Chapter 97: Learning to Enjoy Life
Evening. Andrew's apartment, second floor.
The television was on. Not loudly — just present, the specific background noise of a weeknight with nowhere to be.
Andrew was on the couch, horizontal, one arm over his eyes. Christie was at the other end with her knees pulled up, watching whatever was on with the focused attention she brought to screens.
"How's school?" Andrew asked.
"Fine," Christie said, not looking away from the TV. "Getting used to it."
"When are you going to visit your mom?"
"Few days, maybe."
Andrew shifted, found a slightly better angle for his neck, and let the question go.
This — the specific shape of this evening — was something he hadn't done in a while. No food truck prep. No Mulligan's. No studying. No plans. Just the couch, the television, the particular low-key peace of a summer weeknight when nothing was required.
He'd been running at a specific pace since January — the SAT prep, the food truck, the bar, the social geometry of the friend group and everything that entailed. He hadn't noticed how long it had been since he'd just stopped.
Stopping, it turned out, felt good.
This is the thing, he thought, watching the ceiling. This is the thing people are supposed to be building toward.
Not grinding indefinitely. Not accumulating skills and money and social capital as ends in themselves. Somewhere in the actual living of a life there was supposed to be evenings exactly like this one — comfortable, low-stakes, no particular purpose.
He'd been so focused on the building that he'd been skipping the having.
"I signed you up for a summer camp," he said. "Starting next week."
Christie looked over at him.
"Enjoy your childhood," he said. "There aren't many years of it left."
This was true. It was also true that Christie underfoot during the next several weeks of his summer would create logistical complications he'd rather not navigate. Both things were honest. He didn't feel the need to explain the second one.
Christie considered this for a moment, then turned back to the TV. "I'll go see my mom the day after tomorrow, then."
"Good."
The show changed. Andrew felt the particular heaviness of someone whose body had decided it was done for the day regardless of what the clock said.
He was asleep before the next commercial break.
Christie was already out by the time he registered that he'd fallen asleep. The TV was off. The apartment was quiet.
His neck, on the other hand, had opinions.
The couch was comfortable enough for an evening and actively hostile for an entire night — he'd woken up with the specific stiff-neck situation that came from sleeping at the wrong angle on cushions that weren't designed for the purpose. He could feel the exact spot: left side, base of the skull, the kind of soreness that intensified when he turned a certain direction.
He rotated his head carefully, felt the twinge, stopped.
Fine, he thought. Earned that one.
Central Perk, mid-morning.
Andrew turned his head to follow something Phoebe was saying and caught the twinge again, visibly.
"What's wrong?" Phoebe said.
"Slept on the couch. Neck's not happy about it."
Phoebe's expression shifted into the professional register she got when the conversation entered her area of expertise. "Do you want me to take a look at it?"
Andrew thought about this for approximately half a second. Phoebe was a licensed massage therapist. Her hands-on work — the actual technical skill of it — was something he'd seen referenced and never directly experienced.
"Yes," he said. "Please."
Joey had an audition. Ross had a departmental meeting he'd been complaining about since Tuesday. The morning broke up naturally, and Andrew and Phoebe headed uptown toward her apartment.
Phoebe's place had a massage table set up in the second room — proper equipment, not improvised. Essential oils on the shelf, organized by what Andrew assumed was some system that made sense to Phoebe. The room smelled like eucalyptus and cedar.
She had him change into a towel over his clothes, face down on the table, and started with his shoulders before moving to the neck.
"Andrew." Her voice took on the specific calm authority she used professionally. "Your muscles are very tense. All of them. Not just the neck."
"Training schedule," he said, into the headrest. "I let it slide during exam prep and now I'm catching up."
"How long have you been catching up?"
"Three weeks."
"Your body is not a machine," Phoebe said, with the certainty of someone stating physical law. "It needs recovery time, not just more work."
"I know."
"Do you?" She pressed a point between his shoulder blades that sent a specific kind of relief down his entire left side.
"I'm working on it," he said.
She worked through his shoulders methodically, the kind of pressure that was on the right side of uncomfortable — the kind that meant something was actually happening. After about fifteen minutes she repositioned, took his arm, placed her palm against his shoulder joint, and gave a controlled rotation.
The sound from his shoulder blade was audible.
The relief was immediate and significant.
"Better?" she said.
"Much better," Andrew said, and meant it.
The massage ran about forty-five minutes. By the end his neck had full range of motion again and the low-grade background tension he'd been carrying in his upper back — which he now realized had been there for weeks — was largely gone.
He sat up, rolled his shoulders experimentally.
"Thank you," he said. "Genuinely."
Phoebe smiled — the warm, uncomplicated one she had when something had gone right. "Anytime. I mean that. Don't wait until you've slept wrong on the couch. Come in when you need it."
"I will."
They sat for a while, talking without agenda — Phoebe had a client in the afternoon but nothing until two, and the morning had the easy quality of time that wasn't committed anywhere. She mentioned Ursula once, briefly, in a way that didn't require a response and wasn't looking for one — just naming something that had happened and setting it down again.
Her phone rang. Client rescheduling. She took the call and stepped into the other room.
Andrew let himself out.
He walked south on Amsterdam Avenue in the late-morning sun, hands in his pockets, and thought about the ceiling of his apartment and what he'd been thinking about before falling asleep.
The building. The having.
He had a list, somewhere in the back of his mind, of things he'd been meaning to do that kept getting displaced by things that were more urgent. Not bad things — the studying, the food truck, the music — but the list kept getting longer and never shorter.
Swimming. He'd been meaning to get back to it since March.
Wilderness survival — he'd read about a course upstate and never followed up.
First aid certification. Useful in almost any context, somehow never prioritized.
Travel. He'd been in New York for over a year and hadn't been further than New Jersey.
And then there was the underground boxing.
He'd heard about it from Burton — the guy from his gym, the one who'd mentioned it back in the winter as something that happened in a warehouse space in the Bronx on Friday nights. Real matches, no sanctioning body, the kind of thing that existed in the specific gap between organized sport and street fighting. Burton competed in it occasionally. He'd offered to take Andrew along.
Andrew had been meaning to go since February.
It was a Thursday. He had no food truck shift until Saturday. The afternoon was open.
He found a payphone on the corner of 79th and pulled out the number he'd had in his wallet for four months.
The 1 train ran express to the Bronx on weekday afternoons.
Andrew got on at 79th Street, found a seat, and was reading the transit map out of habit when he became aware of someone stopping beside him.
"Andrew?"
He looked up.
Jennifer Milburn stood in the aisle with a tote bag and the expression of someone who had just done a small statistical calculation and found the result improbable.
"Third time," Andrew said.
"Third time," she confirmed, and sat down across from him. "Where are you headed?"
"Bronx. You?"
"Visiting a friend in Riverdale." She settled her bag on her lap. "You're on the wrong train for the Bronx."
Andrew looked at the transit map again.
She was correct. He needed the 4, not the 1.
"I was reading the map," he said.
"And yet," she said.
He stood up at the next stop — 72nd Street — and she was still smiling when the doors closed behind him.
He caught the 4 at Lexington.
Burton's gym was on Webster Avenue, a converted auto shop that still smelled faintly of motor oil under the chalk and sweat. Burton was there, working the heavy bag with the specific focus of someone who wasn't exercising so much as processing something.
He stopped when Andrew came in.
"Sanchez." He looked him over with the assessing eye of a man who paid attention to what other people's bodies were doing. "You look like you've been working."
"Catching up," Andrew said. "You mentioned the Friday night thing."
Burton's expression shifted — the look of someone recalibrating their assessment. "I did."
"I want to go."
Burton looked at him for a moment. Then he picked up his water bottle, took a drink, and said: "You sure?"
"Yes," Andrew said.
Burton nodded slowly. "Friday. I'll pick you up at nine."
Andrew nodded back.
Burton went back to the heavy bag.
Andrew found the free weights and got to work, and the afternoon passed the way good afternoons passed — purposefully, without urgency, the specific satisfaction of time that was both spent and enjoyed.
He thought about what he'd told himself on the walk south.
New York is just the starting point.
He was starting to believe it.
[Guitar: Beginner — 34/100]
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