The Whole World (24 page)

They forgot about my key too.

“It’s one thing to use a girl because you’re just so in the moment overwhelmed by her. It’s something else to make her finish someone else’s job. After that, he was gone. And good, you know? Why would I want him to come back?” I told Dr. Keene everything, not about money but about Nick, to shock him.

He winced, then looked over my shoulder, as if the “Building Stones of Britain” were really, really interesting. We were in the basement gathering area under the Sedgwick Museum. My art stuff was spread out over utilitarian tables. The walls were covered with rock samples, every one a slightly different color. They were apparently a lot more interesting than me.

I’d volunteered to make models for a special exhibit at the Sedgwick: “Creatures of the Burgess Shale.” Apparently the Cambrian period, which was way before dinosaurs, had far weirder creatures than most people know. The students who’d studied these fossils in the seventies had given them hilarious names, like
hallucigenia
. I love the seventies. I would have looked awesome with Farrah Fawcett hair. I have this friend who’s fat who spends all her weekends at Renaissance Faires because the dresses look good on her. I think if I could be an original Charlie’s Angel on weekends, I’d do it.

It felt good to be making art again, not just talking about it. I was making these outsized abstractions of these creatures that were wacky in the first place. No one knows what color any of these things were, so I was free to really go for it. They needed to be paper pop-outs so kids could make their own spiky
hallucigenia
, or
marrella
, which is like a shrimp wearing elaborate headgear, or
wiwaxia
, which looks like Mercury’s winged helmet. With glue and pom-poms and feathers too. Anything to make the kids like science.

I’ve thought about majoring in science. Not stopping making art, but coming at it from knowing more about life. Because experience is the foundation for art, right? So I’m tempted, and then I think,
What’s the point of this school thing at all? Why not be like Gauguin and have an adventure?

That’s the kind of thing I said to Dr. Keene, just to see if I could set him off. It was Day Ten, the rains had stopped, and the police were dredging the Cam. He’d come to take a look at my models, probably just to have something else to think about, and we ended up talking. But he didn’t rise up in defense of formal education and good grades. He just nodded absently. So I told him everything about Nick and me.

He did that thing of freezing his face to not show any reaction. A person only does that if their real reaction is something they’d be embarrassed by, right? He’s known Nick for longer than I have, so maybe it’s happened before. Maybe he knows Nick is a dog. Isn’t that the point of his religion? Knowing we’re messed up, and just accepting that as inevitable? So he acted weary about it, but not surprised. What he said, though, was “I don’t think you should be telling me this.”

“Why?” I said. I said it sharply, because that kind of prissiness about life is just what I’m trying to get away from. “Why not tell you about this? You mean it’s okay for Nick to be this way, just not okay to talk about it? Or it would have been okay, except Nick is gone and his victimhood trumps mine?” We were all imagining Nick bloated and gray from drowning.

“Or do you mean …” I was attacking him at this point, hurling words. “Do you mean that I shouldn’t tell you this because you’re a man and I’m a woman and we shouldn’t talk about S-E-X? Even about other people? Because I didn’t think a biologist would be all squeamish about that; isn’t that what you study all day long?” Which is absolutely true: the drive for sex, and the likelihood of sex and the success of sex, is the whole process of natural selection.

“So, like, isn’t this exactly the point? My traits won’t be carried on to the next generation because it’s not like someone’s going to fuck me. So, like, my belligerence and insecurity are going to die out. And that’s good, right? And good manners and restraint are going to be passed on by people like Polly, and people like you.” I knew he was getting married. To a doctor, a medical doctor.

You have to specify “medical doctor” here because Cambridge is stuffed with the other kind. Yelling “Is there a doctor in the house?” would get you Ph.D. computer scientists and engineers and geomorphologists and historians. It wouldn’t get you anyone practical. It wouldn’t get you anyone who knows how to apply a fucking Band-Aid.

I cried but I didn’t stop working, because I had said I would make the models. I do what I say I’ll do.

“I think it’s a wonder,” he said, sighing, “that any of us get past age twenty at all.”

I stabbed little spiny bits all over
hallucigenia
. I’d painted them purple.

“Why?” I challenged him. “What happened to you at twenty?” If he was going to be all I-know-what-you’re-going-through, I wanted to make him spell it out.

“That’s the year my brother decided he hates me.”

“Poor you.” Stab, stab, stab. “Was it over some girl?”

“Oh, no. He came to hate me over a woman a few years later. But the first time he hated me was when he joined the University. I was already here. We were in different colleges, different departments. We were completely different—nothing to have rivalry over.”

“So, what?” I pushed.

He shook his head. “That’s just it. There was no event, nothing to blame. He just realized he hates me. I’ve never been able to fix that.”

His forlorn gravity was overwhelming. It wasn’t fair. Everyone felt sorry for Polly, and for Nick, and now I was supposed to pity Dr. Keene for a bad brother. No matter how bad I felt, it was never bad enough to rate. It’s like everyone just says, “No big deal. It could be worse. Wake me when it’s worse.” I never measure up, even in failure.

“Well, I wish my brother hated me. He liked me way too much. He raped me when I was thirteen.” I don’t even have a brother, but I spewed an eruption of tears. “He said I was beautiful. I was so pretty he couldn’t not do it, he said. It went on for, like, a year. Then my father found out and threw Will out. He still writes me letters. If my dad found out, he’d kill Will.” Then I remembered that Will is Polly’s brother. But I couldn’t change it once I’d said it.

I wasn’t really in the floral gallery when the vases broke, like I told Polly. I hadn’t been in the museum at all when it happened. But it had been important to make her understand that moment. I told it to her in a way that would make her understand. I had to make Dr. Keene understand, and if he needed a lie to get it, I’d give it to him.

The whole point of cubism is to capture more than one side or one moment. Cubists tried to get a deeper accuracy than photographic representation by including many moments and many sides at once. It doesn’t look literally, physically real. But it is real. It’s the real that includes more than one moment, more than one viewpoint, more than just the physical. It’s a truer real.

What I say may seem a mess, like a cubist painting, but that’s only because it’s even truer. It’s how I really feel. It’s what what’s happened has done to me. That’s truer than just what literally happened.

I finally got the look. I got it. His mouth opened and his eyes didn’t blink. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He said it with full attention. I feel like there hasn’t been full attention from anyone in Cambridge, even from Nick when I was on my knees.

I leaned forward. I filled his field of vision. I had to keep myself bigger in perspective to him than the fucking rainbow of British building stones.

“I know I shouldn’t let him write to me. I don’t write back. But I do read the letters. He’s my brother, y’know?”

“Perhaps you ought to tell the authorities in your home state—”

“Oh, no, no, it’s not like that. He’s not writing things like that. It’s over. He wants me to know how sorry he is. He writes to say that he’s sorry. He has a girlfriend too. He saw a therapist and he’s got a girlfriend. Everything’s cool.”

“Have you talked to anyone professional?” he asked.

“I talk it out with my friends. That’s good enough for me. Like talking it out with you right now. It’s good. Thanks.” I smiled. He was hooked. I leaned back in my chair. I looked down shyly. Then he ruined it.

“Can I call someone?” he asked. “You’re friends with Polly, I could see if she can come around….”

I shook my head back and forth. “No. No, Polly and I aren’t really friends right now. You know,” I said, bringing it back to Nick.

He nodded, and looked away. Everything flowed back into place again, inexorable: This was the day they were dredging the Cam. Only Nick mattered today. And Polly, with both parents in jail. It had been years since my brother had raped me, right? It had been more than a week since Nick treated me like a whore. God, like ten whole days.

“Let me tidy this up,” Keene offered, about my art supplies. Isn’t that just his whole drive in life.

“And me do what? Go back to my room and feel sorry for myself? Or join a volleyball game on Parker’s Piece and pretend it’s all good? It’s not.” I bounced my giant paper
hallucigenia
from hand to hand.

Dr. Keene looked past me. Then Peter strode in, Nick’s friend. “Richard,” he boomed out. “Richard, it’s done. They didn’t find him.”

Dr. Keene closed his eyes and it was like his body melted a little. All the tension that had been holding him up slipped away. He and Peter clasped hands. The testosterone in the gesture made me laugh. Keene looked at me strangely.

Peter said to me, “He’s not drowned. He’s not drowned.” He didn’t say “He’s not dead,” because by that time we couldn’t be sure he wasn’t, some way or other. But, at least, there would be no body today.

Isn’t that a kick when that’s the best you can say about a day? That there isn’t a corpse in it, at least as far as you know? There’s no certain corpse. It’s like … Schrödinger’s corpse. Until we see it, it isn’t really dead. I laughed again.

“Peter …” Keene started, and in his pause I could tell he wondered about the wisdom of fobbing me off on a man with Peter’s reputation, what with me in such a vulnerable state. But he wanted to get rid of me. That was obvious. Teacher-student, etc. There was potential for a fabricated harassment accusation if things got too personal and he had to be stern.

“I’m all right,” I said, standing up. “I’m all right.” I said it without making eye contact, so he knew to keep worrying. “I’m going to go down to the river,” I said. “Now we can enjoy it again, right?”

I can only assume Keene gave some kind of nod or signal to Peter to follow me. It’s not like he would bother with me otherwise.

“How are you holding up?” he said, keeping pace beside me, awkwardly matching his longer stride to mine. The three tower cranes building the Grand Arcade at the end of the road dominated the view. Each was a huge, latticed capital T. One swung around at the command of a little man in the driver’s seat underneath. It wound up a cord to pull a massive load up over the tops of all the aged college buildings. It was making shops.

“They’re beautiful,” I said. It had been pouring since Nick left, but today the sun was out, shining on the cranes. “I’ll miss them when they’re done.” I would, really. They’re so tall, so aggressively enormous, and perfectly balanced. The completed Grand Arcade won’t be able to live up to them when they go.

“What, the cranes?” He sounded like I was crazy.

“Whatever,” I said, turning the opposite direction, to walk toward Trumpington Street instead.

“No, wait,” he said, and that’s how I was sure this was Keene’s idea. Peter has better things to do than chase me.

“Look, you may not want to believe this,” I said, “Nick being your best friend and all. But he raped me. Just before he disappeared. I didn’t have anything to do with him going, but I do know that I wouldn’t care if he were in the Cam, because he’d deserve it. You can ask around at Magdalene. We were at a staircase party together, after Polly left his office. I guess he wasn’t finished, you know? He asked if he could crash in my room, you know, from drinking too much. He acted like he needed to crash. But when we got there, he wasn’t tired at all, I guess. He was plenty able to do what he wanted to do. That’s what I think of your best friend.”

I’m not sure why I went with that. It was completely different from what I’d told Keene, but it’s not like Keene would compare notes with Peter. It’s not like anyone even listens, right?

Peter put his hand through his hair. He scanned whatever was behind me, same as Keene. “Nick?” He put his hands on his hips and puffed out the word, as if winded from a long jog. He was so ridiculous I almost lost it and started laughing. “Jesus, Liv—”

“Yes: Nick. I haven’t told anyone because it would just make the police think I had something to do with him being gone. Which I don’t. It may have been karma that got him for it, but not me.”

“Jesus,” he said again. “Nick?”

Everyone acts so surprised that Nick would do anything wrong. Is what I was saying that much different from what he really did do?

“I don’t want to ruin things for his family,” I explained nobly. “He has a sister. I don’t want to ruin him for her, at least, not unless he comes home. But if they have to grieve I’m going to let them have it nicely. When my dad died, everyone said only nice things about him. I appreciated that.”

“I don’t really know what to do with this …” he said, holding his palms up.

“There isn’t anything to do.” I shrugged. “These things happen.”

“Maybe you should talk to Polly.”

I pushed him in the chest. “What the fuck does Polly have to do with this? Why does everyone think of Polly?”

“I’m just saying she’s been through a lot herself, maybe she would understand—”

“What the fuck has she been through? As far as I see it, she’s been treated like a princess ever since she revealed her traumatic, scandalous past. Jeez, I gotta get me some of that, right? Because everyone’s tiptoeing around her, all solicitous, all whatever-you-say, whatever-you-need. And anything she wants to be is okay, all of a sudden okay. If she wants to work, she’s being strong. If she wants to hide away, she’s ‘taking care of herself.’ And if she wants to act like a jackass and joke around like nothing’s wrong, then she needs her space, because we all have to breathe, right? And it’s all okay. If she turned around and went with some guy we’d all be proud of her for ‘healing,’ right, instead of thinking, ‘That’s awfully quick …’—which is what it would deserve. And if she never goes with a guy again, it’s not because she’s a coward, or stuck, or just stupid, but something profound. Something that has nothing to do with her choices, but all to do with life whipping her around. And that’s bullshit. We make like her dad made her in that moment, made in her the right to anger, and the right to grief, and the right to fear and frigidity. But I’ll tell you—all that stuff is already in everybody. Maybe her dad kicked it up a notch, okay, but it’s not like what he did invented anything inside her. But when she acts fucked-up it makes people want to protect her, and when I act fucked-up it scares people away.” He had stepped back. We were still on the street, just down from the pedestrian crossing. Periodic clusters of people waiting for the green light had heard parts of what I said, making Peter’s eyes shift from side to side, embarrassed.