Silver Girl (18 page)

Meredith’s elation was short-lived. Once they were in the plush office belonging to the dean of students, which was empty but for the two of them, Trina closed the door. Meredith remembered an Oriental rug under her feet; she remembered the brassy song of a grandfather clock. She noted that Trina had extinguished her cigarette, but an aura of smoke still clung to her. Up close, she could see that Trina had speckles of mascara on her upper eyelids.

What’s going on?
Meredith wondered. But she wasn’t brave enough to ask. It was definitely something bad. She fleetingly thought of how ironic it would be if she got kicked out of school right at the moment that she had learned Freddy was unattached.

Trina said, “The dean is in a meeting across campus. I’m an intern here, so they sent me to tell you.”

Tell me what?
Meredith thought. But her voice didn’t work.

“Your mother called,” Trina said. “Your father had a brain aneurysm. He died.”

Meredith screamed. Trina moved to touch her, but Meredith swatted her away. She could remember being embarrassed about her screaming. She was screaming in front of Trina, whom she had considered a paragon of Ivy League womanhood. And what news had Trina, of all people, just delivered her? Her father was dead. Chick Martin, of the eggplant parm subs and the monthly poker games; Chick Martin, the partner at Saul, Ewing who specialized in the laws of arbitrage; Chick Martin, who had believed his daughter to be brilliant and talented. He had suffered a brain aneurysm at work. So arbitrage had killed him. Arbitrage was tricky; it had a million rules and loopholes, and while trying to decipher the code that would bring him to his answer, Chick Martin’s brain had short-circuited. He was dead.

But no, that wasn’t possible. Meredith had just been home for Thanksgiving break. Her father had been waiting for her at the Villanova train station. He had wanted to come get her at the university, but Meredith had insisted on taking the train—New Jersey Transit to 30th Street Station,
SEPTA
to Villanova.
That’s what college kids do, Daddy!
Meredith had said.
They take the train!

Both of her parents had coddled her over break. Her mother brought her poached eggs in bed; her father gave her forty dollars for the informal class reunion that was taking place on Wednesday night at the Barleycorn Inn. Her parents brought her along to the annual cocktail party at the Donovers’ house on Friday night, and as a concession to her new adult status, her father handed her a glass of Chablis. He introduced her to couples she had known her whole life as though she were a brand-new person:
My daughter, Meredith, a freshman at Princeton!

Chick Martin, Meredith’s first and best champion, the only champion she’d ever needed, was gone.

Meredith stopped screaming long enough to look at Trina, thinking how she
hated
her,
hated
the smell of clove cigarettes,
hated
the city of Istanbul,
hated
the beauty and sophistication that was masking the sadism required to deliver this kind of news. Meredith said, “No, you’re wrong.”

Trina said, “I’ll walk you back to your suite so you can pack your things. We’ve called for a car to take you home.”

The world had stopped being safe on that day. As happy as Meredith had ever been in her life, she had never been
truly
happy again. Her father was gone; her father’s love for her was gone. She thought back to the driving lessons in the university parking lot, her father saying,
I can’t stand to see you hurt like this.
The pain Toby had caused Meredith was one thing. This pain, now, was quite another.

Seven hundred and fifty people attended Chick Martin’s funeral—his law partners, his poker buddies, friends, neighbors, Meredith’s teachers, everyone she had ever known, it seemed. Connie was there and Connie’s parents, but not Toby—he was entering finals at the College of Charleston and said he couldn’t get away.

Dustin Leavitt came to the funeral.

Dustin Leavitt?
Meredith saw him approaching the church as she waited for the hearse out front with her mother and grandmother. There were so many people from so many parts of Meredith’s past in attendance that she had a problem pinning names to faces. When she saw Dustin Leavitt, she registered his good looks and she thought he was someone she knew from Princeton—a professor? a graduate student? then it came to her—Dustin Leavitt, thirty-three-year-old coworker of Mr. O’Brien’s at Philco, whom she had danced with at Connie’s graduation party. She had forgotten all about him.

He took her hands. Despite the fact that so many people had held, pressed, or squeezed Meredith’s hands, they were ice cold. Meredith hadn’t given a thought to her appearance in days, and now she worried that she looked like a red-nosed, wild-haired troll. She didn’t own a black dress, so she was wearing a black cashmere turtleneck and a gray pinstriped skirt. Black tights, awful black flats. She had stupidly put on mascara, which now trailed in sooty streaks down her face.

“Hi!” Meredith said, trying to sound normal, as though she had come across Dustin Leavitt sitting at a booth in Minella’s Diner and not on the steps of Saint Thomas of Villanova on the occasion of her father’s funeral. She felt embarrassed by her situation, and then ashamed about her embarrassment.

Dustin Leavitt said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Meredith. Everyone knows how much your father loved you.”

“Oh,” Meredith said. She welled with fresh, hot tears. Dustin Leavitt hesitated. Meredith knew she was making him uncomfortable, so she tried to smile and wave him on. He squeezed her bicep—it seemed to her he had also done this after the Lower Merion swim meet—and then he disappeared into the dark mouth of the church.

Meredith saw him later at the reception at Aronimink, and still later, at the after-reception, which was an impromptu event held at the O’Briens’ house. Meredith’s mother and grandmother had gone home, but Meredith had stuck with Connie, and Veronica and Bill O’Brien, and the other mourners who were for the most part all drunk, but because of the early hour—six o’clock—and because of the meager, WASPy offerings of the luncheon at Aronimink, thought that more drinks and pizza and cheese steaks at the O’Briens’ sounded better than going home. Meredith had little recollection of anything that had transpired that day—she had taken a pill at 9 a.m. to settle her nerves—and by the time she reached the O’Briens’, she was drunker than either Connie or Veronica, which was saying something. She believed she finally understood alcohol’s true purpose—to eradicate conscious and deliberate thought when such thought was too agonizing. Dustin Leavitt did his part in providing comfort by bringing Meredith a tall flute of very cold champagne.

“People think champagne is best for celebrating,” he said. “But I like it for misery, myself.”

Meredith knew she had a witty response to that somewhere inside her, but it was buried beneath a pile of her broken childhood memories, and she couldn’t snatch it out. She raised her glass to Dustin Leavitt’s handsome but increasingly blurry face and said, “To misery.”

They touched glasses. They drank. In the dining room, where the table was laden with pizza boxes and foil-wrapped subs and cardboard boats of curly fries, Connie was huddled in the arms of Drew Van Dyke, who had come home from Johns Hopkins in order to be with Connie during her time of need. After all, her best friend’s father had died. Meredith felt a surge of confusion. Certainly Connie had loved Chick Martin; because Meredith and Connie were so close, Connie had been like an adopted daughter to Chick. But Meredith suspected that for Connie and Drew, this funeral was just a bonus opportunity to travel the two hours to see each other and have sex. And why did Connie have someone here to comfort her, but not Meredith?

Toby should be here,
Meredith thought. He should be here for her father. He should be here for her.

Meredith looked at Dustin Leavitt. “Get me out of here,” she said.

“Gladly,” he said.

They walked out the front door together without explanation or excuse, and no one fussed. Meredith had the leeway granted to the newly bereaved, maybe—or maybe nobody noticed.

She followed Dustin Leavitt out to his car, a Peugeot sedan. He opened the door for her. She got in, humbled once again by her hideous outfit, and to make matters worse, over the course of the day she’d worked a hole into the foot of her tights so that her big toe stuck through the material. This bothered her the way a ragged fingernail or loose tooth might.

Dustin said, “Any place special you want to go?”

Meredith shrugged.

He said, “My place okay?”

“Sure,” she said.

She watched out the window as they drove. The town of Villanova looked the same as it had her whole life, but it was different now because her father was gone. They passed the train station where, until the day before, Chick Martin’s car had remained in the parking lot, as if waiting for him to come home. How many times had Meredith ridden the bus home from school and seen her father’s bronze Mercedes in that parking lot?

Dustin Leavitt took roads that led them to the expressway, and Meredith felt the first stirrings of panic. “Where do you live?” she asked.

“In King of Prussia,” he said. “Over by the mall.”

The mall, okay, yes the mall was familiar, but in her childhood naïveté, Meredith had thought that King of Prussia
was
the mall. She hadn’t realized it was also a place people might live.

She had no energy or desire for conversation; she didn’t want to ask Dustin Leavitt about his family or his job or his hobbies, and she certainly didn’t want to talk about herself.

He pulled into an apartment complex. Three tall buildings, twenty or thirty stories, formed a semi-circle. They walked into the center building. On the ground floor was a Chinese restaurant. Through the window, Meredith saw people whose fathers had
not
died that week drinking electric-blue cocktails out of fishbowls.

Dustin Leavitt pulled out his keys, opened his mailbox, removed a sheaf of letters, and flipped through them. This simple, everyday act jolted Meredith like ice cubes down her back. What was she doing here? Who was this man? What would happen next?

Next, they would get into the elevator. Dustin Leavitt would push the button for the eighteenth floor. Dustin would step off. What choice did Meredith have now but to follow? The hallway was carpeted in maroon wall-to-wall that held the paths of the vacuum cleaner. It smelled like cigarettes and litter boxes and soy sauce. Meredith was disgusted. Her drunkenness started to assert itself. She feared she was going to vomit. Dustin Leavitt unlocked the door to apartment 1804. The apartment was dark.

Dustin said, “Good, my roommate isn’t home.”

Roommate?
thought Meredith. She was the one with a roommate. Gwen Marbury. Meredith hadn’t known what to expect from Dustin Leavitt; she supposed she’d expected that he would own a house, like Mr. O’Brien, minus the wife and children. Dustin was thirty-three years old. She certainly hadn’t expected a crummy apartment and a roommate.

He opened his refrigerator, and it illuminated the kitchen. He said, “Would you like a beer?”

“Sure,” Meredith said.

He handed her a bottle of St. Pauli Girl. She took the tiniest sip, mainly to block the ambient smells of the apartment. Dustin opened a beer for himself, loosened his tie, and walked down the dark hall. Meredith faltered. Now, it seemed, would be the time to excuse herself. But she had
asked
him to take her away from the O’Briens’ house, and when he said, “My place okay?” she had said yes. She was far from home with no way back. She followed.

The next thing she knew, they were kissing on the bed. Dustin Leavitt was on top of her. His hands were fighting to get her tights down. Her shoes had fallen off, her big toe was protruding from the foot of her tights. Meredith couldn’t decide whether to help Dustin or resist him. Meredith wished she were anywhere else. How could she stop him? She had asked for this.

He yanked off her tights. He put his finger in her. It hurt. She hadn’t been with anyone since Toby, way back in June.

“Tight,” he said.

Meredith was afraid she was going to vomit. Dustin Leavitt put on a condom; Meredith breathed in and out through her mouth, willing herself not to get sick. She would not think about the cheese steaks with cold, congealed onions on the O’Briens’ dining-room table. She would not think about cat turds lying in kitty litter. She would not think about her father, collapsed on his desk, bleeding from one eye.

Dustin Leavitt entered her.

This,
Meredith thought,
is what happens when a girl loses her father. She gets date raped.

And then blames herself.

Meredith stayed home through Christmas, playing and replaying “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on her turntable.
If you need a friend, I’m sailing right behind.
Relatives and neighbors came to put up the Christmas tree and fix lovely meals that Meredith and her mother didn’t eat. The holiday was a brightly wrapped box with nothing inside. Toby called, but Meredith refused to talk to him. She asked her mother to take a message.

“He sends his condolences,” her mother said. “He said he loved Chick and will remember him fondly.”

Condolences? Fondly?
What kind of lexicon was this? Toby loved Chick, but he no longer loved Meredith. Meredith was furious. She thought about calling Toby back and telling him she’d slept with Dustin Leavitt. Would he care?

Meredith asked Connie about this when they met for beers at Bennigan’s. Connie was noncommittal and dismissive about Toby.

“Try to forget about him,” Connie said. “He’s a lost cause.”

Meredith would try to forget about him. To distract herself, she studied. In a rare form of torture, Princeton held finals after Christmas. Meredith went back to campus and, despite the fact that she was a shadow of her former self, she slayed her exams: A’s across the board.

Freddy approached her in the first week of the new semester.