A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

by Benjamin Wood

  In my adult life, I’ve seen more therapists than I’ve seen clouds, and they’ve been so entirely useless in such a wide variety of ways that I almost gave up on the idea of therapy altogether. But lately I’ve been going to a grief support group in my neighbourhood, run out of the basement at the 10th Street Church. It was recommended to me by a doctor as kind of consolation prize in lieu of sleeping pills. I went along one night to see if it had anything to offer, and it surprised me just how comfortable I felt inside the space. The counsellor who hosts the meetings is a man called Dennis Alma, a retired police psychologist. He has a manner that reminds me of my best teachers at school—forthright but avuncular—and he can fill a silence with as moving a soliloquy as you’re likely to hear from the mouth of a shrink (the stories he has told us about his life have helped to place my own in context, or at least to position it along a spectrum of guilt: Dennis was responsible for accidentally shooting his own sister when he was five years old). He lets me sit there every other Thursday, cross-armed and silent, without pressing me for contributions. One of the things that Dennis always tells the group is that we must stop viewing the present as the continuation of our past and see it, instead, as the beginning of our future. I know that this is just an aphorism, not an actual solution to the problem, but the same thing could be levelled at the words of Sophocles. I’m getting closer to believing what he says is possible.

  Alisha and I met about eight months after I transferred to New York, which constitutes the greatest stride towards contentment that I’ve ever taken. She was in the very first accounting course I taught in Queens, although she missed a couple of the early sessions. I remember she appeared three weeks in, towing a steel trunk on wheels that she seemed rather nervous about parking in the empty room. ‘You can just bring it up to the front,’ I told her, ‘if you’re worried someone’s going to pinch it. The others will be here soon.’

  She pulled a musing face at me and said, ‘Hmm, I don’t know. That seems a little far away. My whole life is in this thing.’ I couldn’t tell if she was being serious or not until she took a desk chair on the back row and set the trunk down next to her, resting her feet on it.

  ‘Is there a pen and paper in it?’ I said. ‘You’re probably going to need to take a few notes.’

  ‘Nah, I got that covered, though.’ She brought out an old Dictaphone from the inside of her coat, holding it up as though it were a pocket bible she was about to consult. ‘You don’t mind if I record this, do you? I just figure it’s easier than trying to read my own handwriting later. I haven’t studied much of anything since high school.’

  ‘It’s fine with me. But you might need to check with the others.’

  ‘They won’t care,’ she said. ‘And if they do, I’ll just go ahead and record it all in secret anyway.’

  ‘Like the FBI,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly. If it’s good enough for the Feds . . .’

  I smiled at her and went back to organising photocopied handouts. As I recall, we covered simple balance sheets and cash flow in that session. ‘So, I’ve got a few absentees here on the list, and I’m just trying to guess which one is you. I’m thinking you aren’t Rodolpho or Cliff. But maybe you’re Mackenzie—I’m assuming that’s a woman’s name. It’s a surname where I come from.’

  ‘I’m Alisha,’ she said.

  ‘Ah. Okay. Welcome to the class.’ I ticked the register they’d given me.

  ‘Good to be here. Can I just double-check something with you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘This thing is totally free, right? I mean, you’re not going to spring any hidden charges on me.’

  ‘No. It’s completely free, don’t worry.’

  ‘Good.’ She puffed breath at her fringe. ‘ ’Cause I was sitting here thinking, man, those cashmere pants alone would cost me half my rent. I hope I can afford this guy.’

  I had come straight from the office in a tailored blue suit. ‘Yeah, I suppose I should’ve changed into something a bit less—’

  ‘Wall Street.’

  ‘I was going to say corporate, but, yeah.’

  ‘Don’t bother. You’re teaching us how to be good with our money, right?’

  ‘Sort of. There’s a bit more to it.’

  ‘What I’m saying is, if you want anyone round here to follow your advice, you’ve got to look the part. I’d rather know a guy’s got money if he’s telling me what I should do with mine. And I’m sure most people in this neighbourhood would think the same as me. So, okay, maybe lose the cufflinks and the tie, roll up your sleeves, but you don’t need to come here in your sweats because you happen to earn more than we do. Let it show a little. You’re a pro at this, from what I’ve heard. And besides—’ She turned her eyes quickly to the window. ‘You look nice.’

  Each Tuesday night for the remainder of the course, I resisted the impulse to call on her for answers just to feel the pleasant weight of her attention. I would like to say that I was more concerned with helping her appreciate the fundamentals of accounting than I was with getting to know her, but all Alisha had to do back then was show up with her hair still damp and formless from the shower and I would lose my grasp on numbers, thinking of the freckled incline of her neck and what it would be like to kiss it (‘Um, don’t you mean, one-sixty-four, Dan?’ one of the students would say in my periphery. ‘Or is my calculator broken?’). I guessed that she was similar in age to me, though I always got the sense from her behaviour in the class that she was older—there was a candour to her conversation style that I associated with maturity, world-weariness (Alisha is, in fact, a year younger, but I still maintain she has a streetwise quality I’ll never possess). Every week, I hoped that she would stop me in the doorway as I left the building and invite me for a drink with her and the whole group; but there was little camaraderie among her cohort—no doubt I’d failed to inspire it—and so the invitation never came. I told myself that it would be unethical to socialise with my own students anyway; I remember thinking it was best if I partitioned my teaching life from my personal life to avoid any conflicts of interest, even though the students were grown adults with their own small businesses and they treated me as their tax advisor.

  It took her almost missing the last session of the course for me to change my view on that. With Alisha’s seat empty, I got deflated by the idea that I’d never see her again. I spent forty-something minutes of the class discussing straight-line depreciation and recapping my notes on the double entry bookkeeping system, and I couldn’t tell you whether or not a word I spoke that night was reasonable or incoherent. When time was almost up, there was a scrape and a shuffle from the corridor, and I saw her peeking in through the window with a face of desperation. I waved her in. ‘Is this Time-keeping 101?’ she asked, ‘because I could use some serious tuition.’ The group laughed and jeered, sarcastically—camaraderie at last, I thought—and she came into the room, dragging that steel box of hers across the linoleum. ‘Could someone give me a hand here?’ she said. ‘I lost a wheel getting off the damn bus.’ I couldn’t run there fast enough. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘What did I miss?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Rodolpho, in his usual caustic way: he was a fifty-seven-year-old garage owner who hadn’t smiled once in nine straight weeks of teaching. ‘But I’m sure Dan can find some extra time to catch you up—can’t you, Dan?’ Smirks all round the room. I had never felt so utterly transparent.

  At the end of the session, I asked the students who would like to get a drink with me to celebrate their official mastery of accountancy, and only Alisha raised her hand: the rest had families to get back to, work to get up for early in the morning, night shifts to show up for. ‘No can do,’ said Cliff. ‘It’s been awesome, though. I learned a lot.’ I don’t know if they were being charitable or if they were especially ambivalent, but I didn’t try too hard to persuade them.

  ‘Wherever we’re going, we’ll need to schlepp this thing,’ Alisha said. ‘Sorry about that.’

  �
��You take one handle, I’ll take the other?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘I’ll just have to lock up and give the keys back to the super.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll wait.’

  That night was our first at the Neptune Diner, the place Alisha and I now return to every year on the same date—her way of consecrating what she refers to as ‘our true north anniversary’. Walking down Astoria Boulevard with the trunk swinging between us, I asked her: ‘What the hell d’you keep in here, anyway?’

  ‘Man,’ she said, ‘I don’t even know your last name. We’ve got to be pretty well acquainted before I let that information out.’

  ‘It’s Jarrett,’ I said.

  ‘See. I didn’t know that.’

  ‘You would’ve done if you’d been at our first class.’

  ‘True. But there’s no guarantee I would’ve listened. I tend to fall asleep a little when you talk. No offence.’

  ‘It’s probably my teaching style. Accountancy is too much fun. I have to play it down or no one can sit still.’

  She laughed. ‘It really works. You’re like a shot of Nyquil to the senses.’

  ‘I’m guessing it’s equipment of some kind.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘In the box.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I knew she was a photographer. During the course, she had disclosed it in the preamble to a set of pointed questions about entity—we’d covered the topic in much greater depth than I’d planned to in that session, solely out of deference to her interest in it. ‘How expensive are the cameras in here that it takes two people to lug them around?’

  ‘I never said they were cameras. And by the way—shshh.’

  ‘No one’s going to come and nick it right out of our hands.’

  ‘This is Queens, pal. I’m not taking any chances.’

  ‘You really think we might get trunk-jacked?’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said, laughing. ‘That’s not a word I want to hear you speak again.’

  ‘Well, whatever it is,’ I called out, ‘it’s heavy.’

  ‘Look, you got me, all right.’ She was enjoying herself—I could tell from the bounce in her stride. ‘My father’s pretty well known around these parts. He’s in the sanitation business, if you get my gist. I’ve been chopping bodies up and packing them in here, and now I need a big strong guy like you to help me toss it off the bridge before it really starts to smell, you know?’

  I’ve been told since, by Alisha, that I slowed my walking pace so much, clenching the handle of the trunk, that it nearly slipped out of her grasp. She tells me that my face turned sickly grey, and I stopped speaking altogether for a block or two. There is no reason to doubt that this is true. I have no memory of those minutes, just the chugga chugga clank chugga chugga clank chugga chugga clank. ‘Jesus, Dan, I wasn’t serious. Are you okay?’ she said. ‘Dan? I was just kidding around.’ It was the sight of the express station that brought me out of it. The N train was shuffling in to the raised platform up ahead and it overwhelmed the sound. I can cope with any noise that I can glean the source of, and I’m often drawn into the subway here for the same reason I used to be attracted to the tube: I know the noise is not the noise. ‘Yeah, shit, I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I spaced out a bit. It happens to me sometimes.’

  She looked at me with a sort of pity. ‘You want to call it a night?’

  ‘No way. I’m hungry.’

  ‘Oh good,’ she said. ‘Me too.’

  We sat down at a booth (now our booth) at the window of the Neptune, with the trunk in the space between us, pressing at my toes. She ordered pancakes and I had a Denver omelette and, while we waited with our beers, she apologised a second time for her line about the bodies. ‘I guess it maybe touched a nerve with you or something, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I was just trying to sound more interesting than I am.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ I told her. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  She didn’t push me on it. Kicking the trunk, she said: ‘Well, I’m still not telling you what’s in it.’

  ‘Wait until you’ve had a few more of these.’ I wobbled my glass at her.

  ‘Ah, you’re not going to care by then. I need to start lowering expectations.’

  ‘Anything short of plutonium is going to be a disappointment.’ I realised it already—the effect she had on me. I felt so much calmer in her company than at any other time during my day. She extracted thoughts from me that I would otherwise have been too mannered to conceive.

  ‘Okay, since you’re already losing interest, cards on the table,’ she said. ‘Here’s what it is: a portable darkroom. Cost me like nine hundred bucks, so, yeah, I keep it pretty close. I’m sort of between apartments and I don’t have a studio space right now. Can’t afford to stop working, and I can set this thing up in, like, a parking lot, so, it comes with me everywhere I go. These last few months have been crazy with work. I’ve sold a lot of pictures, earned a lot of money, but I’ve spent way more than I should have. If you saw my balance sheets, you’d cry.’

  ‘I could help you with that, you know. Whenever you want.’

  ‘Shut up,’ she said. ‘I can’t afford you.’

  ‘You know I wouldn’t charge you. It’d be my pleasure.’

  She planted her elbows on the table, landed the globe of her head on her fists. ‘What’s with you, Dan? Always doing stuff for free? Are you like some trust fund kid or something, getting his hands dirty with the regular folks?’

  ‘Shit,’ I said, and slugged my beer. ‘Is that really how I come across?’

  ‘No. Not at all. I’m just curious. I mean, what brings a guy like you out here to teach the likes of me?’

  ‘Oh, you don’t have time to hear that story, trust me,’ I said. ‘And the likes of you are exactly why I do it. I don’t get to meet a lot of genuine people in my line of work.’

  ‘Okay.’ She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘So tell me more about yourself. I mean, how do you keep the roof over your head? I take it you don’t live in Queens.’

  ‘Queens is pretty nice. I wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘Shut up. Queens sucks. That’s non-negotiable. Come on—’ She leaned in, lightly scratching at her clavicle. ‘You’re probably the smartest guy I’ve ever met. Where did you study?’

  ‘Again, if you’d been there in week one—’

  ‘Get over it. Seriously. Where?’

  ‘The London School of Economics.’

  ‘That’s cool.’

  ‘And the Institute of Chartered Accountants.’

  ‘Less cool.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  An old couple went by on the pavement outside and she watched them ambling towards the half-lit underpass. ‘Must’ve taken a while, huh? Nine weeks of numbers in my head was bad enough. I only made it through one semester at CUNY. Liberal Arts. I hated it.’

  ‘It’s not for everyone,’ I said. ‘But, I don’t know, I’ve always liked studying for things. Targets are good for me. I can lose myself in them.’

  ‘All right. This is good, this is good.’ For a second, she held her dainty necklace in her mouth and then let it cascade: every little move she made was unrehearsed, an extension of her drifting thoughts. If I didn’t love her right away, I was at least invested in the possibility that I would love her soon. ‘Now I’m learning stuff I didn’t get from sitting in your class.’

  I tried to pre-empt her next question, but it only wrong-footed her. ‘You ever heard of Vaillant Stack Kinnear?’

  The firmness of her ‘No’ was resounding. This was the same woman who now collects the paper from our doormat every morning, reads through the Finance pages before turning to the Arts. ‘Sounds like a girl-band from the eighties.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you asked what keeps the roof over my head. That girl-band is it. I’m in the M and A department there—mergers and acquisitions. I can give you a business card, if you like. I chose the colour myself.’

  ‘Which one did you go for?’
>
  ‘Cauliflower green, I believe it’s called.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s an official Pantone shade.’

  ‘No. But they’re nice. Look.’ I took one out of my jacket and handed it to her.

  ‘So what do you merge and acquire?’

  ‘I don’t. I just advise people who do.’

  ‘Ah, you’re like the guy at my gallery who says, Photoso f the sidewalk are hot right now. Bringm e ten and we’ll talk.’

  ‘No, I’m the guy who says, Here’s a pileo f data about sidewalks. Someo f them look good but theym ight blow upi n your face.’

  ‘Hah. See, that’s the kind of gallery guy I need.’

  ‘Well, you have my card now. You know where to find me.’

  Our food arrived. Alisha drowned her pancakes in syrup. I attacked the strange coagulation of pale cheese that had been put in front of me. ‘So, all right then. What is the hottest thing in M and A right now? What are you working on?’ she said.

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘I really want to know.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Look at my face: I’m serious.’

  ‘But it’s so boring. You’ll hate me.’

  ‘Wait, have some of this bacon first. I can’t eat it.’ She dumped two rashers on my plate before I could stop her—another habit of Alisha’s I’ve grown used to, and which feels as charming to me now as it did then. And, while we ate, I told her about the package I’d been compiling to attract investors into aviation financing. She let me drone on to her about the big commercial banks in Europe weakening their posture in the industry, about the flood of money coming into the sector from government-backed schemes in China and the UAE, about hard assets being particularly good for moving large amounts of capital, about the regulatory changes that emerged from Basel III and the ASU, and how I thought it was a solid space for pension funds and private equity firms to enter without wariness. Not once did she undercut me, roll her eyes, or feign a coma. Instead, she put her knife and fork haphazardly across her plate and said, ‘Well, I’ve got fifty-three dollars and four cents in my checking account. That’s got to get me a piece of something, right? Maybe a bright orange vest and a set of those earmuffs?’