“Is everything alright?” he asks.
“No,” J says. “How can it be?”
The waiter looks at a loss for words, and J decides to let him off the hook.
“Everything will be fine,” he says. “Just please, although I’m sure it’s very good, don’t bring out the moussaka.”
J finishes the meal. Of course he finishes the meal. When he gets the check, he sees the waiter has taken the moussaka off.
As if V had never been there.
He knows it won’t work to show up at her office with flowers.
He knows it won’t work to text her and ask if she’ll meet for a drink after she’s done for the day.
He knows it won’t work to follow her and see if she’s meeting anyone else.
He knows it won’t work to find the last boom box in Manhattan, hold it over his head, and blast the love songs he’s written for heruntil she comes down to the lobby and lets him take her away from it all.
He knows all the things that won’t work.
He just can’t find the one that will.
I still want to see you,he texts.
She reads it, but doesn’t reply.
He should go back to the apartment, work on the songs. But instead he goes to the Museum of Modern Art and walks around. He wishes he could get lost in the paintings, but they too fall out of reach. He feels like he is an exhibit himself, for all the tourists to see.Man with Failed Reunion,a collage of worthless words and deeds, a gift of the artist.
You know that nothing has ever been given to me, not by my parents, not by anyone.
V feels this, more than any other, is the sentence that J should be focusing on. While his own parents were certainly concerned when he decided to try supporting himself with his music, they never removed the safety net that had been underneath him his whole life. V’s family was far more fraught—her father perpetually drunk and perpetually underemployed, her mother a locked box of oddly shaped resentments. When V left home at sixteen, there was no going back and no map forward. She made mistakes and then had to live with those mistakes. J has heard stories of these times, but none of it was visible to him. The woman he met, the woman he fell for, was built from a girl he would barely recognize. She is proud of this evolution, but she doesn’t think it would take much to undo it. Like all smart people, she is petrified of making a stupid choice. And when a golden opportunity comes along—and what she’s doing with Secret Project is that elusive golden opportunity—that fear is so large that it can influence everything else. J has never felt this way about anything. V knowshe hasn’t. And now, when this is the sentence he should be focusing on, she’s sure he’s hearing others instead, the ones more directly involving him. It’s human for him to react that way. But that’s why humans are such messy creatures.
She doesn’t even have the energy to hide in a bathroom stall. When Meta walks into her ramshackle office, V is staring at a calendar pinned to the wall. It shows March of last year, but V’s kept it up, because she likes the owl that illustrates it.
“Am I interrupting?” Meta asks, so flatly that V can’t tell whether she’s being sarcastic or not.
“No,” V says, sitting up in her chair, all business.
But Meta doesn’t take the hint. Or pushes it away.
“Bad lunch?” she asks.
“Difficult lunch,” V says.
“Your boyfriend’s in town, right?”
V doesn’t remember telling Meta about J’s arrival. She realizes she has to start assuming if she tells something to Thor, Meta will end up knowing it.
“Yes. That’s who I had lunch with. Even though I ended up missing lunch.”
Meta clocks this and pulls out her phone.
“You have to have lunch,” Meta says. “I’m ordering you lunch.”
Meta is talking to V like they’re friends, like they are in Meta’s dorm room at NYU commiserating over a bad date. V doesn’t know what to do with this.
“Thank you,” V says. Then, “Do you know what I want?”
