“Why not what?”
“Why not find out?”
I sit back down and stare at her. This is absolutely not the direction I thought this conversation would go. She is, of course, absolutely correct that I wanted her to talk some sense into me, because surely it’s not only thesaferoption but also theonlyoption.
“It’s not impossible for you to find out who he is,” she continues undeterred, ignoring my silence. “It’s not impossible for you to go to London and ask him out for a drink. It’s not impossible for you to suggest a phone call or some other way to have a conversation offline. I’m wondering whyyoubelieve it’s impossible. Why don’t you stand up for yourself and take more responsibility for your own life? If you think you’re in love with someone, don’t you owe it to yourself to at least ask the question?”
I stand up and pace again. Ari doesn’t say anything else. She’s played her move, and I can tell she’s fairly certain she has me in a checkmate anyway, no matter how long I try to think of a way out.
But as I pace around this sparse office, focused on the carpet, avoiding picking at my jacket again, my own words to J come back to me.You absolutely deserve more than feeling lonely.Why am I so quick to tell others to stand up for themselves but not myself?
“Okay,” I say slowly.
“‘Okay’?”
I’m amused by her surprise—she thought (or knew) her advice was right, but I don’t think she expected me to agree with her without pushback. On the contrary, Ari is always encouraging me to be braver, and I’m always giving her excuses for why it’s not practical right now.
But I can be braver. I need to be braver.
“Okay,” I reiterate, as though I need to say it again to make it stick. “I’ll really give that some thought.”
And after everything today, I think I’m going to have to. Maybe it’s time for me to stand up too.
Chapter 3
After meeting with Ari, I normally just walk down University Place until I reach my building. I’m lucky that she’s only five minutes from me—as close as can be in a city as large as New York.
But today I need a longer walk. I need to breathe out that conversation.
I take a loop around Washington Square Park, walking the perimeter and watching the cornucopia of city life inside: lounging students, shrieking kids playing, smokers shooting the breeze, skateboarders practicing, tourists snapping photos in the shadow of the famous arch. There’s pure early-summer bliss emanating from behind it as the sun starts to dip and the water of the giant fountain catches the light.
The conversation keeps replaying in my mind, no matter how hard I try to distract myself. It’s one thing to decide you’re in a rut and need to do something about it. It’s another thing to know what actuallytodo.
For as easy as Ari made all her suggestions sound, they’re not exactly easy forme. It’s been hard enough in recent years to take her advice about my family and stop trying to contain my feelings through just the sheer will of ignoring. Actively knowing what I want and going after it has been Ari’s yearslong project for me. But can she really expect me to apply that to a man I’ve never even met?
Happily, though, my train of thought is interrupted by one of my favorite sights as I walk back toward home. Three of my neighbors are standing in front of our building, chitchatting.
There’s nothing inherently special about our building from the outside. It’s ten stories tall and made of brick and concrete, and it was built at the turn of the twentieth century as a printing factory. In the seventies, a group of people bought the abandoned space and turned it into a co-op apartment building. If you can imagine the kind of people who wanted to live in Greenwich Village, amid the dueling crime and bohemia of that era, that’s the majority of my now–senior citizen neighbors.
And because they were all friendly with each other, very few of them ever left; as a result, most of the original tenants (that are still alive) remain here. So I’m surrounded by either elderly badasses or young professionals like me, and there’s no one in between.
I bought my little top-floor studio apartment from a woman who was an accomplished portraitist (she’d even had a retrospective at the Whitney in recent years) and who’d said she always loved the light that streamed in from the northern view. She was leaving in her nineties to finally move in with her “kids.” To say she was a character would be an understatement. And the few people my age in the building all have similar stories to mine.
I’ve been here for five years now, and I can’t imagine living anywhere other than my little slice of New York.
Meryl kneels on the sidewalk with her face up against Kwan’s border collie, Lucy. Meryl’s usual billowing skirt tiers out across the ground like a cupcake, and she’s howling with laughter as Lucy licks her trademark small, circular purple glasses. Tom—Meryl’s adoring husband—and Kwan are barely paying attention, because nothing about Meryl’s behavior is out of place. As I get closer, I realize they’re dissecting some minutiae from the semiannual neighborhood Build the Block meeting they always insist on going to.
“... Maureen always wants to act like trash collection isn’t a public safety concern, but when the bags aren’t tied up, it can really wreak havoc,” Tom is saying.
“And it’s bad for the dogs!” Kwan points out.
“Absolutely right. Absolutely,” Tom concurs, shaking his head with as much condemnation as you’d expect for a triple homicide.
“Hey, guys,” I say, sidling up to the conversation. All three of them immediately smile and start talking at me at once. Meryl even stands up and brushes herself off so she can get right in my face, as she always seems partial to doing. She shushes Tom’s and Kwan’s hellos to get her own word in edgewise.
“Hi, sweetie. How’s the cheaters, snoozefests, and soon-to-be divorcées?”
I purse my lips to stop myself from laughing. She always describes my clients with an ever-expanding disastrous vocabulary, as though anyone in marriage or relationship counseling is automatically a train wreck.
