Authors: L. Alison Heller
Crammed into a very crowded elevator, I bump up, local-style, floor by floor, until the doors finally open on ten. I push my way out of the doors, the weight of the motion heavy in my arms.
____
I
’m back in Manhattan, emerging from the subway, when my phone rings. I assume it’s Liesel because it usually is, but it’s a Manhattan number, unrecognizable. I clear my throat to sound as official as possible before picking up.
“Molly Grant.”
“Uh, hey.”
I recognize him immediately, but pretend not to. “Who is this?”
“Caleb.”
“Oh, hey.”
“So, it was good to talk to you the other day.”
Here’s how it had happened: I had called Duck’s cell phone two days ago and she had answered and said hello. Nothing out of the ordinary, until I heard a male voice in the background.
“You talking to Grant?” it demanded.
“Uh-huh,” said Duck.
“Where
are
you?” I had asked her, suddenly light-headed.
She sighed, second-guessing her decision to pick up my call. “Caleb’s new office space, taking measurements.”
I heard his voice. “Tell her we have an extra ticket to the Klezmaniacs, if she wants to come.” It was a private joke, referencing an interminable klezmer concert, a requirement for his Ensemble Melodies of Religion class, that we had driven to in Rutland, Vermont, my junior year.
“Only if he promises to lead the audience in a scarf dance, like usual.”
Duck repeated this and Caleb chuckled. “Only if she wears a—”
“Here,” said Duck, flatly, “tell her yourself.”
“Hey.” Caleb’s voice was closer in my ear. “Your friend seems rather touchy.”
“Well, she gets focused when she’s working.”
“Where are you?”
“Trying to work, although now, thanks to you, my head will be filled with the magical strains of flute meets violin—”
“Meets drum block, meets cymbal, meets crazy hook. Sorry about that.”
“You should be.”
“Hey.” Pause. “Can I call you sometime?”
“Sure.” I gave him my number, trying to push away the image of Duck, who I knew was still within earshot, probably shaking her head over her measuring tape.
Since the call, I had replayed our conversation several times, but now, I try to sound like I haven’t. “Good to talk to you too.”
“So, you up for grabbing some grub, catching up sometime?”
“Sure. When?”
“Um.” Long pause. “The fourteenth?”
“Let me just check my schedule.” I wait a couple beats. “Yep, the fourteenth works.”
“Well, all right, then. See you around nine.”
“Wait, where?”
“I’ll e-mail a place.”
Even though I’m due back at Bacon Payne, I can’t help myself. I stop in my tracks right there on Forty-eighth Street, lean against the side of a building and do an Internet search, something—I realize with pride—that I haven’t done since last month. No new photos, but there is one mention on a random
society Web site: Mr. Caleb Frank and Ms. Anastasia Peppercorn, still apparently in cahoots, are jointly listed as Angel Benefactors of the Aristotle Foundation’s Annual Benefit.
__________
I
f my preliminary research hadn’t tipped me off to the fact that my dinner with Caleb is not a date, the location would have. We are at the Burger Joint at Le Parker Meridien, a tiny little hole-in-the-wall. Great burgers, good fries, yes, but to get them, we had to stand in line for forty-five minutes, making awkward conversation about New York restaurants and mutual friends from college.
Now we’re crammed next to each other on one side of a tiny table for four. Mike, one of the guys sharing the other side of the table with us, is a blond, red-faced beefy man. He and his dining companion, Chip, work in management at Kroger’s corporate offices in Cleveland, really enjoyed
The Lion King
and are both divorced. I learned all of this after Mike spilled his beer on me and, by way of atonement, filled me in on the details of his life.
“So,” I say.
“So.” Caleb lazily dips a fry in some ketchup.
We look at each other.
“You’re at Bacon Payne?”
I nod.
“That’s, like, a strong firm. You know Dominic Pizaro in corporate?”
“Of course,” I say, as though Dominic and I hashed out corporate structure maps together plenty of times.
“Yeah, worked with the guy a little bit. He was pretty sharp.”
I play dumb as Caleb explains his illustrious career. In business school, he and his buddy would spend all this time on their asses, playing video games and blowing off class. Well, his buddy loved tooling around with computers and one day had this great idea for a new kind of joystick for the Xbox. So, Caleb said, we
should totally do our business plan about that, because they had to do one anyway as an assignment for school. The professor contacted a friend who was a venture capitalist, and the next thing they knew, they had a company, Da Styck, Inc., which they then sold to a megaconglomerate, making a gazillion lucky investments with the proceeds. Enter Dominic Pizaro.
“So what are you doing now?” I say.
“We’re looking at other opportunities, working some stuff up.”
“Sounds good.”
“So, you’re not married yet, huh?”
“No,” I say, laughing. Does he honestly think I’d be here with him at ten fifteen on a weeknight if I were married?
“You dating mostly serious types? Lawyers and bankers?”
I do a vague head move that’s neither nod nor shake. I’m not about to say that my current type is fictional. “My hours are pretty long, so at this point it’s kind of all about the job. What about you?”
“My hours aren’t that bad. Sometimes travel, but pretty humane.”
“No, I mean, are you married?” Even though I know the answer, it’s not as ridiculous a question for Caleb. Somehow, I can picture him meeting an ex-girlfriend for dinner while his wife stays home with leftovers.
“Married? Uh, no.” He looks at Mike and Chip out of the corner of his eye, and then leans across the table, his hands gripping the side. “So, Mol.” He lowers his voice and I lean my head closer, tilting my ear toward him without losing eye contact. “Is this the most awkward conversation you’ve ever had?”
I laugh. “It’s up there.”
“Can I level with you?”
“Level away.”
“I’ve been wanting to call since last fall. Seeing you brought back some memories.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Complications.” He is straight-faced, as though this actually answers anything, and I can’t help myself. I snort. A flicker of annoyance crosses his face, bringing me right back to where we last left off, as though neither of us has evolved one iota since college. And I don’t want or need that feeling—what would be the point?—so I smile, waving my white flag.
“So what kind of memories did it bring back?”
He smiles too, almost shyly. “The good kind. Loon Mountain? You remember that?”
I nod. The truth is, although I know that we decided on a whim to drive to New Hampshire for the weekend, I have no recollection of the ski conditions, how we got along, whether our conversation was as awkward as tonight. My sole memory from the trip is this: for some reason the orange gate was skeptical of our E-ZPass and we got stuck at a tollbooth; it was late and dark and isolated. Without words, we looked at each other, unbuckled our seat belts and jumped into the backseat, fogging up the windows and ignoring the few headlights of other cars.
I am happy keeping this thought—and the full-body flush it triggers—to myself, but Caleb looks at me pointedly and presses his knee against mine under the table. He laughs and shakes his head. “It’s been, what? Ten years. Every time I go through a goddamn tollbooth…” He shakes his head.
“Am I really supposed to believe that you remember anything from college?”
“What would make you say that?” he says, his hazel eyes growing big with mock indignation.
“Certainly not the haze of smoke around your head back then. Nor the bags of magical fungus in your apartment.”
He chuckles. “Huh. Right. So, if my memory can’t be trusted, what do you think happened with us?”
My eyes wander off to Chip and Mike, who must be eavesdropping,
based on how quickly they look down at their burger wrappings. “You really want to do the postmortem?”
“I do. I want to do the postmortem. You know why?”
“Because nothing is as much fun as a good postmortem?”
He treats my question like it was a serious one. “No. Not because it’s fun, but because you know what seeing you made me realize?” He shifts his knee away from mine, making my leg feel suddenly cold, even though it’s probably eighty degrees in the restaurant. Keeping his eyes locked on my face, he lightly covers my feet with the tips of his shoes. “I’ve really missed you. It’s not so easy to connect with people the way we connected.” He presses his feet down gently on my toes. “So, Ms. Grant. What were our college missteps?”
I decide against relaying the first fifty missteps, exclusively Caleb’s, that come to mind. “We weren’t…on the same page.”
“Not on the same page,” he says, drawing out each word. He laughs. “Is that your corporate-speak way of saying I was young and stupid?”
I didn’t start out as one of those girls in college, the kind that hangs up a neon sign proclaiming “Taken” at the first spark of interest in a guy. Initially, I assumed things with Caleb would be casual. But one night at three in the morning a few weeks after we met, I woke up to a soft scratching at the window. At first, I was freaked-out—I lived on the ground floor and wished I hadn’t laughed off the protective bars that my dad offered to install.
Duck was sleeping through the intrusion—I could tell from the way her body was lumped, immobile, under her comforter—so I sat up in bed and peered out the window. There was Caleb, his curls escaping out of a baseball cap that sat low on his head.
I gestured that he should go around to the front so I could let him in, but he held up a bottle of wine and a blanket and tossed his head backward to indicate that I should come outside instead.
“Prebreakfast picnic?” he said, and we walked, hands clasped,
to the quad. He spread out the blanket and, this being college, unscrewed the cap of the wine.
“What’s this about?” I had asked.
“I like these stars,” he had said, casually pointing up to the sky, with a flick of his index finger. “And I like you”—he pointed to me—“and I was thinking to myself that it might be really nice to look at the stars I like with a girl I like.”
It was, I knew, a grand romantic gesture, the first I had ever really received. Later, when I tried to describe it to Duck, she smiled and nodded, but I could tell by the way she failed to clutch her chest and swoon that I hadn’t been able to properly articulate the moment’s magic. Which was fine, because as long as Caleb and I both felt it, it didn’t matter if anyone else did.
Of course, a mere two weeks later, I watched Caleb leave the Sex on a Beach party with Chloe Small, the two of them entwined at the head like pipe cleaners. In retrospect, that should have been enough, but it wasn’t. Eventually, though, with the passage of time and after hearing Caleb profess his “like” of many things, including a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips and a fleece sweatshirt, I eventually got it: Caleb had not been promising anything more that night than exactly what his words indicated. Stars he liked. A girl he liked.
I rest my chin on my hands. “I wouldn’t argue with young and stupid.”
“It was me. I’ll wear the scarlet letter. I was young and stupid.” He keeps one hand on my leg and reaches for his beer with the other.
“Let’s be fair. We both were.”
“Maybe. But, Molly, the thing is, I’m a little older now, and a lot less stupid.”
“Is that so?” I reach for a fry without breaking eye contact.
He does the same. “It is so.”
He lifts his bottle. “To real connections.”
“To connections.”
Although I’ve spent years telling myself I’ve imagined the heat of our connection, I feel it again now, our eye lock making me feel warm and floaty and like we’re the only real thing in this restaurant, despite the fact that my left sleeve is still damp from the beer-spilling Kroger executives. Maybe his relationship with Anastasia Peppercorn has taken a turn for the professional and they’re just charity buddies, going around donating to worthy causes together. I mull whether this is possible, somehow managing not to laugh out loud at myself for doing so. I reach under the table for my bag. I recognize this feeling; it is nothing more than lust.
Caleb pouts. “You’re leaving?”
“I have to go, Caleb.”
“Then come over to see my butterfly collection.” He cocks his head and arches an eyebrow, deliberately and exaggeratedly.
I am more tempted than I want to be. But I know him too well. Being obsessed by the idea of Caleb is one thing; willingly submitting to the heartache again is another thing.
I laugh. “Not tonight. I’ve got to work.”
He nods, unsurprised. “Don’t think you’re off the hook, Ms. Grant. I’ll be in touch.”
____
I
love summer, and not just for the obvious reasons like the beach, ice cream and barbecues. I love it because it’s possible to nonchalantly leave my office without a coat, casually tell Liz that I’m just popping down to another floor for a minute and, instead, slip out of the building.
Which is exactly what I do when an e-mail comes in from my virtual office, notifying me of the first official communication on the Walker case.
I speed-walk the two doors down, more from nerves than anything else, snatch the fax from the receptionist’s extended hand and skim.
It’s from the court. Oral arguments on the motion are scheduled for July 16, with Robert Walker’s reply papers to be served on us at the end of June, in a few weeks. I run down the street to Bacon Payne and stop first in Henry’s office.
He looks up. “Are you sweating?”
“A little.”
He puts down his pen. “I’m intrigued.”
“I got the date.”