“Whatever, MFA timewaster.”
And in that moment, with their undrunk drinks, shadows tattooed to the wall, the man’s hat struggling to contain his hair—there was something so oddly familiar about the scene. Suddenly, she had it. L’Absinthe! Only it was the modern-day equivalent of the Degas painting: L’iPad. Feeling pleased with herself, Anna took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote the words Pinter, Chinski and Harms under the word From. She underlined the words twice, stared down at the page. But a minute later, it was still blank and she couldn’t help thinking this whole exercise begged the question How many fresh starts can a person reasonably expect to make in life? Unironically, that is.
Now here was Leslie again, looking somehow refreshed. She had done something to herself in the bathroom. What was it? A fresh coat of lipstick? Or blush, the invisible kind that looks like you aren’t even trying? No. Maybe she’d removed a coat of something? Was that the trick? You refresh by stripping back, like peeling away the generic wall-to-wall carpeting to reveal the charming hardwood below? Suddenly, more than anything, more than solving the riddle of her future, all Anna wanted to know was what Leslie had done to herself in the bathroom.
“What?” Leslie said. “Is there something on my face?”
“No.” Anna pressed a glass of ice water to her cheek. “I just like your hair more the other way.”
Leslie glanced at the piece of paper, flipped it over. “You’re taking things too literally. What do both of these things have in common? Grad school and Pinter?”
“The B line?” Anna ventured.
“Stasis,” said Leslie. “I want you to stop worrying. Stop thinking.”
“OK.”
“Don’t take it as criticism.” Leslie drew a line down the middle of the page, wrote “Definitional Present” at the top of one column, and “Aspirational Future” at the top of the other.
“I know.”
“And don’t drift off on me again. This whole process will go so much better if you clear your mind.”
“OK.”
“Remember, there’s no need to rush into Implementation.”
Anna was about to agree again. To agree as many times, in fact, and for however long, as Leslie wanted her to, when a man balancing two lattes bumped into the table, spilling his coffee. They both looked up. He wore the standard hipster uniform—a T-shirt featuring a bleak water tower and skinny jeans—yet somehow radiated the unmistakable air of a cherry picker. There’s unread e-mail in that man’s in-box, Anna thought. His cell phone was probably vibrating against his balls at this very moment. Lately it had become hard to separate what Anna really wanted from the things she felt obligated to manufacture for Leslie’s consent, but now she experienced a moment of clarity. The thing she wanted more than anything else, the answer to every To statement, was simply: e-mail. More e-mail, better e-mail. Looking up at the man, she lost herself to a fantasy of his in-box: booty calls, exclusive invites, jokey messages from intelligent colleagues about inspired, time-sensitive projects. E-mail like that one she’d received from Columbia years ago informing her she’d been accepted to the Department of Slavic Languages. Con-gratu-fucking-lations. Her heart beat faster now, just thinking about that e-mail. What she wouldn’t give to feel the adrenaline rush of that first virgin click again.
Since leaving Pinter, Chinski and Harms, Anna had kept a solitary unread e-mail in her in-box. It sat there like a goldfish in its parenthetical bowl, keeping her from feeling lonely. When she went to lunch, she turned off her phone just to ride the high of withdrawal, and while she ate tried to guess the number of messages that would be waiting for her back home. Often the number was still one. She would then sit in front of Gmail for a minute or ten, willing the 1 to change to a 2. And sometimes, as if by sheer magic, it did.
“Excuse me,” the man said, executing a deft, Zumba-like move to prevent more spillage.
“No problem,” Anna said, wondering how many Google search results there were for his name. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? More? She looked back down at her Life Map, watching as the slow latte river blurred the word objective, coming menacingly close to the little star-shaped icon. The one representing her.
2
Thirty-seven is not the end, Anna decided. No, forty-three is more like the end. Strike that. Forty … six. Or maybe the end just kept zooming away from you the older you got, like the outer bounds of the universe expanding from the blastula where hope was first born? Of course, there were always exceptions; she’d read once that the Marquis de Sade didn’t really get his perv on until he was fifty-one. Still, ignoring the outliers, Anna had only, let’s face it, ten years max to get her shit together. The clock was ticking. Many different clocks were ticking, in fact, if she really stopped to consider it. But stopping to consider the orchestra of ticking clocks was pointless and only paralyzed her. Still, there was a reason that store was called Forever 21, not Forever 37. Maybe she had already pissed away her quotient of potential. Who else was a late bloomer? Well, there was always Grandma Moses. And some people said Jesus didn’t do his best work until after he was dead.
Anna and Leslie had decided to wrap up their life-coaching session early. Anna had made enough progress for one day, and besides, Leslie had to pick Dora up somewhere or drop Dora off somewhere, and everyone knows that as soon as someone mentions their child that’s the end of it. They absolve you of all social responsibility, children do. Like cancer, or church. But Anna hadn’t particularly wanted to go right back to Sunset Park after Café Gowanus, to the back issues of InStyle scattered on the sofa where she’d fallen asleep last night and the refrigerator full of dubious bodega produce. The walk back to the subway was a dismal one—Third Avenue wasn’t much to look at—yet surprisingly it was here, in the long shadow of a Dunkin Donuts that simultaneously managed to be a Pizza Hut and also a Taco Bell, that the idea struck her: What if I wrote a book about women who were late bloomers?
From there, the plan unfolded quickly. If she used the rest of her savings, the severance, the money from Aunt Clara, her tax refund, she could take a trip around the country, or even the world. She would find and interview the heroic women late of bloom—unlikely political candidates, entrepreneurs, madams, all those makers of organic kimchi and knitters of artisanal tampons fleeing unhappy jobs at hedge funds. She could picture herself sharing confidences with these women in taxicabs, on Vermont porches, in ashrams, touring a factory floor in matching hard hats. They would remain friends after that first initial interview, so touched and flattered would the women be at having been elevated to exemplar status. And, of course, as a late-blooming woman herself (nowhere near forty-six, of course, but still …), there was a beautifully seamless logic to Anna taking on such a project. She would bloom late while documenting late bloomers. It would be so meta. This fit her Core Competencies perfectly, and if Leslie were still here, Anna would tell her, yeah, go for it, change her Vision Statement or stick it in her fucking Spheres, whatever. She was ready for Process and Learning!
The feeling lasted until Anna got home and checked Amazon only to find there was already a book about women who were late bloomers. It was called Late Bloomers and—this killed her—it was written by a man. A man who was clearly already in full bloom (this was his fifth book) and could just as easily have written about human beatboxers or ironic leitmotifs in London street art or heirloom fucking melons. This man, whose name was Lars Stråtchuk, with a little circle above the a (he wasn’t even American!), had quite literally stolen her future. A future Anna had already inhabited for two sparkling hours, where she moved purposely through each day and her work had weight and meaning. She did not want to go back. Already she felt the apartment closing in on her, the late-afternoon light muddying the corners, the drapes and the stained IKEA carpet letting go of the day’s heat, filling the air with their stale breath, making her tired. But first there would be a comfort snack. A tub of Sabra hummus and pita chips.