Life After Yes (12 page)

N
ever set foot in a heart-shaped hot tub,” Phelps said once. We were both nineteen and had just finished our freshman year of college. His hair was longer that summer, losing his mother's blondness and gaining his father's curls. His skin neared that caramel brown of summer. My guess was he had grown at least an inch or two over the past year.

“What is
that
supposed to mean?” I asked. “Who was talking about hot tubs anyway?”

Our parents sat only a few feet away, conversing in hushed, civilized tones. They sipped martinis. Dad said something about his martini being “dirty,” and Mom and the others laughed.

“No one was talking about hot tubs, Quinn. That's not the point.” Phelps sipped his Bud Light slowly and dramatically, concentrating on each drop, as if it were potential poison. Our parents decided that this summer it would be okay if we drank. If it was okay for kids our age to fight in combat,
then certainly it was okay for us to have a beer or two, they reasoned. A logical thought indeed.

My parents knew I drank. I'd spent a year at college and they weren't clueless. But condoned public drinking was another thing. The funny thing is that Phelps's parents were Lake Forest WASPs through and through; no one doubted that alcohol flowed like water in that household and that little Phelps had been drinking for some time now.

But appearances were big.

“Why the non sequitur warning then?” I asked. Phelps and I had been talking about college, the ubiquity of marijuana and Ecstasy on our respective campuses, whether each of us would go Greek, our potential majors. What we didn't talk about: the dance-floor kisses, the hookups and crushes. This was our rule. It wasn't prudent to put life on hold, especially during our formative college years. But when we were together, we were
together.

Only a nineteen-year-old would think this could work.

“Non sequitur? Good to see you're getting some mileage out of those SAT words,” Phelps joked. “The
point
is that predictability is a plague.”

“Huh? Now you have lost me,” I said. Phelps's eyes glinted with the setting sun. Birds chirped lethargically. Bullfrogs gulped.

“All I mean is that…” He paused, took a big, bold swig of his beer. “We have to make sure not to become one of them.”

“One of
them
?” I said, motioning to our parents, creatures who guffawed with practiced laughter, legs politely crossed, swirling colorless drinks with pinky fingers.

“No, Quinn.
One of them.
Part of the crowd. The cliché. What's expected of us.”

“What is
expected
of us?”

“No, what's expected of
us.
” Phelps said, motioning his beer-less hand between us, quietly like a secret.

I nodded.

“Why do you think they drink like that?” Phelps said. And then he did something he often did. He answered his own question. “They drink because they're bored. Booze adds spice.”

I nodded again.

“There's nothing wrong with it,” he said. “It's simply adaptive behavior. Darwin's ideas in action.”

And I didn't realize it then because I was young and blinded by his undeniable glow, but Phelps had a pathological fear of boredom. It manifested in a spoken reverence for paths dark and difficult. He had a taste for rebellion, for originality. He was determined to dodge the clichés that litter life's path. But the irony (and I'm never sure how to use that word) was that in his steadfast efforts to avoid predictability and prudence, that's what his life would become: predictable and prudent. And that's who
he
would become: a hardworking doctor, a predictable and prudent soul.

“Did college transform you into an intellectual big shot?” I asked. “Maybe you should contemplate the philosophy track too.”

Phelps shook his head. “I'm not going to spend my days digesting the pretentious musings of bearded men whom history has arbitrarily chosen to revere.”

“History hasn't chosen anything.
People
have chosen. People like us. And history can't choose anything unless you are speaking of the poetic device metonymy.”

“Poetry, Quinn?” he said disapprovingly, dragging out the simple word, enunciating each of the three syllables. “Po-et-ry?”

“Yes, Phelps. Poetry.”

“Why bother? Life is about more than iambic pentameter and rhyme. There are plenty of disciplines that actually have some consequence, some practical consequence, but poetry isn't one of them. It's an indulgence.”

The vast majority of our conversations were like this one: undeniably intelligent, unabashedly indulgent, both predictable and youthfully profound. A competitive, passionate pulse throbbed beneath these exchanges, one that would unite us at the time and divide us down the line.

“Poetry is art,” I corrected him. “It's daring. To capture everything—and nothing—in a few chosen words.”

“Impossible,” Phelps said, drinking his beer.

“Exactly,” I said.

Our conversations were everything we were: smart, pretentious, smacking of privilege and naïveté. Full of a shared and practiced cynicism only college could polish. Full of fancy words we used for the most part correctly. Full of nascent confidence and inchoate insecurity.

But if you listened closely to our words, the ebbs and flows of our own brand of flirtation, if you took the time to trace the flimsy contours of our banter, you'd realize that every conversation we had was really the same. Over and over, we talked, debated, dreamed aloud and together, about one thing, one impossibly nebulous thing: who it is we'd become.

Because for the most part, we knew who we were up until that point. Or we were foolish enough to think we did anyway. We were two kids. Good kids. Smart kids. Kids who liked learning and fishing. Who loved each other. Because love each other, we did. I've come to doubt many things, arguably everything, but this I've never doubted.

I loved him for his smile, for his abundance of confidence, for his arrogant displays of control. I loved the way he took something complicated—like fishing, art, love—and rendered it in simple strokes. Fishing was sport. Something to be good at. Art was beauty, impracticality. Love, according to his gospel, was what we had.

Some things defy articulation, Prue
, he said. When shrouding me with his most lofty musings, he called me Prudence or one of its diminutives.
You can't capture it in words. And it's not worth trying.

And at the time, this was nothing short of bliss. Of romance. But as time went by, I wanted him to try. I wanted the words even if they were clumsy or insufficient. I wanted him to attempt the impractical. Do the impossible.

But, alas, he was a fan of efficiency and prudence and possibility. It never shocked me when he declared ambitions to be a doctor. To leave a stamp. To make a mark on this world.

And, at the time, this was heroic and responsible and lovely. I imagined the sandy-haired boy in a white coat with all the trimmings. I imagined him gripping hands of sick people, sharing that winning smile with those who were losing life.

When I thought about the future, my future, he was in it. His white coat flung on an armchair by the door. His stories of pain and perseverance relayed over home-cooked meals like the ones I'd relished growing up.

Phelps and I spent many long, languid, wine-soaked nights, talking about my future. When I mentioned going to law school, his eyes lit up as if I had uttered something deeply genius and not utterly predictable. I reminded him that many people, too many people, went to law school because
of concurrent uncertainty and desire to achieve paradigmatic success.

But he swatted my doubts away like mosquitoes and told me there was nothing wrong with success. That success is what makes the world go around. That people like us were bred to be successful and there was nothing wrong with that. And as he said these things, I nodded. In part because he had an intense and intangible power over me and I believed him. In part, because I wanted to believe him. But even then I knew that this man, this smart-thinking, success-bound man, was worlds different from the boy on that old porch swing.

But I chose to believe him. And that deep in this ambitious creature lingered the dreams of youth. And I went to law school.

“It's just too easy,” he said, seeming to enjoy his newfound cryptic aura.

“What?”

“Doing what our parents want. We go to school, we get good grades. We send our grandparents birthday cards. Being good kids. It's just too easy.”

His words were laced with fear. Fear that our parents had blueprints for how they wanted us to turn out and that it was up to us to fight this, to be ourselves.

“What's so wrong with being good, Phelps?” I asked.

“Nothing is
wrong
with being good. But being good can be boring. Before we know it, we'll be engaged, get married, honeymoon in small town, U.S.A., make love in a heart-shaped hot tub infested with germs of mediocrity, wake up with three blond-haired kids who eat only Cheetos and Wonder bread, and have a lease on a minivan.”

At the time, I nodded, swallowing his musings whole. If
only I could go back and say:
Chances are we will get married, honeymoon in Asia, and make love in a private plunge pool infested with germs of privilege, wake up with three blond-haired kids who eat only edamame and soy crisps, and have his and hers Range Rovers.

“
We
will be engaged?” I asked. My heart danced, a rookie ballerina, bouncing softly, uncertainly.

“No, Quinn. Don't be silly. We
will
be
engaged
, though. Both of us. In a matter of years. And our mothers will phone each other up to talk about centerpieces and ceremony music. About whether to serve mint juleps with the lemonade during the procession.”

“Oh.”

Phelps finished his beer in one proud gulp as if it would make him seem more of a man. Mine was still halfway full.

“Well, my kids aren't necessarily going to have blond hair. And who knows if I will even give them Cheetos or Wonder bread. Did you have a bad experience with a heart-shaped tub, Phelps? You're being weird.” It was a soggy comeback, but honest.

“No.” He smiled and took a swig of his beer that was already empty and blushed.

“Spill it.”

“Spill
it
?” he said, shaking the empty bottle.

“
Spill
it. Where is all of this ridiculous hypothesizing coming from?”

“Okay, okay…” he said. On the lake a mother loon swam, her five babies trailing behind.

“Yes?”

“Okay, I admit it. I heard my parents talking on the ride here. They were talking about the heart-shaped tub in their hotel room when they went on a road trip in college.”

“You're hijacking your parents' stories, buddy?”

“Shut up, Quinn,” he said, embarrassment plain on his tanned face. “I'm going to get another,” he said, holding the beer bottle in front of me. I looked down the nose of mine, into the bottomless amber darkness. I still had some left. “Want one?”

“Sure,” I said. In retrospect, not because I wanted more beer. But because I didn't know what it was I wanted. Because when life gets quiet or uncertain or loaded with that dampness before truth, there was always something to fill it in. Because we can always sip instead of think.

Before he left to find beers, Phelps looked at me, studied me, looped a strand of hair around my ear, and asked me a question he'd come to ask me many times, too many times: “Am I boring you?”

At this, I smiled sweetly, and said something that was true at the time. “You couldn't bore me if you tried.”

 

“Am I fat?”

It's not even eight in the morning.

“No,” Sage answers. He races around our apartment, coffee cup in tow, cleaning up clutter. Both of our mothers arrive in a few days. Typically, I get more than this, more than the one-word response that he must utter as a man who wants to survive.

“Victor thinks I'm fat.”

“Of course he does,” Sage says, flipping through a thick stack of bills we haven't paid.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, if you start realizing that you're in good shape, that you are far from fat, you just might not need him anymore. And that wouldn't be good for little Victor's bank account.”

“He's not little, Sage. And why does everything have to be about money to you? Not everyone's a banker, all hot and bothered by the bottom line. Some people care about other things, like helping people for instance,” I say.

“Like my super-charitable wife-to-be who spends hundreds of dollars a week sculpting her figure when she could donate it to some worthy cause?” Sage's eyes wander to Katie Couric, who gesticulates wildly while talking to George Clooney about his ever-baffling bachelor status.

“What? Katie deserves your undivided attention, but not your future wife?”

Sage is quiet. He runs his fingers through his hair. It's gotten a bit long. “Yes, actually. She actually talks about
things
; it isn't all about her. Self-obsession gets stale.”

“It's Katie's
job
to talk about things. She has a freaking script and now I'm the self-obsessed one? And I hate to break it to you, but Ms. Couric has a
team
of Victors. How do you think she gets those legs that apparently hypnotize you?”

Sage doesn't take the bait. He continues his efforts to bring order to our chaos.

“Too bad Katie's too old for you. Though you never know these days. She'd probably love your new surfer dude coiffure,” I say, running my fingers through his hair. “And a little Botox here, Restylane there, and she could pass for thirty.”