The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  “See you then,” she said.

  That week and the next passed uneventfully. I kept minutes at the meetings: the fall deadline for grant applications was September 15; plans were on track for the gala in November. I answered Laurie’s phone, filed her paperwork, made polite small talk while I waited to use the copy machine. On Friday morning, at the end of my second week of work, the phone rang. “Julia, it’s Eleanor.” Her voice crackled from a bad connection. “I’m off-site this morning, so I’ll meet you at the restaurant, okay?”

  The maître d’ sat me outside. Eleanor arrived ten minutes late. She tossed her long red hair over her shoulder and dropped her bag onto the seat next to her. She kept her sunglasses on. I wondered how she managed to afford all of it, the watch and the bag and finely made clothing. Surely the foundation didn’t pay her that much. She waved to get the waiter’s attention. “Iced tea, please. Julia?”

  “I’m okay with water.”

  “And an ashtray, too. Thanks.”

  She pulled out a pack of Camel Lights and a silver Zippo. “So,” she said, leaning back in her chair, directing a stream of smoke from the side of her mouth. “Laurie tells me you’re friends with Henry and Dot.”

  “I guess so. Really it’s more my parents. They’re friends with the Fletchers.”

  “Close friends?”

  “Kind of. My dad is one of Henry Fletcher’s lawyers. They go way back. My mom is involved in some of the same organizations as Dot. You’ve met the Fletchers, too?”

  She smiled, like she knew something I didn’t. “Oh, of course. Henry and I do a lot of work together. I do all the publicity—which I guess you know by now—so I’m really the gatekeeper when people want to talk to Henry. We’re very close. And they are quite involved in the event planning. This gala might drive me mad, actually. Henry is as sweet as they come, but Dot can be a total control freak.” Eleanor ashed her cigarette. “She’s so stubborn. I swear, everything I suggest, she wants to do the opposite of. I don’t know what it is about her. You know what I mean?”

  So this was why she had asked me to lunch. Even behind her sunglasses, I could see the hunger for gossip. Truth be told, I didn’t really know much about the Fletchers. Not at that point, at least. I’d said hello to them at parties for years, but that was it. They were rich, that was the main thing to know. I mumbled some assent, and Eleanor’s gleam faded to indifference, as fast as a scudding cloud. She glanced at her watch, calculating how much longer she’d have to endure with me.

  We passed the time with empty back-and-forth. She perked up when I mentioned that Evan worked at Spire. “Oh, they’re great. Their CEO, David Kleinman, he bought a table at our gala last year. Those guys are legendary.” She laughed. “So I guess you’re doing well for yourself, then.”

  After our plates had been cleared and we were awaiting the check—she kept looking over her shoulder to hurry the waiter—someone called her name from down the sidewalk. She pushed back her sunglasses, and she smiled for the first time.

  I turned in my seat. Then I went cold, despite the sunshine. I turned back, and reached for my water to erase the dryness in my throat, my hand shaking. The person waving at her was Adam McCard.

  Eleanor kissed him on the cheek. He turned to introduce himself to me just as I was standing up and trying in vain to smooth the wrinkles from my dress. Before I could remind him who I was, his mouth fell open.

  “Julia Edwards!” he shouted.

  He remembered me. Of course he did. He laughed, then hugged me. “I can’t believe it! It’s been—how long? Two years?”

  “Something like that.” I smiled. Then I exhaled. My nerves were already fading. I felt shy, empty of anything to say, but a little part of me felt an old comfort return. Adam could always make me feel like I belonged, which in those tricky months after graduation was the most important and elusive feeling of all.

  I saw Eleanor watching us—watching me—with unconcealed disdain.

  “How do you two know each other?” she said.

  “Wow. I can’t get over it.” He shook his head. “El, Julia and I went to college together. We both wrote for the same magazine on campus. Shit, we go way back. Wait—how do you guys know each other?”

  “We work together,” Eleanor said. “Julia’s an assistant at the Fletcher Foundation.” She pronounced the word assistant with a distancing sneer.

  “Man. This is crazy.” Adam looked at his watch. “Shoot, I’m actually late for something. Jules, I’m so glad I ran into you. I didn’t even know you were in New York. I’ll give you a call, okay? Eleanor, beautiful, you look as amazing as ever.” He walked backwards down the sidewalk, waving before he continued on his way.

  “Well,” Eleanor said, donning her sunglasses again and reaching for the check, which had arrived at last. “You just know everyone, don’t you?”

  Chapter 3

  Evan

  “Do you want to ride in together tomorrow?” Julia had asked the night before. We were lying in bed, her blond hair fanned out across my chest. It was the first day of work the next morning, for both of us.

  “Nah, that’s okay. I have to get there early.”

  “Evan.” She turned to look at me, like she could sense the anxious jump in my stomach. “You’re going to be great. You know that, right?”

  I drank my coffee too fast on the subway ride down and burned my tongue. My pace quickened on the sidewalk in midtown, to keep up with the other workers hurrying toward their air-conditioned refuges. Outside my building, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass and started—I wasn’t used to seeing myself in a suit. Up on the thirty-ninth floor, a receptionist typed rapidly behind an imposing front desk branded with Spire’s logo. She sized me up in one glance. “First day?” she said.

  I’d gone through several rounds of interviews back in the spring. My third and final interview had been with Michael Casey, the second in command at Spire. Back in March, he’d come to fetch me himself from the thirty-ninth-floor lobby, jerking his head for me to follow. He was on the short side, and his hair was going salty from gray. Other people stepped back as Michael walked past with an impatient stride, giving him a wide berth. In his office, he pointed for me to sit. He looked pissed off. He hadn’t even shaken my hand. He must hate this part, I thought—sifting through résumés, trying to discern some difference among us. It was all a big waste of his time. The interview was doomed. It was stupid of me to ever think I’d get the job. But then Michael picked up my résumé, and at that moment his expression changed. Softened. He looked up at me, back down at the résumé, and nodded carefully.

  “You’re from Canada,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “British Columbia—near Vancouver?”

  “In the interior, actually, about seven hours away.”

  “Small town?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Michael crumpled up the résumé. “Tell me about yourself.”

  I launched into the routine I’d been perfecting the previous few months. My experience was thin, with none of the internships that everyone else had done, but I had other talking points. An economics major interested in the efficiency of the free market. A varsity athlete who knows the value of teamwork and discipline. So on and so forth. But Michael interrupted me before I was even halfway done.

  “No, no, I already got all that from your résumé. Tell me more about where you’re from. Your hometown. How’s the economy doing out there?”

  “My hometown?” I said, scrambling to rearrange the words in my head. Michael nodded. “Well. It’s really small. There’s not much to do. We like to joke that there are more bears than people.”

  Michael smiled. He nodded again for me to continue.

  “Everyone who can plays hockey. That’s the main source of entertainment.”

  “You played? You must have been pretty good to get to Yale.”

  “I’m all right.”

  Michael barked a short laugh. “You’re all right,” h
e repeated. “That might be the first humble sentence ever spoken in this office. What do people do for work?”

  “My parents run a grocery store. There’s some tourism a few towns over, so some people commute to that. And logging is pretty big in the region.”

  We went on like that for a while. To my surprise, Michael seemed engaged. Some transformation had happened. Maybe my lack of experience wasn’t such a bad thing.

  They didn’t seem to think it was, in any case. Two days later, I got the call from Spire. The job paid more than any of the others I’d applied to, a six-figure sum that I couldn’t quite believe. I accepted on the spot. I’d be the only person from Yale joining Spire that year. I was certain the old small-town Evan Peck was gone, once and for all.

  I was assigned to sit next to Roger, another analyst, a former tight end at Stanford with a thick Alabama drawl. We didn’t have much to do early on. When we weren’t in training sessions, we wasted a lot of time on ESPN or skimming the news, only jumping into action when the higher-ups staffed us on something. But it looked bad to leave before 10:00 p.m., so none of us did, no matter what. There were five analysts in total that year, all of us men, which wasn’t that remarkable—Spire overall was mostly male. Roger was our ringleader, the one who stayed latest and arrived earliest and generally assumed authority. He led the charge every night for postwork drinks at a bar called McGuigan’s near the office, and already it felt like a mandatory part of the routine.

  “So how was the first week?” Julia asked. This was Saturday morning. We’d brought bagels to the park along the East River. Every night that first week, Julia was already asleep when I got home. It annoyed me a little, that she couldn’t bother to stay awake. Her job ended many hours before mine did. This was the first time we’d really seen each other since the weekend before.

  “Good,” I said. “I think. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell what it’s really going to be like. It’s all just training sessions for now.”

  “What about that guy—Michael? The one who interviewed you. Have you seen him yet?”

  “I passed him in the hall, but he was talking to someone else. We didn’t say anything.” Truthfully, I wasn’t sure whether he even recognized me.

  Julia nodded. She was quieter than usual. She seemed to be gazing at the buildings across the river in Astoria, but her eyes had that glassy quality of staring at nothing in particular. There was a poppy seed stuck to the tip of her nose. I leaned over and brushed it away. She turned and then smiled. Back to normal.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Fine,” she said. “Just distracted. Thinking about work.”

  “What’s up?”

  “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?”

  “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 f
rom 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.