830 AM Mia #2
“I liked that piece you did on whether AI is going to lead to a nuclear war.”
“It should have come out two months earlier. It got caught up in fact-checking. Everyone and their mother had run a similar story by the time we finally published.”
“Well, I thought it was very good. Classic, old-school Archaki. Also, you’ve got some egg on your face.”
Now he smiled a little. He wiped away the egg and when he lowered his napkin Mia saw that he was blushing.
“Thanks,” he said.
“And how’s Sarah?”
“It’s Sara. Like the a in car.”
“Sorry. How’s Sara. You’ve been together for how long now? Two years?”
“About two and a half.” Lev’s smile faded. He set his hand on top of his coffee cup and moved it back and forth. “She’s at a bachelorette party in Nashville. This morning she sent me a picture of her drinking tequila out of a giant plastic penis. All of her friends are getting married.”
“She’s about that age, I guess.”
“Yes, she’s about that age. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you seeing anyone?”
Mia smoothed her napkin on her lap. Up until recently she had been.
His name was Jerome, and she had met him through a colleague of hers at the New York Times’s London bureau.
He was a barrister, with soft brown hair and a tendency to raise his voice an octave when he laughed.
For a little over three months they’d dated.
But then one night he got drunk and started defending Liz Truss with such a violent fervor that his lower lip started trembling and he spilled his beer down the front of his sweater.
After that, Mia stopped calling him back.
“I’m trying to focus on my work right now,” she said.
Lev nodded. “Smart girl. You’ve got a television show to write.”
“And produce.”
Now he gave her an incredulous look. “You’re producing too?”
“Am I not allowed to? I wrote the story, Lev. If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t be any goddamned show.”
“Who taught you how to talk like that?”
“You did.”
Lev smiled, then wiped his mouth with his napkin.
Through the restaurant’s window Mia watched as the hostess sat two people at a table in an enclosed dining hut on the street.
Beyond them, a woman looked at her phone while her dog investigated something on the sidewalk.
Lev finished his omelet and half of his fruit, and the server cleared their plates away and brought the check.
Opening her purse, Mia offered to pay; Lev protested and made a futile show of reaching for his wallet.
A few minutes later, as they stood outside, he traded his readers for a large pair of sunglasses and turned up the collar of his coat.
The clouds had cleared completely; the hoods of cars sparkled in the light.
Mia brushed a piece of white lint from her dress.
“What time does everything start?” Lev asked.
“The service is at eleven.”
“I’m very sorry, by the way.”
“Thanks.” Mia took hold of two of his fingers and squeezed them. “I appreciate that.”
“I’ll say it again, though: you look gorgeous. Much too gorgeous to be going to a funeral.”
“Knock it off.”
“I’m serious. Have you lost weight?”
“Lev?”
“Yes?”
She let go of his fingers. “Please stop.”
He said he would walk her east, as far as the station at Seventy-Second Street, but then he needed to get back to work; at ten o’clock he had a call with an economic policy adviser from the White House for a story he was working on about lingering inflation.
Mia didn’t need anyone to walk her two blocks—in fact, she was looking forward to a few minutes to gather herself before she headed back downtown—but still she let him take her arm, and deliberately slowed her pace to match his own.
At Amsterdam Avenue they turned north, stepping around what remained of the morning’s puddles.
Neither of them had spoken for a minute or two, and as she was preparing to say good-bye and cross the street, Lev stopped Mia and said: “Do you ever think about what would have happened if…”
Here he got quiet again. Mia waited for him to finish the thought, and when he didn’t, she asked, “If what?”
“I don’t know. If you would have had that kid.”
“Oh.”
A woman with a handcart walked toward them and Mia stepped out of the way.
The truth was that she did think about it sometimes.
Walking through Regent’s Park or past a playground, she would see someone pushing a child around in a stroller or on a swing, and she would think: Holy shit, there was a split second when that could have been me.
The rest of the afternoon she would spend parsing out how her life could have ended up so wholly unrecognizable had one tiny thing gone differently at any given moment—how for the last forty-two years she had been making choices that hadn’t struck her as worth noticing, but that in fact made up the very shape of her existence.
She suspected that wasn’t what Lev was talking about, though, and so she said, “I think that things probably worked out exactly as they were supposed to.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Yes. Or, no. I don’t know.”
Again he nodded, then removed his sunglasses to scratch at the bridge of his nose. When Mia looked at him again, she saw that his eyes were red.
“Yeah,” he said, “me too.”