“Shhh,” Charlotte would reply. She’d take him by the hand and lead him back to his room, settling him in, scratching his back, hoping he would fall asleep. He never did. When, finally, she’d stop scratching, holding her breath, he’d turn his head and open those fathomless eyes again.
He dared to say it only once: “Can you just stay?”
“Oh, no, honey,” she’d replied quickly, instinctively. He never asked again. After a few more strokes along his back with her fingernails, she’d leave him in the dark to return to her own bed, where she lay awake until dawn, missing him—his warm body, his sweet, even breaths.
Why hadn’t she stayed? It had seemed improper, or slovenly, or something. Weak. She’d been taught to remain solitary. Charlotte was proud of her ability to ignore and rise above her desires. Louisa had never stayed in Charlotte’s bed, and that was for sure! But maybe, if she’d snuggled underneath Cord’s navy comforter, Charlotte might have found a way back to the deep sleep she’d once had next to her nanny, Aimée. But she thought she was supposed to sleep in her own bed. Charlotte wasn’t one to be needy, to burrow next to a child for comfort.
Now, Charlotte wanted to return to Cord, to take him by the hand and lead him back to his room, to tuck him in with a glass of water and two Advil on his bedside table. She would press her lips to his temple.
She did not turn back. Charlotte soldiered on, braving staircases (both crystal and non), elevators, passageways, room numbers that seemed to shape-shift as she passed them. At one point, deep within the ship, Charlotte opened a metal door to see men laundering sheets in clothes washers as big as cars. She stood, wobbly and blinking in the bright light, and watched as the men fed bedclothes into a machine and then gathered them when they spooled out, perfectly pressed. The room was uncomfortably warm and smelled of bleach and metal.
Finally, the elevator came and whisked her back up into the passenger area, which Charlotte never understood how she’d escaped in the first place. Again, she plodded down corridors—identical, dim, smelling of disinfectant and French fries. It seemed she was the only one on the ship. And then an apparition: her porter, Paros. He stood at the end of a long hallway. Was he real, or just a dream? “Mrs. Perkins?” said Paros.
She wanted to run toward him. To crash into him. To wrap her arms around him, allow him to lift her up, carry her soundlessly across the miles of carpet to her stateroom. There, they would order tiramisu and feed it to each other from long-handled spoons. He would hold her; she would allow herself to stay.
Charlotte had spent so long denying her desires—not just sexual ones, but her longing to give voice to the desirous woman inside her. She plodded through her days—mass, grocery, dinner, bed—as if sleepwalking. If she acknowledged the flame of her need, Charlotte feared it would consume her.
“Mrs. Perkins,” said Paros, “is that you?”
CORD ROLLED OVER, HISeyes hot coals in his head, his mouth a desert. One and a half years of sobriety, gone. He grabbed his iPhone from his bedside table and reset his Sobriety Calculator to zero. No, he told himself, to one. Day One, again.
His last Day One had been the morning after his 3rd Eyez visit, the trip that would determine his fate. If 3rd Eyez was a hit, he’d be wealthy and revered. If it tanked, he was ruined.Ruined and alone,said the lonely voice. It was always loudest after a binge, so forceful and authoritative that it was hard for Cord to tamp it down, to quiet it with logic.Ruined and alone,it repeated gloomily.
Cord had graduated from Princeton in 2001, at the end of the Internet boom. NYC Ventures, founded in 1998 by two members of Cord’s eating club, Tiger Inn, was still flush with funds and Cord happily joined the firm, settling into an Upper West Side apartment where he bought furniture online and pretended to be straight (booze helped). It was all downhill from 2001 for VC in general and NYC Ventures in specific, but Cord still clung to his job even as the firm dwindled and his former buddies treated him with kid gloves after he was spotted at a gay pride parade. “Cord, are you gay?” asked Hammersmith over drinks at Dorian’s.
Jacoby and Wyatt waited for Cord’s response.
Cord, his gut seizing, nodded.
“Never would have thunk it,” said Jacoby. He shrugged.
Andfurthermore,as Charlotte would say.
By hook or by crook, they’d kept NYC Ventures alive. In 2014, with only six employees left, they had raised a smallish fund. “We’re looking for agame changer,” said Jacoby (now balding, with three kids and an ex-wife in Rye).
Back at Princeton, one of Cord’s best friends had been Georgie, a whippet-thin, pasty-faced girl from Florida. They’d bonded over late nights in the library, an unlikely duo: the closeted frat boy and the painfully shy genius. But they both loved nineties rap, microwave popcorn, and each other.
Georgie had dropped out of medical school after creating some complicated surgical instrument and cashing in. Lately, she’d been emailing Cord that she’d created a VR product that could “hijack your mind.” Unlike the dumb headsets and battery packs everyone was messing around with, Georgie said her product, 3rd Eyez, could override the brain’s ability to distinguish between real and virtual. It had something to do with lasers aimed at your eyeballs. “Seriously,” said Georgie. “I can convince your brain that any world I make is real. And if we make the worlds fun enough, nobody’s going to want to come out. The real world is old news at this point.”
Terrifying implications aside, Cord saw dollar signs: videogames, teleconferencing, films…the hope of replacing all screens. 3rd Eyez did sound like it was making, as Georgie’s marketing guys called it, “a disruption machine.”
Because he was a friend of Georgie’s, and because 3rd Eyez needed someone to lead their Series-A-round financing, Cord had been invited to Orlando to see the prototype. When Georgie got the flu and couldn’t join her team in showing the product to Cord, Cord had given himself permission to empty his Sheraton hotel minibar. By the time he’d met the team for dinner at a steak joint, then added a few martinis to his bloodstream, Cord was flying high. He remembered sitting in the back of an engineer’s car. There was a warehouse, a parking lot steaming with heat, a cooler of beers to enjoy while they checked out the machine.
Were there wires attached to his head? Electrodes? Cord remembered something about jungle animals coming to life in 3rd Eyez’s conference room. An elephant? And then Michael Jordan and Babe Ruth hanging out, interacting with them. Something like walking through a Norwegian forest, touching icicles…
Then blackness. Cord woke up in a cold sweat at 3:24A.M.in his Sheraton room, filled with nausea and the familiar crush of impending doom. He didn’t remember the phone call he’d made, telling his NYC Ventures team to invest every last cent in 3rd Eyez. He didn’t remember insistingthis was it,the answer to their prayers.I trust you, motherfucker!!!Wyatt had texted at some point.
By the time Cord was sitting in a hastily located AA meeting, clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee, shaking with regret and grief, the money had been wired. NYC Ventures led the Series A round, catapulting 3rd Eyez to viability.
They would find out within days that Cord had signed papers ensuring that 3rd Eyez didn’t have to show anyone the product until the IPO. Cord had given them enough money to operate in secrecy.
“Man,” said Jacoby, clapping Cord on the back when he returned to the office, “I just can’t wait to see it.”
Cord didn’t say,Neither can I.
—
AND HERE HE WASagain. A new Day One. Why couldn’t he stay sober? Why? Giovanni had known only sober Cord, Cord in Recovery. Gio had even once said, “You can have a bit of good wine once in a while, right?”
