1
Aurora
I watch him from afar. I know him even though I don’t even know his name. He probably wants everything that’s mine. He imagines that my life is wonderful and fun and full of possibilities that he could only dream of. What he doesn’t know is how boring it can be or how isolating.
I have my parents, my friends, my parents extended social circle, and even my grandparents. But none of them really know me. I wish they did.
Not even my therapist knows me.
Everywhere I go, I wear a false face and it makes my life a farce.
My makeup and dress are my armor.
Thousand dollar shoes. Two thousand dollar bags. Three thousand dollar dresses.
My closet is as big as most one-bedroom apartments in New York City. I can buy anything and therefore, I want nothing.
My therapist thinks that I’m depressed. She diagnosed me with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed meds that I don’t want to take. Maybe I am depressed. But who wouldn’t be? I’m in my mid-twenties and I can be anything I want. The only problem is that I don’t want to do anything.
During the year I stay busy by going to school. The classes give me some structure to the day.
I take four each semester and between that, studying, the gym, and the weekly spa session, I manage to stay busy enough to forget how bored I am.
On the weekends, my girlfriends, the ones working sixty hours a week at non-paying internships for famous designers, artists, and gallery owners insist that I pull myself away from my books and my boring grad-school “friends” and hang with them instead. Their parties are usually two-day affairs that require helicopter rides and mansions in far-flung places. It’s the stuff of dreams, or in my case, nightmares.
They say friends using quotation marks because they know that those people are not really my friends at all. They're just people I know. What my other friends don’t know, however, is that they aren’t really my friends either. They are just people I have known longer.
This guy with his hazel eyes, casual smile, and cheap clothes probably thinks the same thing of me as everyone else. That I’m just a spoiled little girl who has had everything handed to her, that I have never worked hard for anything, and I will never deserve anything I have.
I don’t blame him. A part of me thinks the same way. What else can you think? My father owns a media empire and has dominated New York society ever since he came onto the scene in the 1980s. He owns hundreds of buildings and homes in New York and around the world. He’s someone every businessman wants to be but can’t because he will never step down.
I’m his oldest child and he wants to groom me to take over, but I know that that will never happen. He is not the type to retire. He’s not the type to fade away. Besides, I have no interest in running an empire. I want to carve out my own place in this world, what that is exactly I do not know yet.
Neither of my parents understand this, even though they should. They both came from nothing and they both grew Tate Media into what it is today. My mother was not the type to stay at home. She is Tate's Chief Financial Officer and that’s just scratching the surface of what she does there.
My parents are Tate Media. They have built it from scratch, buying up one distressed radio station at a time. They know the ins and outs of the whole business and, despite all of that, they have never made me feel welcome there.
I have spent one long and miserable summer there during my sophomore year with both of them looking over my shoulder and micro-managing my every move. After that, I said no more and promised myself that I would never work there again.
The guy glances at me. I sit back in the lounger and point my toes. I take a sip of my margarita, pursing my lips just so. I adjust my Chanel sunglasses and oversized floppy hat to both hide my gaze and to get a better look at him.
He’s cute enough and probably witty, to a degree, but I wish that people weren’t so predictable. I know exactly what he’s going to say before he says it. I know exactly what he’s going to compliment me on and what he’s going to pay attention to. There is no surprise and without that, he will be just like a hundred others I’ve met who did not hold my interest.
He walks up to me slowly. I brace myself for a boring pick-up line. He looks deep into my eyes, so deeply in fact that I can't look away. I pull my sunglasses to the bridge of my nose and wait for him to open his mouth. His lips curl at the corners, but only slightly.
“Have you ever read Flannery O’Connor?"
I sit back in my seat, taken aback. Hmm…this is interesting.
“Of course,” I say, raising one eyebrow.
"She's one of my favorite writers,” he says, spreading his shoulders out widely. He holds a mop in one hand and with the other runs his fingers through his hair.
The confidence he exudes is overwhelming, and a little off-putting. “Why are you asking about her?”
“Well, I was just reading one of her stories this morning before work, Good Country People. You know it?”
I nod.
“Really?” he asks as if he doesn’t believe me.
He is challenging me, which is not something that usually happens. No, let me amend that. That’s not something that has ever happened.
"It's about Joy, a thirty-two-year-old atheist and a PhD student of philosophy who lives with her small-minded mother,” I say, focusing my eyes directly on his. “Joy doesn't have a leg because she lost it in a childhood shooting accident. A Bible salesman comes to see them and her mother believes that he is good country people, as they say. Then he invites Joy out for a date and that's when things get, let's just say interesting.”
He raises his eyebrows and takes a step away from me.
“Are you surprised?” I ask.
“Yes, to tell you the truth I am. Pleasantly.”
“Why is that?” I ask.
“It’s pretty obscure,” he says with a pronounced shrug.
I fold my arms across my chest and raise my chin in the air in defiance.
“Did you bring it up to teach me a lesson?” I ask. “Maybe make me feel bad, or stupid even?”
He shakes his head. When I look into his eyes, I can’t look away. There's something in them that pulls me in, even convincing me that he didn’t mean it that way at all. It was a genuine attempt to make a connection.
“While they are on their date, the Bible salesman persuades her to go up in the loft and to take off her prosthetic leg,” he says. His words come out smoothly, naturally even. “He then shows her the inside of one of his Bibles that contains a bottle of whiskey, condoms, and cards with naked women on them.”
“When she says no to his advance,” I finish the story for him, “the Bible salesman tells her that he collects fake legs and takes off with hers.”
“What do you like about the story?” he asks.
"Who said that I liked it?” I ask him.
He smiles.
“You have to.”
“I have to?” I ask.
“You know it so intimately and innately that they must've made an imprint on your soul,” he says.
I gaze into his eyes. I have lived for twenty-five years and not once have I ever spoken with another human being about the existence of a soul. Yet here is a stranger, a simple worker on my father's yacht, who speaks of it as if it's second nature, as if it's as real as gravity.