The Romantics (25 page)

“I guess it doesn’t make a difference,” Tom said.

“No,” said Laura. “It doesn’t.” She dispensed with the clump in a single hurl.

They sat for a moment in silence.

“Did the same thing happen when you proposed? You dial the wrong number?”

“I hate how you do this,” Tom snapped. “I share something personal, then you use it as a weapon.”

“What you do is hardly better,” she said. “Rewriting history like a politician.”

For a moment, they remained united in mutual irritation. But
as always, the distance between them gave way to a need to be closer.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No, you’re not.” He smiled.

“You should be,” she said. “A single digit, and everything would have been different.”

They laughed, bonded more closely now by their shared regret. The feeling weakened Laura at her core, and she suddenly felt as though every muscle in her body had gone slack. Giving in, she extended her legs and lay down at Tom’s side. As they lay, they stared up at the sky, as though trying to locate the stars beyond the mass of clouds.

“I remember when I moved to Brooklyn,” he said. “I was very confused by the view. I’d expected the sunset to be farther away, blocked by all those skyscrapers. For some reason, I thought it would set behind Manhattan’s skyline. But it was just as close.”

“The skyline?” Laura asked.

“No, the sun,” Tom said. “Just as close as it was in Manchester. As close as it was in New Haven.”

“You wanted evidence of change.”

“No,” he said. “I wanted evidence of distance.” Laura smiled and nodded.

She settled into a more comfortable position and indulged in a moment of nostalgia. “Remember that paper sophomore year? The one that inspired your thesis.”

“The Hopeless Romantics,” Tom said, smiling. “Chronicles of a Failed Movement.”

“Only you could start a fifty-page paper the night before …”

“And still get an A minus,” Tom said slyly. “Only because I wrote it,” Laura said.

“Hardly!” said Tom, mock offended. Then, he smiled. “Okay, maybe half of it.”

They sat in silence for a moment, enjoying the memory of that night—the anxiety, the exhaustion, the importance.

“I do feel sorry for them,” Laura said.

“Who?”

“All those distraught poets.”

“How could you feel sorry for a poet,” said Tom. “Is there anything more useless and indulgent?”

“Oh no,” Laura said. She turned to face Tom, insistent on eye contact. “They were radicals, revolutionaries. More influential than Newton and Darwin. Without them, there would be no point-of-view, no ecstasy, no heartbreak, no novels.”

“The Romantics cannot be credited with the birth of emotion,” Tom said.

“No, but maybe, without their work, we wouldn’t know how to express it.”

“That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t feel it,” Tom said.

“Who knows,” Laura marveled. “Maybe we wouldn’t experience those sensations if they hadn’t defined them.”

Tom paused, mesmerized, considering Laura’s assertion. There was no one—nothing else in the world—that had this unbelievable effect on him: thrilling electrification. But just as soon as he acknowledged this gift, he sought to destroy it.

“People dreamed before Freud,” he said. “Maps existed before Copernicus.”

“But no one knew to interpret,” she said. “And the maps were ridiculous.”

Tom shook his head, refusing to acknowledge Laura’s argument. “They were nothing more than the lucky witnesses of a crumbling religion.”

“No,” Laura said, whispering.
“They
were the reason religion crumbled. They were inventing a new one.” How had she found herself, once again, arguing with the same intensity as a lawyer defending a man set for execution?

“They were just confused kids,” Tom said conclusively. “A bunch of freaks and depressives.” He turned away, signaling his loss of interest. “Love and hysteria are easily mistaken.”

“You
would
look at it like that,” Laura said. In the past, an idea like this would have marked the launch of a sparkling new conversation. But now, it sputtered to its death, estranging them further.

“Oh, Laura, I’m weak,” he said, turning to her. His eyes conveyed his plea for forgiveness.

“No you’re not,” she said, still looking up. It was too much to look in his eyes.

“Am I making a horrible mistake? Tell me. I need to know what you think.”

“You already know what I think,” she said. “You want to know if I think you’ll regret it.”

“Stop torturing me,” Tom said.

Laura smiled. The irony of this statement was almost comical. But he was sincere and his tone had changed. She noticed the movement of tears before the sound. His shoulders shook slightly, and his body contracted as though he had been punched in the stomach.

“You broke my heart,” she whispered.

“You are my heart. I love you,” he said. “I really love you.”

Laura smiled. “I love you too.”

Tom shook his head, wild with confusion. “But why? I’m a total asshole.”

Laura laughed, choosing not to dissuade him of this fact. But she answered the question. “You inspire me,” she said.

Tom stared back, incredulous. “I’m so sorry.” He shook his head. “I ruined everything.”

Laura paused, unsure how to respond. What could you say after that? How could two people be so close and yet so distant?

Luckily, a new rain shower conspired to bring them together. At the first timid drop, they instinctively huddled. They spent the next several hours clutching each other, running their hands over each other’s bodies as though it was their last night on earth, a last precious chance to memorize the shape, to know the fleeting warmth, smell, and taste of another human body. For Laura, it felt like a respite from blindness, a glimpse of color after years in the dark. For Tom, it was an emergency rescue, a hand offered through the silver spray before waves took him under.

Technically, on the spectrum of very bad things, they did nothing truly wicked. But of course, that spectrum has no measure for the greatest of all carnal sins, the kind that occurs before skin touches skin, before wondering turns to yearning, yearning to having, having to holding for dear life, when two people cling to each other so desperately that even when they lie, inches apart, neither is fully satisfied until the light between them turns to darkness.

C
hip awoke with a start to the shock of falling rain. God knew how long he had been lying on the beach. He vaguely remembered falling to the ground and mistaking the sand for a desert. The sensation of a hangover—the mind-numbing dehydration, the vertigo, the bludgeoning headache—was familiar enough. But now, in addition to the usual distortions, he was faced with a summer shower. For a moment, he wondered if he had drowned. But memory returned in a series of flashes. He remembered the raft, the race back to shore, and Laura—had he tackled her to the ground?—and began to reconstruct the last few hours.

Like most addicts, Chip was extremely skilled at reducing the effects of a hangover. He knew how to manipulate his intake—the type of alcohol he drank, the chasers he used, the post-party ritual—to ease what would be a devastating crash to less seasoned partiers. In its stead, he had perfected the slow comedown, a process that lasted several days and required various herbal concoctions. It was
best achieved with excessive sleep, constant television watching, the occasional late-afternoon jog, and a complicated assortment of macrobiotic teas, whose salutary purpose was lost on him entirely. Alternatively, the whole process could be circumvented with continued drug use.

Choosing the latter, Chip made his first attempt to stand. Eight vodka sodas, a bottle of wine, and the buffet of pills he had added to hors d’oeuvres was not an extreme tally for one night, and yet he now wondered if he had finally ingested a toxic amount.

Dehydration was an urgent problem. His brain felt as though it had withered from his skull like dried earth in a flowerpot. With new desperation, he looked out at the bay and wondered why ocean water had to be off-limits. The problem of dehydration at sea had always struck him as the cruelest torture. Being surrounded by the very substance that could save your life and yet finding it totally useless—it was, to Chip, even more than freak accidents, good cause to doubt God’s existence. Every time Chip heard a tale of shipwreck, he felt certain the solution had been overlooked. Surely, there was some small pocket of the ocean whose water was not contaminated by salt. Perhaps, if he cupped his hands tightly and took only a very small sip, he would happen on one such pocket of purity and save himself.

He had searched for this very thing—a pocket of purity—for his entire life and yet, even in this seeming paradise, had found only corruption. He amused himself as he stumbled up the lawn by making a list of those people in his life who were guilty on this count. He ordered his list from most to least rotten-to-the-core and so began with his mother.

Augusta Hayes, in Chip’s humble opinion, was a deluded woman. The same could be said of his father, of course, but William
at least evidenced some discomfort with the disparity between his beliefs and reality. Augusta, on the other hand, seemed to thrive on the contradiction. She performed an impression of warmth and yet felt very few emotions; she projected an air of nonchalance and yet was compulsive in all her activities; she claimed to love her children at all costs and yet recoiled from neediness. That she could be blamed for all his problems and unhappiness was a conclusion he’d drawn years ago. Ironically, he’d done so under the guidance of a therapist whom she’d funded.

Together, Chip and Dr. Shineman had distilled his childhood to a single moment. He was seven years old and had slipped as he emerged from the bathtub, landing first on his bottom, then on his back, and knocking his head in the process. Oddly, it was not the bruise that had traumatized him but rather his mother’s response.

“You’re okay,” she had said when she found him wailing. She bestowed a ceremonial forehead kiss. Then, she patted his bottom and dispatched him to go. “You’re okay, Chippie,” she had said again. “You’re absolutely fine.”

And the result was, Chip and Dr. Shineman agreed, to deny Chip the opportunity to experience the pain, a form of emotional censorship that had not only scarred his childhood but stunted the formation of his adult personality.

More disturbingly, Chip went on to infer, it was an ailment of the entire Wasp culture: The refusal to express and process pain amounted to a cumulative repression so enormous it rivaled the force behind a volcano. It was no surprise therefore that Chip’s adolescence had seen a series of painful and powerful explosions and, more fitting still, that a Jew was the only person in whom he could confide these feelings.

William was not beyond reproach, but he was somehow less
culpable than his wife. Where Augusta was corrupt, he was crippled; where she was pathological, he was passive. His surrenders amounted to a crime that was more disappointing but ultimately lesser. As the weaker parent—and the father, no less—he inspired more pity than rage. When he married Augusta, he resigned himself to a life of idle chatter, and that crime was far greater—and far more tragic—considering he had once had something to say.

Proceeding from most to least corrupt, Lila fell next on the list. Her failings were almost too obvious to review. Lila, like her mother, was vain, controlling, and emotionally frigid. Yet she feigned a saccharine demeanor. She was doggedly ambitious and yet took issue with evidence of aspiration in others. She was only truly interested in those people who provoked her competition. She had chosen Laura as her best friend because she was her most formidable rival. She had chosen Tom as her husband for the same reason Augusta had chosen William, because their goals dovetailed and his “artistry”—the only thing she lacked—amplified her status.

Tom was closely tied with Lila. Why more people didn’t see him for what he was—a shameless social climber, a gold digger, really—was truly a mystery. Tom was bound to abandon his artistic goals just as William had. And worse, he had found—and seized—in Lila, the financial means to this end. If this fact were not evident from the lack of chemistry between Lila and Tom, it was immediately clear from the spark that existed between Tom and Laura. When Tom was in Laura’s vicinity, his entire frequency changed. That they were in love was clear to anyone but a total buffoon. It was, in fact, a testament to Lila that she recognized this fact and yet managed to ignore it. Changing his mind, Chip revised his list: Tom was more corrupt than Lila.

And then there was Laura, who was not so much corrupt as corrupted. Her jealousy of Lila was petty, certainly, and her covetousness unappealing. But there was something endearing in her conflict, something redeeming about her goals. And when she was in a good mood, albeit rare, she was wild and hilarious. She was a riveting conversationalist. And she was so much more beautiful than the waxy, freckled girls with whom he’d grown up, the Westfields, the Biddles, the Grants. Tragically, Laura would always view him as Lila’s repulsive little sibling. And, of course, she was painfully in love with Tom, a fact that was unlikely to be changed even by his marriage to another woman.

Chip’s unscrupulous taxonomy was interrupted by the weather. After showering sporadically for the last several hours, the sky finally made good on its threats with a hearty downpour. It began as a drizzle that dusted the lawn but gained speed quickly until its unison rhythm could be heard across all of Dark Harbor. It seemed to start on the roof of the house, then move into the rustling trees, ending its journey on the bay, where it picked up momentum.

Luckily, Chip was halfway to the house by the time it was really pouring. He knew it was halfway because, as a child, he had attempted to measure the distance from the porch to the water. Placing one foot in front of the other, he had counted the steps to the beach, committing the halfway mark to memory with the aid of a large elm tree. That this tree had witnessed all the same storms as Chip was immeasurably comforting.