“I’m glad you made me get them,” Evan said. We were walking back to the apartment, a bag with his new shirts and ties swinging from one hand. He’d pick up the altered suits in a few days. He kissed me. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
I was proud of him. Really, I was. He was a boy from the middle of nowhere who had gotten himself to Yale. He was working at the most famous hedge fund in New York, leaving for work every morning in his finely made suits. He’d said it to me more than once that summer. I don’t know what I’d do without you. I knew he meant it as a compliment. But Evan was always better at taking direction from others than he was at taking direction from himself. It could have been anyone prodding him to get a better suit, and his gratitude would have come out sounding the same. My being the prodder was only incidental.
I suppose, at the time, I didn’t understand how rapidly my feelings toward Evan were evolving. Maybe I didn’t want to admit how little it took to dismantle what we’d built. It wasn’t that our relationship had been perfect before. We’d fought in college, but those fights always felt specific: fireworks that faded into smoke as fast as they arrived. But in New York, in the real world, every annoyance and disagreement felt like a referendum on our relationship. The bitterness started to linger. I was seeing growing evidence of why this was never going to work. A sickening suspicion that Evan and I were, in fact, all wrong for each other.
On the surface, my life seemed normal enough. I went to work, I jogged in the park, I saw my friends at crowded bars and brunches. Evan and I would try to have a late dinner on Friday or Saturday, compressing a week’s worth of intimacy into a few hours, but more and more often he didn’t even have time for that. Every night, I came home to a quiet apartment. My brain crackled with excess energy. I’d pace. I’d toss aside books, unable to concentrate. I’d sit in silence, ears pricked, hearing every flush of the toilet and clacking of heels echo through our building. Sometimes I’d try to stay up late for Evan, but those were always the nights I fell asleep with the lamp burning. Or, instead, I’d decide to go to bed early and wake up for a long run before work. Those were inevitably the nights I tossed and turned in our too-hot bedroom, unable to sleep, and when the alarm went off at 6:00 a.m., I’d rise like a zombie and jog through the empty streets.
What had happened? Looking back at those early weeks in New York, as we were wading into the shallows of our new lives, I realized that everything had changed so quickly. Earlier in the summer, things hadn’t been perfect, but they’d been okay: late nights out, long walks home, lingering over the last glass of wine. But something had changed soon after we started working. I was plagued with a new dissatisfaction. Was this it, was this everything? Was this my life from now on? Something was wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it—until suddenly, it seemed obvious what the problem was.
One August weekend, Evan and I were having a hurried brunch before he went back to the office. He had a new habit of keeping both his phones, flip phone and BlackBerry, on the table while we ate. I was telling a story when his BlackBerry vibrated. He picked it up immediately and started reading the e-mail that had just come in. “Oh, man,” he said loudly. I couldn’t tell whether it was good news or bad. Then he smiled at the screen. A big, wide, face-cracking grin. “Jules, this is awesome. Oh, man. So I was telling you about this WestCorp deal, right? Well…”
And he launched into the details, forgetting entirely that I’d been in the middle of a story. But I wasn’t listening. Instead I was thinking that I was such an idiot. It was so obvious—how had I not seen it before? That night in March, when I’d overhead his conversation with Patrick. That smile, that big grin. It was the exact same grin he was wearing at brunch, chattering away about the WestCorp deal. It was the blossoming of the seed I’d first glimpsed months earlier. Evan was more excited about his future than I was about mine. He had been all along. More alive with energy, with possibility, thinking about a million things other than me. I’d seen it before, how Evan threw himself into something he cared about. It happened in the most intense parts of the hockey season, back in college, and it was happening now, only now it wasn’t finite. This wasn’t just a season. This was real life. Our life—my life.