Will leans out of the driver’s-side window toward his wife. “It’s
not too late to change your mind,” he says.
Her dark glasses show him the houses on their side of the block,
greatly reduced and warped by the convexity of each lens. The fancy
wrought-iron bars on their neighbor’s windows, the bright plastic
backboard of the Little Tikes basketball hoop one door down, the
white climbing rose, suddenly and profusely in bloom, on the trellis
by their own mailbox: it’s as if he were studying one of those
jewel-like miniatures painted in Persia during the sixteenth
century; the longer Will looks, the more tiny details he finds.
“Did you remember to bring pictures?” Carole asks.
He points to an envelope on the seat beside him. “I mentioned the
pool at the hotel?”
“Several times.”
“Babysitting services? Pay-per-view?”
“Come on, Will,” Carole says, “don’t do this to me.”
“Do what?”
“Make me feel guilty.” Her bra strap has slipped out from the
armhole of her sleeveless dress, down one shoulder. Without looking,
she tucks it back where it belongs.
“You know I’d make it up to you,” he tells her. She smiles, raises
her eyebrows so they appear above the frames of her sunglasses.
“And how might you do that?” she asks him.
“By being your sex slave.”
She reaches behind his neck to adjust his collar. “Aren’t you
forgetting something?” she says.
“What’s that?”
“You already are my sex slave.”
“Oh,” Will says, “right.” The errant strap has reemerged, a black
satiny one he recognizes as belonging to the bra that unhooks in
front.
Carole ducks her head in the window to brush her lips against his
cheek, a kiss, but not quite: no pucker, no sound. For a moment she
rests her forehead against his. “I just can’t deal with it. You know
that. I can’t talk about Luke-not with people I don’t know. And the
same goes for your brother.” She pulls back to look at him. “If you
weren’t such a masochist, you wouldn’t be going either.”
I’m curious, Will thinks of saying. It’s not as simple as masochism.
Or as complicated. Carole steps back from the car door.
“See you Sunday,” she says, and her voice has returned to its
previous playful tone. “Call if you get lonely.”
“Oh, I doubt that’ll be necessary.” Will turns the key in the
ignition. “I’ll be too busy connecting with old friends. Blowing on
the embers of undergraduate romance …”
“Checking out the hairlines,” she says. “Seeing who got fat and who
got really fat.”
Will glances in the rearview mirror as he drives away, sees his wife
climb the stairs to their front door, the flash of light as she
opens it, the late June sun hot and yellow against its big pane of
glass.
S Something about the cavernous tent defeats acoustics: the voices
of the class of ’79, those Cornell alumni who made it back for their
twenty-fifth reunion, combine in a percussive assault on the
eardrum, the kind Will associates with driving on a highway, one
window cracked for air, that annoying whuh-whuh-whuh sound. He moves
his lower jaw from side to side to dispel the echoey, dizzy feeling.
Psychosomatic, he concludes. Why is he here, anyway? Does he even
want to make the effort to hear well enough to engage with these
people? Everyone around him, it seems, isn’t talking so much as
advertising. Husbands describing vacations too expensive to include
basic plumbing, referring to them as experiences rather than travel,
as in “our rain forest experience.” And, as if to demonstrate what
good sports they are, wives laughing at everything, including
comments that strike Will as pure information. “No, they relocated.”
“Ohio, wasn’t it?” “The kids are from the first marriage.” “She fell
in love with this guy overseas.”
He tries to picture the women’s workaday selves: quieter, with paler
lips, flatter hair. Still, on the whole they’re well preserved,
while the men by their sides look worn and rumpled. Receding
hairlines have nowhere else to go; love handles have grown too big
to take hold of.
“Hey!” someone says, and Will turns around to a face he remembers
from his freshman dorm. “David Snader!” the face bellows to identify
itself. With his big, hot hand, David pulls Will into a crushing
hug. “Where you been!” he says, as though he’d lost track of Will
hours rather than decades ago.
“Hey!” Will pulls out of the sweaty and, it would appear, drunken
embrace.
“Are you here alone?” David asks him. He blots his forehead with a
handkerchief.
Will nods. “Carole-my wife-she wasn’t up for a long weekend of
nostalgia with people she’s never met before.”
“Same here. Same here.” David gives Will a companionable punch in
the arm. “Where’s Mitch?” he asks, and Will shrugs.
“Didn’t make it. At least not as far as I know.”
“Oh yeah?” David squints. “You guys not in touch or something?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Well.” He punches Will’s arm again. “Guess that makes sense. All
the travel. Media. Price of fame.”
Will produces the rueful smile he hopes will convey that his
estrangement from his famous twin is no big deal. Unfortunate, of
course, but nothing hurtful or embarrassing. He’s about to ask David
about his wife and whether or not they have children, when David
lurches off into the crowd. Will fills his cheeks with air, blows it
out in a gust. David Snader is the fifth person in one hour to have
approached him to ask not about Will or Will’s work, his family, but
about his brother, whose career as a long-distance swimmer has given
Mitch a name as recognizable as that of, say, Lance Armstrong or
Tiger Woods. Not that any of these alumni were his friends. Will and
David hadn’t even liked each other. But still.
He goes to the bar for a glass of red wine. If he’s going to drink,
he might as well rinse a little cholesterol out of his arteries.
He’s just replacing his wallet in the inside breast pocket of his
blazer when he looks up to see someone else bearing down on him, Sue
Shimakawa, with whom he’d shared an exam-week tryst, if that’s the
right word for abbreviated coitus in the musty, rarely penetrated
stacks of the undergraduate library. Punch-drunk from studying
chemistry for a few hundred hours, on a dare Will had asked Sue to
have sex with him, prepared for a slap, or for her badmouthing him
later or laughing at him in the moment, anything but what he got:
her accepting his invitation with a sort of gung-ho enthusiasm. She
had one of those bodies Will thinks of as typically Asian: compact,
androgynous, and smooth-skinned, with pubic hair that was absolutely
straight instead of curly, the surprise of this discovery-along with
the panic induced by having intercourse in a potentially public
place-enough to eclipse other, more inclusive observations.
“Will, Will, Will,” Sue sings at him. “I was hoping to see you!” She
has a man in tow, a sandy-haired giant at least a foot and a half
taller than she. “Meet Rob. We have five kids, if you can believe
it! Five!”
Wow, Will is about to say when Sue turns to her husband and says,
“Rob, this is Will Moreland, an old fuck-buddy of mine.”
Whether Rob is mute or only, like Will, horrified into silence, he
thrusts his big, freckled hand forward without saying a word. The
two men shake, silent in the clamor all around them, and then each
drops his hand to his side and looks at Sue to see what might happen
next.
“Rob’s a debt analyst,” she says.
“Really!” Will exclaims.
“Yes.”
They all nod.
“Hey, hey,” Sue says. “How about that brother of yours, huh? We’re
major fans. Major.”
“He has had a spectacular ride.” For once, Will is relieved when the
conversation turns to his brother.
“Oh, I don’t know. There’s heaps of athletes that are celebrities.”
“Of course, yes,” Will says. “I know that. I just-”
“Is he here?”
“Here?”
“At the reunion. Here at the reunion.”
“No. I’m afraid not.”
“Oh, too bad. I really wanted to catch a glimpse of him.”
Me, too, Will thinks as Sue and her husband move off. Having not
heard from his brother for fifteen years now, during which time
Mitch went from being known in the world of elite swimmers to being
known by just about everyone, Will fantasized that Mitch might
actually show up. If he’s honest with himself, the hope of seeing
his brother was at least part of what persuaded him to attend the
reunion-especially after he’d learned that Andrew Goldstein, the one
friend with whom he’d kept in touch after college, wouldn’t be
coming because his wife’s due date fell on the same weekend. Not
that seeing Mitch would be pleasant or, Will imagines, anything less
than traumatic, but he’s fed up with having to manage his private
anguish even as he’s forced to admit sheepishly to friends,
colleagues, neighbors, and now alumni that he’s no better informed
about his brother’s latest stunt swim-as Will has come to think of
them-than the average reader of Sports Illustrated.
“Hello,” says a voice behind him, startling Will out of what Carole
would call one of his social desertions, when he becomes a spectator
rather than a participant. He turns in the direction of the
flirtatious tone he almost recognizes. As for the face: arresting,
angular, unforgettable. Thinner than she used to be, but no less
substantial-she looks concentrated, a distillate of her younger
self.
“Elizabeth,” he says.
“William.” She tilts her head to one side, lifts her eyebrows. “Were
you looking for someone?”
“You, of course. Who else?” Will unbuttons his shirt collar and
loosens his tie. “Do you think I didn’t scour each of those e-mail
bulletins listing who was planning to attend, hoping-hoping against
hope-to see your name?”
“Can it be?” Elizabeth says. “Has Mr. Fatally Earnest developed a
sense of humor?”
“Only in extremis.”
Elizabeth glances around herself. “I guess this qualifies,” she
says.
“Actually, I was just looking over the crowd. Seeing what
generalizations I could make about the class of ‘seventy-nine.”
“And?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know that I’ve had enough time to study my
impressions. You?”
She shakes her head. “Insufficient data,” she says.
“Data? That’s a clinical word.”
“I’m a clinician.”
“Oh, right. I’d heard you’d gone on to med school.” Having read her
bio in the reunion book-studied it would not be inaccurate-Will
knows also to which school Elizabeth went, when she got her degree,
and where she now works. But he’s not going to give her the (false)
impression that he’s still pining for her. “Where’d you end up-what
school?” he asks.
“Johns Hopkins.” Elizabeth pauses, Will suspects, to give him the
opportunity to compliment her for having been accepted by a
top-flight med school. He dips his head in an abbreviated bow of
congratulation. “I was in dermatology,” she continues, “then I
specialized.”
“I thought being a dermatologist was specializing.”
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Envy
by Kathryn Harrison
Copyright © 2005 by Kathryn Harrison.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Random House
Copyright © 2005
Kathryn Harrison
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-4000-6346-9
