The Reunion

The gloomy morning felt foreboding to Oliver as he left his house, locked the side door behind him, and walked to his car. The Volvo he drove now wasn’t the same vehicle he drove when last he saw Jenny, but his mind wandered to that beat up Nissan as he turned over the engine. Since she had texted him a few weeks ago, it felt like all he had experienced were flashbacks like these, only broken by crippling feelings of dread, scabbed over anger, and a longing—or a grieving—for what could have been.

Oliver had met Jenny in college, but not in any sort of meet cute way that you see in the movies. He was earning beer money and some bullshit course credits working as a tutor and she was apparently terrible at English 101. She walked into the library twenty minutes late and quick-stepped her way over to the table where Oliver had been waiting for thirty minutes already. She had apologized for her tardiness and made some lame excuse. He didn’t remember what it had been anymore, but he remembered the thin layer of grime from yesterday’s makeup on her face and the faint but distinct aroma of vodka either wafting out of her pores or clung to the faded and wrinkled denim jacket that she must have fallen asleep wearing after a late night out.

He snapped out of his reminiscence and backed out of his drive onto the sleepy road where he now lived. So much had happened in his life since that last year of his undergrad, he wondered what they would even talk about at this coffee summit she had invited him to: what happened, or what had happened since. Oliver was a pretty successful English professor now, unmarried, but he thought he liked it that way. It isn’t so much that he was a loner, he just preferred the untethered existence that bachelordom afforded him. He had good friends, and was even godfather to his best friend’s daughter, Eva, who’s picture hung in his office and who he bragged on to colleagues as much as he doted on her. He was loved by his students and appreciated by the other faculty, and he even had a book deal in the works for high school curriculum. He even held down a a girlfriend once in a while. But things weren’t always so simple for Oliver.

As he turned onto Highway 1 toward the Bridge, he thought back to one of his happiest memories of Jenny—maybe the only happy memory he had left of her. They had gone for a hike, or maybe just a day-long walk in Sausalito through the Muir redwoods and talked for hours about what they wanted their lives to look like in ten years. Oliver spoke of his dreams to be a screenwriter, and Jenny of hers to be an artist. What these visions of future selves had in common, if only implicitly, was that they would be together. They convivially argued about where they would live, how many children they wanted, and what extracurricular activities the little ones would engage in. On the way back, Jenny told Oliver how much she appreciated him. This memory stood out so strongly because while Jenny was effusive, she was always short with her words. “You brought me back from the brink,” she told him, “and I cannot imagine where I would be without you in my life.” They kissed under the orange and pink clouds surrounded by pillars of wood dressed in evergreen. It was, in his mind, a cathedral worthy of the love they shared. Oliver thought then that he would remember this moment for the rest of his life. He turned out to be right.

As he started over the bridge, his mind flashed to the last time they had spoken. Jenny had a troubled upbringing, and so he always felt like he had to wear kid gloves with her. This decision undoubtedly made the fight that much worse, in hindsight. In a night out with some of the guys, Oliver had made a mistake. He had a little too much to drink and made out briefly with a cute girl he met at the bar. Not his proudest moment, but hardly his lowest. Jenny, however, was inconsolable. “You fucking bastard!” She screamed the same thing over and over as she smashed the shabby furnishings of his apartment. He hadn’t spent much money, and even less thought acquiring the mismatched second-hand lamps and glass-framed posters and rickety wooden chairs, but this was the first home he had made for himself. Seeing it destroyed before his eyes locked him in a kind of morbid trance. “You fucking bastard!” Even in her rage, she still was not very verbose.

Oliver got off the Bridge and his anxiety over the coming conversation swelled with each passing mile. He thought back across the dozen or so different conversations that ensued in the weeks after the Night of Broken Furniture. The first came the following day with his boss, Professor Allen. George Allen was a southern man in his early seventies who had managed to live such a long life without ever developing a sense of humor, despite having two first names. He called Oliver to his little cupboard of an office behind the lecture hall and asked him to shut the door behind him without looking up from the stack of papers in his left hand. Allen quietly laid down his papers and pulled his large tortoise-framed glasses down his nose as Oliver slid into the chair opposite the portly old man. “Got your hand caught in the cookie jar, eh, boy?” Over the course of the hour or so long conversation, Oliver pieced together that Jenny had gotten drunk after leaving his freshly tortured apartment and called in a complaint of sexual harassment on him to the school. The resulting inquiry lasted nearly ten months, delayed his graduation, and cost him several years off his life in unearned stress.

The second memorable conversation happened around five weeks later. During their brief time together, Oliver had met only one or two of Jenny’s relatives. Her older cousin, Andre, though, took the cake as one of the least favorite human beings Oliver had ever met. Andre was a ladder-climber. Famously good in first impressions, he was a man of great respect but very little character. He carried himself like he was the next Gatsby, which got under Oliver’s skin—especially because in reality (as Oliver would soon learn) he was not much more than the town gossip. Whenever they had hung out, Andre seemed to know everyone. He could flit from social circle to social circle and wax on about whatever was important to that group. Andre was, though, a very influential alumni, and so when he asked Oliver to come over to his house for a drink, he didn’t dare turn it down. He imagined that Andre wanted to talk about how his cousin was doing amidst all this, and while Oliver cared about Jenny deeply, he was too hurt to care. What he could not have anticipated, though, was the ambush he was walking into. Andre had asked several people who were important to Oliver, but not necessarily close, to his home that night as well. There was Thomas O’Malley, the Parish Priest, seated alongside Mr. Amberson, a member of the Board of Trustees for Oliver’s university on the couch. Picking at the fabric of the gaudy overstuffed armchair he was seated in was Professor Allen, looking rather bored and dissatisfied to be there himself. Each of these men uniquely handpicked because of their importance to Oliver, and to the community he belonged to, but each unable—or unwilling—to mount any kind of defense of him because of their casual familiarity. One character in the room stood out from the others, though. Over by the fireplace leaning against the mantle was Oliver’s friend Sam. When Oliver entered through the foyer, Sam shot Oliver a confused and maybe apologetic glance and then downed what was left of the glass in his hand. It was the last time that evening that Sam looked him in the eye. Andre had told these powerful and important men that Oliver had repeatedly raped his cousin, and this was meant to be some sort of an intervention to get him to turn himself in to the authorities. Oliver had spent the better part of two hours that night trying to defend himself to this ad-hoc Grand Jury, and the better part of three years picking up the pieces of his shattered reputation.

As he turned up the hill toward the coffee shop which was the agreed upon rendezvous, Oliver couldn’t fathom why he had agreed to the meeting. Jenny had ruined much of his reputation with a false claim and cost him years of anxiety, mistrust, therapy bills, and a false start to his adult life. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting—or hoping—to come out of the conversation, but he knew what he feared above all else: recurrence. In the years since they were together, Oliver had become convinced by his study of literature, and maybe even his relationship with Jenny, that history has a tendency to repeat itself and that people never really change. They may grow and regress or improve and diminish their character, but they are always the same person they were. The same character destined to play his part in the story of the world, no matter how much he despised the role. He wondered if maybe the seemingly masochistic drive that had its foot on the gas pedal of his Volvo station wagon was the same one that led him to a relationship with Jenny in the first place. Could he hope for a different outcome? Could he dare cling to the hypocritical notion that things might turn out differently this time?

Oliver slammed the car into park, and checked his watch; twelve minutes to nine. He let out a long breath that he guessed he had been holding for some time now and walked toward the little cafe. It was perched awkwardly on the side of a hill and had a partially obstructed view of the Bay several miles away. He looked around for Jenny, but didn’t see her, so he sat down and ordered himself a cappuccino from the waitress. She clearly had things she’d rather be doing, but she was pleasant enough and walked back inside to place the order with the barista. Oliver wasn’t exactly surprised when Jenny picked this place for their little reunion. It held a small piece of significance in their briefly shared life. This cafe was where they had convened to debrief after they cooled off from their first really big fight. It certainly wasn’t the last fight they had, nor did it even make the list of the worst, but it was the first. Around the third or fourth date, Oliver had noticed that Jenny had a habit of lying about things. Never anything big or even anything important, she just seemed to act like a story was better with embellishments and that people didn’t need to know the little details of her life. Oliver paid attention then to all these details and began to keep score of how often he believed he was getting the whole truth, or merely an obscured and polished version of it. Deception bothered him profoundly, probably because he had a complicated relationship with the truth himself. Oliver never intended to deceive anyone but himself, but Jenny’s little fibs were like a mirror into a part of his soul that he didn’t particularly appreciate seeing. One evening, Jenny had come over to his apartment drunk. This frustrated him, because it was a Tuesday at 7pm. She had obviously been drinking most of the day. When he confronted her, she protested that she had only had one cocktail with a friend just before she came over. Annoyed, he accused her of being a liar and laid out his laundry list of her sins that he had made mental note of over time. She threw a slurred tantrum and he threw her out.

The waitress silently laid his cappuccino on the table and walked away to attend to other customers. As he took his first sip he looked up and made eye contact with her as she crossed the street to the shop; the woman who ruined his life.

• • •

Jenny was enjoying her night out with her new friends more than she thought she was capable of. When she had arrived on campus for her freshman year of college, she breathed what she imaged was the first free air ever she had ever smelled. She made a promise to herself that she would never return to Iowa again. Her mother had run out on her and her dad when she was around six or so, and her father was a shell of a man. He was a drunk, and she had to predict his mood swings between catatonic indifference and helter-skelter rage. She didn’t think he even noticed when she packed her bags and walked out of the house. She boarded a Greyhound bus to San Francisco, where her only real family lived, and never even thought to look back.

She had met these girls in her dorm and felt an immediate magnetism about them; probably because they were so unlike her or any girls she had met before in her hometown. They were bold, independent, and—above all—free. They did what they wanted when they wanted, and Jenny wanted to be just like them. Tonight, they had gotten into a swanky nightclub and were dancing the night away. Jenny was failing a couple of classes, dodging calls from a few worried family members, and in many ways felt like her life was careening along a road at the edge of a precipice; but tonight, she didn’t care. She was with her friends, and she was free.

On the walk back to their dorms, Jenny was caring for one of her friends, Brooke, who had way too much to drink. She wrapped her mother’s old denim jacket around her and supported her weight as she stumbled around the streets of San Francisco in her kitten heels. Jenny didn’t know why she kept the jacket—after all, she despised her mother for leaving, never even bothering to try and find her as a young adult—but it really was her favorite thing that she owned. “How are you-u not a-as drunk as me?” Her friend managed to stammer as the two of them plopped down on a curb to wait for an Uber to take them back to school; the rest of the group had moved on to the next club. The truth was, Jenny had not had anything to drink at all that night. While the other girls were letting cute guys by them shots and glasses of champagne, she was getting club soda and cranberry for herself from the bar. Seeing her dad drink like she had her whole life had soured her to the idea of being out of her mind, no matter how fun her new girlfriends made it look. “I totally am,” she lied to Brooke.

By the time she got back to Brooke’s dorm room, it was already three in the morning and she didn’t feel like going back to her room. She had a tutoring appointment set up by the school the next morning and really wasn’t looking forward to it. She managed to get Brooke tucked into her bed, with some effort—a practice she was more familiar with than she would like—balled up her jacket, and fell soundly asleep on the floor next to Brooke’s bed.

The next morning, Brooke’s roommate Denise woke Jenny up coming in from her own late night, shoes in hand. She reached for her phone and flew into a panic. It was five minutes to nine and she had to make it all the way across campus to the library. She quickly gathered her things and ran out the door, offering a quick greeting, apology, and goodbye to Denise already on her way down the hall. She had missed a shuttle bus outside by maybe a minute and had to wait another ten minutes before another would arrive. She anxiously waited for the next one, but her phone had since died, so she had no idea what time it was. She cursed herself for forgetting to plug it in the night before. When the shuttle finally dropped her at the library, she hurried in at nearly a full run. She found her tutor, Oliver, waiting for her at one of the tables in the study section of the university library. He was a fairly attractive guy, in a geeky sort of way. Twenty-one or twenty-two, slender and maybe six feet tall with brown tousled hair and reading glasses. She thought he looked destined to be in some field that allowed him to be a bookworm or behind a computer. Jenny made a casual but sincere apology for being late and tried to explain that her friend needed help last night. He seemed to accept her apology, but Jenny felt like he was looking down his nose at her. He was helping her with English 101, a subject she was not excelling at, and that she genuinely hated. Articulating her thoughts had never come easy to her. He was helpful enough, though, and certainly knowledgeable about the subject, so by the end of the tutoring session, she plucked up the courage to ask him to tutor her more consistently.

After the fifth tutoring session, Oliver surprised her by asking her out to dinner. If she was honest, she wasn’t looking for or expecting any romantic attachments to form her freshman year. She had been rolling her eyes for months at all the girls in her dorm hall who were fawning over the boys their age—they really were boys, in her eyes, with all their flexing in mirrors and riding their skateboards shirtless through the quad between classes. She would mock these girls behind their back with Brooke, who she was beginning to suspect was a lesbian. There was something about Oliver, though, that seemed more refined—or at least more mature—than the freshmen boys she had seen. Of course, he was a graduating senior, but he also had a quiet confidence that she had not seen in a guy before. Their first date, he surprised her again with how interested he was in her life. He asked about her family, her passions, what sports she played as a young girl, her high school crush, her childhood best friend, her dreams, and her political viewpoints. Really, it was all very overwhelming for her, but she appreciated that at least he didn’t make her feel like he just wanted to get in her pants.

By the third date, things seemed to be getting more serious for Oliver. Jenny wasn’t even sure she knew what a relationship was supposed to look like. She had gotten more used to the pseudo-interrogation that each date seemed to bring, and was even getting better about asking him about his life. The more she thought about it, she had never experienced deep conversation like this and such interest from a stranger. It was becoming as fascinating as it was terrifying for her. There were still some subjects she chose to skirt around, though, like her mother’s abandonment and her father’s alcoholism, how lonely she was in Iowa that she had contemplated ending it all, or her near fatal grades. Oliver had an intensity about him that she just wasn’t sure she knew how to meet.

About a month into their relationship, they traded their first I love you’s. Of course, Oliver went first, but Jenny decided that she did love him, if not in the same way that he appeared to love her. That same month, they had their first real blow out fight. Jenny had gone out for a cocktail with Brooke at this beautiful rooftop bar overlooking the Bay. Neither of them had fake ID’s, but Brooke knew the bartender from her Sociology class. It was only the third or fourth drink Jenny had ever had in her life, but Brooke insisted that they celebrate the two of them passing their first semester of college—more or less passing, anyway. The scene felt like something straight out of Sex and the City to Jenny, and she let herself enjoy the moment with her new best friend. They spent most of the time talking about Oli (as Brooke insisted on calling him) and how the relationship was progressing with the “L word” happening the weekend prior. After she finished her Appletini, she caught an Uber to Oliver’s to spend the evening with him at his apartment. He had this condescending air about him when he answered the door, which immediately put her on the defensive. Out of nowhere, he accused her of being a drunk and a liar, which really blindsided her. She was furious to be compared to her father, even if Oliver didn’t outright say it. She saw red, and he told her that if she didn’t leave now, he wouldn’t speak to her again. Jenny cried herself to sleep that night alone in her dorm room.

They fought quite a bit as the months went on, and while she largely assumed that the fights were her fault because this was all so new to her, she did wonder if it was normal for a guy to be so dependent on her affection for his own sense of wellbeing. All things considered, though, she was opening up to a new way to experience life—a life of openness to another human being. She did get the sense that she wasn’t opening up quite fast enough for Oliver’s preference, but she was doing the best she could and really was enjoying trusting him. All her life, the people in it had taught her that the only person she could really trust was herself, and this guy was making her feel like maybe that wasn’t always the case; if all he wanted in return was a few affirming words, she felt like she could tell him what he wanted to hear. They spent a Saturday afternoon in the woods across from the Bay, chatting about what each of them dreamed for their futures. Oliver was so funny about insisting one way or another that the perfect life would look like. Jenny would laugh and call him crazy, insisting that she wanted only one child, if any, and more than anything to stay in the city—as far away from her small rural hometown in Iowa. He bawdily protested that a bunch of kids was the recipe for a happy life and to watch them fish and play on a big plot of land in middle-America was what everyone dreamed. She knew that he romanticized Huckleberry Finn, and laughed at the apparent influence. Toward the end of the end of the afternoon, they were headed back and it began to rain a little; not enough to bother her, but Jenny still wasn’t used to the coastal weather pattern and feared that they would get stuck out in some storm. She suggested that they turn back to walk to the car and offered her thanks for the date and for the way he had helped her with school, and with opening up. To this day, she doesn’t remember what she specifically said to him, but she remembers the way he looked at her in that moment. He kissed her so simply and deeply that she felt the final brick in the wall she had carefully erected around her heart topple over.

The next month or so felt like a dream to Jenny. Her grades were improving, she had her first best friend, and she had a guy who had finally convinced her to really trust him. It all came crashing down on a rainy Sunday evening, though. The other shoe always drops, and Jenny didn’t see it coming. She had gone out for a late lunch with Brooke and had a couple glasses of white wine—she had become more comfortable with alcohol, thanks to Oliver and Brooke, but had really settled on this being her “drink”. Oliver had texted her that he wanted her to come over that evening, which surprised her, since she thought he was out all weekend for his friend’s bachelor party; Brooke teased that Oli couldn’t get enough of her and had to come back early to see her. The reality of it was honestly staggering for Jenny. She remembered so clearly running from the Uber up to his apartment in the rain so clearly. The rest was a blur of snapshot images, like a slideshow at a graduation ceremony. His words, “we kissed”; his stone-cold expression; her fury; him standing statue-still while she ripped photos off the wall and hurled them in his direction; “fucking bastard”. She didn’t fully regain consciousness until she was at Brooke’s dorm room late that night. She had cried a lot, she knew, and she was more hurt and broken than she had ever been in her life—and that was a high standard. This man had begged, prodded, goaded, instructed, guided, prepared, and pleaded with her to trust him, and he thought that he could break that enormous trust without consequence?! Brooke fueled Jenny’s rage and stoked her into a tipping point. If she were allowed room (without judgement) to be honest, Jenny would also say today that tequila played a more than small role in what happened next. “You should make him pay,” Brooke insisted confidently— maybe more confidently than she was in her ability to stand—“tell the school that he abused his position as your tutor, which he totally did!!” Brooke might have been drunk, but so was Jenny, and she was making a hell of a lot of sense. Jenny logged onto the school’s Student Services website and filed an official complaint against Oli—er, Oliver.

The next few weeks were a blur. Jenny began going out to clubs and frat parties almost nightly with Brooke. She told every guy she was even vaguely interested in that Oliver had taken advantage of her. She wasn’t sure anymore if it was to hurt him, or to make herself feel better about trusting a human being—let alone a man—enough to hurt her like this. Her cousin Andre, who she never really trusted either, insisted on getting involved. She had a few hearings at the school, only one of which she bothered to show up for, and even then, it was hungover. She convinced herself that it was enough to make Oliver pay for what he had done to her; that she could now go on with an unattached and invulnerable life of saying yes to whatever suited her and no to anything that had the most remote potential of pain. She didn’t want him to suffer for the rest of his life, per se, she just wanted him to suffer for at least as long as she suffered.

She ended up suffering for quite a while. Within two months, she had a big enough fight with Brooke that she would never speak to Jenny again, she dropped out (or flunked out) of school, she moved back to Iowa, and she was for the second time in her life contemplating ending it.

Several years ran by for Jenny like this; an indifferent person going through the motions of an indifferent universe. She kept telling herself—and everyone in her life—that she was happier unattached, but the truth was that she felt so unwilling to trust another person with her thoughts, her beliefs, her truths, and her dreams. Occasionally, Oliver popped into her mind, and she did her best to force away the pain of remembrance; more than anything, the fear of recurrence. It felt impossible for her to hold down a job, invest in a friendship beyond casual acquaintance, and certainly unthinkable to have a meaningful romantic relationship. Oliver had taken all of that from her in one fell swoop, and she didn’t think she’d ever have the ability to find a sense of closure.

One day, it finally felt like too much. She was working as a waitress in a roadside bar that mostly served truckers on the long haul. There was a younger guy, Gil, who always flirted with her when he passed through. Gil finally worked up the courage to ask Jenny out, and she agreed, asking him to meet her after she got off her shift back at the bar. She figured she would have some casual sex and move on with her life, and maybe give Gil the time of his. Three hours later, Jenny clocked out and sat down at the bar she served four nights a week, alongside the regulars she served. This environment suited her fine, she thought, and was more than adequate for whatever it was that Gil had in mind. Thirty minutes later—on time to the second—Gil walked in with a pressed shirt and tie; Jenny and Gil obviously had very different ideas in mind of what this encounter meant. She slinked off the barstool before he noticed her and disappeared into the kitchen, standing him up. She cried for the first time since that night in Brooke’s dorm room.

Jenny pulled herself together, jumped behind the wheel of her Ford Ranger and pointed it west. By the time she hit Lincoln—fueled by hatred, energy drinks, and anxiety—she sent a simple text to Oliver, I’d like some closure; Cafe Atelier 9am on Tuesday?

In Salt Lake City, she pulled over at a truck stop to sleep for a bit. Her mind raced a million miles per hour as she tried to piece together what she was doing, what she felt, and what she felt about what she was doing. She knew that she wanted some sort of apology from Oliver, but she couldn’t contemplate what he would want in return—he always wanted something in return. He always needed some affirmation or capitulation. Regardless, she felt at least determined to tell him everything that had happened in her life since and how his betrayal at her most vulnerable state set the trajectory for the less-than-anticipated life she was now living. She went to bed thinking over and over again, and maybe even out loud, “you fucking bastard.”

By the time she pulled into San Francisco, for the first time in years, she was beginning to rethink her decision. Of course, Oliver deserved the tongue-lashing he had coming courtesy of yours truly. But she hadn’t kept track of what he had been up to since. What if he was married with kids? What if he walked away from their breakup and hadn’t thought of her since? What if he had forgotten she ever existed? These insecurities emboldened her position further; if this asshole had forgotten her, in spite of how empty and lonely he left her, she would give him good reason to remember. She pressed on, emboldened and infuriated.

She pulled onto the block of the coffee shop that annoyed her—but annoyed him even more—and made her first parallel parking job in over six years, and turned the ignition. She climbed out of the car, set her gait, breathed deeply, smoothed her dress, and crossed the street. As she did, she made eye contact with him; the man who ruined her life.