“This is different.”
“Taking a class isn’t strategic, Anna. That’s operational.”
“It depends—” Anna began, because she already had a theory about this, but Leslie cut her off again.
“Remember: a goal without a plan is just a wish.”
“Yes, but—”
“And I’m sure you’ve already asked yourself this, so let’s pretend I’m not asking, but is this really what you need to be spending your severance on?” Leslie set her latte down inside Anna’s Core Competencies as if it were nothing more than a cocktail napkin. Which, of course, it was. They were sitting by an open window, the air off the canal as fresh as a newborn fart, with Anna’s Life Map on the table between them. “Your Core Competencies still look thin,” Leslie said, prodding the moist napkin. “Let’s go back to your experience at grad school, mine it for some strengths.”
“That was years ago,” Anna began. If anything, shouldn’t they be talking about Pinter, Chinski and Harms, where the wounds were still fresh, Google-searchable? “Why rehash that stuff now?”
“Because you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been,” Leslie said, possibly for the second time. “Start with the dissertation.”
Anna’s stomach plunged. Dissertation had the same effect on her as the word sarcoma.
How she had missed graduate student life at first! Her amorphous days tethered to an illusory sense of purpose. Setting off for a bright café like this one each morning to not write her thesis. How she missed lunches with Sveta and Evgeni (the Slavic Studies department was stuffed with Slavs perfecting their Slavism). Of course, a month after the department kicked her out the pendulum had swung hard the other way. Academia, she realized, was a sham. An intellectual sports club where she could walk the treadmills of her pointless arguments for years, mesmerized by the illusion of progress. Suddenly she wanted nothing more than to rise early each morning, get on the subway with her lunch in a bag, disgorge at the foot of some gleaming mass of glass and steel, serve as the filling in a capitalism cannoli. She had taken the job at Pinter, Chinski and Harms because it was a name that made people say “Oh!” They hadn’t heard of it, just felt as though they should have. In truth, it didn’t pay that much—not enough to live without a roommate—but there were benefits, including, Anna remembered with a twinge, tuition reimbursement. Six years later and what did she have to show for it? Aside from the cubital tunnel syndrome she’d developed dragging files from one subdirectory to another for hour after useless hour. No, she didn’t want to talk about the past, she wanted to talk about the future.
“Criminology,” Anna said. The idea had come to her while watching a TiVoed episode of True Crime.
“Huh?” Leslie said, looking up from the Venn diagram she’d begun drawing.
“The class. I know it sounds random, but in a crazy kind of way, it’s perfect. Look, it’s got something for each of my Spheres.” And to Anna’s surprise, Leslie allowed her to take the pen from her hand. “Criminology. It’s about figuring things out. It’s about writing and analysis. And when you think about it, it’s all about people.” Leslie continued to say nothing, which Anna found encouraging. “The other thing I like is how it’s sort of, you know, provocative. Because—let’s admit it—murder is interesting. ‘Abnormal personalities,’” Anna air-quoted. “Psychopaths, rapists, pedophiles.” Leslie looked around in alarm at the word pedophiles, but Anna kept going. “So even if you’re just moving a bunch of papers around on a desk, the serial killers still keep things jumping on a certain level—”
“If,” Leslie cut her off, “you are really serious about criminology and you’re sure that’s what you want to do, we’ll put it on the map. It’s your map, Anna. Honestly, do whatever you want. You can be a criminologist. You can be a unicorn. It’s all you. But know that this is major. OK? Something like that changes your entire Vision Statement. It’s a campaign, not something you can just stick in your Spheres.” Leslie took the pen back from Anna, who had waved it decisively all around the map without daring to make an actual mark. And as it slipped from her hand, Anna couldn’t help but notice that Leslie’s pen, which was heavy and silver and probably had her initials engraved on it somewhere, was, let’s face it, kind of obnoxious. It was—how hadn’t she noticed this earlier?—a fuck-you pen. Despite herself, Anna suddenly hated Leslie all over again. Leslie, who could sit there looking so very Whole Foods, with her curator husband and three-bedroom condo at the Emory, her job at McKinsey, those Selima Optique sunglasses—telling Anna exactly what she could and couldn’t stick in her Spheres. Anna couldn’t help but wonder if Leslie and Josh were still trying to have another baby or if things had gotten dire. She imagined Leslie wouldn’t let it go lightly. There would be egg donors, sperm spinning, even surrogacy. Wouldn’t it be just like Leslie to outsource?
“Of course, if you feel like you’ve given criminology the proper amount of consideration,” Leslie continued, “and you’re ready for Process and Learning, then let’s do it. Go ahead. Put it down.”
They both knew that Anna was not ready for Process and Learning.
And criminology wasn’t even the worst of it. Anna had spent last night jotting down ideas in the margins of The New Yorker that she’d gotten from ads—the Middle Monterey Language Academy (Make a language breakthrough!), Voyages to Antiquity (Experience the extraordinary cultures of ancient civilizations!), Vantage Press (Publish your book now!)—opportunities that had seemed so alluring, with their elegant font and refracted New Yorker glory, when she’d perused them alone at her kitchen table.
“You think I’m mean,” Leslie sighed.
“No!”
“I just want you to weigh your options before jumping into something,” she said, rising from the table. “Again. Honestly, Anna. You have a nice life. Is this the kind of thing you really want in your head before you go to sleep at night? Murder? Pedophiles?” She shook her head, shook out the pedophiles. “I’m going to run to the loo, and when I get back, I think we should start all over with some To-From statements. Stop worrying about the big picture, OK? Better to have some low-hanging fruit at this stage. Makes the whole thing look doable. Start without me and think about the ‘From.’” Leslie gave Anna a light squeeze on the shoulder and smiled. “Carpe diem, right?”
Leslie’s eyes were so clear and calm, so reassuringly full of goodwill that all Anna could do was smile back. And as Anna smiled, she hated herself for hating Leslie, who had, after all, sacrificed her Sunday afternoon to help Anna. Leslie was, in fact, always volunteering to help Anna, forwarding e-mail about secret sample sales, reminders about daylight saving time, status updates from people they’d both gone to high school with, whom Anna had deliberately (and at no small emotional cost) managed to ice out of her life. Leslie had canceled her Pilates class to make Anna’s whole thing look doable, but what had Anna ever done for Leslie? And on the heels of this self-doubt came another panicky thought: had these laptop people been sitting here the whole time, listening to her and Leslie? The tables at Café Gowanus were jammed right up against one another, practically overlapping. Anna turned to the couple at the neighboring table, and was relieved to find them both too deep into their screenplays to notice much else.
“What’s with the Celtx?” the man was saying. “I thought I told you to buy Final Draft.”
“It does the same exact thing,” said the woman, who looked gaunt and Vice magazinish, her cheekbones holding up her face like tent poles. “The only difference is one’s free.”
“If you think producers won’t see the glitches when you convert to PDF, you’re wrong. They’re definitely gonna think you belong in the slush if you won’t even cough up two-fifty for professional screenwriting software.”
The woman stared morosely into the screen, not saying anything as the guy retreated to his cell