The Red Book (35 page)
Authors: Deborah Copaken Kogan
“I love this idea,” Bruno says. “Of being broken but finding pleasure in it.”
Jane smiles. She is struck, as she often was, even when she and Hervé were married, at Bruno’s quiet reservoirs of intellect and compassion. “The gentle giant,” Hervé used to call him, using the English phrase, for it was surprising, in a person so large, so physically intimidating and unwieldy, to see the inner child so clearly. Bruno’s need for love had a childlike innocence in it, too, both in its vastness and in its conspicuity. It must have been painful, Jane thinks, to have been abandoned by her—for nearly a year—as her mother lay dying. And like that, without further thought, she forgives his transgression. “Bruno,” she says, turning around, pressing her body next to his, “I know it’s late but . . . please. Make love to me.”
“Now?” he says, somewhat shocked, for it has been at least six months since their last congress, maybe longer, he’s lost track. “Here?” He looks behind him at the tableau of bodies on Claire’s bed. What could she possibly mean?
Jane stands up and skims off, from the top of a nearby bag, an old sheepskin rug that had been replaced, in the 1990s, with sisal. Claire had kept it for sentimental reasons—it was the first joint purchase of her marriage to Harold—but then found herself hauling it out for functional purposes one Christmas when her granddaughter was seven months old and still unsteady in her sitting. Jane places it now in the center of the closet floor and gently shuts the door. “Yes, here,” she says. “Right now.”
“But what about, you know—”
“You know” are Jane’s birth control pills. She’d run out during one of her trips to care for her mother but couldn’t stomach paying the exorbitant monthly cost to refill the prescription Stateside. “Forty-eight dollars!” she’d said to Bruno. “Can you believe it?” In France, they were essentially free. Since she and Bruno weren’t having sex anyway, she decided not to waste the money. She’d meant to start taking them again when she got back to Paris, but grief and the endless paperwork of the dead got in the way, plus she wonders if there’s even any point in going back on the pill at her age. “I don’t care,” she says. “I want you. Right now.” She pulls down her rainbow suspenders and lets her pajama bottoms sink, without ceremony, to the ground. Then she yanks off her T-shirt until she’s standing in her underwear.
Bruno stares at Jane’s nearly naked torso, its lines and curves as stirring to him as the first time he laid eyes on them. He feels himself stiffen, his jeans constricting. Dropping to his knees, removing what he can of his own clothes while Jane dispenses haphazardly with the rest, he devours the sharp jut of her hip bones, the swell of her breasts, the concave triangle between her neck and clavicle. Then he yanks off her underwear and buries his face in the musty tangle until she, unable to remain standing any longer, crumbles to her knees and falls on her back, feeling the softness of the rug on her skin, then the downy friction, in 2/2 time, between her shoulder blades.
Their movements and muffled moans fill that barren room with the only logical repudiation of its vacant racks and empty shelves. In nine months time, five days after Clover goes into labor in New York with little Frankie, Jane, Bruno, and Sophie will welcome Claire Streeter Saint-Pierre into their sunny home on the rue Vieille du Temple.
The birth will be uncomplicated; the infant healthy and easy; the father, as Jane will write on her Facebook wall, atop a photograph of a three-hour-old baby Claire, “over the moon.” Jane will initially mourn the fact that her mother will never get to meet her namesake, but that dense cream of sadness will be aerated with time’s whisk, mulled with memory’s sugar, until one day Jane will taste only sweetness at the utterance of her daughter’s name.
And once a year, without fail until his death, she will send a Christmas card to Lodge Waldman at her old Belmont address, so he can watch the new Claire grow.
In Memoriam
*Indicates reported deceased since last Anniversary Report
Elizabeth Frances Abernathy
* Jonathan Hatch Brownmiller
Anthony John DiCarlo
Jasmine
Fulton
Randal
Delia Anne Harrison
Carl Ronald Lefevre
Asher Thomas Monk
Pearce Snowdon Northrop III
Cynthia
Nussbaum
Franklin
Michael Edward O’Hara
* Bill Sunshine Pelton
Penelope Jane Schiff
Leonid Yegorovich Shirvin
* Sharon
Spivak
Warren
Orly
Weinberg
Axelrod
Allison Dunworth Young
Obituaries
J
ONATHAN
H
ATCH
B
ROWNMILLER
died on December 27, 2008, in Boulder, Colorado. He was born on January 23, 1967, and graduated from the Lincoln School in Ash Fork, Arizona. Brownmiller was a resident of North House and received an A.B.
summa cum laude
in biology. He studied medicine at the UC San Francisco and worked as an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York until 2004, when he moved to Denver to start a bicycle business. He is survived by his parents, Helene and Bud Brownmiller.
B
ILL
S
UNSHINE
P
ELTON
died on September 11, 2007, in Northampton, Massachusetts. He was born on September 12, 1967, and was prepared at the Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was captain of the women’s field hockey team. Pelton was a resident of Adams House, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated
cum laude
in computer science. After graduating, he completed his Ph.D. at MIT in Artificial Intelligence before moving to Northampton, Massachusetts, to work on the Theodora Project. He is survived by his partner, Felicia Herrera, and by his parents, Lou and Betty Pelton.
S
HARON
S
PIVAK
W
ARREN
died on February 14, 2006, in Washington, D.C. She was born on May 13, 1967. Graduating first in her class at the Dwight D. Eisenhower School in Coral Gables, Florida, she received an A.B.,
magna cum laude
with highest honors, with our class. Warren was a history of science major at Harvard and a resident of Dunster House. After graduation, she worked as a public advocate for breast cancer research in Washington, D.C. She was also a gifted flutist who played in a local chamber orchestra. She is survived by her father, Harold Spivak, her husband, Whit Warren, and by her three children, Eleanor, Adam, and Daisy.
A
NGUS
A
RTHUR
F
ROELICH.
Home Address:
2600 Cook Street, Denver, CO 80205 (303-587-9496).
Occupation:
CEO and founder, The Orpheus Group.
E-mail:
[email protected].
Spouse/Partner:
Lily Busby Froelich (B.A., University of Colorado ’90).
Children:
Kelly Jane, 1999; Luke Randolph, 2001; Allen Brock, 2004.
I started the Orpheus Group, a consulting firm specializing in arts, sports, and ecological/green organizations, after a decade spent locked in the golden handcuffs of McKinsey. We set up shop here in Denver and moved the family from our former home base in Chicago to be nearer to my wife Lily’s parents and to take greater advantage of the great outdoors. We were followed almost a year to the day later by my old roommate and best friend, Hatch Brownmiller, who left a thriving career in orthopedic surgery to pursue his actual passion, biking. With my firm’s help, he opened up Heaven on Wheels, a high-end bike shop frequented by none other than the bicycle-loving mayor of Denver himself, John Hickenlooper. (Who, if we’re all lucky, will one day be the governor of Colorado and then maybe even the president of the United States, mark my word. Helluva guy. Watch him carefully.)
Anyway, when Hatch wasn’t running the business like an old pro, shaking hands with the mayor and whatnot, he was running me into the ground like a sadist, insisting that I lose fifty pounds by reunion. He had me on my bike four mornings a week, come rain or shine, and on snow days and the other three days he made me do yoga—no, that was not a typo, I actually took up yoga, people—and damned if I didn’t lose those fifty pounds Hatch ordered (for health reasons) and then some (for my own vanity), along with a bucketful of stress and most of my hair, not that the latter had anything to do with the former, I just thought it was worth mentioning that, though I now have the body of—well, not exactly Michelangelo’s
David
, but maybe
David
’s slightly flabbier, older cousin, Irv—I am also now completely bald. That’s right,
b
-
a
-
l
-
d
bald. Haven’t any of you chem majors come up with a secret formula yet? You’re Harvard grads, for Christ’s sake. Start inventing!
My kids are my joy; my wife still loves me, despite my lack of hair and the fact that I
refuse
to root for the Broncos; and I thank God for the gift of my life every friggin’ day.
Jane, Clover, Addison, and Mia, all four of them pumped full of Nespresso pod run-off, generic ibuprofen, and Au Bon Pain croissants hastily procured and masticated in Harvard Square, take their seats in the Kirkland House common room at a hair past ten, just as the first eulogist, Angus Froelich, approaches the podium. The crowd seems small, although considering the early hour and the thousands of offspring and last night’s debauchery, not unexpectedly so, and anyway they have nothing with which to compare it. None of them have ever been to one of these reunion weekend memorial services before, but Bill Pelton, back when he was Belinda, had been their housemate in Adams House; and Addison had slept with Hatch Brownmiller’s other roommate, what’s-his-name, Griffin, that one time freshman year; and Clover, who’d held yearly fund-raisers for Sharon Spivak’s breast cancer organization at her house in the Hamptons, had been asked to give a short eulogy on her behalf; so they roused themselves from the slumber of the dead to pay their respects to the literal dead.
“Oh my God, is that Angus Froelich?” whispers Addison to Clover, and when Clover nods yes, she says, “Holy shit. He must have lost sixty pounds.”
“Seventy-five,” says Mia. “I asked him last night.” Mia is determined to drop the last twenty pounds of extra baby weight if it kills her. Well, not really if it kills her—she has no intention of being eulogized at the twenty-fifth for pulling a Karen Carpenter—but she has made an appointment with both the nutritionist and the trainer to whom Jonathan sends all of his actors who show up on set with a jiggle, however slight.
“How’d he do it?” says Jane, who’s never needed to lose a pound in her life but found herself nevertheless riveted, when she was in Belmont caring for her mother, to the seemingly endless array of weight-loss reality shows.
“Yoga, biking, no white bread,” whispers Mia.
“That’s it?” says Addison, who for many years believed her life would be better minus three to five pounds. Maybe six. Until recently it finally occurred to her that the few extra pounds were the least of her burdens.
“That’s what he told me,” says Mia, suddenly feeling a bit rude, considering the occasion and venue, discussing the vicissitudes of flesh and bone.
“Shhh!” says someone sitting behind them, and they all fall guiltily silent as Angus begins.
“I didn’t like Hatch when we first met . . .”
“Hell of an opener,” whispers Addison to Clover. “I hope yours is as good,” but she is shushed again by the scold and falls silent.
“. . . I thought he was a bit aloof, cold.” Angus glances down where his notes should be, if he’d had them, then up at the seated crowd, clearly at ease with extemporaneous speaking but not with the subject matter. “The first thing he said to me when I arrived in our dorm room in Weld was ‘Dude, don’t touch my bike.’ Not ‘Hello, nice to meet you’ or ‘Hey, so here we are, roommates!’ or even ‘Please dude, don’t touch my bike,’ but simply ‘Dude, don’t touch my bike.’ Hatch always claimed he added a
please
at the end, and since he’s gone I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, but in my memory, there was no
please
. Great, I thought. I have to spend my entire freshman year with this bozo? The only thing he had going for him, as far as I could tell in those first few seconds of snap judgment, were his looks. Meaning, or so I imagined, it was only a matter of time before beautiful women would show up in our room, and when they couldn’t find Hatch or our other roommate Griffin—who, no joke, turned down an offer to be on the cover of the 1985 Men of the Ivy League calendar—maybe every once in a blue moon they’d settle for me.
“How wrong I was. On all counts. Except for the part about the pretty girls showing up in our room, which they did in droves. But not once—not once!—did any of them ever settle for me, as pathetically as I might have tried to sway them otherwise. As for Hatch’s opening salvo—‘Don’t touch my bike’—it was, I later realized, uttered from a place of fear and insecurity, not nastiness. That bike was his baby. The one steady passion of his life. He later told me that purchasing it had taken him four years of working nights and weekends at the local pizza parlor in Ash Fork, and he was simply afraid of anything happening to it. Like the time his father, on a bender at the time, drove it into a tree.
“Hatch and I ended up rooming together all four years of college. And despite my first impressions of him, Hatch Brownmiller turned out to be the most warm and caring human being I’ve ever met. My best friend until the day he died.
“There are literally thousands of examples of what made him so special, but to give you just one, I’ll take you back to freshman year. The three of us—Hatch, Griffin, and I—were all punched for the Delphic, Griffin because his dad had been a member, Hatch no doubt on account of his bone structure, and me because, well, God only knows. A clerical error, let’s assume. Griffin and Hatch were invited to join; I wasn’t. Griffin accepted, Hatch declined. Why? He said my not getting in had nothing to do with it, but I never believed him. Finally, twenty years later, after I lost seventy-five pounds in no small part due to Hatch’s fear, ironically, that I would die an early death from excessive Dorito consumption, he admitted the truth. At a cocktail party during punching season, one of the members had said to him, pointing behind my back, ‘You live with that fat fuck? You poor bastard.’
“ ‘I couldn’t be with the kind of people who would say that kind of stuff behind your back,’ he told me.
“A few years ago, when Hatch’s marriage was foundering—he wanted kids, she didn’t, we’ll just leave it at that—I invited him to come stay with us until he could figure out his next move. He’d been talking about leaving medicine for years—not that he didn’t like it, he just didn’t love it or the hours, and frankly I was tired of hearing him complain about both his wife and his job—so when he separated from his wife he also took a leave of absence from orthopedic surgery, from New York, from the entire infrastructure of the life he’d so carefully constructed. His ‘false self’ he called it, though I sometimes accused him of revisionist history. I think he simply outgrew what he once thought he wanted. Happens to the best of us. Anyway, he lived in our spare bedroom for several months, trying to figure out whether he liked Denver, whether opening a bike shop was a viable option, whether it was possible to completely reinvent himself on the brink of middle age.
“Those months with Hatch in our house were some of my favorite months of my life. Even my wife says so, and that’s saying a lot, having your husband’s college buddy living under your roof for so long. Because he’d been deprived of having children of his own, he took to playing uncle to my kids like a fish to water. I’d come home from work and find them knee-deep in some crazy project he’d invented, like turning the living room into a spiderweb or making a volcano out of baking soda and vinegar. Anyway, cut to three years later, Hatch’s business is thriving, he’s got all the time in the world to ride his bike, and he meets Jill, who’s dying to have kids, like, yesterday.
“So the four of us—Hatch, Jill, me, and my wife—we decide to go to Boulder for the weekend over Christmas break. It’s the end of December, and it’s cold, but the roads are completely clear and plowed, so Hatch suggests we go biking for an hour or so while the ladies go for massages. So we bundle up, snap our shoes in place, and we’re off. While we’re out riding, Hatch tells me he’s thinking of asking Jill to marry him, but he’s afraid of making that kind of commitment again, what did I think? I say, ‘Buddy, are you fucking kidding me? If you don’t marry that woman, you’re a fool.’ ‘Okay, fine,’ he says, ‘I’ll do it.’ ”
Angus takes a breath, sputters. “Fifteen minutes later . . .” Several long seconds pass as he attempts to regain composure, but his eyes are too full now to contain their contents any longer. The surface tension breaks. Tears fall. “Fifteen minutes later, I’m holding Hatch’s body in my arms. It all happened so fast. One minute we were riding, the next he was down. A simple sideswipe. The driver was completely sober. It was just . . . an accident. I tried to will him back into existence, I really did. I gave him CPR, tied off the bleeding, I held him next to my body to keep him warm. But he went limp before the paramedics even showed up.
“I wish there was a lesson to draw from this, some piece of wisdom I could give you to make his death mean something. But I’ve got nothing, folks. Not a single truth or pithy aphorism or comforting thought. Other than to say I loved Hatch. And my wife loved him. And my kids loved him. And his girlfriend loved him. And I bet some of you here loved him, too. And now he’s gone.”
Angus steps down from the podium and retakes his seat, where he is comforted, with a gentle arm around his shoulder, by his wife.
Mia, who never met Hatch, is crying, thinking about the proposal that never happened. Addison, who met Hatch once briefly, on her way from Griffin’s bedroom to the bathroom, is crying, thinking about how you can transform your life completely—really take stock, figure out what works and what doesn’t, even midstream—and then one day, boom! None of it matters. Clover, who can’t remember whether or not she ever met Hatch, is crying, thinking about the children he’d wanted to have but never had. And Jane, who thinks she might have taken a Civil War class with Hatch their junior year, is crying not because she knew or didn’t know Hatch but because no matter how many people close to her have died, no matter how much grief has been piled on and endured, the fact of death itself still has the power to shock her, every single time, with its indifference.
• • •
Jonathan leans up
against the kitchen wall, stretching first his left hamstring, then his right. “You sure you’re okay watching all of them?” he says to Bruno. His older kids and the Griswold kids are all still sleeping, but Zoe woke up at the crack of dawn, as usual, and Sophie has been zoned out in the family room, indulging in her favorite verboten (or at least verboten when her mother’s around) pastime: watching American cartoons. Mia said she’d cart Zoe along to the memorial service, so Jonathan could go on his run, but Bruno had jumped at the opportunity to babysit.
“But of course,” says Bruno, who has the baby strapped to his chest in the BabyBjörn as he tries to figure out which color pod to place in the Nespresso machine. “
Putain, mais quelle couleur c’est la plus forte? C’est nul, ce système,
” he mumbles to himself, searching for some indication on the pod itself of its strength, forgetting for a moment that Jonathan has a few years of high school French under his belt.
“
Système
’s masculine?” says Jonathan.
“What?”
“You said, ‘It’s hopeless, this system.’
Ce
système. Ce.
Masculine. But it ends with an
e
, right?”
“Yes, but every rule is made to be broken, no?
Vagin
is masculine as well. So are, how you say”—he holds his hands, palms up, to his chest, cupping the air in front of it—“
les seins
?”
“Breasts.”
“Yes, breasts are masculine as well. Makes no sense.”
“Or
seins
, as the case may be.”
“Huh?” says Bruno.
“Never mind. Bad joke. Makes no sense. Makes no
seins
?”
“Oh yes, ha-ha. Good one.” Bruno smiles.
“No, bad one.” Jonathan looks puzzled. “Wait, vaginas and breasts are masculine? That seems so . . . wrong.”
“Yes, and
figure-toi
, bomb is feminine.
Une bombe
.
Bizarre
, no? But please, Jonathan. Tell me what color I must to use. I am in need of the caffeine immediately.”
“Black’s the strongest. But I think purple tastes the best. What about penis, masculine or feminine?”
“
Un pénis
, but of course. Masculine.”
“Well at least there’s that.”
“Yes, although I once had an Australian girlfriend, there is a long time ago, who could never say it right. ‘
Je veux sucer ta pénis
,’ she would say. Ta
pénis
, as if the penis were feminine. It amused me so much. But I did not correct her.”
“Yes, well, considering that the grammatical error was expressed within a request to give you a blow job, I think you can be forgiven your pedagogical failings.”
“Pardon?”
“Call it ‘situational incapacity.’ ”
“I’m sorry, I do not understand these words what you say. Situational what?”
“Never mind.” He sees Bruno still struggling to choose the right pod. “Dude, it’s not rocket science. Just pick the purple one. It tastes good.”
“No. I must to choose the most strong,” says Bruno, pulling a black pod out of the Tupperware container Claire bought to store them. It was he himself who’d bought the machine for Jane’s mother, the last Christmas they were all here together, after he realized he would otherwise have to spend another holiday week drinking the swill from an American drip machine. Some of his colleagues had bought one for the office, the French being early adopters of pod systems, and they seemed to tolerate it well enough, but he settled for it only when he was too busy to leave his desk, since a perfectly brewed, crema-rich espresso could be purchased for less than a euro downstairs at the café. He felt the same way about the pod system as he felt about dating other women back when Hervé was still alive and married to Jane: Until he could find a woman like Jane, all other women he bedded were just a lesser version, fulfilling a need (sex/caffeine) but not a desire (love/a perfect cup of coffee).
With the smell of Jane still lingering on his fingers, and the memory of last night’s coupling still fresh in his head, he vows to remember, from now on, the difference between the two. The universe handed him an opportunity when Hervé died, and he must not trample on it ever again. He felt guilty at first, for feeling euphoria on top of his grief that night he got the call saying Hervé had been killed, but that guilt has long been replaced by feelings of well-being and gratitude so profound that every year, on the anniversary of Hervé’s death, he looks up at the sky, for lack of a more compelling focal point, and says, “
Merci, mon pote
”: Thanks, mate.
