I spent that summer working in lab and volunteering at the regional hospital downtown. I worked hard. I would wake up at seven in the morning, swim for an entire hour, and go to lab; after dinner in the evening I would go over to the hospital and help out at radiation oncology until around nine, and then go back to lab until around two in the morning.
Senior year was pretty much the same. Hard work, and more hard work. My efforts in lab eventually became a prize-winning thesis paper and I was the second author of an article in a prestigious scientific journal that later became a benchmark in the field. I had gotten into most of the top ranking medical schools. Meanwhile, I spent less and less time with other people.
I saw Violet only twice during this time. Once was in March, right in the middle of thesis induced craziness. I sat through an entire weekend in front of the computer, and by five-thirty Monday morning I was immobilized by an overpowering hunger. I finally managed to go to the dining hall, only to find that it wasn’t open yet.
Right after I sat down on the steps outside of the dining hall, I saw Violet walking towards me, her pale yellow spring dress hanging loosely over her. She was with a short, skinny guy wearing a red Nautica jacket. They were holding hands.
We exchanged greetings and commented on how we haven’t seen each other in a while. There wasn’t the awkwardness that I had expected; neither of us showed any hint of emotions to each other. We were simply two people who happened to bump into each other.
“Ah, sorry. This is my boyfriend Jeremy.” She said.
“I know.” I shook his hand.
Violet turned slightly. “Jeremy, I think we should probably find somewhere else to get food. Your have to go to class soon.”
“Yeah. Let’s go then.” Jeremy said, and then turned to me. “Nice meeting you.” I waved bye to them both, sat back down and waited until the dining hall opened.
The second time I saw Violet was at the exhibition of her fine arts thesis work. It was held at a downtown gallery by the harbor, on a Thursday night. I got out early from lab and took the bus downtown by myself.
The gallery was crowded with students and professors, each holding a cup of wine and a plate of cheese and crackers. I skipped the refreshment table and wondered through various pieces of artwork, trying to find Violet’s exhibition.
Suddenly she was right beside me. “I’m glad you came,”
I turned around. “Hey. Congratulations.” I said. “Shouldn’t...”
“Jeremy? He has something to do at the med school. Come on, you haven’t seen my work yet right? Let me show you.”
Her work was this large canvas that took up one entire wall of the alcove at the end of the gallery. The entire canvas was covered with a dark indigo that was almost black, and three bright orange vertical stripes dominated the middle. Upon closer inspection, the stripes had very jagged edges, and the paint itself was very unevenly applied. Even shades of color on adjacent strokes were different throughout the entire painting. It reminded me of the ocean at night---all vast, all dark, filled with mysterious possibilities.
“It’s titled ‘Somewhere Only We Know.”
“Like the song?”
“That’s right.”
“Is there supposed to be a meaning?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t come with an explanation.”
“I suppose.”
“It took me a long time just to come up with the concept. At first I had no idea what I wanted...but when it came to me, I knew this was the one.”
“I see.”
We stood side by side looking at the painting for a while.
“The award ceremony is about to start. I’m supposed to get the second place prize. I’m going to have to go for a bit before it starts, but please stay for the ceremony, ok?”
“All right.”
“Well...let’s keep in touch.”
“Right.”
After she headed off towards the atrium, I quietly exited through the back door and boarded the bus back to campus. That was the last time I saw Violet until we met up again in New York, almost fifteen years later.
Eventually I ended up at a certain top medical school in another state and graduated with high honors; but, I can no longer detail anything that transpired during those four years. Like a machine, I shut my mind off and dutifully performed the tasks that I was assigned. I never stood out; I was always in the middle, and got along with people without making any real friends.
Even so, I did get involved with this one girl named Ann. She was a dental student that one of my roommates had introduced me to. She was younger than I was by two years, wore rimless glasses, and didn’t express much opinion on anything. We saw each other a couple of times a month. She would come to my room and make pasta with store-bought tomato sauce. We would eat the pasta while watching Jet Li movies on VHS, during which she would put on this blank expression that reminded me of wax statues. I didn’t quite consider those pasta dinners as dates, but apparently my classmates thought otherwise; they referred to her as my Pasta Bitch.
One day I found sitting in the mailbox the invitation to Violet’s wedding, along with a two page handwritten letter. My parents had forwarded the letter to me a week after they received it at home. I tore open the envelope and scanned the letter. Things had been going very steady with Jeremy, Violet wrote, and that he simply asked her to marry him over cannolis and cappuccino. She wasn’t exactly ecstatic since they both had expected it to happen for some time, but she was still very content; they’d be moving somewhere else after they get married, but they hadn’t decided on where; and that she wanted very, very much to see me again.
I stuffed the letter back into the envelope, took out the RSVP card, and placed the card on my desk. Then, I poured some of my roommate’s whiskey into a red plastic cup, downed it, and filled out the RSVP card.
The night before the wedding, however, I didn’t go to the airport. Instead, I called Ann for her to come over and drank several cans of beer while I waited for her. When she stepped through my door I grabbed her hand and pulled her towards me. I embraced her tightly, and buried my face into the cove formed by her neck and shoulder. She wrapped her arms around my collar without saying a word.
I had her lie in my bed, and I pulled her clothes off while she stared at me. As soon as we went through just enough of the obligatory foreplay, we had sex with her on top of me. She moaned rhythmically, her expression while she moved more blank than that during the Jet Li movies. Having had the beers made me dizzy throughout the entire episode, and all I could remember was concentrating on ending it as if I were running in a hundred-meter dash, as if the answers to my confusion were there at the finish line.
Of course, at the end if it all---nothing came to me, as much as I had naïvely believed that by screwing Ann everything would change. Still I was just the same person, with the same paradoxes haunting my life. If anything, I was more confused, as if something important to me had vaporized into the air, leaving me searching in vain. I realized this was what people referred to as maturing.
A couple of weeks later I told Ann that I regretted doing what I did to her, to which she simply said, “I can’t trust you anymore.” We stopped seeing each other, but when she faded from my life I didn’t feel much pain. Life went on as usual.
Med school, residency, another two years at NYU Downtown Hospital, and then my own clinic by the time I was thirty-five. All this time I put the deep thoughts about my life aside, locked away in a little jar. Once out of a blue moon these thoughts would resurface, always when I was alone, but for the most part I settled into a comfortable routine. I made a good living, and I was quite accepting of the way my career had turned out. There’s not much more I could want, right?
And then a month ago the a crack appeared on the jar when Violet told me about her divorce and that she was coming to New York.
(To be continued)
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