The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  I touched Mrs. Fletcher on the elbow. She looked startled to see me. “Oh, hello, Julia. Laurie’s speech was wonderful, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it was. Mrs. Fletcher,” I said, glancing over at Laurie. Her lips were drawn in a tight line. “I just wanted to say thank you, so much, for your and Mr. Fletcher’s show of support tonight. It was inspiring, really.”

  Dot and Laurie made brief eye contact, something passing between them. “There’s no need to thank us, dear. We see this foundation as our responsibility. It bears our name, after all.”

  “Of course. Well, I thought it was very nice.”

  “Yes,” Laurie said. “In fact, we were just talking about what this donation is going to allow us to do in the upcoming year.”

  Laurie looked more annoyed than anything else. She and Dot tilted their shoulders to indicate I was no longer welcome. But I was distracted anyway by the sight, behind them and out of their field of vision, of Henry and Eleanor.

  It looked innocuous enough. Their heads were awfully close together, but it was noisy in the ballroom. I stepped aside and took my phone out, pretending to check something. Then I glanced back up at Henry and Eleanor. He slipped his hand to the small of her back, leaning in closer. She looked over her shoulder, then nodded. From my pretending-to-be-on-the-phone post a few feet away, I heard Mr. Fletcher approach Laurie and Dot. “Honey,” he said to Dot. “I just got a call from the office. I need to go in tonight. Something urgent’s come up.”

  “Now? Henry, it’s so late.”

  “Turmoil in the Asian markets. I should only be a few hours. You take the car, and I’ll see you back at the hotel.” He exited the ballroom with long and loping strides. Eleanor had already disappeared.

  Outside, the sidewalk held a few lingering couples. It was a little after 10:00 p.m. I was less than twenty blocks from our apartment. I could go home, wash my face, put on my pajamas, and wake up early and fresh the next morning. Be responsible. It didn’t sound so bad. I started walking north on Park, past the empty office lobbies strung through the night like square golden beads. Some of the lobbies had oversize sculptures in the center, like exotic flowers suspended in a high-ceilinged terrarium. They looked so strange, alone in the night, on display for no one.

  I was getting closer to home, and Park had gradually turned residential, the big glass lobbies replaced by solid limestone and brick. I felt my phone buzzing and saw Adam’s name on the screen.

  “Hey. Where are you?”

  “Walking home. I just left the gala.”

  “I’m only going to be a few more minutes. Meet me at my place?”

  “Well…I really am almost home. It’s getting kind of late.”

  “I have a good bottle of wine. I’ve been saving it. In the cabinet next to the fridge. The doorman will let you in. I’ll be right behind you.”

  This was my fourth visit to Adam’s apartment in as many days. Upstairs, I flipped the lights on and wandered through the living room, running my fingertips along the spines of the books on his bookshelf. It was the first time I’d been alone with Adam’s things. I went into the bedroom. He had a desk at one end of the room. I noticed the bookshelf next to his desk was filled with books on finance. Histories, economic theory, Barbarians at the Gate, When Genius Failed, Liar’s Poker. Curious. It was his beat at the Observer, but he’d always described it as a way station. Not something he was genuinely interested in. I pulled the copy of When Genius Failed from the shelf. The pages were dog-eared and bristling with Post-it notes. I fanned through it. There were pencil marks and underlines on nearly every page. It had the look of something obsessive.

  I jumped when the door slammed. “Hello?” Adam called. I shoved the book back onto the shelf and hurried out to the living room, where he was shrugging off his coat. “There you are,” he said.

  “How was work?”

  “I’m glad it’s over.” He ran his eyes over me. “That is one hell of a dress.”

  “You think so?” I glanced down, tugged at the fabric. “I was just about to take it off, actually. But if you’d prefer I keep it on…”

  Afterward, in bed, he rolled over and pulled a pack of Marlboros from his nightstand drawer. He lit the cigarette, inhaled, then exhaled with a sigh. He always looked more pensive in profile.

  “You smoke?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I don’t think I knew that.”

  He blew a smoke ring that floated briefly in the air above him. The room was almost unnaturally quiet. The constant thumps and squeaks and rattles that I’d come to expect in our walk-up apartment were absent here. Thick walls, double-glazed windows, the rugs and the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves: we were in a womb of money and culture. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” Then he laughed. “You want one?”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t want it, not really, but it felt like the right thing to do.

  * * *

  In our apartment, that morning of his return, I sat on the futon while Evan paced.

  Back and forth, back and forth. I’d never seen him like this.

  “Evan, what is it?” I said. “Just tell me.”

  He stopped abruptly. “Michael. It’s Michael. The thing has been rigged all along. And he made me deliver the papers, so the blood is on my hands, too. They trapped me. I can’t go anywhere. It’s totally fucked.”

  “Slow down,” I said. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “The WestCorp deal. It’s fixed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He took a deep breath. He started talking about the mechanics of the deal, Spire betting that WestCorp was going to skyrocket because of their exports to China. I nodded. I knew all that. Then he explained that China had agreed to loosen the trade barriers, to drop the taxes and tariffs. Again, old news.

  “Evan,” I said. “I don’t—”

  He held up a hand, kept talking. He’d gotten locked out of his hotel room by his coworker. So he’d crashed on the couch in another suite. Michael and someone else from Spire came back to the room in the middle of the night.

  “Did they know you were there?” I interrupted. Evan shook his head. “Why didn’t you say something? Like, hey, guys, I’m right over here?”

  “I couldn’t, Jules. I just couldn’t. It was too late.” There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. The other person in the room confronted Michael while Evan was listening. He’d spotted something in the books. Michael admitted that the deal was rigged. Michael and WestCorp had arranged for immigration papers for the Chinese officials and their families. The next day, Michael asked Evan to deliver a briefcase to a Mr. Wenjian Chan at the Venetian.

  “And you did it? You agreed to deliver the briefcase?”

  He nodded, looking pale and sick.

  “Evan. You had just overheard all that and you went along with it?”

  “What else was I going to say? He didn’t know that I’d overheard them. So I deliver the briefcase, and Chan seems happy. But before I walk out, his daughter stops me. Translating what her father’s saying. They want to keep in touch, she says. She’s applying to college in the States, and they want my help. They seem to think I have the right connections. Like, she can blackmail her way in through me.”

  “Did you tell Michael this?”

  “He was already gone by the time I got back. I haven’t talked to him yet. I don’t know what to do.” He stopped his pacing and sank down onto the futon next to me. He dropped his head in his hands. “Jesus. What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

  I was silent. I waited for him to look up at me, but he wouldn’t. He kept his palms pressed up against his eyes, like a child willing a monster to disappear. After a minute, he said it again. “Julia. What should I do?”

  He finally looked up. I flinched when he reached for my hand, when his gaze locked on mine. My heart was hammering. Evan had been ignoring me for so long. He hadn’t asked a single question in all that time. How was I? How was my day? How was I feeling? What
was I thinking? And, finally, this was what he came up with. He wanted my help. I was only there to solve his problems, and then he’d go right back to ignoring me.

  I was also thinking: How had he not figured this out? His pretending at innocence made me queasy. He wasn’t innocent. He’d done this, too. He let himself become blinded by it. We’re going to make billions. Spire is going to crush the rest of Wall Street. But when the truth finally became too uncomfortable, he wanted out. He wanted an escape. I was angry, but part of me felt relieved, too. Validated. I wasn’t the one who had fucked up our relationship. I’d been duped. Evan had betrayed me—had betrayed us. And whatever was happening, whatever person Evan was becoming, I wanted no part of it. This was a waste of my time. I was done.

  “I don’t know, Evan.” I stood up, walked over to the kitchen. “I don’t know what you should do. You need to figure this out on your own.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked confused. He hadn’t even considered that I would be anything but sympathetic. That confirmed it. He really wasn’t thinking about me.

  I reached for a glass and filled it with water. I was just realizing how thirsty I was. “I mean that I don’t have the answer for you. This is your problem. You need to fix it.”

  He said nothing for a long minute. My pulse was pounding in my ears. I hated this person in front of me, hated what he made me feel. I felt it boiling up, the blood in my body primed for a fight. Shouts, slammed doors, permanent words. Get out. The end.

  But he just said, quietly, nodding to himself, “Okay.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m late for work.” I put my glass down loudly on the kitchen counter and went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. The shower took a long time to get hot, and as it did, I felt the sharp edge of my anger dulling. This was how it always went. Evan was always waiting for me to cool down, to come to my senses. He never let our fights escalate, never shouted back. His patience knew no bounds.

  It didn’t have to be this way. Our relationship deserved a better ending than this. I wrapped myself in my towel and opened the bathroom door. I could apologize, tell him I was sorry for snapping like that. I would.

  But Evan was already gone, his duffel bag left behind on the floor, the imprint of his body slowly fading from the cushions on the futon. I was too late.

  Chapter 9

  Evan

  Paranoia was a disease whose symptoms I didn’t recognize right away. Or maybe that’s the essence of it: nothing is as it seems. The world rearranges itself while you aren’t looking. You never know you’re suffering from it.

  “Evan? Honey, are you there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, sorry, Mom, I’m here.”

  My parents often called to catch up after their workday ended. I’d stepped outside the office to take the call, pacing for warmth in the chilly November night. Until I noticed a dark figure sitting in the front seat of a car parked down the block. Just sitting there, unmoving. He’d been there for at least fifteen minutes. Watching me.

  “I said, how was your weekend? It was Julia’s birthday, right?”

  “Yeah. Um, it was good.”

  “I hope you two did something nice.”

  I hadn’t told them I’d gone to Las Vegas. It felt like a jinx, telling them even that, spreading any aspect of the story further than it needed to go. A family of tourists was walking down the block in an unwieldy amoeba, arguing about the best way to get back to their hotel. I ducked behind them, trying to blend in and get a better look at the figure in the car without his seeing me. We got closer and closer, and finally I could see clear through the window. It was a chauffeur, his cap pulled low over his forehead. Asleep.

  “Hey!” One of the kids glared at me. I’d stepped on his heel.

  “Shit. Sorry,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Mom. I should go.”

  The same thing kept happening all week. The towel hanging crooked when I was sure I’d left it straight. My desk chair spinning in slow circles when I returned from lunch. And a hot flare of panic until I eventually realized the explanation. Julia wiping the toothpaste from her mouth in the morning, leaving the towel askew. Roger pushing past my chair on his way to the bathroom. Chan and his colleagues were businessmen, not thugs. They weren’t going to corner me and press a gun to my head in some dark alley. Whatever they did was going to be more subtle than that.

  * * *

  We got to the airport in Las Vegas on Sunday evening for the red-eye home. I stood in front of the departures board. The destination cities were organized alphabetically, and near the end of the list was Vancouver. The flight was leaving a few minutes after ours.

  I could do it. I could afford the ticket. I had my passport with me as ID—my British Columbia license had expired a few months earlier—and I had my duffel bag in hand. I’d arrive near midnight, get a room in an airport motel. There was a Greyhound that headed east out of Vancouver in the morning. My hometown sat near the end of the line. I imagined walking into the grocery store, near where the bus dropped me off. Finding my parents in the back, doing inventory or reviewing the accounts at the end of the day. They would be surprised to see me, but maybe not that surprised. I could sleep in my own bed, with the familiar rush of wind through the tall pine trees outside. I could be doing all that tomorrow. It was right within my reach—a chance to run away and pretend this never happened.

  “Evan?” Chuck emerged from the airline’s first-class lounge and caught me staring at the board. “They’re calling our flight. Come on, let’s go.”

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, hon,” Wanda said. It was Monday morning. I’d gone home to change after the flight, then went straight to Michael’s office. Wanda could probably tell that I was underslept and in desperate need of a shower. I hadn’t had time to wait for Julia to finish hers. “He’s completely jammed today. I can’t fit you in anywhere. You want me to get him a message?”

  “You can just tell him that I’d like to see him. Need to see him.”

  “What’s it regarding?”

  I shook my head. “He’ll know.”

  I tried again on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday. It was the same story. Door shut. Wanda shaking her head. It had been almost a full week since I’d found out, and the knowledge was starting to solidify within me. Telling Julia had done no good. I knew I owed her the truth—I couldn’t just flee to Canada, if only for that reason: the thought of telling her what I’d done over the phone or in an e-mail had made me too sick to go through with it—but she seemed utterly uninterested in it. The sting of her cold reaction only lasted for a few moments. So Julia was in a bitchy mood—I still had bigger problems. I decided to try to use this mess to my advantage. There was more than one way that I could have theoretically discovered the truth. Maybe Chan had let something slip, and I’d put two and two together. I’d show Michael that I knew exactly what he was up to. Show him that I wasn’t so easily duped after all.

  Late on Friday afternoon, I tried one more time. Wanda sighed. “I’m sorry, Evan, but you’ll have to wait until Monday. Mr. Casey is about to leave for the weekend.”

  “Who is that?” Michael strode into the hallway, pulling on his coat. “Oh, Evan. Wanda, you know you can always send Evan straight in.”

  “That’s okay.” I stepped back. “I don’t want to interrupt.”

  “I have an appointment, but we can talk along the way. That’ll be better, in fact. Get your coat and meet me at the elevator.”

  Downstairs, Michael and I climbed into the back of a town car idling by the curb. It sped off, heading west. “Just give me another minute,” Michael said, his thumbs punching the keys of his BlackBerry. Then he glanced up, saw the look on my face, and grinned unnervingly. “Relax, Evan. This is going to be fun.”

  The car came to a stop.

  “My favorite place in the city,” Michael said, climbing out. We were out past the wasteland of 11th Avenue, in front of a nondescript building. The elegant silver
lettering above the door was so discreet that you had to know what to look for.

  “Mr. Casey,” a voice boomed as we walked inside. A man in a dark green suit shook Michael’s hand. He had slicked-back hair, a signet ring on his pinkie, a big barrel chest, and spindly legs. Like a toad with a very good personal shopper. “We’re so glad you could make it in this evening.”

  “Bruno, this is one of my associates, Evan Peck.”

  He extended a hand. Soft, pink, recently moisturized. “Bruno Bernacchi. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  I glanced around the room. The cars gleamed under the bright lighting like sleeping animals. Maserati of Manhattan. It was empty except for the three of us. Bruno noticed me looking. He had a quick, darting gaze that didn’t miss a thing.

  “We normally close at five o’clock,” Bruno said to me in a conspiratorial tone. “But we’re always open for Mr. Casey. One of our very best customers.”

  “Your message said it was delivered today?”

  “Just this afternoon. It’s the newest model, a beauty. They aren’t officially available until next year. There’s a waiting list already, but you’re at the top of the list, of course, Mr. Casey.”

  “I’d like to take it for a test drive.”

  “Of course. I have in mind a route through Westchester. Wait until you see how this one handles the curves.”

  “Actually, I’d like to take Evan along. This is the only time I can give him all week. So the two of us need to talk during the drive—multitask, you know what I mean?”