The Futures(16)

The truth was that I missed my friends, my teammates, the ones who hadn’t come to New York. I especially missed Arthur, who was working in the Obama campaign’s field office in Ohio. We’d traded a few stiff e-mails since graduation, but I couldn’t say what I was really thinking, not in stark black-and-white text. I didn’t even know what I was really thinking. And we hadn’t acknowledged the fight we’d had right at the end. I wondered if we ever would.

The shower was already running when my alarm went off on Monday morning, at the beginning of the second week of work. Julia’s bathrobe was hanging on the hook, the steam drifting through the open door.

“You’re up early,” I called into the bathroom.

“I figured we could go in together,” Julia said over the weak sound of the shower. Our water pressure was pathetic. “You have to be in by eight thirty, right?”

We walked to the subway hand in hand, stopping for an iced coffee at the cart on the corner of 3rd Avenue. The train was packed, and I got on last. Julia was crammed next to me, the front of our bodies pressed together. I felt an incongruous longing for her in the chaos of the train car. The smell of her perfume, the tender paleness of the part in her hair. We hadn’t had sex all week, not even on the weekend; I’d been too exhausted. I was an idiot for not appreciating what was right in front of me. I slipped my hands down her waist, pulling her closer, and kissed her on the forehead. She smiled up at me. She seemed to know what I was thinking.

We commuted together all that week. I liked the routine. Alternating turns in the shower, Julia drying her hair while I shaved in front of the speckled mirror. The coffee cart, the descent into the hot subway, the kiss good-bye. On Thursday night of that week, Julia had plans to get dinner with her parents, who were passing through town. “Bummer you have to work so late,” she said as we walked to the subway on Thursday morning. “They’ll miss you.”

“Your parents? I doubt that.”

She laughed. “You know what I mean. Their version of missing.”

Later that night, as I was riding the elevator down to the lobby to pick up my dinner delivery, I thought of Julia and her parents. I pulled out my phone and texted her: Sorry I couldn’t make it. Tell them hi.

She texted me back a few hours later. Just finished. I’m nearby. Meet me outside your building in a few?

It was almost 10:00 p.m., and the office was dead. There was no one left to impress. I stood up and turned off my computer. Roger raised an eyebrow. “No McGuigan’s tonight?”

“Nah, not tonight. Other plans.”

Julia was waiting outside. She was more dressed up than usual, probably for her mother’s sake. Had she been wearing that dress this morning? I couldn’t remember. She was clutching a funny-looking silvery thing.

“What is that?”

“Leftovers,” she said. “It’s for you.”

“Weird-looking leftovers.”

“You’ve never seen this before? No, see, look. It’s a swan. See? That’s the neck, and those are the wings.”

It was made of aluminum foil. “That’s a thing?”

“I ordered the biggest steak so I’d have extra. My mom almost had a fit—she thought I was going to eat the whole thing. Oh, and guess what else I got?” She opened her tote bag and pointed inside, but it was too dark to see. “Come on, I’ve got a plan.”

We walked up Broadway, the crowds gradually thinning as we left behind Times Square. Julia was chattering happily with news from home, from work. She was having lunch the next day with her coworker Eleanor. She was hopeful that they might become friends. This stretch of midtown at this hour was strange and abandoned, like the aftermath of a hurricane. Julia tugged me across the intersection. We stopped, and she swept her arm across the mostly empty plaza. “Voilà. It’s like our very own Campo de’ Fiori.”

“Columbus Circle, you mean?”

“Come on, play along. You remember that night, right? It was almost a year ago exactly.” She sat down on the stone steps next to the fountain and pulled two cups from her tote bag, then a half-empty bottle of wine. She split the remaining wine between the two cups, handed one to me, and stashed the empty bottle in her bag.

“Where’d you get all this?”

“We got the wine to go with dessert, but we couldn’t finish it, so I took it with me. And the cups are courtesy of Starbucks.”

We touched the paper cups together. “What are we toasting to?” I said.

She tilted her head, her blond hair catching a shimmer from the lamps at the edge of Central Park. The stoplights changed from red to green, and the yellow taxis swept forward in unison, peeling off at various points around the traffic circle. If you squinted, the color blurred into one mass, and it looked like the same ring of taxis going around and around, forever. Julia smiled at me and said, “Whatever we want, I guess.”

I wanted this feeling to last. To fix it in place.

We kept commuting together. On Wednesday morning, our third week of work, the subway was messed up, even worse than usual. Several trains went by, the doors opening and closing on packed cars from which no one disembarked. It was hot and sticky, and frustration was mounting on the platform. People jostled, leaning into the tunnel to look for the next train. Someone stepped on Julia’s sandaled foot. “Ow!” she said. “Fuck. That hurt.” When the third and fourth and fifth trains passed by, Julia muttered, “This is fucking ridiculous.” The sixth train pulled up, and she said, “I’m getting on this one, I don’t care.” We both squeezed ourselves in, but Julia slipped farther into the train than I did, finding a pocket of space in the middle of the car. She gave me a halfhearted shrug, then looked away.