The Faculty Club

20

The next morning, I felt lighter than I had in months, confident and full of purpose. I called Chance to make sure he was okay, but he wasn’t in. I called the hospital and learned that Sarah had been discharged. I walked to her brownstone and rang the bell. Sarah’s roommate answered the door, still glum, with thick glasses and a pink barrette in her hair.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see Sarah.”

A slight pause.

“She’s not here.”

“I know she’s here. She got discharged yesterday.”

She leaned toward me and puffed out her chest, ready for battle.

“I know who you are.”

“Look, um… what’s your name?”

She eyed me suspiciously, as if revealing her name would grant me some secret power over her. Finally, she said, “Carrie. But she doesn’t want to see you.”

“I understand. I wouldn’t want to see me either. And you’re a good friend for trying to keep me out. But I’m here for a reason. I want to make things right.”

“Oh. I didn’t realize you were Jesus,” she said.

A voice called down from the stairs beyond their living room. “Carrie, who is it?”

“It’s the guy,” she replied. “The lawyer.”

“Law student,” I said.

“He won’t go away,” Carrie explained.

There was a long pause, and then Sarah said, “It’s okay. Let him in.”

Carrie narrowed her eyes at me.

“Whatever,” she said, stepping aside.

I walked into a neatly appointed living room, the complete opposite of Miles’s philosopher’s cave. They had self-assembled modern furniture, the kind that comes in a box and lives in a world halfway between student and adult. There was one bedroom off the living room; the staircase led up to a second. Sarah waited at the top of the stairs, her door cracked. I could see half her face, one bright hazel eye, one rosy cheek.

I took a breath and started up the stairs.

When I got to the top, I saw her in a blast of sunlight from the window. She glowed, without makeup or jewelry, her cheeks flushed, eyes iridescent. She was somehow ordinary and enchanted at the same time: the tomboy you know your whole life before you see her at the prom and realize she’d been beautiful the whole time.

“Sarah,” I started to say, but she walked away from the door, leaving it open.

She sat down on her bed and hugged her legs. She nodded at a chair by her desk.

“Thanks,” I said.

All the speeches I’d practiced on the way over seemed inadequate now, flimsy and childish. Instead, I just looked at her. She was watching me, quietly. Her room was cheerful, with light yellow walls and framed Delacroix prints of Parisian life: Ferris wheels, hilltop churches, kids with scarves in the snow, warm orange windows. But then I saw the cardboard box filled with books on the floor, next to other boxes, with sweaters, socks, folders: she was packing? On top of the books was a model brain, with every hill and valley labeled, though they all looked the same to me.

When our eyes met, there was a tense energy between us, but also, I noted, curiosity. Whatever else, she wanted me to say something. I noticed my hands were shaking.

I pointed at the model brain.

“May I?”

She sighed into her folded hands. “Why not?”

I turned it over in my hands. It was made of rubber and felt pleasantly spongy.

“Is part of my brain really called the Sylvian fissure?”

She nodded.

“Sounds like a place where you’d meet a witch. Or a talking wolf.”

Stop talking, I willed myself. She looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded at the brain.

“There’s also an anterior commissure.”

“Where soldiers buy toothpaste.”

“And a cingulate gyrus.”

“A dance craze. The Cingulate Gyrus.”

“Everybody’s doin’ it,” she said. For a split second, the corners of her lips flickered into a smile. Then, as if she suddenly remembered why we were here, a wave passed over her face, her eyes hardened, and we were back to square one. She didn’t say anything for a moment, and when she did, her voice was strangely bland.

“I quit my program.”

There was no rebuke in her voice, but it felt like a hard slap anyway.

“I’m sorry, Sarah.”

She shrugged.

“It was that or an investigation. I didn’t want my dad to get in trouble.”

“I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”

She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.

“After the trial, all I could think about was how much I hated you.”

I started to tell her I understood, but I saw her face and shut my mouth.

“Not just minor hate, understand. I wanted to… I spent a whole week wanting to kill you. I blamed you for everything wrong in my life. By the time I got home yesterday, I was tired of hating you. That’s when I realized something… I felt relieved.”

“What?”

She smiled.

“That secret. It was killing me. A little bit, every day. Like my whole life was based on a fraud, and everything that came after made that fraud heavier, more impossible to escape.”

She looked at me.

“What I’m trying to say is, I forgive you.”

The strange thing was, I didn’t feel better. I felt worse.

“I’m not sure I forgive myself.”

I saw that look again, the one that made me imagine her in a hospital, caring for patients. “You were just doing your job,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Was I? Was that the way to do it? The only way to do it?”

“I was lying.”

“I know.”

I closed my eyes. “This could take a while to figure out.”

“Well,” she said, smiling, “your life’s not over yet.”

I nodded. If it weren’t for my recent burst of good sense, she might have been wrong about that. But now I saw a different path. I took a deep breath and hoped I wouldn’t screw up what I was about to say.

“I brought you something.”

She looked surprised, even skeptical.

“I can’t change what I did. I know that. It’s just a token. To say I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. She waited.

“Well, it’s not here.”

“What?”

“We have to go get it.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“Where is it?”

“I can’t tell you. But we have to take a train.”

“Are you crazy?”

We waited for someone to flinch. No one did.

“You’re crazy,” she said.

“Know what I thought, the night we met?”

She shook her head.

“I thought you’d forgotten how to have fun.”

“Oh. I thought you were going to say I had nice eyes.”

“You seemed so sad. I wanted to fix that.”

“Why?” she asked.

I think I must’ve blushed. She just said Oh and looked away.

“Listen. This morning I had two hundred dollars in my bank account. Now I have twelve. I’ll probably have to give blood under a couple of names to make it to the end of the semester. At least come see what I blew it on.”

“So,” she said softly, “my choices in life are: one, go off with the guy who ruined my career, or two, stay home and think about the fact that I have no job, no friends, no money, and no plan? Does that sound right?”

I said it did.

“Big day,” she said.

I waited.

“Well,” she said finally. “I’m curious.” She stood up and looked around the sad, half-packed room. “And curiosity beats this.”

We rode the train for an hour and a half. Mostly she looked out the window at the towns and fields passing by. I saw the orange blue light reflect on her face.

She spoke only once. She turned to me and said, “If you’re some psychopath who’s planning on killing me, don’t bother. You already did.” Then she turned back to the window.

When we left the train we took the subway, then went the final blocks on foot through the bright, crowded city. Everything felt fresh, alive. She didn’t ask where we were going. But when we came to the broad plaza with the central fountain and the glass temple beyond, her face went to recognition, then surprise.

“Do you know where we are?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Have you been here before?”

She shook her head.

She looked around, taking the whole piazza in: the men in black tie, the women in regal dresses. There was a look of wonder in her eyes. It was wonderful. Before us was a glass wall, enclosing two giant paintings of angels, each a hundred feet tall, one red, one yellow, both swirling and arching up toward heaven. We walked past the fountain to the Metropolitan Opera’s grand entrance.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Come on.”

“We’re going in?”

I nodded.

“In in?”

I nodded. Her face lit up.

“You look like a kid,” I said.

We walked through the immense atrium. Everything was upholstered in red and gold. We waited as an ancient man in a tuxedo tore our tickets. Then we took our seats under the glass chandeliers that looked like splintered stars, bursting with faint white light.

Sarah kept looking around, soaking it all in.

“How did you know,” she asked, “how I felt about opera?”

“You told me. The night we met.”

The opera was Mozart’s Magic Flute. It was a fairy tale, with dancing animals, a Sun King, and a pair of flirtatious parrots named Papageno and Papagena.

It all would have been ridiculous if it weren’t for the music. I’d never heard anything like it: celestial, pure, gliding like a hummingbird. When the curtain came down, the audience leapt to its feet, roaring with applause. I watched Sarah. She faced the stage, smiling and clapping, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Afterward, we walked the city. We came to a bright street filled with Indian restaurants. Each one was decorated with Christmas lights, inside and out; entire walls and ceilings were covered. Every restaurant seemed to be trying to outdo the ones around it until the whole street was flickering red, yellow, purple, and green in a beautiful, benign arms race. We sat on a bench and watched the people pass in and out of the restaurants.

“Can I ask you a question,” Sarah said.

“Sure.”

“When did you decide to be a lawyer?”

“When I was thirteen.”

“How did you know?”

“I was working at my grandfather’s office for the summer. There was this one case. This little girl was being abused by her mom. The dad came to us. He was scared. He didn’t know what to do. My grandfather made it right. We went to the judge and got the little girl away from the mom. She wasn’t allowed anywhere near her ever again. And I thought, wow, the law did that. It saved that girl.”

“That’s nice,” she said.

“My grandpa was a one-man practice. He had a little office with a shingle in front that said William Davis, Attorney and Counselor.”

“He actually had a shingle?”

I nodded. “It was a small town.”

We were quiet for a little bit.

“When I was a teenager,” she said to me, “my mom used to say, when you feel lost, remember the last time you really liked yourself. I was thinking about that today.”

“Did you come up with an answer?”

“I did. The year before I went to medical school, I worked as a librarian at a neighborhood library. I loved that. I loved the little kids, the books.”

She smiled at the memory.

“What about you?”

I thought about it.

“Four years ago,” I said. “I got accepted to Princeton for college, if you can believe that. I was all set to go. And then my dad had a heart attack. A really big one. He was out of work for weeks. My mom needed help. So I decided to skip Princeton and stay at home for school. Help them out.”

“Do you ever regret it?”

“Best decision I ever made.”

“Did you ever wonder if maybe part of you was scared to leave home?”

I should’ve been mad. If anyone else had said it, I probably would have been. But there was something so gentle about her that it seemed like an honest question, without any judgment attached.

“I don’t know. Maybe that was part of it.”

It was getting cold. Sarah shivered and pulled her coat tighter.

“Do you get the feeling,” she said, “that in some alternate universe we’d be engaged by now?”

I was so surprised I started laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. That just seems… I don’t know… I mean, could we have gotten it more messed up? Not we. Me. Everything I’ve done in the last few months… I wish I could go back and do it over.”

“I should have said yes when you asked me out. I wanted to.”

It felt like a portal had opened up, from my present world to a world of husbands and wives, houses and children. I remembered the windows in her Delacroix painting, warm and orange.

I wanted to kiss her, but I decided not to. We just sat there, and after a while she put her hand on mine.