It’s only on occasion nowadays, and mostly because Christmas obligations are boring holes in his savings, that Nathan still drives for the rideshare companies. As the unpartnered, child-free sibling – of four – and as the one who hasn’t moved back to South Florida since college, it’s on him to buy the airline ticket home each year, and on him to rent the car, if he doesn’t want to be stranded at his parents’ house in the suburbs through the new year. Then there are the gifts. Gifts befitting the idea of the sibling/uncle/son whose name appears regularly in the paper of record and whose book was recently recommended on a morning show.
Primarily, Nathan is a writer. A novelist. Last year, he debuted, to much critical acclaim, and though he can live off the advances for his first and next book (a small miracle), for a couple or three thrifty years anyway, his adopted city, Boston, is stupid expensive to live in.
Even in a city as small and literate as Boston, the odds of running into anyone who might recognise Nathan has proven, over the past three years, to be slim. Add the KN95 face mask, add the skully pulled down to his eyebrows, add sunglasses when it’s bright enough out, add the 40 pounds of Covid lockdown weight turned extended book tour weight, and he’s hardly recognisable to the casual acquaintances of his past. Still, had his ex-fiancee’s name or likeness flashed across his phone this or any day, he’d have cracked his screen protector cancelling her ride.
But it was her lover, the one she’d cheated with, the one who stole her away, who called the car.
Jamaican-American author Jonathan Escoffery was raised in Miami, Florida, and now lives in Oakland, California. His first novel, If I Survive You, was shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize and described in the Observer as “a thrilling debut that starts as an exploration of second-generation American identity by way of a Jamaican-descended literature graduate”. The book is also on the longlist for the Gordon Burn prize 2023-24, which will be announced next year. Escoffery is currently working on a novel set in south Florida.
Nathan knows what Miriam would think of that phrasing. She’s not an Yves Saint Laurent handbag. Not an object to be smash-and-grabbed. The language we use is important, to gender studies professors and novelists and rideshare drivers alike. And he imagines, too, that it’s the same for venture capitalists, though that might be a generous assumption.
It snowed all night through to the afternoon and the ploughs have buried Downtown Crossing’s curbs, so the lover, or boyfriend, or whatever he is to her now, had to walk out into rush hour traffic to open the back passenger side of Nathan’s Audi. An XL ride on the app, with the peanut butter interior. Palomino brown, Audi calls it. The vehicle purchased at that rare dip in preowned car prices before the market discovered the shortage in computer microchips. One of the few times Nathan has ever felt truly lucky.
Before accepting his first ride of the day, Nathan covered the back floormats with newspaper then put down a layer of plastic wrap to catch the snowmelt.
The lover’s first name and the accompanying 3mm profile picture does little to jog Nathan’s memory of the man, but some chemical repulsion between them makes the hairs on Nathan’s neck stand up, and look, there in his rearview mirror is the person he has hated most in life, the man who helped blow up Nathan’s world nearly three years earlier.
Dominic? Nathan grunts from under his mask, and the man in the backseat responds, That’s me, in a voice that betrays his disinterest in speaking to those he deems inconsequential, in addition to his lack of recognition. And why should he recognise Nathan? Face covering aside, they’d met only once, in Cambridge, among a hodgepodge of Miriam’s Boston-area acquaintances, shortly after Nathan and Miriam moved to town. The first bad omen to arise out of the dinner was when Miriam’s pediatrician friend complained that she couldn’t afford her one-bedroom in Brighton and would need to find a roommate. The others at the table echoed their concerns about the cost of housing. What Nathan would come to understand as the usual blame was cast at the wealthy parents of the college students who would pay anything to have their kids attend Harvard or Boston University or Boston College, and the list of elite schools goes on.
Dominic was up from New York. Miriam introduced him as someone she’d known from the academic conference circuit, but after an hour or so of Dominic’s bragplaining about how hated people in his profession are, Nathan asked, Wait, how do you two know each other?
What, after all, populated the centre of the Venn Diagram for persons dedicated to dismantling the patriarchy and those bonded to corporate wealth-building? Nathan hadn’t been suspicious, more-so baffled, until Miriam and Dominic’s combined ums and uhs stretched beyond what any reasonable story might redeem.
Brookline? Nathan says to Dominic now as he inches the car forward.
Dominic responds, You’ve got it, in a voice that expresses, So you can read.
As he manoeuvres through traffic toward Storrow Drive, Nathan tries calling to mind one of the revenge fantasies he’d consoled himself with, to see if any had been reasonable enough to enact. Had driving them both into the Charles been among them?
Instead, what comes to mind in vivid detail is the date he recently tanked, when she inevitably asked what brought him to Boston, and he’d answered, Misfortune, and followed it with a laugh she did not join in on. He’d failed to find the right decoy. Misfortune raised red flags. It made her stop to dissect his response, then more closely, or sceptically, evaluate him. He declined to elaborate, and she refused to move on from his answer. And so the night ended.
Dominic says, Babe, traffic’s insane. Why don’t you call your own car and I’ll meet you there. He’s popped wireless headphones into his ears. Could Miriam accept such a diminutive as Babe? Had she ever been Babe to Nathan? Or hadn’t she deemed it among the list of words meant to infantilise women? Or wasn’t it just plain basic? The language we use is important.
In hindsight, Nathan realises Love would have been the better answer for why he moved here, one that might imply what he believes to be true, that he’s moved on. Misfortune shifted attention to the more pathetic version of the truth: that he’d followed his fiancee to Boston, and that she’d shortly after called off their engagement.
Dominic says, Did I remember to get it? These are your colleagues. OK, ex-colleagues, but still yours though, right? I couldn’t begin to fathom what a gaggle of professors might want. Fine, don’t want then. Babe, it’s going to take me forever if I have to stop at a store now, just pull something out of the storage closet.
In Nathan’s estimation, Miriam mustn’t have been a stellar professor, as she had hardly been proficient at explaining complex concepts, such as the difference between an emotional affair and a physical one, admitting only to the former.
But why? Nathan asked.
I think maybe you don’t earn enough money for me.
I don’t earn any money at all, Nathan admitted. That was the plan, remember?
They’d agreed he should spend the first three months in Boston focused on revising his MFA thesis with his agent.
That’s what I mean, Miriam said. I’m realising that I need someone who would have never agreed to that. To letting me carry him. I feel taken advantage of. Or taken for granted. I’m not sure which.
Decide, Nathan said. The sentencing for each typically differs vastly.
I need you to know how serious this is, Miriam said.
I just need to know if you fucked him. And how many times.
I told you already. No.
But you will. If we break up, it’s the first thing you’ll do?
The muscles in Miriam’s jaw pulsed in miniature spasms before she said, I think you need someone more supportive of your writing. You deserve that. I mean, I am. Supportive. In that I am literally supporting you. And also in theory. But not really. Like, I want to believe it’s a job, that what you do is work, that it has value, but I know I don’t really feel that way. Not in my heart.
I’m sorry, Dominic says. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just, the interview didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. I’m frustrated. When are things going to turn around?
They were fresh out of grad school when they moved here, Miriam and Nathan, both out of prestigious programs at the Midwestern university where they’d met. Until the book was published, though, or at least under contract, he had little chance on the academic job market. So he’d looked for other jobs, jobs that seemed to disgust Miriam at least as much as his unemployment had come to.
Do you really want to do that? she’d ask when he told her where he’d spent the day applying. Her eyes reddened, as though he’d assaulted her with mediocrity. Do you really want to do that? she’d ask. Like he’d pissed on her wellbeing.
At a Christmas party thrown by the chair of Miriam’s department, the host announced that her eight-year-old had declared earlier in the day that he wanted to drive a snowplough when he grew up, a job that could apparently net him $40,000 per winter. Can you imagine? she’d said, tightening her eyebrows. A snowplough driver?
Miriam had joined the others in laughing.
Back at home, Nathan lambasted Miriam for her elitism, reminding her that she was disconnected from reality, that she had never worked a day outside of college and grad school. That she’d never had to degrade herself in order to pay the rent. Nathan had.
Working shitty jobs doesn’t mean you have integrity or character, she’d responded. Working shitty jobs just makes you somebody who’s willing to work shitty jobs.
Dominic says, I need to add a stop, and I need you to wait five minutes while I run into a store.
You can add a stop, but I can’t wait while you do your holiday shopping. That’s not how this works. I’m not your chauffeur, Nathan says.
Dominic looks up at the driver’s seat as though realising for the first time that there is another human being in the car. Come on, guy, he says. Help me out and I’ll give you 20 bucks cash.
The morning Nathan’s book went to auction, he didn’t mention it to Miriam. Not before the auction had concluded and he’d secured a two-book deal worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. He told Miriam when she arrived home from work, presenting her with a champagne flute and the bottle he’d gone out to buy using their joint checking account.
At the news, Miriam said, Oh, thank God, and released a sigh she seemed to have been holding in all the months they had lived in Boston.
Nathan smiled briefly, believing in this moment, as he had that entire afternoon, and, in fact, all those months, that a significant book sale, or some white-collar employment, would fix everything. But Miriam’s jaw tensed, as though the sigh she’d released had been forced back into her face with a bicycle pump.
Does this really change nothing? Nathan asked.
I’m really happy for you, Nathan. I’m happy you can take care of yourself now.
Dominic says, Look, my wife and I are going through a hard time, and if you could just help me out.
Your wife? Nathan says. Which wife? What hard times? He presses down on the accelerator.
It’s nothing really, Dominic says. I just need a gift for this White Elephant party her old boss is hosting. It can be anything really. You can stop literally anywhere.
White Elephant, Nathan says. That’s the one where you bring a crap gift nobody wants? Or am I thinking of a Yankee Swap? Or are they the same thing?
It doesn’t matter. It could be anything, Dominic says. It could be good even. We’re hoping her former Chair might know of an opening somewhere. They didn’t renew my wife’s contract last year. Enrolment’s been down everywhere. And the job I took up here fell through.
What are you talking about? Nathan says. Unemployment is at an all time low. It says so everywhere? Don’t you read the paper?
Nathan didn’t move out in the end. So Miriam did. One article at a time. A painting off the wall went missing, then her pots, her shower curtain. She let him keep the liner. It was like the life they’d built together was decomposing.
It made no sense that he should keep their apartment. He wouldn’t see the first instalment on his advance for several months. He should have moved home to Florida, but his pride wouldn’t let him. So he began driving.
Pull over here. OK here. Will you please stop driving? Dominic was almost begging now.
I’ll stop, but I’m not waiting. You want that? Nathan was almost yelling at him now. Plus, you have to tell it to the app. The app, that’s how this works.
Please.
Tell me how you met your wife and I’ll stop. Tell me everything.
I don’t see the relevance. Why do you care?
All right, Dominic. Have it your way.
The furniture had been more difficult for Miriam to disappear. She’d made plenty of acquaintances in the city by then, but not the kind of friends who would help her move a couch. The kind of friends who could suggest movers she could hire, yes, but with the first and last month’s rent paid down on her new apartment, plus a month’s rent for security deposit, plus fourth months’ rent for the realtor’s fee, Miriam was wiped out.
I just need you away from the apartment on Saturday, she told Nathan. He understood that she meant her lover was coming to town to help move her out. He conceded. He was heartbroken, not petty.
But when he returned to the emptied apartment, he discovered that Miriam had left the toolset she’d bought herself when she moved away for college. She’d once told Nathan that she’d come to associate the tools with her independence and sense of self-reliance, and that an ex-boyfriend had even tried to take it in their breakup, so she tracked down his superintendent and convinced him to let her into the ex’s apartment when he was at work and stole the toolkit back from him.
I don’t see it anywhere, Nathan had lied, when she called looking for it. You must have left it in the moving van. He hid the kit in the trunk of his car, in case she broke into his apartment. So maybe he was petty.
You son of bitch, Dominic says from the backseat. It’s you. I knew you looked familiar.
Nathan’s GPS announces, You have arrived, and he pulls close to the mound of snow hiding the curb. He puts the car in park, then swings around, saying, I’m the son of a what now?
Not you, Dominic says. Him! And he bends to dig at the newspaper bedded down beneath the plastic wrap.
Have you lost it? Nathan says, but he bends to see his own smug face staring back at him from underneath the plastic. It’s the spread the Times did on him a couple of months ago. He meant to have one of his many copies framed to put up in his office but hasn’t gotten around to it. He must have mixed this copy up with last Sunday’s.
Stop tearing at the plastic, Nathan says, or you’ll get mud on my carpet.
Do you believe the attention this loser’s gotten? Dominic says. You know he drained my wife’s savings. Had her taking care of him for months like some gigolo. Freaking leech.
He did that? Nathan points down at himself. Is that what she says?
She doesn’t have to say. I saw it on her. Turned her hair half white, the stress. Now he’s paraded around in the media like some kind of hero. He didn’t even thank her in the acknowledgments.
Wait, you actually read his book?
She did. Said it was all right. I think she was just scared he’d put her in it. Make her some villain. That part was a relief.
Maybe he had no intention of hurting her, Nathan offers. Maybe people have a way of hurting each other just by being.
Yeah, well be better, people. Damn. I didn’t even get the present. My wife is going to kill me.
I have an idea, Nathan says. Hop out.
Both men exit the Audi and Dominic follows Nathan to the trunk.
He hands Dominic a compact pouch and says, I bet this will do the trick. You don’t even need to wrap it. A bunch of academics? They won’t know what to make of it, it’s perfect. And if you play the game right, maybe you and your wife take it home. And I bet the Chair has good news for her. And I bet you did better at the interview than you think. And I bet things turn around for you guys. There’s no guarantee, of course, but I’m rooting for you. And I’m telling you there’s a chance.
