He stared at me, and although no more words came out of his mouth, his eyes said it all.
What good are you then?
I tried to turn Manhattan into an adventure. I memorized the subway lines. Made lists of all the iconic places I would visit and Broadway shows I’d see when I wasn’t working or speed-reading the news or figuring out where to buy groceries or trying to troubleshoot my snail-like Wi-Fi. I’d even tried my hand at a game of chess in Union Square—and lost to a nine-year-old.
Still, being here didn’t feel like the adventure I’d imagined.
Thousands of people intersected and intertwined on the streets of Manhattan, yet it felt as though we lived our lives in parallel. On the subway, no one made eye contact. Instead, their glowing faces were consumed with unrequited love for their phones. And when they did look at me, watch out. A woman’s bag had its own seat during the packed rush hour, and when I asked if she would move it, she lifted baleful eyes from her phone and said, “Yeah, no.”
“Here we go,” the guy behind her muttered.
Everywhere I went I was pressured to buy things. Leon the Vietnam Vet—or so his signature T-shirt proclaimed—hawked his “mojo” hot dogs a block from my apartment, shouting at me, “The secret’s in the char.” A teen wearing long red basketball shorts and a white T-shirt blocked my passage at the top of the subway stairs, imploring me to buy designer sunglasses. But it was a frail Latina with mournful eyes who managed to sell me a snow cone from a pushcart the size of a mini-fridge, even though I didn’t like sweets.
On the subway ride home from work, I made the mistake of scrolling through Instagram. Teri had posted photos from our friend Mayi’s thirtieth birthday, a party on Dockweiler Beach. As I scanned the photos of a half dozen of my closest friends, their smiling faces lit by the glow of the bonfire with a fierce orange sun setting over the Pacific Ocean behind them, I felt the ache of loneliness.
I messaged Teri: Miss all of you.
CHAPTER THREE
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Eric was saying on the phone that night.
My stomach lurched. Something in the way he said those words, a tone that was probably undetectable to anyone else, made me think that whatever he was going to say next would be painful to hear.
Anxiety sped through my veins. I wanted to ask him point-blank: Are you coming to New York? But I was afraid of the answer. And as long as I didn’t ask the question, I could keep pretending. Hoping.
I heard a raspy edge in his voice, as if the words he was saying were causing him physical pain. “People are counting on me here. As much as I might want to, I can’t leave.”
Might want to. The tiny word had slipped into that sentence, changing everything. But maybe I’d misunderstood. “Maybe in a few weeks then? A month?”
He was silent for a long moment. “This isn’t something I wanted to say on the phone. But I think . . . I think it’s better to be honest rather than waiting for the right time for us to be together to talk about it. I can’t come to New York.”
His words sounded final.
“That’s not what I was hoping you’d say,” I said, mournful, defeated.
I wanted him to fight for me. To tell me all the reasons we had to be together. To propose the sacrifices we’d both make. But even as I wanted that from him, I knew this wasn’t his fault. It was mine. I was the one who’d left LA to take a job on the other side of the country. “I’ll come back to LA.”
His breath was heavy. “Would you really move back?”
And then it was my turn to be honest, and I didn’t know how to answer. As frustrating and difficult as Manhattan was, I couldn’t see running back to LA after less than a week here. Even though words were the tools of my trade, I suddenly didn’t know what to say. Maybe because I was discovering a hidden truth. A realization that loving someone didn’t always mean you could build a life with them.
“No, I can’t,” I said tentatively, then felt tears sting my eyes.
“I get it.” His voice broke. “People spend their whole lives searching, hoping to find work they’ll love. You’ve found it.”
I swallowed my tears. I knew where this was headed. “Let’s not make any decisions right now.”
“We can’t keep pretending that things are as they used to be, when we both know they aren’t.”
The silence on the phone was deafening, and my stomach gripped as it continued. Three seconds. Then four. I sat down on the couch, shaking. The room closed in on me.
“It sounds like you’ve already made up your mind,” I said.
“I’m only saying . . .”
I should’ve accepted the uncertainty of his words. I should have been patient. Instead, I rushed in. “Are you breaking up with me?”
He didn’t speak for a long while. And when he did, his voice shook. “I’m sorry . . .”
I let his words hang there. Then I felt my heart crumble, remembering all that I’d loved about him.
My lips suddenly felt thick, too heavy to form words. I imagined the future, and all I could see was black. “How did it come to this?” I asked, wiping tears from my eyes.
His voice sounded far away. “Kate, I’m so sorry . . .”
My whole body was numb.
Although the last place I wanted to be was the newsroom, the next day I threw myself into covering the last-ditch negotiations to avert a government shutdown. For a few moments throughout the day, the story offered a distraction from the breakup. But most of the time, I felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. A memory of us together would float up, and then my head was spinning. Stringing words together into a story seemed like a hopeless effort.
My reports throughout the day focused on a couple of senators who had stepped into a cloakroom on the Senate floor, frantically trying to map out a strategy on the phone with the White House chief of staff and the vice president.
The “national crime and justice” beat Andrew promised me was thrown on the back burner in favor of a story that could have been on House of Cards: quotes from anonymous insiders, dour assessments of odds, the drama and spectacle of procedural bickering, and the play-by-play of the rituals of political negotiation. If aliens had watched the last hour of ANC, they might have assumed that the entire human race was a shouting, arguing circus of anger and hate.
As I trudged back home in the stifling, muggy heat, the city amplified my agitated mood. A block from my apartment, a guy was sitting on a milk crate throwing crumbs at pigeons while a barrel-chested man in a wrinkled white T-shirt yelled at him, something about a taxi. The pigeon feeder kept rambling on about baseball. Meanwhile, everyone around them just kept walking, ignoring them.
At least Leon the Vietnam Vet was in a good mood. “Our mustard’s homemade,” he tried with a wide grin.
“No thanks. Dumplings tonight.”
I held up the still-warm bag from Bao Dumpling House, the place Stephanie swore was New York’s most hallowed haven for dumplings and dim sum.
“Good choice.”
When I got to my apartment, Raymond had taken over the steps again, this time smoking a cigar. If the sound of a crying baby could be converted to a scent, that was what his stogie smelled like. “No, you’re wrong about that,” he shouted into the phone. “Louis is gonna take care of it. Tomorrow.”