Page 16 of The Paradox Club

“What question?”

“How did you and Harry, and for that matter Vivian, how did you all meet?”

“The official story,” said Marie, “or the real story?”

“You mean there’s a secret story you never tell anyone?” asked David, turning on his side so he could look into Marie’s eyes.

“There is,” said Marie mischievously.

“Tell me that one.”

Marie fidgeted with her pendant—an art nouveau concoction of turquoise and gold with tiny emeralds and sapphires set around the edges. She never took it off, wearing it on a silver chain around her neck hidden underneath her clothing. Now, it was the only thing she wore, and she let it drop into the cleft between her breasts as she returned David’s gaze.

“The official story is that we all met at a party, or a movie, or a play. I can’t even remember exactly what we decided. The world’s most boring meet-cute. But the real story is one that could only have been dreamed up by Harry Maxwell. Even though he was just a sophomore, he drifted around campus like he was already a professor—dressed in tweed, chomping on an unlit pipe. He was in a couple of my classes, but he never said much. Harry was one of those people that everybody knew about, but nobody knew. I was aware of Harry, though I didn’t know his name. And I didn’t know Vivian at all.

“Winter of sophomore year I was in the library one afternoon looking for a book on the history of science fiction for a literature class I was taking, but in the spot where that book should have been was a plain black binder. I slipped the binder off the shelf and took it back to my carrel. I felt a thrill of secrecy as I opened that binder to see twenty sheets of paper covered from edge to edge in meticulous handwriting and headed Chapter One. I read the whole thing, and at the end of the last page were the words Please return. Chapter two on Wednesday.

“This was on a Tuesday night, so I returned the folder and came back the next afternoon and sure enough, there was chapter two. And the next Wednesday, chapter three. Chapter twelve came right before spring break, and while most of campus was headed for someplace warm like Florida, my big plans included organizing my sock drawer and getting ahead in my reading for spring semester. I was double majoring in English lit and art history, so I had plenty of work to do. But when I reached the final page, it didn’t say Chapter thirteen on Wednesday. It said, The End. And below that it said, Readers gather Saturday night at midnight, followed by some numbers. Now I’m thinking, maybe Millhouse College has secret societies and I’m about to be in one—especially given the content of the manuscript I just read.

“It didn’t take me long to figure out that the numbers were map coordinates, but this was before everybody had a GPS device in their pocket, so I had to find an atlas, and then a more detailed map of the area and so on until I finally found the spot—an island in the middle of a lake in northeastern Wisconsin. And Millhouse is in central Pennsylvania—that’s a solid two-day drive. So, I skipped my Friday classes and drove. Saturday afternoon I made it to this boat landing where a man was on a ladder painting the boathouse. I paid him five dollars to ferry me across the lake, and ten minutes later I was standing on the dock of what I later learned was Maxwell’s Island watching the man head back to shore and wondering if I’d made a huge mistake.

“Now it was maybe three o’clock and I’d had nothing to eat all day and as far as I could tell I was all alone. There was a cabin just up the hill from the dock, so I went up there, but all the doors were locked, so I sat down on the steps to wait. And wait. And maybe two hours later, I heard the boat coming back and I went down to the dock and that’s how I met Vivian.

“‘You read it, too?’ she said. And we started talking about the manuscript; she said she thought the science was a little iffy and I said the prose was stilted and before you knew it, we were talking like old friends, not like two strangers abandoned on a deserted island.

“At midnight, the lights suddenly came on in the cabin and the doors to the deck flew open and that’s how I met the famous Harry Maxwell.”

“And…” said David.

“And what?” said Marie. “You wanted to know the true story of how we met. That’s the true story.”

“But what happened? What was the book about? Did anybody else show up? What did Harry say? Did he write the book?”

“Nobody else showed up. Just the three of us.”

“And the rest of my questions?”

“Oh, I can’t answer those,” said Marie with a smile, twirling her pendant on its chain.

“Why not?” said David.

“It’s a secret.”

In spite of all the pain that had followed, Marie smiled at the memory of Harry Maxwell’s secrets. In that first meeting he had confessed that he had chosen Marie and Vivian—watching them in class and in the library and placing his story where he knew they’d find it. And he had confessed something else: Every word of the story he had used to lure them to Maxwell’s Island was true.

Long after David had rolled over and begun snoring lightly, Marie lay awake staring at the fairy lights—intensely aware that the sparkles in the dark blue ceiling did not represent the actual pattern of the night sky that she knew so well from summers at the lake with Harry and Vivian. Those summers began a few months after they first met and while in later years one summer blurred into the next, she could remember almost every detail of that first summer. They quickly discovered several things—that Vivian had that rare scientific mind that could keep up with Harry (though some of his math still puzzled her); that Marie and Vivian shared a taste in art (encompassing both Pre-Raphaelites and Postimpressionists) and literature (from Jane Austen to P. G. Wodehouse to Umberto Eco); and that Harry and Marie were in love. While Harry and Vivian found their greatest intimacy in scientific speculation and Marie and Vivian talked endlessly about books and paintings, Harry and Marie were soon sharing a bed nightly and to say they had been sexually compatible, thought Marie, would have been a grand understatement. Their relationship evolved that first summer into what it would be for the next decade and a half. Harry and Vivian couldn’t think without each other; Vivian and Marie couldn’t laugh without each other; but Harry and Marie couldn’t live without each other.

RICHARD RUNNING

Richard loved running barefoot on the beach, just at the edge of the water, where he kicked up wet sand that dried on the backs of his calves and he would rinse off later in the walk-in shower. He was usually up early enough to watch the sun rise out of the Atlantic as he ran. This morning that happened at low tide, which put Richard as far away from the cluster of buildings that made up the Waves Beachside Retirement Community as he could get without leaving the property. There were a few other runners at the Waves, and on most mornings he passed one or two on his way up or down the beach, but today, aside from a beachcomber and his unleashed but lethargic dog, Richard saw no one. After spending the past decade dodging other people on busy sidewalks or in crowded parks, he felt like he had discovered running all over again.

He did not, like some of the other runners he had observed, carry his phone with him when he ran. He didn’t listen to podcasts or to the music of his youth, nor did he care about timing himself or calculating his pace. He simply ran to the end of the beach and back, a distance which, if pressed, he would guess was about three miles. But Richard didn’t run for the miles or the pace or the time plugged into some audio program. He ran to feel the sand beneath his feet and the damp sea air in his lungs and to feel the first rays of the morning sun on his face.

When he finished showering and dressing, he picked up his phone and saw he had four missed calls. His ringer had been silenced for at least the past couple of days. It was just luck, he thought, that he had picked it up at all. He rarely made or received calls. Richard had no children, no siblings, and, after losing Harry, no close friends. He did not object to being a loner, but he had little use for the cell phone that was required of all Waves residents. His encrypted messages to and from certain members of the Paradox Club came via an email server that he usually accessed with a laptop computer. His phone sometimes sat for days unnoticed. He had lately been using it as a paperweight to protect a few unpaid bills from the breeze that wafted in off the sea through the patio’s sliding glass door. Only because he decided to pay those bills had he reached for his phone.

VIVIAN—MISSED CALL read his screen over and over. Eight o’clock last night, midnight, two in the morning, and about the time the sun rose—twenty past seven. He hadn’t had an actual phone call from Vivian in ages. He had only called her once since moving to Florida, preferring to use his leisure time to write letters. She never called him. He knew everything was quiet at the club. Both of his moles had checked in last night. Had something happened since then? Richard had hoped to make it past October 14 without doing anything but reading by the pool and running on the beach. With apprehension he hit the CALL BACK button.

“Tess is back,” said Vivian without preamble.