The Romantics (6 page)

Sprinting now, his vision was blurred by so many familiar names: Hayes, Getty, Westfield, Adams. Would he and Lila be buried here, too? What would Lila’s headstone say? Lila Hayes McDevon or Lila McDevon Hayes? And as though these morbid thoughts possessed a force of their own, Tom found himself running at a desperate pace as though he was being pursued. He ran faster and faster through the sloping cemetery, past the modest graves that rose out of the earth like an endless row of perfect teeth, past the formidable mausoleums with their intricate vines. Soon enough, gravity and velocity combined to pull him toward the ground. Grabbing hold of a branch, he averted a fall and glimpsed the water beyond the trees. He remained like this for several moments, panting and wheezing, watching the afternoon ferry as it lessened into the fog.

T
he Gettys’ house was a smaller version of Northern Gardens, but it lacked the vibrance of the Hayeses’, and, of course, it lacked a name. It was built with similar materials and with only slightly smaller proportions, but it looked, particularly when seen from the water, like Northern Gardens’ younger, less attractive sister. It was painfully clear the house had been shortchanged the attention and refinements Northern Gardens had enjoyed. Its defects were visible even as the group approached from across the field. Its white paint peeled noticeably near the gutters; all but one of the decorative black shutters was missing a crucial panel; the wraparound porch had been so severely damaged by termites that whole sections had been roped off. Like so many homes that have remained in one family over several generations, it had become a museum of sorts. Everything about the house bore the faint musk of 1963.

Lila had given the room assignments great consideration. She had factored in the respective needs of each guest (and her affection
for that guest) before settling on the right room. Tripler and Pete, she had decided, would stay in the master bedroom, a sizable, if slightly dated suite whose red toile upholstered furniture had faded to a consistent pink. Weesie and Jake would stay in the bedroom that belonged to the Gettys’ older son, a small damp room that made up for its size with a stunning view of the ocean. Annie and Oscar would stay in the younger son’s bedroom, a room that made up for its inconsequential views with a charming built-in window seat. Laura would stay in the room that belonged to the Gettys’ youngest daughter, a room that had remained monastically untouched since the child’s tragic death from leukemia.

At Lila’s insistence, the group disbanded to settle into their rooms, promising to reconvene in an hour on the porch of the Hayeses’ house. The girls dispersed to compare their rooms—why did Tripler get the best one—and to assess available bathrooms, negotiating their order of entry through a series of announcements shouted across the hall. The boys dropped their bags in the appointed rooms and reassembled on the porch, arranging themselves on the wicker furniture, oblivious to its state of disrepair. Laura took advantage of the commotion to retreat to her room, hopeful that silence would work its magic on her frayed nerves.

She stood at the door before entering, unnerved by the stillness. Every attempt had been made to barricade the room from the summer sun, as though to shield the delicate soul who lived there from the outside world. The bed was sheathed in crisp white linen with a delicate pink monogram, its fraying eyelet ruffles brittle enough to break at the touch. Tulle curtains on the windows dusted the room with a confectionary shadow, and the windows themselves seemed to have been intentionally painted shut. A
white wrought-iron headboard had jaundiced significantly, and red rosebuds on the wallpaper had bleached to a fleshy pink. One leg of the bed seemed to have suffered an emergency amputation, but a stack of books tucked underneath served as a prosthetic limb. Even though it was long before dusk, inside this room it looked like evening.

Scanning the room, Laura reconsidered Augusta’s claims about ghosts. The room was unsettling—chilling, really—in that specific indescribable way of a haunted house. It was classic Lila to condemn her to this room. Annoyed, Laura walked toward the window and pushed her face to the glass. A thick forest of spruce ended a few feet from her window as though it had grown, untamed, past a designated perimeter. Still, Laura found it pleasant enough to stare silently into trees. It was an interesting change, if not exactly a relief, to leave the noise of the city, to forget, as she did, even with brief separation, the rhythm of her daily routine. Ben, though technically a boyfriend, suddenly seemed like a figment of her imagination, as permanent and corporeal as the girl whose bedroom she borrowed right now.

Raucous laughter in the hall jolted her from her thoughts, reminding her of her imminent obligation: a toast for the rehearsal dinner. As maid of honor, she was expected not only to propose a toast to the bride and groom but to deliver one of the most eloquent toasts of the night. Nostalgic reflection, dramatic summary, uproarious hilarity—these were merely the prerequisites of a successful wedding toast. And as though the task was not daunting enough, she was expected, while weaving a compelling narrative of the bride, to paint a secondary portrait, an equally, if not more captivating, depiction of herself.

Every time she fixed her mind on the subject, it went suddenly, totally blank. When she thought of Lila, she had nothing to say. No, not true; she had nothing
nice
to say. She had experimented with various openings during the drive up to Maine.

“I’ve known Lila for nearly ten years now,” she considered, “but it was only when we roomed together that I grew to detest her.”

But irony was better left to the groomsmen. People expected more of the bridesmaids, adulation, clear and bright. She went on to consider the brazen potshots of a roast:

“Lila Hayes is universally known as the most beautiful girl ever to attend Yale. Unfortunately, she’s also known as the most promiscuous …”

But she quickly dismissed this concept in favor of a more traditional narrative.

“Lila and I have shared many things over the years: rooms, clothes, study notes, colds, boyfriends.”

But nothing about their relationship sanctioned this kind of candor. As a last resort, she experimented with earnestness.

“Lila Hayes is, quite possibly, the luckiest girl in the world. Beauty, wealth, impeccable lineage, intelligence—the list goes on and on.”

This tone felt right, even if the content was nauseatingly saccharine. If nothing else, it would please the bride.

“But in addition to her extreme good fortune in said areas,” she might go on, “Lila Hayes is perhaps luckiest in love.” And this, in Laura’s opinion, was the thing that made this the best and worst option for a toast; best, because it segued naturally from a discussion of the bride to the groom; worst, because it revealed the very thing Laura strove most to deny, that she was envious of any stroke of Lila’s good luck, let alone her groom.

The thought was so literal and banal it made Laura blush. It would have been subtler to say that she was jealous of Lila’s looks. But although Laura had absentmindedly yearned for skinnier thighs or mused on the perks of life as a golden blonde, she had ultimately decided that her dark hair and thoughtful eyes were more mysterious in the final analysis, that blondes were bubbly, bodacious, and all that, but rarely did crossword puzzles with her speed and expertise. And why preclude the possibility that her own DNA hid the coveted recessive gene? For all she knew, she would one day give birth to a blond, blue-eyed child, revealing the raw potential she stored within, the untold capacity to assimilate. No, for all her self-criticism, Laura had settled on the fact that she liked her appearance, appreciating it both for aesthetic value and for its difference from her friends. She was the brooding, intelligent one, the exotic Jewess. Conceptually, boys coveted Lila, but it was Laura they wanted to possess. And she would take sultry over pretty any day.

No, if Laura was jealous of anything of Lila’s, it was not her looks. But to say she was jealous of her relationship with Tom bordered on comic understatement. Jealous was not the right word, she decided. Cynical was more accurate. Or indignant. Indignant was accurate. And why wouldn’t she be? She had dated Tom first, for the first two years of college. The only difference was that her relationship with Tom ended in the span of an afternoon. And as though that was not cruel enough, she had been robbed of the comforts of mourning. She had been forced to face Tom the very next day when he started dating Lila. The two roommates had merely switched places as though it were a beloved Ivy League tradition for roommates to trade boyfriends every fourth semester.

Laura had watched as a fling grew into a relationship of its own.
Throughout, she comforted herself with two predictions: Tom and Lila would go their separate ways after graduation, and she and Tom would eventually reunite, wiser and more in love. But the years after college confirmed only half of this hypothesis: Tom and Laura did reunite with renewed passion, but they did so even while Tom and Lila’s relationship thrived. At the tender age of twenty-two, Laura found herself entwined in an affair.

In the beginning, it felt like most transgressions—like an experiment, a day in someone else’s life. But gradually, it became commonplace, banal even. That she still spoke to Tom on the phone every day even while he went home to Lila seemed perfectly normal—unfortunate to be sure, but manageable nonetheless. They were still too young to concern themselves with the notion of permanence, and there was a certain freedom in having her nights to herself. That she pictured Tom when she was with other boys was peculiar but convenient. It softened the blow of wasting time with hopelessly incomparable replacements. Like any other habit—vice or virtue—it eventually became routine. It was simply a function of their unusual bond that they remained in love—fell deeper in love really—after their time as a couple ended, in much the same way you yearn for a family member after he dies.

Physical attraction did its part to glue them together, but something stronger than sexual attraction sealed the bond. When men and women grow apart, Laura had found, it is for the same reason they are drawn together; because they are finally, inherently too different. Friendships among women, on the other hand, were burdened by similarity. But Tom and Laura were somehow immune to the pitfalls of both relationships. They enjoyed the intrigue of opposites and the comfort of twins.

In Tom’s presence, Laura felt incomparably calm, the way you
feel on a rainy day when your only reasonable option is to consign yourself to sitting still, the way she had felt the moment time was called on the last exam of senior year, that a vast amount of work had been completed and the future held only excitement. In Tom’s presence, time passed at an accelerated pace. They could be sitting in traffic or talking on the phone or waiting in line for a movie, and their time felt precious, important, worthwhile. Memories of Tom looked different. Their colors were sharper and richer, like grass after it rains. And she had been in love enough times to rule out the possibility that this was merely some feat of nostalgia.

With everyone else, Laura felt rushed, convinced that her companion was on the verge of being bored. She spent her life cursed by this awareness, rushing to make a point, pretending to understand someone else’s. But with Tom, she felt the same pressure to finish a thought that she would if she were talking to herself. It was understood that they shared the same thresholds—the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking about books, for obsessing over pop culture, but mostly for laughing, talking, and simply being together. There was nothing one could say that the other would find too cruel or too kind. And on those rare occasions when they did tire of each other, they needed only go a day without talking before they yearned to reconnect.

Laura knew perfectly well that her friends disapproved of her friendship with Tom. But their disapproval was based on an incomplete set of facts. Unfortunately, she could never share the extent of their relationship. So she stomached the disgrace and let them think what they pleased. They were, at least, correct in thinking
that she was brokenhearted. Only, she was not brokenhearted because the relationship had ended suddenly; she was brokenhearted because it had never truly ended. Finally, new inspiration for her toast:

“Tom and Lila are two incredible people,” she could begin, “who are going to have incredible lives. Unfortunately, they are not meant to spend their lives together.”

Loud laughter from the hall interrupted the pleasure of this notion. Suddenly conscious of the time, she collected her things and hurried to join her friends in their customary pre-party bathroom caucus. As for the toast, she would simply have to hope for the best.

“What was that about anyway?” Tripler was saying when Laura arrived.

The bathroom had been transformed into a steamy war room. Each girl stood at the mirror in uniform, one towel wrapped around her showered body, another twisted into a turban on her head. As they dried their hair and applied makeup, they plotted the evening’s strategy like top military aides.

“That
was
a little weird,” Annie agreed. “It kind of felt like the beginning of a horror movie.”

“Gussie’s gotten a little cuckoo,” Tripler said, “in her old age.”

“It’s not her fault,” Weesie said. “You drink enough champagne, it’s bound to waterlog the brain.”

“That whole thing about the porch,” Annie said. She extended her arm and craned her neck to inspect the state of her underarm.

“That’s her way of saying they’ve let the house go,” said Weesie. Lips pursed, she leaned into the mirror and applied a coat of sugary lip gloss.

“It’s her way of saying they’re not as rich as the Hayeses,” Tripler
corrected. Without warning, she sprayed perfume inches from Weesie’s ear and stepped toward her, into the mist.