She hoped whoever lived there now felt the Elle-Rae ghost in the giggling of the pipes, or perhaps in loopy heart drawings that reappeared in the steamy bathroom mirror no matter how many times the glass was scrubbed.
More pedestrians pushed by. Ellen linked her arm through Rae’s, and they kept walking, setting a brisk pace while the guys lagged back in a dutiful attempt to bond.
“Stu is even greater than I remembered,” Ellen said. There was no risk of being overheard thanks to the urban mash-up of horns, garbage trucks, construction cranes, and helicopter traffic.
“So great,” Rae agreed.
They’d spent most of the weekend double dating, though she and Stu had opted to stay in a hotel, where they’d taken off the bathrobes nearly as fast as they’d put them on.
“He’s easygoing,” Ellen went on, “but still has a strong personality. Very good balance for you. Do youeverfight?”
“I picked a fight last week about how we never fight,” Rae said. “Does that count?”
Ellen pinched Rae’s arm. “Let yourself be happy.”
“I know,” she said, as they passed their old coffee shop on the corner of Perry and Bleeker. “I’ve decided I value steady emotional cash flows over the highs and lows of risky investments.”
“Very mature of you.”
“Well, I am twenty-nine now,” Rae said, her tongue still getting used to the number. According to the fertility data, 90 percent of her eggs were now dead. The stat hung over her head, polluting her birthday with a sense of dread.
“I can feel a proposal coming soon,” Ellen said. “And I’m never wrong about these things.”
Rae felt something in her stomach that she figured must be butterflies. “Don’t be one of those people,” she said, “who gets marriedand then starts evangelizing the whole world that they should get married too.”
“Not the whole world,” Ellen said. “Just you and Stu.”
“We’ll see,” Rae said, not wanting to divulge too much to Ellen since the guys weren’t far away, or at least that was how she chose to explain her secrecy, a more palatable reason than the truthful alternative, which was just how much she and Ellen had grown apart after her marriage and Rae’s move.
Privately, Rae had decided she’d only need to date Stu a year before getting engaged.
It was a significantly condensed timeline, but she and Stu went back so far that she felt fully confident in her vetting process. His roots were so entwined with her own that she knew, with a kind of calm she hadn’t thought possible after watching her parents’ marriage snap apart, that she wasn’t going to uncover any surprises or skeletons in Stu’s closet. And she was old enough now, too, that she didn’t need as much time to make up her mind.
Ellen beamed triumphantly, like she’d heard all of the words Rae had just thought to herself, and said, “Remember all those nights we stumbled out of cabs at this corner at twoA.M., crying our eyes out because some guy didn’t text us back?”
“Us, overdramatic about guys?” Rae said with mock incredulity. “Never.”
Ellen laughed, flinging the sound freely so that it soared above the millions of competing noises. “The universe had a plan the whole time.”
“Maybe it did,” Rae said, as her feet led her along the cracked sidewalk toward Washington Square Park, where she figured they could sit on a bench and rest for a while. “Maybe it did.”
“Nice job in there,” Rae’s boss told her one Thursday morning in early November as they rode an empty elevator down from a three-storyoffice building in downtown Indy. “You really have a knack for telling the story of corporate synergies. I think we’ll win that deal no question.”
Rae had just finished her first solo-ish acquisition pitch, with her boss there to add the stamp of middle-aged masculinity that clients seemed to correlate with credibility.
“Thanks,” Rae said, feeling crunched because her storytelling skills were being wasted on such dry plots, but also feeling pumped up by her accomplishment and the independence she was earning.
“And you hardly even used any numbers from the projection model,” he said.
Rae fought the urge to apologize.
“That was a compliment,” her boss clarified as the elevator doors opened and he let her out first. “Can’t tell you how many guys I’ve seen read from their spreadsheets and completely miss the body language in the room.”
“I don’t bow down to decimal points,” Rae said with a grin. She’d been letting her personality seep out more at work recently, appreciating the more casual vibe of Midwest corporate life. And unlike the guys back in Manhattan, she trusted her current boss in Indy wouldn’t dismiss her as a ditzy blond if she let out a bubbly laugh.
Her boss chuckled appreciatively, a deep, resonant sound that Rae found herself envying. “You’ll be taking over for me soon enough,” he said.
“Maybe one day,” Rae said, trying not to analyze how “one day” had gone from meaningone dayshe’d be a free-spirit poet whose words changed the world, one soul at a time, toone dayshe’d be a midlevel banker whose work propagated capitalism’s status quo.
