Fourth Comings (17 page)

forty-one

D
r. Kate’s penthouse had sweeping panoramic views of Broadway, and from this top-of-the-world vantage point, the Other Jessica Darling’s billboard shrunk down to the size of a postcard. The suite was less distractingly sexy than the lobby, though the large living-room area still resembled an after-hours lounge more than a place to conduct business. There, perched on the edge of a low, square, suede love seat with her legs angled and crossed at the ankles, was Dr. Kate. I was quite surprised to find her alone in this humongous living space, without the entourage of payrolled hangers-on that I had assumed would lamprey upon such a successful impresario.

I’d never seen her on TV, but I knew what she looked like from her various author photos. In the prominently positioned glamour shot on the home page of the iLoveULab website, she presented herself as a blown-out blonde with china-doll eyes and overindulged lips. From the neck up, in fact, Dr. Kate’s picture didn’t look that different from the Other Jessica Darling’s. There was such a disconnect between her academic background and her pornified photo that I assumed that the digital image had been highly enhanced for promotional purposes. Surely she’d be much plainer and less plastic in person. I mean, was it really necessary for a neuroscientist/C.E.O. to look like a porn star?

I saw for myself that Dr. Kate was even more flawlessly Photo-Shopped in real life. She was wearing something that resembled a traditional lab coat, only it was black and tight and had a slight sheen, and it was unbuttoned to reveal a black, white, and red python-print dress. She resembled a curvaceous, credulity-busting scientist in the Bond Girl tradition, the kind who saves the world from thermonuclear apocalypse and still makes it on time for her next Brazilian wax. This, apparently, is her signature look.

“You must be Jessica,” she said, without getting up, but extending her hand. Her nails weren’t long, but all squared off and expertly painted in the vampy, nearly black color I’d noticed on chic women around the city. My fingernails had been quickly and unevenly snipped with a pair of toenail clippers. Some nails were roundish, others were squarish, and one or two were cut so low that neither term applied. All had been unevenly painted in a clear ninety-nine-cent polish about one minute before I walked out the door. It’s fortunate for me that fingernails are not the windows to the soul.

“When I read about your work,” she said in a confident, TV-ready tone, “I thought you sounded perfect for iLoveULab.”

“Well, thank you,” I said, dipping my head in a gesture of false modesty, but also to avert my eyes from her artificially inflated lips. They
looked
like Novocain
feels.
“And I’m so glad to meet you and find out more about iLoveULab.”

“I’m so thrilled about this new venture,” she began, gesturing toward the suede cube chair on the opposite side of the slick black coffee table. “iLoveULab International is the first networking service to use state-of-the-art brain-imaging technology to pair up life partners who are matched from the inside out….”

Dr. Kate must know that her company’s name, though perfectly in keeping with others in the matchmaking game, has cheese-ass connotations, and could be a turnoff for the more serious-minded employees she courts. She was quick to put a smarty-pants spin on what many might perceive to be a shallow endeavor beneath her highly educated pedigree.

Maybe iLoveULab International has defied Silicon Alley odds and hasn’t hemorrhaged money like so many new media start-ups before it. It’s possible that in your second or third or tenth rereading of this notebook, iLoveULab has entered the pantheon of successful Fortune 500–type companies. Perhaps iLoveULab’s motto (“We’ve got love on the brain”) has become a multigenerational catchphrase with the timelessness of “Just do it!” Perhaps the iLoveULab logo (a cartoonish red heart inside a medical textbook illustration of the brain) has been canonized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and no longer brings to mind a drugstore clearance bin on February 15.

“What do you know about the brain in love?” Dr. Kate asked. Her brisk, no-nonsense demeanor was, again, totally at odds with her bimbocious appearance.

“Well,” I began, “I know a growing body of research shows that falling in and out of love is the result of various chemical reactions in the brain.”

“Go on,” she said.

I was glad to have read up on this research before the interview. “Certain regions of the brain get flooded with different hormones depending on the stage of the relationship.”

“Go on,” she said.

“And MRI machines can take pictures of people’s brains as these chemical reactions occur.”

I must say that I was even impressing myself.

“And how is that information useful?”

“Well, I’m assuming that if some hormones are more active than others, it can affect your personality, and your approach to relationships. A brain scan can tell you what romantic type you are, which gives you a better shot at selecting complementary partners.”

Dr. Kate was pleased with my answers. “Exactly,” she said. “iLoveULab uses the latest advances in technology to create a MindLoveMap of the brain, which serves as a guide to matching couples who will fall—and stay—in love.”

Dr. Kate went on to explain that each iLoveULab client is put into one of four main MindLove categories, determined by what the MRI scan reveals as the prominent chemical system in the brain. Everyone falls into a primary category but manifests secondary or tertiary characteristics from the others. They are:

The Connector

Chemical influence:
Serotonin, the mood-regulating neurotransmitter

Strengths:
Well-organized, calm, considerate, gets along well with others

Challenges:
Habitual, nonchalant, overly concerned with popular opinion

The Commander

Chemical influence:
Testosterone, the male sex hormone

Strengths:
Logical, success-oriented, bold, decisive

Challenges:
Domineering, self-absorbed, uncompromising

The Creator

Chemical influence:
Dopamine, the pleasure-seeking neurotransmitter

Strengths:
Spontaneous, lively, theatrical, thrill-seeking

Challenges:
Moody, addictive, takes unnecessary risks

The Communicator

Chemical influence:
Estrogen, the female sex hormone

Strengths:
Verbal, multitasking, insightful, innovative

Challenges:
Overemotional, irrational, hypersensitive to criticism

“This is such a radical approach to matchmaking,” Dr. Kate said. “Our clients will appreciate how our systematic, scientific approach removes most of the guesswork from dating. Life is too complicated to wait for a serendipitous love connection. It might have worked for the boomers, but it doesn’t work for the millennials.”

I shook my head no.

“And affluent singles won’t hesitate to pay fifteen thousand dollars for our MindLoveMapping services.”

“Fifteen thousand dollars?!” I blurted

“Yes,” she said, stiffly uncrossing and recrossing her legs. “But is that such a price to pay for lifelong love?”

I closed my mouth and shook my head.
Of course not.

“Still, I recognize that our services might be cost prohibitive to some.”

Dr. Kate went on to explain that at the onset, a greater portion of iLoveULab’s revenue—and the bulk of its Dating Base, as it’s called—will be made up of the thousands of customers who forgo the MindLoveMap brain scan and pay the more modest sum of five hundred dollars to fill out a Chemical Quiz—250 questions painstakingly designed to determine the client’s hormonal report without having to get inside the claustrophobic and costly MRI machine. For example, if you can quickly find the pattern in a random group of numbers, you’ve got a lot of testosterone. You’re a Commander. Or if you can easily determine from a photo whether a person’s smile is sincere or not, your brain is high in estrogen. You’re a Communicator. And so on.

“It’s not as accurate as the MRI MindLoveMap,” Dr. Kate pointed out. “But it’s an affordable option for most customers, and it’s still better than the
personality-based
questionnaires offered on inferior sites.” She wrinkled her tiny, upturned nose as if falling for someone’s sensitivity or sense of humor was akin to falling for his bed-wetting habit or penchant for pedophilia.

I wrinkled my nose right back at her. Mirroring her gesture was a shamelessly obvious maneuver, but I was, after all, on a job interview. And I really needed, and maybe even really wanted, this job. A job I felt in no way qualified to have, since I had no idea what I’d be doing.

“What would my position entail?” I asked.

“Well, at first, a lot of reading, scoring, and categorizing the Chemical Quizzes as they arrive via e-mail, then entering them in the iLoveULab Dating Base.”

“Sounds fascinating.”

“It is,” she said, her eyes ablaze. “Eventually I would have you work as a liaison between the MRI technicians and our clients, analyzing the MindLoveMaps themselves….”

As Dr. Kate spoke, I started thinking about how you already disliked the sound of this job, just based on my early descriptions of the e-mail from Dr. Kate. This additional information would only make you hate it even more.

You dispute any empirical data that explain the origins of human emotions. You dismiss the science that proves that passion is no different from hunger or thirst or sleep or any other biological drive. You want to believe that love is this ineffable thing that can’t be quantified.

No wonder, then, that you were deeply offended when I suggested that we both take the Chemical Quiz that Dr. Kate had sent for my perusal last week.

“I’m not taking the test,” you said as you sat cross-legged on your straw meditation mat with your head resting between Claire and Chloe’s names on the wall.

“Why not? It’s just for fun!”

“Why take a test that will only prove that we’re not compatible?”

(This exchange resonates deeply in light of recent events.)

You were afraid that I’d be swayed by any evidence that proved we weren’t meant to be. So you didn’t take the test and I never asked you about it again.

From what I’ve read, I can pretty much guarantee that I’m a Communicator with a bit of Commander, which means that the female side of my psyche is barely outmuscling the male side in the tug-of-war battle over my brain. I would’ve bet my first paycheck that you are a Creator. And not that you care, because you think it’s all crap, but Creators like you and Communicators like me are supposed to be ideal matches….

“Is there something wrong?” Dr. Kate asked in a sharp voice, jerking me out of my reverie.

“Oh, yes! I mean, no! Nothing’s wrong.” I didn’t realize that I was frowning until I rearranged my features into a smile. “I was just thinking about how your technology and research could have spared me a lot of heartbreak.”

“That’s my goal: to eradicate heartbreak.”

I smiled wider when she said this because it sounded silly, but then quickly drew my face into a contemplative expression when I realized that she was totally serious.

“It might sound trivial to some,” she said, with the tiniest of nods in my direction on the word
some,
“but more people are devastated by broken hearts than cancer, AIDS, and all other diseases combined.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’ve never had AIDS or cancer, but I’ve had a broken heart, and I can’t imagine that those diseases could make you feel any worse….”

Dr. Kate puckered her lips in disapproval. Her mouth was so puffed up with plastics that such a tiny, easily-missed gesture took on ginormous, notice-me significance.

“But…uh…,” I stammered.

“What?” Dr. Kate asked.

“Can you really cure heartbreak?” I asked. “I was recently doing some reading for my job, and I learned that the prefrontal cortex shuts down completely when you first fall in love. That’s the part of your brain that controls social judgment, right?”

She nodded.

“So when you first fall in love, you can’t see any of your lover’s faults; you only see an idealized version of him. And over time, when you find out that this perfect guy is a flawed, complicated human being, it can be a huge letdown. Which explains why most relationships implode after a few months or years.”

A half nod.

“I mean, can the iLoveULab brain scans do anything to stop love from fading over time? Doesn’t all passion die and turn into something else, like companionship? I’ve been thinking about breaking up with my boyfriend because no real relationship with him could ever be like the perfect version I imagined when we first fell in love….”

I stopped talking when I realized that Dr. Kate had stopped listening.

“Well, then,” Dr. Kate said, glancing at her diamond-faced wristwatch. “Time’s just about up.”

I waited for her to say something about the next step in the hiring process. She didn’t.

“Well, thank you for meeting with me,” I said. “I know you’re a very busy woman.”

“Yes, I am,” she replied. “Which is why I’m not going to waste any more of my time, or yours.”

I sat up straighter, hoping to hear her say “Congratulations…” But her next sentence began “Unfortunately…”

I wanted to politely excuse myself and ask the Sentinel to borrow his dagger pendant so I could slit my wrists.

forty-two

A
fter my dismissal, I didn’t leave the hotel right away. I wasn’t ready to give up this job that had been mine until I blew it. I went straight to the reception desk, grabbed a complimentary W pen (“Whatcha thinking?”) and postcard (“Whenever Wherever”) to write a quick, apologetic note to Dr. Kate, one that I hoped might salvage the first half of the interview, the part that had gone so, so, so well. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d said about the part that had not.

“Unfortunately,” Dr. Kate had said, “I can’t hire someone who doesn’t believe in iLoveULab.”

“But—”

She raised her hand to shush me. “I didn’t get to be the groundbreaking scientist, author, and entrepreneur I am today by being wishy-washy. Working for me will require no less than a hundred and fifty percent of your time, energy, and enthusiasm. iLoveULab has to be your
life.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I—”

“No apologies necessary,” she said with a smile. “This job isn’t right for you, and you’re not right for this job. We’re both better off severing our ties now. I’m being pragmatic.”

“You sound like you’re breaking up with me,” I said, mustering a lame laugh.

“It’s not all that different, actually.”

“But—”

“No buts.” She stood to encourage me to do the same. “Many psych majors are analytical to a fault. It’s the nature of the beast, I suppose. But they do too much thinking and not enough doing.”

She jerked her head on the last word, and I responded with my own empathetic head bob. But it was too late. The mirror was shattered.

“You seemed like the bright, highly motivated go-getter I need to launch this new venture, but you lost your way during our conversation. You tuned out and turned your attentions elsewhere….”

Still wincing at the memory of her admonishment, I sighed and put the pen and the blank postcard in my bag. There’s no point in arguing with someone you know is right. When I trudged outside in defeat, I discovered that the sunny afternoon was quickly turning gray. By the time I emerged from the subway in Brooklyn forty-five minutes later, the heavens were deeply unsettled by the oncoming storm. The sky crackled with electric tension throughout my ten-block walk home.

(PROPHETIC FALLACY ALERT.)

The common area in our subterranean apartment was dark as night, with only a bluish light coming from the TV. I was surprised that anyone was there at all, let alone to find Hope and Manda doubled over in hysterics on the rug. They had obviously been laughing so hard and for so long that their contagious laughter had spread to inanimate objects. Not even the Olga could contain itself, having shaken off the tasteful green slipcover to reveal its true colors, a garish arrangement of orange and yellow stripes.

“Jess! You have to see this!”

“What is—” My question was cut off by their shushing.

I set myself down on the floor in front of the television. An out-of-tune piano plunked out a simple melody I’d never heard before, sung by a class of six-year-olds in loud, unintentional, atonal twenty-five-part harmony. I could barely make out the words:

“April is the month of showers and gloooooom!”

Two kids stood up from the risers, a boy and a girl in matching yellow rain slickers and boots. The boy held up a sign that said
APRIL.
The girl carried an umbrella.

“May is the month when bumblebees zoooooom!”

“And help make all the flowers bloooooooom!”

Two more kids stood up. The first, a boy, wore a garbage bag painted with yellow stripes, and a set of deelybobber antennae on his head. He held a card that said
MAY.
The girl was wearing a green leotard and tights, her head surrounded by crinkly pink crepe-paper petals.

“Birds winging, children singing…”

“Badly,” Hope muttered under her breath.

“It’s all a part of spring springing!”

I grabbed the remote and pressed Pause. Manda and Hope protested.

“I’ll turn it back on as soon as you tell me what the hell we’re watching!”

(I know I overreacted, but I was still bummed about my botched interview, and a little more so by the fact that neither Hope nor Manda—but especially Hope—had asked me about it.)

“Duuuuuuuuh!” Manda said, elementary school style. “It’s our first-grade pageant. ‘Twelve Months of Memories.’ Written and directed by our teacher, the wonderfully talented Mrs. Kornakavitch.”

“Where did it come from?”

“My mom found it in the attic,” explained Manda. “I just got it today. I haven’t seen it in fifteen years!”

“Doesn’t that freak you out?” Hope asked Manda.

“What?”

“That we’re old enough to say, ‘I haven’t seen this in fifteen years.’”

“Or old enough to say, ‘I’ve known
you
for twenty years.’”

“Twenty years!” Hope exclaimed. “We’ve known each other for twenty years!”

“We have,” Manda said. “It’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”

I nodded in agreement. I often forget that Manda has known Hope longer than I have, that they have about ten years of shared history that has nothing to do with me.

(The irony, in retrospect, is that I wondered if Hope was as unnerved by my parallel friendship with Bridget as I was by hers with Manda. I didn’t even think about you.)

I cringed as the kiddie choir launched into another ditty with a surf-pop melody meant to conjure up images of summertime sunnin’ ’n’ funnin’.

“We get outta sch-oo-oo-oo-oo-ool in June!”

“Have fun ’cause we’ll be ba-aa-aa-aa-ck here soon!”

The calendar boy for June was wearing a T-shirt and swim trunks, accessorized with a snorkel and a life jacket. The calendar girl for June was dressed like the Little Mermaid, with a tangled red wig, a purple shell bikini top, and an iridescent green flipper bottom.

“That’s me!” Manda said.

Was it a trick of the light? Or was it possible that Manda had more significant cleavage at six than I do at twenty-two?

“I had the best costume,” Manda said.

“You totally did!” Hope said, bouncing up and down. “I was so jealous! With my red hair I thought I should have been the Little Mermaid.”

“Hope was December. And she got to sing a solo in the grand finale….”

Hope blushed, feeling shy about a performance that bowed in 1991.

I bragged for her, “I’m sure that’s because she was the only one who could carry a tune.”

I didn’t have to search hard to find Hope on screen because her crazy blaze of hair rose higher than everyone else on stage. That is, except for the boy sitting next to her, who startled me with his familiar face….

“Is that…?” I asked, knowing the answer.

“Yup,” Manda said. “That’s Marcus next to Hope. And she didn’t sing a solo. She sang a duet!” Manda’s laughter had a serrated edge that cut right through me.

Manda fast-forwarded through the rest of summer and fall. A quick succession of twosomes in costume—Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty for July, a fat jack-o’-lantern and a green-faced witch for October—took center stage for a few seconds before returning to their spots on the risers. Manda clicked the remote again after the November Pilgrim and Indian took their bows.

The lights dimmed and a boy and a girl filled the spotlight. They were twin angels, tall, red-haired, and dressed all in white. Fake painted-cornflake snow fell from the rafters and clung to their feathered wings. The piano music swelled and the boy—You! Marcus!—opened his mouth to sing.

“The days go by, go by so fast…”

Hope had the next line.

“What was once the future is now the past…”

Then you took Hope’s hand and you sang together.

“On and on and on we go…And every day we grooooooooow…”

Make no mistake. It was a terrible song. It was a terrible song that has been written countless times by countless hacks before Mrs. Kornakavitch came along. But when you two harmonized, I not only found religion, but I swear I was in rapture. You took the high part and Hope took the low part, and together you created the purest sound I’ve ever heard.

The symphonic ecstasy was short-lived, however, because the rest of the class joined you on the cacophonous chorus:

“School memories we hold so dear, year after year after year!”

You and Hope were still center stage, holding hands under the spotlight. It was the first time I’d ever noticed that you were redheads from opposite sides of the color wheel. Hope’s hair was a yellow-red, closer to orange, hot. You were a blue-red, closer to purple, cool.

“You and Marcus were always so cute together,” Manda said to Hope.

(It was the “always” that first captured, and then refused to relinquish, dominion over my imagination.)

“Those two were inseparable back then,” Manda said to me with a know-it-all air.

“Really?” I asked, looking at Hope, whose eyes stuck to the TV screen.

“Oh, yeah,” Manda said, answering for Hope. “Hope and Marcus were quite the little item at our elementary school.” She assumed a guise of openmouthed, wide-eyed innocence. “You didn’t know?”

“No,” Hope and I replied. We then glanced at each other with a mutual but rare and strange unease.

“I know you don’t like to talk about the whole proposal thing,” Manda said to me, “but you should know that Marcus has been married before…to Hope!”

Hope muttered a faint complaint. “Manda, please…”

Manda was having too much fun to be stopped. “We had a little ceremony on the baseball diamond in fifth grade. The altar was home plate. Hope wore a toilet-paper veil. Marcus offered a ring made of one of those pull-tops off a soda can. I was a bridesmaid with a yellow dandelion bouquet.”

Hope blinked her eyes slowly, almost too slowly to be considered a blink.

I had never heard about any of this. From either one of you. As far as I knew, your only connection to Hope was the dishonorable, drug-addled friendship with Heath that began when you were thirteen and ended when he died. As far as I knew, you had only exchanged unpleasantries with Hope on a handful of occasions, and always in the context of having nothing in common other than your admiration and adoration of her deeply flawed but charismatic older brother.

As far as I knew.

“Well, I’m sure they both forgot….” There was a sly, singsongy lilt to Manda’s voice. She was dropping hints no one was picking up, so she clapped her hands to indicate an abrupt change of subject. “I
never
forgot the time Marcus totally tried to have sex with me.”

Hope’s head almost unscrewed from her neck. “Manda!”

“It was a beach party the summer after freshman year,” Manda buzzed. “He was high on God knows what, and spouted off poetry to try to impress me.”

I said nothing, somehow intuiting that this wasn’t the big secret destined to be revealed. I mean,
of course
you tried to have sex with Manda.
Of course
you read poetry to her, because you often read melancholy poetry to your would-be conquests, ripping off lines from Rimbaud (“Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter…”) or Jim Morrison-ripping-off-Rimbaud (“The days are bright and filled with pain…”) and trying to pass them off as your own. Sometimes, though not as often, the verse
was
your own (“We are Adam and Eve, born out of chaos called creation…”). These seductive tactics usually worked wonders, though not on the spectacularly dumb ones who thought you were a freak, a Dreg, and would have preferred *NSYNC (“How can it be that right here with me there’s an angel…?”) instead.

Manda’s bosom heaved in heavy-breathing anticipation of my response. Hope sat in a—could it be?—lotus position, with her eyes cast down at her hands tucked inside the bottom of her paint-stained T-shirt. She punched her knuckles outward, stretching the cotton away from her skin.

“Oh, it’s okay,” I said, meaning every word. “I’m not surprised. Marcus got in some serious play before he met me, and I don’t doubt that he hit on you when he was still using. He probably doesn’t even remember doing it.”

(Do you? Actually, forget I even asked. It really doesn’t matter.)

“Hmm,” Manda said, “casually” extending her arms toward the ceiling. “Would he remember something that happened a few days ago?”

Hope’s eyes swelled and her mouth hung open. And that’s when I realized that she and Manda were having a totally different conversation.

“Is there something going on here that I don’t know about?”

“No!” Hope said.

“Yes!” Manda said.

Outside, the skies rumbled and rolled like an express train barreling through a local station.

“It’s not what you think,” Hope said quietly.

“I’m not thinking anything!” I said loudly.

(This was a lie. My mind was reeling with sordid possibilities.)

“Marcus knew,” Hope said.

“Marcus knew what?” I asked, getting more desperate by the second.

“He knew that you wanted to break up with him,” Hope said.

“How?” I asked.

“Because I told him.”

On cue, a thunderbolt tore open the heavens, unleashing a torrent of rain.