The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  “Why did you ever want to leave?” I asked, with genuine curiosity. He seemed so happy, so comfortable.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it never seemed like enough.”

  His mother picked us up downriver, and we strapped our bikes to the roof rack of the car. Evan offered me the front seat, but I shook my head and slid into the back. His mother turned around. “What did you think?”

  “I loved it,” I said, and I meant it. We were silent for the rest of the ride home. I could see where Evan had inherited his tranquillity, the ease he could find in just about any setting. I imagined car rides from years before, his mother shuttling him to early morning practices, the two of them silently content in the other’s presence. The landscape out here had a way of shutting your mind off. We were all tired and happy, warm from the sun, hungry for dinner, and that was all that mattered.

  The two weeks went quickly. His parents hosted a barbecue the night before we left. Nights there were cold, and by the time the burgers were sizzling on the grill, everyone had donned sweaters and sweatshirts. I borrowed an old crewneck emblazoned with Evan’s high school mascot. “Look at that,” his dad said, pointing at the sweatshirt with a pair of tongs when I approached the grill. “Julia, you could be a local. You fit right in.” Evan’s mother leaned over and said, “He means that as a compliment, hon.”

  The next morning, on the bus that would take us back to the Vancouver airport, I waved good-bye to his parents through the window with a dull ache behind my eyes. How was it possible to be homesick for a place that I couldn’t call home, a place I’d only known for a handful of days? The previous two weeks had felt like an escape, different in aesthetic but not so different in essence from the way I’d felt in Paris. I realized, at that moment, that I had no idea what I wanted. There was so much out there. The bus shuddered and heaved into motion, and I blinked back a few tears. I was going to be okay. I had Evan, no matter what happened.

  By senior year, my commitments had dwindled. Club sports, volunteering, writing for the magazine: the extracurriculars I had taken up with such diligent dedication as an underclassman were finally finished. I was working on my thesis, about Turner’s influence on Monet, and Monet’s London paintings. Other than that and a few seminars that met once a week, I took it easy—everyone did. Abby and I went out almost every night; someone was always throwing a party. The nights we didn’t, we smoked pot and ordered Chinese and watched bad TV. Things didn’t matter so much. The hurdles had been cleared, and we’d earned our break.

  One night during the fall of senior year, I was sitting on the futon in our common room when Evan let himself in. He slept in my room almost every night.

  “Hey,” I said, muting the TV. Then I looked up. “Hey. Whoa. What’s with the suit?”

  He tugged at the cuff. It was short on him. “I borrowed it from one of the guys on the team.”

  “Yeah, but why are you wearing it?”

  “Oh. I went to a recruiting session. Didn’t I tell you?”

  I had become vaguely aware of it a few weeks earlier—the flyers and e-mails from the finance and consulting recruiters. They made it easy, hosting happy hours and on-campus interviews, promising an automatic solution. I hadn’t pegged Evan for this path, and maybe that’s why it caught me so off guard. I thought I knew him too well to ever be surprised. That night, when he showed up in his borrowed suit, I didn’t say anything more. This phase would pass. I couldn’t imagine him actually going through with it.

  But a month later, he told me he’d gotten called back for several interviews. We had just had sex, and we were spooned together in bed. He mentioned it in the same tone he might remark about the weather, but beneath that was evidence of a certain pride. Validation at being selected to interview. The thrill of success, even if it wasn’t permanent yet.

  “That’s, um, great.” I hoped I sounded normal.

  “Jules, I’m really excited. I think this might be what I’m meant to do.”

  “When’s the interview?”

  “And you know the best part?” He hadn’t heard my question, or didn’t care. “A job like this could get me the visa I’d need to stay after graduation. Wouldn’t that be great? To know that I could stay and not have to worry about it?”

  In January, he had an interview with Spire Management, the famous hedge fund in New York. Even I had heard of Spire. Evan kept insisting it was a long shot, it was too competitive. People killed for jobs at Spire. But he got the offer in March. Suddenly he had an answer to that question everyone was asking: What are you doing next? Evan, working in finance in New York City. I don’t know what I’d imagined for him, exactly, but it wasn’t this. Evan, who was so old-fashioned in his decency, who was so patient and kind. Maybe he’d be a teacher, or a hockey coach in some small town. Or he’d start a company, or he’d go to grad school—but this? It almost gave me whiplash, but I seemed to be alone in this reaction. Evan was happy. Our friends were happy for him. I was the only one who struggled to adjust to this new idea of him.

  “Julia,” Abby said a few days later. We were sitting around watching reruns of reality TV. “You know what? We should throw a party. For Evan. Tonight.”

  “Don’t you have that essay due?”

  A long bleep obscured a string of cursing from the real housewife on screen. Abby shrugged. “The class is pass-fail.”

  “Okay. I’m in,” I said. “What else do we have to do tonight?”

  But as we lugged cheap booze back from the liquor store, a nasty voice in my head, dormant for so long, started to resurface. What are you doing, Julia? What do you want? Why don’t you make up your mind? I had made absolutely no plans for the future, and that seemed okay, as long as I wasn’t alone. But as I looked around the party, I realized that I was the only person left. The only one without a job. Abby was going to be a teacher. Evan’s roommate Arthur was working for the Obama campaign. And Evan had secured one of the most competitive jobs in finance. Only then did I see it clearly: everyone was figuring it out. Everyone except me. I had no passion, no plan, nothing that made me stand out from the crowd. I had absolutely no idea what kind of job I was supposed to get.

  Later that night, at the party, I overheard Evan talking to a friend of ours, Patrick, a tall guy from Connecticut who rowed crew. The guy Abby had slept with, freshman year, expressly to give me and Evan the room. Patrick still pined after Abby, but she had long ago moved on. She never kept a guy longer than a few weeks.

  “You followed the news about Bear over spring break?” Patrick asked.

  “Yeah,” Evan said.

  I was standing several feet away, but they didn’t notice me.

  “That was nuts. Feel bad for all those guys who got their offers rescinded.”

  “I know. Jesus. What a mess.”

  “Close call, too. My dad works at a hedge fund, and he was jumpy as hell. You know I was interviewing with Bear back in the fall? I’m so glad I didn’t go with them. Shit. Can you imagine?”

  “Seriously. You’re going to Goldman, right?”

  “Yup. By the way, congrats, man. You must be stoked about Spire.”

  Evan’s eyes suddenly lit with anticipation. “So stoked.”

  That expression on his face: a huge, satisfied grin. He didn’t know I could see it from where I stood. He had big plans for the future. He was going places. The system had deemed him exceptional. Why shouldn’t he feel a little cocky? When he told me about the offer earlier that week, he had insisted it was just a job like any other. “The main thing,” he said, “is that now I’ll be able to stay. Isn’t that great?” He didn’t want me to feel bad. And I didn’t. I didn’t really care. It hadn’t sunk in that there was something I had forgotten to do.

  But when I saw that expression on his face, talking with Patrick about their jobs and the money and the city and the future, I realized that the way he was looking at me was different from the way I was looking at myself. Evan saw someone who wasn’t keeping up. Someone he h
ad to tiptoe around. I felt a shift that night, when I overheard their conversation. It was also the first time I was aware that Evan had concealed something from me, that he had been anything less than totally honest.

  A week later, he asked me to move in with him.

  * * *

  We didn’t bring much with us when we moved to New York: clothes, books, lamps, my futon and coffee table. It all fit into a handful of boxes and suitcases. We unpacked everything that first day. I even managed to hang our meager art—a few prints I’d gotten in Paris, my favorite Rothko poster from MoMA—strategically covering up the cracks and stains that showed through the landlord’s cheap paint job.

  “Wow,” Evan said, grinning as he surveyed our tiny apartment, our new home. “This is awesome. I can’t believe we’re unpacked.”

  He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth before bed, and a sob caught in my throat. The only thing that had kept me from losing it that day was the relentless distraction of unpacking. I caught a glimpse of myself in a window turned mirrorlike by the darkness. This was where I was: in a shitty fourth-floor walk-up in the shitty part of the Upper East Side. Tired, sweaty, dirty, and what was the point? Why was I even here? I didn’t have a job. I didn’t even have prospects. Evan and I would both wake up in the morning with nothing to do, with a day to spend however we wanted. Evan could enjoy it because it was sanctioned, an acceptable length of idle time before his job started. But this freedom, for me, came with a different weight. With the knowledge that every moment I wasted was another moment I wasn’t looking for a job. My breath grew fast and short. What was I doing?

  Evan emerged from the bathroom, wiping away the remains of toothpaste. He saw me frozen in place. “Jules?” he said. “Jules, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, but the tears had started spilling over. “I’m…”

  Evan led me to the futon, where we would sleep that night; we’d chosen the cheapest possible delivery option, and our mattress wasn’t going to arrive for another week. “Hey,” he said, rubbing my back. “Julia. Hey. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, tears flowing, trying to choke back the waves I felt rising through my chest. “It’s just—I don’t know—I’m tired, that’s all.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. That’s one thing I’d always loved about Evan. He knew when it was enough just to be there; when nothing had to be said or asked. Several minutes later, my pulse slowed down, my breathing steadied. I felt like such an idiot. What was I crying about? If I didn’t have a job, that was my own fault, and it wouldn’t help to sit there and whine about it.

  “Well,” I said, finally. “I bet you’re regretting this, huh? Asking me to move in. You’re stuck sharing a lease with some blubbering crazy person.”

  I thought Evan might smile or laugh. The call-and-response of our relationship. But his eyes were sad. It was a pity I’d never seen from him before.

  “Julia,” he said quietly. “Don’t say that. Don’t even think that, okay?”

  Later, I got up to brush my teeth in our closet-size bathroom. Evan had kept an extra toothbrush in my room for years, but when I lined mine up against his that night, it felt different. A permanent version of what we’d only been pretending to do before.

  * * *

  By late June, three weeks into my joblessness, my mother was ready to intervene.

  “Julia,” she said, already sounding harried and annoyed, even though she was the one who called me. “I only have a few minutes—we have to make this flight—but listen, sweetheart. I’m calling about the job situation. There has to be something more you can do. I can’t bear the thought of you just sitting in that apartment all day.”

  Which was pretty much what I’d been doing that summer afternoon. I’d been feeling okay about the day up to that point—I’d already sent out applications for assistant openings at a small museum, a PR firm, and a publishing house—but my mother’s words punctured any feeling of progress. I was standing directly in front of our newly installed air conditioner, enjoying the luxury of the cold, and I reached out to turn the air up a notch, in a gesture that felt like spite. My mother, father, and sister were all flying to Nantucket that day. This was the first summer I wasn’t invited on the family vacation. My mother thought my finding a job ought to take priority.

  “Mom,” I said with a sigh. “I get it.”

  “Have you thought any more about what we discussed last week?”

  “You mean taking the LSATs?”

  “I’m not saying you have to go to law school, Julia. It’s just not such a terrible idea to have that in your back pocket.”

  “Mom. I’m trying, okay? Trying isn’t the problem.” That was true, but it was an aimless kind of trying. I had applied for all sorts of jobs, anything that seemed remotely likely, but there was no unifying theme. The HR departments could probably sense the dispassion in my cover letters. That feeling had set in, and I couldn’t shake it: What was wrong with me?

  My mother called back the next day, the roar of the Atlantic in the background. She told me that she had spoken with Mrs. Fletcher, a friend from Boston. The Fletcher Foundation was looking for an assistant, and I should send my résumé right away. “I don’t think it pays much, but Julia, you should take this job if it’s offered to you. I mean it. You really need to get going.”

  The next day, I was in the office of Laurie Silver, the president of the Fletcher Foundation. “So you’re friends with the Fletchers?” she asked, peering at me over her glasses. She was small and birdlike, dressed in black, with silver jewelry that jangled and clanked every time she moved. “Yes, that’s right,” I said. “My mother and Mrs. Fletcher are involved in some of the same charities in Boston. And my father is one of Mr. Fletcher’s attorneys.” Laurie nodded, scribbling a note in the margin of my résumé. I had also entangled myself, briefly, with their son Jake Fletcher the summer before freshman year of college, but that wasn’t a topic for discussion. The Fletchers were extremely wealthy—he made a fortune in venture capital, and she came from an aristocratic southern family—and their foundation provided grants to artists, museums, and other worthy recipients.

  “Well, Julia,” Laurie said. “You’ve come along at a good time. I’m in need of an assistant rather urgently. It’s paperwork and record keeping, running errands, basically pitching in wherever you’re needed. Does that sound okay by you?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then I’d like to offer you the job. We’d need you to start next week. The salary is twenty-five thousand dollars, plus health insurance.”

  I nodded vigorously. “Thank you, Laurie. Yes. I’d be thrilled. Thank you.”

  She stood up and shook my hand. “You can find your way out okay?”

  It was the lunch hour, and the office was abandoned. I wound up looping the perimeter of the floor before eventually finding my way back to the elevator. I was dizzy with relief. Someone was willing to pay me for my time! No matter how paltry the money, no matter how humble the work might be—this was exactly what I needed. Balance had been restored between me and everyone I knew.

  On my first day at the Fletcher Foundation, I found a list awaiting me, sitting in the middle of my new desk. The list, from Laurie’s former assistant, outlined in neurotically perfect handwriting all the tasks I would have to, in her words, “learn how to perform immediately.” By the end of the first day, I had them down pat. I wondered whether my predecessor was just not very smart. Maybe she had been fired, based on how challenging she seemed to find these tasks.

  On my second day, I had an early morning e-mail from Laurie asking me to brew the coffee when I arrived. There was a small kitchenette with a sink and a microwave and an old drip machine. It seemed easy enough. When Laurie arrived twenty minutes later, I delivered a mug of coffee to her desk with two Splendas, as requested. She was on the phone. A minute later, she called for me to come in.

  “Julia, thank you for the coffee, but I’m afraid—well…you
didn’t use soap on the machine, did you?”

  I had to think about that one for a minute. Soap? “Oh—oh, I’m sorry, Laurie. I washed out the basket in the sink and I used the sponge on it. Maybe the sponge had soap on it. I thought I should clean out the basket, and—”

  Laurie sighed. “Yes, you’re right, you should clean it, but don’t use soap on it. Just use very hot water to rinse it, then dry it off with paper towels. You see, it makes the coffee taste like soap. I can’t drink this. Why don’t you ask Eleanor to show you what I mean? And if you wouldn’t mind making a new batch.” She slid the mug across the desk.

  I rinsed the basket several times with near-scalding water. I wasn’t going to ask Eleanor for help. I had met Eleanor the day before, and she scared me. She was the foundation’s one-woman publicity department. She had red hair and a porcelain complexion and dressed like a Vogue editor. She had started five years earlier as Laurie’s assistant. I was sure she didn’t have the time to help me with coffee brewing. Meanwhile, I began to reevaluate my feelings about my predecessor. Maybe she hadn’t been fired. Maybe she had gotten fed up and quit.

  Eleanor walked past the kitchen as I was very, very carefully drying out the filter basket. She stopped and stared at me from her towering stilettos.

  “Oh, no. Let me guess. You used soap on the machine.”

  I laughed nervously. “Yeah.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s just one of her pet peeves. How’s it going otherwise?”

  “It’s good. I think I’m getting the hang of—”

  “Good,” she said, then glanced at her watch, which was large and gold and glinted in the light. “I have to get on a call, but why don’t we have lunch sometime? We should get to know each other. Next week, okay? Let’s say next Friday at twelve thirty.”

  “Sure—yeah—yeah, twelve thirty is great,” I stammered.