Epilogue The Future
Epilogue
The Future
It was snowing. I hadn’t had a regular day job in almost a year. I had a boyfriend, and he had a dog—really, we had a dog. And so we took Buddy to the dog park around the corner from my apartment.
Buddy loved the dog park. Little dogs took to him the way a cartoon mouse might befriend a cartoon lion with hearts for eyes. They would jump at his jowls, pawing and mouthing while he played back with such carefully controlled vigor that he wrapped strings of slobber around his own snout. He really only needed one of us to take him. Sometimes I did it while Will was on a job, or Will did it while I was working—by then, I had a decent sideline in consulting and editing—or just camped out on the couch of my own apartment watching something he didn’t care about. But today, we decided we’d all three go together.
We put a red-and-black plaid jacket on him, not because he really needed it, but because while he always got his share of stares and compliments, when he had a lively print on, it happened even more. “That’s a horse” was a very common opinion, but I remained convinced, as I had been on the day I met Will and Buddy both, that what he actually looked like was a cow. There were a lot of people out today, so looking his best could only benefit the good boy Buddy now was, having spent a fair number of weeks going to classes with Will. He had solidified into a reliably well-behaved, always gentle, mostly obedient, and ruggedly handsome dog.
For all these reasons, when we were a block from the dog park, it came very naturally to me to say, “Man, I love this dog.”
“I love you, ” Will said.
I was acutely aware of turning red, and I felt it happening faster and faster as snowflakes fell on my cheeks. “Well,” I said. “I mean, I love you too.”
“You still blush every time,” he said. “It is the greatest.”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “I still get shook.”
“It’s understandable. I think the snow, the walk, the quiet, the dog, it’s all very romantic.”
I stepped over and put my arm through his. “Thank you,” I said.
We continued to walk, and he didn’t look at me, but I saw him smile. “Thank you back.”
So many things had gone so spectacularly wrong since I met him; it was, on the surface, a distressing inventory. I had sold my soul to a manufacturer of cat toys, and then to a woman who tried to set me up with a supplement guy and a guy who didn’t tip. I’d watched my closest friend move away so that we didn’t see each other every day anymore. I’d watched the company where I spent six years get gobbled up like a pig in a blanket, consumed by someone I knew personally, who had already raided my reserve of good ideas once, and who continued to give interviews where they called him a visionary until, six months after they hired him, he left Caravan “by mutual agreement.”
Eliza had temporarily suspended new applications for the Platinum Goddess Package (and the Diamond Goddess Package, and the Girl in a Hurry Crash Course). It appeared that she was focusing on her collabs these days. I was still on her mailing list, so I knew the bottled cocktail had been revealed—it was a Cranberry Crush, but hers was going to be “lower in sugar and formulated to boost your energy.” She’d started doing occasional guest spots on a Caravan podcast called This Is the Life, where she’d answer questions. Somehow, they had persuaded her that there was an audio project that would not be Nowheresville.
My parents liked Will, even though so far, they’d only met him over Zoom. His mother liked me, too; I’d gone to her birthday party and she sent me home with a huge wedge of apple cake and a deli container full of chicken and dumplings. I texted almost every day with Maggie, and Will came over every couple of weeks to eat with Mol and Pete.
Julie was working on a show at Tappan about the moon landing. Every time I talked to her, she divided our time. Half was spent on stories of Bella learning to ride the subway and say “pardon me” when she bumped into people. Half was spent on breathless recitations of the pleasures of working for a boss who not only was not ridiculous or duplicitous, but was working on transitioning the company into an employee-owned co-op. I was envious but ravenous; I made her tell me everything, every detail down to the color of the walls in their break room (sky blue). She insisted they had their own strange rules and regrettable patterns and as many unmet goals as anybody, they just didn’t make her feel terrible in the same way. “All jobs have some degree of bullshit,” she told me, “but it is so refreshing just to have new bullshit.”
As for everybody else, I had made calls to practically everyone I knew in audio on behalf of Charlie and Abby, and Melissa, and everybody else who asked me. Getting them all resettled was the one connection to that job I allowed myself to keep.
All this, all this. But somehow, everyone I loved still loved me. I still opened up audio files on my laptop and pulled out other people’s voices stumbling, other people’s phones suddenly beeping, other people’s first answers to a question that had been followed by better ones. And at night, sometimes I opened up a fresh document and typed out one idea at a time: an eight-episode show. A daily show. A news show. An interview show. Some I would host. Some I would not. It would all shake loose if I wrote it down and left it alone. I, too, needed new bullshit.
I looked over to see Buddy taking deep sniffs of a bush that was dotted with snow. When he reemerged, he had snow stuck to his face as he came over to Will, who brushed it off for him. “Aw, Buddy,” he said. “We’ve got you.”
“We’ve got you,” I repeated, and I leaned my head on Will’s shoulder.
He turned to me. “You okay?”
“I’m perfect,” I said. “For the moment, I’m perfect.”