The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories Read online

  It is easy to understand the inspiration for Marina’s final essay, as we have been embraced by Yale’s amazing community of classmates, professors, and staff. We offer heartfelt thanks to the entire Yale community, and special mention must go to Harold Bloom, John Crowley, Paul Hudak, Amy Hungerford, Deborah Margolin, Donald Margulies, Paul McKinley, Mary Miller, Catherine Nicholson, Cathy Shufro, and Leslie Woodard.

  The following people have contributed to Marina’s legacy in a multitude of ways: Will Adams, Monrud Becker, Debby Bisno, Michael Blume, Luke Bradford, Joseph Breen, Alexandra Brodsky, Alex Caron, Wendy and Bill Coke, Carrie Cook, Gabriel Barcia Duran, Olivia Fragale, Stephen Feigenbaum, Jacque Feldman, Cory Finley, Riley Scripps Ford, Adam Freedman, Michael Gocksch, Henry Gottfried, Josh Grossman, Steve Grossman, Jack Hitt, Rachel Hunter, Cam Keady, Duke and Kathy Keegan, Tom and Lori Keegan, Michael and Luette Keegan, Shellie Keegan, Beatrice Kelsey-Watts, Zara Kessler, Julia Lemle, Dan Lombardo, Kate Lund, Richard Miron, David Mogilner, Lauren Motzkin, Nick Murphy, John-Michael Parker, Charlie Polinger, Michael Rosen, Rachel Ruskin, Kate Selker, Julie Shain, Raphael Shapiro, Diana Shoolman, Vivian Shoolman, Mark Sonnenblick, Ben Stango, Kathy and Jeff Starcher, Jim Stone, Eric Schwartz, Brendan Ternus, Jesse Terry, Gerrit Thurston, Sally Vargas, Sigrid von Wendel, Meghan Weiler, Ben Wexler, Joseph Wynant, Yael Zinkow, and Julie Zhu. Apologies to anyone we have inadvertently left out: You were certainly never left out of her heart.

  In addition to her beloved Yale, Marina experienced the opposite of loneliness in two other formative places: the Buckingham Browne & Nichols School and Cape Cod Sea Camp, where she spent her childhood summers.

  In honor of Marina’s brothers, Trevor and Pierce, with whom she shared a childhood full of spirit and adventure and for whom she had profound admiration and love.

  Finally, we acknowledge our entire community of family and friends who have contributed to make this book a reality. It was comforting to have you there for us and we are grateful to have you in our lives.

  Tracy and Kevin Keegan

  The Opposite of Loneliness

  We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow after Commencement and leave this place.

  It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four A.M. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

  Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers—partnerless, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group texts.

  This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse, I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.

  But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m thirty. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should have . . . ,” “if I’d . . . ,” “wish I’d . . .”

  Of course, there are things we wish we’d done: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my high school self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.

  But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes . . .). We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

  We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out—that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

  When we came to Yale, there was this sense of possibility. This immense and indefinable potential energy—and it’s easy to feel like that’s slipped away. We never had to choose and suddenly we’ve had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it: already going to med school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations and you suck.

  For most of us, however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in biology . . . if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman . . . if only I’d thought to apply for this or for that . . .

  What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating from college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.

  In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my friends to meet them at Est Est Est. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging to SSS,I probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they weren’t. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.

  We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.

  We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.

  * * *

  * Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall is a Yale building that houses deans’ offices and a large lecture hall.

  FICTION

  The middle of the universe is tonight, is here,

  And everything behind is a sunk cost.

  —Marina Keegan, from the poem “Bygones”

  Cold Pastoral

  We were in the stage where we couldn’t make serious eye contact for fear of implying we were too invested. We used euphemisms like “I miss you” and “I like you” and smiled every time our noses got too close. I was staying over at his place two or three nights a week and met his parents at an awkward brunch in Burlington. A lot of time was spent being consciously romantic: making sushi, walking places, waiting too long before responding to texts. I fluctuated between adding songs to his playlist and wondering if I should stop hooking up with people I was 80 percent into and finally spend some time alone. (Read the books I was embarrassed I hadn’t read.) (Call my m
other.) The thing is, I like being liked, and a lot of my friends had graduated and moved to cities. I’d thought about ending things but my roommate Charlotte advised me against it. Brian was handsome and smoked the same amount as me, and sometimes in the mornings, I’d wake up and smile first thing because he made me feel safe.

  In March, he died. I was microwaving instant Thai soup when I got a call from his best friend asking if I knew which hospital he was at.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Brian,” he said. “You haven’t heard?”

  * * *

  I was in a seminar my senior year where we read poems by John Keats. He has this famous one called “Ode on a Grecian Urn” where these two lovers are almost kissing, frozen with their faces cocked beneath a tree. The tragedy, the professor said, is in eternal stasis. She never fades, they never kiss; but I remember finding the whole thing vaguely romantic. My ideal, after all, was always before we walked home—and ironically, I had that now.

  * * *

  I watched as the microwave droned in lopsided circles, but I never took the soup out. Someone else must have. Charlotte, perhaps, or one of my friends who came over in groups, offering food in imitation of an adult response and trying to decipher my commitment. I was trying too. I’d made out with a guy named Otto when I was back in Austin over Christmas, and Brian and I had never quite stopped playing games. We were involved, of course, but not associated.

  “What’s the deal?” people would shout over the music when he’d gone to get a drink and I’d explain that there was no deal to explain.

  “We’re hanging out,” I’d say, smiling. “We like hanging out.”

  I think we took a certain pride in our ambiguity. As if the tribulations of it all were somehow beneath us. Secretly, of course, the pauses in our correspondence were as calculated as our casualness—and we’d wait for those drunken moments when we might admit a “Hey,” pause, “I like you.”

  “Are you okay?” they asked now. Whispering, almost, as if I were fragile. We sat around that first night sipping singular drinks, a friend turning on a song and then stopping it. I wish I could say I was shocked into a state of inarticulate confusion, but I found myself remarkably capable of answering questions.

  “They weren’t dating,” Sarah whispered to Sam, and I gave a soft smile so they knew it was okay that I’d heard.

  But it became clear very quickly that I’d underestimated how much I liked him. Not him, perhaps, but the fact that I had someone on the other end of an invisible line. Someone to update and get updates from, to inform of a comic discovery, to imagine while dancing in a lonely basement, and to return to, finally, when the music stopped. Brian’s death was the clearest and most horrifying example of my terrific obsession with the unattainable. Alive, his biggest flaw was most likely that he liked me. Dead, his perfections were clearer.

  But I’m not being fair. The fact of the matter is I felt a strange but recognizable hole that grew just behind my lungs. There was a person whose eyes and neck and penis I had kissed the night before and this person no longer existed. The second cliché was that I couldn’t quite encompass it. Regardless, I surprised myself that night by crying alone once my friends had left, my face pressed hard against my pillow.

  * * *

  The first time I saw Lauren Cleaver, she was playing ukulele and singing in a basement lit by strings of plastic red peppers. I remember making two observations during the twenty minutes my friends and I hung around the concert and sipped beers: one, that I wanted her outfit (floral overall shorts and a canvas jacket), and two, that she was skinnier than me, a quality that made her instantly less likable. She was pretty, apart from a very large nose, and I’d seen her around campus, riding her bike along Pear Street or smoking cigarettes outside the library. She had the rare combination of being quiet and popular, a code that made her intimidating to younger, fashionable girls and mysterious to older, confident boys. We moved in different circles and I hardly thought about her again until the morning after I first kissed Brian, whom she had dated intensely and inseparably for two years and nine months.

  I’d never had to deal with an ex-girlfriend before and I didn’t like it. Adam and I were each other’s firsts and I’d only had month-long things since the two of us broke up. One thing I am is self-aware (to a neurotic fault), and I recognize that a massive percentage of my self-esteem depends on the attention of a series of smug boys at the University of Vermont. The problem is I’m good at attracting them: verbally witty and successful at sending texts. I’m also well dressed, or try to be, and make fun of boys in the way that reads as I like you. Perhaps it’s not a problem so much as a crutch, but I have this pathetic fantasy that I’d be more productive if I were less attractive. Finally finish some paintings or apply for funding of some kind. The point is that Lauren Cleaver and I were not friends because Lauren Cleaver and I had all this in common. This, and Brian.

  * * *

  His parents arrived the morning after the accident, and his roommates e-mailed a few people they thought might want to stop by. I wanted to go, and felt like I had to go, so I put on a pair of black jeans and a black sweater and asked Charlotte if I could borrow her black boots.

  “They don’t fit you,” she said. “And besides, you don’t need to have black shoes.”

  I wasn’t sure. And felt guilty for pondering my red ballet flats as I walked the seven-minute walk to his house. I figured I wasn’t supposed to be capable of that kind of thinking, and I felt like an alien. I feel that a lot, actually, in a lot of circumstances. Like I ought to be feeling something I don’t. My father used to tease me at the table by implying “cold Claire” had brought in the draft. I had three older sisters, all beautiful, and I was always less affected than they were, slower to smile. I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting. My sisters forever humiliated me over a moment in fifth grade when I’d opened a present from my grandmother and declared, straight-faced, “I already have this.”

  It was cold for March, so I walked quickly. Brown snow still hugged the sides of our streets and the pines leaned in like gray walls, still limp with yellow Christmas lights. Whenever I slept at Brian’s, I called him as soon as I passed this certain stop sign—timing his arrival at the door so I wouldn’t have to wait. “I’m here,” I’d say, a block away, and he’d meander downstairs to let me in. This time, I knocked.

  William let me in. Roommate and rich boy from Los Angeles. We were never friends, really, just occasional cohabiters, but we awkwardly hugged and he asked me how I was.

  “Fine,” I said instinctively. But he understood that I wasn’t.

  We walked upstairs and I felt immediately like I shouldn’t have been there. It was smaller than I’d imagined: Brian’s parents, two adults I didn’t recognize, and five or six of his closest friends. They huddled together in the corner next to a plate of bagels and an untouched platter of fruit. His mother was actually sobbing into the side of one of the women and I felt suddenly and extremely claustrophobic. The whole world was stark and bleak and I realized I couldn’t think of a single thing I was looking forward to. Brian had begun to be that for me—the thing at the end of the day I could think about when everything else was boring. I looked through the open door to his room and saw that his bed was still unmade.

  “This is Claire,” William said. Tactful enough to stop before attempting to label my relationship. I held up a palm to the room and I wondered if anyone else had needed to be introduced.

  “Claire,” his father said. “It’s good to see you.” He sounded genuine.

  We’d gotten along at that brunch, though the whole thing was kind of an accident. Brian and I had slept late and when his parents arrived at his house at eleven o’clock, I was still in his bed, naked. I got dressed quickly—embarrassed to put on my heels from the night before—and was invited by default to
eat eggs at Mirabelles. We laughed about it later.

  “Good thing you weren’t some one-night stand.” He bit at my ear.

  “Good thing,” I said, and punched him.

  * * *

  Brian’s dad gestured toward the untouched food but I said I was fine and moved over to the circle of his friends. I could tell at least one of them, Susannah, didn’t want me there. You don’t know him, I’m sure she was thinking. We don’t know you.

  Apparently, they’d all been together at the hospital on Tuesday night and they were sharing stories in hushed voices about how and when they found out and waited, how and when the congenital aneurysm took place. I wanted to ask exactly how it all worked, how it all happened, but I couldn’t really engage. I kept looking into Brian’s room at the lump of a comforter piled on his sheetless bed, at the light spilling in from his window, speckling its folds, and decided it was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

  * * *

  When Lauren Cleaver walked down from upstairs, everyone turned. Her face was swollen and red and she was breathing in staccato bursts. She must have gone upstairs to collect herself. To calm down, stop crying. There was an older boy with her whom I recognized from pictures as Brian’s brother. He was holding her by the shoulders and saying something into her ear. My mind raced, imagining the dinners she must have had at his family’s table. The trips she might have taken with them, the grandparents she must have met. She’d have watched movies at his real house clad in sweatpants and sweaters. Spent time with his brother, his mother, met his dog, his uncles, his high school friends.

  Lauren looked thin and beautiful as she walked down the stairs and I realized that of course I wasn’t the girlfriend. I can’t explain how or why, but it filled me with a profound, seething anger . . . followed, inevitably, by waves of a familiar self-disgust. Brian was mine, I wanted to cry. My nose he’d kissed on Friday, my shirt he’d slipped his hand inside. The last time he’d kissed Lauren was in June and I knew they no longer talked. I imagined for a moment what he would have been like if Lauren died—if he would have romanticized their relationship and lamented the loss of their potential reunion. But it didn’t really seem like she was engaged in rationalization, just that she loved him a lot. Or had.