The Futures(65)

My hands were gripping the back of the desk chair. So hard that I thought the wood might splinter. “This is my girlfriend you’re talking about,” I finally said.

“I know. But I’ve known you a long time, Evan, and I’ve known her a long time, too. And she can just be so…well, self-pitying. You’ve seen what she’s like when she’s in a bad mood. And I know she’s had a hard time finding a job—”

“Oh, come on,” I snapped. “That is so petty. She’ll get a job.”

“Right, well, that’s not exactly the point. The point is whether it’s a good idea to be moving in with someone so self-centered.”

“You’re calling her self-centered?” I shouted.

He stared back at me. “Yes.”

“What the fuck is your problem?”

“I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t think it was for your own good.”

“Oh, well, in that case.”

Arthur sighed. “Forget it. Forget I said anything.”

I stood up and opened the door. “It’s late. I think you should go.”

The next morning, we managed to act like nothing happened. These would be the pictures printed and framed, to be looked at years later: graduation day, all of college reduced down to a single snapshot. Julia had her camera with her, and she made us pose together, two roommates with their arms slung around each other. Still best friends, four years later, amid a sea of black polyester robes fluttering in the May breeze.

My mind snapped back to the present. The glowing, blipping computer monitor in front of me, the hum of the lights overhead. Arthur on the other end of the line.

“Julia? Uh, no, she’s good. I don’t see that much of her. I’m barely ever home. But she seems to keep busy.”

“That’s good.”

There was a long pause. Arthur cleared his throat. “Well, they’re about to carve the turkey. I’d better get going.”

We hung up and promised, emptily, to talk again soon.

*

I had chalked it up to jealousy at the time. Arthur never warmed to Julia. When I was with her, I wasn’t with him. Simple as that. I suspected that they were too much alike. Not superficially, but underneath they had that same quality. A watchfulness, a gaze that never missed a thing. It was why I liked them both so much. They took me in whole without my needing to explain myself.

So that’s all it was, I told myself while Julia and I drove a rented U-Haul down I-95 to New York the day after graduation. Arthur’s words had been humming through my head since our fight. He was jealous. He thought I was picking her over him. Those nasty things he’d said—it was just envy. In our tiny new living room that first night in New York, I looked over at Julia. She had her hands on her hips, head cocked to one side, deciding where to hang the pictures. I felt such a rush of love at that moment, watching our new life become real. It wasn’t a fluke, the way I felt about her. We were meant to be.

But Arthur’s words were back again. Fresh and whole, like a submarine breaking through the surface. Had he been right all along? Self-centered. Self-pitying. Julia had an independent streak that I’d always liked, but since graduation, it had hardened into something else. A life so separate that I wasn’t even part of it.

Had I known it, too? Julia was flawed, like anyone else. Sometimes she could be selfish, it was true. But she had so much that transcended it. When things were good, the selfishness disappeared completely. And for most of our time together, that’s the way it was. I’d had glimpses of how it might be different. Our fights. The way she could snap like a sprung trap. One weekend sophomore year, when her friends from boarding school were visiting, I watched her turn into this other version of herself. They were catty and cruel, making fun of old classmates on Facebook, getting more vicious with each bottle of wine. “Look at her dress!” Julia shrieked, mouth stained red with drink. “God, she looks like a Russian prostitute.”

But those moods passed quickly. Mostly, college had been good to us. Julia’s arc bent toward a happier version of herself. Senior year, after we got back from our summer abroad and our visit to British Columbia, she was more comfortable and relaxed than I’d ever seen her. There was one night in particular that sealed it for me, that seemed like definitive proof of the kind of person Julia had become. A Saturday in early September, near the start of senior year.

“You sure it’s cool if I don’t go?” I said. Abby’s society was throwing a big party that night. A fancy one, with a dress code and bartenders. I sat on her bed as Julia was getting ready.

She caught my eye in the mirror. “Of course. You already had plans.”

“It’s just with the guys. I could cancel.”

“I don’t mind. Hey, how do I look?”

She spun in her dress and heels. I smiled. She didn’t even need me to say it.

But later that night, when I was hanging out at the hockey house, plans shifted. One of our teammates was also in Abby’s society, and he texted me and some of the other guys around 11:00 p.m., begging us to come to his rescue at the party. It was a question of loyalty; we couldn’t leave a teammate twisting in the wind like that. When we arrived, ten minutes later, I saw what the problem was. This was one of those parties where the main form of interaction was conversation. The lights were too bright, the music too quiet, the whole vibe too stiff. He stood in a corner, eyes wide and terrified. Making friends with new people, especially nonathletes, was not his strong suit. The poor guy. When he saw us, he practically shouted “Thank God.”