Andrew Fox: Over Our Heads

‘You must be heartbroken,’ she said. ‘Really, you poor, poor thing.’

‘Asshole,’ Sky said, the word a bubble on her little lips.

‘That’s a grown-up word, honey,’ Emma said and grinned at Darren as she punched his shoulder.

When I got home, I went looking for Carol’s coat but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I searched for her pillow but couldn’t find that either. It was then that I noticed the big Rothko print missing from above the bed. The dresser top was bare. I checked the bedroom closet, the kitchen and bathroom cabinets: Carol’s sweaters and cardigans, her Crock-Pot and her Cuisinart, her soft towels and her acne medication and her hair dryer — all were gone.

‘She’s moved out,’ I told Darren that Friday at the Tiger’s Tail, a sweaty, dollar-a-PBR joint on Amsterdam where our dissertation workshop met. ‘She just let herself in when she knew I’d be out and took all her stuff away.’

‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘that’s cold .’ He eyed one of the new MAs, a girl in brown-and-white wingtips, a cape and Warby Parkers. ‘So, what are you going to do for rent?’

I rubbed my hands over my cheeks, hard enough to hurt. ‘I hadn’t even thought of that.’

My father, in his will, had left me a small inheritance about which I’d never told Carol, and which I’d always thought of as my exit fund: enough money to buy a ticket home and to sustain me through a few months of looking for work. It would be enough, I imagined, to square me with the landlord until the end of the academic year — but only just.

‘Listen,’ Darren said, ‘me and you, next weekend. Let’s get out just the two of us and watch a game, okay? I’ve cleared it with ground control.’

But in the end, he couldn’t make it: Sky had a cold. I sat in the living room in my Yankees hat, an empty Sunday stretching out before me. I checked Carol’s Facebook page — she hadn’t posted since Dublin. I wondered where she was, what she was doing, if she missed me. The couch, bare of Peruvian throw or embroidered cushion, no longer felt comfortable but merely worn. The white wall beneath the empty pot rack was hatched with dark streaks grazed by saucepan lips. The corkboard above the desk — but hadn’t the cards and the concert tickets and the love notes scribbled on Post-its all been there the morning before? Hadn’t the Chinese tea set still been sitting on the window ledge, the glass candlesticks still centred on the kitchen table? I smiled — she had been back again, and might be back once more for the microwave and the TV and every other little thing of hers she missed.

I started to mix up my hours, to work from home whenever I could and to leave campus straight after class, but Carol never showed. At length I discovered that, as long as I was reading or teaching, I could go sometimes for a full hour without thinking of her. Slowly, I put a shape on the dissertation chapter I’d been drafting since the summer, got to know my students and felt some vague enthusiasm. So it came as a shock when Darren and Emma invited me over to their place in Morningside and broke the news of what they’d learned.

‘Who’s Tyler ?’ I said.

‘Listen.’ Emma showed me the lines of her palms. ‘All I know is what I saw and what little she told me.’

‘And why was she telling you anything?’

‘I told you,’ Emma said, ‘we just ran into each other in the street. I had Sky with me. They were coming out of some breakfast place.’

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘ Breakfast? How long has this been going on?’

‘Really, I don’t know. It was only for a moment. I saw them before she saw me. She was embarrassed, I think. But Sky had dropped her little baby Kermit, and he — the guy —’

‘Tyler,’ I said.

‘He picked it up and I don’t think she would have introduced me or anything otherwise but —’

‘So you don’t really know anything, then,’ I said.

The baby monitor screeched. Emma leaped to her feet.

I pictured this Tyler: tall and blond, with broken-in expensive shoes and a neck full of well-groomed stubble. I saw him peering back at me everywhere from the crowds on the platforms at Times Square and started leaving earlier in the mornings to beat the rush-hour hustle. I’d arrive at the library around quarter to seven, chain-smoke on the steps until it opened and then hurry through the silent stacks towards my carrel. And there I’d stay, with the exception of class hours or trips to the vending machine, until ten or eleven at night. I sped through my second chapter at a rate of fifteen hundred words per day, lost ten pounds and grew a patchy beard and chewed all my nails to the quick. I stood before my class on a rain-lashed Monday morning, more caffeine in my veins than blood. I opened my mouth to speak but realized that I had nothing to tell them. Twenty pairs of eyes pinned me to the wall. I sat back down, assigned some busy work and dismissed them early.

My supervisor summoned me to his office on a sunless corner of the fourth floor. The lone window was set in a wall of too-often-repainted cinder block. Most of the bookshelves were overstuffed, chaotic. But the eye-level one held an orderly line of titles whose spines all bore the professor’s name.

‘Okay, look,’ he said, his suit sleeves shiny, ‘I understand that you’re going through some personal stuff right now. But let me just level with you brutally here — may I be brutal?’

‘Please,’ I said.

He tented his slender fingers. ‘No one has time for any of that, okay?’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Which is not to say that we’re inhuman. We are in the Humanities, after all! Just — hey — don’t bring it into work with you, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay?’ he said as I watched, behind him, the clouds begin to break apart in a sudden, clattering rainstorm.

‘Okay,’ I said.

The rain continued for a full week. It battered the windows in roaring torrents and ran like a river in the streets. I woke at night with a racking cough that left me torn and sour, and decided that the smoking really would have to stop. So, once the storm moved on, I slapped a nicotine patch to my shoulder and bought a new pair of lightweight sneakers. I was still young, I told myself; there still was time for me. At dawn, I wheezed along the promenade by the river, where Carol and I once had strolled on summer evenings. I added a hat and gloves and thermals as the days began to chill, and when the paths became clogged with soggy leaves I switched to a treadmill at the gym.

The Monday after Halloween, I cleared my third chapter. And that Thursday I presented a paper based on it to a conference at NYU. Aside from my fellow-panellists, three people forwent lunch to sit in the over-lit and under-heated conference room. Two of them looked unsure as to how they’d gotten there, but one turned out to be a minor star in my field. He took me out afterwards for coffee, and suggested that I send him something for a collection of essays he was editing. I hadn’t been able to publish anything since a handful of reviews during the first year of my MA in Dublin, so I caught a train uptown to my carrel and stayed there until I’d edited the chapter down to a submittable draft.

At one a.m., I splurged on a cab to take me home. And for the first time in a long time, I felt grateful to be in New York: to be lurching between the lights in the crush and blare of Midtown, then speeding across the bridge suspended high above the East River. The cab rolled past the no-name clothing stores of Downtown Brooklyn and hung a right at the rust-coloured arena that always reminded me of the carcass of a ship I had once seen marooned on rocks off Inisheer. We slowed on President, coasting between the lights. I paid the cabbie and climbed the stoop. Someone, two weeks before, had strung the railings with cotton cobwebs, and they remained, as did a gang of pumpkins on the lower window ledges, their features now soft with decay.