In Five Years

Chapter Thirty

An hour later, I’m at the bar upstairs at the hotel. I should sleep, but I can’t. Every time I try I think about Bella, about what a terrible friend I am to be this far away, and my eyes shoot back open. I’m leaning over my second dirty martini when Aldridge comes in. I squint. I’m too drunk for this.

“Dannie,” he says. “May I?” He doesn’t wait for my response but takes the seat next to me.

“Tonight was good,” I say, trying for steady. I think I’m slurring my words.

“You were very engaged,” he says. “Must have felt good.”

“Sure,” I deadpan. “Wonderful.”

Aldridge’s eyes flit down to my martini glass and back to me. “Danielle,” he says. “Are you alright?”

I’m suddenly aware that if I speak I will cry, and I have never cried in front of a boss, not once, not even at the DA’s office where morale was so bad that we had a designated room for hysterical outbursts. I pick up my water glass. I sip. I set it back down.

“No,” I say.

He gestures to the waiter. “I’ll have a Ketel on the rocks, two lemons,” he says. The waiter turns, but Aldridge calls him back. “No, actually, I’ll have a scotch. Neat.”

He takes off his suit jacket, drapes it over the empty stool next to him, and then goes about rolling back his sleeves. Neither of us speaks during this interval, and by the time the ritual is complete, his drink is in front of him and I no longer feel as if I’m going to cry.

“So,” he says. “You can begin or I can do my ankle cuffs next.”

I laugh. The alcohol has made everything loose. I feel the emotions there, right on the surface, not tucked and tidy where I normally keep them.

“I’m not sure I’m a good person,” I say. I didn’t know that’s what was inside my head, but once I say it, I know it’s true.

“Interesting,” he says. “A good person.”

“My best friend is very sick.”

“Yes,” Aldridge says. “I know that.”

“And we’re in a fight.”

He takes a sip of scotch. “What happened?”

“She thinks I’m controlling,” I say, repeating the truth.

At this, Aldridge laughs, just like Dr. Shaw. It’s a hearty belly laugh.

“Why does everyone think that’s so funny?” I ask.

“Because you are,” he says. “You were quite controlling tonight, for example.”

“Was that bad?”

Aldridge shrugs. “I guess we’ll see. How did it feel?”

“That’s the problem,” I say. “It felt great. I loved it. My best friend is — she’s sick, and tonight I’m in California, happy about some clients at dinner. What kind of a person does that make me?”

Aldridge nods, like he understands it, now. Gets what this is about. “You are upset because you think you need to quit your life and be by her side.”

“No, she won’t let me. I just shouldn’t be happy doing this.”

“Ah. Right. Happiness. The enemy of all suffering.”

He takes another sip. We drink in silence for a moment.

“Did I ever tell you what I originally wanted to be?”

I stare at him. We’re not exactly braiding-each-other’s-hair besties. How would I know?

“I’m assuming this is a trick question and that you’re going to say lawyer.”

Aldridge laughs. “No, no. I was going to be a shrink. My father was a psychiatrist, so is my brother. It’s a strange career choice, for a teen, but it always seemed the right one.”

I blink at him. “Shrink?”

“I would have been terrible at it. All that listening, I don’t have it in me.”

I can feel the alcohol weaving its way through my system. Making everything hazy and rosy and faded. “What happened?”

“I went to Yale, and my first day there I had a philosophy course. First-Order Logic. A discussion of metatheory. It was for my major, but the professor was a lawyer, and I just thought — why diagnose when you can determine?”

He stares at me for a long time. Finally, he puts a hand on my shoulder.

“You are not wrong for loving what you do,” he says. “You are lucky. Life doesn’t hand everyone a passion in their profession; you and I won that round.”

“It doesn’t feel like winning,” I say.

“No,” Aldridge says. “It often doesn’t. That dinner, over there?” He points outside, past the lobby and the palm tree prints. “We didn’t cement that. You loved it because, for you, the win is the game. That’s how you know you’re meant for it.”

He takes his hand off my shoulder. He downs the rest of his drink in a neat sip.

“You’re a great lawyer, Dannie. You’re also a good friend and a good person. Don’t let your own bias throw the case.”

The next morning, I take a car up to Montana Avenue. It’s overcast, the fog of the morning won’t burn off until noon, but by then we’ll already be up in the air. I stop at Peet’s Coffee, and take a stroll down the little shopping street — even though everything is still closed. A few Lycra-clad mothers wheel their distracted toddlers while they talk. The morning bike crew passes by on their way out to Malibu.

I used to think I could never live in Los Angeles. It was for people who couldn’t make it in New York. The easy way out. Moving would mean admitting that you had been wrong. That everything you’d said about New York: that there was nowhere else in the world to live, that the winters didn’t bother you, that carrying four grocery bags back home in the pouring rain or hailing snow wasn’t an inconvenience. That being your own car was, in fact, your dream. That life wasn’t, isn’t, hard.

But there is so much space out here. It feels like there is room — to not have to store every single piece of off-season clothing under your bed. Maybe even to make a mistake.

I take my coffee back to the hotel. I walk across the concrete bike path, into the sand, and down to the ocean. Far to the left, I can see some surfers, zigzagging through the waves, around one another, like their movements are choreographed. A big, oceanic ballet. Moving continuously toward the shore.

I snap a picture.

I love you, I write. What else is there to say?