We’d made it through security and were headed to the gate. “Sure,” I said. “I just get anxious about flying.”
He seemed satisfied with this answer. “Mom is scared of flying, too.” He looked at me and smiled.
“What are you smiling about?”
“Nothing. You look really handsome.”
And then I asked—I couldn’t help it—“You think I’m handsome?”
“Duh.” He laughed and looked away, back at his phone. “What are you, stupid?”
I once read a study that said unhappiness sprang from the gap between expectations and reality. The researchers focusedon work and found that academia was among the unhappiest professions. The authors attributed this to the fact that the life we imagined as eager young graduate students—high on critical theory and the freedom from a nine-to-five status quo—was so far from the truth of what the job entailed. The article concluded that we might be happier if instead we expected the career of a midlevel accountant.
I remember thinking that summer, after my first year—I worked so many years for this; forthis? I fantasized about quitting, but had no idea what else I could do. My dread grew as a dull ache inside me, thinking of a lifetime spent in this relentless rotation of weeks and semesters, of meetings and reviews, conferences and publications. Driving my same car to the same lot, to walk the same path to the same building to sit in the same office. Is this all the promise my future contained? What a cruelty, to have to work to live.
I often go back to that night before the trip, confiding in Tyler about Cassie. This is the memory of Tyler to which I most regularly return. I can lose myself in the sweetness of its recollection. How it felt to confess, the way he offered his body to be held like a child, when it was him holding me. And other times, I obsess over it, searching out some detail I missed, desperate for knowledge I will never have. Wondering what he was thinking as he listened to me. Wondering what he already knew that night, what he had already decided. I can make myself crazy trying to figure out what of that night was real—whether it was Tyler at his most loving or his most traitorous. Sometimes, I’m not sure there’s a difference.
But what I do know is that, that second year, when Tyler appeared, the dread and despair that had haunted me my entire life, and which Sawyer had only compounded, began to fade,replaced by something like hope. Hope that my life could be more than I’d thought. And this I can say with certainty: Those few days with Tyler in New York were the happiest of my adult life. They were perhaps the happiest of my entire life, or least since Cassie left us. I had not been back to New York since coming to Sawyer. The moment the city came into view from the cab, it dazzled all over again, as if it were my first visit, too. The ambition of it: its towers spiraling into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, its avenues stretching for miles, bending beyond sight. Tyler’s awe only amplified my own. I loved watching him take it in and, even more than that, I loved being the one who had brought him to the city. I’d had moments of rabid jealousy; his comfort in bed was something clearly earned, and the thought that he’d had sex without me could make me feel crazed, scraped out. I desired Tyler with an unsettling depth and persistence. But this, introducing him to New York, being with him the first time he walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, an icy wind leaving us alone at the crest; giving in to his insistence and taking him to Times Square, the glow of his eyes competing with the neon blast overhead, these firsts—no one could claim these but me.
We ate dim sum in Chinatown, stuffing our faces with dish after dish, sweet meats and bitter, soothing greens, staying in the restaurant until close. We wove the streets of Williamsburg, jockeying with frat boys and foreign tourists to stare across the feral waters of the East River at Manhattan, a mountain of glass and steel pushing itself to the very edge of the island. We went to my favorite bar, near Tompkins Square Park. I had discovered it on my first night in the city. A tiny chamber with black booths bathed in pink light, Patti and Nina and Nico crooning with longing as we bent over drinks gleaming and dark. Back at the hotel, wechristened the room with our fucking, each surface and every corner an invitation to reach farther, push harder. As if the room itself begged us to fill it.
Our last afternoon, before heading to LaGuardia—he would fly to Charlotte and I back to Ohio—we visited the Met. We strolled through an exhibit of early fashion photography, the images growing sharper, both more complete and more abstract as the decades unfolded across the warren of rooms. Back downstairs, I led us past the throngs to my favorite part: ancient Egypt. Room upon room of pilfered goods, benevolent mummies greeting us with their hallowed silence. A glass case displayed tiny scarabs and we sought out the smallest among them to marvel that human hands could make something of such beauty, that could survive so long, defying time itself, to arrive in a future terrifying and unknown. At the end of the corridors, we found the temple, disassembled and rebuilt here, stone by stone. Outside the glass walls of the room, the bare trees of Central Park bowed over empty paths. We shared the space with few others, or maybe there were more and my memory has subtracted them. It felt as if we were alone, a hush stilling the room. We walked the perimeter of the temple, the path of water, the low afternoon sun glinting at us, leading us to the gate. I took Tyler’s hand and held it in my own, marveling that a gesture so small could suffuse me with such expansive joy. It felt like everything was mine, all of it belonged to me: this city, this day, this museum, this room, this light, soft and yellow and breaking apart, the padding sound of our steps on the rose-gray stones of the floor, the sand-colored stones of the temple’s gate, this boy, his hand in mine—it was mine, just for me: a universe of wanting, answered.
PART II
CHAPTER 10
Returning from New York, I saw my apartment for what it was: half-furnished, incomplete, a holding pattern in the shape of a few small rooms. I stood between the thin walls of its cramped kitchen and suddenly understood: the problem was Sawyer. In the bloodless air of the school and town, I was shrinking, fading away.
And then from this realization, a fantasy of another life bloomed. I would get a new job. If not in New York, in some other city, on one coast or the other, a place that met you with something unexpected, that kept you moving. Somewhere not hemmed in all sides by the rusted-out sprawl of the US collapsing on itself. And I wanted this with Tyler, what we’d had on the trip, something public and known. This alternate life of happiness, pleasure, and surprise felt not only possible, but like it had been there all along, just waiting for me to open my eyes.
When we’d left each other at LaGuardia, I waited with my luggage and watched Tyler weave through the security line toward the checkpoint. I followed the arc of his shoulders until he disappeared into the crowds; a murky dread that I might never see him again uncoiled within me. But now I realized the break was a gift. Six weeks to devote to my book. This project, which had felt like a leaden weight around my neck, now, I could see, was the key. I would finish the book, I would go on the job market, and Tyler and I would be free.
I rearranged my living room, clearing space to work—even my office on campus had been constraining me; who could think in that place? I piled towers of reference books against one wall and against another stacked my research documents, one for each chapter. I read through everything I had written up to that point: lectures and chapter fragments, notes squeezed in the margins of photocopies, flashes of insight scrawled across manila folders. Above the kitchen table—I had hauled it into the living room, it was now my desk—I tacked sheets of yellow legal paper, across which I worked out a map of the project: black ink for what I already had, green for what was missing. I had done more over the past years than I realized.
I dove in, swept up in the currents of the project. I felt like a first-year graduate student again, the thrill of thinking through writing, of discovering an idea as you were putting it down in words. The anxiety that had greeted me every morning for years, my loyal and persistent companion, gave way to a kind of electrified anticipation: nerves, raw-edged, alert and ready. I’d wake up and leap right from bed and by the time the coffee was ready, I was already deep in the work.
Tyler and I slipped into an easy groove without naming it, texting each night, and only at night. This granted me working hours free of distraction, but with something to look forward to, a promise at day’s end. I would sink into the warm, cushiony bubble of our exchanges in satisfied exhaustion, worn out but not weary, grinning at his daily reports. Updates on high school friends, a story about his father setting an oven mitt on fire, his mother yelling as she doused the flames. He sent photos, close-ups of his face, blasted with light from a bedside lamp, goofy and unaware, as if he had surprised himself. He asked about the book always with the samequestion:How were your murderers today?I sent thoughts on a letter from the archives, a grisly detail I’d uncovered in a coroner’s report. I told him my ambition—to have a draft, rough but complete, by the end of break. But I didn’t tell him why—that I was working toward our escape. I would save that for his return. After we signed off for the night, although it was late and the next day would begin early, I would stay awake a while longer, basking in the feeling of his company.
These weeks of work experienced just one interruption, once a day. An intrusion I tried to hold off, but always, at some point, it pushed through. Sometimes it happened without my realizing. I would find myself not at the table but standing in my bedroom, my hand holding my phone, which I hid in there during my working hours. The new phone. Every time, the same result: still no word from Safie. We’d had no contact since the Walton Walk. I would steady myself and start to compose a message—I had been an unforgivable asshole; it was on me to reach out—but everything sounded trite, insincere. I would vow to write later that night, with a clearer head not muddled by my manuscript. I just needed to get through this day. The weeks wore on and as the gap of communication widened, it felt even harder to imagine what to say: The deepening silence demanded more words to fill it. Maybe the break was good for us; Safie just needed some space. We would reunite when the semester started, me unburdened and ready to be a better friend. We would sort things out. We always did.
I also set the next steps of my plan in motion. A few years earlier, I’d met an editor from a university press who was excited about the project. I tracked down her email and wrote.I am not sure youremember me from the conference. We talked at the reception and somehow got into a long conversation about Tana French and reality TV. But I have made good progress on the book and would be eager to connect.I worried that too much time had passed, that I’d missed my opportunity, but she responded the next day.Of course I remember. I’m so glad you reached out. Actually just last week I heard this story about a serial killer and thought of you. Ha, you must get that a lot!We decided I would spend the semester revising and send her the manuscript by the end of the spring. With all going well, I would enter the fall job-hunting season with a book contract in hand—it was an ambitious plan, but doable.
And by the Saturday before classes resumed, I had done it: a draft of the entire thing. It was a mess, of course, but it was there, it was real, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. I was one step closer to freedom.
I spent the rest of the day getting ready for Tyler’s return. Table moved back to the kitchen, books tucked neatly on shelves. I took everything down from the wall. Alongside the map of the project—it had grown dense and convoluted over the weeks, the scratch of my handwriting almost illegible—I had tacked up grainy printouts, photos of my murderers, childhood portraits and mugshots. The blank wall glared, naked without them. I should get some art or hang up a poster, I thought, like a normal person.
Late in the afternoon, he called.
“Hello,” I said. “You’re back.”
“I’m back.” He raised his voice over a din of music and pitched conversation. “How are you?”
“Good. Great.” More noise, the smack of something crashing to the ground. “What’s going on over there?”
“Sorry, it’s crazy in the dorms. Everyone is amped about being back. Hold on.” Shouts, a door banging shut, and then quiet. “That’s better.”
“Where did you go?”
