‘One more circuit and we’re done,’ Jeff said, idly flexing a bicep in the mirror as I began yet another set of weighted lunges. I suppressed the urge to thwack him over the head with a kettlebell.
Workout done, shower taken and personage assembled, I made my way to the subway, wheeled suitcase dragging noisily behind. The city had stretched its limbs and was fully awake now, and I had to shoulder through a crowd lined up outside Birdbath Bakery, all desperate to get their hands on a freshly baked cronut despite the fact that no one in the city ate gluten anymore (except me). I dodged a woman struggling to free her stiletto from a subway grate, a vagrant pushing a shopping cart full of dismembered mannequins and a squall of hungover-looking college students before descending into Second Avenue station.
The subway was, as ever, a minefield of smells and sounds and strangers’ limbs. I normally avoided the subway – the BlueFly office was within walking distance – but there was no way I could walk the thirty-plus blocks across town to Penn Station, and a cab would take twice as long to snake its way through the morning traffic snarls. I pushed my way onto a busy F train, enraging everyone in the vicinity by having a suitcase with me during rush hour, and let my face arrange itself into its Don’t Fuck With Me expression (a mix of boredom, stand-offishness and vague menace). I found a (hopefully) non-living place to hold on, and spent the next twenty minutes scrolling through my iPhone – thirteen new emails had come in during my gym session – and trying to ignore the truly appalling stench coming from the man next to me. I stole a glance at him: he looked normal, handsome even – fortyish, with an appealing shock of salt and pepper hair and wearing a good suit – but he smelled like he’d rolled around in a mix of garlic and wet dog hair.
I looked at him again, more closely this time. There was something familiar about him … maybe I’d worked with him before? Did he go to my gym? And then I remembered: I’d swapped a few messages with him on Ok Cupid the month before. We’d even arranged a date, but I’d had to cancel at the last minute because of a work emergency. I felt his eyes on me and stared hard at my phone. Please don’t recognize me, I prayed silently. Please, garbage man, leave me in peace.
‘THIRTY-FOURTH STREET, HERALD SQUARE!’ The conductor’s voice crackled across the loudspeaker and I pushed my way through the door and onto the platform, leaving a wake of disgruntled tsks as I pulled my suitcase off behind me. The doors started to close and garbage man locked eyes with me, a look of recognition written across his face. I looked away and the doors clanged shut behind me, whizzing him up to 42nd Street. I smiled to myself as I lugged the suitcase up the stairs: another tiny victory won.
I emerged from the station and began my cross-town journey on foot. The heat of the summer had started to press down on New York like a thumb, and by the time I walked into Penn Station, sweat had begun to trickle down my back.
‘Can I interest you in free highlights? Our brand-new salon has just opened …’ ‘Free sample of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chocolate! The first chocolate substitute made entirely of beetroot!’ ‘Half-price tickets to the Knicks!’ I hustled my way past the tourists and ticket touts and promoters pressing leaflets into any passing hand. There was a time when I would have taken the handsome man up on his offer of a free haircut, but experience had taught me the hard way that by ‘new salon’ he meant a back-alley joint in Chinatown where they would bleach my hair orange and charge me $110 to fix it. That is the thing about New York: its beautiful, maddening essence. No one gets anything for free here. You have to work for it.
I hurried down the long, curved white corridor, flying past Nathan’s and the souvenir stands and the bookshop stacked high with the latest pulpy bestseller. The floors were now scattered with the detritus of the morning commute: splashes of coffee splattered on the polished concrete, along with flimsy paper bags that had held now-eaten croissants and egg sandwiches, an abandoned sports section lying limply on a nearby bench. The rush had ended, and an echoey calm had fallen on the station. I saw my train listed on the board – the 6929 to Millburn – and headed towards the platform. I was early, so I stopped at a bagel cart on the way and ordered a wholewheat bagel (cream cheese on the side) and a coffee (black).
I was furiously blowing on the scalding coffee when something caught my eye: staring out at me from the magazine rack was none other than my ex-boyfriend, his face smiling smugly out from the cover of TechCrunch magazine. ‘Can Ethan Bailey Save the World?’ the headline asked, as if specifically designed to annoy me. ‘I’m guessing not,’ I muttered as I pulled a copy from the rack and slapped it down on the counter.
‘Four dollars,’ said the unsmiling man, hand outstretched. I peeled off the bills and shoved the magazine deep into my bag, where I could feel it throbbing, and then headed off to catch my train.
The Morris and Essex line is a miniature socio-economic tour of the Greater New York area. I stared out of the window as we chuntered through Chelsea, speeding past the boutique shops and expensive cocktail bars, out past the High Line and over the Hudson River into New Jersey. Through Hoboken and into a sea of squat industrial parks dotted with billboards advertising strip clubs and loan sharks and auto-body shops until the first ad for West Elm appeared and you knew you were out in the suburbs.
I finished off the last bit of bagel and pulled the magazine out of my bag, holding it gingerly between thumb and forefinger as though it might be radioactive. Which it sort of was, at least to me. The coffee I’d gulped down made an unwelcome reappearance in my oesophagus. I leaned in and inspected the photograph. He hadn’t changed at all. If anything, he was now better looking. He had the confident sheen of wealth shining out of every pore, and had obviously used some of his apparently now-vast fortune to have his teeth straightened and whitened. His dark hair was slightly shorter, but still curled around his temples, and his eyes were the same greenish-gold I remembered. Yes, it was definitely him: a beacon of success, heralded the world over as the designer of a generation, and presumably described as one of the city’s most eligible bachelors somewhere in the article. At least he was still a bachelor the last time I’d allowed myself to Google him (once every two months, no more) following his split from some leggy fashion editor.
I skimmed the article, which contained the word ‘genius’ so many times I seriously considered sending a thesaurus to the sub-editor, and allowed myself to stare at the accompanying photographs for exactly four minutes. There he was with the late Steve Jobs, arm tossed jovially around his shoulder as they grinned out at the camera in matching turtlenecks. Now he was at the Met gala, aforementioned leggy fashion editor wrapped around him like a baby monkey on a tree branch. And finally, there was a picture of him with his business partner, arms slung around each other’s shoulders and smiling at each other as if they both couldn’t believe their luck.
I couldn’t believe it, either. If you had told me ten years ago that Ethan would end up designing one of the most used and best loved apps of all time, I would have laughed in your face. Actually, first I would have asked what an app was, and then I would have laughed in your face.
I closed the magazine and shoved it back in my bag. You know that feeling when you put coin after coin into a slot machine without winning a single penny, only to walk away and watch the next person who drops a quarter in win the jackpot? That was the feeling that I had been living with for the past seven years, ever since Ethan’s face appeared in Wired in an article entitled ‘Rising Stars’. I drank half a bottle of vodka with Jess that night, eventually setting fire to the magazine and placing it in a garbage can in what Jess had promised would be a ‘cleansing ritual’, but which ended up just melting the (plastic) garbage can to the living-room carpet and resulted in a serious deduction from our security deposit.
The trees whizzed by as the train sped deeper into New Jersey. I closed my eyes and leaned against the window, head knocking rhythmically against the pane as the train clicked over the tracks. Tomorrow, I would see him again – the first time
in nearly ten years. What could I possibly say to him? Would he even talk to me? What if he still had feelings for me? Or, worse, what if he didn’t? I swatted the thought from my mind like an errant fly. The man opposite caught my eye and gave me a friendly smile. He was dressed in a suit, but the edges of his cuffs were frayed and his collar slightly yellowed, and he had the harried look of a man teetering on the brink. I looked back at the whizzing trees, which were thinning slowly and being replaced by identikit clapboard houses and the occasional strip mall. What if I still loved him after all this time? What the hell was I supposed to do then?
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published 2014
Copyright © Melissa Pimentel, 2014
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-1-405-91828-2
Age, Sex, Location Page 31