The Futures(66)

A few heads turned at his outburst. Julia was one of them. I felt immediately guilty. So I hadn’t been willing to come to this party for her, but I had been willing to come for my friend? We lumbered in like a bunch of cavemen. I was still wearing a baseball hat and hadn’t shaved in more than a week. There was no way this wasn’t embarrassing for her. She spotted me and walked quickly across the room. I braced for impact. I deserved whatever I was about to get.

But instead she threw her arms around me. “Thank God is right,” she whispered. She turned to my teammate and added, “I am so glad you told them to come.”

“You’re not mad?”

“Why would I be mad? This party is dead. You just saved my life. Come on, let’s get a drink.”

Julia got the bartender to pour a dozen shots of whiskey. She raised her glass for the first toast. “To bringing home that championship,” she said, and everyone cheered. One of my teammates nudged me after Julia threw her shot back without a grimace. “She’s a keeper, man.”

It was one of those long, meandering nights, the best kind, when you don’t need a plan. By senior year, all of us finally understood that we did, in fact, belong there; that we were no longer faking it. We ended the night, many hours later, lying in Julia’s bed in the darkness.

“I’m so happy,” she said. “Evan. I want you to know that.”

“I’m happy, too.”

She was quiet for a while. Then her hand drifted over, her fingers intertwining with mine. “I’m just so glad we made it. You know?”

I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “I love you, Jules.”

“Mmm,” she said, yawning, curling up in sleepiness. “See? You always know exactly what to say.”

This was the Julia I loved the most, the person whose love meant more for having been tested, for having endured. But in the months between graduation and late fall, the story had changed. The arc I’d seen over the previous four years had vanished. Her outlying behavior became the new normal. She was spikier, crueler. Harder in every way. I considered the question from different angles. Had something happened in the world, an outside shift that set her in a new direction? Or was it inevitable, an uncovering of the person she’d always been? Maybe it wasn’t that her flaws were balanced out by the good. Maybe it was that the flaws were merely one side of a two-sided coin. What made a person good also made a person bad. Confidence could easily become arrogance. A sense of humor was only ever a few rungs away from cruelty.

*

Things were back to normal by late afternoon. E-mails started flooding in, and my BlackBerry resumed its regular buzzing. Michael told me he wanted to review the WestCorp numbers first thing the following morning.

As the sky darkened and night fell, I felt better. It was weird, actually. It was the opposite of that sick Sunday night dread I’d sometimes felt in college, the looming threat of classes in the morning. I was already thinking happily about the next day, about the office coming alive again with the sounds of work, the way it was supposed to be. I had told Julia about my bonus earlier that week, but I hadn’t told anyone else. I’d stuffed the money into my sock drawer. I liked the idea of it tucked away, secret proof. On the walk home, I decided to stop for a drink. Maybe I ought to celebrate. It was Thanksgiving night, and Michael was right, after all. This was a historic deal. I ought to take a moment to savor it.

It was a cold, clear night. Along Central Park South, I passed families bundled up inside horse-drawn carriages, the hooves clopping loudly on the pavement. Christmas lights laced the awnings along the street. I saw the Plaza Hotel up ahead. I’d been to the Oak Bar once before, with Julia. We came into the city one weekend senior year to have dinner with her parents. We’d gone for a drink at the Oak Bar afterward, then caught the last train back to New Haven. At that hour, 5th Avenue had been so peaceful, just the two of us for blocks at a time as we walked down to Grand Central, the passing whoosh of a street sweeper and the silent drift of steam from an open manhole.

When I walked in, the bar looked just as I remembered—dark wood and leather and a soft glow from the chandeliers. I ordered a martini, and it slid down my throat, cold and bracing and wet. I ordered a second one. The bar was half full, a murmur of conversation and clinking ice cubes occasionally punctuated by the cocktail shaker. There was a beautiful foreign-looking couple at a table, the woman’s neck dripping with diamonds. Another young woman in a black dress, a few stools down, glancing nervously at the door. A mother and father and two little boys, the parents drinking their nightcaps while the boys munched on peanuts. It was comforting, being alone in a room with other people. A floating island where we’d all happened to seek refuge in this eerily quiet city.

The door swung open, letting in the cold. A man in a dark coat and cream-colored scarf came in, peeled off his leather gloves, and ran a hand through his hair. He turned, and I felt a pulse of recognition ripple up my spine. I knew him from somewhere. He scanned the room, and his eyes landed on me.

He recognized me, too. He smiled and strode over.

“Hey—it’s Evan, right? Evan Peck?” He extended his hand.

“Yeah. Hi.” I squinted. “God, I’m sorry, you’re so familiar…”

“Hey, don’t sweat it. Adam McCard. We met a few times through Julia.”

Of course. That grin, the too-strong aftershave.