The Loss of Innocence (Cont.)

"So, are you seeing any one?" Sam winked at Megan, trying hard to push David's memory back into the recesses of her mind. "Last I remember you and Rick Kogan were inseparable! Of course, that was years ago…"

"I married him," Megan said simply.

"Married. Wow! I always told you to keep him around. He was the richest kid at the school! I guess high school sweethearts really do sometimes end up more than just that… So, how is he? What's he doing?"

"He's dead, Sammy. I don't wanna…" She fell silent.

Sam, too, didn't know what to say. She had always been good at condolences, but never sincere ones. Her father had said to her once: "People come in and out of our lives, and we have to forget them once they're gone. Can't live your life searching for ghosts from the past." Sam adopted this as a maxim and refused to have regrets. To the best of her ability she locked out the ghosts. Only sometimes, like David, they came back to haunt her.

Sam was relieved when Megan once again picked up the conversation. She started to reminisce and Sam was glad. In retrospect, high school was the age of innocence, though she certainly wouldn't have seen it as such back then.

Megan went through their crushes, then their teachers, then the people from their class, tactfully omitting Rick. She seemed to know everyone's biography right up to the present, and Sam wondered if Megan somehow could have known about David. If she did, she had enough courtesy not to mention him. Instead, she entertained Sam with stories. She had such an amusing way of retelling the past and such an acute memory for detail, Sam couldn't help but laugh, covering her mouth with her hand in a futile effort to keep the burrito from flying out of her wide open mouth.

She was enjoying herself so thoroughly, she hadn't noticed when it was that Megan herself had stopped laughing and became contemplative.

"How come you stopped writing, Sammy?" she asked, her voice completely serious now. "You were so good. Much better than any of us. But then you just quit..."

"I didn't. Don't you know, I wrote a book when I was in college..."

"Sammy, please, have some basic respect for me, will ya? Growing Up in the '90? I read it. That was crap, and you and I both know that! A screw manual for college students! A trashy little paperback appealing to the lowest common denominator! What were you trying to prove? You remember how you used to write in high school, what you used to write? You had a gift, a true gift! So why did you stop?"

Sam became quiet. She looked into Megan's eyes, enlarged at least threefold by the magnification in the lenses.

"How come you've always worn glasses, Meg?" She suddenly asked. "Why not contacts? You have such beautiful eyes."

Megan took off her glasses. "'That better? Now why?!"

Sam lowered her eyes. "You know why, Meg. Don't you? ... I thought you knew."

She realized she wasn't sure she had known herself this whole time, not until Megan asked, when it all came together for her in two short words.

"Your dad?"

"So you did know?" Sam was surprised.

"I guessed. But he always seemed so encouraging. He was always pushing you..."

"Pushing me...? Well, yes. He wanted me to be successful, but not just that... rich, too. Not just an engineer like himself, but something more, something better."

"Once he picked up a story I had finished and when he read it, he laughed. He said I was wasting my time and talent. Pragmatism, pragmatism, pragmatism. Why waste words to describe the beauty of an ocean? 'Will I detract from its beauty by describing it?' I remember asking. 'No,' he said, 'but will you be adding to it?' Then he quoted Plato: 'All things are produced by nature, by fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by one or the other of the first two, the least and most imperfect by the last.' And then as he was walking away, he was muttering perhaps to me, perhaps more to himself 'You're wasting your time, Sam. You could own the world. You're wasting your time.'"

"The next morning at breakfast he asked if we had a rhetoric class offered at our school. When I said we did, he told me I should take it. 'Do you know who runs our country?' he continued. I told him I thought it must've been the President and Congress. 'No, it's lawyers!' He was involved in a law suit just then, with someone... I don't remember... It cost him a fortune, so perhaps that shaped his perspective."

She fell silent, knowing she had told a half-truth. But she didn't want to broach the subject of her mother, the now famous Elizabeth Lane. Though she went to every one of her movies, even the most obscure ones, she never forgave her mother for leaving. How could she? The last time she saw her in person was on Elizabeth's 30th birthday. The next day, early in the morning, while the three year old Sam and her father still slept, she had gathered her bags and left for Hollywood to become a star. Sam never spoke of her since, never mentioned her once, not to her father, not to her friends. As her father said, one must forget the ghosts of the past.

Megan took the opportunity of the pause that ensued to finish the story.

"So you stopped coming to Writers and Poets, wrote a sharp, but extremely cynical political satire for an English class workshop, and stopped being my friend..."

"I'm sorry..."

"Why'd you stop being my friend...?"

Sam didn't know whether she was prepared to answer that. She thought she had had enough revelations and soul searching for one day, but Megan was never one to let her off the hook easily.

"Do you remember what I wrote in your yearbook, Sammy? Do you remember... you weren't talking to me, so I had to ask Becky to borrow your yearbook when she was done signing it so I could write something to you, too? Do you remember what that was?"

She did.

It was a poem by Christina Rossetti, a love poem called "Remember." As Megan recited it to her now, Sam could see the lines scribbled in her yearbook in Megan's round childish handwriting:

For if the darkness and corruption leave... What a great line to meditate on, Sam suddenly thought. Had they now truly left? Had she thrown them out?

"I resented you," Sam finally admitted. "I told myself you were dragging me down, but really, I resented you, because you could sit by the pond out in the back of the school yard and indulge in the beauty of the lilies and you could take that beauty with you, transform it even, just by jotting down a few verses..." Her throat had dried and she tried to swallow some saliva, but that only hurt it.

"Why couldn't you?" Megan interjected in the pause.

"Do you want a cliché? I would tell you that something in me died that day, when my father told me I was wasting my time, but that wouldn't mean much, now would it? But you know, it's like I became inhuman. Do you remember how I had become so ambitious all of a sudden? Nothing could stand in my way. Not you, not poetry, not fiction. I had given up my priorities..."

"And adopted your father's?" Megan tried to finish her sentence, but for once she was wrong.

"No, I doubt what I'd become was exactly what daddy had in mind. If he had only known what I'd become."

She thought of Jack, moaning like a wounded animal as he lifted up her skirt and, leaning her against the desk with one hand, groped her thighs with the other. She thought of Edward, Robert, Nathan, and countless others, it seemed. From promotion to promotion to yet another promotion. All it took, after all, was that first step. The next were easier. Morality went out the window.

* * *

It was dusk by the time Sam was walking home to her apartment. She had a large smile on her face. Megan may have known her well, but she still didn't believe Sam was a bum. And because she didn't believe her, she never asked what triggered it. If she had, she wouldn't have believed that either. All it was, was a commercial. A stupid TV commercial, like the one for diamond rings or expensive perfume that show beautiful happy people with even rows of sparkling white teeth, who hug and kiss and are a part of a utopian dream that the marketing manager sells to the public. Only it wasn't an ad for perfume or jewelry. It was business suits. The TV was on in the firm's lunch room and Sam glanced at the commercial obliviously as she diligently chewed her store-bought sushi, simultaneously reading a brief one of her assistants has submitted to her for approval. But something caught her eye, and she cued her attention in on the TV.

The woman on the screen was wearing the precise suit Sam had on that day. She was shaking hands with a middle-aged thin white man, whose expression reminded Sam of Jack Ross. They were both smiling large-toothed smiles and speaking in an animated manner, though the actual conversation was missing. They were happy dumb puppets, playing the role of corporate executives. From watching the clip one could tell immediately that buying suits by Laura Shay would lead one to success and most importantly happiness. At that moment a colleague walked by and Sam gave him that same wide-toothed grin she saw on TV and greeted him with a standard "Good afternoon, George. How's that Garcia case coming along? … Good? … I'm glad."

It was then that Sam looked inside herself and saw the void that she has been nestling in her breast for the past six years. Or had it been more? Had it started with Jack? Maybe with her father? Who knows, maybe even earlier than that? Only she knew that she cared nothing about George's case or about her own for that matter. She didn't care about the client. She cared about winning. For her personal glory and aggrandizement. For money. Because she could own the world if only she tried a little harder, worked a little longer hours, was just a little more ruthless… And this is where she ended up.

The commercial was over. Sam left her things on the table and walked out never to come back. Megan would never believe this story!

Sam came home and checked her machine. Already Megan, who must have gotten home earlier left a message. Her breathing was heavy: "I don't know if you'll appreciate this… I don't know you as well as I used to… But I thought I should tell you so it's not a total surprise. You might be hearing from an old friend soon." There was a click and the rumbling of the tape rewinding.

Who did she mean? Sam wondered again if Megan could have known about David!

* * *