Harvey had been a Sopranos fan. He had lots of Sopranos quotes. For example, whenever he saw Ethan wearing shorts he’d say, in his best Italian-American accent, “A don doesn’t wear shorts.” Harvey never wore shorts, although that was because he was self-conscious about his chicken legs, not because he was a member of the Mafia.
Ethan is looking forward to nachos with Jasmine more than he knows is good for him.
Carter will not be in attendance. Hallelujah. He has a regular Monday poker night with friends, so Mondays are blessedly Carter-free in the apartment.
He’s been trying his best to like Carter. Jasmine could have any guy on the entire planet so Carter can’t be as bad as he comes across. Ironically, the night of the incident in the kitchen, when Carter turned on the light with that murderous expression, ended up being the night that it first seemed possible they could become friends. Or at least friendly acquaintances.
Carter had said, in a tone of voice that honestly made Ethan’s blood run cold: “Is there something going on I should know about?”
If Jasmine’s blood was also running cold, she sure didn’t show it. She appeared unbothered. She didn’t take a step away from Ethan, although Ethan moved a little away from her. She clearly felt no guilt about possibly harboring a secret crush on her flatmate, so that was depressing.
“A psychic predicted Ethan’s death at thirty,” Jasmine explained. “And some of her other predictions have been coming true.”
This seemed to really cheer Carter up. “Seriously?”
When he learned Ethan’s thirtieth was only a few weeks away he became positively chipper.
“Sorry, mate,” he said. “About my reaction. It just looked…for a moment, like something was going on between the two of you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jasmine with mortifying speed and conviction. Ethan agreed it was ridiculous.
The three of them ended up having English muffins and Sleepytime tea together, and Carter watched the video of the car accident and said, “You must be scared out of your mind.” Then he paused and said, “But has it made you kind of grateful to be alive?”
Ethan admitted it really had not made him grateful to be alive, just occasionally nervous that he might soon be dead.
Then Carter became unexpectedly animated and informed Jasmine and Ethan that he regularly contemplated his own mortality. One of his poker buddies has gotten Carter into “the ancient philosophy of Stoicism.” There was something charming, well, almost charming, about the self-conscious way Carter used the words “ancient philosophy,” like when the school jock suddenly pipes up with an earnest contribution in English to the discussion about Romeo and Juliet. Carter even went to Jasmine’s room and came back with a prop to demonstrate his point. It was a gold coin he “carries everywhere” inscribed with the words Memento Mori, which mean “Remember Death.” Carter told them about the Roman generals who, after winning a big battle, would ride triumphant in their chariots, with some poor sod in the back, whose only job requirement was to whisper in the general’s ear, over and over, “Remember thou art mortal. Remember you must die!”
“So that the dude didn’t get a big head,” explained Carter. He slurped his Sleepytime tea and said he looked at the coin every day to remind himself not to waste time thinking about trivial shit. (Like hanging up your bath towel, thought Ethan.)
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Carter, in the manner of someone about to pass on something incredibly profound. “You’ve got to treat every day like a gift because it might be your last.”
It was like he honestly believed he was the first person in the world to say that.
Then Jasmine talked about how her life coach (different guy from her therapist) got her to write her own obituary, which really clarified what she wanted out of life (success, fame, adulation), and how she’d once done this really cool death meditation workshop in LA, where she learned all about a Buddhist tradition where you visualize your dead body, like rotting and decaying, with maggots (she creepy-crawled her fingers across her beautiful face to demonstrate). The idea, she went on, was to help you lose your attachment to the material world. Afterward she’d just felt so alive, and by the way, the pancake station at the breakfast buffet at the Beverly Wilshire was amazing and she’s experienced some pretty amazing pancake stations in her time.
“But didn’t your friend die recently?” Carter asked Ethan delicately. “Doesn’t that make you…I don’t know, grateful it wasn’t you?”
“No,” said Ethan. “It just makes me sad it was him.”
The three of them talked until dawn, at which point Jasmine and Carter went back to bed, secure in the knowledge that all their days were gifts, and Ethan got ready for work.
Since then there have been the deaths of the two elderly doctors, which Jasmine believes is further proof of the lady’s special powers, but which Ethan doesn’t find especially impressive. Anyone could have predicted those deaths. He could have predicted them. They don’t count. Sorry, old doctors.
Carter is still staying over just as much but seems convinced that Ethan is his friend now. Whenever they come across each other, Carter offers Ethan a solemn fist bump and says, “Bro.”
Sometimes there is more than one fist bump a day, which is excruciating. He’s like that work colleague who brightly greets you every time you pass in the corridor, when everyone knows you should avoid eye contact after the first time, or at best exchange pained smiles.
Carter has also asked Ethan, on more than one occasion, to remind him of the exact date of his thirtieth birthday. Is he planning to get him a gift? Yeah, good one. Bro is gleefully counting the days.
The woman next to him nudges him, tapping at the bus window to indicate another cherry blossom tree.
“Beautiful,” says Ethan again.
It actually is quite beautiful.
Chapter 75
Something extraordinary happened to me on a cloudy, breezy Saturday morning three days after my eighteenth birthday.
At the time I was studying for a double degree at Sydney University: a Bachelor of Science in Pure and Applied Mathematics and a Bachelor of Arts in Statistics. I was fulfilling my father’s dream for me.
I don’t mean to imply I only studied math to honor Dad’s memory, and I would have preferred, for example, to be a ballet dancer. Imagine me dancing Swan Lake with my two left feet! That would defy the laws of physics.
(It is obviously impossible to defy the laws of physics, I was using hyperbolic language.)
I loved university. Not for the social life, of course. I didn’t make any friends. Most of the time I was the only woman among hundreds of men, but that didn’t bother me, and it’s not why I didn’t make friends. I can’t recall making eye contact with a single person. I wasn’t there to socialize. I was there to learn. If someone asked to borrow a pen or pencil I would hand it over without even looking. It was like I lost my peripheral vision. All I could see was the board or the figures on the overhead projector.
Everyone I knew thought my studies were useless, like learning a language nobody spoke. Math, by the way, is a language, I would argue a beautiful one, and it’s the only universal language there is, because it’s the same all over the world.
People said I would be qualified for only one job, and it was one I didn’t want: teaching math to children who didn’t want to learn it. I wasn’t known for my love of children.
I didn’t care. I was in seventh heaven.
One day, I was at home in my bedroom absorbed in my work. Auntie Pat was over, she was over more often than not, but this time she was there for a particular purpose: floating shelves. Mum had seen a picture in a magazine she wanted to replicate and she’d found a carpenter in the Yellow Pages: Jack Murphy, EXPERIENCED CARPENTER, prompt, reliable service, quality work. For all your carpentry needs! Auntie Pat was there to make sure this experienced carpenter didn’t charge Mum an inflated price for these fancy shelves.
Nineteen years old. Tall, lanky, but graceful in his lankiness. The most vulnerable of necks and the kindest of eyes. Jack was the tallest man who had ever entered our house, which meant that he was the first and only person to nearly bang his head on our mother-of-pearl hanging light fixture. He swerved his head in a nimble, sporty way as if he were changing direction in a rugby game.
I saw this, because I happened to walk into the room at that exact moment, on my way to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. I stopped dead and looked down at myself in a panic. I wore bell-bottomed blue jeans, a tight blue-and-yellow-striped T-shirt, and silver hoop earrings. I’d washed my hair that morning. It reached the middle of my back, long and straight. I was relieved to find that, by pure chance, my appearance was excellent.
