The Futures(12)

He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth before bed, and a sob caught in my throat. The only thing that had kept me from losing it that day was the relentless distraction of unpacking. I caught a glimpse of myself in a window turned mirrorlike by the darkness. This was where I was: in a shitty fourth-floor walk-up in the shitty part of the Upper East Side. Tired, sweaty, dirty, and what was the point? Why was I even here? I didn’t have a job. I didn’t even have prospects. Evan and I would both wake up in the morning with nothing to do, with a day to spend however we wanted. Evan could enjoy it because it was sanctioned, an acceptable length of idle time before his job started. But this freedom, for me, came with a different weight. With the knowledge that every moment I wasted was another moment I wasn’t looking for a job. My breath grew fast and short. What was I doing?

Evan emerged from the bathroom, wiping away the remains of toothpaste. He saw me frozen in place. “Jules?” he said. “Jules, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said, but the tears had started spilling over. “I’m…”

Evan led me to the futon, where we would sleep that night; we’d chosen the cheapest possible delivery option, and our mattress wasn’t going to arrive for another week. “Hey,” he said, rubbing my back. “Julia. Hey. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said, tears flowing, trying to choke back the waves I felt rising through my chest. “It’s just—I don’t know—I’m tired, that’s all.”

We sat in silence for a long time. That’s one thing I’d always loved about Evan. He knew when it was enough just to be there; when nothing had to be said or asked. Several minutes later, my pulse slowed down, my breathing steadied. I felt like such an idiot. What was I crying about? If I didn’t have a job, that was my own fault, and it wouldn’t help to sit there and whine about it.

“Well,” I said, finally. “I bet you’re regretting this, huh? Asking me to move in. You’re stuck sharing a lease with some blubbering crazy person.”

I thought Evan might smile or laugh. The call-and-response of our relationship. But his eyes were sad. It was a pity I’d never seen from him before.

“Julia,” he said quietly. “Don’t say that. Don’t even think that, okay?”

Later, I got up to brush my teeth in our closet-size bathroom. Evan had kept an extra toothbrush in my room for years, but when I lined mine up against his that night, it felt different. A permanent version of what we’d only been pretending to do before.

*

By late June, three weeks into my joblessness, my mother was ready to intervene.

“Julia,” she said, already sounding harried and annoyed, even though she was the one who called me. “I only have a few minutes—we have to make this flight—but listen, sweetheart. I’m calling about the job situation. There has to be something more you can do. I can’t bear the thought of you just sitting in that apartment all day.”

Which was pretty much what I’d been doing that summer afternoon. I’d been feeling okay about the day up to that point—I’d already sent out applications for assistant openings at a small museum, a PR firm, and a publishing house—but my mother’s words punctured any feeling of progress. I was standing directly in front of our newly installed air conditioner, enjoying the luxury of the cold, and I reached out to turn the air up a notch, in a gesture that felt like spite. My mother, father, and sister were all flying to Nantucket that day. This was the first summer I wasn’t invited on the family vacation. My mother thought my finding a job ought to take priority.

“Mom,” I said with a sigh. “I get it.”

“Have you thought any more about what we discussed last week?”

“You mean taking the LSATs?”

“I’m not saying you have to go to law school, Julia. It’s just not such a terrible idea to have that in your back pocket.”

“Mom. I’m trying, okay? Trying isn’t the problem.” That was true, but it was an aimless kind of trying. I had applied for all sorts of jobs, anything that seemed remotely likely, but there was no unifying theme. The HR departments could probably sense the dispassion in my cover letters. That feeling had set in, and I couldn’t shake it: What was wrong with me?

My mother called back the next day, the roar of the Atlantic in the background. She told me that she had spoken with Mrs. Fletcher, a friend from Boston. The Fletcher Foundation was looking for an assistant, and I should send my résumé right away. “I don’t think it pays much, but Julia, you should take this job if it’s offered to you. I mean it. You really need to get going.”

The next day, I was in the office of Laurie Silver, the president of the Fletcher Foundation. “So you’re friends with the Fletchers?” she asked, peering at me over her glasses. She was small and birdlike, dressed in black, with silver jewelry that jangled and clanked every time she moved. “Yes, that’s right,” I said. “My mother and Mrs. Fletcher are involved in some of the same charities in Boston. And my father is one of Mr. Fletcher’s attorneys.” Laurie nodded, scribbling a note in the margin of my résumé. I had also entangled myself, briefly, with their son Jake Fletcher the summer before freshman year of college, but that wasn’t a topic for discussion. The Fletchers were extremely wealthy—he made a fortune in venture capital, and she came from an aristocratic southern family—and their foundation provided grants to artists, museums, and other worthy recipients.