The Man Under the Table

I came back to 2016 under a table while a woman in a blue dress asked whether I intended to join the party before everyone went home. In 2026 I had fallen asleep after another lighting job, old enough to be tired of promising that the next booking would improve my life. Now I was twenty-eight again, the calendar on my phone said February, and the woman waiting for me was Luna. She was twenty-six, a dance instructor and the evening I had spent ten years wishing I had not missed. My name was Ken. I put down the roll of tape, came out from under the table and discovered I still remembered how badly I wanted to take her hand.

We lived on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I worked with qualified event crews, hired equipment when it made sense and had fourteen thousand US dollars saved through a discipline I rarely applied to my own evenings. In the lost decade I had become useful to every private celebration except the one I wanted to be inside. I could make a room look warm, make a speaker visible and make a difficult customer feel important. I had become much less reliable at arriving for dinner as a man rather than as the person who could fix something before he sat down.

This time I remembered a company whose later value would make the small early price seem absurd. During the first part of 2016 I bought four hundred original NVIDIA shares at an average twenty-five dollars, using ten thousand of the fourteen. I kept the confirmation, read it again and let myself enjoy the strange confidence of having acted before the world supplied the answer. The remaining four thousand stayed available for ordinary work and living arrangements while paid jobs continued. When the order filled I stared at the account until Luna asked whether the phone had finally proposed something worth accepting. I said I had bought a possibility. She smiled and said she had invited me to enjoy a certainty called dinner.

Nora was twenty-eight and organized private events with a talent for finding the missing chair before the guest who needed it arrived. We had worked together often. I asked her to build a small event-lighting and planning venture where we could choose suitable jobs, hire qualified help and stop making panic our standard package. Nora wanted half for her equipment, continuing work and actual client relationships. I put my available four thousand and skills into the other half. My stock account stayed outside it. She looked at me for a moment and said she had been waiting years for the man who complained about the schedule to offer one he intended to own.

Our first private job brought eighteen hundred dollars. Suitable equipment hire, paid crew, transport and delivery costs totalled a thousand, leaving eight hundred before shared overhead and tax. The venture's four-thousand-dollar starting cash became forty-eight hundred after payment. Nora made me write down the actual result before I began describing all the future rooms we could fill. I asked whether she was always going to make success sound so ordinary. She said she hoped so; ordinary success could be repeated without inviting the customer to pay for our excitement. Then she booked the next sensible job and sent me home before the evening could grow another unpaid hour.

The 2017 Transfer Day centennial was already a public milestone, with preparations under way long before I returned. I remembered how many private gatherings, visiting relatives and small businesses would need useful support around it. We planned for actual private customers, not an official concession nobody had offered us. Nora wanted reasonable bookings and enough time between them to remain competent. I wanted to make the most of a season I had already lived. She asked whether the extra decade had taught me anything about the difference between being in demand and being available. I said I was learning. Nora said the calendar would be an excellent place to demonstrate it.

At dinner she wore red and left the planning folder behind. I was halfway through describing a beautiful room when she asked whether I had noticed the woman who had arrived in this one. I stopped. Nora smiled, leaned closer and rested her hand over mine. I told her she looked beautiful. She said the answer was promising and that she would be interested in another evening without requiring a professional excuse. The kiss outside afterward was warm, unhurried and impossible to enter into the booking sheet without ruining the point of it. I went home pleased, then remembered that pleasure would eventually need an answer larger than yes to the next invitation.

Luna invited me to an adult dance gathering. She watched me try to anticipate a movement I had not yet learned and said I was making the same mistake with music that I made with every conversation: planning my part before I heard hers. I offered to start again. Luna put her hand at my shoulder, drew me close enough that I stopped looking for a better place to stand and led me through the step. When the song ended she kept my hand in hers. I said I had missed this. She asked when I had finally arrived. I told her I hoped it had been early enough to be invited back.

I wrote a different memory down before the baseball season could supply it: the Cubs would win the 2016 World Series, taking Game Seven eight-seven. Nora and Luna kept the sealed note. When the result arrived, they read it together and asked for an explanation. I told them about 2026, the second chance and the ordinary man who had gone back to find himself under the same table. Luna listened, then said the remarkable part might be that I had finally come out before the evening ended. Nora asked whether knowing a score made me any better at keeping the next promise. I said I was willing to be judged on the next one I actually made.