The science majors, if they weren’t applying to medical school, were thinking about working in a lab, while some of the liberal arts majors were planning careers in early-childhood education or sales. Or else, like a few people they knew who had already graduated, they imagined themselves working in publishing, answering phones in sprightly voices, saying, “Magda Stromberg’s office, this is Becca!” dozens of times a day, when really they wanted to be Magda Stromberg, not Becca. A number of them would be taking jobs in fields that possessed a certain impressive weight simply as words: Marketing. Business. Finance.
None of them wanted to be like the occasional Ryland graduate who stayed around and haunted the campus. There was one who had graduated three years earlier, and he worked as a barista at the Main Bean downtown, and made a show of leaving whatever book he was currently reading splayed open, title facing up, beside him next to the pumps of syrup and the pitchers of steamed milk, and he’d try to catch the eye of one of the current students buying coffee. The student would take his cup and add packet after packet of raw sugar, gearing up for a paper he had to write that night, while the barista no longer had to gear up for anything except another day behind the counter. It was bewildering the way a place that had held you tightly for four years simply released you at the end, no longer responsible.
Greer had started to imagine becoming a writer; she saw herself writing essays and articles and eventually maybe books with strongly feminist themes, though probably that was the kind of work she would do late at night at first. She would have to start earning a salary to support her writing. She couldn’t have a life like her parents. But if she had a real job, and didn’t have to fall into poverty, then she could try to write when she could, and maybe she would have some luck.
Though Zee was definitely more of the nonprofit type than Greer was, now Greer could see working for a while in communications for someplace that was good. She also imagined that she might write to Faith Frank and tell her about it: “As I try to figure out what to do with my life, I have a job writing the in-house newsletter at Planet Concerns. Again, this is probably because of the conversation we had in the ladies’ room. I’m trying to make meaning, as you suggested.”
Soon Greer was saying to Cory, unasked, “A nonprofit. That could work at first, while I write at night, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” he said easily, but he didn’t really know what he was talking about; neither of them did.
“Chloe Shanahan’s friend works for an organization that brings art to people with disabilities. Her brother is blind,” Greer added, then felt she had to put in, “Not that she wouldn’t have worked there anyway.”
“But probably she wouldn’t,” Cory said.
“True.”
It seemed that you came to what you ended up doing, and who you ended up being, through any number of ways. Being a writer had a dreamy impossibility about it, but she liked to imagine it anyway. She became increasingly able to see herself writing on the side while working someplace decent and honorable. “It won’t be marketing,” she told Cory. “It won’t be fashion. It won’t be,” she added gratuitously, “library clown.”
Cory had become friends with two people he’d met in a class on economic development at Princeton, and after talking fiercely around the seminar table about poverty, and later continuing the conversation outside of class, the three of them talked about developing a microfinance app after college. Both Lionel and Will came from wealthy families that were considering investing in their sons’ app. The three of them were now buzzed with the idea of it, swarmed with plans.
“I think this is actually going to happen,” Cory said to Greer. “It’s exciting, though it has to be handled right. There are people out there throwing around these terms, microfinance, microloans, but essentially ripping other people off. When it works it can make a huge difference to small-business owners. But the interest can be incredibly high. So we’re going to do it in a way that’s low-interest. We’re not going to rip anyone off. Also, women apply for these kinds of loans a lot,” he added, and though this remark was a self-conscious nod to feminism, a nod to her, she didn’t mind.
Greer imagined Cory in shirtsleeves in a little office somewhere in Brooklyn, his phone blowing up with the sound effects of a cash register dinging as loans went through. But mostly, in this image, she saw Cory’s happiness. At the end of an industrious day, he would come home from microfinance, and she would come home from nonprofit. They would talk about policy, and problems Greer was having with her writing, and drink beers on the fire escape, and once in a while from that fire escape they would watch fireworks, which appeared at intervals over the skies of New York for no good reason except a general excitement about the city—living there and being young, wanting to see color shoot across its skies. Late at night, when Cory slept, she would stay up beside him in bed with her laptop, writing fiction and essays and notes for articles that she hoped to publish. She’d already started keeping a notebook of ideas.
After college they were going to be living together in Brooklyn and hoping they could find a way to afford it; this was the plan now. They’d have a small, bare-bones apartment. Greer saw a jute rug on the floor, and imagined its unforgiving texture, and then the cold floor a few feet later as she padded to the bathroom after sex in the night, or before work in the morning.
“Neither of us is great at cooking,” Greer noted. “We can’t microwave everything when we live together.”
“We’ll learn,” he said. “Though can you tolerate me cooking meat, and turning the place into a meat palace?”
“Separate pans and good ventilation,” she said. “That’ll help.” Vegetarianism had become a fixed state for her, and she never wanted to go back.
Now, when Greer couldn’t sleep sometimes, she thought of her future with Cory, each detail burnished and discrete. She imagined Cory’s size-13 foot peeping out at the end of the bed, the two of them sleeping together every night, finally, and no longer in a bed meant for a child or a college student. A bed that could hold both of them easily, casually.
Whenever you saw a young couple that had recently moved in together, you knew there was something substantial going on with them. All that love, all that fucking, all that flipping through catalogues on a treasure hunt for linens and furniture and small appliances that had been designed expressly with them in mind. The prices had to be slightly out of range, and yet, upon reflection, not! We can do it, the couple said to each other. We can make it work. The prices spoke of the big step this would be, buying this table or chair or immersion blender; but unlike in the past, when men would leave home decoration and kitchen assembly entirely to women, putting together a life was now a joint activity. It could happen in bed, even, where you might study a website or a catalogue together—the new, engrossing literature of the first flush of adulthood—warm body to warm body, in a festival of imagining. To commit to actual things composed of wood and metal and fabric was to make real the vagueness and unreality of love.
For now, they were tolerating college apart well. They had full course loads, and there had been a thrilling election followed by a new president; and they made weekend trips to see each other, though sometimes Greer could perceive little incomplete flashes of the life Cory led that had nothing to do with her, and she was anxious about them. He might say, “Steers and Mackey and Clove Wilberson are forcing me to join the Frisbee team.”
“They are physically forcing you?”
“Yes. They said I must surrender.”