Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the short story of the week - this one very much about being in one’s 20s. At co-founder reflects on Covid, Camus’ Plague, and a very personal grief.
Best,
Sam
THE TRIP TO NEW YORK
Carl already had a tendency to over-book and for New York he was exuberant. After college, it had become the hub. From his resort in the Tyrol he had checked facebook to see how his old classmates were doing – and because he was usually very drunk on Trappist beer at the lonesome moments he did this, all sorts of metaphors occurred to him, that he was the eagle in its eyrie watching the plain below, that the highlands received only the news of import from the valleys, that sort of thing, so self-indulgent he was ashamed even to think it – and, as far as he could tell, everybody else really was just scurrying from one place to another. Reading between the lines in people’s statuses, people’s posts, he learned about companies that had flopped, mostly dormroom enterprises, people giving up on false start jobs, people giving up on cities – lots of upbeat messages about ‘fresh starts’ and ‘opportunities’ and ‘lessons.’ Sometimes – and this really was what drew him to facebook – he came across a genuine cri de coeur, someone talking about how life was just not going their way, how they’d expected some post-college transition blues but this was ridiculous. In other words, Carl felt he wasn’t missing very much. In his Tyrolean seclusion, he skied, he had a modest income from ski lessons, he was learning to shoot, he had a beautiful place to stay and the owners had shown no signs of tiring of him, he stayed up late in the lodge, the walls lined with old books and hunting trophies, drank a variety of complicated, pedigreed liquors, and, between the mountain air and the heady isolation, ideas percolated into him. They were disparate and contradictory, sometimes ideas for companies, sometimes films, sometimes social movements, but they were frequent and they seemed to choose him and made him feel that, unlikely as it seemed, he actually was on the right track. Sometimes, one of the lodge’s wizened visitors had said to him once, it’s better to wait than to pursue.
And he had a girlfriend. College had been surprisingly unconducive, at least in his social group, to relationships – everybody was into hookups, which meant, in practice, that they spent a lot of time playing beer pong with one another and boasting about past conquests, and, once again with a little bit of detective work on the online profiles, he could tell that very little had changed – all the ironic ‘it’s complicated’ posts with somebody of the same sex and then the somewhat frenetic posts when someone was in one of the hubs, New York or London or L.A., and wrote ‘Here in town for the weekend! Let’s hang out!’ which meant almost always that the most recent stab at a relationship had just ended. He and Mariana had been steady and reliable for almost four years, since he was a senior and she was a flirtatious and hard-to-place sophomore. True, their relationship had almost always been long-distance. He had been concerned about that, had offered, in a kind of benevolent way, like a terminal patient, to break up with her when he was graduating. “I’m moving into a very different phase,” he had said. “I’ll be lonely and I’ll be desperate and there won’t be any dating pool around – so I’ll clutch onto you. And that won’t be fair because you’ll be in college, and there will be all kinds of possibilities, all kinds of people, and it’ll be like you’re tethered to this old man.”
They had been lying in her dorm room, their heads propped on their elbows, facing one another, braiding together their free hands, running the tips of their fingers, the backs of their hands against one another’s hips and ribs. It felt like a permanent condition, they were talking as maturely as they could manage about the future, but really it was impossible to imagine life being anything other than this.
She got quiet, looked down, clenched her cheeks. Usually, when she looked this way, it meant that she was mad at him about something or other – they’d been together only three months, an eternity of three months, and in that time she had gone after him with a reformer’s zeal, picked apart his clothes, his life plans, his friends, the way he greeted people, the way he treated school, his habits of speaking, the conventional, lazy views he held. He had never experienced anything similar in his admittedly limited dating life. Girls, both where he’d grown up and in college, prided themselves on being chill and detached. They made fun of you but they left you alone. ‘Boundaries’ were a very important concept. Mariana ran roughshod over that idea and at first it had been nerve-wracking and off-putting but then he found it invigorating – she was right, infuriatingly, she was right about everything, without any exception that he’d discovered, and then he took it as an incredible, a heartfelt compliment that she cared so much about him to fix him up. This time when she looked up her eyes were moist and she had the steely face of a martyr.
“I don’t believe in institutions managing love,” she said. It was her way that almost everything she said, no matter if it was a completely fresh idea, sounded like some long-held principle. “I hate this idea that relationships are like phases in your career. Everybody gets to college and they stand around in the courtyard the first week of school and on the phone they break up with their high school boyfriend. And then they have their time to hook up, and then when they get bored of hooking up they find somebody to keep them company through the sophomore slump. And then when they graduate they’re moving on and that’s the end of the relationship. It’s so – ” she looked around for the word. It was one of her sweetest, most kissable gestures, the way she would pause everything while she searched, almost physically, for the perfect word and warded off all his cuddly attempts to distract her. “It’s so corporate,” she said with finality. “It’s not how love should be run. It’s not how I want to run love. I love you. I loved you as a senior when we were in the same place. It’s not like I’ll stop loving, not like I’ll stop loving you because you’re a college graduate – because you’ve gone somewhere else. I think it would be a pretty pathetic kind of love if we broke up because we weren’t in the same time zone.”
It had been a good speech, like the moment when the hero rallies the troops in a movie, and, really, that was what had sustained them for all this time. One by one, everybody else in a relationship from college had broken up. When he was 25 and had tabulated the relationship results of all his friends, he had proudly gchatted Mariana to say, “We’re the last ones standing.” They had never been in the same place for more than a few weeks at a time – the longest had been when he stayed with her for a month senior year in her off-campus apartment. Those meetings were never quite as he’d pictured them from his Tyrolean heights, which was basically the window blinds closed, a jug of water on the bedstand, their clothes on the floor, a constant intertwining of limbs, an exploration of every corner of the mattress, but the meetings were very nice nonetheless – a lot of cappuccinos from cute local places she had discovered, these winding conversations that were (this was one of her lines) the ‘best possible types of conversation,’ directionless, circling back on points made a long time earlier, dynamic and free-flowing and full of interesting ideas that they could never quite remember afterwards. The month he stayed in her off-campus apartment had been a heady experience in a different way. She had been depressed, or ‘had the blues,’ which was her preferred way to describe it, had her own terror of the world beyond graduation and for virtually a full month he had sat in her bedroom, holding her in his arms, trying, either with deductive questions or patient silence, to dig away at the causes of her sorrow. It was a difficult experience, not least because he had felt like a ghost on a visitation to his old campus, but that month had probably been the high-point of their whole time together. He had the feeling that he was a bear, a protective, long-suffering bear who could take this delicate creature in his arms and let her weep against his chest. The rest of the time it had been skype and gchat, managing their time differences as shrewdly as if they were running an international consortium – it helped that he so often stayed up late. They sent each other pictures of where they were – photographs taken with as little thought as possible of their immediate surroundings, that would have made no sense to anyone else. They talked about missing and loving each other at least four or five times per day. They made all kinds of promises about how they would spend the time when next they saw each other. After a couple of years, she finally overcame her reticence and agreed to sext and phone sex with him, at which she had proved to be surprisingly proactive and imaginative – and it had fulfilled a very particular fantasy of his, the large, dark, quiet hunting lodge, the computer sound turned low so no one in the house could hear, and the two of them clutching themselves, their pupils dilating in the video chat.
The last few months had been difficult – well, not difficult, just a little shapeless. Through shared neglect, the video sex, which really had been a constant for a while, tapered off. There were prolonged silences in the phone conversations. These were justified on the grounds that people who really knew each other didn’t need to keep the conversation going – it was one of her lines that you become real friends with somebody only after the first unfilled pause. It was nice in a way, he could hear her doing her course work through the line, turning the pages in her reader. There was a romance to it, like they were in the movie Her, sharing a life as much as possible. He suspected, though, that the real reason for the silences was that there was both nothing and too much to say – nothing more to say between them really, their relationship was what it was, the plot hadn’t advanced in any way since yesterday when they’d last talked, and then there were all the details of their separate lives, the brilliantly cynical man who ran the lodge, the guests filtering in and out from all corners of Europe, the blue glint of the snow on the mountaintops – nothing that could be contained in a story or a communication, small details, but they had a way of accumulating. In the middle of one of these directionless conversations – they were talking about missing each other – he said, “Well, maybe I could visit at the end of April.” He had said it impulsively, to pick up a lull, and then suddenly it was so. It was the end of ski season, there were no guests expected at the lodge, and it would be easy enough to cover his admittedly nebulous duties there. “You will?” she said and, in her tone, he heard something he hadn’t heard in some time – the sound of things happening, excitement, the world moving forward.
She threw herself into planning for it. He, of course, procrastinated in looking up tickets. By the time he did, prices had gone discouragingly up. She was like a travel agent, hunting around the web for deals, connections, obscure sites with discounts. She set it all up, she was the one who got on the phone with airlines to negotiate a change of dates when some conference of hers got rescheduled. In the end, just about the only preparation he did was to visit a florist on the way to the airport. He boarded the plane clutching a complicated bouquet of reds and whites and yellows that he had been assured went well together. He discovered the unique difficulty of storing flowers in an overhead bin, although the stewardesses smilingly treated it as a special case and rearranged a whole set of suitcases to help him. That was what he was holding, his bouquet, a little wilted, a few of the petals shed on the trip, dragging his suitcase behind him when he met her in the arrivals lobby at JFK.
Carl was a handsome, broad-chested guy, he had been the starting tight end on his high school football team and had been offered athletic scholarships out of that, and she was of a completely different body type, small and birdlike, but somehow they always fit together. She was waiting for him behind the barrier next to the cab drivers. She scampered off to the side to greet him. He kissed her on the lips and then they hugged and then they kissed again. She was very soft and warm, the way she always was when he hadn’t seen her in a long time – and, really, this was the best thing of all, among all the fantasies this was the most enduring, the airport, the embrace, and then the walking-off, hand-in-hand, to look for a taxi, their arms swinging together, like kids with a whole summer in front of them, Mariana holding her bouquet aloft. Like all fantasies, it was ephemeral, had a way of subtly disappointing. It was over quickly, there was a slight frisson between them, a static of not quite melting-into-one-another, which was, without exception, how it had always been envisioned.
He was a good sport, chill guy, and he kept up the conversation, told a story from the plane, got their bearings and found their way to the cab stand. Waving off assistance from the driver, he organized the trunk and lifted his suitcase into it. On the ride into the city, the familiar ride, he placed his hand in hers across the middle seat. He told her about the Tyrol, told her how much he missed her, how good he had gotten at skiing, it really was completely effortless now, he didn’t think at all, seemed to achieve a perfect zero with his body and the skis and the snow. He didn’t neglect to notice the cluster of skyscrapers across the East River, which always looked exactly like the Emerald City from the yellow brick road, and were just as improbable, and the traffic on the Triborough Bridge, the way you could feel life just streaming into the city. He left a generous tip, hauled all his luggage upstairs, so that she had to carry nothing but the flowers. He expressed his appreciation for some changes in her apartment since he’d last seen it. They kissed again. She put a tea kettle on the burner. He went to the bathroom to shower and clean up. When he came out, there were two cups of tea on doilies on the coffee table. She was sitting on the couch, her chin buried in her palm, staring at a spot on the floor. She looked so desolate that he had to say something.
“Everything ok?” he said.
She continued to stare at the floor as if she hadn’t heard him. When she looked up, her eyes were leaden and full of tears.
“Carl,” she said, and her voice was wavering, like she was asking him to take pity on her. “I can’t do this.”
He really was a very chill, very affable guy. He took a deep breath, didn’t get angry, sat down next to her. He took her hand in his. She let him but she didn’t meet his look. After a bit, she moved her hand away. “What happened?” he said and there was a long silence, the ticking of the clock, the traffic passing in the street outside. When he reached to sip his tea, she said, “I don’t feel it anymore.”
“Feel what?”
“Feel love.”
“For me?”
“I don’t feel love for you anymore,” she said carefully. “I don’t feel a connection. I’m really sorry.”
He tried not to slurp his tea but it was very hot and he did slurp it a little bit. Putting his cup down, composing himself just as much as if he were a wronged lover in an old movie, he said, “Did you meet someone else?” His voice was very low, he wasn’t completely sure she heard him. She shook her head firmly. “No, that has nothing to do with it,” she said. “I just don’t feel it with you.”
It was evening and already it was possible to talk, as matter-of-factly as if he were some visiting relative, about sleeping arrangements. She brought out a pillow, sheet, and blanket for the living room couch. She laid it out, had a sudden stab of guilt. “Maybe I should sleep here,” she said. “I’m the one that did this.” He was too much of a gentleman for that, took out his clothes. There was a drinks thing he’d said he’d go to, a few friends they both had in common. He supposed, wryly, that she didn’t want to go to that. She shook her head.
He sat on the couch, was looking at his things. She came to his side, ruffled his hair. Then she went to her bedroom and the door closed behind her.
Carl was exhausted from traveling but it was the kind of exhaustion where you’re wired. She had given him keys and he knew the city well from a pair of summer internships. There was a whole group of his friends meeting at a large bar near Union Square. They were college friends, the people he’d been hanging out with at the time he met Mariana – at which point he’d promptly disappeared from their circle, spent all his time in Mariana’s dorm room. They were milestone friends, the kinds of people you hugged very deeply at graduations and reunions, the ones you always promised to get coffee with, and because you never followed through and never got entangled with them, they were the ones you felt most warmly towards, in the purest possible way – how they were always there, always registering your life; at your funeral or on Judgment Day they would be the ones to vouch for your character. Carl imagined sauntering into the bar, and when they asked how he was doing, he would say, as nonchalantly as if it were a film noir, ‘I got dumped today.’ He imagined the way the whole table would hang on his story, the sudden tilting of interest in his direction – the realization that, for the first time in memory, Carl was single, the way scenarios would proliferate, how people would start to play matchmaker.
The bar was very large and very dark, Carl fought his way to an area in the back with its own bar and a pair of pool tables. He was very late, no one had really expected him to come. His group was scattered. Micah, who he met first, greeted him with a bear hug, and, like he was giving a house tour, pointed airily to where everyone was. Sarah, the prettiest girl, at the bar, facing away, locked in a long conversation with a stranger. A pair of guys holding down the pool table, a couple of others over the jukebox, debating the selection. Micah was in a sport coat that was hanging loose off him. He had always been on the heavy side and now he had given into it, he had jowls and a paunch, facial hair that was coalescing into a beard. “It’s just the grind man,” he was saying. The music was very loud, and spittle blew from his mouth as he struggled to be heard. He was holding an amber beer away from his body as if it were a lecturer’s pointer. “Everybody’s just blowing off steam. 40 hours a week billable, no way to do it and not be an alcoholic. I wouldn’t mind that, it’s the shitty food you eat all the time, that’s why I’ve gotten so fat.” With his free hand, he reached affectionately for his belly. He seemed to be taking his hosting duties seriously. He was giving Carl a full run-down of the group, skipping straight to the weaknesses, the vulnerabilities. “Damian in grad school for linguistic sociology, nobody can figure out what that means, trying to write his Ph.D. Aaron in the grind too, also an associate, except for some reason he has all this free time that he spends distracting Damian from his thesis.” He was looking around a bit haplessly, like an anchorman on a slow news day. “Oh, and Sarah’s about to close on a place, that’s what we’re allegedly celebrating – that and you’re being in town – she was all set to move with this dude to some place in the suburbs, instead dumped him, made an offer on her place in the city. Love conquers all – except when there’s real estate involved.”
He was pleased with himself. The group had been the same way in college, how they would pick each other up from hospital overnights, once or twice from the drunk tank – they all had a wide margin of error for each other, were very forgiving of one another’s frailties. “What about you?” Micah said, “what’s doing in the great big world? Where’s Mariana?”
Carl put his hands in his pockets. He said, “She’s at her place sleeping.”
“Aren’t you the one with the jet lag?” Micah said.
“Yeah, but I’m the one that’s excited to see you. She can meet up with you any time she wants.”
“Not that she ever does,” Micah said. He made a sweeping gesture with his beer arm. “You should say hi to everyone,” he said. “Just go up to them. Nobody’s doing anything important. They’ll be thrilled to see you.”
Carl made his rounds. He hesitated before tapping Sarah’s shoulder – women were so touchy about that. She swung around and shrieked and gave him a big hug. She was really pretty, a bit short, but shining, very straight hair, she was some complicated ethnic combination that gave her a dark-eyed olive complexion. As long as he could remember, the entire group had orbited, subtly but inexorably, around her. “This was really crazy,” she shouted over the music. “Cory wanted the jukebox – like you can’t listen to music without a jukebox. And now we’ve listened to Sweet Home Alabama fifteen times and we can’t have a conversation.” She made the same apologetic sweeping gesture that Micah had, it was a signature of their group, a way of taking everything in, making it clear that none of it was that impressive. “We’ll be in my apartment on Sunday, it’s the same apartment I’ve always had but bought instead of rented so that’s a big deal. That’ll be civilized. You should come. You should bring Mariana.”
He made his way to the pool players and to the jukebox jockeys and to a small group hunkered over a countertop. By the time he finished his round, everybody was agreeing that the place had been a mistake, that it was time to head home. He walked with a few of them to the subway and then he took the train back to Mariana’s place, opened the front door gingerly so as not to wake her. The sofa was already nicely made up for him and he slid himself under the covers. The door to her room was firmly closed.
She was up before him and she ran some errands. He waited for her, fooled around with his phone on the couch, and when she came back she agreed to have breakfast with him. His bouquet was in water in a vase on the kitchen counter. They sat across a diner counter from each other. There was something remote in her expression, which he had never seen before. There were long pauses. He found the silverware in front of them oddly enrapturing. Like spies, they paused their conversation whenever the waiter was there or approaching. “You have to give me a reason,” he said, emphasizing all the words. “You owe me that.”
“I already told you,” she said.
“That wasn’t a reason.”
She got a distracted look – like she was annoyed, he thought, like all she could think about was getting out of the conversation. “I don’t feel a connection,” she said levelly. “I’ve felt for a while that it’s gone.”
“You didn’t say – ”
“I didn’t want to admit it but I felt it. You must have felt it too.”
Carl didn’t dignify that with a response.
“There aren’t reasons for this, it’s not something that you can fix or can’t fix. If there’s no connection, there’s no connection. I felt it over the phone and then in the airport I knew it for sure.”
She paused and sipped at her drink. “It’s nothing you did or didn’t do,” she said shruggingly. “You and I are just very different people.”
Long, excruciating silences seemed to be the order of the day. He had developed, all of a sudden, a new gesture, shaking his head vigorously from side to side, like a child absolutely vetoing an adult’s suggestion. At the end of the meal, after he’d finished his eggs and they were waiting for the check, she said, “What are your plans?”
“I bought a ticket for two weeks,” he said primly. “I just got off a plane. I’m not getting back on one.”
He did make a point of being out of her apartment as much as possible during the day. He did the things he had never done when he was living in New York, or when he was visiting Mariana. He went to museums by himself. He walked around Greek vases, Roman armor, in his mind’s eye he tried to summon up the people the objects once belonged to, he tried to figure out whether they were in any way similar to him. He let himself drift between neighborhoods, he enjoyed the feeling of coming across a massive crowd, feeling it pass over him like a wave.
He found that his thoughts were all gearing themselves towards the party on Sunday. It was a one bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, cramped but pre-war with marble flourishes. He didn’t let the cost of it overly impress him – Sarah was a spoiled kid, that was her persona in the group, the basis of her sense of humor, her dad was wealthy, and Carl was sure that he had, at the very minimum, chipped in for it. There was the usual assortments of six-packs and wine bottles. The cruditiés were surprisingly diverse and sophisticated. He was roundly embraced. A drink and plate were handed to him. He was given a fairly intricate tour of the apartment – “only one room,” said Sarah, “but you can see all the nooks and crannies.” He was ushered into a plush chair, Micah and Sarah gathered around him, Sarah sitting on the edge of the bed.
They were in a different mood now, they kept apologizing for the other night. Apparently, it had been out of control. They could chat now, they could actually catch up. They wanted to know all about the Tyrol. He told them about the beauty of it, the ease of living there, a story about the brilliantly cynical man who ran the lodge which had them in stitches. “That is what we are missing,” Sarah said emphatically. “That is what McKinsey does not have, and needs to have, the opportunity, when you’re ticked off, to send someone skiing into a bear’s den.”
Micah leaned over from his seat and lightly touched Carl’s knee. He had downgraded from his sport coat, was in the jeans and sweatshirt that Carl remembered from college, like a soldier in civvies. “And where is Mariana this time?” he said. “Still avoiding us?”
Carl took a sip from his beer can. “She dumped me,” he said, very much in the casual way that he had rehearsed when he was walking into the Union Square bar. He let his audience soak it in. “Got off the plane and she was right there and we kissed – ”
“You smooched,” Micah substituted.
“We smooched and then – I don’t know – and then something happened, she felt, some feminine intuition thing – ”
Micah laughed knowingly at that principle.
“She felt that it wasn’t right, it wasn’t working – ”
“She broke up with you in the airport?” said Cory who had stopped by while in his search for a corkscrew.
“Not in the airport,” Carl clarified. “She was weird in the airport and on the ride back and then she broke up with me when we were at her apartment.”
“Why?” said Micah.
“No real reason. Lost connection. Didn’t want to do long-distance probably, exactly the kind of thing that we always told each other we wouldn’t do – which she now finally did.”
Carl was impressed with himself, his sangfroid, how measured he was, but Micah and Sarah exchanged a look the way two people might who had just heard a very distressing news bulletin. Sarah reached for his hand and took it. As if in an enveloping maneuver, Micah, at the same time, leaned in, said, “What happens now?”
Carl looked at him evenly, with the same sangfroid as earlier. “I’m here,” he said. “I don’t want to cancel the trip just because of some girl.”
Micah patted his knee. “Hanging tough,” he said.
Sarah had her lips pursed, this complicated, feminine look, like she was assembling the entire history of the relationship and the grief he felt from it. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You guys seemed great together. I really wish I wasn’t hosting. I really wish I could properly spend time with you on this.”
She looked at him, this look with a chin upturned, a look from an older sister telling him to buck up. After a bit, she pressed his hand and moved away – there were people ringing the doorbell, her phone was blowing up. Micah stayed with him a little, put together a replica of Sarah’s complicated look. They chatted about how he was spending his time in New York, how, to be honest, there had been some premonitions of the breakup but he had chosen to not pay any attention to them. Eventually, Carl put him out of his misery, went to get another drink.
The party had filled up. It was dense, with conversation in small, tight groups of people who seemed to know each other very well. Carl was starting to get very buzzed. They were talking about real estate some, about trips they were planning – “when they could get away.” Mostly, they were talking about their jobs, how demanding their jobs were, how much they hated their jobs. It was hard not to miss the secret pride in their voices every time they talked about what they did and how much it drove them crazy. On the far side of the apartment, Sarah was giving her tour of all the nooks and crannies. Her long hair was draped over the side of her face. It had really happened, thought Carl through his buzz. The world had moved forward, it wasn’t what it had been, it had become mean and shrewd, and everyone else had kept pace with it. He was the only one who had been left behind.
Hi Castalia,
I do think this is like an episode in a short film, what's impressed me most is that it's neat & tidy, grammatically (past tense consistently). Intend to read everything here.
Is this still possible to grant me a free pass to your Substack? Current student in creative writing. Thanks.
email: bigwendylau@outlook.com
8 of these bound together will make an truth in advertising sweet and sour cautionary tales. Shiit put a disnick character on the cover nothing too racy not servicing the wolf stealing his stupid watch chain. I wanted this Caution to act out for me why it is seen in polite company excessuve to be an epicure. But he is instead motivated by half formed ideas. For instance that his long time date would clearly have gone in for a semblanc2 of a participatory party. Why anyone would want to undergo a trial by combat i donot know, it just is one drunken theatrical possibility. Teasing and pleasing. I like it. I will tell you from my investigations one dark day why people cringe at a drunk. Likely in the moment failing to recognize an excitable child like their adhd selves. No idea i am collecting scrapbooks.