This isn't happening. No.
Why me.
Why today.
Oh fuck...
+
He slipped his skis into the rack by the door and stepped inside the little cabin, right behind Terry, and he sat down across from her as the door shut. With a lurch the gondola car began heading up the mountain, dangling forty feet above the slopes below, and he tried his best not to look at her...
But she wasn't having any of it.
She put her gloved hand on his knee.
"Are you going to ignore me all day long?"
"I could try," he said. "I guess."
"You'll fail."
"I know. How've you been?"
She nodded her head, grinned. "We haven't seen each other in thirty years, and you ask me 'how I've been?'"
"Well, I could say you're looking good, but then again, you always did."
"Good old shallow, superficial Terry, eh?"
"I didn't say that..."
"You didn't have to, Aaron."
He laughed, gently, but he laughed. "Gee. What an efficient way to have a conversation. I'll just sit here and you can say my lines for me. Saves time that way, don't you think?"
She looked out the fogged-up plastic windows, but he could tell she was far, far away in that moment. Maybe as far away as he had been.
+++++
He was unpacking his bags, putting clothes on hangers his mom had packed away in his footlocker, when a tall, blond headed guy walked in his dorm room.
"You Goodman?" the guy asked.
"Last time I looked," Aaron said. "And you are?"
"Henry Larkin," he said. "I think we're roommates this year."
And so it was.
And so it began.
His third year at Stanford. His continuing love affair with San Francisco. He'd decided to major in physics, take a minor in electrical engineering, but after meeting Henry Larkin there'd come a meeting of the minds, and it was decided that all either really cared about was skiing. Well, skiing -- and girls. But not necessarily in that order.
Still, being over-achievers came with certain practical limitations, namely a serial inability to do anything until their homework was done, but that only lasted until they discovered The Oasis.
Back in the day, when you drove south on El Camino Real through Menlo Park headed towards Palo Alto, just before you came upon the Stanford campus you'd pass a run-down, white clapboard hole in the wall restaurant. If you blinked you'd miss it, because it was set back a little from the road and turned sideways just for good measure, and while there was a sign, of sorts, out front, this sign's most distinguishing characteristic was white paint -- peeling white paint -- with just two words hand painted on it: The Oasis.
It was the kind of place that looked like it belonged to a biker gang, or at least the kind of place bikers hung out at. Until you went inside, anyway.
Everything inside was pine. Pine stained a very dark brown, then coated with megatons of bright varnish, and an L-shaped squadron of booths lined two walls. Once you were inside, you realized these booths were kind of strange. Kind of magic, really.
Because for a long time, perhaps from the very beginning of time, people had carved their names on the walls, on the tabletops, on the seats, and on any and every surface that could be carved. Okay, so no big deal, right? A bunch of names carved on walls, but that is how one October afternoon Aaron and Henry came to be sitting in The Oasis, reading legendary names carved on walls and tabletops -- and staring at a table full of blonds across the small, dark room.
Henry was a rich kid, too, quite unlike Aaron. There was a Jaguar XK-E in the parking lot -- Henry's of course, as was the Rolex Submariner on his wrist. Henry always wore too tight Levis and starched, button down collared Oxford cloth shirts, always from Brooks Brothers and always white. And Bay Rum aftershave. Aaron would never forget the smell of Bay Rum after his one year with Larkin.
And Henry met Terry that afternoon at The Oasis.
When it started snowing at Tahoe that November, Aaron and Henry cut classes and raced up to Squaw Valley. Bliss, pure bliss. By Thanksgiving they'd already racked up ten snow days, and all was right with their world, and with five days off for the coming vacation break, Henry decided it was time to take Terry skiing. He rented a condo at Heavenly and five car loads roared off campus and across the Bay Bridge, tearing through the night bound for South Lake Tahoe.
What followed was predictable enough. Hours on the slopes, of course, and Terry proved to be an excellent skier, almost as good as Henry -- though nowhere near as good as Aaron, but she was a good sport nonetheless. After hours were spent in the hot tub, and Aaron remembered good times spent drinking rum and cokes and cheap fruit wine, cooking burgers, and of course, lots of America's favorite pastime. Sex.
Henry spent hours behind closed doors with Terry, and Aaron spend hours on the other side of that door feeling jealous. He had a "crush" on her, he had ever since he first saw her, but soon he looked on helplessly as he watched just how poorly Henry treated her. He belittled her constantly, made fun of the way she dressed, the food she ordered when they went out together, the way she kept her hair...
But what got Aaron was how she put up with it, but pretty soon he'd figured that out, too. Henry Larkin came from money, old money, and that's what Terry Caldwell had been programmed to want all her life. She'd found money now, and had no intention of letting go. No matter the price she had to pay, Henry Larkin was what she wanted -- more than anything else in the world.
But the funny thing about it all, he remembered, was the way she always came to him. To talk. To find a shoulder to cry on. When she just needed to someone to say nice things about her, Aaron was there. Always there. She was, he learned, a country club girl. Her father had a bunch of car dealerships in Kansas, her mother was Junior League, and she was the only child. Spoiled beyond belief, Terry was also smart as hell -- academically speaking, anyway -- and somehow she'd ended up at Stanford. Terry's mother was sure she'd find "just the right man" there, too, and so the hunt had begun. When Henry asked her to come home with him over the coming Christmas vacation she was elated, her future assured. He'd never seen her so happy.
Yet when everyone returned from Christmas break that January, Aaron found a profound change had come over both Henry and Terry. He was sullen, withdrawn, and didn't want to talk about about her anymore; Terry was awkward and suddenly shy around him. Aaron focused on his studies and walked on the eggshells between them.
Then one day Henry came to him.
"I need you to do me a favor," Henry said carefully, his lips trembling.
"Sure. Name it."
"I need you to take Terry."
"Take her?" Aaron said, confused.
"To the doctor. I need you to take her to the doctor. I can't...I can't do it..."
So Aaron went to Terry's dorm room, found her sitting on her bed, staring at a Monet poster on the wall.
"Terry?"
She turned and looked at him, sorrow in her eyes. "It figures," was all she said.
"What's going on, Terry?"
"Really? You haven't figured it out yet, Aaron? You, of all people?"
"Figured what out?"
"I'm pregnant, Aaron. I'm getting an abortion this afternoon. I was waiting for Henry. He was going to take me..."
She seemed broken, set adrift on a sunless sea, and he didn't know anything else to do so he walked to her, sat beside her and put his arm around her. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
She leaned her head on his shoulder, took his hand. "Thank God you're here," she whispered.
"I've always been here, Terry." He brought her hand to his mouth and kissed it. "What do you want to do?"
"We'd better go now."
"Terry? Is this what you really want? You?"
He remembered how she turned to him, the confusion he saw in her eyes. Tears forming, a forced smile. "Yes, of course," she said, but she was shaking her head. "Come on, let's go."
He remembered the clinic most of all. Everyone looking at him. The eyes especially. Confusion. Suspicion. Everywhere he looked, desperate souls seeking desperate measures, an easy way out of the dead end street they found themselves on.
"Why are we here, Terry?"
"Because he says if I don't, it's all over. He thinks I did this on purpose..."
But she couldn't see it. It already was over, and when 'it' was over and done with he carried her out to his car and got her up to the dorm room, and he lay beside her for hours while she cried. Henry never came. Never. And still, Terry just couldn't understand.
A week later, a month. She never made the connection. But Aaron was there, always there. He went to classes, got her to her own classes, walked her back to the dorm and stayed with her. He helped her with homework, went with her to meals -- just to make sure she ate something, anything -- and when she fell down he was there. He was always there, and by the time summer came around she was almost strong enough to stand up to life on her own.
He packed his footlocker, avoided looking at Henry Larkin on the last day of the term, then that was it. Everything was over. Larkin didn't return the next year; he transferred to a school closer to home after his grades tanked, and Aaron never saw him again.
Terry went home and she wrote to him almost daily for a few weeks, then the letters stopped, and she too didn't return in the Fall.
He graduated that next year, then went on to graduate school at MIT before moving out to Seattle. He lived and worked there for almost twenty years, before he'd had enough of life in the fast lane. He dreamed of skiing, of living in the mountains. Of maybe dropping out for good, just skiing. He sold out, invested his money and talked with an architect whose work he admired, and they flew to Aspen and looked for land. He bought a pickup truck and put a camper on the back and drove around the West, skiing where there was snow, taking photographs when the flowers bloomed, while his house was being built. Somewhere along the way he found a mangy white puppy abandoned near an Indian reservation in Montana and he picked her up, named her Terry and they rode around together while he built her health back up. When the house was finished they moved in together, and she slept by his side, licking his ears, loving him, and they were both happy. Still, after two years of driving and skiing he felt as good as he ever had, and he joined the ski school at Aspen Mountain that next winter. And life was almost good.
+++++
The gondola car crossed a pylon and it jumped and swayed in sudden sunlight, and she looked at him, that same sad smile in her eyes.
