himself from his mind,
silencing
his mind—he could not transcend his inner noise. In fact, the harder he tried, the worse his brain spiraled in on itself, until trying to learn how to meditate was stressing him out more than the stress that had brought him to meditation in the first place.

His doctor suggested Wellbutrin, which she said would aid in norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake inhibition. “Nora who?” said Jonathan, with a smile. “Could you translate that into Endocrinology for Dummies?”

“Stress,” said the doctor. “It’ll ease your stress.” She handed Jonathan a prescription, which he promptly lost. He keeps meaning to call her office for a new one, but his anxiety distracts him until it’s too late to call.

As for Jonathan’s temporal lobe, it is now bathed in the familiar comfort of Chopin’s notes as Fresh Pond moves into the foreground, and his feet step up their already blistering, demon-fleeing pace. When his body finally arrives at pond’s edge, and his eyes are peering out at the vista of water, trees, and sky, a smattering of puffy clouds above echoed in the liquid mirror below, his occipital lobe identifies this almost instantaneously as beauty, and his frontal cortex produces two near-simultaneous, competing thoughts. The first, which he experiences as a burst of joy, is this: Holy shit, am I glad to be alive; the second, triggered by a surge of crushing pain, as if an elephant were standing on his chest, is this: Oh my God, I’m dying.

The pain now paralyzing him with its intensity was actually triggered several minutes earlier by an unusually large spasm of stress, which ruptured a piece of the plaque lining his main coronary artery, which in turn formed a blood clot that will, within minutes, if left untreated, deprive Jonathan’s heart of the necessary oxygen it needs to survive.

Several minutes behind Jonathan on the running path, Aaron Scharfstein, a Harvard economics professor who’d been sounding the warning bell on the American housing market for years, to the detriment of his career and credibility, is out for a jog with an old friend. Professionally, he tells this friend, he is riding high these days, now that his doomsday theories have been proven sound. The CNN bookers have him on speed dial. His lectures are packed. Personally, however, he feels like a failure for having not been able to make himself heard when his words might have made a difference. The friend says, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. No one was listening. They didn’t want to hear.”

The two are not far, but they are also not close enough yet to see Jonathan’s knees buckle under him.

As his shoulder blades hit the dirt, Jonathan’s perception of reality, distorted by a dearth of oxygen and a terrifying understanding of the ramifications of that dearth, twists time into a sepulchral slo-mo. His temporal lobe fires indiscriminately, shooting shards of memory straight from its ancient canon: his mother’s face in profile, at the wheel of the family Edsel; his father, postwork, removing his hat; his brother tackling him into a dune on the Jersey shore; Mia sashaying into his office, wearing a smile and a polka-dot dress; the umbilical cord that was stuck around Eli’s neck until it wasn’t; Josh’s first steps, on the Santa Monica Pier; Max just last night, taking Trilby’s hand; the candles at his fiftieth birthday, melting wax into chocolate ganache; Mia nursing a baby; the visible pulse of a fontanelle.

Zoe! he thinks. My God, Zoe!

The world goes black.

•  •  •

Mia, Clover, Jane
, and Addison are standing outside Kirkland House, saying their good-byes. Promises are made to keep in touch, offers of hospitality exchanged. “Oh my God, totally,” says Mia to Clay. “We have more than enough room.”

He invites her to see his next show, a commission from a young playwright about a mother in Scarsdale who falls asleep at twenty-five, nursing an infant, only to be woken up fifteen years later by her two surly teenage daughters demanding a ride to the mall. “Ooh, that sounds just up my alley,” says Mia. “I’ll come. Definitely. Who’s playing the part of the mother?”

“I’ll tell you what, girl. You figure out a way to get yourself up to Seattle for two months?” says Clay. “That part’s yours.”

“Very funny,” says Mia.

“You think I’m joking?” says Clay. “I ain’t joking.”

“You know what?” she says. “I’ll talk to Jonathan, see if it’s even feasible.”

Clay smiles. “Now you’re talking!”

Clover says to Bucky, “I feel like I’m disintegrating.”

“Welcome to the club,” says Bucky. He puts an arm around her. Kisses the top of her head. “Just take your time. It’s a lot to consider.”

“I’m not even talking about your offer,” says Clover, disentangling herself from his embrace. “I’m talking about life. Or . . . whatever. I don’t even know what I’m talking about. That was rough, that service, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, it was.”

“Look, I really appreciate you propping me up, and the tissue and all that—really, I do—but the answer is no, Bucky. I can’t just . . . leave my husband. And you’re married, too, in case you’ve forgotten.” She’s feeling inauthentic already! Speaking soap-operatic platitudes that are appropriate for the situation at hand but are hardly a true measure of her feelings, although she’s having a hard time pinpointing exactly what those feelings are. To admit love would be a start, but uttering such words out loud would be to cross the Rubicon over a rickety bridge specifically designed to unmoor itself behind her. She’s angry at herself, both for allowing love to enter into the equation and for her inability to quickly identify a solution to the quagmire and implement it. How can she love two men at once? It’s ridiculous, the kind of sloppy bookkeeping that would never have been tolerated at her old job, although that’s not really true either.

“Look,” says Bucky, “I’m not asking for your answer right now. I’m asking you to think about it. Go home to your husband. I’ll call you in a few months.”

“I really don’t think anything’s going to change between now and then.”

“Pace, I don’t know what world you’ve been living in, but in my world everything can change between now and then.”

Addison hugs Bennie. “Lady,” she says, “I really, I just . . . I don’t know what I would have done without you this weekend. I’ll never forget what you did. Never.”

“It was nothing,” says Bennie.

“Are you kidding me? It was everything,” says Addison. “You
sprang me from jail
, if you’ll recall. How am I ever going to pay you back?”

“You won’t.”

“That’s ridiculous. Of course I will.”

“Addison, please. I’m not trying to brag, but it wasn’t financially painful for me to pay that fine, okay? I give away more than that to charities I don’t even care about. I’m a sucker when it comes to buying those benefit tables. Save the Pigeons of Poughkeepsie? Okay, sure, just tell me where to send the check. Look, think of it this way: It would be the equivalent of someone else lending you ten bucks. Five even! I don’t want to hear another word about it. Ever.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll stop. Jesus, Bennie, I’ve missed you. I’m so sorry I’ve been out of touch.”

“So hit ‘accept’ on my frigging friend request already,” says Bennie. “We can start there and move on to a cup of tea whenever one of us is in town, how about that?”

Addison immediately pulls out her cell phone, fiddles around with the buttons, and hits accept. “Done,” she says. “When’s our next tea?”

Bennie laughs. “I’ll be in New York for work at the end of September. I’ll call you when I know the exact dates.”

“Cool,” says Addison. “I’ll keep the kettle warm.”

Jane is coordinating school vacation schedules with Ellen Grandy, realizing their daughters’ spring breaks don’t overlap. “Well, why don’t you and Nell just come for Christmas then,” she says. “I mean, now that my mother’s gone, it’s not as if we have any reason to come here this year. Nell can sleep with Sophie in her bedroom, and you can stay on the pull-out couch in my office. It’ll give us all something to look forward to.”

“Really?” says Ellen. “Are you sure? I mean, think about it first before you make that kind of an offer.”

“Nothing to think about,” says Jane, nevertheless engaged in a swirl of random thought: If you’d asked her, a week ago, whether she would have ever invited her late husband’s lover to stay with her in her home, she would have laughed you out of that home. But when faced with the actual person herself—a person to whom she is elusively drawn, she assumes, for the same reasons as Hervé—she can’t help wanting to get to know the woman better. “We’d love it. And I won’t be working that week anyway, so I won’t need the office.”

“All right then,” says Ellen, albeit tentatively. “Christmas in Paris. I’ll see if I can rustle up some cheap tickets. Nell will be thrilled.”

“So will Sophie.”

Mia’s cell phone goes off. A photo of Jonathan and the four kids, snapped a few days after they brought Zoe home from the hospital, appears on the screen of her phone. Max had showed her the “assign to contact” button in her iPhone’s picture file, so now every time one of her kids or Jonathan calls, the caller’s photo magically—or so it feels to Mia—pops up on her screen: Max on the balcony of their house in Antibes at sunset, his face sunburnt and glowing; Eli sticking his tongue out at the camera on the red carpet of Jonathan’s last film; Josh in his orange Tigers uniform, wielding a bat; Jonathan sitting on their bed cradling Zoe, the boys snuggled up with him in their boxer shorts and pajamas on a lazy Sunday morning, marveling over the not-yet-week-old creature. “Hey, sweetie!” she says, reacting each time to the sudden telephonic apparition of her husband and children in the palm of her hand with an almost giddy feeling of shared history, love. “What’s up?”

But the voice on the other end, belonging to Aaron Scharfstein, is unfamiliar, panicked, barely audible above the sounds of sirens, the shouts of strangers. “Uh, yes, hello, am I speaking to the wife of Jonathan Zane?” Later Mia won’t be able to recall a single word of the rest of this exchange that bifurcated her world into then and now, before and after, just the seven capital letters, broken up into three syllables, upon which her eyes happened to fall the instant she heard the news. Those letters, that word, inscribed on the Harvard shield of Clay Collins’s name tag, was this: VERITAS.

There was no accounting for it, she would say to friends later on, the odd details one retains. Her eyes must have alit on that word, that shield, every hour of every day back in college—on chairs, gates, banners, walls, mugs, sweatshirts, flyers, pencils, underwear, you name it, truth was on it. It just took her twenty years and a choked heart to finally see it.

C
LOVER
P
ACE
L
OVE.
Home Address:
16 Tingum Road, Harbour Island, Bahamas.
Occupation and Office Address:
CEO, Pace Tours Unlimited.
E-mail:
[email protected].
Graduate Degrees:
M.B.A., Harvard ’98.
Spouse/Partner:
Archibald Bucknell Gardner IV (B.A., Harvard ’89).
Spouse/Partner Occupation:
Captain, Pace Tours Unlimited;
Children:
Frank Love, 2010.
Stepchildren:
Archibald Bucknell V, 1994; Eloise Mason, 1996; Caroline Pearce, 1999; Charles Case, 2001.

These past five years have been such a whirlwind, it’s hard to know even where to begin. I think I have to start back at our twentieth reunion, where my son Frank was conceived. That I happened to be married, at the time, to a man who was not at the reunion made things complicated, to say the least. We separated a month after little Frankie was born, when I finally came clean and told him that the child was not his. My ex, understandably, was quite upset. Let’s just say it was a real low point, and I don’t recommend divorce as a life experience, unless absolutely necessary. Bucky Gardner, my old beau from freshman year and the father of my son, had recently separated from his wife as well, and after our divorces were finalized, we got married in city hall and took the summer off, with Frankie and my new stepchildren in tow, to sail around the Greek Islands.

Being a stepmother is tricky, no doubt, but my stepchildren have made it as easy as they can, under the circumstances. They’re good kids, mature beyond their years, and after having been childless for so long, I’m grateful to have this huge, boisterous brood during school holidays and summers.

On the work front, I tried finding another job in banking equivalent to my former position at Lehman, but my heart wasn’t in it, and the job market was still abysmal, so for about a year or so, while Frankie was still in his stroller, I helped Addison set up her vintage clothing shop in Williamsburg, to get some business experience under my belt outside the banking world and because, as you can imagine, it was like going to a party every day working with Addison. Bucky and I were renting an apartment in Tribeca at the time, looking to buy a place big enough for all five kids, but then it suddenly occurred to us that Bucky’s youngest, Case, would be heading to boarding school the following fall, so the idea of us staying in New York to be near his children was no longer an issue. That’s when we sat down together and really hammered out what each of us wanted from the rest of our lives. I told Bucky I was tired of Wall Street, that I wanted to work at a company that actually produced something tangible—a product I could believe in; a memorable experience. Bucky said he wanted to spend the rest of his life sailing.

Within the Venn diagram overlap of those two desires, Pace Tours Unlimited was born. We found a home in Harbour Island, Bahamas, near enough to the dock that Bucky can walk along the beach to work. It was slow going and rocky at first, trying to build a name and reputation for ourselves, but then Jane flew out from Paris with Bruno and their daughters, and she wrote a story about her trip and old friends and the idea of blended families—hers and ours—for
Travel
+
Leisure
, and after that we had to turn away clients.

Recently, it struck me that for the first time in my life, I feel a sense of balance and contentment I’ve never felt before. I love my work. I have enough time with Frankie that I never feel guilty. He goes to a great school within walking distance of our house. I have four bonus children who bring raucous laughter and friends down with them whenever they visit, which is frequently. I’m married to my college sweetheart, whom, as it turns out, I never stopped loving.

There, Bucky, as promised, I just saved you the trouble of writing your own entry. Carry on, Captain Gardner. Everyone else? I’ll see you at reunion.

A
DDISON
C
ORNWALL
H
UNT.
Home Address:
85–101 North 3rd Street, #4, Brooklyn, NY 11211 (718-427-0909).
Occupation:
Owner, Back in the Day Vintage.
E-mail:
[email protected].
Spouse/Partner:
Esther Grimm (B.A. Brown, 1991; Culinary Institute of America, 2008).
Spouse/Partner Occupation
: Chef, Plum Lane.
Children:
Charlotte Trilby, 1995; William Houghton, 1997; John Thatcher, 1998.

Good lord, people. Really, truly, you gotta believe me, I had every intention of getting this done on time, and yet once again, I put it off until the last minute. You’d think I’d have learned by now. You’d be wrong.

Okay, so, lots of stuff to cover, little time to cover it. I got divorced. It sucked, it’s over, moving on. I met my current partner Esther at a boring party neither of us had any intention of attending, and now we share a sock drawer. Amazing. She’s a chef, and she cooks like a dream, but my expanding waistline and I are determined to lose some of our girth between now and the reunion. Wish us luck.

So what else? Oh yeah, right. I had some serious liquidity issues back in 2009, and it took a while to sort that stuff out. During this time, I finally had to admit that as much as I love painting, I wasn’t ever going to have a solo show at MoMA, but I was going to have to earn a real living if I didn’t want my kids to starve. I had no marketable job skills aside from graphic design at that point, and there were no graphic design jobs to be had, so I started out by hawking a bunch of Jane’s mother’s vintage clothes on eBay, splitting the proceeds with Jane. I realized I not only had a weird knack for it, I actually enjoyed it. A lot. With an initial investment from Bennie Watanabe, who’s known around these parts (my apartment, that is) as the Hunt/Grimm family guardian angel, I opened my own vintage clothing shop, Back in the Day, right on Bedford Street near the L train entrance: vintage central, if you know what I mean. Clover was my CEO for a year until she picked up and moved to Paradise. I’m not kidding. The name of one of the islands near hers is Paradise, but hers is even better. You should go there. I’m serious.

Now I’m the CEO. I’m not as good as Clover, but I try.

Anyway, Clover said I should be picky about what we sell, to stick to quality over quantity, which is the best piece of advice anyone has ever given me about life let alone retail, so now I have a loyal clientele who stop in weekly, to see what treasures we’ve found. Then one day some Japanese travel guide must have written a rave about our wares, because now we get forty to sixty Japanese girls stopping in here every day, and man oh man, those girls can
shop
. If any of you former East Asian studies concentrators out there can still read Japanese and are able to find the mention of my store in that guide, I’d love to know the name of the publisher, so I can personally send them a thank-you note on the exquisite handmade vintage paper I just found in some woman’s attic.

My eldest, Trilby, is a sophomore at Bennington, and she’s going to kill me if she reads this, but she’s been seeing Mia’s son Max for a while now, though they’ve never actually managed to live in the same city for more than a few months at a time. After his dad died, while Gunner and I were separating, Max moved in with us for three months to do a summer internship in the city, which was healing and really nice for everyone. I love that kid. He’s now a man. It’s crazy how time passes. Houghton leaves for college in a year. Thatcher will go the year after that, if he can just pass chemistry.

I try to stay open, present, grateful for what I have. I could dwell on all the mistakes, the seventeen years spent hiding in a troubled relationship, but I choose to look forward. I’d like to make it to eighty in good health. I’d like to meet my grandchildren. I’d like to stick with Esther for as long as she’ll have me. It’s nice to finally love and be loved in return. I had no idea what I’d been missing.

J
ANE
N
GUYEN
S
TREETER.
Home Address:
11 bis, rue Vieille du Temple, 75004 Paris, France (33 1 42 53 97 58).
Occupation:
Writer.
E-mail:
[email protected].
Spouse/Partner:
Bruno Saint-Pierre.
Spouse/Partner Occupation:
Editor,
Libération
.
Children:
Sophie Isabelle Duclos, 2002; Claire Streeter Saint-Pierre, 2010.

Five years, it occurs to me, is the perfect amount of time between these entries. A lot can happen in five years. For me the changes were both slight and monumental. Slight in that I still live in the same apartment and fall asleep every night with the same man as before, although now he’s officially my husband and legally Sophie’s dad. Mia insisted we get married at her house in Antibes after her husband died: one last blowout before the house was sold. The deadline and Mia’s pleas worked wonders. We committed ourselves to both the date and to each other, and it was one of the loveliest weekends of our lives. Melancholy, of course, too, as we were all missing Jonathan like crazy, but Mia said planning it gave her something to focus her grief on, instead of the void. Having lost my first husband as well, I understood the compulsion completely.

The monumental changes were the usual—my mother’s death from cancer, a new life, a new career. Baby Claire, named for my mother, was born a few months after the wedding, and I gave her a full year of my undivided attention before trying to step back into the working world. This proved to be more difficult than I’d imagined. My services were no longer required at the
Globe
, so I freelanced articles for various British publications and took on a few translation projects. Then, after I sold my mother’s house, I had a bit of a cushion, so I took the opportunity to give myself two years to write a novel.
The White Mouse of Nha Trang
, based loosely on my experience as a child in Vietnam, was finally sold to an American publisher last year and will come out this spring, just before our reunion. I’m proud of it, but I also know the realities of the publishing industry these days, so I’m keeping my expectations low. I’ve never worked harder on anything in my life—every day it felt as if I were slicing open another vein and pouring the contents out onto the page—but I guess the best I can hope for is that the few people who actually find their way to the book and read it will, in whatever small or large way, be moved by it.

Bruno has managed to hold on to his editing job at
Libé
, but it feels very tenuous right now to be a wordsmith. It makes me wonder what kind of wordless world our children will inherit. It’s hard to imagine a world without sentences, thoughts, poetry, and prose, and yet every day I see it happening: the shortening of our attention spans, the editors who ask for two hundred words max, the daily fix of small nothings. A YouTube clip of two monkeys humping; Aunt Mildred’s status update; baseless rumors; lies that become truth simply for having been typed into somebody’s blog. What can one learn in two hundred words or 140 characters or thirty-five seconds about anything? Nothing, it strikes me, that’s worth knowing.

M
IA
M
ANDELBAUM
Z
ANE.
Home Address:
804 Marco Place, Venice, CA 90291 (310-589-0923).
Occupation and Office Address:
Broker, Venice Beach Properties.
E-mail:
mzane@venicebeach properties.com.
Children:
Max Benjamin, 1992; Eli Samuel, 1994; Joshua Aaron, 1998; Zoe Claire, 2008.

The past five years have been the hardest five years of my life. I was actually going to leave this part blank, but this morning I sat down at my desk and realized I had two full hours between showings, so here goes nothing.

As many of you who were at our Twentieth are aware, my husband Jonathan died of a heart attack the Sunday morning of reunion weekend. Apparently—or so I learned from both his physician and our accountant—he was under a tremendous amount of stress that day, which he hid from both me and the kids for reasons that died with him. Suffice it to say, I wish I had known. Maybe his heart would have failed anyway, but to know that financial worries may have played even a minor role in his demise—and worse, that I was kept in the dark—has been almost too much for me to bear. I understand his desire to protect me, but I can’t help thinking that if he’d shared his burden, it would have been lighter, and he would still be here.

That first year after he died was spent in a blurry haze of grief, paperwork, and asset liquidation. We sold our house in Antibes, but not before I made Jane walk down the aisle there with Bruno. We sold our house in LA and moved into a much cozier place in Venice Beach. It’s lovely. Don’t feel sorry for us. Two of my boys are away at Harvard, both on financial aid—thank you, all of you who give—and the third’s nearly out of the house as well, and we couldn’t have stayed in that bigger house even if we’d wanted to. It held too many memories in its too-large rooms. We never needed that much space anyway.

Our debt was such that, even with our assets liquidated, I still had to find a job. Quickly. Watching our real estate agents in action, I realized that being a broker was the one potentially well-remunerated job where my acting skills would come in handy while still leaving room for me to be a single mother to a toddler and three grieving teens. So I got my license. I begged for work. I can’t say I find my career totally fulfilling, but it’s not unfulfilling, either. It feels good to earn a living. I like working with clients. I like selling homes to young couples just getting started. And I’m particularly well suited to dealing with the widows. It’s a pleasure, in some weird way, to share grief with a stranger. I’ve become known for my compassion with the mourners, which serves me well, since a third of my deals involve estate sales.

My children have been incredible throughout this experience. It’s impossible to put it into words. Strength? Dignity? It all sounds so clichéd. Suffice it to say that, even though they lost their father, they are my rock, and I’m so grateful for their love.