Due Diligence
When Lili shoves her apartment door open, putting the strange car ride out of her mind, she hears Jackie humming in the living
room. Her roommate’s running shoes are discarded in the entryway. Lili smells coffee as she walks down the hall.
She frowns. Their coffee table is covered in boxes of bagels: plain, sesame, poppy seed, everything. Flat lays of smoked salmon,
rings of red onion, capers, whitefish. Discarded Russ her friends know she likes rough
sex, they don’t need to know more. “Some sense of, like, relief. Like I can clear my mind, for a little bit.”
“Sounds like you should keep him.”
Lili shakes her head. “Catch and release.”
“Whatever you say.” Jackie rolls her eyes but nestles closer into Lili, taking another big bite of bagel. Lili feels her heart
soften with affection: the fond familiarity of quiet mornings recovering together after nights out. “Have you decided if you’re
going to visit home yet?”
She stiffens. The bite of reality comes back; she had forgotten the cause of last night’s spiral for a moment. She needs to
respond to Jane, feign breezy acceptance of her rejection. “No, I’m going to stick around. Focus on my thesis. And there’s
a lot going on with the farm’s expansion this summer.”
Jackie makes a contented hum of agreement. “All the better—summer in the city is unbeatable. We’ve got that farm trip upstate,
plus Amina’s gallery show is coming up! Next week should be chill for me with work, only one shoot—oh, and my parents invited
me over for dinner, they asked if you’d like to come? My mom’s on a new macrobiotic kick, so I’m thinking . . .”
As Jackie suggests plans, Lili overhears laughter outside their window, people walking dogs and pushing strollers, the distant
roar of the M train as it heads up the Williamsburg Bridge, Citi Bike bells ringing.
Lili has firm ideas about ownership: the exploitation inherent in private property; the way ownership reduces the world to
the primacy of profit over people. There’s something she tries to form into regret, but is much closer in shape to yearning,
straining through her as she distantly listens to Jackie. As she thinks of, I can do whatever I want to you, and how much parts of her—buried, vulnerable parts—want that; despite her politics, despite her ambition.
To be owned, to be ruined. To struggle, and not be allowed to get away. To not have to ceaselessly try, a temporary surrender
of responsibility for her own choices, making up her life—instead, to only be fucked so hard her thoughts can’t exist, her
anxieties, and fears, and dreams, and pains, and hopes settling into nothing. Silt at the bottom of some vast, silent ocean.
Just her blood coursing, made animal again. Thoughts drained. Emotions simple.
All the rest—gentle brush of fingers against her bare skin, that possession mingling with softness, Let me take you on a date—she doesn’t want that; she can’t have that.
She can’t.
“Oh, that’s cool, economics—so, you’re like, what, getting an MBA?”
Lili winces. “Something like that,” she says, stirring the straw of her fresh drink. “Excuse me.”
She extricates herself from the bar and the twenty-something boy dressed in entirely too much Aimé Leon Dore. Looking over
the crowd, she tries to find her friends. Glancing down at her phone, she checks her messages, but no, nothing. Just the text
she sent almost two hours ago.
(9:43 p.m.) hey, i’m going to be downtown tonight
Arms wind around her waist, startling her.
“What’re you doing?” Amina asks, starting to sway against her to the music.
“Nothing!” she squeaks, shutting her phone screen. “Just checking the time.”
Amina groans. “No, the night is young. Come on, there was a hot gluten entrepreneur—I think he means baker—over there. He
was telling me all about his sourdough starter, I need backup.”
“Does Jamie know you’re suddenly interested in bread baking?”
“James knows I’m an individual of untold depths.”
“That’s a really gross way of telling me you two have started having anal sex.”
“It’s only fair, after you introduced us—”
“Don’t make me regret undergrad decisions!”
“Fine,” Amina laughs, “no bakers. Let’s dance?” Lili lets Amina pull her into the thick of dancing, telling herself she won’t
check her phone for at least another thirty minutes.
Later, sneaking outside, taking a break from the packed bar, she begs a cigarette off one of Amina’s gallery scene friends,
trying not to be attuned to the slightest phantom buzz of her phone. Disappointed when it’s just James texting the group chat,
announcing with great ceremony that he’s finally off work.
By the time she grabs coffee the next morning, walking through SoHo towards the J train as Jackie runs off to a shoot—her
roommate wearing sunglasses, grumbling about her ankle, still sore from when Amina had dropped her last night, trying to drunkenly
piggyback her up the stairs to her studio on Broome—Lili’s considering whether Aleksandr’s lost his phone. He’s older. People
of that generation sometimes don’t really get the concept of texting, live communication, rapid responses.
It’s been a week since she left his loft.
He could have—should have—done something by now. At least texted her?
His words loop in her mind while she’s on the train: Let me take you on a date. He’s a grown man. It’s clear what they’re doing—mutual gratification, no strings attached. Isn’t it?
By the time she’s sitting at home, fresh coffee made, laptop open to start revising, it’s getting absurd. Just her own stupid
text staring back at her. Lili throws her phone onto the couch, out of sight. She puts her earphones in, and makes herself
focus. If she has her phone off silent for once in her life—loud enough to catch an incoming text or call—it’s just to make
sure Jackie can reach her if she’s forgotten her keys.
It’s a long shoot day for Jackie, so Lili takes advantage of the quiet, running a final review. She’s run out of incense,
so she swipes some of Jackie’s sandalwood sticks, waving them around her desk, before stacking the faintly burning wood in
one of the rose quartz geodes clustered on her windowsill; focus, Lili.
Her draft is due Monday for Kerr’s first in-depth review.
Each revision takes her closer to graduation; to the future vulnerable with possibility, with all its yet unopened doors that an econ masters can get her through—the chance for real security, stability of her own making, control over what happens to her; the heady yet insidious combination of prestige and good money in some cushy private sector job if she really needed it, cashing in her morals, but also: the fragile potential of meaningful work that both does good in the world and takes care of her.
It’s a hope she doesn’t often let herself linger on.
So: one step, one revised page, at a time. It feels both so entirely out of reach and just about to slip out of her grasp.
In the afternoon, she absently gnaws on an apple, leaning against the kitchen counter and considering the current state of