The Futures(21)

I suppose, at the time, I didn’t understand how rapidly my feelings toward Evan were evolving. Maybe I didn’t want to admit how little it took to dismantle what we’d built. It wasn’t that our relationship had been perfect before. We’d fought in college, but those fights always felt specific: fireworks that faded into smoke as fast as they arrived. But in New York, in the real world, every annoyance and disagreement felt like a referendum on our relationship. The bitterness started to linger. I was seeing growing evidence of why this was never going to work. A sickening suspicion that Evan and I were, in fact, all wrong for each other.

On the surface, my life seemed normal enough. I went to work, I jogged in the park, I saw my friends at crowded bars and brunches. Evan and I would try to have a late dinner on Friday or Saturday, compressing a week’s worth of intimacy into a few hours, but more and more often he didn’t even have time for that. Every night, I came home to a quiet apartment. My brain crackled with excess energy. I’d pace. I’d toss aside books, unable to concentrate. I’d sit in silence, ears pricked, hearing every flush of the toilet and clacking of heels echo through our building. Sometimes I’d try to stay up late for Evan, but those were always the nights I fell asleep with the lamp burning. Or, instead, I’d decide to go to bed early and wake up for a long run before work. Those were inevitably the nights I tossed and turned in our too-hot bedroom, unable to sleep, and when the alarm went off at 6:00 a.m., I’d rise like a zombie and jog through the empty streets.

What had happened? Looking back at those early weeks in New York, as we were wading into the shallows of our new lives, I realized that everything had changed so quickly. Earlier in the summer, things hadn’t been perfect, but they’d been okay: late nights out, long walks home, lingering over the last glass of wine. But something had changed soon after we started working. I was plagued with a new dissatisfaction. Was this it, was this everything? Was this my life from now on? Something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it—until suddenly, it seemed obvious what the problem was.

One August weekend, Evan and I were having a hurried brunch before he went back to the office. He had a new habit of keeping both his phones, flip phone and BlackBerry, on the table while we ate. I was telling a story when his BlackBerry vibrated. He picked it up immediately and started reading the e-mail that had just come in. “Oh, man,” he said loudly. I couldn’t tell whether it was good news or bad. Then he smiled at the screen. A big, wide, face-cracking grin. “Jules, this is awesome. Oh, man. So I was telling you about this WestCorp deal, right? Well…”

And he launched into the details, forgetting entirely that I’d been in the middle of a story. But I wasn’t listening. Instead I was thinking that I was such an idiot. It was so obvious—how had I not seen it before? That night in March, when I’d overhead his conversation with Patrick. That smile, that big grin. It was the exact same grin he was wearing at brunch, chattering away about the WestCorp deal. It was the blossoming of the seed I’d first glimpsed months earlier. Evan was more excited about his future than I was about mine. He had been all along. More alive with energy, with possibility, thinking about a million things other than me. I’d seen it before, how Evan threw himself into something he cared about. It happened in the most intense parts of the hockey season, back in college, and it was happening now, only now it wasn’t finite. This wasn’t just a season. This was real life. Our life—my life.

I had a suspicion. I started administering silent tests. Evan would get home, dropping his briefcase to the floor with a sigh. “You wouldn’t believe what happened at work,” he’d say, flopping down on the futon. He told me everything about Michael Casey, about the WestCorp deal. On and on and on. I’d keep perfectly quiet, waiting for him to finish, to turn his attention to me—to anyone but himself. Waiting for him to ask how my work was going, what I’d eaten for dinner, the people I’d been hanging out with in his absence. Anything. But he never asked, not once.

This new Evan didn’t have anything left for me. Evan needed me to affirm his existence, to nod and smile and say the right thing at the right time. He failed the test, and my suspicion was confirmed. He wasn’t really thinking about me. He never was. I don’t know what I’d do without you. He seemed to forget that it was supposed to be reciprocal.

At work, later that September day, there was nervous chatter in the hallways. I imagine that was true everywhere in New York that afternoon—watercooler speculation about how far it would go, if we were witnessing the end of one era and the beginning of the next—but we had particular reason to be concerned. Organizations like ours formed an appendage to the financial industry, rising and falling along with the market. It was symbiotic, our minnow cleaning the gills of the whale that swam around lower Manhattan. We relied on the largesse of the Fletchers and others like them to keep us alive.

Had I started thinking of the foundation as ours? Had I started thinking of myself as us? I guess I had. I was beginning to understand why people sometimes stayed in jobs they hated. It wasn’t just about the paycheck. It was about the structure, contributing to the hum of civilized society. My own contribution was almost invisible, but I liked the accoutrements. The nameplate on my desk; the security guard in the lobby who knew me by sight. Even if the job wasn’t much, it was something. I’d complain about it to Evan, but all he said was how lucky I was to have such easy hours; cutting, even if true.