Dorian sat on a rock in Central Park wearing a soft jersey dress and sunscreen. The dress was yellow and held onto her shoulders with thin braided straps; the rock was big and lofty and felt like a podium. Several two dollar used books and a spiral notebook sat next to Dorian inside a shiny blue backpack, the main compartment of which would not be unzipped today. A bunch of Midtown office stood by as big and nondescript as an audience.
People either want money or they want… Dorian was thinking, slowly, of a reply to Daphne. The night before Daphne had said, “I know how I ended up here. It’s because I want things. I prodigiously want. But you don’t even want dessert. You’re a mystery.”
Dorian hated being a mystery. Coyness was a gimmick; she preferred to be loved purely for her face.
After an hour or so Dorian fell asleep out there in front of Midtown, backpack under her head and arm across her eyes.
*
“I solved last night’s problem, too,” Daphne replied to Dorian. They were sitting down for dinner at a sidewalk table downtown. Next to them hot streets and fresh shadows ran into each other crookedly. “The one about the next ten days.”
“I knew you would,” Dorian said. In ten days they would take the bar exam. A score of 66% was required to pass but Daphne, in all of her practice exams, scored nearly perfect. So what would she do for the next ten days? Studying more was pointless but she’d been having trouble thinking of an alternate worthy project that could be started and finished in only ten days.
“I’ll get Johnson to propose,” Daphne said, smiling in order to add a silent so there. Her olive face didn’t bow or bob but some of her tied-up black curls bent in the wind.
“Gross,” Dorian said. She ordered a vodka on the rocks from the waitress; Daphne ordered a beer.
“What’s wrong with marrying Johnson?”
“There’s nothing in it for me. Marriage is always hard on the friends. Now if I ever hook up with one of you, for example, it’ll take twice as long for the awkwardness to go away.”
“True,” Daphne said, sighing. Dorian drank her vodka without letting Daphne free of her stare. “Assuming you don’t like suburban Roman Catholic masses or hugging my grandmother, the wedding will be a zero for you. Tell you what-you don’t have to buy me a present.”
“Speaking of,” Dorian said. “Yesterday you said you didn’t know what I wanted in life. Today I figured it out.”
“It only took you 24 years!”
“So there are two kinds of people in the world, greedy and lazy. Most people have both traits, but everyone only is one or the other-” The waitress stood at their table, a pad crunched in her hand. Dorian ordered mashed potatoes and Daphne, medium-rare roast beef. “Greedy people want stuff. Lazy people want time. Stuff sits there for the taking, but time doesn’t. Time is standing up and walking away. Every second that passes, the lazy person loses another thing that she loves. To put it in your language, the lazy person’s life is a stock market crash in slow motion. Imagine if every time you signed online the Times was saying, ‘DAPHNE PLUMMETS!’ That’s the life of a lazy person.”
“Kind of tragic, Dorian.”
“Romantic, on the upside.”
“Of course! You want to be a romantic.”
“No! No, I just want time. That’s why I went to law school, for the flexible scheduling. But even the student’s clock is a thug. The pinnacle of tonight’s drunkenness will last a single tick, and I’ll never write a story and read a book in the same ray of sun. If I misspend a summer day, for example by studying-”
“Speaking of,” Daphne said. “Have you studied for the bar yet?” Dorian rolled her green eyes and took a sip. The brute drink was driving her lips red, she hoped. “If you don’t study now, it’ll only cost you more precious time when you fail and have to take it again. You bumped along through law school okay because of grade inflation and benefits of the doubt, but the bar is different. Here.” Daphne reached into her big be-buckled purse, plucked out a queasy orange pill bottle, and pressed it in Dorian’s lap. Her hand took the under-the-table route.
“Speed!” Dorian said through a big open-mouthed smile.
“Adderall XR. Clearly I don’t need them anymore this summer, so you take them. Most of us swallow pills in order to get more points, Dorian, but you might use them to stop wasting time.”
“Uppers are highly unromantic,” Dorian said. “And passing the bar is untragic. I’ll have to think about it.” The dinners arrived, interrupting eye contact. Daphne reached for the salt and Dorian, the pepper.
*
“Johnson!” Daphne yelled effeminately as she opened his door. She had to do it fast because in a second she would be facing him up close; his apartment was a West Village studio. At the same flirtatious pitch but lower volume she continued, “I’ve just had one of those nights, Johnson.”
“Come here, my lightweight,” Johnson said from the far end of the couch. He spread his long skinny arms wide. It was a gesture he never would have performed a year ago because all stretched out he looked like a cold tree. But since then he had published his dissertation under a new title in order to appeal to general audiences (Lobotomized: A History of Cranial Operations in America) and started dating ex-cheerleader-ish Daphne-actually she was an ex-soccer player-and now he had more butch problems than hylomorphobia.
(Fear of looking like a tree.)
“I’m going to miss this when I’m in Cambodia and Madagascar,” Daphne said, her head in Johnson’s lap now. The lighting would have felt random to an outsider. One artistic lamp left on which was close to the floor and half absorbed by a plastic trash bin; scrapes of neon from outside the window.
“Think of me when you’re hunting giraffes,” Johnson said. Yes, he had upgraded his self-image lately.
“It’s not a-” Daphne hit his chest awkwardly, without enough torque-”hunting trip, Johnson!”
*
Dorian decided that she would blog about studying on adderall. The next morning she set up her materials on a large brown table on the ground floor of the university’s frigid general library. All the library’s summer patrons were skells-earnest middle-aged “non traditional students,” grad students who’d lost track of time six or seven terms ago-so Dorian didn’t mind if they mistook her for a pragmatist. Once all her notebooks and books were laid out, she dropped a gel cap into her mouth and washed it down with water from a leg sized bottle. Daphne had warned of dry mouth.
A few minutes later the cognitive changes started. There were three phases:
First Dorian realized that the only reason she wanted to see Rosemary so badly, and stalked her, etc., was so she could write about it and compare the experience to striking reunion scenes she’d read in Woolf and Bellow. Rosemary was-well, it didn’t matter anymore.
In the second phase Dorian’s breasts told her that they were going to fall off. She pulled the unbuttoned flaps of her pink grampa cardigan over each other and crossed her arms tightly against her chest. Of course they’re going to fall off, they’re so heavy, she told herself. And then, see, I’m being sarcastic. (They weren’t heavy.) Sarcasm meant she didn’t really think her breasts would jump off. So let go of the cardigan and study! The skells will dial 911 if you keep this up. She didn’t let go until the feeling passed about twenty minutes later.
In the third phase, Dorian studied for the bar.
Eight hours later she left the library in order to find food. She wasn’t hungry, but she thought it would be a nice reward to taste something exotic. Since she’d skipped lunch, it could be pricey…
*
After closing her oven on the last batch of oatmeal banana cookies, Daphne broke from the kitchen and called Dorian.
“Are you getting enough rest these days?” Daphne asked.
“No! I mean yes! Enough and not a lot. Daphne, do you have a really high tolerance or is your brain really slow naturally? Or maybe adderall manifests in people differently depending on their personality, not just their like… thyroid? So I’m definitely going to pass the bar at this rate, plus after midnight I’ve been switching over to writing, which is what I’ve always wanted to do so it’s not like adderall has changed me at all. Except that I’m writing science fiction now, not aspirationally beautiful paragraphs anymore. More of a market for that, you know, so there’s this country named Jitoba where currency takes the form of disembodied tonsils instead of paper so people hate to spend it, because then they have to touch tonsils. This politician is trying to get it changed because he stole all these robots, like a labor force worth of them, and stands to make money if people ever spend it. But he says he’s doing it to end the tonsil black market-”
“You’re right,” Daphne said. “Adderall affects different personality types-”
“I’m being so rude, how is your engagement project going?”
“It’s on track,” Daphne said. “We talked about the future the other night and I acted needy, said I hated being alone and would be willing to compromise on a lot of things in order to avoid it. Really, I’m afraid I didn’t choose a time-consuming enough project. Even baking turns out to be very straightforward. Totally rules-based, as far as I can tell.” Daphne realized she was looking at her nails the way men did-curled fingers-and pinched her palm deterrently.
“So the plan is to project yourself into the role of wife and sort of suck him onto the stage with you? Or maybe you’re impliedly incentivizing proposing, or else you’re weakening his defenses-
“I’m giving Johnson permission,” Daphne yawned. “My family is richer than his, Dorian. My firm is more prestigious than his college. I have fewer sexual hang ups than he does and more sophisticated fetishes. My performance this week isn’t meant to manipulate Johnson; it’s a nod.”
“Good plan, I’m listening, also did you know that if you held a life estate you’d need all the remainders’ consents to enhance the place’s value?”
“I’ve known that for five weeks,” Daphne murmured, her eyes on facebook inbox. Ronald had sent her a message: he was in New York for three days and wanted to see her. Was it significant that he hadn’t written the message as a public wall post?
“I think America is finally ready to read about an octopus-gold fish romance,” Dorian said. “Like Finding Nemo meets Lolita.”
*
Ronald and Daphne were a couple during senior year at Westfield High, which was two years after Daphne fell in love with him. They broke up hatefully that summer, right before Ronald moved across the country for college, and made up nostalgically the night after Thanksgiving; broke up December 26; and so on for two years, until they’d had so many fights that they thought of each other as siblings. Then they stopped talking.
Daphne’s doorman called at 7:00 to announce Ronald. She opened her front door and then sat across from her laptop on the couch, not fidgeting.
Then there he was, knuckles around the edge of the door and eyebrows raised in a question, in case the door was left open by mistake. When she stood up he stepped in, and below his bony face he was wearing a dark suit.
“Hey!”
“Ronald! Thanks for coming out here. I just didn’t feel right going out, five days before the bar.”
“No, this is great! Your place is great! Notice the tie?” Daphne looked at it and nodded. “Westfield colors?” She smiled. “Christ that’s corny, I’m sorry.”
“No, no, but hey-we have so much in common besides high school, right?” Daphne wasn’t sure if she was being ironic or sincere, but at least she was sure of the tone: chastely flirtatious.
“Yes. For example, we both wasted the first two years of the best four years of our lives being lovesick wretches.”
Later that evening, Daphne and Ronald had sex. This is who I am, Daphne thought when they were lying down next to each other afterwards. I’m Ronald’s. Johnson had been a game, like law school, but now she was back to herself. Just skin and bones and green and black (Westfield colors). The last three years had been a betrayal-no, the last seven years. Daphne thought lazily about soccer fields and sneaking glances at the bleachers. Then she said with her eyes closed:
“I was such a romantic before I scored you.”
When Daphne started dating Ronald, she’d realized she could get what she wanted.
*
Dorian’s calves had been dotted and itchy ever since that dirty hipster ex started staying over. Also, sometimes at night Dorian saw insects which looked like-she typed the words into wikipedia-bed bugs! She chucked the laptop onto a pile of clothes and tore the sheets from her bed. Mattress on its side, slide it out the door and down the stoop…
Life on adderall felt like driving with headlights on. Dorian’s first night on it she’d bought a bunch of new pens, something she’d been putting off for months. The second day she’d googled how to avoid cramps (take motrin before they start). On day three she’d responded to a confusing email from the ex (“thanks for the sentiment-I’ll call you”). And now she was about to cure her itchy legs. A week earlier she’d had no ambition at all to fix that problem. She’d thought maybe it had to do with fate, or ageing.
Maybe Dorian’s life wouldn’t be a simple descent, each day itchier than the last. She’d always secretly assumed that it would be. She had no work ethic, after all, or real world skills. That was why Dorian thought about her face a lot. No matter how pathetic a beautiful woman acted, no one ever called her pathetic. The tabloids, even, never went further than “poor Jen!” As long as a woman kept the shadows off of her face, no one could accuse her of falling into a “downward spiral.”
But now Dorian could picture herself evading scorn a different way: by wearing designer business suits.
Getting rich could be fun. For example, Dorian had started enjoying salmon crepes from the most pretentious crepe place of all the ones near school. Yes, the future was shaking out rainbows.
*
After a night’s sleep, Daphne felt guilty about cheating on Johnson. So this was what Dorian had been talking about, in her little speech about time: Daphne felt like she would never get to take a deep breath for the rest of her life, because she couldn’t spend it with both Johnson and Ronald. Time was yanking Daphne along by her upper arm and making her give something up.
She would give up Ronald. He lived in California.
The night before the bar, Johnson stood up from his couch and said to Daphne: “one sec.” He clicked a switch on a wire Daphne hadn’t noticed before, and the room filled with rotating multicolored stars.
“Daphne…” Johnson rotated angularly, reached into a pocket, and bent onto a knee.
“I wasn’t expecting this!” Daphne said without meaning to. She had always expected him to propose after the bar, out of deference to her concentration on the law.
“I didn’t want you to go into your test feeling any uncertainty vis a vis me,” Johnson said. Daphne gazed at his eyes dumbly. He was as sincere as a nickel. She didn’t feel like she was giving up anything at all.
*
Dorian finished the first section of the bar early. She walked down a long lane of ducked heads, feeling like the only person who’d survived a nuclear holocaust, and into the restroom. After she washed her hands she stared a herself in the mirror: Dorian, esq.
There, near the corner of her mouth: a fissure in the frozen pond of her cheek! A… line. Dorian’s mind raced through the problem. Adderall sped her thoughts up. It had sped her skin up too. Her whole life. She touched the line. Shadows would grow there darker than any suit.
Dorian wanted a good life. Where’d all this good job crap come from? And… Finding Nemo meets Lolita? She looked away from the mirror.
*
“Sounds like adderall suited you,” Daphne said when they got their bar results. “Will you try to get a prescription?”
“It was a stunt,” Dorian said coldly, then remembered her manners. “I’m grateful for it, Daphne.” And she remembered to throw Daphne off the scent of her vanity: “but adderall speeds me up, and I like lazing around and coming up with ideas slowly. I don’t think I can have it both ways.”
“Well, at least one of your slow ideas was right,” Daphne said. “We’re two very opposite kinds of people.”
