The Collective by Alison Gaylin
Dedication
For Beverly LeBov Sloane. Love you, Mom!
Epigraph
Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour.
—Medea (Euripides)
One
The ceremony starts in twenty minutes. I’m climbing out of the subway tunnel, a thousand unwanted smells in my hair. I’m not used to being around this many people—the stink of them, the heat, the noise. The noise especially. I just shared a subway car with a group of high school girls, and their laughter still swirls in my ears. I probably should have driven, but it’s been hard for me to drive long distances since Emily’s death. My thoughts start spinning along with the wheels, memories of road trips, of carpools and radio sing-alongs and petty arguments, and before I know it, I’m aiming straight for the divider.
The venue is just three blocks away. I walk slowly, slower than everyone around me, trying to catch my breath, to still my thoughts, to think of nothing but the sidewalk and the cold night air and where I need to be.
From half a block away, I recognize the Brayburn Club. I know it from the photo I found online. It’s located in a Gramercy Park brownstone with leaded windows and wide, majestic steps. It’s a week past New Year’s, but the Brayburn Club is still decorated for the holiday season, a lush wreath filling the front door, icicle lights dripping from the windowsills like fresh beads of sweat.
I pass a group of young women smoking last-minute cigarettes—friends of his, maybe?—and I think back to the time I caught Emily smoking weed with her friend Fiona. She must have been fourteen, always a little old for her years and bored of our small Hudson Valley town. I got so angry with her. Grounded her for two months. Her dad thought it excessive. We smoked pot when we were that age, Matt said, missing the point. Yes, we smoked pot when we were fourteen, but Emily wasn’t us. She was better than us.
I won’t do it again, Mom. I promise. Her voice in my head is as clear and real as the shrieking laughter of the girls on the train. I want to lose myself in it and never come back.
It isn’t until I’m at the top of the stairs, after I’ve handed the boy at the door my invitation and I’m in line for the coat check, that Emily’s voice quiets and I remember where I am and why I’m here.
“Anything else, ma’am?” says the coat check girl. She has a freshly scrubbed look and shiny dark hair and she’s wearing the Brayburn College colors—crimson jacket, gold blouse. “Anything else?” She says it like she’s prompting me from a script.
“No. Nothing else. Thank you.”
The girl’s nose scrunches up. She looks at me funny, and I wonder if she can sense what I’ve been up to. Who I am.
THE EVENING’S MAIN event is the first alumni dinner of the year. It will be held in the formal dining room—a four-course meal, capped off by a speech by a noted software developer from the class of ’98. But I won’t be staying for any of that.
They’re holding the ceremony first, in the club’s library—a sprawling room, with wall-sized bookshelves and grand arched ceilings painted with exotic birds and flowers. It smells of leather bindings and polished floors, and there’s a Christmas tree in the corner, decorated entirely in Brayburn colors. I imagine most people are calmed by this place—a respite from the stench and bellow of the city. I relax my shoulders and try my best to act as though I feel the same.
The seats are all filled by the time I’m in the room. A boy in a tuxedo offers me a glass of champagne from a tray. I take it for the sake of having something to hold, and slip in next to a group at the back, waiting.
There’s a man watching me. That used to happen all the time, and I used to find it flattering, but I don’t like it now. I’ve lost twenty-eight pounds since Emily’s death. I’ve stopped coloring my hair and wearing makeup and I had the bolt-ons removed, and so I am literally no longer the woman I once was. There is no reason to watch me. No flattering reason, anyway.
The man is around my age, with a thinning buzz cut, his jacket and tie cheap for the room. He smiles, and I turn away from him, the stem of the champagne glass tight between my fingers.
“Why are you here?” he says, and I think, Does he recognize me? I’m hoping my thoughts don’t show on my face.
“Excuse me?”
His smile is surprisingly warm. Disarming. “Are you a relative?”
“No.”
“Brayburn alum?”
“Yes.” The easier lie. “How about you?”
He says nothing. Just nods, as though he doesn’t believe me. Then he turns back around. Strange. But then everything is strange here. Like a dream, or maybe an acid trip, the colors too soft, the whispers too loud. I’m feeling a little nauseous. There are other people looking at me—two silver-haired women in the back row. Is my hair okay? Do I have something stuck to my shoe? I almost ask them that, but I stop myself just in time.
There is a podium at the front of the room, and a man pads up to it. He has thin lips, wispy hair, narrow shoulders, everything about him meager and unobtrusive. His name is Richard Waverly, and he’s the dean of the School of Humanities. He introduces himself as such, but I already know those things. I take a big swallow of champagne and then another and then the glass is done when I hadn’t even intended a sip. The room shimmers and blurs. The silver-haired women whisper like snakes.