Chapter 33 1215 PM Mia
Mia joined the end of a long Starbucks line in the northeast corner of Penn Station, her phone illuminated in her right hand.
It was the last Saturday of October. She wore a long coat and a gray cashmere sweater and her hair was loosely held back with a brown clasp.
Before the phone’s screen darkened she looked down at it, saw that she had received no messages, and puffed her cheeks.
The line moved forward. Mia glanced over her shoulder, searching for the boys.
A disembodied voice made a boarding announcement for the Keystone Regional to Harrisburg, and people began moving toward a set of escalators to her left.
Hanging from Mia’s shoulder was a canvas tote bag, on the side of which was printed The New York Review of Books.
She reached up to adjust it, her fingers brushing against a pair of costume mouse ears that protruded a few inches from the bag’s opening.
Yesterday she’d bought them at a Spirit Halloween store on Kent Avenue; the other option was a four-piece Harley Quinn costume, which included a pair of blue-and-red booty shorts.
The price tag still hung from one of the mouse ears. She didn’t plan on removing it.
The line moved forward again. As she shuffled along with it Mia tapped her phone’s screen, opening up a new text message. She added Adam Parker and Richie Fournier to the recipient field and typed I’m in line at the starbucks. ETA???
A few seconds later, the phone began to buzz.
Adam Parker: which one? I’m at the one in Moynihan
Mia: the one closest to 7th ave
Adam Parker: stay there I’m walking over
Mia counted the people between her and the register. She received four more texts in quick succession.
Richie Fournier: are you still in line???
Richie Fournier: can you get me a venti iced coffee black no sugar
Richie Fournier: pls and thank you
Richie Fournier: I’m stuck on subway at 14th st
Mia: our trains in ten minutes
Richie Fournier: tell that to the C train
Adam Parker: I don’t think the C train would listen
Another announcement was made for the Keystone Regional, and a chaotic mass of people formed at the entrance to track number eleven.
Mia watched as two women fought over who got to descend the escalator first, and then as a man in a suit folded a piece of pizza in half, eating nearly all of it in a single bite.
Marinara sauce coated his fingers, and he wiped it away with a napkin that he then dropped to the ground.
Mia sent a separate message to Adam that said I’m thinking of changing my fall look but I’m having trouble and I’m worried the problem is my face, then returned her phone to her coat pocket.
After undoing the clasp that was holding her hair back, she shook it loose and ran her fingers through it, getting it to fall neatly to her shoulders.
The person in front of her ordered a drink with a very long name and a dizzying number of specifications; he stepped aside and Mia asked for two iced coffees.
She tapped her credit card against the reader, thanked the cashier, then pulled the sleeve of her sweater back half an inch to check her watch.
“Sorry. I went to the new Penn Station instead of the old Penn Station. What’s the problem with your face?”
It was Adam. He was wearing a white oxford, suspenders, and a pair of black-plastic-framed glasses with a strip of tape around its bridge.
“New Jersey Transit leaves from the old Penn Station,” Mia said. “And I don’t know. I think it’s getting in my way. Cute costume, by the way.”
“Thanks. I’m a sexy nerd.”
“What exactly about it is sexy?”
“Oh.” Adam took a sip from Mia’s iced coffee. “If we get back from Sasha’s in time, Rami wants to go to this dance party in Maspeth. There’s this DJ he really likes, I guess? If we go, I’m going to lose the shirt, and just wear the glasses and the suspenders.”
“Where is Rami?”
“He can’t come.”
“Why not?”
“Because he has to go to our fertility clinic in Connecticut to have the fitness of his sperm analyzed.”
Behind Adam, a woman inserting a straw into a green Frappuccino turned around to look at him. Mia took her coffee back.
She said, “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but gay men can be very exhausting.”
A Halloween party in Montclair, New Jersey: Sasha had sent them a Paperless Post invitation for it three weeks ago.
When Mia received it, she was sitting in a coworking space on Greenpoint Avenue.
For the past six months she had been on leave from the Times, working on a book about the evolution of climate activism for which she had been paid a respectable advance.
The first draft was due to her publisher at the end of the year, and so far she had made staggeringly little progress.
She told herself her problem was that the subject was so vast, and so urgently important, that she was paralyzed by the pressure to get it right.
But the truth was that she didn’t know what she was doing—in terms of writing a book, yes, but more so in terms of her life.
She and Lev had broken up a year earlier.
Warner Bros. had bought the rights to a profile Mia had written about a climate activist in London and was planning to turn it into a television series, and in the months that followed Lev accused her of letting it go to her head.
He told her that articles got optioned all the time and nothing ever came of it, and that if Mia kept acting the way she was acting, she shouldn’t expect any comfort from him when the studio ultimately let her down.
This was all very confusing to Mia. There might have been a single day where she had expected the news would change her life in a substantial way, but the next morning she woke up, and walked to the bodega to buy milk for coffee, and stepped over piles of dog shit on the sidewalk, and spent the next few hours doing two loads of Lev’s dirty laundry, and then went back out to the grocery store to buy salmon to cook for dinner because after a recent doctor’s appointment Lev had decided it would be best for his cholesterol if he turned pescatarian.
It wasn’t until after another few weeks of him belittling her that Mia realized the real problem wasn’t that she was being haughty or egotistical, but rather that Lev had never sold an article to Warner Bros.
himself and would always resent the fact that she had, no matter how much she curtailed her self-celebration.
That was when she’d decided it was probably time to end things.
He’d screamed at her when she told him—he said that she was making a huge mistake, not only in terms of their relationship but also in terms of her career.
She left their place on the Upper West Side and went back to Greenpoint, where she rented a one-bedroom, second-floor walk-up that was a block away from the apartment she and Marco had lived in during the second half of her twenties.
A few weeks later, a former colleague of hers from the Times had texted to say that Lev had started seeing a twenty-six-year-old staff writer from Vanity Fair.
When she read the message, Mia was hit with a rush of betrayal that felt like an electric shock to her stomach.
She turned her phone on silent, and then spent the next four hours watching reruns of Friends while simultaneously trying to wrap her head around two conflicting truths: The first was that she was happy to be away from Lev, and to no longer share a bathroom with him.
The second was that she was almost forty years old, and alone, and felt like an unlovable freak.
The coworking space on Greenpoint Avenue had plush velvet chairs and desks with rose-gold legs.
One wall was lined with glass-enclosed conference rooms, and along the other was a bar, the back of which was tiled with squares of light-pink tile.
Succulents had been thoughtfully placed on shelves and side tables that were spread throughout the workspace, you were never more than four feet away from an electrical outlet, and in the vestibule by the elevator, there was free cold brew that came from a gold tap, above which hung a pink neon sign that said, BUT FIRST, COFFEE.
At the center of the workspace were a large burgundy rug and a green couch, and on the day she received Sasha’s Paperless Post, there was a man with a shaved head sitting there saying, “Yeah, babe, I don’t know if that’s really the vibe,” to the screen of his laptop.
Mia had watched him for a moment, then clicked on Sasha’s invitation to open it.
Four animated ghosts floated happily across her screen.
She read the time the party started (3 PM), and Sasha’s address (94 Inwood Avenue, Montclair, New Jersey), and that costumes were of course welcome (strongly encouraged!).
Then she noticed that Sasha had also sent a message to the group chat that they had all created to stay in touch during the pandemic.
Mia tapped it, and saw that the last time anyone had used it was more than four months ago.
It had been Adam’s thirty-ninth birthday.
There were six versions of “HBD!” and then, below the last one, Sasha’s most recent text.
It said: Hey guys! Just sent you all an invite for a Halloween party Theo and I are having for the kiddos. Hope you can make it!
Immediately Richie responded: I am not spending Halloween in the fucking suburbs, and then, oh shit, wrong text.
A second later, Mia’s phone rang.
“Smooth move,” she said.
Richie sighed. “I got trigger-happy. I thought I was only responding to you and Adam.”
“Well, you weren’t.”
“This is, like, the fourth time I’ve done that this week.”
“It’s pretty remarkable you still have any friends.”
“What do you think I should do?”