December 29, 2021, 8:15 p.m.
SkyLoft Hotel, Los Angeles
Gwen’s perfect laugh reaches me from across the hotel lobby just as I step into the elevator. Through some acoustical trick of polished floors and curved walls, the unmistakable peals echo inside the elevator for a moment, a memory replayed in stereo. I turn just in time to catch a glimpse of her tossing her dark, glossy hair beneath a glinting halo of upside-down wineglasses at the hotel bar.
“Eleventh floor,” I say.
The grad student I picked up at the reception, all elbow-patched corduroy and absurd woolen scarf and lips pouting suggestively around the word Lukács, pushes the button. I try to focus on this eager young man from Yale—or is it Harvard? Fresh off my keynote, I wasn’t paying attention, but it hardly matters. The doors start to close. Once we’re alone, I’ll slide my hand down his chest, check his badge, and use the lanyard to yank him in close for a kiss as we rise skyward to my corner suite.
This train of thought is halted by the shuffle-and-clatter of drunk women in interview heels. A pair of assistant professors I recognize from the reception waves for us to hold the elevator, and my grad student, playing the gentleman, leans past me for the button. As the doors reverse their course, I note with displeasure more stragglers on the way—an elderly woman with a cane, a mother dragging a small boy. Not only do these newcomers promise to make my elevator ride with Harvard substantially less interesting, but their slipshod progress across the lobby is giving me ample time to reflect on the oddity of my first impulse, which was to ignore Gwen altogether, to pretend, as I was on the point of doing a moment ago, that I didn’t see her, didn’t know her, haven’t spent half a lifetime trying to be her.
But I have seen her, and I can’t unsee her now.
I dip into my pocket for the hotel key in its soft paper sleeve and hand it to my Ivy League companion. “Wait for me in my room,” I command, without listening for an answer. From ten paces away, the women are already squint-and-scanning our badges. In another moment one of them will recognize me from my talk and buttonhole me with the words, “Your book changed my entire way of thinking about X,” a conversation sure to segue into a full-blown explanation of her book, Discourses on Y, and a request that I read and endorse it. Without a backward glance, I step out of the elevator and into the lobby, calculating the odds that I could lose my starfucker to a bigger star in the time it takes him to get to the eleventh floor. These two women certainly don’t look important but, then, I absolutely refuse to squint.
By now the lobby is filling up, and Gwen is temporarily obscured by clusters of conference attendees deep in probing conversations about Heidegger that might lead to screwing later on. I’ve sighted Gwen around so many corners over the years that for a moment I let myself think I am mistaken, experimenting with the mixture of relief and sadness this would bring. But the closer I get, the more certain I am that the woman perched at the bar, bare legs crossed at the knee, one hand pushing back her hair as if to listen more attentively to the handsome older man toward whom she is radiating her special brand of vanilla-cashmere calm, is Gwendolyn Whitney.
My best friend.
When she sees me, Gwen’s eyes widen and her mouth opens, and I nervously anticipate some outburst of emotion, something to bridge the ten-year gap since we saw each other last. But that’s not Gwen’s way. Instead, she lays her thin white hands on the bar, closes her eyes for a moment as if pained, and steps down from the bar chair, losing a few inches of height in the process. Whispering a word to her conversation partner, she walks around the back of his chair, and by the time I reach her, she’s settled her mouth into a smile tinged with just a hint of sadness—an acknowledgment that we have not, despite our best intentions, kept up.
“Gwen.”
She notices my name badge. “Claire?”
“I go by my middle name now.”
“It suits you.” She opens her arms. “So good to see you.”
I enter into the obligatory hug and find myself briefly enveloped in her subtle perfume. I back away quickly and the scent dies.
“Of course, I should have known you’d be here.” She indicates the sign in the lobby. “How’s the conference going so far?”
“Good. I just gave a keynote.” She looks a bit too surprised, so I add quickly, “There are several. It wasn’t the opening or closing address.” More of an audition, really, for the Very Important University with whom I am interviewing first thing in the morning. One more reason I really ought to hurry up to the room and conclude my business with Harvard on the early side.
“Still,” she says, nodding appreciatively.
“Are you here long?”
She shakes her head. “Just for the night. I’m flying to Rome in the morning.”
Typical of Gwen to avoid the big chains and spend the night in a luxe boutique hotel. I can’t help but feel a tingle of pride that our tastes have once again converged, however accidentally—the Association of Emerging Studies, for all its problems, has a reputation for style. The quaint deco exterior of this historical 1920s high-rise has been preserved, its interior made over with a ferocious sleekness. “Wish I could say the same.”
“But you’re happy at . . . ?” She checks my badge again, noting the name of my university and, I assume, its less-than-glamorous location. Even though Gwen and I are technically only friends in the sense of people who haven’t yet deleted one another from social media, it stings a bit to know she hasn’t followed my career online, knows nothing of my book and my other academic successes. However painful it is to be reminded of the tragic accident that led to Gwen leaving the Program in the middle of our first year, I have managed to keep up with her various career shifts since then—the brief stint in law school, the turn to public policy, and then various NGOs for clean drinking water, the eradication of global poverty, that sort of thing. I am momentarily struck with the fear that her more virtuous world is so far removed from academia that she doesn’t realize my university is Research I, and therefore a terrific job.
“Very happy,” I say, wishing I could add that if tenure review goes as it should, I’ll soon be done with backwaters for good. The hiring committee chair of the Very Important University did, after all, nod twice during my lecture. I content myself with saying, “I’m up for tenure next year.”
Gwen frowns. “That can’t be right.”
“I made good time,” I say modestly.
“Still, that would mean it’s already been . . . ?”
“Ten years.”
She puts a slender hand to her forehead, closing her eyes briefly. Then she opens them again, and her smile returns. “Look at you. You have the life we used to dream about.”
I take in the monastic luxury of her simple cream dress, suddenly self-conscious about my artsy academic getup—black leather pants and a bulky woolen cocoon of a wrap. The oxblood boots that draw compliments from the tenured elite of bicoastal universities feel clumsy and adolescent next to Gwen’s pale, expensive-looking pumps.
I smile tightly. “We’ll see if it lasts.”
She shakes her head and waves her hand toward the tweedy crowd. “You’ll get tenure. You were born for this.”