Chapter 5
The Friday after studying at the café with Florencia, Emily was summoned to Sirocco for an extra shift.
It didn’t matter that final exams began the following week.
Another bartender had called in sick. The manager made clear to Emily that her job was on the line.
Emily bundled up and shoved stacks of index cards labeled with conjugations of Greek verbs into her backpack.
Wind cut through her hat as she walked down Mass Ave.
, footsteps rapid over brick sidewalks glazed with ice.
The cold grasped her in its fist until she took an escalator down into the T, where the sugar-and-coffee smell of the station’s Dunkin’ Donuts wrapped her in an extra layer of subway warmth.
She caught the Braintree train, remembering how tentative she’d been taking the subway for the first time, sure she’d get lost, especially when red line trains from Harvard Square into Boston had different names and went different places, but then she had learned that the terminus meant little, because she probably wouldn’t go that far, whether it was Braintree or Ashmont.
Emily had written to Gen about that, including an annotated map of the T in the letter’s envelope.
She had circled the Longwood Medical Area stop and wrote about how everyone she knew at Harvard had had braces in high school, so when she discovered that her student health insurance included dental, she took two trains and a bus to ask a campus dentist if she could get the braces she’d never had.
He said that her teeth were perfect. She was disappointed.
It was as though she had been told that there was no point trying to catch up to her new friends.
Emily circled the map where she had gone ice skating with Florencia at Frog Pond.
She circled the T stop for the art museum with orange nasturtium trailing down its interior courtyard and a hall that had held Rembrandts until thieves cut the canvases from their wooden frames.
The paintings were rolled and taken away.
Who is the frame and who is the canvas? she almost wrote, but knew the answer.
Gen was the missing canvas: a huge emptiness in Emily’s mind, which was the frame.
It wasn’t until after Gen’s awful visit to Harvard later that year that Emily considered that Gen could be the thief, too, and the knife.
The train emerged over the Charles River. The water below was as dull as stone.
At Sirocco, Emily pulled her hair into a ponytail, tied her black apron, and taped the index cards with ancient Greek verbs behind the bar.
She hid her copy of The Odyssey in the refrigerator.
It was happy hour, but slow enough that she could read an index card when she reached for the soda gun.
One couple left the bar to sit at their ready table.
A man’s suited companion arrived and ordered a margarita, which was every mom’s favorite special drink in Emily’s hometown and clashed with the serious tone of the two men’s low conversation.
Emily scrunched the rim of a cocktail glass into salt.
The men’s faces reminded her of the WWII soldiers in Saving Private Ryan as they contemplated a blown-out church in Normandy.
When they were dating, Dillon had suggested he and Emily go see that movie.
He had suggested it ironically, as a low-class alternative to the Kie?lowski retrospective at the Brattle.
She agreed to spite him, then regretted it when he held her hand throughout the gunfire.
After her breakup with Gen, she had thought she might as well date Dillon, who was objectively cute and had told everyone that his resolution for ’98 was to ask her out.
The idea of dating another woman made her want to look for the nearest bomb shelter.
Nothing had been better than being with Gen—until the end.
It had been the kind of disaster you should have known was coming by how much you needed it not to be one.
Maybe being with a woman would always be that way: too good, then too sad.
So there she was, sharing a Coke with Dillon, watching a movie about being brave.
As the Tom Hanks character recalled his wife cutting roses in their garden, Dillon drew Emily’s hand across his lap and positioned it on his erection.
She pulled away. He told her not to be a prude.
They had been dating for a few months and hadn’t progressed beyond making out.
He wanted to know why she wasn’t interested in more.
She said, “Maybe I just don’t like you enough.
” He said, “You’re cruel, you know that?
” He stood, his face bathed in the projector’s shifting light, eyes squinted as though she had punched him.
He thudded up the aisle, head swinging back once to see if she was following.
She stayed until the end of the movie, when Private Ryan became an old man who wondered if he had been good enough to have been worth saving. She loved it.
The suited man at the bar accepted his margarita and turned back to his companion. They were probably talking about stocks or a new dot-com company.
Then Jack came in, beating snow from the black wool shoulders of his coat.
He smiled at Emily from the door, checked his coat, and came to her.
He sat, hair damp with melted snow, and ordered an old-fashioned.
The two serious men left, and Emily predicted that Jack would say, It’s cold out there!
or It’s really coming down, or another dull and harmless phrase that might clear a path between him and his obvious object of interest: her.
But he took his drink with a simple thanks and opened a newspaper.
The facing page showed an article about the Y2K bug.
Emily retrieved The Odyssey from the fridge.
He noticed, raised one brow, then ignored her.
She ignored him, turning the chilled pages, reading about Odysseus’s bow.
Jack slid a new section from the paper’s fold.
He had an unusual way of reading: he held a flat blank sheet of paper over a portion of the text and shifted it lower as he read.
He must have been reading line by line. Emily didn’t want to be curious about him, so she returned to her book.
They pretended the other didn’t exist until Emily forgot that that was what they were doing and stopped pretending, the book no longer cold in her hands as she read intently.
She was startled when he asked for the check.
Again, he left a one-hundred-dollar bill. It made Emily mad. She didn’t like the pressure of trying to figure out what he meant by his stupid tip. She pulled the bill from the server book and set it down on the bar. With one finger, she pushed it toward him. “Why?” she demanded.
He pushed it back. “Why what?”
“What do you want from me?”
“Nothing. It’s a tip.”
“That’s not a tip. It’s too much.”
“Not really.”
“So you tip every server like this?”
He laughed. “Just the rude ones.”
“What are you, made of money?”
“That’s an odd expression, isn’t it? Like if I cut myself, I’d bleed pennies.”
Surprise interrupted Emily’s irritation. She imagined, vividly, what he had just said. She imagined dimes shed as tears. She reached into his chest and pulled out a paper heart.
“The tip doesn’t mean anything,” Jack said. “I like to think about what you will do with it. I think about it when I’m on the train from New York or sitting through my parents’ endless dinners. Sometimes I think, She will buy a scarf .”
“For a hundred dollars?” No one would spend so much on a scarf.
“Or I think, She has a dog. She will buy dog food .”
“What kind of dog do you suppose I have?”
“A loyal one.”
“What else do I buy?”
“Dinner with your friend. You treat her, and gossip.”
“About you?”
“I would never presume to know your secrets. I honor the sanctity of girl talk.”
“Pretend we talk about you. Do I say nice things?”
“I hope so.”
“Maybe I have a boyfriend, and I’m treating him to dinner.” She had dated a few guys after Dillon but couldn’t bring herself to sleep with any of them. They were too boring.
“Maybe you do. Take the money. You’re doing me a favor. If the tip means anything, it’s a story I tell myself about how you enjoy it.”
Although at first it had been disconcerting to imagine him imagining her—all those alternate Emilys taking actions in response to his own—she found that she liked his boyish smile.
She liked that she occupied his mind. She enjoyed being the center of his game.
This man was not boring. “I’ll tell you what I do with the money. ”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Ruins the fantasy, does it?”
He held up one pleading hand. She felt the force of his good looks. He said, “How about we stop right there.”
Why stop, when she was already appreciating the clean, hard lines of him, offset by the soft play of his hand raised in defense?
She liked his pretense of vulnerability, perhaps because some part of it was real.
It had to be, for him to think of her so much, to return to the same bar and leave the same tip, with the habit of ritual. She said, “I save the money.”
He placed his hand flat against his chest. “You’re breaking my heart.”
She smiled. “Do you want to go out with me?”