Work Text:
November 2019
Sam knew she was going to regret wearing the Northwestern hoodie, but she’d thought it was because it was getting a bit ratty. Good for a Thursday night on the couch, not dressy enough for the cocktail bar she’d picked on a whim. “You’re not going to meet any nice men dressed like that,” she could hear her mom say.
But—she told her mom, internally— she hadn’t gone out to meet men. She’d gone out because sitting on her sofa and binge-watching Friends, again, was starting to feel incredibly sad.
Where was her cool coffeehouse gang? She wasn’t going to meet them sitting at home. She knew she had to get Out There. She wasn’t entirely sure where There was, or what she was supposed to do when she got There. All her favorite shows seemed to come with a friend group already assembled.
Maybe she should have stayed in Chicago, where things made more sense.
The middle-aged man on the stool to her left – wearing a wedding ring, ick, ick – kept looking at her. Even her sad and coffee-stained hoodie wasn’t putting him off. Go home to your wife, she thought.
And now he was talking to her. “Excuse me,” he said. “Did you go to Northwestern?”
She turned to him slowly and gave him a look that made most douches give up. At least it would have worked in Chicago.
Wedding Ring ignored the look. “I just got back from dropping my daughter off there. She’s a freshman, and they put her in some enormous dorm, in a triple. It was like a man’s name. Bob McGrath or something.”
“Bobb-McCullough,” Sam corrected, before she could stop herself.
“Right!” He flashed her a surprisingly non-creepy smile. “The other’s the guy on Sesame Street. He was my wife’s hall pass, don’t ask me why. I think he’s dead though.” Something Sam couldn’t read flickered over the man’s face and was gone. “So, Bobb-McCullough. Is Olivia going to like it? Olivia’s my daughter.”
She should get up and leave, but this conversation was still marginally better than sitting on her couch. If Wedding Ring crossed the line, she could always go. “It’s kind of the party dorm, or at least it was when I went there. But that was a decade ago.”
He shrugged. “It probably still is. Good. Did you like Northwestern? Were you happy there? It just seems really far away.”
“I had a great time,” Sam said. It was probably the happiest she’d ever been, honestly. Since her parents’ divorce, it had always just been her and her mom. And then she went to college, and there were people around her all the time, happy to talk to her about everything big and small, from the life of the mind to who brewed the best coffee around campus.
That’s what she thought adult life would be like. And it wasn’t. She liked her job at the magazine, she liked her coworkers, and then at quitting time they all went home and the silence started.
And since the man was still looking at her, she added, “I bet your daughter will like Northwestern too.”
“I think so,” said the man. “She didn’t even really need me there. Or want me there, honestly. My other twin, Payton, drove herself up to Cornell about a month ago. I offered to go with her, but she said she could handle it. It’s just that Olivia’s always been the shy one, so I thought—but you know. They’re at the point when you need to learn how to step back and let them make their own mistakes. So I flew back home, and the apartment was so quiet. And I realized that a big part of my life was over. Twenty years, and that book is closed.” Were his eyes wet? A little? “I mean, I know they’ll be back. I see my parents all the time. But now we’re at the point where they’re off on their own and I pretend I’m okay without them. Oh shit,” he picked up a cocktail napkin and wiped the tear that had just come out of his eye. “Sorry. I did not mean to say all that. It’s been a long day.”
Why journalism, Sam? Her mother had always asked. Because she always wanted to hear other people’s stories. “It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t mind.”
“No, I mean, I specifically went out to get my mind off things. I could have called my friends, I could have called my brother. I didn’t want to wallow. So I asked myself, well, what would I have done twenty years ago? Gone to that bar on Lexington and started talking with a stranger. I mean, it was a different bar back then. Really different.”
“What kind of bar?” Sam said, a little worried.
“A cigar bar,” said the man, and beamed at her.
“Ew,” she said.
“Hey, cigar bars were big back then! There was even a magazine for people who liked cigars, Cigar Aficionado. One time they had Danny DeVito on the cover.”
“I like Danny DeVito,” she admitted.
“Who doesn’t?” he said. “He was great in Taxi.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Because it was on before I was born,” she said, acidly.
“Are you calling me old?” he said, grinning at her.
“Yes,” she said.
“Ha! It’s true,” he said. “But I’ll tell you, it sneaks up on a person. One day you’re a hot young thing, the next you’re an alte kocker sitting in a bar and wondering what the hell happened. So what’s your story? You come to New York from somewhere Midwestern…”
“Ohio.”
“To become a—"
“Journalist.”
“Okay, that’s awesome. Like Tom Wolfe, or Hunter S. Thompson…”
“No, like Susan Orlean.”
“I have no idea who that is.”
“She wrote The Orchid Thief.”
“Oh, right! Julie’s book club did that one.”
Sam smiled. That’s your wife’s name. Julie. “But it wasn’t that book that made me want to do it. It was one of her earlier ones, Saturday Night, where she just followed a bunch of people around and wrote about what they did on Saturday nights. There was a babysitter, and a dance hall where she interviewed a woman in her eighties, and a halfway house. When I read it, back in junior high—”
“Oh, you’re killing me, kid.”
“I thought, that’s what I want to do with my life. I want to meet interesting people, and tell their stories. I want to make people care about the people I interview.”
“I bet it’s going well,” the man said.
“How can you know that?” asked Sam.
“I can tell when someone has the right kind of ambition. And you went to Northwestern, so you’re smart. There aren’t a lot of jobs for journalists these days, but I bet you have one.”
She looked at her drink, feeling shy. “I mean, it’s not a big magazine.”
“That’s how you start,” he said, eagerly. “And then you go big. Right? I used to have this job, selling penny stocks. My first job, out of Penn. It was the worst. But that’s how I started, and a few years ago I retired from Goldman. So it all worked out.”
“I mean, yes,” she said. “I guess it is okay. But—oh, I don’t know.”
He leaned back in his chair, waving his left hand as if he were shoveling her words towards himself. “Go ahead, tell me. That’s what strangers are for.”
“Is it supposed to be this lonely?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you this lonely, when you were my age? I get up, I go to work, I sit in my apartment with my TV and my phone. Sometimes I think, maybe I should get a roommate, but I don’t think I want that. I don’t know. There are people around me all the time, but I just feel so alone.”
He considered her, thinking it over. “You need to get yourself out there.”
Now he was pissing her off. “What the hell does that mean? Out where? Doing what?”
He touched the slick surface of the bar. “Just like this, what we’re doing right now. Go to bars and talk to strangers.”
“Maybe that’s easy for you, but it’s not easy for me.”
“Well, a little coke will get you right over that.”
She laughed. “You can’t be serious.”
He shrugged. “You know how I met my wife?”
“I’m guessing you got yourself out there.”
“Okay, it’s November 2000. And my bros and I are going to have a party upstate, so Ari asks me to pick up cigars. And the thing about this cigar bar—did you tell me your name yet?”
“Sam,” she said.
“Sam, I’m Trevor. Okay, so this bar, when it was a cigar bar, they had a source who’d get Cuban cigars—I think they smuggled them out of Canada -- which was illegal, but who cares? Cuban cigars are the best. And I was negotiating with the guy, and then I saw this woman at the end of the bar smoking a cigar, and I’m telling you it was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. She takes a drag, and gives me a look and blows a smoke ring, and she winks at me, and I’m like this is the one, Lefkowitz, do not fuck this up. And you know, it all worked out.”
“Except for the party.”
“Oh, I got her number, and I was headed to the party, just in my own car, but then – do you want to hear this? It’s pretty fucked up. Excuse my language.”
“I’m a journalist,” she said.
“Right. So Ari and the guys decided to haze the intern by making him run into town in nothing but a T-shirt. They’d done it before, but it was July, so it was a different fucking experience when I did it than Pinkus running in November. I mean, holy shit, he could have died. So I spot him by the side of the road, he’s this close to hypothermia, and by the time we’re back in the city I’ve already paged my buddy at Merrill who’d been low-key recruiting me for years, and two weeks later, we both have new jobs, and fuck Lehman.”
“You worked at Lehman Brothers?”
He shrugged. “I worked at a lot of places that aren’t there anymore.”
She shook her head. “So the moral of this story, is “get yourself out there”?”
He smiled. “No, it isn’t, because you sidetracked me. That’s the moral of the Julie part, which is that we went out for drinks the next night, and then six months later we got married, and about three months after that we had Payton and Olivia, and it was the best decision I ever made in my entire life, and it all started because I saw a hot girl smoking a cigar.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It sounds like you make a lot of impulsive decisions, and some of them work out.”
He clutched his heart. “You are so young, but you are so mean. No, listen. You live in the best city in the world. I was just in Chicago, and they claim to be a city, but that’s bullshit. This is it, right here. Somewhere, here in New York, fun is happening. And you and I are going to go find it. If you want.”
Actually, she kind of did. She had the sense that whatever happened, it would be a memorable evening. And when she thought it through, how many evenings did she really have in her life? How many evenings when she was young and healthy and free of anyone who really needed her? But still—“I don’t know what Julie would say about that.”
“She’d say, ‘What kind of goofball bullshit are you up to tonight, Trev?’”
“I mean—”
“I know what you meant,” he said. “Julie died five years ago. Our girls are both off at college. My apartment is empty, and I can’t go back there right now. I can’t do it, Sam. So I’m going out, somewhere in this city, where people are having fun, and I want to bring you with me. So what do you think?”
He smiled at her and she thought, most of what you thought you knew about this guy is wrong. “All right,” she said. “Why don’t you show me how it’s done.”