After New Year’s I returned to the office in Crystal City, and I was there when Nina called. I guessed that she wanted to schedule her driving lesson, but instead she invited me to go hear a band with her, an indie act popular enough that even I knew a few of their hits, minimalist ballads about breakups and the seaside and minor historical figures. Again her dad had planned to go with her, but he’d found out he would be in court the following day, which meant he had to spend that night preparing. “He said I could ask you,” she said.
I had to keep my voice low, and we were on cell phones. The undercurrent was lost in a tower someplace. I agreed to take her.
God, it was cold that night of the show, not a typical mid-Atlantic cold but some ice-fanged front from farther north blowing right onto my eyeballs. I hurried out of my building and hurried up the stoop next door, and after I was buzzed in I hurried up to the second floor as though the wind were still gnashing its jaws at me.
Here was Daniel welcoming me with a kindness that made me feel very young, a friend of his daughter’s. I couldn’t conceive of growing up like this, in a two-person apartment, so quiet! But inside of it, I could feel the quiet warmth intertwined with the quiet sadness, the sloppy odd-couple care that father and daughter had for each other. The place itself had the indifference to looks that you might expect in the home of a man and a teenager: there were pillows on the floor and days’ worth of schoolwork and legal documents on the dining room table, and on the wall next to the door they’d taped Nina’s basketball schedule and a calendar from a Salvadoran restaurant. Daniel showed me to the kitchen, where Nina was eating a sandwich over the sink. “We usually eat together,” he said, apologetically. “It’s been a crazy week.”
I’d been wishing I could get out of the whole thing, because of the weather and because I didn’t care about the band and didn’t want to stand for two hours in a crowd of its giddy young fans, but Nina had put on eyeliner and she’d pinned her hair back with a mishmash of barrettes, and by the way she was wolfing down her sandwich I could tell she was more excited about this than I myself had been about anything in ages. Seeing her that way, I tamped down my reluctance and let Daniel call the taxi company.
In the cab she clasped her hands between her knees and looked out the front windshield. The sidewalks were nearly empty, blown clean, while the streets were full of cars. Angry trees wagged at us. An unlatched chain-link gate blew open and shut. Nina listened to music in her head that I couldn’t hear. The cold had pinched her cheeks, and in the half light of the backseat, in profile, she had the ghostly look of a fashion model.
“Have you seen them before?” I asked.
“I’ve seen videos from their shows.”
“That singer is cute,” I said, though I actually thought he was scary-looking. In the photographs I’d seen here and there, he was shaggy and skinny and so white he was almost a pale blue, and when he smiled it was like his face had been winched open, so that you could tell what a sneering, miserable person lived inside his too-small clothes. But it was the sneer and the misery in his voice that made the songs into what they were.
“I know,” Nina said. “Adam is so adorable.”
We were trying to find each other, but there were no doors. As the cab rattled over a series of potholes I gripped the seat, and she let herself be jostled.
“You have the tickets, right?” I asked.
She frowned, and at first I thought she’d left them at home. Slowly she reached into her small khaki purse and pulled them out, then studied what was printed there. “I invited someone, a friend of mine,” she said.
I didn’t get it. “Does your friend have a ticket?” I asked. Nina turned to me with so much pleading in her expression that I could barely stand it, and that’s when I understood what she meant.
“My dad doesn’t let me go on dates,” she said. “All we ever do is e-mail, since he doesn’t go to my school. We can never see each other.”
“It would have been better if you’d told me about this before now.”
She didn’t say anything, rereading the tickets instead, until more words burst out of her. “It’ll just be like, two hours, and we’ll be inside the club the whole time. You can do whatever you want and I’ll just call you when the show’s over.”
Just do this one thing for me, her eyes said, for young love and pop music.
People were clustered in front of the club, stomping and shivering as they waited to get in, smoking cigarettes with frozen fingers. Nina got out of the cab, and the mob ejected this boy come to meet her. Was he really in high school? I wondered. I couldn’t tell anyone’s age anymore. He was on the small side, his dark hair more neatly trimmed than any of the other guys’ hair, his skin neither dark nor light, his ethnicity unclear to me, his jacket too thin for the weather—he looked like an engineering student from someplace warm. They beamed at each other without touching, he and Nina.
Oh shit, was all I could think. I bumbled after her and told her I’d pick her up at that exact spot at 10:30, no later. She started to say that she could just call me when—but this was me feebly putting my foot down. “Ten-thirty,” I insisted. Then I stuck out my hand and introduced myself to the boy, who politely said his name, Sam. His tone was soft. Then he smiled so broadly that I wondered whether he might be high, but I couldn’t tell, and before I had a chance to think it over they said so long.
Suddenly I was the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, only the nurse never had to spend two hours in a fricking Burger King on 19th Street, which is what I did, eating onion rings out of a cardboard pouch and reading an article from somebody’s discarded newspaper, about a planned overhaul of government intelligence services, and asking myself why I’d let myself be manipulated by a sixteen-year-old kid. But then I remembered the question my dad had posed—are you depressed?—and I decided that no, I didn’t think I was anymore, and that this improvement seemed to have come about less because I’d figured anything out about my life than because I was no longer sitting in my L.A. apartment watching election coverage. Even sitting in this Burger King seemed better. Even here I was busier, and while I did still want something more for myself, I had a new appreciation for the merits of keeping busy. I wondered whether this was one reason why everyone around me worked such long hours, whether they were all warding off secret funks.
My phone shuddered at me.
What are you doing?
The text was from Rob, and I was all too glad to get it.
Eating onion rings.
R they hot?
Yes. Want to come over later?
He didn’t reply. Though I had bought a texting-enabled phone, I wasn’t in the habit of texting and certainly didn’t have the hang of text banter. For the next ten minutes I kept checking the phone, thinking maybe I’d missed a response from him. I walked back to the club. Nina came out at exactly 10:30, alone, her coat over her arm as if she could no longer be touched by the cold. “Thank you,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, not knowing what to say. For the first part of the cab ride home we barely talked. Then I asked her how she and Sam had met.
“He was my math tutor, last semester.”
“Where does he go to school?”
“AU,” she said. “He’s a junior there, but he started college early. He’s only three years older.” She took a deep breath. “He’s actually from Turkey. Samed is his real name but he calls himself Sam. He’s like, the smartest person I have ever met.”
I thought about Anthony Jaffe, my high school not-quite-a-boyfriend, and the things he used to say. “Did you know,” he said to me once, “did you know that time is not a property of the universe? It is a property of clocks. A convention,” he said.
But then how come I can’t be rid of it, I’d wondered.
“Does your dad know?” I asked Nina.
“The first time we kissed, he walked in on us. Oops. That was the end of math tutoring. He thinks Sam’s too old, even though hello, my mom was three years older than him. He says that’s different, but I don’t see why it’s different.”
“So you’re not allowed to see him.”
Her phone buzzed, and she took it out and read something that lit up her face. She thumbed a reply, then looked back to me. “Please don’t tell,” she said.
“I kind of should.”
“I’m really sorry.”
No, I thought, no you’re not. She begged me not to say anything, and I refused to make a promise one way or another. I said I would have to sleep on it. She angled her head back against the seat and returned to the club and the boy with two names and the adorable-miserable singer, and the sight made me sentimental in spite of myself, late-night sentiment trumping the sense I might’ve had at another time of day or another time of life: though I was pretty sure I’d messed up, I also thought that now she would have this for the rest of her life, this night when she was sixteen and went to hear music with the boy she was nuts for, and who was I to take that away from her?
At home I checked my phone again.
I can’t. Let’s check in fri.
I felt out of sorts. I could still smell the onion rings. I put the phone away.