Chapter 7

The Human Condition

Hannah Arendt: "Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart."

What happened, though, after the romantic resolution? The heroine and her destined love interest found each other and love—and then? The Disney ending? The Jane Austen ending? The Julia Roberts ending? The Hugh Grant ending? The 90's rom-com ending?

Well, let's see what happened, then, shall we?

Exhibit A. The Disney ending

And they lived happily ever after.

Exhibit B. The My Best Friend's Wedding ending

Camille and Spencer got married two years later. The wedding was understandably gorgeous. And extravagant, because there was no other way for Camille's stepfather to try to show that he was part of the family and for Camille's father to one up his ex-wife, noticing her existence only after they separated. They had a small family crisis just deciding where to host the wedding. Her father insisted on the Koenig summer house in the Catskills that Camille had spent many childhood July fifth afternoon three to seven o'clock. Her mother argued for Boston, where she moved to with the MIT professor she married and besides, her baby always liked oysters so obviously she had a natural affinity with the area. Camille wanted a Hudson River Pier or DC waterfront thing because that was much more practical despite not being that economical. In the end, they all compromised on the Long Island club where Camille's father met his third mistress (the one that his family never found out about), because Camille liked their white picket chairs (and that bartender who had floppy hair and a sweet smile even when she was awkwardly braced at thirteen).

Spencer's dad was shocked at how much money was thrown into the affair (it took how much to book these white wooden chairs on a piece of lawn?). He had been invited despite Spencer's reluctance, because Camille said that a wedding was the best time for overblown emotions and forgiveness. Spencer's aunt also came, and the both of them were amazed at the casual extravagance that defined Camille's families and after the rehearsal dinner tried to warn Spencer against sinking into riches and not living to his fullest potential (Spencer smiled tightly, understanding the importance of keeping up an appearance of domestic bliss in front of the in-laws and so many guests; Camille made sure he understood). Spencer's aunt, fulfilling her stand-in maternal duties, proceeded to the bar (which was such beautiful reddish wood, mahogany maybe) to get a glass (Swarovski glasses!) of wine (some French or Italian thing—European in any case—recommended to her by the sommelier—a word she had just learned—who was a handsome young man in a suit that looked custom made). Her glass soon turned into four (or five, it was hard to keep counting). Spencer's father went to the other side of the bar, free from his sister's scrutinizing gaze, and decided that it wasn't a bad place, not with all the skinny, blonde waitresses who were already desensitized to mild sexual harassment, not bad at all, even if the bartender had this snobby air and a suit too expensive for his station (and the boy's station was somebody he hired so how dare the boy have a better branded suit! He contributed to the wedding—not much, but that still made him the client here).

Camille's mother came here for a nightcap as well, running into her new to-be in-law and chatted with him the way one tolerated boorish relatives (didn't she tell the staff to get Turnbull bespoke suits? Why did the bartender still wear his tatty off the rack thing?).

The cheekbones dude who had made Camille cry outside of that bar, spurring the couple's first kiss—remember him?—was here as the date to one of Camille's distant relatives. He came to the club a day early because it was his only chance to set foot on this kind of property. He was aghast to see that the bride was the same desperate woman he had turned down once. To marry into wealth—the last of the American dream, except for perhaps winning the Powerball lottery—oh how he had missed his chance! He was determined to sabotage the wedding and swoop in when the bride was at her most vulnerable, tailing the bridal party group into their section of the club and being ushered in, mistaken as one of the strippers, being felt up by one of the girls (the brunette one, while the hot blonde sneered at the brunette) even after he explained that he wasn't some male entertainer. Except the bride didn't fall for his charming grin or sharp wit or even the feel of his impeccably sculpted abs. Bitch.

Natalia had a good time at the party the night before, but almost was late and had trouble finding the ring in her hangover.

Rosalie spent the night bleary eyed and making sure Natalia didn't choke on her own vomit. The last time, Rosalie promised herself again as she pulled her curls into a tighter bun, the last time she would do this.

Elle wasn't there; she resented Camille for choosing the exact date she had to go to alimony negotiations, although Camille's big day had been set before her divorce.

But the gorgeous wedding itself went off without a hitch. Fifty friends and a hundred and fifty acquaintances plus another two hundred relatives, associates, coworkers, enemies, and other auxiliary characters gathered to witness the beginning of the Jane Austen ending.

Exhibit C. The Jane Austen ending

Camille and Spencer got married two years later. They had two children in quick succession, a girl then a boy, and two and a half dogs. Spencer liked the names Melanie and Carl, but Camille opposed the suggestion with great vehemence that she refused to explain. Camille made partner at her firm eventually and Spencer, after taking a gunshot to the knee, retired to the role of a consultant profiler and stay-at-home husband, which would have pained his father had he been alive. Spencer then had the liberty of learning anything and everything, and he found the pursuit of knowledge rewarding. Camille also found her job rewarding, especially given that she was almost fired the second time she took maternity leave. The marriage was exceptionally Disney by today's standards, and they were often teased in their circles for making the others look bad, Rosalie's joke that nobody except her laughed at when Natalia remained unattached and Elle divorced her husband when he got fired for snorting coke on the job. Rosalie herself was also happily married, to an older woman with blue hair (a dyke, Elle had called her, which surprised Spencer because wasn't Elle the feminist one?), but their marriage was less socially convenient. Camille and Spencer proceeded to live happily ever after, defying the inevitable fate of their race.

Exhibit D. The When Harry Met Sally… ending

Camille and Spencer got married two years later but the actress Lila Archer divorced her hedge fund manager husband three years after that. Lila still felt that Spencer belonged to her, although they only maintained a brief long-distance relationship that ended on a sour note. With this sense of entitlement, she suggested a reunion, conveniently when Camille was away on a business trip. Lila kissed Spencer after three drinks, and did Spencer kiss back? That depended on if the movie was halfway or three quarters done.

Exhibit E. The Princess Bride ending

Eventually, inevitably, one of Spencer's cases turn into hers. She recognized the killer that her firm was defending from one of Spencer's worse stories. At work, she slipped out that there was no point in the defense, and MacLeish was by the water cooler and overheard and told the boss. Her firm changed their strategy to appealing to juries' sympathy. The killer got off slightly better than he should have. Spenser shrugged and said that happened sometimes, but at least the woman was put away. He seemed so jaded that Camille felt overwhelmingly guilty. The manifestation of guilt was her recurring nightmares of this killer walking free and shooting Spencer.

The real world repercussion was that their boss thought Camille to be ruthlessly pragmatic, a trait that he liked, and took her as a protégé. Something about the man made Camille uneasy though, and she frequently complained to Spencer about his behavior.

And not two years later, it was discovered that this boss, a major name in the business, had been kidnapping and holding hostage women since twenty years ago. He kept them in an underground WWII bunker, creating a small cult, each woman representing a perfect part of the perfect 'blonde beast' woman, the 'Eve' with whom he will produce the master race. When the BAU found his hideout (also inevitably, because Spencer already knew this man so well), the lawyer had already massacred half of the women and was in the process of killing his children when Spencer saved the day. Spencer killed the man with a practiced bullet, but also took a bullet to his kneecap and a splinter of a bullet too close to his lungs that he would never fully recover from, wounds that impeded his future with the BAU. He saved the day and retired to be a consultant to the BAU.

It would have been a heartwarming ending had it come twenty years later, when Spencer wasn't still in his prime.

Exhibit F. The (500) Days of Summer ending

Spencer had thought complete liberty would be freeing, and that he would enjoy it. His knee still hurt and he was bad with physical therapy, but in a way, he knew this was going to happen—that he couldn't stay the hotshot profiler forever. He stayed at home with the four year old Bethany and two year old Hendrik, in the house that they mortgaged (a sensible financial decision, Camille had assured him, despite it being a typical house in the typical suburban Bethesda and their—her—bank account having enough zeros for purchase; something about tax deductions, which Camille figured out with their accountant).

Sometimes the largeness of the house confused him, despite knowing full well that it was two thousand square feet and three bedrooms. They had planned to remodel the study into a spare guest bedroom, since eventually Bethany and Hendrik would fight for their own room. Obviously that plan was put on hold since Spencer needed a room of his own. He had been as involved as Camille in choosing this purchase five years ago, much more so than their wedding, which had greatly terrified him because he kept missing social cues. He had spent more time in this house, given his jobs had always had more regular hours than Camille's. Yet, feeling like a small boy wadding in the adult pool section, Spencer wondered how Camille was able to take care of the house. She didn't do it by herself, of course—they had hired a nanny and then another one for the second baby (both of whom middle aged, avoiding the trope of the affair with the nanny) and had Mrs. Hughes come clean every other afternoon and more recently she had hired a gardener for the front lawn although they hardly needed one for a simple flowerbed and some hedges (the gardener was a good looking youth with the sort of rural face that made the suburban folk feel immediately superior and nicer than they usually were with each other; but they avoided the trope of the affair with the 'pool' boy as well). Camille had, via supervision, kept her touch on every corner of the house. And Spencer felt lost here, like he could hardly recognize this place he had lived in for the last five years.

In the room of his own, he studied economics like he had promised years ago. Then he tried a more serious pursuit of programming. He built an algorithm for trading that was quickly shut down because it broke some financial markets rule that he had not read up before. He drifted from endeavor to endeavor like he had drifted from job to job. He had it all—a loving wife who had not bored of him at the seven year relationship itch, could now explore his mind to its full potential, and the sort of kids that seemed to mean success in life to people of a certain circle.

The ennui kept nipping at his heels, but the ending was always happy, wasn't it?

Exhibit G. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ending

The expensive Dr. Faustus asked Camille if she was sure that Spencer loved her, in the way that she loved him— with the tone that suggested the question to be rhetorical. Dr. Faustus said that Spencer was a high functioning sufferer of mild undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome, who used her mind, her body, her love as a vessel to facilitate his analysis of human emotions. She was his post doc in psychology.

Camille switched therapists.

Exhibit H. The Love Actually ending

When Camille was forty-one, she fell madly, irresponsibly, illogically in love with a young man of twenty-one, a potential intern that she interviewed but did not hire, who later politely emailed her for a coffee to talk about his interview skills. It was a mundane request, and usually Camille was too busy for it, but she felt especially frustrated that day with a client and wanted to hear her voice without the echo of another's, so she said yes.

It was silly, but Jacob (the not-intern) accidentally brushed her hand when handing her the coffee, and they both froze a little—that was, static had shocked both of them, a commonplace occurrence due to the dry air and Jacob's sweater, but it had seemed somehow symbolic. A few coffees later, Jacob gently covered her back when escorting her out of the too-crowded coffee shop and Camille offered him a ride and they had their first tryst in the front seat of her Maserati.

Her new therapist said it was retribution for her husband's brief dalliance with the perfect blonde (Lila had gleefully informed her of it, and to be fair to the woman, nothing she said was false) and the redhead with the over-adjusted teeth. Camille paid good money for her therapist but she knew it was just the obligatory mid-life crisis and if she hadn't found meaning and love in the Hollywood blue eyes of Jacob, she would have found it in somebody else. But as it was, she felt like she had never before felt so much raw, rich emotion as the moment just before she touched Jacob. Life tasted like ashes until she was with Jacob. But Jacob was twenty-three and in love with being twenty-three on his Harley motorbike.

When Camille was forty-five, she had almost forgotten what Jacob looked like.

Exhibit I. The Sleepless in Seattle ending

It was entirely by happenstance that Spencer met the red-haired Lilith. Lilith was by all means a rather homely sort of woman, and to compensate for her homeliness, the clever Lilith had long mastered the art of interesting conversation—which could be summarized as asking people of their lives and doling out earnest compliments. It was a wonder how far in life this carried her.

What happened was this: little Bethany had gotten lost on a field trip to the journalism museum (well, she claimed to be lost but was in truth just in the next room and she could faintly hear Rufus screaming and she hated Rufus). Lilith was there to check out the Pulitzer photography wall, but, catching a glance of a lone little girl with both hands tugging the straps of her backpack, she flipped a coin and decided to go check if she was alright. Bethany told her she was lost (Rufus was still screaming) and asked her to call her dad so she wouldn't have to go back to the group. Spencer rushed over, terrified of failing at his paternal role, and thanked Lilith profusely.

Bethany said she was hungry and they went to a bistro for lunch. Spencer, surprised by how nicely Bethany behaved around this woman with over exuberant braces (Lilith's parents both suffered from irregular teeth, so she was subject to long term braces to atone for her parents' genetics). He asked for her number (in case they needed a babysitter, there was no love or chemistry at first sight, because yes, Lilith was that homely). Bethany usually was a nightmare around any female presence not her mother—she had a natural suspicion of women, and neither Camille nor Spencer knew where she got this from, the two of them being sensible, trusting marriage partners—but Bethany was instinctively jealous and wary. However, Bethany did not feel threatened by this Lilith, on account of her appearance (Bethany had thought ugly; she had an unexplained streak of meanness too) and her braces. It would prove to be a mistake, as Bethany would later discover, three years later, when migrating data from her dad's old phone into his new. Bethany, barely adolescent, was suddenly thrown into a well-developed morally-complex drama. It would be easy to blame Bethany's exceptionally rebellious and troublesome teenage years on Spencer's indiscretion, but you know that thing were never that simple.

In any case, never in their happy, stable marriage did Spencer once regret marrying Camille—to him, the idea of Camille being the other part of his life was so natural, so thoughtless that it seemed as given as the sun rising. So the thought of leaving Camille never occurred to him. It was, however, a thought that frequently occurred to Lilith. Lilith didn't understand her own infatuation with the man—he was old, not that handsome, socially awkward, and most of all he had no career and no money. It was an extremely insensible match; she could do better, but she couldn't stop pining for his touch anyhow. After a few months, she brought up the idea of divorce in a carefully casual and very subtle manner. Spencer was oblivious. A few weeks after that, she brought the topic up again in an equally careful but less subtle manner. Spencer was still oblivious.

After three years of that, Lilith got out, and Spencer missed her terribly for six months.

Exhibit J. The Annie Hall ending

Instead of Jacob, there was Julius.

Camille was in New York on business and her flight was canceled in anticipation of the incoming snowstorm, which turned out to be a light dusting of white powder over the city. There was little to do that bitterly cold evening (there was always plenty to do in NYC, but little she wanted to do); so on a whim, Camille attended an alumni social. When she stepped into the room, she belatedly realized that she was interrupting a speech that some man was giving. She felt awkward, so naturally she took a flute from the nearby waiter leaning against a table with a platter of wine, who turned out to not be a waiter but rather Julius, a professor of criminal psychology. (It appeared that she had a type.)

Julius was an older man—although Camille herself was no spry spring chicken by then, she still felt small and innocent next to the wonderfully, cynically charismatic Professor Julius. Born to and raised by two New Yorker parents, Julius rarely stepped off Manhattan island, and was bred to a neurosis that transcended above that of the everyman's. He was enigmatic and the right blend of casually abrasive and considerate. They did not tumble into bed that night, for Julius understood the fine nuance of long-term seduction. Instead, he persuaded Camille to email her assistant to change her flight to Monday, leaving him the weekend to reintroduce her to the city, which had, he claimed, completely changed and remained the same during her time away. Camille of course knew how the city morphed, flying here regularly on business, but she agreed to the tour. They chased the footsteps of the street artist Banksy (she used to be marginally artsy, before she had to be professional), slurped ramen in a tiny, cubicle-inspired shop (people hated cubicles in offices but stick them in a restaurant and oh the ingenuity!), waited for the ferry to Governor's island (she remembered when it used to be barren with only the occasional jazz age or indie music festival, how passé it was to visit and then how hip it was and then how clichéd it was again), drank in a relatively new speakeasy with deconstructed ceiling and vampiric waiters (her own favorite speakeasy had closed two years ago, but Camille had to admit that his was much cooler), found their way to Per Se (a late minute reservation that defied all known conventions of Michelin three stars, and although Camille always preferred the slightly over salted austerity of Eleven Madison). Sunday they went to Chelsea and Julius introduced her to his friend, the gallery owner (they had certainly slept together in the past, their bodies turned towards each other in such a familiar way), ate seafood on stools in the middle of Chelsea Market (Camille couldn't remember the last time she enjoyed being near so many people, but she let Julius grab her hand to guide her), and again drank at a new dimly lit bar (this time a slam poetry spot that updated Camille's idea of slam poetry from college wannabes yelling non sequiturs and gulping Franzia to a quietly appreciative crowd of failed but talented poetry graduates in their middle age clapping at other failed but talented crinkled faces). The entire weekend was exhausting, the sort that Camille would have loved in her twenties, and still loved now though her body objected.

When Camille returned to her own life, she suffered acutely in longing for Julius and what didn't happen—the sex would have been great, she thought, better than the tepid vanilla routine that Spencer ticked off his weekly to do list, before heading off for Lila. At last, her life was complete—she was feeling again, and being of the age one questioned why one never felt the sort of emotions that was promised (the middle age bliss, the middle age crisis), she rediscovered that pained, lonely yearning that seemed to be specially reserved for adolescence.

When she had another business trip, she flew into Julius's apartment (above a meatball shop, how quaint!), and she was right—the sex was great. Yet it was the in between, the emotional suffering, that Camille relished the most. She was never discovered, partially because she never made the effort to go to New York—never once did she fabricate meetings or even volunteer for trips, there never was an arrangement that wouldn't have happened even without Julius—but also partially because Spencer never looked. The idea of an indiscretion was inconceivable. They simply were not such a couple—they were strong, independent, intelligent, and refused to succumb to the malaise of their race. (Lila didn't count, they were both discreet.)

In a year, Camille's true love Julius got engaged to a young girl of twenty and change—a Lilith, a former student of his. He said nothing had to change, but Camille drew the line at hurting another innocent girl. By that time, Spencer was drawing close his own indiscretion with Lila, and the two of them—Spencer and Camille, that was—rented a cabin in the woods and fell fervently in love with each other in the absence of their lovers.

Exhibit J. The Knocked Up ending

There was talk of a divorce, but there were no affairs on either side—never even a touch even though there were plenty of moments of weakness or wavering. They went through couple consoling—thousands of dollars of consoling—and just when they were drafting an agreement, their daughter Bethany got pregnant and didn't know who the father was. You see, even without Lila and Lilith, Jacob or Julius, Bethany still grew into troublesome puberty; and Camille and Spencer still wondered sometimes if they were somehow responsible for inflicting upon their sole daughter precocious concepts without realizing it.

However, in the face of this shared emergency, the family united in the grapple and the talk of divorce was swept under the rug. (You would call it ironic, but the term needed to be handled carefully because you were sure at least one person would cry with outrage that 'this isn't ironic!'.)

Exhibit X. The ending of all endings

Camille and Spencer died, respectively, and their ashes (you know they would be the sensible sort not to take up valuable land property after their deaths) were kept together.

.

Of course, public exhibits were rarely representative of fact, so often distorted by entertainment value and popular media, as Spencer would have been the first to point out.

So what happened, you ask? A mixture of various elements from the above exhibits, probably.

Which ones? Well how should I know, the story is yours, isn't it?

Author's Note: If the ending seems abrupt, it's because I was going to write a whole plot with a serial killer etc. as per Exhibit E. Princess Bride, but action filled plot heavy text has always been very difficult for me. Then I reread Atwood's Happy Endings, and I just couldn't not write this. It's much more pessimistic than the rest of the story, and I don't know, maybe a little jarring, but haven't you wondered what happened after all the rom-coms end? Like, sure, the boombox and the APC trench coat is great, and sure, in high school Heath Ledger is so hot, but after, after, after? Who are they to escape the faults of our race? And like Exhibit X says, it's ultimately your story, this romance-you could choose to take Exhibit B or C straight to X, which would make a true happy ending.

Also, I began this story while reading Arendt. Life of the Mind is just too perfect a pun for both the show and Reid. Life of the Mind was a response to the famous trial of Adolf Eichmann before the Jerusalem District Court in 1961, in which she tried to answer her own question: 'Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?' To Arendt, there can be no freedom without the faculty to both forgive and promise.

Not that, you know, anybody cares about any of this.

Hope you enjoyed it at least, and please leave your thoughts!