The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  But I wanted to. I wanted to imagine, and then to see. I clung to the time I’d been given. I didn’t want to leave.

  On my fourth night in a row at McGuigan’s, Maria said, “I’m off early tonight. You want to get dinner? I can cook.”

  A cat was purring atop the refrigerator when she opened the door to her studio apartment, up in the northern reaches of Morningside Heights. “Make yourself at home,” she said, turning on the stove with the click and hiss of gas igniting. She handed me a beer, and I wandered around. I liked her apartment right away. She had houseplants on the windowsill, a rag rug, a desk covered with textbooks and notes from law school, a refrigerator layered with family pictures and yellowed recipes. I stood at the other side of the room and watched Maria at the stove—apron tied around her waist, humming along to the radio—and I remembered the night I came home to Julia cooking in our tiny kitchen. How she had glowed from a happiness that I thought belonged to both of us. That was the worst part: I’d been misreading it all along. It was why I couldn’t bear to think about Julia, not even the good parts, because I couldn’t be sure that there ever were good parts.

  After dinner, after sex that was surprisingly intimate for a first time, we lay in Maria’s bed, which was tucked in the corner next to an open window. I was half asleep when she climbed out of bed, wrapped herself in a robe, and turned on the desk lamp. “Stay there,” she said. “I’m going to study for a few hours.” She was taking the bar exam that summer. Her cat had been asleep on top of Maria’s stack of textbooks. The cat unfurled and stretched, purring regally as she hopped down to the floor and made way for her owner.

  The next morning, Maria kissed me good-bye, and we made plans for dinner the following night. It was while I was shaving in front of the bathroom mirror back at home that I felt it. I’d told someone the truth. The actual, whole truth. And it was okay.

  Was it that Maria had finally given me the thing I had craved for so long? Acceptance and forgiveness; grace? I thought so at first, but I realized that wasn’t it, because she wasn’t the one whose forgiveness I needed. What Maria had given me was simply a reminder that the loneliness didn’t have to last forever. I didn’t have to know what came next in order to have hope.

  * * *

  One morning in early May, Kleinman summoned me to his office.

  “Peck. Have a seat. You’re aware that we’re approaching a settlement with the SEC in the WestCorp case.”

  “I had guessed as much, sir.”

  “And you probably know about the compromised state of the firm right now. We’ve taken a lot of hits in the last few months. We’re starting a round of layoffs later today. Someone from HR will be calling you around eleven to go over your package. But I wanted to give you a personal heads-up.”

  I had been expecting this for a long time, but it was still strange to hear the words actually spoken. Kleinman smiled at me.

  “You know, I can see why Michael liked you so much. You’re loyal, and that goes a long way. In another life, you probably would have had a great career ahead of you here. But you understand why we can’t keep you on.”

  I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re Michael’s guy. He made you his guy. If I kept you around while laying off a bunch of people who had nothing to do with this—you know how bad that would look. People would hate you, to be frank. And then they’d hate me. You’d just remind everyone of what came before. What we need here is a fresh start. We’re going to be a lot smaller, but we’ll rebuild eventually.”

  Kleinman stood up and extended his hand. “Well. Best of luck, Peck. Thank you for your cooperation these last few months.”

  The HR woman fetched me shortly afterward. It was the same woman who had moved me into my windowless closet office. I wondered whether she felt guilty about her earlier deception; she must have known, even then, that she’d have to deliver this news eventually. There was a piece of paper that listed my severance package: several months’ salary, a one-time payment in exchange for my signing a nondisparagement agreement. It was a lot of money. She cleared her throat delicately.

  “Mr. Peck, I should also remind you that your visa will run out eventually, given that you’re no longer employed by Spire. You can, of course, obtain sponsorship from your next employer. We have excellent contacts at other firms in the city and in Connecticut. Mr. Kleinman has offered to write a glowing reference. We’re confident you’ll find a good home. Would you like a—”

  “No, thank you,” I said loudly. Then I stood up. “Is that everything?”

  She looked startled. “Yes. That’s it. Just turn in your badge at reception.”

  I had purposely avoided thinking too much about what came next. But now that the time had arrived, I knew one thing for sure. This wasn’t what I was meant to do. Five minutes later, I turned off the computer and shut the door for the last time, leaving the keys dangling in the lock for the janitor.

  “So should we celebrate?” she said when I walked into McGuigan’s at midday.

  “Celebrate me getting fired?”

  She grinned. “I can’t think of a better reason.”

  Maria got someone to cover the rest of her shift. We bought tallboys of beer in paper bags and picked up Sabrett hot dogs and ate them in Columbus Circle. I thought of Julia, the night we had spent out here, drinking wine and watching the traffic swirl. That moment felt distant and immediate all at once. The city was like that, layered with memories that existed in multiple tenses. Ever since I had started sleeping with Maria, five weeks earlier, I had been thinking about Julia more. Memories of her were creeping back in. But Julia only existed as that, I reminded myself—as a memory, as the past.

  “Was it weird? Finally saying good-bye to that place?”

  “A little. Mostly it’s a relief.” I shook my head. “It’s sort of surreal, you know? I can’t believe all that shit actually happened. I can’t believe I just went along with it.”

  “Well,” she said, crumpling up her ketchup-stained napkin. “It’s amazing what people can rationalize. Humans are a delusional bunch.”

  “You’re gonna have to tone down that sympathy when you start prosecuting the bad guys instead of serving them their drinks.”

  She laughed. “You criminals are humans, too.”

  The previous week, Maria had gotten a job offer at the district attorney’s office. The pay was miserly, the hours long, but it was work that actually made a difference. I envied her sense of purpose, her accomplishment, but it was easy to forget the years of hard work that had led her to this point. I put my arm around her and pulled her in for a kiss.

  “Actually,” she said. “That reminds me. I’m getting together with my new coworkers tomorrow night, so I won’t be able to do dinner after all.”

  “No problem. I can come over afterward?”

  “Sure, if you want.”

  She leaned back against the stone steps and tilted her head up toward the sun. Already it was slipping away. The bar exam was in a few months. Her start date at work was soon after. Maria had carved out a life for herself in this city long before I arrived. I knew she liked me, liked what we shared, but the need was one-directional. Maria brought me back into the real world, but I was seeing that it stemmed from compassion rather than love. She asked nothing of me; there was nothing I could give her that she didn’t already possess. And maybe I didn’t need love right then. Being with Maria was the first time I felt remotely like a grown-up. Like a person capable of surviving on my own.

  She stood up. “Do you want to walk home?” Her home, not mine: she never once set foot in my apartment. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  There were several guys from the hockey team also living in the city, Sebi and Paul and a few others. Most of them worked in finance. When we got together for drinks a few days after my firing, they were envious of my situation.

  “You are fucking lucky, man,” Sebi said. Late on a weeknight at a bar in Murray Hill, which was so similar to McGuigan’s that if
you squinted you couldn’t tell them apart. “I would quit my job in a second if I got that kind of package.”

  “What are you gonna do next?” Paul asked.

  “Don’t really know. I thought about joining a league, just for fun.”

  “You should,” Sebi said. “Actually, one of my buddies plays up in Westchester, in a midnight league. They’re always looking for players. I’ll give you his number.”

  Which was how I found myself lacing up rental skates one night the following week. The other players were men mostly older than me, fathers going gray and potbellied, but I was rusty from so many months off, and we were evenly matched. The team I was on for the scrimmage lost, but it still felt good. After the game, just as I’d cracked a Coors in the locker room, one of the guys on the team came over to me.

  “Evan Peck?” He extended his hand. “I’m Frank Donovan. Call me Donny. Sebi told me about you. I heard you might be looking for work.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah. Well, yes, sort of.”

  “I’ve got something to offer you for the next few months, if you’re interested in hearing about it.”

  A few weeks later, I was back on a train to Westchester. I had to call my parents and get them to ship my hockey stuff back to New York. I was going to work as an assistant coach at a summer hockey camp for middle schoolers up in Westchester. Donny needed someone to help with his program, running drills and reffing games. I got to the rink early on the first day, before any of the campers arrived. After the first lap around the glassy ice, I felt dizzy and short of breath. I had to pause and lean against the boards. The sound of my blades against the ice, the smell of the cold air, the mustiness of the rink—it was almost too much to bear. Hockey had always been more than a sport to me. It had been the thing that rescued me from the suffocation of a small town, and when I escaped it, it was the thing that I clung to in a strange new world. But I realized—chest heaving, heart aching, my breath escaping in curls of white fog—that it wouldn’t work this time. I couldn’t hitch my dreams to it anymore. I couldn’t love it the way I used to.

  Donny dropped me off at the train station at the end of the first day. We chatted during the drive about the kids and how the day had gone. I had to stifle a yawn when we said good-bye—I hadn’t worked so hard in months. Before I closed the car door, he asked, “You gonna be back tomorrow?”

  I laughed. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  The week went fast. That Friday night, I called Maria.

  “Hey, stranger.”

  “Hey, I know. I’m sorry.” All week I’d been coming home, making dinner, and going straight to bed. My new routine was already digging grooves: apartment, Metro-North station at 125th Street, grocery store. McGuigan’s felt like another universe.

  “Yeah, I know how it goes. First week on the job and all.”

  “Can I see you tonight?”

  “I’m off at midnight. Come over then?”

  A few hours later we lay in her bed after having sex, the sounds of the street floating in through the open window. Maria had turned on the fan, which rotated toward us every few seconds. There was something different that night. The way she lay there with her eyes open, when normally by then she’d be drifting off, or back at her desk. Her silence had an alert quality. I could sense her thinking.

  “Hey,” I said, running my hand along her arm. “Is everything okay?”

  She turned to face me, resting her chin on my chest. A serious gaze.

  “Evan, you know, we don’t need to keep pretending for no good reason.”

  “Maria.” I swallowed. A lump formed in my throat.

  “This has been fun. I’m going to miss you,” she said.

  Something within me was finally falling. My fingers were being pried away when I wasn’t ready to let go.

  “Can’t we just…” I said. “We don’t have to do this right now, do we?”

  She propped herself up on one elbow, rested her hand on my chest. Her palm covered my heart. “It’s time.”

  Maria stood up and padded into the bathroom. I heard the sound of the bath running. Her cat was atop the refrigerator, purring loudly in her sleep. I got dressed and hovered outside the bathroom door, my hand almost touching the doorknob. I could smell the candle she liked to burn while she was in the bath. And then I stopped. I withdrew my hand. I let myself out, looking around the apartment one last time to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.

  Arthur was passing through the city the following weekend. He had been accepted to all the top law schools in the country—no surprise there—and was making up his mind about where to go. He was in town to visit NYU and Columbia before swinging up to see Harvard and Yale, and he was staying with me for the night.

  “This is weirdly good,” Arthur said. “I had no idea you knew how to cook.”

  “I’m learning.” Enchiladas, nothing special. It was Friday night, a week since I’d last seen Maria. I thought about her, but only occasionally. She had been right. Arthur and I sat on the futon, plates balanced on our knees. “So you’re really up for spending another three years in New Haven?”

  “There are worse things. I don’t think it would be anything like undergrad. It would probably feel like a totally different place. Different people. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I think I do.”

  “You going to be ready to go in a minute?” he asked. Arthur’s phone kept buzzing. A friend from college was throwing a party that night in her Williamsburg apartment. Really more Arthur’s friend than my friend. He had a lot of people to see during his short visit to the city. “What’s the best way to get there?”

  “The six to the L, I think.”

  When we got to the party, I recognized a few people from school. I asked one guy what he’d been up to since graduation, and he cocked his head. “Same thing as before, man,” he said, taking a long draw from his beer. His tone was odd, almost offended. And then I fuzzily recalled: it was this guy. I’d talked to him at a party not so different from this one, several months earlier. Back when I was still at Spire and still with Julia. “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “Shit. Sorry. I knew that. I have a bad memory.”

  My memory was fine. But memory was beside the point when I wasn’t even noticing things in the first place. The thing that kept me going through the months at Spire—it was the same thing that had kept me alive through playoffs and postseason intensity in the past. An adrenalized tunnel vision, everything else dropping away into background noise. And maybe that was okay in short bursts, but there was a danger when it went on for too long. For months at a time. It was like a hole in my brain. There was an entire section missing.

  A little later, I felt a hand on my elbow. I turned around and saw Abby.

  “Evan,” she said after we hugged. “Wow. It’s so nice to see you.”

  “Been a while, huh? How are things?”

  I didn’t really have to ask. Her happiness was obvious.

  “Well, I’m in the home stretch.”

  “School’s almost done for the year?”

  “Praise the Lord.” She laughed.

  People came in and out, rearranging our corner of the room. Abby and I didn’t get to talk for much longer. I caught her eye a few times and started to move toward her, but then someone else would get in the way. Her gaze said the same thing—we were both thinking about the one thing missing from this night. The hip-hop on the stereo, the keg in the bathtub, the Solo cups scattered across the kitchen counters. It was almost like college. Almost, but not quite.

  “Hey,” Arthur said, coming over. “Ready to go? I’ve got an early train.”

  I glanced back over at Abby, stuck in conversation with some close talker. I took a deep breath. I wanted to interrupt. This merited interruption, didn’t it? A chance for news of the person I had spent four years of my life with and hadn’t heard from in months? But Arthur was already holding the door open, waiting for me.

  We took the subway back to the Upper East Side. “Pi
zza?” Arthur pointed at the neon sign of the slice joint on Lexington. It was just like old times. Two pepperoni for me, one cheese for him.

  “Was it weird?” he said on the walk back to the apartment. “Seeing Abby?”

  “Kind of.”

  “You don’t talk about her much, you know.”

  “Who? Julia?”

  “No, the Mona Lisa. Yes, dummy. Julia. The girl you used to live with?”

  I shrugged. “What is there to say?”

  “Well, you don’t have to be so stoic. You can admit that you’re upset. Or mad or whatever. You don’t have to pretend like nothing happened. It’s kind of strange.”

  “I’m not. I’m just…” I shrugged again. “I’ve learned to live with it.”

  We walked for a while. By silent agreement we sat down on the stoop outside my building, finishing our pizza. I felt a click, the temperature rising a notch. “Why?” I said. “Did you want to say something about Julia? Do you have something you need to say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on. You’re not tempted to say ‘I told you so’? That you could have seen this coming all along?”

  “I’d never say that.”

  “Aren’t you the one who called her self-centered? Don’t you remember?”