“I ordered the biggest steak so I’d have extra. My mom almost had a fit—she thought I was going to eat the whole thing. Oh, and guess what else I got?” She opened her tote bag and pointed inside, but it was too dark to see. “Come on, I’ve got a plan.”
We walked up Broadway, the crowds gradually thinning as we left behind Times Square. Julia was chattering happily with news from home, from work. She was having lunch the next day with her coworker Eleanor. She was hopeful that they might become friends. This stretch of midtown at this hour was strange and abandoned, like the aftermath of a hurricane. Julia tugged me across the intersection. We stopped, and she swept her arm across the mostly empty plaza. “Voilà. It’s like our very own Campo de’ Fiori.”
“Columbus Circle, you mean?”
“Come on, play along. You remember that night, right? It was almost a year ago exactly.” She sat down on the stone steps next to the fountain and pulled two cups from her tote bag, then a half-empty bottle of wine. She split the remaining wine between the two cups, handed one to me, and stashed the empty bottle in her bag.
“Where’d you get all this?”
“We got the wine to go with dessert, but we couldn’t finish it, so I took it with me. And the cups are courtesy of Starbucks.”
We touched the paper cups together. “What are we toasting to?” I said.
She tilted her head, her blond hair catching a shimmer from the lamps at the edge of Central Park. The stoplights changed from red to green, and the yellow taxis swept forward in unison, peeling off at various points around the traffic circle. If you squinted, the color blurred into one mass, and it looked like the same ring of taxis going around and around, forever. Julia smiled at me and said, “Whatever we want, I guess.”
I wanted this feeling to last. To fix it in place.
We kept commuting together. On Wednesday morning, our third week of work, the subway was messed up, even worse than usual. Several trains went by, the doors opening and closing on packed cars from which no one disembarked. It was hot and sticky, and frustration was mounting on the platform. People jostled, leaning into the tunnel to look for the next train. Someone stepped on Julia’s sandaled foot. “Ow!” she said. “Fuck. That hurt.” When the third and fourth and fifth trains passed by, Julia muttered, “This is fucking ridiculous.” The sixth train pulled up, and she said, “I’m getting on this one, I don’t care.” We both squeezed ourselves in, but Julia slipped farther into the train than I did, finding a pocket of space in the middle of the car. She gave me a halfhearted shrug, then looked away.
It was a strange thing to watch her from this distance. To realize what a difference a few meters could make. The way she glanced at her watch, as if to make the train move faster; the way she stared vacantly at the ads for dermatologists and vocational schools. She seemed frustrated and grumpy, but underneath was something harder. An irritation that had nothing to do with the sick passenger or the signal malfunction or whatever had caused this train backup. Something that had been there before we’d even left the apartment that morning. It was like I was looking at Julia from a different angle and seeing something I hadn’t seen before.
The next morning, she was still asleep when I left for work.
*
August arrived, and the city grew quiet. Our neighborhood was a ghost town on weekends. It had become a way of marking time, the Hampton Jitney pulling up on Sunday evenings, the seep of sunburned passengers back to the crosshatch of numbered streets. Everyone who could afford to had fled for the beach.
Work was quiet, too. I checked everything two or three times, guarding myself against boneheaded mistakes. The bosses accepted the work I was doing with a clipped thank-you. I tried to see this as a positive—the models and decks must have been good enough to make it across their desks without comment—but I felt a crackling undercurrent of worry. The sluggish market, rumors about layoffs. There were still long stretches of hours, sometimes days, when I didn’t have much to do. Maybe it had been rash to jump at this job. Maybe I should have thought more about trying to play hockey after college—in Europe or the minors. My life at that moment would have been totally different.
Until one Friday night in early August, when my luck changed.
It was early evening. The higher-ups had left around lunchtime to beat the beach traffic. The other analysts were already at McGuigan’s. I was getting ready to leave when my phone rang.
“Could you stop by?” Michael Casey asked in a flat, untelling tone.
When I arrived, he looked up from a stack of papers and gestured me inside. I hadn’t been in there since the interview back in March. His office was bare of decoration except for a few pictures of him and a younger blond woman who had to be his wife, the two of them smiling against Caribbean sunsets and snowy ski hills. She looked a bit like Julia, though not as pretty. No kids, I noticed. Michael was unsmiling. “So, Evan. How have things been? What are you working on?”