Inside the house, Finn lobbed himself onto the living room couch and sat, legs straight out in front of him. Ana dropped the shopping bags of Finn things: the plastic-wrapped blue sheets; the owl-printed quilt cover. She sat opposite Finn on a white club chair, divided from him by a glass coffee table. Suddenly, Ana was exhausted. She gave in to that pulling, that dark, stuffed feeling in her gut. Sarah, she thought, Sarah. She felt without gravity.
Finn was picking at the beads on a throw pillow, puzzling over Ana’s expression across from him. This was how James found them when he entered. He stopped at the strange configuration of Finn’s concerned expression and Ana, head in her hands.
He went to her and placed a hand on her shoulder. She grabbed it hard, and looked up, a slash of sadness across her face.
“I’ll make dinner,” said James. Ana nodded.
“I come,” said Finn, sliding off the chair. He held out his hand and James dropped Ana’s to grab it, pulling up Finn to his chest like a monkey plucking a baby from a tree branch.
“That’s quite a move,” said Ana, trying to bring some lightness. But James and Finn were already in the kitchen, too far away to hear her.
After leaving Finn at daycare, James began walking. He realized that he had not returned to the scene of his firing in weeks and felt a little burst of pride.
James walked past a bleak stretch of tile stores and boarded-up facades. Then, the changes. Two coffee shops side by side: One, a chain with COFFEE written in a yellow-and-maroon font on a grimy awning. A few dry doughnuts on a shelf were enough to draw the old men, thought James. They all sat alone. One worked the belly of a doughnut with his fingers, gazing into space.
And then, a new place—James felt instantly slighted that he had not seen it before, considering that since he’d been fired, he was on these streets all day, every day—filled with people who looked like younger versions of himself, men with beards and laptops, women in black sweaters. These patrons sipped from garage sale mismatched coffee cups, caught in the glow of computer screens. Their feet rested on thick pine planks meant to remind urban people of barns, of something purposeful and only accidentally beautiful.
James caught a glimpse of himself in the large mirror over the bar. The angle caught its own reflection in another mirror across the room, so that James could exactly see the back of his head, right there, floating like a balloon above the gleaming Italian espresso machine. This always ruined his day. His hand rose to the spot, and then dropped quickly, embarrassed by the possibility of being caught. It would have been different, he thought, if he hadn’t looked the way he had when he was young. He had always considered himself exempt, and now—this thickening of everything below the neck, this thinning of everything above.
His concern was the most revolting part. He wasn’t that kind of guy, was he? The kind of guy who cared about losing his hair? What was he, a woman? He knew better. He’d interviewed a blind woman who climbed Mount Everest! He’d been to the Gaza Strip (or on a helicopter that flew above it, at least)! He had perspective! And yet, and yet—oh, how it used to be: those girls in university, the plain ones who unbuttoned their pastel polo shirts to reveal the bodies of strippers. All that, just for him, because he was kind, or kind enough, and asked one or two questions, and paid for a beer—and then all that body, all the consent to enter and be risen—oh, it was easy.
Until Ana, who was tightly buttoned at first, the friend of a friend of a friend, connections all lost to him now.
Then James set to work: James in the hallway of the law school. James on the doorstep of her apartment. James finally cast as listener, and meeting her mother—her mother, for Chrissake—he had never met a girl’s mother before. Ana’s was drunk. On the subway ride home, Ana burned with anger and James wanted to put his hand down her pants and push through her, bring her moaning back to him, but he put a protective arm around her shoulder instead.
But what he liked most, maybe, was that once he had Ana, once he could lean close to her and watch other men’s eyes flutter in defeat—what he liked most was that he meant it. That he did actually love her. She was strong, but she could be very still, and he craved that. She was never desperate for anyone’s approval, and casually comfortable in the demimonde she’d grown up in. They attended parties with her mother’s friends, artists and poets, in the kinds of book-lined downtown houses that James had dreamed about from the distance of his suburban childhood. Ana’s mother could make her daughter laugh just like James could, teasing her for being the sell-out daughter, beloved and feared for her efficiency.
And when he wasn’t with her, he still got the glances, still pushed at the edges of his manner to see if he could get the woman to bend her head back, a throaty laugh, the slight spreading of the fingers around a glass, or the knees in a skirt. James knew: If I wanted it … He fed on that If, even now that the women he saw most often were the wives of his friends or the aging producers at his old office. A line from a poet he’d interviewed: “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.”
The women he considered his peers were changing; he had noticed a shift in silhouette, a meatiness between the ass and the knee that didn’t exist before, the shape of a traffic cone. Soon they would revert to their ethnic stereotypes, these once exotic Italian and Portuguese women. In a decade or so, they would look like snow women, circles on circles. His mother, once petite, now sported the body of an old Yugoslavian woman in the hills. But not Ana, with her hollows. Not Ana.
It didn’t matter how gorgeous his wife was, because he needed, still, the collective giggle of the young women whose lives were just beginning and who let him in under the mistaken assumption that he had some grown-up wisdom to impart about what came next. He needed it through the wedding, and the rise and fall of Ana’s attachment to him, the wane of their sex life, the renovations of the house. He needed that small, cooing possibility.
So how had he missed the moment when it stopped? He couldn’t pinpoint precisely when his presence in a room began to generate boredom, or when the women got even younger, and the Jessicas became Emmas. At the staff party last Christmas, the handful of pretty young girls were text messaging the whole time, heads bowed. They couldn’t keep eye contact. In the months before he was let go, one of them, Ariel, had begun doing segments for his show. She pitched gauzy academic takes on lowbrow subjects: Is Hip-Hop Dead? Teens and Sexting. Why We Need Cute Animals on the Internet. She had a Tumblr, Sly told him. She “repurposed content.”
During interviews, she seemed to be always laughing or on the cusp of laughing. She was furiously short and wore an array of colored scarves, shooting her own work on a handheld camera, writing and producing herself. James remembered when he was surrounded by a cadre of writers and producers and directors and cameramen, a different person for every job. They were all expected to be one-man bands now. What had happened to those guys? Technology had shrunk the world. He made a mental list of all the things that had vanished because of the Internet: newspaper boys; breathless first meetings; the slips of paper he used as a teenager to withdraw money from the bank. These were all things Finn would never know, and that these girls had already forgotten.
At the party, the young women’s eyes had skimmed his body with tolerance, stopping on Sly—Those ties! Those tasseled loafers!—with flat-out revulsion. They all had long straight hair, as if there had been a conference to decide, a hairstyle colloquium. James, wearing an Arcade Fire T-shirt under his blazer, had caught a glimpse of himself in a window and found he had no idea what he had been trying to achieve. He’d left the party early to watch the Leafs on TV.