Chapter Nine #2
“You caught me,” Landon said. Because what could he say?
No, you have it all wrong, I’m your ex-husband who is still madly in love with you?
I followed you here, to your nude modeling class, but I promise I’m not creepy, I’m a registered, trademarked good guy?
He took a breath, then spit out the lie.
“I took the pill and just felt like I could do anything. And then I thought, well why not this?” Landon was parroting things that he’d heard and read, like an actor in an improv class.
“I used to want to make money, and now I just genuinely don’t care.
I feel called to this. Or something like this.
Something I feel certain my past self would have found pointless.
I also thought about writing a novel. I guess I still could. ” Now he was really in it.
“That’s it,” Rose said, smile somehow growing wider. “It’s like, at our core, all we really want to do is create. It’s all so hopeful, my heart could burst.”
Landon’s, too. “It’s so nice to talk to someone who gets it.”
“Rose!” the professor called, with a slight edge. “Almost ready?”
“Almost!” She tossed her long brown hair back over her shoulder and fiddled with the straps of her robe. “What’s your name?”
“Jamie,” Landon said, probably a beat too slow.
“Jamie,” she repeated. “I know this is probably going to sound weird, because you’re about to spend upward of an hour staring at me naked, but do you have any plans after this?”
He knew he had to keep playing it cool, something he wasn’t sure he had ever successfully done for quite so long. “Nothing concrete,” he said. “Just checking out the area to see if it’s a place I’d want to live for a year or two.”
She brightened. “There’s a coffee shop around the corner, if you’re interested. I love talking to other people who’ve taken the pill. It’s like being in a secret club with some of the best people in the world. Don’t you agree?”
“That’s just how I would have described it. You took the words right out of my mouth.” Landon flipped his sketchpad to a fresh page. “And I’m still working through jet lag. Coffee would be great.”
“Meet me downstairs after?” she said. “It won’t take me long to change.”
Landon nodded, pretending this wasn’t the best thing to happen to him in months. “Break a leg up there.”
“Oh God, I hope not.” Rose moved as though floating. Had she always moved with such elegance? Landon was starting to second-guess his infallible memory.
At the front of the room, Rose took her robe back off and settled into a more comfortable pose, presumably one she could hold for sixty minutes with very little issue.
Landon shook his head, alarmed by how quickly she had flipped the script on him.
He traded the charcoal back and forth between his hands until both palms were coated.
“I’ll remind you all that this is a different exercise entirely,” Professor Amos said.
“Precision is key here. The work is not about what you feel, but what you see.” That would be hard for Landon.
When it came to Rose, he had a long track record of irrationality.
“Resist the urge to hyperfixate: the arm, the ear, the nose—they are all important but trivial in isolation. The figure in its totality is the thing.”
The hardest part for Landon would be deciding where to begin.
He could not get past those eyes, so dark and so vacant now that she was locked into the session.
What would she think about while she was up there, holding still?
Perhaps she’d spare a thought for Jamie and how he’d somehow drilled down to her essence on the first try.
Landon would spend the next sixty minutes seesawing between feeling he was the luckiest man on the planet and feeling he’d just begun digging a hole he wouldn’t know was too deep until he tried to climb out.
“Well, I, for one, found it very flattering.” Rose looked up at him over a tiny espresso cup. “First-year students usually make me look much worse than I do in real life.”
The charming coffee shop Rose selected was two blocks away from the university, just far enough that it wasn’t only patronized by undergrads, but not so close to the tourist-infested High Street that it was overrun.
The shop had a subtle Alice in Wonderland theme, serving coffee and tea in colorfully mismatched teacups on saucers, a variety of whimsical vintage hats displayed on white mannequins.
Landon spied two copies of Lewis Carroll’s novel on the long bookshelves, which would have been enough for him to confirm, but the owner had gone further and leaned them up against Cheshire Cat bookends.
Landon wished he and Rose could joke about how apt her selection was now that Landon had hurled himself through the looking glass.
“I think I gave Professor Amos false hope about my abilities,” Landon said, taking a small sip of Earl Grey from his dainty teacup. “I’m finding I prefer my work to be a little abstract.” His life, too.
“You don’t start a master’s program to make the professor happy,” Rose said, with passion.
“You get a master’s degree to turn something in that makes you happy.
To do something that makes you happy.” She smiled a little behind her cup.
“Though I don’t need to be telling you that. You took the pill.”
“Right,” he said. “You just keep saying exactly what I’m thinking.”
Rose lifted a hand to her head, massaging her temples.
“This headache has been coming on behind my eyes for the last hour. I could definitely use some food. Are you hungry? These last few months I feel hungry all the time. It makes me wonder if my other used to starve herself, but she didn’t say anything about that in the letter.
Let’s get some pastries. Their muffins are to die for, and they’re absolutely enormous. ”
The letter. Her other. He was grateful Poppy had already spoiled the fact that Rose had left something behind for her future self; otherwise, he might have fallen apart completely, instead of the quiet, internal, half unraveling he allowed himself.
“I’ll get them,” Landon said, shoving his chair so hard the plastic legs left thick black marks on the tile.
It was edging past five p.m., and the line was nonexistent.
He bent down and pressed his nose up against the glass case.
Exactly nothing in it looked appealing to him.
“Two muffins: one chocolate, one blueberry. And one of the cranberry scones.”
The teenager behind the counter moved slowly, clearly on the dregs of her shift, taking her time selecting each mass of flour and sugar and placing them in individual paper bags. “On the house,” she said. “My boss is gone, and I’m about to throw all these out, anyway.”
“Well, thanks,” Landon said. The second he felt like he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the city itself threw him a lifeline.
“Doesn’t mean you can’t tip, though.” She flashed a wan smile.
Had tipping culture infiltrated the UK, or did he just look that easy a mark?
Landon dropped the ten-pound note he’d planned to spend and considered himself and the city even.
The reprieve had done its job and given him the time to collect himself.
Jamie couldn’t be seen giving in to bouts of sadness, because Jamie had nothing to be sad about.
“So you wrote yourself a letter?” Landon spread the pastries out on napkins and used a knife to cut each muffin into four pieces, like they used to do.
“It wasn’t long,” Rose said. “I know some people write themselves these novels chock-full of every mundane detail about their other.” She grabbed a quarter of the blueberry muffin and a quarter of the chocolate, ripped off the tops, and popped both crumbly pieces in her mouth.
“I don’t really understand why those people take the pill in the first place.
The side effects are amazing, but they don’t last forever.
All you’ll be left with is the new life you’ve built or whichever pieces of your other’s life you’ve been able to put back together. ”
“They last a long time.” Landon was about as far as you could get from a forgetting pill expert, but everybody who’d turned on a television or scrolled social media in the last few years knew the basics.
There was a reason they were so popular.
People felt hopeful and optimistic for long enough to entice them to start over.
“Five years isn’t a long time.”
“It is to some people.” Landon didn’t know what compelled him to argue with her. Maybe Jamie was kind of an asshole. “I’m just saying that time is relative.”
Rose ripped off a piece of the cranberry scone. “Besides, no one’s taken it even close to that long. I mean, they’re telling us this optimism, this hope, will last at least five years, but that’s just an educated guess, isn’t it?”
“I always assumed they’d tested it on animals.”
Rose laughed, beautifully. “That’s funny. There’s your optimism showing. We’re the guinea pigs, Jamie.”
The thought was not comforting, nor was the fact that Rose didn’t seem the least bit bothered by it.
Landon did not want to think about it another minute.
“Well, my other wrote me what I would consider a medium-length letter,” he lied.
He had already taken it this far. What was the harm in digging in?
Her eyes sparkled, and she tapped a hand down on the table.
“You don’t have to share, of course, but I’m always curious to know what an other decides to include.
Can’t get enough of it, really. The internet is filled with stories, but I swear I think I’m up to date on every post as of this morning. ”
“It was a bad breakup,” Landon said. “Really bad. Soulmates and all that. He didn’t think he would ever be happy again.” Like the very best lies, it was half true. “Well, that and rising ocean temperatures. It sounds like that last degree was the tipping point for other Jamie.”