“Nothing worth talking about. Tell me more about your week.”
It was a relief to have Julia there, to have a partner in the minor struggles: how to decipher the Con Ed bill, where to find the nearest Laundromat, what to do about the noisy neighbors and the leaky faucet. She always knew exactly what to do. I was acutely aware, that summer, of how alone I was in the world. My parents had gone back to Canada right after the graduation ceremony, and I wouldn’t see them again for months. This never bothered me in college, when the proximity of your family only mattered when it was time to travel back and forth. But being in the real world seemed to emphasize how far I was from home—something I hadn’t felt in a long time. And moving to New York had highlighted certain differences between me and Julia, too, things I’d never noticed before. The advice and money and connections she took for granted. How she was never limited to this place. She could always take the train to Boston, or hop on a plane to Nantucket. Even though she made less than a fifth of what I did, she had money from her parents. We’d agreed to divide the rent in line with our salary discrepancy, so I paid two-thirds, although sometimes I wondered how fair that was. My money came like water from a pump, flowing only as long as I kept working. Hers came like a spring whose source was bountiful and deep. We never talked about this.
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?”