The Futures

by Anna Pitoniak

  “Yes,” he said, picking at his pizza crust. “But I didn’t mean like that.”

  “What did you mean, then?”

  Arthur was silent for a long time. Finally he cleared his throat. “Okay. Yeah, maybe I thought you guys shouldn’t have lived together. That wasn’t a great idea. I’ll stand by that. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like her. It doesn’t mean I think she’s some terrible person, that you should never think about her or talk to her again. I mean, she made some pretty big mistakes. But so did you, right? You guys both screwed up. I just don’t think it does anyone any good if you keep hanging on to it. If you don’t let yourself move past it.”

  “You think I’m hanging on to it?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  It was almost exactly a year earlier that Arthur and I had our big fight. A night just like this: late walk home, pizza, warm air. Part of me was itching for a redo. To shout until my throat was raw. To scream even if no one was listening. But there was a difference, a big one. Last year, I hadn’t been able to hear what Arthur was saying. I was so focused on the idea of what came next. On the idea of packing up the last of my boxes and putting them in the U-Haul with Julia’s and arriving later that week at our apartment in New York, beginning the next chapter of our life together. That’s all that had mattered, the continuation of the present into the future, the uninterruption of that dream.

  “Do you see what I mean?” Arthur said. Arthur knew the whole truth of what had happened by then, but this was the first time he’d voiced the other side. That I’d screwed up. That as much as Julia had betrayed me, I had betrayed her, too.

  “I’m just saying,” he continued. “Don’t act like it’s nothing. But don’t be so hard on yourself. And don’t be so hard on her. I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to give her a call. I can tell you’re still thinking about her.”

  “How?” I said. Was it that obvious? In the previous few weeks, she’d come back into my mind, memories growing stronger and stronger. That was the real reason I couldn’t leave. I needed to know whether the Julia I had known and loved was the real Julia; whether that Julia would ever come back. I had no idea how long I’d have to wait.

  He shrugged. “I’m your friend, Evan. I just can.”

  Chapter 16

  Julia

  The loft was in an old building in Tribeca. There was a freight elevator, which he used sometimes for moving his oversize canvases, but we took the narrow metal staircase. He had the whole second floor—half for his living space, half for his studio.

  I started to knock on the unmarked metal door, but Elizabeth said, “Don’t bother. No one can hear you.” She pulled a jangling ring of keys from her purse.

  Saturday night, the night of the big party. She’d shown me pictures of Donald Gates, and he looked exactly the same in real life: unkempt gray hair, paint-stained cargo shorts and plastic Crocs, a belly that strained against his T-shirt. But his voice was deep and booming, and even from a distance, I could see the brightness in his eyes. He had a pipe clamped between his teeth. He looked like the king of his small kingdom.

  “Donald,” she said. “This is my sister, Julia.”

  “Julia. Lovely. Elizabeth talks about you all the time.”

  “Did the frames arrive this afternoon?” she asked.

  He sighed. “They got the order wrong. We have to send them back.”

  The apartment was one big undivided space, vast and pleasantly chaotic. A kitchen in one corner, with a metal sink as big as a bathtub. A long wooden table in the middle of the room covered in dripping, flickering candles. A massive living area with mismatched couches and armchairs grouped around rugs and coffee tables. A thick slab of a sliding wooden door, standing partially ajar, opened into the studio.

  “I’ll show you the studio later,” Elizabeth said, pouring us each a glass of wine at the island in the kitchen. “It’s pretty spectacular.”

  “So this is where you work?”

  “Most days. He’s getting ready to mount a new show at a gallery in Chelsea, so we’re over there sometimes, prepping the space. Here. You should meet the others.”

  Donald Gates had several assistants working for him. Some, like Elizabeth, were on summer break from college. Others were closer to my age, young artists pursuing their own careers in their spare time. They were sitting at the long wooden table watching a skinny Asian boy roll a joint. “Hey, guys, this is my sister, Julia. She’s visiting for a while,” Elizabeth said as we slid next to them on the bench. The others looked up and said hello in unison.

  I’d been skeptical about tagging along. It made me feel so old, the idea of following my younger sister to this downtown loft. Elizabeth is cooler than me, I’d always known that, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to have it rubbed in. She already seemed to know the city better than I ever had. But I was skeptical for another reason, too. Those orbiting the great Donald Gates would surely resort to insufferable pretension when they got together. The thought made me cringe: lofty theories and showy name-dropping, a posture of sophistication, conjuring—for me, at least—the ugly ghost of previous seductions.

  But as I sipped my wine and listened to their patter, I found I was wrong. They talked about their work with a weary professionalism, like union members down at the local. The walls in the Chelsea gallery weren’t right for the kind of mounting they usually used. Pearl Paint was out of Donald’s preferred brush. Donald wanted to finish a big series, and they were all going to have to work late to get it done. The work wasn’t about pretension. It was about humble logistics. Theirs was a mild sort of complaint, and I could tell that Elizabeth and her coworkers actually took pleasure in it. It was the breaking down of something big into a series of finely grained tasks, like glass melting into sand, something you could sift through your fingers.

  The skinny Asian boy handed me the joint. I took a small toke before passing it. I didn’t want to get too high or too drunk. I’d gotten to New York a day earlier, on a sweltering Friday afternoon, and that was overwhelming enough on its own. I tilted my head up. The ceiling of the loft was so high that I could barely see it. Donald had bought the space in the 1970s, when the city was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in one place for so long. Keeping your head turned to the light, letting the seasons change and the decades pass, doing your work.

  A little later, when we stood to get another drink, Elizabeth led me to the wooden door. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “We’re not really supposed to bring other people back here.” She made sure no one was watching, then we slipped through the opening.

  The noise of the party vanished behind us. The studio was even bigger than the living space. The dim light that filtered through the windows gave just enough illumination to see by. The room had the patina of long use: paint-splattered floor, walls spidered with cracks, empty tubes and crusty brushes. But the artwork hovered above and separate from the ordinary mess of the room. Donald Gates was known for his big, aggressive, abstract canvases, a throwback to an earlier era. “You can get closer,” Elizabeth said, nudging me forward. I felt drawn to the paintings like a magnet to iron. The thick and tactile smears of paint. The blend and contrast of colors. They were so beautiful, but so ordinary, too. It was just paint, applied by the human hand. They glowed, gently, through the darkness. I couldn’t believe that something that revealed itself to be so simple, when seen up close, had the power to move me so much.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Elizabeth said. “It’s hard to turn away.”

  “Exactly.”

  “He’s just a guy. He sleeps, eats, breathes just like the rest of us. Gets grumpy, makes stupid jokes. But then he does this, and I realize I have no idea what’s going on inside his head. How he comes up with it.”

  “It’s so beautiful.”

  “I know.” A beat later: “We should get back to the party.”

  The night continued. Guests arrived bearing bottles of wine
and gifts of food. Some were young, like us, but many were closer to Donald’s age. The gathering felt like an assortment of friendships collected over a long period of time, like a plant shooting off vines in radius. As the hours passed, the room gradually quieted until it was only the lingerers with their empty glasses. Donald was holding forth from a high-backed velvet chair, a shaggy mutt curled at his feet. Elizabeth stood up, stretched, and yawned. “I’ll say good-bye, and then we can go, okay?”

  Despite the late hour, in bed back at Elizabeth’s apartment, I couldn’t sleep. I kept remembering how Elizabeth had looked, when she said good-bye to Donald. The dog awoke, his tail thumping the floor when Elizabeth reached down to scratch his ears. Donald patted Elizabeth on the shoulder. Together they looked like a version of home. Elizabeth had found the tiny nook in the world that was shaped just for her. She possessed a sense of belonging that seemed so rare to me in this city. But I’d encountered it before; a path that I’d been too foolish to pursue. I turned on the bedside lamp. My wallet was sitting on the dresser, and inside it was the business card I’d been hanging on to all these months. I took it out and stared at it for a long time.

  In the morning, the card fell loose when I stood from the bed. I double-checked the time—well past noon on a Sunday. A perfectly reasonable time to call. I took a deep breath and dialed.

  I hadn’t been planning to stay longer than the weekend. My tote bag held a few changes of clothing, my phone charger, a book, and that was it. I took the train down midday on Friday, and I had a return ticket for Monday morning. Rob sounded nonchalant when I called. “Okay,” he said. “No worries. I gotta go. See you around, Julia.”

  Elizabeth met me at her apartment on Friday afternoon. “If you want to shower, the shower’s weird,” she said, showing me around. “The faucet is on backwards. Let’s see…help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. You can use my computer if you want. I have to go back to the studio for a few more hours, but maybe we can get takeout or something for dinner. Oh, and I already changed the sheets on the bed for you. You’re welcome.”

  I smiled. Despite the grubby Chinatown setting and Elizabeth’s budding artistic pursuits, her habits were reflexive—the manners of a good hostess, which our mother had instilled in us. The apartment was small, but it was sunny and clean, the window propped open to let in the breeze. A bouquet of bodega carnations sat on the bookshelf. Her roommate’s bed, where I’d be sleeping, was neatly made with hospital corners. I’d taken a nice bottle of wine from my parents’ collection and stuck it in my bag as a housewarming gift. We’d drink it later, on the roof, with our cheap dinner.

  I had an e-mail on my phone from Abby. She and Jake were in Barcelona. We’d promised each other that we’d Skype at least once a week while she was on her European jaunt. Her e-mail asked if I wanted to talk that afternoon around 4:00 p.m., their nighttime in Spain. It was 3:52. I opened Elizabeth’s computer and logged on, and soon the computer chimed with the sound of an incoming call.

  “Abby?”

  “Buenas noches, amiga!”

  “Hey, you’re practically fluent!”

  She laughed, her voice echoing as it traveled the span of the Atlantic.

  “Are you guys having fun?”

  She sighed, or I think she sighed. I couldn’t tell with the lousy audio connection. “Holy shit, Jules, it’s amazing. I’m quitting my job and never leaving.”

  “How long are you there?”

  “Barcelona for another two nights. Then Valencia next week, then Málaga, then we’re going over to Morocco.”

  “Where’s Jake? How is he?”

  “Too much wine at dinner. He passed out. He’s good. We’re”—she smiled, glancing down—“I’m really happy. Things are really good.”

  “Oh, my God, you’re blushing. When’s the wedding?”

  “Shut up.”

  “You know, I’m the reason you guys met. Dibs on maid of honor, right?”

  “All right, all right. Hey, what about you? Where are you? I don’t recognize it.”

  “In New York. I’m staying at Lizzie’s.”

  “Jules! You had to wait until I was gone, huh?”

  “It’s just for a few days. I’m going home on Monday.”

  “Why such a rush?”

  “Well,” I said, looking around the tiny apartment. “For one, I don’t live here anymore. And I’m staying in Lizzie’s roommate’s bed. She’s back on Monday.”

  “You should stay longer. You can stay at my place. It’s just sitting there.”

  “You didn’t find a subletter?”

  She shrugged. “Too much of a hassle. My rent is cheap. Jules, I’m serious. You should stay there. What else are you going to do? Aren’t you bored to death up in Boston?”

  “But your roommate—”

  “Cat won’t care. You know she practically lives with her boyfriend.”

  It seemed too crazy, too all-at-once. “I don’t know. Let me think about it.”

  “I’m going to e-mail Cat now. I’m gonna say that you’ll call her tomorrow and get the keys, okay? I’ll send you her number and stuff. Hey, have you talked to Evan lately?”

  “Evan?” His name felt funny when I said it out loud. “No. Why?”

  “Well, are you going to see him? Now that you’re back?”

  “I doubt it. We haven’t talked since December.”

  Abby was quiet on the other end. I thought the video had frozen, but I could see the flicker of her eyes. Part of me was tempted to change the subject, avoid the Evan minefield, but I remembered what Abby had said on the phone. Enough of this repressive WASP bullshit. She was right. “Okay, spill. What’s up?”

  “I saw him. The other week. At a party.”

  “You saw Evan? How is he?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear?”

  My stomach dropped. He was with another girl. Or he’d launched into a tirade against me. Or both. But I needed to know, all of a sudden. Evan. The thought of him filled me with an aching curiosity. “Yeah. Tell me.”

  “He’s good, actually. He has a new job. Spire let him go. They let a bunch of people go. It sounded like things were pretty rough for a while.”

  “Where’s he working?”

  “Brace yourself. He’s a hockey coach.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “At some summer program up in Westchester. It’s sort of temporary while he figures out what he’s going to do. I guess he got a bunch of severance from Spire. He seems to like it, though. He said the kids are great.”

  “Is he still living in our old place?”

  “I think so. Jules, listen. You should call him. Or at least let him know you’re back in town. Don’t you think that’s only fair?”

  Fair. I was glad for the shitty video connection, disguising the hot beginnings of tears. I could only think of that night, Evan making it so clear that he didn’t want to see me again. Fair wasn’t a factor.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Abby. Did he…um, did Evan—”

  “Did he ask about you?” She shook her head. “I think he wanted to. I mean, you know Evan. He’s so Canadian. He probably didn’t want to be rude and put me on the spot. But so what? Call him. Life is too short. Hey, so I’m sending you Cat’s number. Go get the keys from her. Deal?”

  “Deal.” I smiled. “I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too. I’m glad you’re back.”

  That night, on the sticky tar roof of her apartment building, I told Elizabeth about Abby’s idea. Part of me was hoping for one last exit ramp, for Elizabeth to raise her eyebrows and say it was crazy. But instead she exclaimed that it was a brilliant idea, and she clinked her plastic cup of wine against mine. I wondered how my parents were going to take the news. I’d have to ask my mother to send down a box of clothes.

  “This is great, Jules,” Elizabeth said, crumpling the wrappers from our banh mi into a tight, waxy ball. “It’s going to be a great summer.”

  On Sunday, Cat opened the door.
We’d met a few times, through Abby.

  “That’s all you have?” she said.

  I shifted my tote bag on my shoulder. “Yup. For now.”

  She showed me around their West Harlem apartment quickly, apologizing for her abruptness, but she was on her way downtown to meet friends for dinner. “That’s the thing about this neighborhood,” she said, responding to a text, slipping on her sandals, tying her hair back in a bun, a flurry of motion. “I love it, but it’s so far from everything. Anyway, I sleep at Paolo’s most nights. He’s in the East Village. It’s just easier.”

  I spent a lot of time walking that first week. I had nothing else to do. I woke up in the morning, and it was always the first thing I realized: there was nothing I had to do that day. But this was different from how I’d felt in Boston. Then, the emptiness of the day stretched before me like a punishment. The discipline of my routine was a way of combating the loneliness, the reading and running and walking the dog like beads on a rosary. But at Abby’s I woke to an empty apartment, and the emptiness actually felt good. Peaceful. Every morning was different. Sometimes I’d make coffee in the kitchen, drinking from Abby and Cat’s mismatched mugs. Other mornings I’d go to the diner on the corner, watching the sidewalk traffic over eggs and bacon. Or I’d set out on a long walk to some unknown destination and pick up things on the way. Coffee from a Cuban restaurant, milky and sweet. A hot, spicy samosa for breakfast at 11:00 a.m., because I could do whatever I wanted.

  Was it that the city had changed since I left? Was it such a different place, altered by the events of the previous year—the collapse of the economy, the election of a new president? Maybe it was, in small ways. The quieted construction sites, halted until the money started flowing again. The real estate listings, marked down further and further. The miasma of worry that hovered in the subway cars, nervous and desperate job seekers, commuters distractedly thinking of their 401(k)s. But mostly, life went on. Before long, it would be back to normal. The market would rebound. Apartment prices would pause, catch their breath, then resume their relentless climb.