“I wish we lived in an optimistic era,” Frank said. They were sitting at his kitchen table and it was late, the hour when things pretended they could go either way. Some part of him wanted her to leave. Or he wanted some part of her to leave. The rest of her could have stayed.
There was a slice of lemon in the bottom of his glass that now seemed bizarrely festive, like a birthday cake delivered to someone in a coma. He thought about sucking on the lemon, then thought the word pesticide, then reached for the lemon anyway, then didn’t like the look of his fingers in the glass, then removed his fingers and wiped them on his pant leg.
“What’s an example of an optimistic era?” Anya said. There was a silence in which she got the bad feeling she always got after confessing to something she wrongly assumed was on everyone’s mind. The last time this had happened, she’d told a visiting salesman from a software startup that she didn’t wash her hands after peeing. The man was waiting for a meeting with her boss. He was peddling a tool that tracked projects and emailed team members a weekly productivity summary. The mock-up email, which he showed Anya on an iPad, addressed an imaginary employee named Chuck who was “falling behind” but could easily “get back on track.”
Anya was the receptionist. She took it upon herself to loosen up nervous visitors before their meetings. The visiting salesman listened as she described turning on the faucet for the benefit of anyone standing outside the bathroom, but not putting her hands in the water. “Germs are real,” the man said. “They’re not some pizza-basement conspiracy.”
“The 1950s?” Anya said, picturing a shiny car in a driveway, a dad and two kids squinting in the sun, mom holding the camera. Was that optimism? History had revealed that homogenous, harmonious cultures were in fact repressed ones. And yet, progressive cultures like twenty-first-century New York lacked harmony on all levels, public and private. America had disintegrated into hyper-specific niches governed by micro-celebrities wholly unknown to occupants of other niches. Conversations dead-ended quickly. “You’ve seen this, right? Alright, well, you should look it up.” But you wouldn’t look it up; you had your own corridors to traverse.
“Yeah, kind of,” Frank said. “But the 1950s were also a time of fear.” He was satisfied with this phrase—“a time of fear”—and felt inspired to support it with a list. The list would need at least three items. Frank thought hard about the 1950s. A PBS documentary played foggily in his brain. He once visited the Roosevelt estate in Upstate New York. “There was the Cold War, and polio, and...” He couldn’t furnish the list. He looked nervously at Anya, who was gazing down at her lap with an expression that was either annoyance or distraction, an aimless tension around the eyes. Then came Frank’s usual sequence of thoughts: she’s not that attractive; I find her attractive; not that attractive; attractive; not. Anya was still looking at her lap, her body as still as something in a shop window, something with a label that said “not for sale,” unique and dusty. Her dress was short. She had a feminine style, short skirts and sandals with thin straps, but a masculine posture. The result was an indeterminate sensuality. There was city grit between her toes and her panties were visible, gray cotton with tufts of dark hair on either side. This annoyed him at a distance but wouldn’t have annoyed him up close. Anya once told him her butt had made full contact with the subway seat on the ride over. After she left his apartment that night, Frank sniffed the seat of her chair until he came on the kitchen tiles.
“The ’90s,” he said. “That was an optimistic era.”
“You’re just saying that because you were a kid then,” Anya said in a mean voice. “You think the ’90s were all Kraft macaroni and Sunday morning cartoons.” But Anya wasn’t feeling mean, and she wasn’t imagining macaroni and cartoons. She was feeling tender and imagining a group of weirdly tanned Caucasian teenagers on spring break in Cancun; a TV obstacle course with boulders of painted plastic; a cassette tape in the wrong case, so when you opened it you were disappointed. “Maybe it’s the type of thing you can only know in retrospect. Maybe we’re in an optimistic era right now, we just don’t realize . . .” She trailed off because she was wrong. This was a pessimistic era. This was the hour when things could go either way, but didn’t.
Most people saw talking as a means of expressing ideas; Anya saw it as a testing ground. Frequently, she said things that, upon hearing them, she no longer believed; or adopted long-scorned beliefs because they sounded nice vibrating through her inner ear. “How does that feel in your body?” her therapist used to ask, and Anya would reply, “Does my brain count as my body?”
She started seeing this particular therapist because he was cheap, and he was cheap because he was still in training. This lowered the stakes of the whole enterprise: Anya could dismiss his suggestions without feeling as though she was in denial or wasting a lot of money. Anya was just one component of her therapist’s training, like an assigned reading. She was an actor playing a patient, a series of lessons to prepare him for his real clients.
“I’m not talking about my own childhood,” Frank said. “I read a whole book about the ’90s. It was called The Nineties. I forget the subtitle.” He paused. “No, I remember it now. It was just A Book. The subtitle. Anyway, it was super comprehensive.” He wasn’t saying anything. What was he saying? “What I’m saying is I’m trying to view things through a sociological lens.”
The idea of him as a cartoon-drunk child, possibly in footie pajamas, hung over the conversation. It was a low blow, a humiliation tactic, but also an attempt at flirtation. Anya could be fun to flirt with—she was quick and made ready reference to her own prudishness, as a sort of bawdy-friar gag—but there was always an undercurrent of earnest expectation. The flirting was a prelude and not an end in itself.
Frank was still loosely involved with his ex, a woman he’d met on a dating app two years earlier, then dated seriously for one year, then never stopped seeing. Christine was now sleeping with other people, men and women, and she encouraged Frank to do the same, which felt infantilizing. She once read aloud from a magazine article: one of the top reasons for divorce is financial differences. They were lying in her bed, which was appointed in the manner of a high-end hotel—tight corners and too much cushioning, so Frank had to use double strength to move closer to her. He rested his head on her stomach. “Good thing we’re not married,” he joked. “Exactly,” Christine said, and he felt the word boom in her diaphragm.
Everything in Christine’s apartment looked mandatory, like it came with the lease: amber-hued light bulbs, clear canisters for displaying pasta, gray wool rugs, wooden hangers. It seemed unlikely that any apartment in the building contained different decor. There was a compact, glass-walled gym down the hall that Frank had to walk past whenever he visited; thin women raged on the ellipticals. It reminded Frank of glass-walled hospital rooms where newborns slept. Had he ever slept in one? Did they exist? The gym was a grown-up version: America’s future, propulsive and paralyzed, shaking with an energy that folded in on itself like a silent scream.
Christine was chill. Anya claimed that saying the word chill was a red flag, and that no notable historical figure met the criteria. Christine was easy to spend time with. They had fun doing regular things like eating at restaurants and saying, “You have to try this” or “I’m so stuffed” or “This’ll be my lunch tomorrow.” At clubs, Christine danced normally, moving her hips and raising her arms above her head, instead of giving Frank an imaginary box, as Anya had done at a warehouse rave in Queens. Frank hadn’t participated in the mime, and Anya had then placed the imaginary box on the floor with an expression of comic sadness that betrayed genuine hurt. Christine had never tried to hold anything that wasn’t real. She liked stadium concerts and wine and pickleball. Their sex was satisfying but their kissing wasn’t.
“I guess I mean,” Anya tried again, “what if we’re actually in a really good era and after this it’ll get worse?” Her therapy visits ended after they’d switched to video calls per Anya’s request. She had been experiencing a period of ill health, which she attributed at the time to long COVID or an undiagnosed autoimmune condition. In retrospect, there was a clear connection between the fatigue and Frank. The best she could do was to leave Frank's house around midnight, the way a losing politician withdraws from a race. Somehow there was more dignity in walking to the subway and whispering to herself, “What the fuck, what the fuck”—more dignity in that than in sex with a man she liked.
She had never been able to figure out the video calls. Her microphone was always muted, her camera off, the volume so low that the therapist sounded far away, which he was. Anya’s laptop was a black ThinkPad from work, plastic and laggy with a nametag that said “Anya,” as if the laptop were doing a mean impression of her. Outside of answering work emails, Anya rarely went online. She used social media accounts too infrequently to become addicted. When she did log on, she felt misunderstood. Why was she being shown this picture? Who had thought she would find it funny? She was behind on culture. She blamed the ThinkPad: she needed brushed steel and round corners to participate in life. Plastic had rendered Anya spiritually suburban.
“You’re just describing pessimism,” Frank said. “If you’re expecting things to get worse, that’s pessimism.” He did like her. Even Anya’s idiotic assertions had a compelling, outsidery zing to them. Frank would spend the next day mulling them over, sniffing them like a chair, trying to gain access to Anya via a little door she would never notice. It was her noticing that ruined it; she could never let a thing happen without noticing it, describing it, asking it politely to happen again.
Once, at a Chinese restaurant, Anya had said she didn’t eat baby corn for the same reason she didn’t eat veal. Frank hadn’t known if she was joking, so he hadn’t laughed. Then, at the end of the meal, he’d noticed that the baby corn was gone from her plate. He’d felt stupid for not laughing. The next day, he’d spotted a baby watermelon at a fruit stand and thought, in a tragic voice, “It never got to grow up.” He appreciated that Anya gave him thoughts like that. He never told Anya about the watermelon. She would have taken it the wrong way. She held tight to anything resembling a confession.
It was midnight now and in a few minutes Anya would say, “Alright.” She would remain seated, like a passenger waiting for the fasten-seatbelt light to go off. Then Frank would deliver his line: “You’re always welcome to crash.” It was a line that satisfied no one, and made uncomfortable reference to the one time Anya had stayed over. Frank had laid a twin sheet on the couch and gone to his bedroom. A half hour later, he heard a knock. “Did you want to...?” Anya asked. That was the whole sentence, the whole conversation. It was dark in Frank’s bedroom and bright in the hall, which made him feel like a miner being rescued. He said nothing. Anya looked anxiously in the direction of the couch. She looked back at Frank. Her eyes took a moment to find his in the dark.
Why was she still sitting in the chair now? Things would only ever go one way. It was so obvious, Frank thought. Obvious what would happen and what wouldn’t.. He took a pointless sip from his glass. The ice melt tasted like fingers. He watched her over the rim of the glass. Her face was hopeful. Afterward, once it was all over, it was this he would remember.
