FIVE #7
“You’ve got a vivid imagination, Yung. It’s not my family’s summer house—it’s my college roommate’s. I’ve just been invited up to Chatham every summer since sophomore year. They let me tag along.”
“So that’s when you learned to sail?”
“Well, there wasn’t exactly a sailing club at West Tilden Regional High School,” Murph said.
“You went to a public high school?”
Murph leaned in close, like he was letting me in on something. “I just finished paying off all my student loans last year, Yung. I had tons to pay off, college and law school.”
I felt like an idiot. All these years I had somehow managed to make up a whole life, an elite prepster history for Jeff Murphy that simply didn’t exist. As much as it bothered me when people assumed things about me, well, seems I was just as guilty.
“Wow,” I said finally. “I’m sorry I—”
“Look,” Murph cut in. “We all make assumptions about each other. It’s what people do.”
“I guess.” I still felt sheepish.
Murph leaned his head back and closed his eyes again. “And for the record, I think about that stuff sometimes, too.”
I think I said, “Then you and I have more in common than I thought.” But maybe I just thought this.
We sat there, peacefully, in the stillness of the darkened clubhouse, with my head resting on Murph’s shoulder, for what seemed like a long time.
At some point I dozed off. I don’t know how long we sat there in the darkness—maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour—before a large, clamorous group of summer associates made their way down the corridor toward the buses, talking loudly.
“I couldn’t fucking believe those guys!” shrieked one.
“Yeah, this’ll be up on YouTube in about two seconds,” giggled another.
“Good luck explaining this at on-campus recruiting this fall,” someone else said, laughing.
Murph gently jostled my shoulder. “Okay, Yung, we should go.” He stood up, grabbed both my wrists, and pulled me to my feet. He had to work at this, because I was resisting. I never wanted to leave the comfort and safety of that room, and I wanted Murph to stay there, too.
When we were both on our feet, he gave me a brief, awkward little hug. “Come on, we still need to get our stuff from the locker rooms. The sooner we get back to the city, the sooner we can get you home.”
I dozed nearly the entire bus ride back to Manhattan—my head against the window, Murph feeling solid and warm beside me, eyes closed. Having him there made me feel so protected, so safe. Even more than that, I was beginning to feel understood.
Murph was right. I did feel better by the time we stepped off the bus in front of the Parsons Valentine building, although I was still a little woozy and the silhouette of midtown looked a hazy blur.
I stood obediently on the sidewalk while Murph flagged down a cab to take me the ten blocks uptown to my apartment.
He waited until I’d folded myself into the backseat before leaning into the cab and telling the driver, “Make sure you see her get safely into the building, right?” and handing him a twenty.
Get in, I wanted to say to Murph. Don’t leave me yet.
It had felt so nice to be so close to him, in the safety of the clubhouse and on the bus, and to be talking, really talking, but now it felt like some precious window was abruptly closing, and I wasn’t going to get a chance to say what I really wanted. Get in, Murph. Come home with me.
“Get in,” I actually mumbled, but if Murph heard this, he chose to ignore it.
He gently shut the door of the cab, leaned his head in the window, and said, “You’ll be all right, Yung. Sleep it off. I’ll see you Monday.”
As my taxi pulled away from the curb, I watched Murph’s figure get smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.
The driver let me out in the horseshoe drive of my building.
True to his promise, he waited until I reached the lobby doors before speeding off.
Safely ensconced inside the soothing, tomblike privacy of the elevator, I closed my eyes and slumped against the brass handrail as it hurtled the nineteen floors up.
Once inside my apartment, I kicked off my shoes, tossed my bag toward the couch, and noticed the message light blinking on the phone on my hall table.
“Ingrid-ah,” my mother’s voice came through in Mandarin.
“It’s Friday, after ten o’clock, you’re still not home?
I heard it’s a little cool in New York today—make sure you bring a sweater when you go out.
Daddy and I worry about you, up there all by yourself, always working so hard. Call home when you can. Love, Mom.”
Hearing her voice made me inexplicably sad. I didn’t want my parents to worry about me all the time. Wasn’t I doing just fine as it was? Wasn’t I getting everything they came here for in the first place?
I went into my bedroom and stepped out of my white cocktail dress, leaving it in a little pool on the floor.
As I climbed into bed, exhausted, tipsy, a little sad, wrapping myself tightly in my duvet, my final thought before my head hit the pillow was that I should have kissed Jeff Murphy as we sat there alone in the darkness of that clubhouse, and now the moment was irretrievable.