“Obviously, what happened was appalling, and I don’t want to see Love reelected, but Morris put people in danger, and—she was almost courting it, you know?” My voice went too high on the question. Jefferey’s entire bearing had changed. While raining jokes on me, there’d been an eagerness to his posture. He’d leaned in, looking slightly uncomfortable and apologetic about his weight. Now he lounged back in his chair, staring at the table.
“Meg and I almost took the kids to D.C. for it.”
“Really?” I said, as neutrally as I could.
“Right after Kate gave that speech and people started showing up, we talked about pulling the kids out of school, buying a bunch of camping gear. Maybe quitting my job to do it. Then we decided to wait until school was out, and if it was still going on…” His eyes caught mine and then looked away. “But we were nervous about having the kids there. For good reason it turns out.”
Clearing my throat, I tried to carefully double down and back away at the same time. “That’s admirable. I just think that doing what she did—and it was so appalling what happened to all those people—it was an action like you’d expect from the Weathermen.”
Jefferey’s brow narrowed. “How do you figure?”
“She wanted to create a big spectacle, that’s all I mean. She wanted chaos instead of doing what your wife is doing with FBF. Trying to find solutions, trying to work with industry and government.”
“I think Meg would probably tear you a new asshole if she heard her work described like that.”
His tone was conciliatory, like he wouldn’t be able to stop Meg if she heard, and this was too bad. I was frustrated and anxious because I kept finding myself saying things I didn’t actually believe, but it was like I’d driven into quicksand and throwing the car in reverse was only pulling me deeper. I’d found what Morris did unbearable, but only because, when it first began, I did not want to see her embarrassed. And then I did not want to see her fail. And then I did not want to see her harmed.
“Morris and her followers are misguided is all I’m saying. There are better ways to go about this.”
“Such as? What’s your boyfriend’s hedge fund doing to avert planetary catastrophe, I’m curious?”
I sat with my spine rigid and met the hostility of his voice with calm.
“The fund’s invested in a range of climate solutions and adaptations. It’s very forward thinking, and we work with a proprietary computer model designed by Ashir al-Hasan. I doubt there’s an investment firm in the world that’s thought more about climate change than Tara.”
“No, I get it. You have to convince yourself that doing well and doing good are the same thing. The whole world’s run by people who think even when the dark days come, they’ll just sub in money for justice and it’ll all be fine.”
A defensive heat rose to my face. Who was this person? I had never heard him talk like this in the years we’d dated. When I’d known him, he’d been mostly apolitical with a bit of a conservative bent. I’d had to persuade him to vote for Barack Obama in 2012, and he’d been lukewarm about going to McCormick to see the president speak on election night.
“I’m just saying, there’s a way to go about things that works, and a clear way that doesn’t. Kate Morris and her disciples—or whatever you want to call them—they have to know they can’t win.”
Jefferey pushed his gaze into mine, his eyes moons of certainty.
“Of course they think they can win. They know they are going to win.” He lowered his voice. “Maybe you can’t understand. You don’t have kids, so it’s hard to think past your own lifetime. But a parent has to.”
He might as well have punched me in the stomach. I could feel the red splotches forming on my neck.
“I thought you didn’t even want children,” I snapped, before I could stop myself. “At least that’s what you told me when you were wheedling your way out.”
“I never said that.”
“Liar,” I shot back, and the heat on my throat and face burned harder. “We stayed up till four a.m. that night talking about nothing else.”
“I don’t remember it that way.”
“You strung me along for three years. And sometimes I think it was just because you wouldn’t have been able to tie your own shoelaces, let alone pay down your loans, without me. And I’ve never forgiven you for it.”
As soon as I said it, I realized how true it was. I couldn’t even forgive him for popping up in my dreams sometimes, carrying the anger into my morning even as his image leached away. He chewed his tongue for a moment, glaring at me.
“Do you remember what you said to me when I told you I wanted to quit C. H. Robinson and go back to get my teaching degree?”
“I told you I thought it was impractical. Because it was. You wanted to take out another hundred grand in loans.”
“Sure. You were always… displeased. You didn’t think I took my job seriously. You didn’t like that I hated going to look at condos, that I didn’t really want to tie myself to a thirty-year mortgage. We went to Faulk’s apartment that one time—and I mean, this is a bro in commodities trading—and all you talked about for two days was how beautiful his place was.”
“So? Jefferey, I told you what debt did to my dad. But that never concerned you, so it meant it would have to concern me. You never cared about the consequences. I’m the one who had to worry about being financially insecure our entire lives because you thought it would be fun to never grow up.”
“Yeah, but your version of growing up just meant buying more bullshit. Just spending our whole weekend in some depressing lifestyle store blowing money on more useless fucking garbage we didn’t need. The longer we were together, the more I didn’t like the person you were underneath. Or the person you were trying so hard to become. So maybe I did lie, yes. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to have kids, it was that I didn’t want to have them with you.”
The waiter came, and we got the check: $423.87. Jefferey tried to reach for it, but I handed my card over before he could. He tried to stop me, and I told the waiter to run it. We sat there in silence until he returned. I tipped, signed the slip, and got up, pushing my way between tables. The streets were dry and cold. I folded my arms and set out west, toward Central Park, without any clue where I was walking. Jefferey caught up to me, pulling on a green corduroy jacket that no longer fit. He touched my shoulder, but I shrugged him off. I turned my head only once more, saw his devastation at having told me the truth. How stupid. This fat, childish man, who’d somehow set my entire life on an unknowable course. Someone I shouldn’t have given a second thought to after about 2014.
“It was nice seeing you again, Jefferey,” I told him. “I wish you the best.” Then I breezed down the street, and after calling to me again and again, first exasperated and then defeated, he let me go. His voice, carrying my name, died on the wind.
Before I reached the park, I turned south. I’d had only two glasses of wine but felt the sense of driving drunk down an anonymous highway. Two teen girls wearing VR goggles and giggling at something they saw in another reality whisked by, grasping each other. Two police in full tactical gear ambled up the sidewalk, nodding at me as I passed.
I walked down the east side of the park where spring was struggling in fits and starts in the buds of the trees, past the dual spires of the Plaza. Yellow cabs snarled the Manhattan grid, a din of horns and the scent of exhaust mixing with hot dog and halal carts. Shafts of light from the lobbies of graceful apartment buildings pooled on the sidewalks. I studied the glow of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Empire State Building, and in the distance One World Trade, and recalled the thrill of walking this route for the first time in my twenties and feeling how far I was from Iowa. Steam drifted from the sewers, cut through by the strides of people out for the night, tossing their careless bodies at each other. I passed an older couple, walking too slowly, talking about movies they’d seen when they were young. The open wound of a new skyscraper going up. Old New York still breathing through the luxury condos and glass towers. I kept on through the raucous technicolor glare of Times Square, stuffed with slow-shuffling tourists, holograms dancing over our heads, an ocean of digital life swarming in the sky above. Eventually, I caught a cab home. Passing the gas station on Eleventh and Fifty-First, the teenagers were still there, camped out in little pup tents, taking shifts holding their signs.