Three days after returning to school for their junior year, he appeared outside the house Sadie, Emily, Lil, and Beth had rented, on the little road behind the art museum. They hadn’t yet hung curtains—or, the sheets of theatrical fabric, stolen from Hall Auditorium’s costume shop, that would eventually serve as curtains—and Beth, unpacking books in her second-floor room, saw him gazing up in her direction and knew that something had changed, not just in him but in herself. The next day, as they walked home from the gym after registration, it began to rain and they ducked under a tree, where, somehow, he managed to pull her close to him and, after much fumbling with cheeks and noses, kiss her, a sensation at once deeply, perfectly right, and strangely, frighteningly, utterly wrong. He had, he told her late that night, as they lay in her bed, wanted to kiss her from the moment he saw her sitting in the lounge of Talcott—a turreted, Victorian dorm—reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh while waiting for their English class to begin. “You looked like Holly Hobbie,” he told her. “Um, is that a compliment?” she asked, laughing. “Of course,” he said, too quickly. “You have those beautiful, full lips”—his voice quavered uncomfortably on this compliment—“and your freckles…” She wanted to believe him—about everything—but she wasn’t sure she did. A niggling voice told her that he’d settled for her.
A year later, Dave left his battered journal—an old black sketchbook—open on her desk and she peeked inside. “There’s something too pliant and languorous about her,” he explained, with the aid, Beth thought, of a thesaurus. “There’s something that bothers me about her. It’s as though she’s too vulnerable. Too soft. With those plump cheeks, like a kid. And yet, I wonder if this is what attracted me to her in the first place.” Reading his misgivings gave her a strange sense of relief. She’d been right all along—she wasn’t crazy. For some reason, after she and Dave became boyfriend and girlfriend—rather than simply friends—she had lost her ability to question him, to call him on his bullshit, to engage him in any sort of real discussion. She became increasingly afraid of him, she realized now, sipping her too-sweet coffee, or afraid of losing him. Why? And how had she never realized this before, in all the hours she’d spent dissecting their romance?
She placed a cigarette in her mouth, fumbling a bit with the pack (how did you get one out, they were packed in so tightly), lit it from the stove, and inhaled deeply. A pleasant little hum started up between her ears. She exhaled, giggling slightly. She hadn’t coughed, like a priss in a teen movie, like her friends would have expected. No, like Dave would have expected. He’d loved to see her as a bumbling, frail child. And she’d played into that, hadn’t she? She had, in a way, become that person—too soft, too vulnerable—so as not to disappoint him.
After the cigarette, the coffee, the cruller, Beth’s panic subsided and was replaced by a dull, faraway ache behind her eyes and a restless twitch in her fingers. When the phone rang, her heart leapt and she jumped up to answer it, then thought better of it and slumped down in her chair again. Her parents had returned from California the night before and it was most likely her mother, asking when they might expect her for a visit. She missed her mother and was looking forward to sitting down and talking to her—in theory. Just now, the gulf between them seemed too, too wide. How could she tell her about Will? About her lost job? Her wrecked finances? The mess she’d seemingly made of everything. The mere thought of going home increased the throbbing in her head: she couldn’t bear to picture the train, the quaint train station, the sloping lawns scattered now with rust-colored leaves, the ice cream shop in Scarsdale Village. The phone rang twice more and she heard her own voice—annoyingly breathy and a tad nasal—say, “Hi, this is Beth. I’m not home—” then ran into the next room and held her thumb to the volume button until she was left in a silence so welcome that she began, giddily, to laugh.
four
In December, Tuck lost his job at Boom Time. He was certain, Lil said, to find a similar job, and quick, at a similar magazine, like Fast Company or Bubble Economy, or Salon or Slate or Feed, or a portal like Yahoo! or Google, which was where the real money was, or even at an ad agency or branding firm or something.
“Could Tuck really do that?” asked Beth. It was difficult to imagine anyone she knew working in advertising, a soulless, ethically dodgy industry, which she’d taught her students in Milwaukee to dissect.
“Totally. The new companies operate on a different business model,” Lil told her, missing the point. They were shivering their way through bowls of crab bisque at the Grey Dog, with Sadie and Emily, on the first Saturday of the New Year. “They’re not looking for MBAs or whatever. They just want smart people who have new, exciting ideas.” Her friends nodded dutifully, their cheeks still reddened with cold. “I mean, I’m not excited that he was fired, but I guess, it’s like: if you’re going to be fired once in your life, this is probably the time.”
“You’re so right,” said Beth, leaning in toward Lil. “Will keeps wondering if he should go to a dot-com.”
“Would he do that?” asked Sadie, blotting her nose with an oversized handkerchief. “He seems so entrenched in the Journal.” Sadie’s mother disliked the Journal’s politics—despite appearances, she was a staunch Democrat—and sniffed disapprovingly when she caught James Peregrine reading it.
Beth shrugged. “His friend Ben just got a job at this new site, Law.com, and he’s making like a zillion dollars.”
“What is it? A magazine?”
Again, Beth shrugged. “I’m not sure. They haven’t launched yet. Apparently, Ben has, like, nothing to do. He writes freelance pieces all day.” She blew, halfheartedly, on a spoonful of soup. “It’s just so weird. Jason tells us the most crazy stories about Stanford—”
“That’s where the guys who started Yahoo! are from, right?” interrupted Lil. “Weren’t they Stanford students?”
“Mmm-hmmm,” said Beth, “but Jason says there are so many start-ups that there aren’t enough people to staff them. So they’re recruiting freshmen. So, like, these eighteen-year-old guys are dropping out of school and making these huge salaries. Jason says they come back to campus for parties, and they’re, like, driving Maseratis.”