The Myth of You and Me (13 page)

The card had been in a box labeled
VANDERBILT
, which I’d pulled down from the top of Sonia’s closet. Inside the box I’d also found Sonia’s bid-day photograph—she and Suzette smiling in the center of a crowd of smiling girls, all of them wearing identical sorority sweatshirts—and a notebook from a class she took sophomore year on assessment of learning disabilities. The first two years, she was an education major, something she took on even though it required math. Only three days into the semester, her interest in assessment seemed to peter out, and she began to narrate what was happening in the classroom, the attempted invasion of a squirrel through an open window:
A flurry of blond-haired shriekers fleeing to the other side of the room, clutching a variety of Cosmos and notes.
In the margin of this page she had drawn tiny Chinese ideograms, sketched a flower, and written the word
synecdoche
and circled it. On another page I found a note that said,
I wonder what Camazon is doing right now.

It was almost noon, and I hadn’t even showered. I hadn’t meant to search Sonia’s apartment and yet I’d spent the morning doing just that. When I started opening drawers, I’d wanted only to find some clue to her whereabouts—something that might tell me the date of her wedding, her fiancé’s name, where she worked. But even after I found a paycheck stub—she worked for a photography and literary magazine whose name I recognized because they had once done an interview with Oliver—I kept looking. In part, I wanted to see the letters Oliver must have written her, letters about me, letters she had surely kept, though not in any place I could find.

Most of Sonia’s clothes were black, with only the occasional splash of red. In high school, red had been her favorite color. In college, she went through a pastels phase—the influence of her sorority. She owned an impressive number of shoes—six pairs of red alone, so she did still have a preference for it—and she kept them organized neatly, color-coded, on three shoe racks. In her bathroom was an array of half-used beauty products. She had five different kinds of eye creams, claiming to reduce wrinkles, shadows, puffiness—did she not sleep well? On the table beside her couch she had a framed photo of her father and a pair of opera glasses, decorated with what looked like mother-of-pearl. Did she regularly go to the opera, the ballet, the theater, or did she just find the glasses pretty? I didn’t find any opera in her CD collection, except
The Marriage of Figaro,
which she’d bought for a class on Mozart we took in college. Her taste in music was eclectic, almost random—she had the first Garth Brooks album, the Modern Lovers, Al Green’s
Call Me,
more Mozart, Papas Fritas, U2, Phoenix, and lots and lots of show tunes. She owned a Mensa puzzle book, full of difficult questions about math. Had she bought that to torment herself when her mother wasn’t around to do it for her? She was a reader of contemporary short stories. And she had one of Oliver’s books, which I snatched from the shelf and flipped through, but there was nothing—no inscription, no letters from him tucked inside.

Under her bed were dirty clothes, credit-card offers, magazines—she subscribed to both
The New Yorker
and
Entertainment Weekly.
There were also old receipts—she’d bought her throw pillows at Pottery Barn—and crumpled sketches, mostly of half-finished faces. And, beneath a hairbrush on her dresser, there was a small blue envelope containing a birth announcement from my college boyfriend, Owen, who, I knew now, was married, lived in Brooklyn, had a four-week-old little boy, and still kept in touch with Sonia, something that surprised and upset me. I hadn’t been in touch with Owen in eight years, and yet I felt like he and Sonia, like Oliver and Sonia, were communicating behind my back. Beneath the baby’s weight and time of birth, Sonia had scrawled a large blue question mark. What question was she asking? What question was I asking? What did I hope to discover about Sonia now, rummaging though her things?

When I was in graduate school, and the disastrous end to my relationship with Sonia was still recent, I told a new friend what had happened. She wanted to know why, and I did my best to tell her. I told her about Sonia’s father dying the summer before our senior year. I told her about Sonia’s mother. Then she wanted to know why Sonia’s mother was like that. We were English Ph.D. students and we spent all of our time “unpacking” images and sentences and words, and when we weren’t working we turned that attention to other people. Though my attempts to explain Sonia, and myself, satisfied my friend and made me feel better, there persisted a nagging feeling that ultimately it couldn’t be done. A person is not a suitcase, with a finite number of items to unpack. A person is a world. Look at any photograph—of a stranger, your father, your very best friend. Sometimes the mystery is all you can see.

If Suzette still
lived in Boston, she’d know where Sonia was, but I couldn’t find a listing for her. So I got dressed, copied down the Cambridge address of the magazine where Sonia worked—that day was a Friday—and left to find someone to give me directions. On my way out I stopped at my car to repack what little I’d brought inside. I took Oliver’s package with me. Walking up the street, I turned for a last look at my car, which contained everything I owned. I almost wished someone would steal it.

There was a Dunkin’ Donuts in Porter Square, and as I walked in, a small child with chocolate frosting around his mouth stared at me. I smiled at him, and his eyes widened. He turned to his mother and said in an audible whisper, “Mommy, that’s the biggest girl in the world.”

“Uh-huh,” the mother said, turning the page of her newspaper.

Waiting in line for coffee and directions, I thought of Oliver’s months-long obsession with chocolate doughnuts, how I’d fetched them from every doughnut shop in town, searching for the perfect one—until I began to complain that he was never going to agree I’d found it. On the rare occasions when I grumbled about doing what Oliver asked, he’d endure only a few complaints before saying, with mock sternness, “I’m the boss.” This always made me laugh, and because, in the end, what he wanted was so small, I’d stop complaining and do it. There’s something to be said for living a life subject to someone else’s needs—you never have those empty periods of vague discontent brought on by too much freedom, too little purpose. I never had to decide when to eat my lunch or what I was going to have. And then, too, I used to know that I was what Oliver needed, that I was necessary. I swallowed over a sudden lump in my throat.

Behind the counter was a boy who spoke awkward English. I ordered a chocolate doughnut and a cup of coffee with cream. I confirmed that I wanted no sugar and then watched as he spooned some in anyway. He caught himself and looked up at me with a guilty expression. “That’s all right,” I said. “I’ll take it.” While he made change, I tasted the coffee and tried not to make a face. I put the address on the counter and asked him if he knew where it was.

He let out a whistling breath, studying the address. I could feel the man behind me in line growing impatient. The boy said, “I think Harvard Square. Perhaps, yes.”

“How do I get there?” I asked.

“You take the T,” he said. “Across the street.”

“That way?” I said, pointing. And then the man behind me stepped around and in front of me, jostling me out of the way so that hot coffee sloshed onto my hand and dripped onto my white shirt. I hadn’t even gotten my doughnut yet.

“Can’t you see you have other customers?” he said to the boy behind the counter. He placed his order, not even glancing at me, even though I continued to stand there, mopping at my shirt with a napkin. He was tall, with floppy blond hair and a gray shirt tucked into black pants with an iron crease down the leg. If this had been Oxford, he would have patiently waited his turn. He would have overheard my request for directions and walked me out onto the sidewalk to show me where to go. He would have asked about my errand and expressed interest and concern. Here, he didn’t even thank the boy for his coffee. I followed him out the door, and on the sidewalk I said, “Excuse me.” He whirled around, startled, and I said, “That was really rude.”

He turned scarlet. He stammered, “Well . . . you . . .”

“I what?” I didn’t care that my voice was rising, that people were turning to look. “This is about you and why you would be so fucking rude. I’m looking for a missing person. What’s your excuse?”

“You were taking too long,” he mumbled.

“Well, I’m really sorry. I’ve no doubt two minutes of your time are more important than my missing friend.” I brushed past him. “Asshole,” I said, without looking back. Because I was at the corner, and the light had just turned, I crossed the street. I went into the T station. The escalator down was so long I felt I was descending into a pit of hell.

On the train I stood even though there were plenty of seats, gripping the pole with one hand and holding my coffee with the other, the package wedged under my arm. I was still so angry I was shaking. I could still see that man’s scarlet face. He hadn’t put up much of a fight. My shirt was stained. My coffee was too sweet. It was only as we pulled into Harvard Square that I realized I had left the address on the counter, between the napkin dispenser and an advertisement for a frozen drink. I threw the coffee away as soon as I got off the train.

I walked around Harvard Square for an hour, hoping to stumble across the office of the magazine. I tried to look through Sonia’s eyes at the gourmet food shop and the chess players outside the Au Bon Pain, at the tall man who called me darlin’ and persuaded me to buy, for a dollar, a newspaper about the homeless. If I could see this place the way she did, I would find her.

Finally, past the main part of the square, I found a fancy-looking camera store next to a bookstore, and knew that if Sonia and I had been together, we would’ve parted company here—she to look at cameras, me to look at books, saying we would find each other again later. I went into the camera store.

The clerk—he looked vaguely professorial, and I thought maybe everyone in Cambridge looked like that—knew where the magazine office was. The boy at the Dunkin’ Donuts had been wrong. It was on Massachusetts Avenue—the clerk said Mass. Ave.—outside of Porter Square, not far from Sonia’s apartment. He found a piece of paper and drew a little map for me. Looking over his shoulder at the carefully labeled streets, I asked if he knew Sonia. Indeed, he did. He said she was delightful, and that she came in all the time, for new lenses, for advice, for careful processing of her black-and-white film. The one-hour places, he said with contempt, never got the contrast right. Even in this big city the guy in the camera shop knew Sonia’s name.

I was halfway out the door when he called after me, “Tell Sonia her black-and-whites will be ready in a couple of days.”

“Okay,” I said. “If I see her, I will.”

As I passed a low brick wall on my way back to the T station, I saw among a group of teenagers two girls, about fifteen or sixteen, smiling and frowning and rolling their eyes in unison. In my peripatetic childhood I had had other best friends besides Sonia—Terry in Virginia, Helen in England, and in Kansas, Dana, whose flat American vowels I religiously imitated, frantic to lose my British accent. So Sonia was not my only, or even my first, best friend. She was the last. It wasn’t that I hadn’t made friends since, just that I thought myself past the age of that particular kind of friendship. Adult friendship doesn’t grant you an exclusive, isn’t meant to be ranked above romance and family. I couldn’t imagine ever living that moment again, when you say, with a shy and hopeful pride, “You’re my best friend.” The other person says it back and, there, you have chosen each other, out of everyone in the world. You have fallen in love and said so.

The teenagers looked nothing like Sonia and I had looked at their age. We had big hair—one of these girls had dyed hers blue. We wore Coke shirts and Swatches and acid-washed jeans. We said “fixin’ to” and “dang,” hung out with Southern Baptists, dated boys who drove pickup trucks. These girls probably snuck into rock clubs. They did drugs and went to poetry readings. They knew all about Zen Buddhism and read articles in
The New Yorker.
What I recognized was the way they kept looking at each other even though they were each talking to a boy. Every so often they exchanged these quick, knowing glances, each making sure the other one was still there, still with her. I wondered how long their friendship would last, and I felt sorry for them, because they didn’t know it wouldn’t.

12

O
n the long
escalator back up out of the Porter Square station, people huffed past me on the left while I held on to the railing and felt myself lifted. I knew where I was going now, and I could see myself handing Sonia the package, see her tearing off the paper. I indulged a brief fantasy in which the package contained not only something for Sonia, but further instructions for me, Oliver sending me on a scavenger hunt. As I rose into sunlight, I thought of how difficult it would have been for Sonia to do what I had done that day—buying a T token and telling someone the magazine’s address. For her these simple daily transactions would have been fraught with the possibility of error and confusion. It was no miracle for me to count out the correct change.

I glanced over at the down escalator, and there, just passing me, looking straight ahead and frowning, was Will Barrett, Sonia’s ex-boyfriend.

When I saw him, I thought his name. But I didn’t connect it to the boy I had known. That boy belonged to another time and place and was not supposed to be here.