I Will Last Through

Chapter One

Shooting Stars

Stars burn brightly in a clear sky of late spring. Closely cropped grass on a hillock exudes its fresh scent, enveloping the group of friends lying in it head to head. Trees tower in, bending branches to the dome of sky. Quiet sounds of a college campus winding down comfort rather than intrude, but there is a tinge of the bittersweet. The familiarity of the scene is made poignant by temporal concerns. Yesterday was graduation; tonight is their last together. They have spent the day in panicked celebration. The girls are drunk, the boys stoned.

“It’s happened so fast,” says Julie, breaking a long silence. “I thought that I couldn’t wait, but now I’m scared. And sad.”

“Yeah. I mean, I know nothing about D. C.,” says Hyun, who has landed a summer-plus internship before entering the law program at American. “I’ve only been there with you guys, and once with my family as a child. And I don’t have a place to live or anything yet.”

“Hyun’s fine. She’ll be a lawyer. The other pros will take care of her. I’m worried about the rest of you,” says Jack, feeling, as usual, that his insensitivity is magnanimous—a dose of reality for these art fops. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m taking a year off before—” begins Julie.

“No, I remember what you all want to do. I mean for money. What will you do for money?”

“That’s never been a real concern,” begins Karel.

“It had damn well better be, now!” Jack is feeling the smoke, becomes argumentative rather than mellow. Being the lone Republican has not tempered his views. “I mean defense IT is hot, guys. I considered that. I planned ahead. I have a job. For 65k. To start. Plus signing bonus. What do you have? More school, also aimless. Maybe be able to teach for shit pay in four or five years. Maybe do nothing, followed by nothing—” he is waving dismissively at Julie.

“Cut it out, Jack,” says Gilbert. “We are all feeling it tonight. Don’t lash out. Remember that scene in The Big Chill? Don’t denigrate our friendship because of your anxiety.”

“Oh, fuck that namby-pamby art-house bullshit—” Jack starts, but he realizes that Julie has rolled away, trying to hide tears. He throws up his hands and says no more.

Karel worries about his future. He wants to finish his novel, thinks that Taiwan is a great place to do it, thinks that he will not feel the pressure there, that teaching English part-time in a foreign land while writing and drinking will be bohemian, romantic. He hears his parents’ words in Jack’s brutal speech.

Gilbert, always quiet, thrills at lying so close to Karel. He too has begun a novel, although he knows that it is not as good. He dropped the writing track for literature after one semester.

Julie plans to travel in Europe, have some fun, broaden her perspective with crazy worldly experiences. She thinks about these vague notions now, is still stung by Jack’s harsh words, feels it deeply because there is an element of truth. Her parents are paying half, feeling guilty at having urged her not to spend a semester abroad, considering this a sacrifice, a final act of absolution before the cord is severed—a washing of the hands, if they could admit it.

Hyun turns slightly, presses her breasts against Karel. She is nervous to the point of breakdown but hides it well. She needs touch, affirmation.

They slowly fall asleep in silence and are wakened roughly in the morning by the grounds crew. All are late and must hurry away in a flurry of hugs and promises.

Chapter Two

Taking Off

Karel is grumpy and tired. He has come to Seattle by budget carrier Frontier, with a connection in Denver, because doing so was less expensive than flying out of Newark. His parents were angry, would have paid the difference (hell, would have paid for the whole crazy thing) to be able to see him off for the big flight rather than hugging and crying before the domestic security gates. That was embarrassing to them. Plus, they didn’t pay for four years at a not-so-prestigious college (would have paid twice, quadruple that for Harvard, why did he …) for him to—he interrupts that thought, banishes it. He already has been traveling for seven hours and has not even left the States. He was a little nervous about security, having not flown domestically or internationally since before 9/11. It was a breeze.

He sips a smoothie while checking for Wi-Fi; the airport has it, but not for free.  He had better not. He puts his glossy white iBook away and looks at his watch. Five hours until the international flight. He looks around the lounge and is surprised to see that he is the only white person in it. He is flying on EVA, a Taiwanese carrier, but he expected at least half of the passengers to be non-Asian. He also expected to feel elated, on the cusp of something, a great step into the unknown. He almost bursts into tears at the thought of the thirteen-hour flight ahead. Doubt creeps in. Should he be doing this? Perhaps he should have gotten a “real” job or gone to graduate school like the others, instead of embarking on this lark that is beginning to seem as hare-brained and trite as Julie’s finding herself in Europe. He shrugs the feeling off.

The books that he has read on culture shock and traveling in Taiwan flow through his mind. He knows that he will feel homesickness and crushing depression by the six-month mark, but that if he perseveres, he will adapt fully and successfully, a model laowai. His luggage is packed with small American gifts—baseball cards, miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s, branded bath sets—to give to the people he meets. Asian cultures run on gift giving.

Karel distracts himself momentarily by poring over his contract, but that quickly tweaks his nervousness to an even higher level. He switches to reading Dream of the Red Chamber, blocking out the faces around him so as not to become paralyzingly aware of whether they have noticed what he is reading, have deciphered the inscrutable characters on the cover and spine. As he continues in this distressingly artificial manner, a lump rises in his throat. No amount of swallowing will dislodge it, and as he reads and gulps he comes to think of it as Jia Baoyu’s luminescent jade. Soft household sounds break all around, the distant clink and murmur of the preparation of food and, somewhere, sweeping or brushing. Xiren bends low over him, smelling sweetly of jasmine.

He wakes with a start, panic clutching. His watch shows that only thirty minutes have passed. He sets an alarm, wondering whether it will be loud enough to wake him, curses himself for not having tested it. His palms become sweaty, and he feels rivulets trickling from his armpits and down the curve of his spine into the hollow of his back. He has a few Xanax tucked away, spoils of war from the rich kid front. He wants to avoid taking one, plans to ditch them before boarding (no prescription), finds himself wheeling his carry-on to the fountain, swallowing deep gulps of cool water long after the pill has cleared his throat. He slips the tiny brown envelope containing the remaining tablets back into the inner pocket of his jacket.

Chapter Three

Apartment Shopping

“I want a funky city studio,” Hyun says, “You know, one near shops and restaurants, one where I can paint the walls. A blue bathroom, red kitchen, ochre living room, that kind of thing. I want to spend less than $1200.”

“Are you interested in a particular area?” asks the agent.

“I’ll work near the Capitol,” Hyun says, nervously trying to cover her ignorance of the city, “but I’ve heard that Dupont Circle is cool.”

“The area around the Capitol isn’t exactly swank,” confides the agent. “Let’s look at Dupont and Adams Morgan.” She pulls up some maps on her computer screen and prints out a listing of properties in the area. “Here’s one about a block from Dupont,” she continues, “an English basement. It’s 600 square feet, all utilities included, for $1250.”

“I said under $1200,” Hyun says, feeling the need to assert herself early on, to nip this kind of inflation in the bud.

“Just a sec,” says the agent, scanning the listings with a frown. “Here’s one a little farther away, only $1150.”

“Tell me about it,” she says.

“It’s a sixth floor unit, should have a good view. Not a walk-up. A little smaller—520 square feet. All utilities. Bus stop in front. Want to see it?”

“Let’s work up a few more in the same area,” she says, all cool, debonair. “I don’t want to waste my time.”

* * *

Hyun falls deeply, tragically in love with Dupont Circle. She has, of course, been infatuated since her first bouncing electric night out with college friends, since that first steep ascent from the underground into the burgeoning ring of light and life. One escalator was not working that evening, and the song of the big-lipped black who inspected the machinery reverberated to the summit, there mingled with and was overcome by Chinese strings. It took Karel’s keen awareness to inform her that the man, swaddled in high country silks and holding a curious two-stringed instrument, was not playing a note. All came from a cheap Sony tape machine behind him. Hyun felt that she had failed all Asians everywhere, but that shame was not to last. Passersby threw pocket change and crumpled dollars into the man’s reed basket. Funny how she can now remember that incident with such clarity, while the shopping, drinking, dancing, and making out that followed—so very important and utterly obliterating at the time—has receded into blurry youthful synesthesia.

All of the apartments are well away from the circle itself, down New Hampshire, up by Meridian Hill Park, over almost to Georgetown. All are crummy, played-out, dirty, even, decidedly not the scene of intrigue and romance that has screened in her mind. In the end, she settles for the original sixth-floor unit, the best of a bad lot. It is far to the north, well into Adams Morgan, but it seems safe enough and she must have a place to live. She does not know what else to do, and so the lease is signed, moving day set.

As she sits on the patio of the Starbucks at Connecticut and R, caramel latte quickly cooling, it is as if the treetops twitter with derisive laughter. She knows that it is only the darling little birdies, tosses them a pinch of her poppy seed muffin and dry washes her hands with the thin, oily napkin in pitiful ablution.

Chapter Four

First Day

Jack feels a little coarse and chauvinistic after the row with Karel at the graduation bash. He gets over it quickly. Shit, Sidus pays for his move while everyone else is scrambling to scrape together enough for a rental deposit. Karel has flown, on his own dime, halfway across the world to work for peanuts. No one else has even landed a job yet! He’s coming in at $65k the first year plus signing bonus. Hell, the bonus will carry him through the first month by itself. Fuck those hippies!

He tours the building the first day and is introduced to dozens of smiling faces. There are only a few women, and they are dressed to the nines. The men sport business casual, and they push that a little (especially on Fridays, he’s told). He spends the afternoon with Joe and Jeff, the other Java guys. They use a lot of jargon that is unfamiliar to him, and he gets a little nervous. He relaxes somewhat toward seven (quitting time is officially five, but when he mentions it they laugh) when Jeff gives him a thick binder explaining their architecture and tells him that the company will send him to an intensive Enterprise Java seminar to bring him quickly up to speed.

The guys invite him out for drinks after work. They head out the door at nine. They tell him about a bar they like to hit near the water and give him driving directions in the elevator to the parking garage and employee exit. They laugh when he says that he currently takes the bus, and Joe offers him a ride. Their SUVs, a BMW and a Lexus, gleaming as if newly washed and waxed, are stowed side by side at the far end of the third level where no one else parks. Jack slides around on the leather seat as Joe takes the corners like a race car driver. These things tip, you know.

The bartender, a young Australian, greets Jack’s coworkers by name and draws two Millers. Jack wants a Manhattan but is still the rear dog of the team and weakly mouths “ditto.”

“Seriously, dude,” says Joe, slurping the thin foam off of his pint, “you should just buy a car.”

“I want one, of course, but I also want to aggressively pay off my student loans.”

“How much are they?” asks Jeff.

Jack is taken aback by the specificity but answers truthfully. They both snort in derision at his caution.

“Really,” Joe says when he catches his breath, “that’s nothing. You’re getting $60k, right?”

“Around that,” he hedges, realizing that the ice is thin.

“Have they mentioned the bonuses?”

“I got a signing bonus.”

“Not that. The yearly ones.”

“Not yet.”

“You’ll pull in an extra $10k at Christmas and 5 on your anniversary.”

“I’m not married.”

“Not that kind!” they guffaw. “Your hiring anniversary, you moron.”

“Oh,” he manages.

It’s ten o’clock, and he is tired from the move, but they are just getting started. They order more Miller and some terminals (surprisingly primitive, from a technical point of view; they could cheat if they were so inclined) for the trivia game. They trounce Jack because they have memorized the questions and answers. He gets a few of the sports ones right and most of the music ones.

They have some sliders and nachos (supper) and finally move on to mixed drinks, scotch and soda. He’s a little punchy by now and breaks ranks, ordering that Manhattan. They divide their attention between Fox News and ESPN, catching up with the day. They’ve had enough to shout and give high fives when the NHL scores are announced. At eleven Jack is feeling bushed.

“Do you guys ever go in late?”

They exchange a horrified, wide-eyed stare for a moment too long as the question sinks slowly through the alcohol before answering in solemn unison: “Never.”

Chapter Five

Preparation

Things are weird. Julie has not lived at home since she was eighteen. She is staying in the guest room; her old bedroom is now an office. Her mother has experienced a vague, shaking thrill at having her in the house again, wants to fall into old patterns. Her father is rarely there, absent even more frequently than in the old days. When he is present, he wants to talk to her about her travel plans, wants them to go over maps and edit the itinerary together over beer and pretzels, though he knows she has finished such preparations months ago. All that is left is to pack. She plans to do it soon, even though her flight is almost a month away, wearing cast-off grubbies and pottering barefoot around the house until the time to depart comes.

It is afternoon, Wednesday or Thursday (she is not sure, relishes the freedom not to be). She is curled in a large mocha leather chair with her old Siamese, Dennis. His sleepy purring is a pleasant vibration at her side. She bends to sniff his belly, a strange, deep, musky scent, remembers so much that she has forgotten. What it was like to live in this house. People she used to know. Her first kiss. First intercourse. It seems hazy, distant, attractive, elusive. She cannot remember exactly. She sees it in golden soft focus when she tries. I am too young for nostalgia, she thinks but cannot brush away the unsettled feeling, the sense of having lost something. Her mother comes in, home from the women’s shelter where she volunteers, possessed of the parishioner’s glow.

“Hi, Julie, glad you’re up.” There is a barb in it, a Puritanical disapproval at sleeping into the afternoon no matter one’s bedtime or the circumstances. “I thought you could help me with the garden, and then we could go out for ice cream. Furner’s is open again.”

“Sure, Mom.”

* * *

The resuscitated ice cream parlor reeks of sugar and slightly soured milk. The milk funk reminds Julie unpleasantly of the dull white gargling beast of a refrigerator that stubbornly anchored the southern end of her elementary school’s lunchroom, opening its heavy maw to generations of little hands and arms. From its curdled gummy depths came the tragic third-grade carton of 2% that, despite an expiration date comfortably of the future, brought up three forkfuls of mashed potatoes and peas, a lightly chewed and wholly recognizable bite of meatloaf. Early school days seem punctuated by vomit—second grade ran from Sally’s nervous first day urp through Jana’s unfortunate upchuck on the laden spinning merry-go-round to Brian’s projectile performance in that year’s terminal musical. And now she feels as if even one polite spoonful of rocky road is beyond her capability; Mother will be angry. Perhaps wiggling out of gardening was no triumph at all.

Mother is back at their booth with bowls of ice cream and big spoons. She talks of how faithful the new owners have been in restoring the place, which looks like a 1950s diner and indeed opened during that decade as an outlet for the large dairy of the same name. It closed as Julie entered junior high and remained vacant until recently. She has not given the place a thought since the passing disappointment at the tail end of that girlhood summer, but the parlor obviously means more to Mother than that. She is lost in time, was waiting by the jukebox for a sundae when the news came that Kennedy had been shot. Julie lets her talk but listens only sporadically, thinking of her own past and how it seems so poorly defined, detached. She soon feels well enough to eat a few bites of ice cream, but her bowl has become a soupy mess. She clears the table of their things, stops by the restroom to wash her sticky fingers, and stands by the door looking out, waiting while Mother says a few words of greeting to some of the other customers.

Chapter Six

Blocked

Gilbert has trouble writing. He has invested in an elaborate fantasy for this summer, will bang out the novel that he has been kicking around in the mythical Kerouac spurt. It is not the novel that he began in undergrad before switching to literature. It’s new, fresh, a clean break. He even bought an old Underwood and an antique cherry desk to hold it, succumbing to the sort of fateful romanticism that he finds so appealing in Shelley.

His apartment is perfect, the upper floor of an old house. An adorable, archetypal elderly couple, retired professors both, owns the house and occupies the first floor and basement when not traveling in Europe. He has wooden floors, large windows, vintage lighting and furniture, three rooms—a small bedroom, a study, and a living room—plus a thoroughly Victorian water closet. He pays shockingly little in rent (he will watch the house and tend the plants while the owners are away). He has enough left over to keep a stock of wine on hand, visiting a local shop in the company of the male Dr. Willard, his landlord, and benefiting from his companion’s recommendations of inexpensive but interesting French and Italian reds.

But every night there the Underwood sits, an appealing, appalling still-life, perfectly lighted, an empty glass and an empty bottle to its right, the same cruel paragraph of a beginning leering through the dust of its mocking, curled page.

* * *

On an incongruously beautiful afternoon in August, Gilbert, unable to face the domestic tableau, wanders Georgetown. A small sign, advertising a second-floor stationery shop, halts his erratic progress. A narrow staircase opens onto a perfect little store, a set piece almost, probably smaller than his bedroom, of imported paper goods. He browses for a conspicuous period, at the terminus of which he walks dazedly into light (should darkness not by now have fallen?) with handmade paper and envelopes of curiously nonstandard size and a Portuguese notebook with a deep blue cover. Perhaps typing isn’t his thing. Even Amis still produces a true manuscript. While the charge of Luddite carries increasing weight, does eccentricity not remain an authorial virtue?

Hoping that a change of scenery might be just the thing to accompany a change of implements, Gilbert walks to Foggy Bottom and rides the train to Metro Center, there transferring for the short surf to Dupont. As he emerges onto the scene—men are definitely scoping—he realizes that he lacks a pen. A brief search down bustling New Hampshire nets a serviceable Cross. Armed and dangerous, he occupies a bench on the circle, neatly scribbling stream of consciousness garbage onto the crisp virgin page. Once he has filled three leaves, the crushing knowledge that it is time to halt descends. A half carafe of rotgut red, hastily purchased at Zorba’s along with a cucumber salad that someone, somewhere might consider acceptable sustenance buoys him to resolution. Don’t force it, chum. And take this academic endeavor seriously, mate. Who has ever exhibited greater need for the escape hatch, for the safety school, for Plan B? So the Underwood is decorative. What of it? Couldn’t it be stuffed cats, animation cels, Coca-fucking-Cola advertisements? He could smoke weed, hell, he could smoke Cubans. Many things are worse. It rings false while providing comfort. He has no desire for those other things, those hasty togas, those midnight robes of state. He does want to be a writer, has never desired anything more, damn it! Is ambition so easily subverted? Did a lack of talent ever stop anyone? And is this the god-damned Inquisition?