(Continued)

      I am slightly incredulous but not shocked. This scenario is not out of character for my father.

      “Well, I am glad you made it,” I say, walking him up the worn wooden stairs to my apartment. 

      He puts his luggage down before returning to his car to collect his papers. Wherever my father goes, he carries a stack with him—a pad of paper, a book or two, a pen, often a clipboard, and likely a copy of that day’s newspaper. I am comforted by the familiarity of this dog-eared appendage. I see it as a sign of my father’s busy mind—he is working on a book, putting together a proposal for a new company, studying Mandarin, reviewing Arabic, and jotting down memories from his childhood.

      He sits on my couch, rearranging his stack, while I putter around the kitchen, unable to stand still. It is weird to have him in my apartment. He is my father. But I don’t know how to be with him in the relaxed familiarity of family members who have spent long stretches of time together.

      We have not spent a night under the same roof since I was fourteen years old.

      Not long after my parents’ divorce, my father moved to New York City. Once he was settled, I rode the Amtrak from DC to Penn Station where he met me and took me to his small apartment in Tudor City. The building was near the UN headquarters and looked out on the water.

      For dinner, we went to Chinatown and squeezed into a tiny restaurant where we sat on stools and ate greasy scallion pancakes and lemon chicken. I struggled to scoop up rice with my chopsticks as my father told me about the big deals he was about to close. He was going to take my brother and me camping that summer, and skiing the following winter.

      Men in my family have a proclivity for premature exits—alcoholism, suicide, affairs. The narrative around these men has similar threads—they are eccentric, moody, charming, and so smart. The women in my family cling to their intelligence as their saving grace, the salve that makes palatable all that has gone so terribly wrong.

      At fourteen years old, I had learned to view my father through this inherited lens—he has a Mensa-level IQ, an MBA from Columbia University, and is fluent in Arabic from studying at the prestigious Defense Language Institute. Seeing his new life in New York City, the apartment overlooking the water, the new suit he wore when he picked me up from the train station, it all felt like definitive proof that the elusive deals and big checks he had long promised might finally happen. And why shouldn’t they? My father is so smart.

      On the train back to DC, I pictured the Birkenstock clogs, Vera Bradley bags, and Abercrombie & Fitch jeans my family would soon be able to afford.

       Neither the New York City opportunity nor the trips came to be. My father continued to cycle through different jobs and struggled financially, at one point living in his office, at another, in his car.

      I never spent another night with him after the weekend in Tudor City.

Instead, our relationship took place largely on weekends—going to church and out for brunch after. We rarely ate out and I saw the cavernous Italian restaurant we would go to, located in a strip mall with a Blockbuster and a Merle Norman Cosmetics store, as the epitome of sophistication. Dressed in my church clothes, plastic headband tucked behind my ears, I would visit the buffet, carefully arranging slivers of smoked salmon, briny antipasto, and baked ziti on my plate.

      One weekend, instead of going to church, my father took me to visit a private all-girls school in a neighboring town. My father had gone to boarding school, as had his father before him. Now, it seemed, was my turn. We toured the grounds and learned about the low teacher-to-student ratio and extensive extracurricular offerings—horseback riding, Glee Club, and Stagecraft.

      As our tour guide spoke, I looked down at my shoes where my tights were spilling over the edge of my worn ballet flats. They were not the feet of a girl who belonged at this school.

      At lunch after, my father waved his hand dismissively and told me that, in just a matter of time, tuition at a private school like this would be no issue.

      When I returned home and my mother asked where we had gone, I obfuscated. The post-church brunches upset my mother enough as it was, sending her into a rage as to how my father could afford to take us out to eat, but couldn’t afford child support. I knew better than to mention the tour of the private school.

       My father never brought the school up again, but I kept the brochure tucked in my desk, taking it out on occasion to trace the outlines of the confident girls in lab coats and astride horses in a grassy field.

      At eighteen, I was accepted to a private women’s college, their brochures not unlike the ones I received from the school my father and I toured together. To even consider attending, my parents had to fill out paperwork so I could qualify for financial aid. Instead, my father called the school and told them the full tuition would be no trouble and to simply send him the bill.

      When I learned what he had done, I felt a familiar glimmer of hope. My mother had no patience left for hope and immediately called the school to explain that no, my father would not be able to afford the full tuition. To qualify for financial aid, I had to fill out a form to verify that he was an absent parent.

      By the letter of the law he was—I never lived with him, and to this day, he owes my mother child support.

      Despite my father’s absence, many of the choices I have made echo his—as a young adult, I lived abroad in Shanghai, just as he did in Cairo. Now, in my early thirties, I live in New York City, where he lived at my age, in an apartment filled with notebooks, magazines, and books, not dissimilar to his stack.

      But at this moment, I am wiping nonexistent crumbs from my counter, while my father tells me about the high school reunion he just attended.

      He launches into an overview of the weekend. He waxes poetic about his senior year of high school before pausing to meet my eye.

      “And that’s how my life has been, Astrid,” he tells me. “Things are going well, and then WHAM.” He whacks his palm against my coffee table.

      The wham he is referencing goes unsaid, but we both know what he is referring to.

      When my father was in his early twenties, his father, a World War II veteran, began to decline—erratic behavior, losing the family's money in the stock market, eventually leaving his wife in Connecticut and moving to New York City. My grandfather would attempt suicide several times, eventually disappearing. His body was found years later, dead by a self-inflicted gun wound.

      Wham indeed.

      I nod, not sure how to respond, but my father has moved on.

      He is pulling up his phone—he wants to show me the biography he sent in for the reunion.

      My father has shared similar documents with me in the past, at times delivering them in a three-ring binder, printed pages detailing his earliest memories, pictures of his childhood, photos of my brother and me.

      I examine the pictures he has included of me with my brother. They are awkward snapshots taken in parking lots or in close range at a booth in a diner. My brother and I are of similar ilk, both cautious and measured, a marked contrast from our parents. But we differ in how we approach our father, my brother keeping him at even greater arm’s length than I do. The most recent picture of him is at least five years old.

      I hand my father back his phone and make a mental note that we should take a photo together during this visit. Maybe one of us on my couch or near the tree by my apartment. We have enough photos in restaurants.

      I can only wipe down my counters so many times, and I am itching for an outlet for the jittery energy I feel. I ask my father if he minds if I take a quick run before we go to dinner.

      He waves me off and gestures to his stack. He has plenty with which to occupy himself.

      I take off on my familiar route, relishing time back with just myself.

      When I return, I ask my father where he wants to go to dinner. I mention the Thai place next to my apartment, thinking to myself that the two of us could have a meal there for under $60.

      My father responds that he is craving steak. I feel my body tense as I think about the price of dinner at a steak restaurant. “I don’t know if there are any steak places in my neighborhood,” I say, racking my brain for alternative options. Would a burger do?

      My father tells me he will look up potential places while I am in the shower.

      I am in my room changing when he calls my name.

      “Astrid, I am a little strapped for cash and I, uh, I have some dental surgery coming up.”

      I pause, waiting for the ask. I have loaned my father money before and brace myself for the amount. How much could dental surgery be? A thousand? Five thousand? I think of the sums in my accounts and how I could move money around to make my father the loan.

      “So uh, would you be comfortable covering dinner?” he asks.      

      My shoulders relax and I respond casually. “Of course.” I do not remind him that I have been paying for our meals out since I graduated from college twelve years earlier. I knew I would be paying for dinner from the moment my father told me he would be visiting.

      At thirty-three, I outearn my father and have for years.

      He has found a restaurant that serves steak and is a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment. I am relieved when the host seats us in a quiet corner with no other patrons. After reviewing the menu, my father pushes his chair back. One leg crossed over the other, his pale blue eyes dart around the restaurant as I continue studying the menu. I ask my father what he is planning on ordering and he tells me he is going to get the Brussels sprouts.

      I look up at him.

      “But I thought you wanted steak?” I ask.

      He looks surprised. “Oh, right, well, maybe,” he says, returning to the menu.

      He settles on the steak frites as I settle on the price—$46.

      The waitress comes over to take our order and tells us it is happy hour. My father wants a glass of malbec to go along with his steak—not the happy-hour house red. 

      When I was in high school, one of my father’s many jobs was as a server at a wine bar. One night, after he gave a customer their bill, the man called my father over, confused as to why he had been charged a different price for two glasses of the same wine. Upon examining the bill, my father recognized that he had made a mistake and entered the wrong price on the second glass of wine. Instead of apologizing and getting the customer a new bill, my father explained that wine becomes more expensive as it ages, hence the higher price on the second glass ordered later in the night.

      Apparently neither the customer nor the manager found my father’s remark to be particularly funny, and he was fired. It seems unlikely to be dismissed over such a relatively minor offense. As with many aspects of my father’s life, I have wondered if there is more to the story. Regardless, the wine-bar example may be indicative of why my father has had such trouble holding down a job. My father is clever, proud. Perhaps a little too clever, a little too proud.

      I turn to this story often, to convince myself as to how we are different, a reminder that I am not destined to follow in his footsteps. In my attempts, I have perhaps overcorrected—if I worked at a wine bar and made the same mistake, I would blush a deep red, apologize profusely, and comp the second glass of wine from my own paycheck.

      My father’s steak and malbec arrive, along with my salad and seltzer. I stab at my plate, angling to get a raisin, a parmesan shaving, and a manageable-sized piece of kale on my fork.

      I ask him how work is going. He tells me of the new deals he is working on.

      “No more Amazoo?” I ask tentatively.

      A few years earlier, my father began working as an associate at an Amazon warehouse. The warehouse was an hour-and-a-half drive from his apartment, meaning he had to leave before 4:30 a.m. for his 6 a.m. shifts.

      One morning, I was home visiting my mother, and my father picked me up on one of his days off so we could go out for coffee. In the car, he asked if I knew who Megan Thee Stallion was. At 70, he’d been introduced to the lyrical genius of her music as it often blasted through the speakers of the warehouse. He’d been so inspired, he wrote his own ditty:

Was runnin' low on cash, didn't know what to do

So I got me a job at the Amazoo

Building containers and scannin’ them boxes…

Loadin’ up the trucks, and checkin’ out the foxes!

      He went on to tell me that many of the shipments were from China and he often recognized the Mandarin characters he was studying on the boxes coming down the conveyor belt. The people he worked with were nice enough and he was fascinated by the operational prowess of the behemoth organization.

      “But,” he’d told me, looking out the windshield, the steam of the coffee fogging up his glasses, “it’s absolutely exhausting.”

      Sitting across from me, digging into his steak, he waves off my question. “No, no. No more of that,” he says.

      I am relieved. For his back, for his health, but more so, I am relieved for myself.

      My father never took my brother and me on the camping or ski trips he spoke of during my visit to New York City.

      As an adult, I have found men to fill the void of these unkept promises.

      My first boyfriend took me skiing in Niseko where we soaked in onsens and sucked meat from snow crab legs. My second boyfriend’s father took us on yearly ski trips to Europe where we sipped mulled wine at cozy lodges nestled into the Alps.

      I never told my father about these trips. It felt too cruel, cosmically unfair. My father rising at 4 a.m. and lacing up his steel-toe boots while I buckled into ski boots at the foot of the Matterhorn.

      I take the fact that he is no longer working at Amazon as a good sign. It could mean things are coming together. He tells me of the new projects he is working on—selling solar lights in Africa, a trucking company. The scene is familiar—the two of us at a restaurant, my father telling me about his latest deals while I sit across from him and nod.

      I no longer wish for Vera Bradley bags and Birkenstocks. My dreams for my father are more humble—retirement, funds for medical bills.

      At the end of the meal, the waitress brings the check. My father thanks me and I quickly wave him off. “Of course,” I say. “You came to visit me,” I continue, trying to restore the equilibrium between us.

      I feel my stomach clench as I put down my credit card. Covering this meal is not a big deal and will not impact my finances. Rationally, I know this. But still, I am ever vigilant. Intelligence, an education, checking the right boxes, it won’t protect you. The bottom can fall out at any time.

      Ten months prior to this dinner with my father, I was laid off.

      Two months after the layoff, my boyfriend of almost five years, the one whose family took me skiing in Europe, left me. He had decided that no, he didn’t want to get married. No, he wasn’t sure when he’d be ready to have children.

      WHAM, as my father would say. 

      I had spent my adult life coaxing myself to believe that things could work out. That I was not doomed to replicate the professional and financial instabilities that permeated the first eighteen years of my life.

      Standing in the mirror before meetings, arms over my head, I willed myself to take up space and feel powerful. I scribbled manifestations in the corner of my notebooks, writing “I am strong and capable, I am strong and capable,” over and over again. My shelves were cluttered with books urging me to dare greatly, to design the life of my dreams.

      My attempt to avoid repeating the difficulties of my childhood extended beyond the professional and into the personal—attending individual and couples therapy, devouring articles by Esther Perel, and taking pains to communicate my needs through carefully practiced “I” statements.

      Sometimes it worked. In fleeting moments, say on a Friday evening, buoyed by positive feedback from my boss, and on my way to meet my boyfriend for burgers and pinot noir at our favorite bistro, I could feel myself relax. Loosening my grip ever so slightly, for a few hours, I would slip into the possibility that maybe, just maybe, I could make it through life unscathed, perhaps with what I hoped for most—a successful career and a family of my own.

      When the layoff and breakup happened in such swift succession, the blows I’d been desperate to avoid but anticipating all the same, finally happened. It was, in some twisted sense, a relief. I could give up the exhausting pretense of trying to avoid what felt preordained. The hypothetical calamities I’d feared—a professional setback that leads to financial ruin, a failed relationship putting the family I want in jeopardy—came into sharp focus, closer and clearer than ever. 

      But despite my fervent belief to the contrary, the bottom did not fall out. I was earning more in my new freelance career than I had at my full-time job. I was heartbroken, grieving the future I had envisioned, but my life was moving forward.

      I thought my resilience in the aftermath of the dropping of the proverbial shoe might dissipate my anticipatory dread. Maybe I would finally feel confident things could continue to work out—that I could keep my freelance clients, even build my roster further, raise my rates, and meet a kind person who loves me, who wants marriage and kids as I do.

      These rosy scenarios sound nice, but remain ephemeral longings. I still feel as though I am on the precipice. Only through strict self-discipline and perpetual alertness do I keep from toppling over the edge.

      Back at my apartment, my father and I unfold the sofa-bed in my living room. We are both introverted morning people and I am relieved when he wants to go to bed at 7:30 p.m. I go to my French doors a mere twelve feet away and finish up some work in bed before going to sleep myself.

      The next morning, we wake up early and have coffee together. I do not have a dining table, so he sits at one of the bar stools facing into my kitchen as I lean against the counter. He finishes his coffee and gathers his things. Standing in my doorway, he puts on his cowboy hat and pats his front shirt pocket to confirm he has his cell phone. We go out to his car and I watch as he drives away. The life I have worked so hard to build for myself is mine, and mine alone again. My relief fades as I realize that we did not take a picture together.

§

      A few weeks later, I am at a restaurant with another man.

      This man and I are on a first date, and he has chosen for us to meet at an expensive spot in the West Village. His chin-length hair is straight and glossy. He runs his hand through it, pushing it back from his face, as we sit across from each other and peruse the menu. He asks what I think looks good before suggesting we order foie gras, sashimi, and Wagyu.

      I nod as I study the menu, doing my best to appear nonchalant. I want this man to know he is not the first to buy me Wagyu. We put our order in and begin the typical first date rigamarole. I give my elevator-pitch background. Childhood in Northern Virginia, liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts, five years in Shanghai, seven in New York City.

      Having covered our respective backgrounds, we trade stories about cities we have lived in and places we have visited—we discuss the powder in Niseko, the joy of an onsen, and the beauty of Hakone. We debate the merits of wine tasting in Santa Barbara versus New Zealand and rhapsodize as to the delight that is an après after a few runs at Les Trois Vallées.

      My first-date banter is littered with good schools, high-cost-of-living cities, and lavish travel. It belies a more complicated truth—that my family qualified for free lunch while I was in high school, the expensive liberal arts college was only possible through generous financial aid, and the sumptuous travel paid for by the men I have dated.

      The food arrives and I think of how much my father would enjoy this meal. I imagine my date’s reaction if I were to explain that I will be in the washroom while my father slips in and has a few bites of the Wagyu. Does my father like sashimi? I am not sure. Another casualty of a relationship built on fragmented time.

      This man and my father might enjoy each other’s company—both diplomats’ sons, advanced degrees from Ivy League institutions, and fluency in multiple languages. They have both tried and failed to explain options trading to me.

      But this man is on a date with me and my father is in Virginia. I have not seen the apartment he currently lives in, I can’t picture exactly where he is or what he is doing. Studying Mandarin? Plotting a new deal? We are having a late dinner, it is after 8 p.m., he very well may already be in bed.

      Toward the end of the meal, my date says he is still feeling peckish. What do I think of a second bite somewhere close by? I agree and he makes a move to stand up, pushing his chair back. I follow suit but before we leave the table, I pause. “Oh,” I say, as if it has just occurred to me, “Should we get the check?”

      “I took care of it,” he says, already walking toward the door.

      At the second restaurant, we are seated at spindly bar stools. Over veal Milanese and spicy potatoes, he tells me about his polo horses—all six of them. I am on my second drink, he is on his third, our conversation becomes looser and he leans closer, speaking into my ear, our knees grazing.

      At the end of the meal, he waves off my performative wallet reach, again the check is taken care of.

      He takes his phone out and studies Google Maps. “Looks like traffic isn’t too bad,” he remarks. “Why don’t I drive you home?” he suggests.

      I managed to maintain my nonchalance when he ordered the Wagyu, but at this suggestion I am unable to hide my surprise.

      “Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?” I ask.

      “Not at all, I love driving,” he says.

      He goes to the bathroom and I drain the rest of my martini while I wait. As the bartender dries glasses with a dishtowel, he looks at me. “Everything okay here?” he asks, meeting my eyes before moving his gaze to the empty barstool next to me, raising his eyebrows ever so slightly.

      I am surprised by his question and wonder what my body language is revealing that I myself am not conscious of. I am not sure how I feel about this man yet. He is kind and I find it endearing when he brings his hand up to cover his mouth when he laughs, which he does freely and easily. But my judgment is clouded—the Wagyu, the polo, the finance job, the pull of being provided for.

      “Oh, yes, all good,” I say smiling at the bartender.

      My date returns and leads me to a parking garage a few blocks away. He has called on the walk over and his white Range Rover SUV is waiting when we arrive.

      The garage attendant opens the door for me and I settle into the front seat, taking in the spotless blonde interior and tasteful black accents. It’s mid-October and there is a slight chill in the air. It is nice to be in the warm quiet of an expensive car, rather than standing alone waiting for the C on the subway platform at West 4th Street. As we drive across the Manhattan Bridge, I lean back against the buttery leather headrest, the shimmering lights of the city passing in a pleasing blur.

      We enter Brooklyn as I am envisioning a possible future with this man. Driving home from a polo match upstate, I am wearing a lightweight cashmere sweater, my skin is taut from lasers, and my body tight from an expensive workout routine. My brown calfskin purse rests casually on the console between us and our kids are in the backseat. He turns the car into our garage as we discuss whether they are old enough to learn to ski this winter. If we should go to Breckenridge or Jackson Hole.

Tempting as this life is, it wouldn’t be enough. This man could leave. Even if he doesn’t, he has money now, sure, but derivatives trading is a volatile field. A few bad years, a couple wrong trades, and wham.

      He pulls up to my building and I thank him, for the nice evening, for the ride home. We hug goodnight and I get out of the car, walking a few feet to the door. In my apartment, I brush my teeth and wash my makeup off before climbing into bed. The afterglow of the pleasant evening imbues my last moments of wakefulness with a gentle contentment. 

       The next morning I wake up alone, my mind running through the stressors of freelance life, the balance in my emergency fund ever near, and the elusive exhalation still beckoning.