Chapter Twenty-Four
The pleasure of stomping out that little glimpse of hope on Lewis’s face is short-lived, and all too quickly replaced by an oxygen-sucking pressure. I weave through the rows of tables, past the islands of laughter and busy food carts, my only goal to get as far away from Lewis as possible.
“Hey, watch where you’re going,” someone calls as my hands fumble for my phone to call Karo.
The news about Lewis winning the grant and keeping it a secret is tearing my chest in half and lighting the leftovers on fire, and I know Karo is the only one who can extinguish this horrible, sickening feeling.
But nobody picks up the phone, even when I try calling again.
“Frances, are you okay?”
I look up from my shaking hands, only to find Vivienne a few paces ahead, untangling her hand from Jacob’s arm.
Absolutely fucking brilliant.
Just the people I needed to run into.
“Yes,” I say, but it sounds unconvincing.
She closes the distance between us. “Were you looking for the bathrooms?”
“I’m—”
I’m good, I want to say, though I’m not sure my body remembers how to breathe. Vivienne seems to know better. Hand on my elbow, she steers me toward the psychology building.
“You don’t have to go for the smelly excuses of a toilet out there.” Rummaging in her bag, she swipes a card across the reader and pushes the door open.
I don’t have to pee, but I tell her, “Thanks. I’ll be quick.” My words come out hoarse.
“On second thought,” she muses. “I better go as well. Since I’m here already.”
The corridor ahead is dark, but the overhead lights turn on one by one as we walk, and when we reach the bathroom, Vivienne stops in front of the paper dispenser. She pulls out a towel and holds it under the faucet, as I wrap my hands around the other sink and take a deep breath.
“Here,” she says, and that’s when I see myself in the mirror. Strands of hair curling around my face, my cheeks reddened and splotched with smears of mascara.
Have I been crying?
Surely, I would’ve noticed.
Right?
Come to think of it, my throat does feel raw. Hoping none of my colleagues saw me lose control, I grip the sink tighter and focus on the porcelain against my skin. Solid, cool, grounding.
How is it that I know how the different cells on the human retina transform a visual image into a highly complex electric signal, yet seem to have no idea when tears are running from my eyes?
After what must be a solid minute of breathing in and out to collect myself, I take the towel from Vivienne’s hand and scrape it over my skin. Vivienne leans against the edge of the sink, arms crossed in front of her, and quietly watches as I clean the gunk of mascara and tears from my face.
“Didn’t you want to go…” I trail off, nodding my head toward the bathroom stalls.
She shakes her head. “Look, I know I may not be your first choice when it comes to talking about anything, for very obvious reasons. But if you feel like you need to get something off your chest, I’m happy to listen.”
I do need to get something off my chest, a lot actually, but it’s not like I can tell her about any of it. My dream job is tangled up in the research funding Lewis got, but so what? Vivienne’s working for her fiancé, so that’s clearly not an issue for her.
“I don’t think you’d understand,” I say, disposing my tissue in one of the bins.
Try me, her lifted eyebrows say, and I don’t know if it’s the challenge, or the fact that my emotion regulation is nowhere near as good as I’d like it to be, but I blurt out, “Lewis’s future lab has offered me what is basically the position of my dreams, but there’s no way I can take it because it’s his money.
I can’t depend on that. I can’t have people thinking I got my job because I slept with the boss, which… ”
I stop myself there, my brain chanting Don’t get involved and It’s her relationship, but I’m too angry at Lewis, at Jacob, at all of them, to even care.
“… is your breakup with Jacob, all over again,” Vivienne finishes my sentence, and my jaw?
It drops.
“What? You know about that?”
And yet you’re still with him? I don’t say it, but it hangs there in the air, together with the piercing scent of disinfectant.
Vivienne sighs. “Let me help you.” Too stunned by the change of direction in this conversation, I let her step closer to me.
I stay put when she rummages for something in her purse and then starts dabbing it under my eyes.
“A little magic from my mamie,” she says, her touch on my skin careful and surprisingly soothing.
When she’s done, my face is not only clean and practically glowing, but the roil of emotions in my stomach has quieted down a little, too. Except now my head is full of questions.
“Voilà, much better. My grandmother was a stunning woman. A bit enigmatic sometimes. But before leaving the house, she would always put a little dab of tan lotion under her eyes. That was her little trick,” Vivienne tells me, pursing her lips as she leans sideways against the wall and finds my gaze in the mirror.
“Look, Frances. Believe it or not, I was nervous before the Sawyer’s and before I met you.
Think about it,” she adds when I frown, “you’re the only person Jacob has ever been in a proper relationship with.
Five years! I haven’t even known him for that long, so maybe you understand that I was intimidated by this woman who spent so much time with my fiancé. ”
Her perspective is one that hasn’t crossed my mind at all yet, but as she takes me through it, I see her overfamiliarity that first day and her extra dose of kindness ever since for what it truly was: her way of dealing with her nerves in an awkward setup.
She truly was just trying to be kind in a situation that was as uncomfortable for her as it was for me.
“I feel like we have a lot in common,” she continues, “but also, and this is horrible, I feel like I owe you? Jacob told me how things between you ended, that he was responsible for it, and I know that may be hard to believe. I can’t fault you for that, really.
He didn’t treat you well, and I so wish you didn’t have to go through that.
“But at the same time, I didn’t have to go through that because you changed him for the better. It’s complicated, and,” she swallows hard, “as I said, it probably doesn’t paint me in the best light, but I’m grateful for it. For you.”
I appreciate her honesty, but at the same time, it’s salt in a wound that’s already burning strong with dejection, and now jealousy, too. Maybe five years from now, I’ll run into Lewis’s new partner at a conference only to hear how he finally learned from his mistakes.
That is, if I’m still in academia then.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I say quietly, and even though I’ve been in this bathroom for a year too many, I pull my hair tie out of the frizzy leftovers of my braid and pile my curls into a knot.
“When I saw you with Lewis that first day, it was a relief. It looked like things had worked out for you, too, and it made me feel better to see you’d landed in such a good place.” Vivienne pushes herself off the wall before following me to the door. “Though maybe I was too quick to judge.”
My heart stops for a moment, fearing she means Lewis and me faking it as a couple, but she adds, “I know it’s hard to figure out how to run this beast of a marathon that is academia…
How to push and pace ourselves, balance ambition with the things that make us happy.
It seems like an impossible situation that you’re in, but I’m confident you’ll find a way. ”
Out in the corridor, the motion-sensitive lights blink on again as they lead us back to the foyer, where the music and chattering voices from the picnic are dialed up louder.
“I’m not so sure. But thank you,” I tell Vivienne, even though, clearly, she resolved her impossible situation in a way that’s out of the question for me.
She pushes the button that unlocks the door. “I know you will. You know, Jacob and I were long distance for almost two years before I finally moved here. I refused to work for him—wanted to do my own thing.”
“What made you change your mind?”
Ahead of us, the doors open up to the balmy summer night and Jacob, who’s waiting for us under a lamp pole, thumb scrolling through his phone. Before she heads back to her fiancé, Vivienne turns and catches my gaze. “I didn’t,” she says, a furrow on her forehead.
“You didn’t what?” I ask.
But her next words don’t give me any clarity. “I didn’t change my mind,” she says, and then Jacob notices us and comes to meet her halfway, and it’s too late to ask her what she meant.
Once Vivienne and Jacob have ambled off and I’ve decided I’ve had enough of this event, I wander aimlessly around Morningside Heights, my brain flipping through the memories I’ve formed with Lewis this past week.
How long has he known? When we went for our hike?
When we slept together that first night?
When I opened up to him about Jacob, sipping on the hot cocoa we made in the middle of the night?
I wish I could Control + z my way back to the point when I heard about Jacob’s engagement and correct Vivienne. Fast-forward to now, and it’d just be my long-standing rival offering me a position. It would still be a mess, but a more straightforward one.
I try calling Karo again, and this time, she finally picks up.
“Thank god,” I exhale.
“Franzi, are you alright?”
“No,” I tell her. “Everything’s all messed up.
” The end of my sentence gets jumbled by a sob, but I swallow it down, eager to push out the words so Karo can help me sort it all out.
She doesn’t say it, but I hear her familiar words in my ears.
Start from the beginning, and then I’ll tell you if it’s fixable.
“Professor Alderkamp, the job. She offered it to me, but it turns out that the funding… it’s the same situation with Jacob all over—”
“Franzi,” Karo interrupts me. “Are you hurt? Did something happen to you?” It trickles through to me then how tight her voice sounds. Worried. I’d be, too, if I had four missed calls from her. “Or is this, once again, about work?”
Tight. Angry.
Not worried.
Pissed.
“I—”
“It is, isn’t it? About work?”
I’m too tongue-tied to reply. I’ve never heard Karo speak to me this way. Her compressed tone sends my pulse puckering in my fingertips.
“It’s the last evening of my honeymoon road trip, and I’m sitting here with my new husband, having dinner at this restaurant we booked months ago because it has a view of the ocean and the sky is breathtaking and the food is to die for, but do I actually get to enjoy it?”
I flinch as she pushes out a brittle laugh. What is happening? It’s like I’ve landed in a different reality and my brain is failing to catch up.
“No,” she continues, “because once again, my sister has some job drama going on that is entirely preventable and wouldn’t be half so impactful if she wouldn’t put her career above literally everything else in her life.”
Every syllable out of her mouth is armored with tiny spears. “Karo—”
“If this was a relationship with a person you were in, I would’ve told you to get out years ago. Don’t you see how dysfunctional it is? You give so much of yourself, but do you get anything in return?”
In the short break she takes, plates clatter in the background, cushioned by the soft melody of a piano. A man, probably Lennart, murmurs something I can’t hear.
“I know it hurts hearing this, and it hurts me just as much to say it, believe me. But Franzi, this has to stop. I want you to be happy, but I don’t want to solve your problems about work anymore.
When has it ever made your life better? You want to become a professor and then what?
More sleepless nights? A job on another continent where we get to see you even less? More stress about funding?”
“That’s not—”
“No, Franzi,” she cuts over me. The wobble in her voice hurts as much as her horrible words.
“You listen to me for once.” She sniffs.
“You’re thirty-two years old. You’re supposed to be my older sister.
You’re supposed to give me advice, too, listen to what’s going on in my life.
I know you think I have it all sorted out, because my life is more stable, and Lennart is in it.
But I have worries, too, which you’d know about if you ever gave me the space to talk about them.
I want to vent to you, too. I want to tell you what’s on my mind, that I’m thinking of applying for jobs because I can’t stand the sameness of mine anymore.
That Lennart and I want to try for a baby, and that I’m scared shitless about how our life would change.
But I don’t get to share any of this with you because you’re like…
a black hole. All our conversations revolve around you. ”
She’s crying now while I am speechless, helpless, too far away to comfort her.
Her words are a screw tightening in my chest and knowing that I’m the source of her pain brings tears to my eyes, too.
I hear her hitched breathing, and then she clears her throat, “So whatever it is, Franzi, you figure it out. And I will go back to my dinner and the fucking view of the skyline and have this evening to myself.”