chapter six
“I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU KNOW Jack Lindsey,” Larry said, clapping his hands excitedly. We were on our way to Lauren’s book club, and I was trying hard not to miss the Sunset exit off the 405. “I used to watch him on Days of Our Lives religiously. Such a hottie.”
“Yeah, well, I doubt he remembers me,” I said. “We only took a couple classes together. I’m warning you, though—he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed.”
“Who cares how sharp you are if you look like that?”
I’d known Jack Lindsey since college, back when he was just another pretty-boy baseball player from the Midwest. All the girls had a crush on him. He was handsome in a corn-fed, conventional way, with thick brown hair, tan skin, dimples, a strong jaw. The fact that he was dumb as a rock didn’t seem to detract from his appeal. He was like a golden retriever or a Lab—easygoing, friendly, impossible to hate.
“What’s his wife like?” Larry asked.
“Bex? Well, she’s really pretty. And she’s super smart.”
Jack and Bex had dated all the way through college. Bex was tall and willowy, with the kind of blond hair that looked like it was spun from gold. One of the campus buildings was named after her great-grandfather, who was a trustee back when Woodrow Wilson was president of the college. In class, it felt like she’d read everything and been everywhere, and sometimes it felt like she and the professor were having their own private conversation while the rest of us listened in. I wanted to hate her, but I couldn’t. I wanted to be her.
“How long have they been married?” Larry asked.
“Forever,” I said. “I remember seeing their wedding pictures in the alumni magazine. I think they got married in Nantucket. It seriously looked like something out of Martha Stewart Weddings.”
I sighed. It was hard not to be envious of Jack and Bex. I knew that after graduating, Jack had headed to Hollywood to be an actor—even though he’d never taken an acting lesson in his life, never appeared in a play or done anything besides play baseball. Within two weeks of arriving in Los Angeles, he’d landed a recurring role on a soap and quickly moved into a series of playboy and heartbreaker roles on various television shows. Every so often, I would flip through channels and stop when I saw Jack’s face on the screen, now playing a jock on a CW show, now a hot resident on Grey’s Anatomy, now a young JFK in a History Channel miniseries.
I drove past the campus of UCLA on one side, then made a left through the distinctive white gates of Bel-Air. With Larry navigating, we climbed up the hills, passing mansions on enormous lots hidden by fortresses of trees and hedges.
“Did you finish the book?” I asked Larry.
“Oh, goodness no,” he said. “You know I don’t read anything published after 1920. I’ll just wait for the movie. I can’t wait to see Jack as Rochester!”
High in the hills, I pulled into a driveway with a slablike gate. I buzzed the intercom, announced myself, and waited as the gate slowly swung open. The car faced a steep incline that curved around a hill thick with bougainvillea and olive trees. I stepped on the gas, and Larry and I slid back in our seats as my car strained its way up the hill. The driveway wound around like a party ribbon and then leveled out as we pulled into a circular motor court with a stone fountain burbling in the center.
“This place looks like a hotel,” I whispered to Larry as we drove up to the front of the house.
“No, it looks like the Playboy Mansion,” Larry whispered back.
We made our way into the house, down a long, cool corridor lined with hand-painted clay tiles and looking onto a beautifully landscaped garden thick with purple lilies of the Nile. The drawing room had soaring ceilings and an enormous stained glass dome that glowed orange and yellow in the light. There were soft rugs on the floor, comfortable chairs, and some modern furniture mixed in with the antiques so the place didn’t look like a museum. Larry peered at a full-length painted portrait of a woman in an opalescent silken gown with enormous puff sleeves and a strand of pearls crossing her bodice.
“Christ, is that a real John Singer Sargent?” he wondered.
“Come into the kitchen!” someone called out. We followed the voice through a formal dining room, another sitting room, and into a large, bright kitchen that opened onto a stone-paved patio. Bex was at the kitchen counter, cutting heirloom tomatoes and talking animatedly to Lauren and an assortment of friends. They were all drinking glasses of white wine and looking impossibly relaxed.
“Anne! Larry!” Lauren said, her voice pitched higher than normal as she quickly introduced us to the group. I recognized Lauren’s friends Marni and Celeste, friends of hers from the beach club and PTA who’d first invited her to join the book club. The two other women I didn’t recognize. One was a very tall brunette with hair slicked back into a low ponytail who Lauren introduced as Quincy, a PR rep for one of the studios. The other woman, a pale redhead wearing lots of bangles and rings, was named Schuyler and was a jewelry designer married to a movie producer.
And then there was Bex. I wish I could say she’d aged badly, but she looked just as naturally beautiful as she had in college. If anything, she’d loosened up a little, become less prim and preppy. She was wearing a white tank top that showed off her tanned arms and silky pants that made her legs look even longer than I’d remembered. Her hair was loose and wavy and streaked with gold, and her face was fresh and youthful, unblemished by any makeup.
“I’m so glad the two of you could come,” Bex said, wiping her hands on a dish towel and giving the two of us a kiss on the cheek. I could smell her perfume or shampoo, a mix of white flowers and grapefruit.
“How’s work going?” Marni asked. “I heard you’re writing a book! When are we going to be able to read it?”
“It’s not that kind of book,” I said. “It’s academic.”
“Oh! So it’s not a novel?”
“No—it’s about novels, but it isn’t a novel.” I felt myself getting tongue-tied. “It’s a scholarly study of several nineteenth-century novelists, like Austen, and Brontë, and Eliot.”
“Eliot? I love him! What’s that poem? Where the women are talking about Michelangelo?”
“That’s T. S. Eliot,” I said. “I’m working on George Eliot.”
Marni looked disappointed. I wasn’t writing a novel she could buy at the bookstore, and I wasn’t even writing about an author she liked. She was still smiling at me fixedly, but she’d clearly run out of things to say.
Suddenly Jack peeked his head around the corner. “Hi, ladies!” he said, his dimples showing. “Just wanted to say a quick hello.”
“Jack!” Bex said. “I wanted to introduce you to some people.”
Jack walked into the kitchen, barefoot, wearing a tight T-shirt that showed off his gym physique and a pair of designer jeans. His time in Hollywood had smoothed away any of the fratty, country quality he once had. He wore gel in his hair, a giant watch on his wrist, and his face looked like it had been airbrushed. He went around the room, getting air-kisses from all of Bex’s friends and then giving Bex an affectionate kiss on the cheek. I glanced at Larry, who looked absolutely starstruck.
“I’m Jack Lindsey,” he said, holding out his hand to me. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“Anne went to Princeton with us, honey,” Bex said.
“You did? What year were you?” Jack asked.
“2003,” I said.
“So was I!” Jack said, as if he couldn’t believe the coincidence.
“This is my colleague, Larry,” I said. “He teaches with me at Fairfax.”
“You’re a professor?” Jack asked, shaking Larry’s hand.
“Uh, yes,” Larry stammered. “Henry James, mostly.”
“Do you teach any Twain? He’s my guy. I’ve read all of his stuff.”
“I love Twain,” Larry said. I looked at him incredulously, but he ignored me.
“Did you know his real name was Samuel Clemens?” Jack asked.
“You don’t say,” Larry breathed.
“And he was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi?”
“Nooooo, really?”
“And he was born with Halley’s Comet, and he died with Halley’s Comet?”
“I did not know that!”
“Yeah! I got a book I want to show you.” Jack turned to Bex. “Is it OK if I steal Larry away for a minute? While you ladies get settled?”
“Of course!” Bex said. “We’ll be out on the patio.”
Larry practically sprinted out of the room with Jack. Bex led the rest of us through the French doors onto her shaded patio. It looked like an extension of her house, with plush outdoor furniture, a large dining table with small wildflower arrangements, and more rugs covering the stone walkway. The patio had a stunning view of the city below, spreading outward in all directions, with the bristling outcroppings that marked Century City and downtown Los Angeles in the distance. From where I stood, I could even make out the misty blue haze of the ocean. I walked to the edge of the patio and saw an infinity pool built into the lawn below us, a modern brushed-steel sculpture on one end. To the right was the bright green rectangle of a tennis court.
Holy crap, I thought. My entire apartment could fit on Bex’s patio. Everything was meticulously designed and maintained, from the lighting fixtures to the velvety moss that grew in the crevices of the flagstone path. My own apartment had ancient plumbing and so many layers of thick, gloppy Navajo White paint on its walls that when it rained, you could peel the layers off like bark from a tree.
“Have you been getting Dad’s e-mails?” I whispered to Lauren as we seated ourselves on the couch.
We’d moved my father into Fairfax Retirement Home, a small assisted-living facility near my apartment and the only place, in the end, that could take him on such short notice. Lauren had instructed me that since she was taking care of the bills, I’d be responsible for keeping an eye on my father and checking in on him regularly.
“Yeah. They’re full of sunshine, aren’t they?” Lauren said, making a face.
“Maybe you could come down next weekend? It might cheer him up. There’s a Fall Fest on campus we could take him to. The kids would really like it—there’ll be rides and games and live performances.”
“Ugh, do you have any idea how bad the traffic is from LA?” Lauren sighed. She thought anything east of La Brea wasn’t worth the trip from the Westside. “I’ll have to check with Brett first.”
She heard Bex clinking her wineglass with a fork, calling the book club to order. Leaning over to me, she whispered, “Make sure not to go on and on for too long. This is book club, not Lit 101. And please don’t embarrass me.”
Schuyler was the first to jump in.
“When Jason bought the movie rights for Jane Vampire a million years ago, we had no idea it was going to be such a huge deal! I assumed it was just some tween thing, but then it was like Twilight—all the mothers started reading the book and recommending it to their book clubs, and now it’s a phenomenon.”
“I can’t wait to see it,” someone said. “Who’s playing Jane again?”
“That British actress, Rachel . . . Rachel . . .”
“Rachel Evans,” Bex said. “Jack told me she broke up with her boyfriend and wouldn’t leave her trailer for two days. It threw off the whole shooting schedule.”
There were a few sympathetic clucks followed by a smattering of gossip about Rachel Evans—who she was dating now, what her type was, and why she couldn’t seem to date anyone for longer than three months.
“How’s Jack feeling, now that he’s in post?” Quincy asked.
“What’s ‘post’?” I whispered to Lauren. “Is that like rehab?”
“Shhhhhh!” Lauren hissed. “She means postproduction, dummy.”
“Great!” Bex was saying. “We took a quick trip to France after filming wrapped. It was so lovely—we got a chance to visit Musée Marcel Proust in Illiers-Combray.” The words “Musée Marcel Proust” and “Illiers-Combray” floated off Bex’s tongue like champagne bubbles. I remembered that on top of being perfectly beautiful and perfectly smart, Bex was also perfectly fluent in French, the result of a gap year spent in Paris working at an art gallery.
“I love Proust,” I said. “Though my French isn’t good enough to read him in the original.”
“I wrote my senior thesis on À La Recherche du Temps Perdu,” Bex said. She hesitated, her eyes growing distant, then murmured, “ ‘Autrefois on rêvait de posséder le cœur de la femme dont on était amoureux; plus tard sentir qu’on possède le cœur d’une femme peut suffire à vous en rendre amoureux.’ ”
While everyone stared at her, transfixed (“I have no idea what you just said, but that sounded amazing,” Marni blurted), I clumsily tried to translate the quotation in my head. In the past, a man dreamt of possessing the heart of the woman he loved, I managed before getting irretrievably stuck. I marveled at how easily Bex quoted the passage. She would have made a great professor, I thought.
“So what’s Jane Eyre about?” Lauren asked, suddenly turning to me. “That’s the book Jane Vampire’s based on, right?”
“Um, well,” I stammered. Where could I even begin? “Jane Eyre’s a governess.”
“What’s a governess?” someone asked.
“It’s kind of like a teacher but also a nanny,” I said. “Brontë worked as a governess, and so did her sisters. She hated it.”
“Why?” Schuyler asked, looking mystified. “I’m kind of jealous of my nanny. She gets to go to the park with the kids and take them on playdates, and she gets paid for it!”
“Did governesses clean the house, cook healthy meals, and do light laundry, too?” someone else asked. “If so, maybe I need to hire a governess.”
“It’s so hard to find a good nanny,” Quincy said. “They’re so unreliable. And they can be so moody.”
“We make ours sign a confidentiality agreement,” Marni said. “You can never be too careful.”
“So true,” agreed Schuyler. “I mean, I told the agency I only wanted them to send over ‘mature’ ladies—i.e., over the age of fifty.”
The women were getting progressively more and more tipsy, and soon any discussion of the book had been abandoned and everyone was simply gossiping and refilling their glasses of wine and milling around the patio. I took a deep breath, relieved that my part, at least, was over. As I stood up to refill my glass of wine, Bex came over to me, a copy of the Princeton Alumni Weekly in her hand.
“Did you get this week’s PAW?” she asked.
“Oh, I haven’t updated my address in a while,” I said. I’d stopped reading the PAW years earlier, when the giddy updates about weddings and babies and promotions became too much for me to stomach.
“I’d been meaning to ask if you knew anything about the new president of Fairfax. He sounds great.”
She handed me the magazine. On the cover was a huge photograph of Adam, dressed in a suit and tie, his arms crossed. “Adam Martinez ’03, President of Fairfax College, Blazes New Path,” it read.
“Wow,” I said, flipping through the magazine. “I didn’t realize he’d made the cover.”
Inside was another photograph of Adam, this one his senior class photo. Adam was in quarter profile, grinning broadly, wearing a collared shirt and a tie I’d bought him for the occasion. I’d gotten it at Jos. A. Bank on Nassau Street, using money I’d saved from my work-study job. God, I thought, we were such babies. Quickly, I skimmed the article.
Adam Martinez ’03, President of Fairfax College, Blazes New Path
Adam Martinez ’03 remembers the first time he stepped foot on Princeton’s campus. “I’d just taken my very first plane flight, and it felt like I was walking into a whole new world,” he says. Born in Guatemala City and raised in Los Angeles by a single mother who had fled the country’s civil war, Martinez and his mother settled in a predominantly Latino community east of downtown. Adam was a precocious child and talented athlete, and he soon caught the attention of his mother’s employer, who offered to help pay his tuition at a local all-boys Catholic school. Adam flourished there, lettering in soccer, volunteering as a court translator, and being elected president of his high school class.
When it came time to apply for college, Martinez assumed he’d stay near home. “My mother didn’t want me to go far away,” he said. “I’m her only son, and if it were up to her, I’d probably still be living with her!” A chance encounter with an attorney while volunteering at the courts introduced him to Princeton. “This young guy, an assistant DA, asked me where I was thinking of going to school. I said I hadn’t really thought about it, and he encouraged me to apply to Princeton, his alma mater. He thought it was important that I experience the world outside LA, and he made Princeton sound like a real possibility for someone like me.”
Martinez applied and was accepted on a full scholarship. He arrived on campus excited and full of plans.
“In retrospect, I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” he said. “In my mind, Princeton was wrapped up in so much mythology. I’d read The Great Gatsby in high school and knew F. Scott Fitzgerald had gone to Princeton, so I went to the library and checked out every book written by him. I read This Side of Paradise at least three times and thought I was prepared. Boy, was I wrong.”
Martinez describes a lonely freshman year, full of homesickness and self-doubt. At the end of the year, he decided to take a leave of absence, unsure if he would return. “I thought Princeton had made a mistake in admitting me,” he said. “I knew people assumed I was an affirmative action admit, and I felt incredible pressure to prove them wrong. I was doing well in my classes, but in the end, I gave up.”
Time away helped Martinez gain perspective. “I needed to grow up a little. I worked a series of odd jobs while I was away from school, but I kept reading in my free time—anything I could find in the library, history, economics, literature, the newspaper. I realized I missed school.” After a hiatus of almost five years, Martinez returned to Princeton, joining the class of 2003 as a sophomore. His experience was very different the second time around. “I was more open,” he said. “I made a decision to reach out more, to take more risks.”
I felt like I was reading about a stranger. None of the information was new to me—I’d been there, for God’s sake—but it felt strangely bloodless and incomplete. It was as if I’d never existed in Adam’s life, that I’d been edited out of his biography because I hadn’t, ultimately, mattered that much. Numbly, I paged through the accompanying pictures—a photo of Adam posing with his law school mentor, another of him receiving an honorary citation from the city of Houston, a candid shot of him lecturing in a classroom. His life after me. I quickly skipped to the end of the article.
Some have expressed surprise at Martinez’s relative youth. At just thirty-eight, he is one of the youngest college presidents in the United States, and one of only a handful of Latino college presidents. When asked about this, Martinez laughs. “Woodrow Wilson was forty-five when he became president of Princeton,” he says. “I know I’m considered young by some standards, but I’m not new to university administration.” Board member Ahmanson concurs, “Martinez has a wealth of experience, and we hope he will also bring youthful energy to the campus.” In fact, for the board of trustees, Martinez’s age was part of his draw. “We wanted someone who was early in his career and wasn’t just coasting to retirement,” says Annette Fowler, a longtime donor and board member.
Martinez has only recently arrived on campus, but so far, he has earned high marks from faculty members and administrators for his visible presence on campus. An avid runner, Martinez can often be seen running on local trails early in the morning with his rescue dog, Charlie. For years, he has also been active in Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, mentoring at-risk youth who, like he did, are growing up without a father figure. His other hobbies include reading and travel. Evidence of this can be seen in his office, in the bookcases full of classics like Great Expectations and Moby-Dick and in the framed photographs of distant locales.
“In some ways, I feel like I’m starting college again,” he says. “I’m new, I don’t know many people, and I’m excited and nervous.” He sits back in his office chair, gesturing at the walls of books, the imposing executive desk, the decorative fireplace, an old painted portrait of Fairfax’s first president, Theodore Hubbard. He shakes his head wonderingly. “I still can’t believe I’m really here.”
I closed the magazine and handed it back to Bex. Reading the profile had made me feel dizzy. On the one hand, I felt like I knew way too much about Adam. On the other hand, I felt like I knew nothing at all. That was him, all right, but it was a slick, prepackaged version of him.
“I read that the school’s launching a capital campaign in the fall,” Bex said to me. “I’d like to get involved. My cousin went to Fairfax, and she always talked about how much she loved it there.”
“I can give you the name of someone in the development office,” I said, thinking of Tiffany.
“What are you guys talking about?” Lauren asked, wandering over.
“The new president of Fairfax,” Bex said.
“Let me look at that,” Lauren said, snatching the magazine from my hand. “Is that who I think it is?”
“His name is Adam Martinez,” Bex said. “He graduated our year, but I don’t think we ever crossed paths. I was asking Anne if she knew him.”
“Knew him?” Lauren snorted. “Anne dated him. He even visited us over Thanksgiving one year.”
“Really!” Bex said.
“It was a long time ago,” I said, giving Lauren a dirty look. She’d treated Adam with disdain and even hostility during his visit, alternately peppering him with questions and then ignoring him. Now, though, Lauren was skimming the PAW article and nodding approvingly. “Whoa,” she said. “He’s done well for himself. It says he’s one of the youngest college presidents in the country. Who would’ve thought?”
She turned to me. “So how long have you known about this? And when were you planning to tell me, anyway?”
“Oh, it all happened pretty recently,” I said, shrugging. “I only just found out about it myself.”
“Does he know you’re at Fairfax?” Lauren asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s no big deal. We bump into each other every once in a while.”
“And you’ve been in touch with him all this time?”
“No!” I snapped. “It’s been over ten years, Lauren. It’s ancient history.”
“How funny,” Bex interrupted, her voice so soft I could hardly hear her. “I married my college sweetheart.” There was an uncomfortable silence, and Bex laughed a little self-consciously. “But you’re right. It feels like ancient history.”
“Does anyone know where Larry is?” I asked, looking around. “I should probably get going.”
“Oh, Anne,” Lauren groaned. “Did you really leave Larry with Jack this whole time? How could you? I told you not to let him harass Jack!” She indignantly turned around and marched into the house to rescue Jack.
“I bet Jack’s talking Larry’s ear off,” Bex said apologetically. “I’ll go help your sister find them.” She leaned over to give me a kiss. “It was wonderful to see you. Thanks for coming to talk to us about the book.” She paused for a moment, then almost shyly admitted, “You know, I’m a little envious. I always wanted to be a professor—I took the GREs and everything.”
“Really!” I exclaimed. “I was just thinking that you would have made an amazing professor.”
“Oh, no,” Bex said, waving me off modestly. “That’s very kind of you, but it just wouldn’t have been possible. All that course work, all that writing—”
“It would have been easy for you. You were always such a great student. And you’re so good with languages— I mean, look at the way you just tossed off that Proust quotation!”
Bex shook her head. “No. I couldn’t. I—I had to make a choice. When Jack and I got married and moved to LA, and then his career really took off, and then of course I got pregnant and, well, you know how it is—”
Bex was avoiding my eyes, and it suddenly hit me. She was embarrassed. She thought I was judging her.
“It’s not too late—” I said, but Bex had already moved away.