The Red Book (6 page)

Now Clover smiled. “I am. How’d I do?”

Bucky bobbed his head back and forth, accepting defeat. As his smile widened, there seemed to be no end to his shiny teeth. “I’d give you a solid A minus. But”—he took her hand and placed it on his knee—“I could bump you up to an A if you meet me after class for office hours.”

Clover felt her insides turn to liquid with the speed of a stick of butter in a microwave, an appliance she’d never used before discovering its utilitarian joys in the freshman dining hall. “They have laws against that, you know.”

Bucky lifted her hand from his thigh and kissed her knuckles one by one. “I have excellent lawyers.” Then he leaned over, planted his lips proprietarily onto hers, and carried her straddle-legged into the bottom bunk of the bed she shared with Addison, which would soon be cordoned off, for the sake of the new couple’s privacy, with a primitive canopy fashioned from two of Bucky’s old tapestries from prep school.

That Clover and Bucky became inseparable that fall surprised Addison, who’d been friends with Bucky ever since their days as King Bucky and Queen Addie in the dress-up area at Episcopal preschool, when they locked up that poor kid Thurber, whose father was later indicted for securities fraud, in the supply closet. Addison had known each of Bucky’s girlfriends since seventh grade, blond ice queens all, so either guileless, sepia-toned Clover was Bucky’s new type, in which case Addison was ready to eat her hat, or—and this seemed more plausible—Clover was an experiment.

When the couple broke up four months later, after a disastrous Christmas with Bucky’s parents in New York, Addison finally admitted her earlier doubts about the union while driving a sobbing Clover, who was supposed to have been sitting in Bucky’s passenger seat, back up to Cambridge for January reading period. “Oh, come on, Cloves, it’s not as if we didn’t see this coming,” she said, putting on her blinker to take the exit onto Route 84.

“Speak for yourself,” Clover said. “I didn’t see it coming at all.” She stared out the passenger window, her eyes struggling to make sense, in the fading dusk, of the bare branches, the icy air, which Addison would be escaping mere hours after her last final exam, via a week in St. Barths with a posse of old friends.
We?
What
we
? Even though Addison had urged Clover to join her in the Caribbean (“There’s plenty of room in the house, it’s already paid for, so you’d just have to deal with airfare, and the cook is
awesome
. . .”), Clover didn’t have a spare twelve hundred dollars lying around to purchase a roundtrip ticket. In fact, she was already falling behind on her tuition bills, which she was paying out of her own pocket through a work study program called “dorm crew”: a deliberately vague, inoffensive, sports-team-like term for the twenty to thirty hours a week she spent scrubbing the fecal streaks off her classmates’ toilets and mopping their floors.

Clover had once tried to describe the humiliations of dorm crew to Addison, to paint a picture of that strange paradox of feeling simultaneously invisible and publicly nude while pushing one’s shame, in the shape of a mop, bucket, and broom, through a Harvard Yard choked with central casting freshmen playing Hacky Sack. Addison, attempting to be nice, had replied, “Oh please, Clover, no one’s paying any attention to you and your mops.”

Rummaging through her purse for a tissue, Clover found only an old tampon, barely clinging to life in its torn wrapper. Which is when it struck her that her period was nearly two weeks late. She took mental inventory of her four months with Bucky, trying to recall one sexual congress during which she had not used some form of birth control. No, they’d been safe, definitely. That new epidemic the newscasters were calling AIDS made certain of that. (“Be careful, baby,” her mother, whose phone had been shut off, had written her on a postcard. “They’re saying on NPR that you can die from sex, that it’s not just a gay men’s disease. Death from sex, I can’t even wrap my mind around that one. Love, Mom.”)

Maybe it was the cheap condoms she bought, she thought, the ones in the half-price bin that were well past their expiration date. She was so sick of having no money, of the less than wise decisions it forced her to make. Old condoms, what was she thinking? But the question was, of course, rhetorical: She was thinking, I need birth control, and the pill is too expensive, and I can’t find my diaphragm, and if I buy these at half price, I can use the money I save to buy a few pages of next semester’s books. Ironic, really, because now, it struck her hard, she was going to have to use the money she’d saved up for books and put it toward the cost of an abortion, there being no way she’d ever ask Bucky or his family for a dime.

“Do you have any tissues?” Clover asked.

“Check the glove compartment,” said Addison.

Clover opened the glove compartment, and a thick stack of parking tickets came tumbling out of its mouth. “Holy shit, Ad, these all yours?” Addison had Scotch-taped several dozen of her tickets in a brick pattern on the wall behind her desk—“Wallpaper,” she’d answer, whenever anyone pointed to the expanding enigma and asked, “What’s
that
?”—but out from that glove compartment, as far as Clover could tell, fell literally hundreds if not thousands more dollars in fines, all for minor infractions ranging from parking in front of a hydrant to unpaid meters.

“Ugh, those Cambridge police are
ruthless
. It’s like you can’t even park without getting a ticket.”

“What do you mean? You just have to pay the meter and not park in front of hydrants.”

“Oh, please. Who has time?” Addison’s tone was dismissive, entitled, and Clover, at that moment, hated her for it. If she ever climbed out of her hole of debt and started making some real money—and she would, she was determined she would—she promised herself that she would never become one of those people whose piles of cash are stacked so high that they presume themselves to be above the law, above following rules, above, for Christ’s sake, sticking a fucking quarter in a parking meter.

Bucky stirs the ice in his gin and tonic with his forefinger and takes a swig. Clover examines the pallor of his skin and wonders if, given enough years spent floating in whatever toxic miasma has pickled Bucky’s life, her husband Danny—whose physical resemblance to Bucky’s younger self had not gone unremarked, either by her or by friends who’d met both—would be similarly transformed. Bucky, it saddens her to realize, has become any one of those besuited shadows one sees on the LIRR platform, staring vacantly down the tracks, waiting with equal indifference for both train and death. She was disappointed—but not surprised—that he’d neglected to write an essay for the Twentieth Anniversary Report, since his fifth and fifteenth reunion entries were similarly vacant. As for his wife Arabella’s cipherlike entry, which was about as revelatory as Arabella herself, she might as well have not even bothered.

Not that Clover’s entry was much of a window into her soul either. The day she filed it, that crazy Sunday in September before Lehman’s collapse—when she rushed down to Midtown to join her colleagues, and the CNN trucks were outside, fueled by schadenfreude and the ire of a nation—it was already a foregone conclusion that her name, address, and marital status might be the only pieces of information in that report that would remain factually accurate come Monday morning. But she’d gotten a jump start on the essay during Labor Day weekend, finishing it one night after work that same week, knowing she’d soon be receiving some sort of communication from the Harvard alumni office asking her, once again, to define the past five years of her life in three to five paragraphs or less. She always tried to stay on top of her various responsibilities, anticipating the work before it hit her inbox: a trait each of her superiors had praised during performance reviews over the years. Clover Love, everyone at Lehman knew, was your go-to person when you wanted something done yesterday, because by the time you asked her to do it, she’d already anticipated it, dealt with it, and moved on to the next task, some hanging thread you hadn’t even realized would need trimming.

But what happens, she wondered, when the entire fabric of your life unravels? Her answer, in the short term, was to log on to her work computer, which she assumed she would not have access to come Monday morning, and quickly open the file for her reunion essay in one window and the Harvard alumni Web site in another. She copied the former, pasted it into the latter, and hit “submit” before her life no longer resembled the cheerful, carefree summary of it she’d composed two weeks earlier. Then, loaded down with banker’s boxes, she stepped out into the blinding glare of the news cameras.

“So, tell me,” she says to Bucky. “What have you been up to?”

“For the past twenty years?” he says, smiling.

“For a start.”

“Eh, the normal stuff,” he says, considering his gin and tonic. “Made a few kids, did a few deals . . .” He tosses the rest of the liquid back into his throat like water. At which point a former classmate, one of two who’d repurposed herself as a himself, crosses his line of vision and into the men’s room. “I mean, nothing as exciting as her,” he says.

“You mean him,” says Clover. Joe McMahon, née Josephina McBride, was one of the first people Clover had met at Harvard, while waiting in line for the keys to their dorms. “Do you consider yourself black or white?” Josephina had asked her. It was the first time in Clover’s life that anyone had turned what was normally a binary question in search of a single objective answer—
Are you black or are you white?
—into a subjective, open-ended, gray-scaled discussion about the mutability of self. “Some days I feel black, others I feel white,” she’d said. “Depends on the context.” This was her one and only interaction with Josephina McBride, but it had stayed with her.

“It’s kind of brave of her, I mean him, isn’t it?” says Bucky.

“What?”

“Tossing everything that defines you away like that and starting from scratch.”

Clover cocks her head to the side in mock confusion. “I don’t know, Bucky. I can’t really see you in a dress.”

Bucky laughs. “I wasn’t talking about a sex change, Pace. More like a . . .” He pauses. Then punts it. “What about you? Everything good with you, too?”

Good with me, too? Clover thinks. What is he talking about? Anyone with a subscription to the
Wall Street Journal
knows that Archibald Bucknell “Bucky” Gardner IV was not doing well, having driven Gardner Industries into the ground years before the great recession of ’08. Yes, they were heavily invested in both the printing and newspaper industries, which accounted for some of the recent turmoil, but Gardner’s international real estate holdings alone should have kept the company afloat, had Bucky not made the kind of amateurish missteps he’d made, like overestimating occupancy rates of his vast rental properties, and underestimating the building costs on that skyscraper in Dubai. The company’s stock price was a joke. They’d had to lay off nearly three thousand employees since 2005. The bankruptcy lawyers and the LBO experts were circling the rotting carrion, salivating.

Fine, Clover thinks. If that’s the way he’s going to play it, I’ll lob the same bullshit right back. “Yup!” she lies. “Everything’s perfect! Danny’s good, work’s good, you know, same old same old,” she says, leaving out minor details such as losing her job and the lack of motility of Danny’s sperm.

“Any rug rats yet?” says Bucky.

Only yours, she thinks, and I killed him. “No, no kids yet . . .” Clover has no regrets about her decision to terminate her pregnancy freshman year, but it suddenly strikes her, standing here with Bucky, that had she found herself in the same situation just a half a generation earlier, she could have ended up as the Radcliffe dropout single mother of a twenty-four-year-old. Or dead from a botched abortion. Or the wife of Bucky Gardner, which might have been—she realizes it only now—the most soul-crushing option of all. “. . . but we’re working on it.”

Her infertility specialist, Dr. Seligman, after a full battery of tests, ranked Clover’s chances of having a baby with Danny via IVF as modest to good, provided they did ICSI, wherein the sperm is inserted directly into the egg. Danny, who’d grown up as the middle child of nine, in a big Irish Catholic family from Southie where babies simply materialized every eighteen months like clockwork, was initially opposed even to meeting with Dr. Seligman. After the consultation, however, he promised to think about the various options, although many months had passed since then, and he still wasn’t ready to revisit the issue. (“This may be less about his Catholicism, as he claims, and more about his ego,” Seligman conjectured privately to Clover one day. “We have excellent psychologists on our staff if your husband wants to speak to one.”) “What about you?” says Clover, trying her best to sound blasé, uncovetous. “You have four kids now, right?”

“I know. It’s crazy, right? Four kids, what were we thinking?” says Bucky. “And the oldest one’s off to college soon. I mean, it blows my mind to think he’s nearly the same age as us when we . . .” He pauses, midsentence. His tone—even his facial expression—changes from cocktail party breezy to serious. “You know, Pace, I’ve been meaning to apologize to you for being such a douchenozzle back when we were, you know, back at the beginning of freshman year. I mean, I was
such
a frigging douchenozzle. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, what with this weekend coming up. And I was hoping I’d run into you so I could tell you in person. And, well, I just, I hope you can forgive me.”

“A
douchenozzle
?” Clover laughs nervously, disarmed. An apology she’s been waiting over twenty years to receive has finally been proffered, and she hasn’t a clue what to do with it.

“Tell me you’ve never heard of that word.”

“I’ve never heard of that word.” She feels relieved to have turned the conversation away from uncomfortable mea culpas toward linguistics.

“Come on. Not even at work? I thought those traders were the biggest potty mouths on the planet.”

“They are, but . . .” She realizes she has no desire to be caught by Bucky Gardner, twenty-plus years later, in another face-saving lie, and this strikes her as revelatory. She’s suddenly too old to care what he—what anyone, really—thinks. If nothing else, the passage of time has allowed her the thrill of this liberation. “But it’s been a while since I’ve been on the trading floor.” Clover stares at her feet, spotting a chip in the nail polish on her right toe. “I lost my job, Bucky. A few months ago. I stayed on when Barclays took over, but my department didn’t survive the second round of layoffs in January.” Now she finally addresses him directly, her eyes meeting his. Smiles in a way that she hopes conveys the bravery of which she’s in sudden, surprising possession. “So if you hear of any openings in mortgage-backed securities . . .”