“You’re my best friend, Mac.” It was the first time either of us had said it, and it felt solemn, like a vow. “Nothing’s going to change that.”
December 29, 2021, 8:45 p.m.
SkyLoft Hotel, Los Angeles
To hide my expression, I take a slow sip of scotch, letting the heat melt and dissipate on the tip of my tongue. When I set my glass down, I feel completely fine about not being invited to Gwen’s wedding.
“Coming up soon, then?”
“Well, it’s not like it’s tomorrow.” Gwen stumbles over her words. “There’s a lot of prep to do, so I’m actually heading out there now to—”
“At the villa?”
A muscle jumps in her jaw as she nods. Gwen’s parents keep an apartment in Paris and a villa in Tuscany, as well as a time-share in Colorado for ski trips. It’s not something she’s ever enjoyed talking about, though early in our friendship I was invited to join them on several family vacations. Something always came up at home, coincidentally, just before it was time to go; some emergency with my mom, with Lily. A naked bid for loyalty.
“Andreas is on a shoot in Rome, so I’m joining him first for a little while. Then I’ll go out and help my parents get the villa ready.”
Wedding prep in Tuscany. A shoot in Rome. The alcohol is hitting my unaccustomed system hard. I wonder if Andreas came from money, like Gwen, or if he merely appreciates hers. Filmmaking is an expensive hobby. “It must be amazing. Being with someone like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . .” I search for a word. “You.”
“Andreas and I are nothing alike,” she says hurriedly, then laughs. “He’s so ambitious.”
I laugh a bit more explosively than I intended. Gwen, not ambitious? She was the one who first told me about the Program. I can still remember the thread of panic that ran through me when I read her postcard from Columbia, with its casual reference to Emerging Studies at Dwight Handler University as the “best interdisciplinary program in the country.” People here call it “the Program” like it’s a cult, she’d written, and I knew right then that she was applying. I’d been using Urbana College more like a weekend crash pad than an education, regularly spending the night in the dorm rooms of men I hooked up with at college parties. I taped Gwen’s postcard to the dashboard of my used Nissan hatchback and vowed to become exceptional. I woke up earlier, studied later, attended summer institutes where I met professors from places like Columbia and Yale who could help get me in. And when it was time, I asked Gwen, the most powerful person I knew, for a peer recommendation letter. Gwen, with typical grace, asked me for one, too. That we both got in was nothing short of a miracle, and I attributed it almost entirely to her.
It was true that in the years after she left the Program, Gwen’s do-gooder career struck me as rather quaint. Philanthropy is the teacup Chihuahua in capitalism’s designer handbag. Bethany wrote that. Gwen is the one who told me about Bethany, too. But we’ve all mellowed since then. Now I derive a strange comfort from watching Gwen attain success in a field so far from my own—her work for political exiles in Haiti, her seed fund for medical NGOs. That she would downplay it now bothers me, inviting the unwelcome thought that her current career uses her parents’ connections more than her intellect.
“Come on, Gwen. You were at the top of the Program. The best.”
Infuriatingly, she does not contradict me. Instead, she plays with the knot of her bamboo swizzle stick. “It always meant more to you than me, my being at the ‘top of the Program.’ I was so afraid of disappointing you.”
I gulp down the rest of my drink and gesture to the waiter for another. The forbidden mix of alcohol and medication has taken full effect now, and Gwen’s outline has softened to a shining brunette nimbus, her face a landscape of shadows that leap and shrink in the flickering candlelight. When I relax my eyes, I see two distinct Gwens, side by side, a present Gwen and a past Gwen. I try to sort out which is which, but they keep switching places. I wonder if she sees two of me as well: Mac and Claire, past and present me.
It’s past me who answers: “You could never disappoint me.”
She takes it as a joke, or at any rate she laughs. “Oh, really? I’m quitting my job, Mac.” Lit up by her lemony cocktail, she’s already forgotten my name again. People born rich can always choose to forget who you are at a moment’s notice. “I’m not going back to work after the wedding. I know what I want, now.” She stirs her drink.
“What is it?” I steel myself: housewife, mommy, venture capitalist, cult leader?
“To be happy.” She looks up from her drink with shining eyes.
It’s the first time this evening I want to kill her, and the last thing I remember before blacking out.
The Program
3
I stared up at the dark canopy of oak leaves on the quad. Beyond them loomed the gargoyles of Dwight Handler University and, further still, softened by a haze of pollution, the factory district of our northern industrial city.
I was here. I was really here.
“The students call it ‘Black Square.’ After the Malevich painting, of course,” said the tour guide.
The leaves weren’t really black, but a black-veined auburn where the sun shone through. I could see how later in the fall, when they carpeted the ground in inky piles, the quad might live up to its nickname, but now, in early September—the grass still green on the manicured lawn, the air crisp but not yet frigid, autumn sunlight transforming the abandoned smokestacks of the coke ovens into a romantic backdrop for its gothic spires—the DHU campus looked straight out of the catalog. Students lay reading in the grass. Professors with brutalist haircuts and leather satchels clicked across the flagstones in hard-soled shoes. The bell in the clock tower clanged three times.
I drew in a deep breath. Today was the first day of the Program, and of my real life. The proof was that Gwen stood right beside me, clutching an orientation folder that looked just like mine.
That morning I’d roamed around our shared north campus walk-up in a waking dream. Everything I saw reminded me that I was living in Gwen’s world now. The furniture consisted mostly of cast-offs from her parents’ Manhattan residence, and a brand-new TV stood in the corner of the living room, loaded with streaming apps paid for by Gwen. Even the shelves flanking the long-disused fireplace held Gwen’s books, not mine; I never bought anything I could check out of the school library. Still, I’d read all but a few—many while lounging in those same wingback chairs. They felt more like home to me than my mom’s house.
When Gwen woke up, we ate breakfast together—black coffee and Bircher muesli soaked in plain yogurt overnight, with a dollop of Gwen’s favorite almond butter—and pored over course titles in the catalog. Diasporic Feminisms. Futures of Art History. Dualities of Motion and Emotion. Introduction to Economimesis. It was easy to see why it took an average of six years to complete the Program. There was more than enough knowledge here to fill six years—six lifetimes, maybe. And I would spend every minute of them not just as Gwen’s best friend, but as her colleague. The layering of this fledgling professional relationship over our new intimacy as roommates had an intoxicating effect on me. For the first time, it hit me that if I worked hard enough, got my degree, and landed a tenure-track job as a university professor, I’d never have to leave Gwen’s world again.