I’m dealing with the flowers on the phone at work when Aldridge stops by my office. I hang up on the florist with no explanation.
“I just got off an interesting phone call with Anya and Jordi,” he tells me. He sits in one of my round gray chairs.
“Oh yeah?”
“I imagine you know what I’m going to say,” he says.
“I don’t.”
“Think about it.”
I rearrange a notepad and paperweight on my desk. “They don’t want to go public.”
“Bingo. They’ve changed their minds.” He clasps his hands and sets them on my desk. “I need to know if you’ve had any further contact with them.”
“I haven’t,” I say. Just that one dinner, in which I could feel Anya’s resistance. “But to tell you the truth, I’m not altogether convinced going public right now is the right move.”
“For who?” Aldridge asks.
“All of us,” I say. “I think the company, under their guidance, will grow increasingly profitable. I think they will employ us now, because they trust us, and I think when they eventually do go public, everyone will make a lot more money.”
Aldridge takes his hands back. His face is unreadable. I keep mine steady.
“I’m surprised.”
I feel my stomach tighten into familiar knots. I’ve spoken out of turn.
“And impressed,” he says. “I didn’t think you were a gut lawyer.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Aldridge sits back. “I hired you because I could tell no one would ever get a mistake by you. Your work is meticulous. You read every single line of every single paragraph and you know the law backward and forward.”
“Thank you.”
“But even that, as we know, is not enough. All the preparedness in the world cannot stop the unexpected from happening. Truly great lawyers know every inch of their deal, but often they make decisions based on something else — the presence of an unknown force that, if listened to, will betray exactly the way the tide is turning. That’s what you did with Jordi and Anya, and you were right.”
“I was?”
Aldridge nods. “They’re hiring us to replace in-house counsel, and they’d like you to head up the team.”
My eyes widen. I know what this means. This is the case, the client. This is the thing I need before I make junior partner.
“One thing at a time,” Aldridge says, reading me. “But congratulations.”
He stands, so do I. He shakes my hand. “And yes,” he says. “If this goes well, yes.”
I check the clock: 2:35 p.m. I want to call Bella, but she had a session this morning and I know she’ll be asleep.
I try David.
“Hey,” he says. “What’s wrong?”
I realize I’ve never called him during the day before. If I have something to tell him, I always email, or I just wait.
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Oh—” he starts, but I cut him off.
“Aldridge just gave me my junior partner case.”
“You’re kidding!” David says. “That’s great.”
“It’s the women who run Yahtzee. They don’t want to sell right now, but they want me to head up legal.”
“I’m so proud of you,” David says. “Will it still involve being in California?”
“Probably a little bit, but we haven’t gotten there yet. I’m just excited because it’s the right thing, you know? Like I felt it. I knew it was the right thing.”
I hear background talking. David doesn’t answer immediately. “Yeah,” he says. “Good.” Then: “Hang on.”
“Me?”
“No,” he says. “No. Listen, I have to go. Let’s celebrate tonight. Whenever you want. Email Lydia, and she’ll make a reservation.” He hangs up.
I feel lonely then, the sensation of which spreads out like a fever, until the whole of my body is afflicted. I shouldn’t. David is supportive. He’s encouraging and understanding. He wants me to succeed. He cares about my career. He’ll sacrifice for me to have what I want. I know this is the covenant we made: that we will not get in each other’s ways.
But, sitting here at my desk, I realize something else. We’ve been on these parallel tracks, David and I. Moving constantly forward in space but never actually touching, for fear of throwing each other off course. Like if we were aligned in the same direction, we’d never have to compromise. But the thing about parallel tracks is you can be inches apart, or miles. And lately it feels like the width between David and me is extraordinary. We just didn’t notice because we were still looking at the same horizon. But it dawns on me that I want someone in my way. I want us to collide.
I call Lydia. I ask her to make a reservation at Dante, an Italian café in the West Village we both love. 7:30 p.m.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I arrive at the restaurant — a corner one, tiny and candlelit, with old-fashioned red-checkered tablecloths — and David is already there, bent over his phone. He has on a blue sweater and jeans. The hedge fund is a less dressy environment than the bank he worked at before, and he can get away with jeans much of the time.
“Hi,” I say.
He looks up and smiles. “Hey. Traffic was a nightmare, right? I’m trying to figure out why they closed down Seventh Avenue. We haven’t been here in a long time. Since we first started dating,” he says.
David and I were introduced through my old colleague, Adam. We both worked as clerks at the same time in the DA’s office. The hours were long and the pay was shitty and neither one of us was particularly suited for that kind of environment.
For about six months, I remember having a crush on Adam. He was from New Jersey, liked sitcoms from the seventies, and knew how to get the temperamental coffee maker to deliver a cappuccino. We spent a lot of time together at work, bent over our desks eating five-dollar ramen from the food truck downstairs. He threw a party for his birthday at this bar I’d never been to — Ten Bells on the Lower East Side. It was dark and candlelit. With wood tables and barstools. We ate cheese and drank wine and split bills we could not afford on credit cards we hoped we could one day pay off.
David was there — cute and a little bit quiet — and he asked to buy me a drink. He worked at a bank, and had gone to school with Adam. They had even been roommates their first year in New York.
We talked about the insane prices of rent, how it was impossible to find good Mexican food in New York, and our mutual love of Die Hard.
But I was still focused on Adam. I had hoped that his birthday might be the night. I had on tight jeans and a black top. I thought we’d flirt — scratch that, I thought we had been flirting — and that maybe we’d go home together.
Before closing, Adam sauntered over to us and slung an arm over David’s shoulders. “You guys should get each other’s numbers,” he said. “Could be a match here.”
I remember feeling devastated. That stabbing sensation you feel when the curtain is pulled back and what stands before you on the stage is the wide expanse of nothing. Adam was not into me. He had just made that very, very clear.
David laughed nervously. He stuck his hands in his pockets. Then he said: “How about it?”
I gave him my number. He called the next day, and we went out the following week. Our relationship built slowly, bit by bit. We went for a drink, then a dinner, then a lunch, then a Broadway show he had been gifted tickets to. We slept together on that date, the fourth. We dated for two and a half years before we moved in together. When we did, we kept all of my bedroom furniture and half of his living room furniture and opened a joint bank account for household expenses. He went to Trader Joe’s because I thought — and think — the lines are too long, and I bought the paper goods off Amazon. We RSVP’d to weddings, threw dinner parties with catered spreads, and climbed the ladders of our careers, an arm’s length away from each other. We were, weren’t we? An arm’s length away? If you can reach out and hold the other person’s hand, does the distance matter? Is simply being able to see someone valuable?