“That’s awful.”
“It’s an anomaly, at the very least.”
Jonathan shifts in his seat. “And they caught it … late?”
“That’s the thing,” Alice says. “With gallbladder cancer, you never really know. Or, that’s not entirely true. You do know, when they finally tell you. It’s just that, up until then, it’s not something that they routinely check for, and the signs and symptoms aren’t exactly the same as getting a lump on your tit, you know? Harder to tell that anything’s wrong, and all that. Anyway. Yes. They did catch it late—by the time they diagnosed him, the thing had already set up shop in his liver. And by that point the only thing we could do was keep him comfortable and high enough so he wasn’t in too much pain.”
It’s a rehearsed speech (though one that, until now, she’s avoided having to deliver to Jonathan), not in the sense that she’s practiced it in front of a mirror, but rather in that she’s given it before—to friends, coworkers, countless first dates who ask what happened. At first it was uncomfortable—she rarely wanted to say it any more than they wanted to hear it—but then a shift happened, some hardening of nerves, and she actually managed to mine a sort of perverse joy in recounting the details of her father’s death. It’s avoidance, she knows—she is averting some core emotional issue that she needs to deal with. Paul, with his bullshit master’s degree, has told her as much, and the truth is, he’s probably right. For the time being, though, avoidance seems to work for her. It isn’t fun—fun isn’t the word for it—but it is distracting, and distracting is enough. She likes testing how much she can prevent herself from feeling, how long she can keep remorse at bay.
She imagines that someone else is telling the story, as if she, Alice, is watching some simulacrum describe the death of someone who had her father’s name, and who had her father’s disease, but who, aside from those two inconsequential details, is a complete stranger. She thinks how she’d judge the abilities of this impostor, this made-up version of herself: how well she played with the tones of her voice, how she milked compassion from her audience. This, she tells herself, is a trait she inherited from her father. While Paul prides himself on his emotional hysterics—his keen sense for holding a grudge, for painting himself as the family’s black sheep—Alice has her dad’s knack for maintaining a corpselike calm.
She remembers when he went in for stomach pains and, a week later, the doctors told him he had three months. Her mother was crying so hard that she wasn’t able to drive home from the hospital. So Dad asked her to get into the backseat so he could drive—there was a Cubs game starting in twenty minutes. Alice, who had come home to be there for the test results, had sat next to him on the couch for nine interminable innings. They finished a twelve-pack of beer and half a pack of Marlboros. During the game’s recap, she asked him if he needed anything and he told her to make him a ham sandwich.
She catches a reflection of herself in Jonathan’s eyes, and wonders, briefly, if she’s coming off as a bitch.
“You think I’m heartless,” she says. “For what it’s worth, I also go to a support group. Something to help me deal…”
“Is that where you go on Tuesday afternoons?”
“You’ve noticed?”
He smiles. “I like to keep tabs on you.”
Alice smooths her napkin across her lap. “This is humiliating.”
Beneath the table he grabs her hand. “Look, I think we all deal with shit like this in different ways.”
She appreciates his diplomacy and squeezes his hand.
“Thanks,” she says.
“Anyway.” He’s still holding her hand. “Your brother and your mom…”
“Oh, right,” she says. “He doesn’t approve of how Mom handled it all. So he’s not speaking to her.”
“And how did she handle it?”
“Another story that’s too long.”
“And your mother wants you…” He trails off.
A strand of hair tickles Alice’s chin, and she hooks it behind her left ear. “To somehow make things right, I guess? It’s all because of Eloise.”
“Oh, right.” With his free hand, Jonathan reaches for the bottle and pours himself another glass of wine. “The Wedding of the Century.”
He sips and smacks his lips.
Suddenly self-conscious, Alice gently pulls her hand away and sets it in her lap. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You’ve heard all this before. I don’t want to bore you.”
“You’re not.”
Alice chews on the inside of her lip. “Well, I’m sort of boring myself, to be honest.”
“We can talk about something else.”
“Would you mind?”
“Of course not. What do you want to talk about?”
“Anything,” Alice says. She reconsiders: “Or, no, not anything. Talk to me about big data.”
The corners of Jonathan’s mouth twitch as he tries to suppress a grin. “You don’t want to hear about that.”
“Sure I do. You know how much I love the story.”
And so he begins recounting his own personal history, or mythology, which, by this point, has become so familiar to Alice that she occasionally has to fight the urge to interrupt him and correct facts that he so endearingly fudges. He narrates his first few years after Stanford, when he held jobs at a handful of fledging start-ups, all of which ended up folding on account of (according to Jonathan) their inability to “procure and creatively interpret substantial masses of incongruent data.” Then there was the pivotal trip to Australia (Jonathan says that he started in Sydney, though from past tellings of the story, Alice knows that he flew into Melbourne), where, totally by chance, he met Vishnu Goyal (the Vishster!), a Berkeley grad who’d just fled Google, and with whom Jonathan shared any number of acquaintances back in the Bay Area. They bummed around together for about a month, hitting Brisbane and the Great Barrier Reef, staring at the sunburned faces of Ayers Rock, until, on January 2, they found themselves at a bar in Auckland, hatching a plan for what to do with the rest of their lives.