Distance between us

The interview

Elena Reyes had worn the same blazer to every job interview for three years, and she was fairly certain the fabric knew it. It was navy, a little shiny at the elbows from too much handling, purchased on clearance the week she'd graduated with her associate's degree and never replaced because replacing it would have meant admitting she planned on needing it more than once. She smoothed the lapel one last time in the elevator's mirrored wall, watching the numbers climb toward the fortieth floor of the Ashford & Vance building, and told herself that this was just another interview. Another door that would probably close, the way most of them had.

It didn't feel like just another door. Ashford & Vance was the firm whose buildings she'd sketched from memory as a teenager, tracing the curve of the Meridian Tower into the margins of her algebra homework while her teacher droned on about quadratic equations. She still remembered the exact blue of the pencil she'd used, a cheap one from a multipack, worn down to a stub by the time she'd filled the margins of three separate notebooks with the same building drawn from different angles, trying to understand how anyone decided where a curve should begin and where it should stop pretending to be a straight line. Getting a junior drafting position here wasn't a job. It was a foothold on a mountain she'd been staring up at her entire life, certain she didn't have the right shoes for the climb, certain even now, riding an elevator that smelled faintly of cedar and expensive cleaning products, that someone was about to notice the shoes and send her back down.

She had taken three buses to get here, transferring twice, watching the neighborhoods change through the window the way they always did on this particular route from the block where her mother's apartment sat between a laundromat and a taquería, through a stretch of warehouses being converted one by one into lofts nobody she knew could afford, and finally into the glass canyon downtown where the buildings got taller and the sidewalks got wider and even the pigeons, she'd joked once to her mother, seemed to walk with better posture. She had practiced her handshake in the mirror of the gas station bathroom two blocks away, because her apartment's bathroom mirror was cracked in one corner and too small to see her whole reflection, and she'd wanted, badly, stupidly, to see all of herself walking in the blazer, the portfolio case with the strap she'd reinforced with electrical tape, the shoes she'd polished the night before at her kitchen table while her mother watched a telenovela in the next room and pretended not to be nervous on her behalf.

The elevator doors opened onto glass and steel and the kind of silence that expensive carpet made possible the sound of the city forty floors below swallowed whole, replaced by nothing but the hush of recessed lighting and the occasional soft chime of another elevator arriving somewhere down the hall. A receptionist with a headset and a smile that looked professionally maintained directed her toward a conference room at the end of a hallway lined with framed renderings of buildings Elena recognized the way other people recognized celebrities. The Meridian Tower was there, of course, rendered in the firm's early style, all sharp angles and optimism. Beside it hung a residential complex she didn't know, and beside that, a scale model of something under glass that she slowed down to look at despite herself, despite the receptionist's expectant hover a few steps ahead. She had cut pictures of some of these out of magazines once, in high school, when the school library still got architectural digests nobody else ever checked out. She had them in a folder at home, dog-eared, embarrassing, kept in the same drawer as her grandfather's old drafting compass, which she'd never once used and never once been able to throw away.

She went where she was pointed, counting her breaths, running through the answers she'd rehearsed in the bathroom of the diner where she'd worked the closing shift the night before, wiping down ketchup bottles at eleven p.m. and reciting, under her breath, the kind of client-communication buzzwords she'd read were expected of her. Collaborative. Detail-oriented. A team player who also works independently. Comfortable with deadline pressure. She had practiced saying these things without sounding like she was reading them off an index card, though she'd genuinely made an index card, the corners of it now soft from being carried in her coat pocket for two days.

She did not expect the man already in the conference room to be sitting on the edge of the table instead of behind it, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the forearm, frowning down at a set of blueprints spread across the polished wood like they'd personally wronged him. He had the kind of stillness that made a room feel occupied even before you noticed the specifics of him dark hair slightly disordered, as though he'd run a hand through it more than once in frustration, a watch on his wrist that caught the light in a way that made Elena's stomach do a small, unwelcome calculation of its price.

"You're not Marcus," he said, without looking up.

"I'm not," Elena agreed, hovering in the doorway, one hand still on the frame as though she might need it for balance. "Should I come back?"

That got his attention. He looked up with dark eyes, an unhurried sort of focus that made her feel, briefly, like the only other object in the room, the kind of face that belonged on the cover of the firm's annual report, which, she would later learn, it sometimes did. He didn't look surprised to see her so much as he looked like he was recalibrating, quickly, some private expectation, the way you might glance twice at a set of numbers that didn't match what you'd been told to expect. "You're two o'clock. Elena Reyes."

"That's me."

"Julian Ashford." He said it the way other people said their first names, like the surname wasn't a weight he carried but simply a fact of weather, unremarkable, always there, the way rain was wet or the sky was up. "Marcus got stuck in a client call that's run over by twenty minutes and counting. He asked me to start without him. Sit, if you don't mind an audience of one instead of two."

She sat, setting her portfolio case on her knees like a shield, very aware suddenly of the tape reinforcing its strap, of the scuff on her left shoe she hadn't managed to polish out the night before. "Should I be worried the person actually hiring me isn't here?"

"You should be relieved. Marcus asks about five-year plans. I'm going to ask to see your work." He held out a hand, not for a handshake but expectantly, palm up, toward the case on her knees. "May I?"

She handed it over before she'd fully decided to, some instinct in her hands moving faster than the more cautious part of her brain. He opened it with the unhurried care of someone accustomed to handling things that mattered she noticed that, filed it away without meaning to, the way he turned each page by its corner rather than dragging his thumb across the surface and paged through her renderings in a silence that stretched long enough to make her palms damp against the leather of the case, empty now in her lap. He stopped on a set of elevations she'd done for a duplex renovation, the kind of unglamorous residential project real firms rarely bothered looking twice at, a job she'd taken on for almost no money the summer after her certification because the homeowner, an older man named Mr. Okafor, had reminded her of her grandfather and she hadn't been able to say no.

"You drew these by hand first," he said. Not a question.

"I still think in pencil. I will clean it up digitally after." She heard herself add, unprompted, the way nerves sometimes made her overexplain, "It's slower. But I catch things in pencil I miss on a screen. The eye moves differently."

"Most people your age don't bother learning to think in pencil at all anymore." He set the portfolio down, finally, and looked at her instead of the page, which was somehow worse, more exposing, than his attention on her work had been. "Why residential? A firm like this, most junior applicants want to talk about towers. Skylines. Things that end up on a postcard."

Elena thought about her father's old office, the hand-painted sign, the particular dignity of a well-designed home that nobody famous would ever live in the way a good kitchen window could change the entire rhythm of someone's morning, the way a staircase built with the right pitch could keep an old woman living independently three years longer than a bad one would have. She thought about telling him the truth and decided, in the space of half a second, that the truth was too much for a job interview with a stranger, however striking his eyes were, however much some reckless corner of her wanted to see what his face would do with it.

"Towers are for egos," she said instead. "Houses are for people. I like designing for people."

Something shifted in his expression of amusement, she thought at first, and then, looking closer, something more like recognition, as if she'd said a password he hadn't expected a stranger to know, hadn't expected to hear inside these particular walls at all. "That's either the best answer I've heard in this room in two years, or the best rehearsed one."

"Can't it be both?"

He laughed an actual laugh, surprised out of him, warmer than the boardroom face she suspected he usually wore, and she felt an unreasonable flicker of pride at having caused it, quickly followed by the reflexive worry that she'd been too familiar, too quick with him, that this was exactly the kind of overstep her mother had warned her about before she'd left the apartment that morning. Don't get comfortable too fast, mija. Comfortable for people who've already been let in.

"Fair enough, Ms. Reyes." He closed the portfolio and slid it back across the table to her. "For what it's worth, I think Marcus is going to love you. I think you should know, walking in, that this firm can be a difficult place to be someone who thinks in pencil. It rewards people who think in spreadsheets."

"I can do spreadsheets."

"I believe you. I'm only saying "don't lose the pencil." He stood, buttoning his jacket, the interview apparently concluding on his end though Marcus had yet to arrive, and something about the finality of the gesture made Elena's pulse tick up, uncertain whether the conversation had gone well or whether she'd simply amused a rich man for eleven minutes before he moved on to the rest of his day. "It was good to meet you, Elena Reyes."

She did not know, yet, exactly who she had been sitting across from, not the full shape of it, not the name on the building translated into the specific weight of what that name had done to specific people, including, though she couldn't have guessed it in that room, her own family. She only knew, riding the elevator back down forty floors to the lobby, watching the numbers fall the way they'd climbed, that she wanted the job more, now, than she had an hour ago, and that some small, unwise part of her wanted it partly because of who she'd just met in it.