Will I find Grace there? I went back and forth between wanting to do everything I could to find her and feeling like it was totally pointless. She’d be with someone. She’d be someone’s wife. Someone better than me. I wanted to get away from everything reminding me that I still had nothing.
“If you care so much, why haven’t you approved my request?” I asked.
He scowled. I noticed how deep the line was between his eyebrows and it occurred to me that Scott and I were the same age . . . and he was getting old. “I don’t mean the actual savannahs, man. Running away isn’t going to solve your problems.”
“Now you’re my shrink?”
“No, I’m your friend. Remember when you asked for that desk job?”
I walked toward the door. “Just consider it. Please, Scott.”
Right before I left the room he said, “You’re chasing the wrong thing. It’s not gonna make you happy.”
He was right, and I could admit that to myself, but not out loud. I thought if I could win an award again, get some recognition for my work, it would fill the black hole eating away at me. But deep down, I knew that wasn’t the solution.
After work, I sat on a bus bench just outside the National Geographic building. I watched hordes of people trying to get home, racing down the crowded sidewalks of Midtown. I wondered if I could judge how lonely a person was based on how much of a hurry he or she was in. No one who has someone waiting for him at home would sit on a bus bench after a ten-hour workday and people-watch. I always carried an old Pentax camera from my college days in my messenger bag, but I hadn’t used it in years.
I removed it from the case and starting clicking away as people flooded in and out of the subways, as they waited for busses, as they hailed cabs. I hoped that through the lens I would see her again, like I had years before. Her vibrant spirit; the way she could color a black-and-white photo with her magnetism alone. I had thought about Grace often over the years. Something as simple as a smell, like sugared pancakes at night, or the sound of a cello in Grand Central or Washington Square Park on a warm day, could transport me right back to that year in college. The year I spent falling in love with her.
It was hard for me to see the beauty in New York anymore. Granted, much of the riffraff and grit was gone, at least in the East Village; it was cleaner and greener now, but that palpable energy I had felt in college was gone, too. For me, anyway.
Time passes, life goes on, places change, people change. And still, I couldn’t get Grace off my mind after seeing her in the subway. Fifteen years is too long to be holding on to a few heart-pounding moments from college.
3. Five Weeks After I Saw You Matt
“Matt, I’m talking to you.”
I looked up to see Elizabeth peering over the cubicle partition. “Huh?”
“I said, do you want to get lunch with us and go through the new slides?”
“Who’s ‘us’?”
“Scott, Brad, and me.”
“No.”
“Matt . . .” she warned. “You have to be there.”
“I’m busy, Elizabeth.” I was playing the Sudoku game printed on the brown paper bag from the deli where I buy my turkey sandwiches. “And, I’m eating. Can’t you see that?”
“You’re supposed to eat in the break room. I can smell those onions down the hall.”
“That’s because you’re pregnant,” I mumbled into my sandwich.
She huffed and then turned and walked down the hallway, muttering something to herself.
Scott came up to my cubicle a minute later. “We need to go over those slides, buddy.”
“Can’t I just eat in peace? By the way, did you look over my request?”
He grinned. “You get in touch with subway girl yet?”
“I rode the subway to Brooklyn every day for a month and didn’t see her. I tried.”
It was true, I had been looking for Grace. After work, I would go to all of our old haunts in the East Village; I even hung out in front of the NYU dorm rooms where we had lived. Nothing.
“Hmm.” He scratched his chin. “With all the technology out there, you’re bound to find her. Maybe she wrote a ‘missed connections’ ad. Did you look there?”
I set my sandwich down. “What’s a ‘missed connections’ ad?”
He walked into my cubicle. “Get up, let me sit there.” I rose from my chair. Scott sat down to pull up Craigslist on my computer, navigating over to the ‘missed connections’ section. “It’s like when you see someone in public and have a connection but don’t know how to reach them. You can post about the experience here and hope they find it.”
“Why wouldn’t you just ask for their number when you see them?”
“It’s one of those sensitive-guy, new-wave things. Like, if you don’t have the balls to approach someone but maybe there’s an attraction, you can post here. If they were feeling it, too, they might see it and respond to your post. No harm, no foul. You write where it happened and what you were wearing and all that so the other person knows it’s you.”