The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

to chat straight through them, and when another student came Carmen would move to a different table and read until Josh was free again and then they would pick up on the exact sentence they left off on.

They first slept together a mere one week after Abnormal Psychology was officially over, at a house party his roommates threw. She attended it even though she didn’t know anybody else there, but then it turned out that all his friends were just so goddamn sweet and smart, a succession of witty science-filled conversations, and she had been wondering where these kinds of people were her entire time in New York; everything just felt perfectly natural as they played drinking games and Carmen helped Josh make cocktails in the kitchen and then the party dwindled and Josh and she each met the dark form of the other in the corridor and an arm met another arm and a hand a hand and lips, lips. The first time that night she had been at her normal level of nervousness, but then the second, no, third time in the morning it had gone from the usual—am I going to or not, is it now, no not yet he knows I’m not going to god what is he thinking why can’t I—to a revelation, that with humor and no pressure, orgasms followed. And the more she had with Josh the easier they became—Carmen couldn’t help but think of it like a railroad town being wired up for electricity, everything becoming more and more connected, more and more lights flickering on in surges—oh such surges!

In those heady days of the early relationship a subject she and Josh always came back to was Carmen’s future. They even developed an ironic pet name for the inevitable decision, calling it “the mind-body problem.” A running joke, it would pop up, with Carmen holding her coffee, or leaning against a doorframe with a glass of wine, saying—“I’ve had some thoughts on the mind-body problem.” For a while she had been trying to tell her mother that she wanted to do science full-time, and that this would necessitate graduate school, and that it was impossible to juggle two careers at once, and so on . . . But her mother had this insidious way of slowly working away at Carmen’s defenses, wheedling, marshalling her father, and, when that didn’t work, she’d get so worked up that she became the real victim of the fight. On top of that, modeling had become unignorably lucrative for Carmen, and unexpected sums poured easily into her bank account. Her reputation in the industry grew and she got on more flights, spending more nights away from Josh and her studies. It was not a career she had set out to choose, but she was in fact good at it, far more able to intuit what the industry side wanted than the other girls. At the same time, graduate schools had gotten back to her with rounds of interviews, so she got on more flights. Yet she couldn’t imagine leaving New York for these cold and lonely campuses, and therefore also leaving Josh, and so was banking everything on being accepted by her soon-to-be undergrad alma mater, Columbia University.

At Josh’s birthday that spring they had sat with his friends unwrapping presents around a bar table. Carmen had planned her present in secret for a long time, gathering the correct measurements for the blazer while keeping him oblivious to her true purpose, all so that he’d have something for job interviews as a research technician, which Josh said was a break before graduate school. Unwrapping the Armani blazer his face had fallen to the “oohs” and “ahhs” around the table. Afterward he’d been withdrawn until Carmen had prodded him enough for him to yell about how embarrassed he’d been—she had given him a thousand-dollar blazer, dammit, right in front of all his friends!

The next week Carmen was officially accepted into Columbia University for graduate school. The same day she called her agency to terminate their representation of her, knowing what it would bring. Then she had called her mother. Josh held her hand as they both sat on the edge of the bed and co-listened to the tinny sounds from the phone, starting with—“It’s going to be so hard, honey.” which eventually turned to—“You should really consider keeping modeling as a side job just in case.” to—“The amount of work we’ve put in, for you, for your career, is something that not everyone gets, not everyone gets parents like us.” to—“Well, your lifestyle is going to change completely and don’t count on any support from your father either, that’s over.” After the call Josh had sat holding her as they watched TV late into the night.

The next day on waking beside him she felt she had snapped into focus suddenly at the age of twenty-one, as if a scene had been set and a movie had begun to play of their lives together. She knew exactly what she was going to do with her life, and who she was going to do it with.

Possibly she felt this way because, prior to that relationship, Carmen had never been in love. She had, of course, osmotically absorbed a great deal of information about love from popular culture, from TV shows to pop songs. And she was an avid reader. So she had been exposed to countless explicit in-depth descriptions, from Tristan and Isolde to Anna Karenina to Romeo and Juliet. She knew everything there was to know about love, all the facts of it, long before she experienced it for herself. But when it was her, when she was the one in love, each moment had somehow been completely new and unexpected, perfectly unpredictable—the irreducible indexical fact that it was her experiencing all this blasted away all the prior facts and models and the knowledge she had accumulated and left something raw, fragile, alive. In his company, in their funny and