Chapter 11

Evan

Roger caught me earlier that day. “Trouble in paradise?” he said, clapping me on the shoulder.

I jumped in my seat and exited the browser where I’d been looking at apartment listings, but I felt the heat rise in my face. Roger sat down across from me, grinning with glee at his discovery. “The wife mad that you’ve been spending so much time in the office? She kicking you out?”

“Shut up, Roger.”

“Oh, wow. Did I hit a nerve?”

Several hours later, Roger was gone. Everyone was gone, except for me. The streets were quiet when I finally left the office around midnight. The scattering to home had begun that afternoon. The only signs of life in our neighborhood were the divey Irish bars jam-packed with city kids who were home for the holidays from college, drinking with friends.

In the bathroom, brushing my teeth, I heard a strange noise. A mechanical chirp. After a minute of confusion, I finally saw it on the ceiling: the smoke detector, flashing a yellow warning light. I dragged a chair over and disconnected it, took the battery out, and it went silent. It was too late to go out and buy a new battery. I’d have to survive a night without it.

But I couldn’t fall asleep. The whole apartment felt unsettled—it had ever since I’d gotten back from Las Vegas. I’d taken to lingering longer and longer at the office to avoid it. At least I could still feel normal at the office. Even when she wasn’t around, the feeling of Julia clung to the apartment. I’d started checking online apartment listings in my spare time, furtively, clearing my browser history afterward like I’d been watching porn. The options beckoned: sexy, seductive, a fresh start. Rents were loaded with incentives, post-crash. The new glassy, high-end buildings on the far West Side were perfectly affordable for a young finance bachelor. Then I’d shake my head. I wasn’t a bachelor. Julia and I were still together, after all.

I kept tossing and turning that night, thinking I was hearing the distant chirp of the dead smoke detector. I finally drifted off, but I woke a few minutes later with a start. I thought I smelled smoke, but I knew it was nothing.

  

The next morning, as I passed the diner on the corner, I stopped and peered through the window. A TV in the corner showed the crowds at the parade. It looked cozy inside. The jingling bell announced my arrival, and a sullen waitress showed me to a table. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said, slapping the laminated menu on the table. “You want coffee?”

The coffee was sour and burned, and the eggs were runny, but it didn’t matter. I’d passed the diner every morning, and I’d always wanted to stop there. When the man at the next table departed, he left behind his copy of the New York Observer. I grabbed it, straightening the crinkled pages. There was a story about the war in Iraq, the troops celebrating Thanksgiving in Baghdad and Basra. An item about the Detroit bailouts. At the bottom of the front page was a teaser for a story inside:

HEDGE FUNDS DOWN IN 2008

Results show steep drop in earnings across industry. A12

I flipped to page 12. It was Adam McCard’s byline.

“More?” the waitress said, not bothering to wait for a response. She tipped the carafe and let the coffee splash over the sides of the mug.

I skimmed the story. Manhattan, Greenwich, Stamford—everyone was having a bad year. Negative returns, investors yanking their cash, waves of layoffs. Hundreds of funds had shut down already, and more were on the brink of collapse. Sometimes you had a bad year, everyone knew that. But this looked to be something bigger. A bad decade, or more. Even at Spire, money was tight, and there weren’t going to be any bonuses that year. People grumbled, and Roger let slip, bitterly, that he’d been counting on a bonus to make up for the money he’d been wasting on bottle service. But I think most of us knew how good we had it. We still had our jobs. Spire was the one hedge fund in the industry that hadn’t laid off a single person since the downturn.

The WestCorp deal had finally gone live earlier that week, on Monday, a few days before the holiday. Michael had called me into his office that morning. He gestured at me to sit, then he shut the door. He didn’t mention the car ride on Friday night, what had happened, or what we’d discussed. And that was okay—I didn’t need him to explain anything. I finally felt like I got it. Like everything made sense.

“Evan. I realized I never actually thanked you for coming on the Las Vegas trip the other week, on short notice. You were immensely helpful. So thank you.”

“Of course. I was glad to.”

He searched, it seemed, for a crack in my expression, a sign of sarcasm or timidity. Finding none, he reached inside a drawer and withdrew a manila envelope.

“This deal is going to make history. And 2009 is going to be a record-setting year for us because of it. But you probably know that things are tight in the interim. I debated whether I ought to give this to you. But I wanted you to have it as a token of Spire’s appreciation. Of my appreciation.”

He slid the envelope across the desk. “I doubt I need to say this,” Michael said, “but it would be best if you kept this quiet for now.”

After I left his office, I went into a bathroom stall and sat down on the lowered toilet lid. I paused, for a moment, to make sure I was alone. I ripped open the envelope. Inside were several stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills. I counted them slowly. It took a long time. I counted them again, to be sure.

Twenty thousand dollars in cash. There was no note.

*  *  *

I spent Thanksgiving Day at the office. I deleted old e-mails, checked over some models I’d been working on, read a backlog of market reports. I was already impatient for the holiday moratorium to be lifted, for work to resume. Around midday, my cell phone started vibrating. I smiled when I saw the name on the caller ID.

“Arthur!”

“Hey, Evan! Happy Thanksgiving.”

“You too. Jeez, man, I thought you were dead. How are you?”

Arthur was even busier than I was, and I figured my unreturned e-mails and calls were a symptom of that. A funny reversal of roles had happened by the end of college. Freshman year, Arthur lived in my shadow. Physically and metaphorically—being an athlete came with a certain amount of built-in respect. I was the one who knew about the parties on Saturday nights, whose name was recognized by other people. But by senior year, Arthur was the bigger man on campus. He’d grown into himself. He was president of the debate society, elected to Phi Beta Kappa, tapped for one of the elite senior societies. Arthur Ziegler was going places.

The noise of a full household echoed from the other end of the line. I remembered the Thanksgiving I’d spent with him, freshman year, all the cousins and aunts and uncles. The cramped dining-room table groaning under the weight of too many dishes, voices shouting to be heard over the Buckeyes game on TV. Four years had gone by: was that possible? He surely must have noticed the comparative silence coming from my end. It was the first time that day it occurred to me how depressing this must look to someone else. And then he asked:

“Hey, so where are you today? Are you up at Julia’s?”

“No, actually—no. I couldn’t get away from work.”

“They don’t even let you have the one day off?”

“It’s been crazy lately. But it’s all right. You know how I feel about her parents.”

He laughed. “How is Julia? You guys are still dating, right?”

Did he know how close to the truth he was cutting? “She’s fine.”

“Just fine?”

I felt something tightening inside. To be honest, that was the real reason Arthur and I hadn’t talked much since school ended. The night before graduation, we’d run into each other at the pizza place on Broadway. We got our late-night usual: one slice of cheese for him, two pepperoni for me. We wound up in my bedroom, talking, reminiscing. I was sitting in my desk chair, and Arthur was perched on my bed, swinging his feet above the floor. I was halfway packed, posters stripped from the walls and the closet rattling with empty hangers. The next morning, in a few short hours, we would don our caps and gowns and assemble for the graduation procession. Arthur was talking about the Obama campaign, how his work would put him on the front lines of history. He sometimes turned a little grandiose when he was drunk.

“Are you nervous at all?” I asked.

“No. This is what I’m meant to be doing. I know it.” He drummed his fingers against his thighs and nodded, lost in his own thoughts. Then looked up at me, his eyes narrowing. “But what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Are you nervous?”

“For what?”

“Well.” Arthur swept his hands across the room. “Everything. New York. Your new job. But mostly, dun-dun-dunnn—moving in with your girlfriend.”

I laughed. “Nah. Not really.”

Arthur went quiet. A heavy expression descended on his face.

“Well, maybe you should be.”

“What does that mean?”

“I just mean,” Arthur said, “it’s a serious step to take. Moving in together. Are you really ready for it? Sometimes I wonder whether you’ve thought it through.”

“Wait. Wait, what? I don’t remember you saying any of this when I was actually making this decision.”

“Well, honestly, I kept hoping you’d see it on your own.”

“See what on my own?”

“What a colossal mistake this is.”

I jerked my head back and laughed. This had to be some kind of joke.

But Arthur took a deep breath. “She’s just—well. Look, I’m not trying to offend you. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. But Julia can be difficult, right? I know how it’s been with you guys. And I worry that without some space between you, some breathing room, she could drag you down into the morass with her.”

My hands were gripping the back of the desk chair. So hard that I thought the wood might splinter. “This is my girlfriend you’re talking about,” I finally said.

“I know. But I’ve known you a long time, Evan, and I’ve known her a long time, too. And she can just be so…well, self-pitying. You’ve seen what she’s like when she’s in a bad mood. And I know she’s had a hard time finding a job—”

“Oh, come on,” I snapped. “That is so petty. She’ll get a job.”

“Right, well, that’s not exactly the point. The point is whether it’s a good idea to be moving in with someone so self-centered.”

“You’re calling her self-centered?” I shouted.

He stared back at me. “Yes.”

“What the fuck is your problem?”

“I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t think it was for your own good.”

“Oh, well, in that case.”

Arthur sighed. “Forget it. Forget I said anything.”

I stood up and opened the door. “It’s late. I think you should go.”

The next morning, we managed to act like nothing happened. These would be the pictures printed and framed, to be looked at years later: graduation day, all of college reduced down to a single snapshot. Julia had her camera with her, and she made us pose together, two roommates with their arms slung around each other. Still best friends, four years later, amid a sea of black polyester robes fluttering in the May breeze.

My mind snapped back to the present. The glowing, blipping computer monitor in front of me, the hum of the lights overhead. Arthur on the other end of the line.

“Julia? Uh, no, she’s good. I don’t see that much of her. I’m barely ever home. But she seems to keep busy.”

“That’s good.”

There was a long pause. Arthur cleared his throat. “Well, they’re about to carve the turkey. I’d better get going.”

We hung up and promised, emptily, to talk again soon.

*  *  *

I had chalked it up to jealousy at the time. Arthur never warmed to Julia. When I was with her, I wasn’t with him. Simple as that. I suspected that they were too much alike. Not superficially, but underneath they had that same quality. A watchfulness, a gaze that never missed a thing. It was why I liked them both so much. They took me in whole without my needing to explain myself.

So that’s all it was, I told myself while Julia and I drove a rented U-Haul down I-95 to New York the day after graduation. Arthur’s words had been humming through my head since our fight. He was jealous. He thought I was picking her over him. Those nasty things he’d said—it was just envy. In our tiny new living room that first night in New York, I looked over at Julia. She had her hands on her hips, head cocked to one side, deciding where to hang the pictures. I felt such a rush of love at that moment, watching our new life become real. It wasn’t a fluke, the way I felt about her. We were meant to be.

But Arthur’s words were back again. Fresh and whole, like a submarine breaking through the surface. Had he been right all along? Self-centered. Self-pitying. Julia had an independent streak that I’d always liked, but since graduation, it had hardened into something else. A life so separate that I wasn’t even part of it.

Had I known it, too? Julia was flawed, like anyone else. Sometimes she could be selfish, it was true. But she had so much that transcended it. When things were good, the selfishness disappeared completely. And for most of our time together, that’s the way it was. I’d had glimpses of how it might be different. Our fights. The way she could snap like a sprung trap. One weekend sophomore year, when her friends from boarding school were visiting, I watched her turn into this other version of herself. They were catty and cruel, making fun of old classmates on Facebook, getting more vicious with each bottle of wine. “Look at her dress!” Julia shrieked, mouth stained red with drink. “God, she looks like a Russian prostitute.”

But those moods passed quickly. Mostly, college had been good to us. Julia’s arc bent toward a happier version of herself. Senior year, after we got back from our summer abroad and our visit to British Columbia, she was more comfortable and relaxed than I’d ever seen her. There was one night in particular that sealed it for me, that seemed like definitive proof of the kind of person Julia had become. A Saturday in early September, near the start of senior year.

“You sure it’s cool if I don’t go?” I said. Abby’s society was throwing a big party that night. A fancy one, with a dress code and bartenders. I sat on her bed as Julia was getting ready.

She caught my eye in the mirror. “Of course. You already had plans.”

“It’s just with the guys. I could cancel.”

“I don’t mind. Hey, how do I look?”

She spun in her dress and heels. I smiled. She didn’t even need me to say it.

But later that night, when I was hanging out at the hockey house, plans shifted. One of our teammates was also in Abby’s society, and he texted me and some of the other guys around 11:00 p.m., begging us to come to his rescue at the party. It was a question of loyalty; we couldn’t leave a teammate twisting in the wind like that. When we arrived, ten minutes later, I saw what the problem was. This was one of those parties where the main form of interaction was conversation. The lights were too bright, the music too quiet, the whole vibe too stiff. He stood in a corner, eyes wide and terrified. Making friends with new people, especially nonathletes, was not his strong suit. The poor guy. When he saw us, he practically shouted “Thank God.”

A few heads turned at his outburst. Julia was one of them. I felt immediately guilty. So I hadn’t been willing to come to this party for her, but I had been willing to come for my friend? We lumbered in like a bunch of cavemen. I was still wearing a baseball hat and hadn’t shaved in more than a week. There was no way this wasn’t embarrassing for her. She spotted me and walked quickly across the room. I braced for impact. I deserved whatever I was about to get.

But instead she threw her arms around me. “Thank God is right,” she whispered. She turned to my teammate and added, “I am so glad you told them to come.”

“You’re not mad?”

“Why would I be mad? This party is dead. You just saved my life. Come on, let’s get a drink.”

Julia got the bartender to pour a dozen shots of whiskey. She raised her glass for the first toast. “To bringing home that championship,” she said, and everyone cheered. One of my teammates nudged me after Julia threw her shot back without a grimace. “She’s a keeper, man.”

It was one of those long, meandering nights, the best kind, when you don’t need a plan. By senior year, all of us finally understood that we did, in fact, belong there; that we were no longer faking it. We ended the night, many hours later, lying in Julia’s bed in the darkness.

“I’m so happy,” she said. “Evan. I want you to know that.”

“I’m happy, too.”

She was quiet for a while. Then her hand drifted over, her fingers intertwining with mine. “I’m just so glad we made it. You know?”

I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. “I love you, Jules.”

“Mmm,” she said, yawning, curling up in sleepiness. “See? You always know exactly what to say.”

This was the Julia I loved the most, the person whose love meant more for having been tested, for having endured. But in the months between graduation and late fall, the story had changed. The arc I’d seen over the previous four years had vanished. Her outlying behavior became the new normal. She was spikier, crueler. Harder in every way. I considered the question from different angles. Had something happened in the world, an outside shift that set her in a new direction? Or was it inevitable, an uncovering of the person she’d always been? Maybe it wasn’t that her flaws were balanced out by the good. Maybe it was that the flaws were merely one side of a two-sided coin. What made a person good also made a person bad. Confidence could easily become arrogance. A sense of humor was only ever a few rungs away from cruelty.

*  *  *

Things were back to normal by late afternoon. E-mails started flooding in, and my BlackBerry resumed its regular buzzing. Michael told me he wanted to review the WestCorp numbers first thing the following morning.

As the sky darkened and night fell, I felt better. It was weird, actually. It was the opposite of that sick Sunday night dread I’d sometimes felt in college, the looming threat of classes in the morning. I was already thinking happily about the next day, about the office coming alive again with the sounds of work, the way it was supposed to be. I had told Julia about my bonus earlier that week, but I hadn’t told anyone else. I’d stuffed the money into my sock drawer. I liked the idea of it tucked away, secret proof. On the walk home, I decided to stop for a drink. Maybe I ought to celebrate. It was Thanksgiving night, and Michael was right, after all. This was a historic deal. I ought to take a moment to savor it.

It was a cold, clear night. Along Central Park South, I passed families bundled up inside horse-drawn carriages, the hooves clopping loudly on the pavement. Christmas lights laced the awnings along the street. I saw the Plaza Hotel up ahead. I’d been to the Oak Bar once before, with Julia. We came into the city one weekend senior year to have dinner with her parents. We’d gone for a drink at the Oak Bar afterward, then caught the last train back to New Haven. At that hour, 5th Avenue had been so peaceful, just the two of us for blocks at a time as we walked down to Grand Central, the passing whoosh of a street sweeper and the silent drift of steam from an open manhole.

When I walked in, the bar looked just as I remembered—dark wood and leather and a soft glow from the chandeliers. I ordered a martini, and it slid down my throat, cold and bracing and wet. I ordered a second one. The bar was half full, a murmur of conversation and clinking ice cubes occasionally punctuated by the cocktail shaker. There was a beautiful foreign-looking couple at a table, the woman’s neck dripping with diamonds. Another young woman in a black dress, a few stools down, glancing nervously at the door. A mother and father and two little boys, the parents drinking their nightcaps while the boys munched on peanuts. It was comforting, being alone in a room with other people. A floating island where we’d all happened to seek refuge in this eerily quiet city.

The door swung open, letting in the cold. A man in a dark coat and cream-colored scarf came in, peeled off his leather gloves, and ran a hand through his hair. He turned, and I felt a pulse of recognition ripple up my spine. I knew him from somewhere. He scanned the room, and his eyes landed on me.

He recognized me, too. He smiled and strode over.

“Hey—it’s Evan, right? Evan Peck?” He extended his hand.

“Yeah. Hi.” I squinted. “God, I’m sorry, you’re so familiar…”

“Hey, don’t sweat it. Adam McCard. We met a few times through Julia.”

Of course. That grin, the too-strong aftershave.

“Right. Good to see you, man.”

“You, too. You’re in the city these days?”

“Yup. Yeah, Julia and I live together.”

“Oh, no shit. You two stay in town for the holiday?”

“Just me. I couldn’t really get away from work.”

“So you wind up here on Thanksgiving night. Hey, things could be worse.” He laughed, showing teeth like white coins. There was something different about him. The few times I’d met Adam in college, he’d always looked past me. Always scanning the room for something else. But that night his eyes were fixed directly on mine.

“So where do you work?” he said.

“I’m in finance. Spire Management—a hedge fund, actually.”

“Wow. They’re huge. You liking it there?”

“Yeah, I am.”

“Rough year to start a career in finance.”

“We’ve been lucky. No layoffs, knock wood.”

“Amen. What are you working on over there?”

The bartender swooped over. “Another martini, sir?” I shook my head and asked for the check. When I turned back, Adam was still staring. “Oh, the usual stuff,” I said.

“You know,” Adam said, lowering his voice, “I saw that Spire’s taking a big position on some lumber company up in Canada. Some really ballsy play. You work on that?”

Part of me wanted to take credit for it, just to shut Adam up. Yes, I did, and what the hell have you done lately? But I was skittish about saying too much. The deal was public news, but it was habit by then, keeping it close to the chest, need-to-know. “Not really,” I said lightly. “But what about you? I’ve seen your articles. They’re good.”

He stared for a beat longer. Then, suddenly, the old Adam was back. His gaze slackened and his eyes surfed across the room. “Thanks,” he said in an empty tone. “Glad you’re a fan. Hey, great running into you. I’d better go join my date.”

The woman in the black dress at the bar lit up with a smile at Adam. “See you around,” Adam said to me. He slid on the stool next to the woman and pulled her in for a long kiss. She had transformed from her nervous self and was suddenly playful as a kitten, kissing his neck and snuggling against him. Adam snapped his fingers at the bartender. I drained the last of my martini and stood up to leave, feeling slightly sick.