Page 167 - In Five Years

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