Our dinner was winding down in Chinatown when I got up to get cigarettes. This was more about giving myself something to do than satisfying a craving, unless you count the desire to take a break from other people as a craving. I don’t smoke, not officially. A significant portion of my friends would express surprise to see me smoking at all. I also never smoke the whole thing, opting to leave a trail of crushed paper flutes in my wake. I sometimes wonder how this aborted indulgence reads to the naked eye, aside from registering as litter. I fantasize about other people’s fantasies, about cars that arrive earlier than expected, sweeping me off to some glamorous event. Sometimes I go darker. I think of kidnappings, of vans, of men in ski masks tossing me behind a steel partition. The traces of saliva on the filter—this is how the identifications will be made. Alas, the unlikelihood of being yanked off the street in downtown Manhattan kind of declaws the idea. But it beats vaping.
“What kind?” asked Vadis, tearing herself away from Zach too easily.
Her face was flush. She put an elbow on the table, triggering a little earthquake in her wineglass. Gold bangles slid down her arm, chasing after each other until they became one. Zach reached for his phone in an attempt to claim his own distractions.
“The ones with the nicotine in them.”
“Oh,” she said, somehow disappointed.
What kind. What a meaningless question. Cigarettes are not seasonal and Vadis didn’t smoke. Though she’d always been brimming with meaningless questions, asking what time meetings to which she wasn’t invited began, if I knew a long-dead psychiatrist’s contact information, if B. F. Skinner had pets, if “we” had an angle on this emotional intelligence feature, if I had any double-sided tape. Who, in the history of the world, has ever had any double-sided tape? Then she’d sigh over my desk after I told her I couldn’t help her, drumming those aristocratic fingers on my monitor as if her standing there would produce a better answer. The longer she stood, the more insulting her presence became. This was Vadis’s way of suggesting she knew other people’s minds better than they did.
“I once read this article in Harper’s,” said Zach, eyes still fixed on his screen, “about people who did all sorts of crazy shit on Ambien. They woke up in the corner of the room or boiled their underwear. This one woman, she buttered her cigarettes and ate them.”
“Harper’s published this?” I asked.
“Somewhere,” he said. “Cautionary tale.”
“That’s not a story about cigarettes,” Vadis corrected him, combing her hands through her hair, “it’s a story about Ambien.”
“Or butter,” I offered.
“It’s a story about the confluence of desire.”
“Don’t say desire,” she scolded him.
“An orgy of vices then.”
She looked at him hard.
“Really don’t say ‘orgy.’”
“The woman probably crushed up the pills and rolled the cigarettes in them,” Zach muttered.
“What?!” Vadis hissed.
“Like Mexican corn.”
“No one knows what you’re talking about.”
“Lola knows.”
“You guys can leave me out of this if you want,” I said.
How did these people wind up being my people? I’d had other friends before them, had I not? It was hard to remember. After Modern Psychology folded, it was as if a starting pistol had been fired and we scattered to separate corners of the professional universe. Vadis went to a “bedding and lifestyle” company run by a socialite (the arbitrary delineation between “bedding” and “lifestyle” amused us all), running their events and producing their content (blog posts with headlines like “Thread Count On Me” and “Bath Bombs to Detonate Calm”). Her work complaints centered around her flighty, impetuous, presumptive boss, traits I associated with Vadis herself. It was therefore difficult to tell if the socialite was a real problem or if Vadis was unaccustomed to engaging her mirror.
Zach wound up overseeing the editorial page of a headhunting agency. The idea was that if Modern Psychology, the world’s preeminent psychology periodical, had seen fit to employ Zach, he must be a people person. He must have insight into the needs of people. When they fired him, they cited a personality conflict. The fact that it took them six months to come to this conclusion was alarming. Generally speaking, being fired would’ve been a badge of honor for Zach. Alas, to be an unemployed headhunter was to be the butt of a joke that even he did not find funny. Disillusioned with corporate America and “the hoi polloi corruption of media,” he went the practical route rather than settle for some “foggy facsimile” of culture. He entered the gig economy, delivering medical supplies, building bookshelves, drilling holes in the walls of useless liberal arts graduates, picking up dog medication for old ladies. He would’ve preferred to report to the dogs.
Of Clive’s protégés, only I stayed the course. Or the closest to the course. I wound up running the arts and culture vertical of a site called Radio New York, the pet project of a venture capitalist who mostly left us alone. I farmed out bite-size nostalgia in the mode of lists of popular books and movies and podcasts, or assigned essays on popular books or movies or podcasts or think pieces responding to widely circulated essays on popular books or movies or podcasts. The Lloyd Dobler nightmare for the new millennium. Radio New York stifled every voice and clipped every word count. The culture of quotas and reviews was difficult for some (me) and a given for others (anyone under the age of thirty-five). But at least the specter of media decay felt different than it had at Modern Psychology, where the end of the magazine felt greater than itself. In the new media landscape, reduction was baked into the deal. Like going to work as a stunt double. Probably nothing bad will happen to you immediately but probably something bad will happen to you eventually.
“Is there any of that spicy cauliflower thing left?” asked Vadis, looking down the length of the table.
The table had been demonstrably cleared, all dishes replaced by dessert menus.
“I worry about you sometimes,” said Zach.
“Worry about yourself,” she said, patting him on the cheek.
He jerked his head back in a halfhearted way that suggested that cheek would go unwashed. I touched my jacket on the back of my chair. It was a thin army jacket, flammable, more for style than utility. I told myself I would leave it as self-imposed collateral.
In the beginning, these dinners were a lifeline to the past. The brainchild of Clive Glenn, our erstwhile king, they came with the air of leadership, no matter how neutered. Which is what we wanted and what we had lost. There was a time when we’d spent every moment with one another, arguing over articles like “Arguing Productively with Your Coworkers.” We were shipwrecked from newsstands, kept alive by doctors’ offices that allowed us to claim a staggering 17.5 pairs of eyes per copy. We were not invited to the cool parties (except, sometimes, Vadis) or the all-day Twitter wars (except, often, Zach) or the televised panels (except, toward the end, Clive). But we had low health insurance deductibles and we could stand the sight of one another.
Alas, even we were not spared from the shifting American attention span. Advertisers had clued in to the futility of the magazine ad, even in a targeted publication like ours. Print ads are like “tossing wet pasta down a well,” said the rep for one account, a mixed metaphor that kept us amused—It puts the pasta down the well or else it gets the hose again—as we switched from monthly to bimonthly, from bimonthly to quarterly, from quarterly to online only, from online only to newsletter, from newsletter to dust.
Only Clive was somehow bolstered by this entire experience. Not unscathed, not like me, placed with some media host family until he found his forever home. Bolstered. Even when his name still crowned the masthead, he’d begun to step away from the drier aspects of running a magazine and morphing into a full-blown psych guru. He wrote the introduction to an anthology about psychic pain. He invented a DSM drinking game that he played at intimate dinner parties with celebrities who posted videos of the experience on their private social media accounts. When the videos leaked, he issued an apology for his insensitivity that landed him on NPR. He got his own talk show for a while, which was something. Tote bags appeared with the silhouette of his face on them. His speaking fees skyrocketed. But even Clive, with his Brain-Wise™ meditation kits and fancy friends, even Clive—well, I just never got the sense that any of us were as happy apart as we’d been together.
Which is why, counterintuitive as it sounds, I dreaded these dinners.
We were flaunting our former selves to our current ones. We’d become too disconnected, too leery of bridging the gap, too likely to run down a list of conversational categories as if detailing a car. How’s the family? The job? The apartment hunt? As if making deeper inquiries would open up a sinkhole of sadness from which we’d never escape. Once, at an Indian restaurant, I watched Zach sullenly picking cubes of cheese out of his saag paneer. I don’t know why he ordered it. He was in a self-flagellating relationship with dairy. I asked him if he had any fun summer plans.
“Lola,” he said, twisting his face, “are you ‘making conversation’ with me?”
We hated asking these questions. Besides, I knew all the answers already. For instance, I knew all about Clive’s apartment hunt. He’d gutted a place in my ever-gentrifying neighborhood, a duplex penthouse with heated bathroom floors and two terraces, one of which got caught in the fold of the design magazine spread about the renovations. The building was a complex for childless men who divorced early and without consequence, men who would be young at fifty. Clive had a live-in girlfriend now, a giraffe of a person named Chantal with thighs so thin, birds probably flew into them. But he was still a poster child for New York divorcees, for inoffensive fine art and impressing women half his age by boiling linguine. Sometimes I’d see him on the subway platform and hide. I was not proud of this. But I was never in the right frame of mind to deal with Clive.
And yet the temptation was always there, to grab a stranger, point, and whisper: “Ask me anything about that man over there.”
“Is Lola leaving us?” Clive barked from his end of the table.
He hiccuped but seemed delighted by it, like a baby. No one made it out of these dinners sober. Perhaps because they took place on Friday nights. Or perhaps it was because Clive never took care of the check and was impervious to all suggestions that he should. Zach’s theory was that being cheap made Clive feel like he was running for office. Gather ’round, ye townspeople, and watch the multimillionaire eat a hot dog! Mine was that it was a show of respect, like we were all on the same playing field now that he couldn’t fire us. Vadis’s was that we were overthinking it: Rich people stay rich by not spending money; she should know (she was being grossly underpaid by the bedding socialite). Whatever the reason, we always split the bill, which meant cutting off our noses to spite our wallets and ordering as many cocktails as possible.
“How could you?” Clive asked, feigning a wound.
“Because I’m not interested in spending time with you.”
“Liar,” he bellowed, and slapped the table.
Even drunk and sloppy, a Viking demanding mead, the man was alluring. Maybe not to me, not anymore, but certainly to the Chantals of the world. See the sharp cheekbones to which his youth had clung like a cliffhanger. See the sparkly eyes of indeterminate color lurking below the swoosh of hair that flaunted its bounty. See the chin scar from a childhood bike accident in a town with no plastic surgeons.
“Where are you going?” he mouthed, more sincerely this time.
I pressed two fingers against my lips and moved them away. I could tell he wanted to sneak out with me, the conversational equivalent of eating a hot dog. But he couldn’t risk being spotted smoking by some wellness fanatic with a platform. Plus, his desire to hold court was too strong. To leave would be to acknowledge the conversation would continue without him there to moderate it.
A long bar area connected the entrance to the dining room in the back. Patrons attempted to shift their stools even though they were nailed to the ground. They nursed cocktails with spears of dark cherries and citrus rinds. Mirrored shelving made the rows of booze seem infinite. I felt a sense of pride, imagining a foreigner stumbling into this place, noting that all the world’s swank looks more or less the same. It was mid-May, the season formerly known as “spring,” but the restaurant had yet to take down the velvet curtains that circled the entrance. Passing through them felt like walking onto a stage.
I was unfamiliar with this section of Chinatown, as much as anyone can be unfamiliar with an island on which one resides. The area a few blocks over was experiencing a mini-resurgence in the form of vegan provisions and upscale boutiques manned by Parsons students (the prices could be guessed by multiplying hanger distance and overhead). This was perplexing to me, as there was nothing to resurge. The neighborhood had been fashionable for years. Whatever businesses opened now did not arise from cheap rents or a triangulation of community and so ladling on layers of practiced nonchalance made it feel as if people with no sense of history had planted a flag in a neighborhood where the denizens had been drinking natural wine since 2005.
All this cool I wanted to avoid. All this cool made me tired.
So I made a left, toward Houston, into a less self-consciously trendy zone. There were remnants of a street fair, racks of stiff leather jackets spilling out onto the street. I passed an art gallery with no art, a dive bar with no sign, and buzzers with no names. Eventually, I spotted the telltale yellow of an electric awning. This was a high-class bodega; the kind with enough energy bars to set the mind to calculating how long the body could last if trapped inside. I waited behind an elderly man as he selected lotto numbers and a pack of Merits. The hem of his pants dragged along the floor as the cashier suffered him patiently. Atop the register was a wide-eyed plastic cat, its paw moving up and down in silent protest.
When it was my turn, I felt compelled to be extra sane. I forwent matches in a tone that suggested I was giving up my inheritance.
“I’ll take a lighter, too,” I said. “Please.”
The cashier slid one across the plastic counter. I gave the metal wheel a quick roll.
“Don’t light that in your pocket,” he warned.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Actually, I would dream of it and often did. I worried that I’d be mindlessly playing with a lighter in my pocket and set myself on fire. I thought about it so much, it was a miracle it never happened.
I walked back along the same side of the street, packing the cigarettes against my palm. I got a disproportionate kick out of pleasant interactions with strangers. I suspect it’s because these were the kinds of interactions I wished I could see performed by every man I’d ever dated. Or vice versa. So many of my past relationships devolved into fights on public transport or long chains of undignified texts and I’d think: If only I could see you, flipping through your mail. Or booking airline tickets. And if only you could see me, wishing the driver a good night. Or either of us, reciting our social security numbers to prove we are ourselves. Where did these seductively functional people go when sex got in the way?
It was then that I spotted my ex-boyfriend Amos.
Amos was standing outside the restaurant with a taller friend. The two of them shared a square of sidewalk, the friend running his thumb under the strap of a messenger bag to relieve the weight. I could tell they’d just come from inside. Larger forces had protected us from seeing each other, but larger forces had done all they could. When I left and came back, they’d washed their hands of me.
This was not a place I would’ve expected Amos to have heard of, forget patronize. When we were together, he was dismissive of the “fetishized expense” of Manhattan. Manhattan was soulless, gentrified, once for the very young and the very rich, now only for the very rich and the very soulless. Reduced to a high-end strip mall, all the city’s personality was in the past, all its pride delusional. I was too tired to mount a defense—tired, probably, from having to schlep to Bed-Stuy to see my boyfriend. Dropping our near-identical rents or the pilates studios of his neighborhood into conversational evidence bags didn’t seem worth it. Besides, what Amos never understood was that with each pronouncement of my home as a dead zone, he made me feel better about living here. The eye of a hurricane may be inaccessible, but it’s still the eye.
Toward the end of our relationship, I felt a reactionary love for all the things Amos hated. Not just Manhattan, but streaming services, nature videos, expensive toiletries, pop music, smartphones, beaches, throw pillows, bottled water, alternative milks, kitchen gadgets (a strawberry destemmer—who knew!), and cats. So completely did I commit to these things (was this the first time anyone adopted a kitten out of spite?), I convinced myself they were more indicative of who I was than the deeper things Amos and I had in common. I became resentful of the books and politics and niche references that had brought us together, as if they had betrayed me by leading me into the arms of a man who diagnosed Clive as a charlatan and my friends as “morally impoverished.”
Our relationship never would have lasted for the two years it did were it not for Kit. Amos had a twenty-something cousin named Kit, a Hollywood starlet with a penchant for filters and quotations. But she was a blood relation, which made her tolerable to Amos, which, in turn, made him tolerable to me. When Kit was filming in New York, the three of us went out to dinner. She ordered food as if she and the waiter were working on a project together. She recounted stories from Amos’s childhood and demanded our conversion from tequila to mezcal.
“You’re such a good proselytizer,” Amos told her, “too bad you’re Jewish.”
Kit flicked the straw wrapper she’d been balling into Amos’s face and he cackled. She unlocked a less captious Amos. He refrained from deriding the Hollywood industrial complex in front of her. When the bill came, Kit grabbed it like it was nothing. I’d never seen someone take a check like that, without momentarily losing track of what they were saying. Amos didn’t flinch. Whereas whenever I grabbed the bill, we had weird sex afterward.
After we broke up, I found myself watching the multi-cam sitcom on which Kit appeared, searching for his jawline in hers. I wasn’t trying to torture myself, though I did manage to do that, only to search for evidence that Amos had been real, that I had kept this person’s contact lens solution in my medicine cabinet. I often felt like this after breakups, no matter who had cut the cord—that fresh shock that life does not end from a single blow. A comforting concept in the long term, a jarring one in the short term. Resiliency is overrated. To get hit by a truck and ride the subway the next morning is not commendable, it’s insane. But thanks to Kit, I could postpone this mourning process indefinitely. I watched her show so religiously, my interest in it took on a life independent of Amos. At the magazine, Zach and I shared a cubicle wall, so I foisted plot summations on him, despite his having zero interest in hearing about a sitcom meant for teenagers. I read the recaps, scrolling for Kit’s name to see if any of them had isolated her performance. I closed out of these articles if I sensed Clive or Vadis behind me.
When the show was canceled, I felt a second wave of remorse about Amos that felt a lot like the first wave. Details that should’ve cycled through my memory long ago came rushing back in—the holes in his clothing, the scratches in his records, the disability that prevented him from wringing out a kitchen sponge. I remembered the layout of his apartment too well. This included the musty sofa on which he explained that monogamy was a vestigial construct gifted to us by the Puritans. It wasn’t me, I had to understand. Except that it was me because there was only one of me.
We sat there, like guests of the furniture. I told him that I did not like the way he was talking about this, as if he had some kind of affliction that required him to put his penis in multiple people. I said that I could forgive someone, even him, for cheating, but I could not forgive someone, even him, for plotting to cheat.
“Why do you have to call it ‘cheating’?” he asked in that redoubtable tone of his.
“Call it whatever you want,” I said. “Pancake. I am not going to sit here while you pancake every woman you meet.”
“Every woman is unlikely,” he said, scoffing.
The breakup was about six years ago. Kit’s show was canceled two years ago. As I approached, I worried this discrepancy in mourning would be palpable. I also happened to have on the same shirt I’d worn the night we broke up, as if I’d been walking around in a mausoleum the shape of Amos Adler, breathing stale Amos Adler air. I reminded myself of the full life I had now. I had a steady job that I didn’t completely hate. Old, good friends. Ten fingers, ten toes. I had wiped all the sleep from my eyes before noon. Also, I’d been having sex. More important, the sex I’d been having was with my fiancé. My fiancé to whom I was engaged to be married, a person I’d swindled into a lifetime of mutual tolerance.
Here was a man who would never pancake on me (though I sometimes worried this was more a failure of imagination) or disappear for weeks, breaking the silence with a three-thousand-word screed or, better yet, the insistence that there had been no silence. May our gaslights illuminate the bridges we burn! Here was a man whose snobberies were logical (buy the more expensive concert tickets, vote early, make your own coffee). Here was a man who asked me about my day because he wanted answers, not credit. A man who intuitively sensed the relevance of my summer camp stories. A man who let me refer to him as “Boots,” a nickname that began during a conversation about parents who give their babies nonsense names in utero. Never mind the implication he was the child of our relationship. He didn’t care. Because here was a man who did not think of himself as woefully untapped by the world, who was not driven to an existential crisis by an unread literary journal. Here was a calm, nonjudgmental soul who knew of Amos Adler only because I’d mentioned him once, in passing.
“Famous Amos?” Boots asked, mulling it over. “Like the cookie?”
“More or less,” I said, balling up the old sweatshirt of Amos’s that had inspired this exchange.
“I’ve never known an Amos.”
I wanted to add “me neither,” but I knew I had to end this conversation.
When we first got together, Boots and I made an agreement never to speak about our exes unless absolutely necessary. Say, one of them died in a freak accident and one of us was tapped to deliver the eulogy. Or one of them was elected prime minister of a small country. It was his suggestion that we move into the future with only each other. He’d been scarred by a girlfriend who was obsessed with her ex. It was exhausting and scary, trying to predict her triggers. She “carried around hatboxes of baggage, like a cartoon of a woman with steamer trunks behind her.”
“And a poodle!”
“What poodle?”
“Nothing, go on…”
“Well anyway, I guess my baggage is baggage.”
And so I agreed to this arrangement, even though I thought this policy was too strict, not to mention robbing us of imagery that could be pocketed for sex. But I was the one who stood to benefit: Boots had been in two serious relationships, college girlfriend and scary girlfriend included. We were never going to be seated at a table with someone who required an explanation. I, on the other hand, had nothing but explanations. Some of us get smaller denominations from the romance ATM than others. In addition to the flings, I’d had about fifteen five-month relationships, not to mention the six- and nine-month relationships, not to mention the ones that came to life in the night like haunted toaster ovens: You up?
I had tried to explore the why of it. Thanks to Modern Psychology, I had access to the most complete therapist database on the planet. My parents were still happily married. No one had abandoned me, beaten me, or withheld their love. Was I enamored by disinterest and disinterested in affection, set on giving my heart to people who didn’t deserve it? Seesawing between desperate and inscrutable like a deranged child? Was I trying to find replicas of my father and then smashing those replicas? Had Cupid’s bastard brother snuck into my bedroom and whispered in my ear, “My child, never commit”? I’d begun to suspect that my search for an inciting incident was the inciting incident. But before I could get to the bottom of it, I met Boots, who made it all stop, who could not unbreak me but who could protect me from the narrative of the broken.
The night we got engaged (along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, the lights of the city winking in approval), we were in a cab going over the Manhattan Bridge. I was drunk by then, flirting with nausea in the backseat. I cracked the window and looked down my left arm, following it to its natural conclusion.
“Whose finger is that?” I asked.
“Who put that there?” Boots laughed, teasing me, declaring me wasted.
But I was not talking about the ring. I was so drunk, I was talking about my actual finger.
Boots had asked my parents for my hand, if it was my hand, in marriage. This conversation was easy to imagine, one of them screaming at the other to pick up the kitchen phone. They are not tough people. A phone call is all that would be required to sell the house and pay off the terrorists. Or marry off their daughter. But he and I had not discussed marriage, not seriously, only implicitly, in the way we kept filling up the calendar, facing holidays head-on. So while the question did not come out of left field, it was no fastball to home base.
I knew I’d spend no small amount of time, working it out in my head, wondering if I’d be just as disturbed by him not getting permission. I often felt my prime years to figure out if I subscribed to the concept of marriage were when I was a child, back when all of life was hypothetical. As an adult, it’s hard to come down on a common institution to which you have no anecdotal access. It smacks of sour grapes. Boots had come along at a time when any reasonable person would’ve assumed I had an educated stance. If I wanted to take the political route, marriage was confinement, a raw deal. People hoped for transformation but too often got lobotomization. Idealization hardened into disappointment. But life is not lived in politics, it’s lived in days.
And so I was content, sitting in the back of that cab with nothing to look at but the profile of Boots’s head, the city rising up beyond him. Even if I was only ever borrowing someone else’s certainty, it would become mine eventually. I could let the idea roost. I decided right there and then that if there was ever anything so terribly wrong with me, it was only that I was a woman who’d spent her youth in New York and never left.
To make this moment exponentially worse, Amos had, in fact, become a famous Amos. Time bends differently for each of us, but it had bent so favorably in Amos’s direction, it was clear any post-breakup curses had backfired. He’d written two novels and, last I heard, was compiling a collection of his poetry. The first novel was long and pretentious and inspired the kind of critical ire so extreme, you couldn’t argue he was doing something right by getting a rise out of people. The second was equally long and pretentious but about a Palestinian child who, while playing one day, wanders into a dilapidated house. He opens a kitchen cabinet and stumbles upon a Hamas-built tunnel that he crawls inside, but instead of popping out in Israel, he winds up in an alternate reality where there’s no such thing as war. It was on the bestseller list for four weeks, popular enough to amend the consensus about Amos’s first novel, which went from “unreadable” to “dense.” Suddenly, Amos was not a poet who’d tried his hand at fiction, but a novelist who’d dabbled in poetry.
The taller man with the messenger bag was probably his new editor. This person must have selected the venue and expensed the meal. He spotted me first. Amos clocked the break in his audience’s attention and followed the taller man’s gaze. He smiled and rocked back on his heels.
“Hi there,” I said, hugging him to buy myself time away from his face.
“Lola,” he half-whispered.
“I feel like calling you ‘Stranger.’”
“Go ahead,” he said, chin moving against my shoulder.
“Hello, Stranger.”
By the time we detached, he had this beatific look on his face. Here was someone who’d mourned well, whose memory was flushed of unpleasantness.
“Are you coming or going?”
“Neither,” I said, holding up the pack of cigarettes, “coming back.”
Amos smoked more than I did, or at least he used to.
“How are you?” he asked, as if having administered a truth serum.
“Just, you know, meandering the mean streets of Chinatown. You?”
“Oh, it’s far too much to sum up in a sentence.”
I had to refrain from flicking the lighter in my pocket.
“It’s good to see you,” he continued. “Are you still editing?”
“Are you still pissing standing up?”
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said, waving at the air. “Yes, of course I’m still editing. I’m at Radio New York.”
“The tech thing?”
“It’s not a ‘tech thing,’ it’s just funded that way. I’m a little disappointed you don’t know where I work.”
“Or am I just pretending not to know?”
“Now there’s a question. Clive and Vadis and all them are in there.”
“You’re kidding,” Amos said, looking over his shoulder as if their faces would be pressed against the glass. “I didn’t see them.”
“Well, that’s probably okay.”
“I never had a problem with those guys.”
“Clive’s toned it down,” I said, “since he found inner peace and a billion dollars. And Vadis’s not, I don’t know—”
“Barking at interns?”
“No, no barking. She’s gypsy chic now.”
“I’ll pretend to know what that means. But man, how did I miss seeing you?”
Should we just fuck on this pavement square and get it over with? Amos was shorter than most of the guys I’d been with. “Napoleonic sexy,” as Vadis dubbed him after a digital slideshow. Amos looking pained on a panel. Amos looking pained at a party. Amos looking pained on a dock in Maine. A real-estate broker who was not Amos at all. Success had unlocked his grooming. He’d always been a fancy person trapped in a starving artist’s body. It was the jawline, destined for good suits and clearly defined from the neck like a Pez dispenser.
I offered my hand to the tall man, feeling Amos’s eyes trained on my breasts.
“We’ve met,” he said, taking my hand, “a couple of times. Roger.”
I was sorry Roger didn’t have his own ex-girlfriend to screw on his own pavement square, but there was no need to punish me for it.
“Of course,” I said, shaking my head. “Are you guys working together?”
“As in, is he my author?”
No, as in on a construction site.
“Yes, as in that.”
“I wish,” Roger said.
“He wishes,” Amos confirmed, as if some fantastic joke had passed between them.
“So why aren’t you? I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Amos is a very brilliant writer. I’m sure he has another book or six in him.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to mess with Jeannine.”
“Jeannine Bonner,” I said, just to prove that some people’s names were worth remembering.
“Jeannine is very proprietary,” said Amos, as if it were a burden to be claimed by a legendary editor, to be conversant in her personality.
Roger removed his glasses and began cleaning them on his shirt. He was at least five years junior to Amos and me, as many as eight. I got a whiff of a roommate. Laminate flooring. Roach traps.
“I hope you didn’t pay for dinner,” I said, “since Amos is the property of another woman.”
“More like the other way around,” tittered Roger.
“By which you mean that Amos makes women his property? Is that a thing we’re admitting in public now?”
“Can you believe we used to date?” Amos asked, and then to me: “Are we getting a drink or what? Roger has to go home so he can wake up to a screaming baby.”
Roger released a theatrical sigh. My eyes zipped down to his left hand as my brain confirmed the improbable calculus—yes, his left was my right and there was a gold band on it. The roach traps vanished, replaced by soft toys and frozen breast milk. I could feel Death stringing cobwebs along the walls of my uterus like Christmas garlands.
“I need my jacket,” I announced.
I left with the understanding that Roger would have absented himself by the time I returned. It was helpful to have a buffer, but I did not enjoy this version of myself made uneasy by a young family.
Inside, my jacket was waiting, zombie-like over my chair.
“We went through your pockets,” said Vadis.
“Anything good?”
“Nothing. A pen. It’s broken.”
“Keep your coat off,” instructed Clive, stretching his arms. “Stay awhile.”
A waitress was flipping the chairs upside down, slamming wood against wood.
“Nope,” I said, “I’m leaving you all.”
“Booo,” said Zach, who was now drunk enough to express emotion.
Alcohol knocked the intellectual out of him. He would not like knowing that Amos Adler was outside. Amos was a more successful, more confident version of Zach. They were the same species. Same politics, same takes. This was the primary source of Zach’s distaste, a conclusion so obvious, he never reached it. Instead, he spent years analyzing why Amos Adler “sucked so hard.” I kissed them all in the vicinity of their faces, but when I got to Vadis, I whispered: Amos. Outside.
“What?!” she hissed, with a sharp “t.”
She twisted in her chair, as if taking in more of my body would reveal further truths. If there was further truth to be had, it was that I was shocked Vadis would remember Amos. She had inverse retention skills when it came to men. The more firmly planted someone was in my life, the more likely she was to give that person a dismissive nickname or forget his name altogether. One night, I told her that the reason she made up names for these men was so they could never be real. Because if they weren’t real, they couldn’t take me away from her. I don’t think I meant a word of it. But this is how you speak when you’re in a bathroom stall in your twenties, high on cocaine, and testing the depths of your friendships.
When I went ahead and got engaged to someone with the nickname of an unborn baby, it was like I did Vadis’s job for her.
“Amos,” Vadis stage-whispered, looking toward the door. “I can’t believe it.”
Then she turned abruptly and shouted: “Clive!”
“What?!” he shouted back. “Jesus.”
“Vadis,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder, “don’t.”
“Nothing!” she said, before turning back to me. “How did he get here?”
“Well, to be fair, how did any of us get here?”
“Obviously. Right. It’s just … Okay. Have fun. Report back. Be careful.”
“Of Amos? I’ll let you know if he stabs me in the neck with a quill pen.”
“Just, you know, in general. Take notes.”
She tapped at her temple as if turning on a button.
“Okay,” I said, patting her on the head, “you’re weird. Cute, but weird.”
I left quickly, feeling pressure to get back outside. I was sure the reality of seeing each other felt just as tenuous to Amos. He could just vanish. But when I stepped back through the curtain, there he was.
“Where to?”
I was disappointed by his reliance on me to pick a place. During the years of not speaking, I’d superimposed a new person on Amos, composed of all the things I liked about him as well as an eradication of all the things I didn’t like. In this case, an inability to select venues.
“Give me a second.”
I removed my phone and began rapidly scrolling through my texts. I’d gone on a date with Boots to a perfect bar around here, but I could never remember the name. It felt less like a betrayal to take Amos to the bar than it did an insurance policy that I’d be reminded of my relationship, of who had become responsible for my healthy associations. I held the phone close to my face, putting a spotlight where Amos was already looking.
“And when you’re done,” he said, “you can tell me about this.”
I let him hold my arm up by my engagement ring. My hand went limp in his, a napkin in its napkin ring. Which is about how big the ring suddenly seemed. The ring had belonged to Boots’s grandmother. Why my generation assumes that entire generations before us had taste when only a few of us have taste now is a mystery. The diamond is cloudy and pear-shaped. It’s fixed in a setting that brings to mind the word prongs. I learned the hard way to turn it around every time I put on a sweater.
“It’s dual-acting,” Boots decided, “a shiv and a ring in one!”
He had a way of putting a positive spin on everything. It’s one of the things that first attracted me to him. I did not need another poet, arguing that depression was the only reasonable side effect of intelligence. The downside was that when the subway smelled or the food was inedible or the hotel room was too loud, Boots would be the last person to call the manager. You can’t make lemonade out of everything, I posited, some lemons are meant to be tossed. On our fourth date, I broke my ankle and Boots refused to ask the emergency room nurse for pain medication.
“She already said she’d bring it,” he assured me.
“But that was thirty minutes ago.”
We didn’t know each other well enough for me to use him as my personal pit bull, and a trip to the emergency room was a premature stress test. But even then, I knew I had this man on my hands who would sit with me for as long as it took, one who brought me flowers and stripped his tone of disappointment when he saw me light a cigarette afterward.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t,” I said, forgetting that I was supposed to be trying to impress him.
The filter pulled at my skin as I yanked it away and threw it on the ground.
“I also didn’t know you littered.”
So what if he was being serious? And so what if he would not harass the nurse? Or allow himself to be overcharged for the wrong flowers?
It was just a ring. But sometimes, when people complimented it, I tacked on a disparaging comment. I worried that the ring broadcast how disconnected I felt from Boots of late, how secretly full of misgivings, none of which I felt I could share with him. The ring was dangerous in this way. But the ugliness of the thing was one of our private jokes.
I pulled my arm away from Amos. He cleared his throat.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything,” he said, hands in the air.
I had not hidden my relationship. In fact, where was my thanks for not shoehorning it into the conversation? I’d done nothing wrong except, perhaps, to lay the groundwork for wrongdoing. My only crime was relying too heavily on Amos. I knew he would notice the ring and, once he did, we’d be safe. Amos was intolerable on the surface but good deep down. Whereas I was starting to worry I was the reverse.
We sat at a shellacked block of wood beneath a canopy of Christmas lights that never got taken down. New York was perpetually waiting for the cold, steeling itself for gray skies and sleet. I pawed for hooks beneath the bar and put my foot onto Amos’s stool so that my leg hovered between his. We clinked glasses. Then he asked me why I wasn’t in love with Boots.
“Good morning,” I said, swallowing beer foam. “You never did like to preheat the oven.”
“Neither did you. Answer the question.”
“I do love him,” I stressed.
Amos winced. That “do” was pretty damning. But all I wanted was to feel the brush of Amos’s fingertips on my kneecap, to rent some of our old electricity. Of course I loved Boots. We’d been together for two years—over two, by his count. But admitting I was not being held captive in a loveless cage was a buzz kill.
“Were you ever in love with him?” Amos asked.
“Define love,” I said, tossing chum in the water, “define ever.”
Amos rolled his eyes.
“You’re asking if I’ve ever had a six-hour phone call with him? Or driven upstate in the middle of the night to tell him I’m sorry only to get into a second fight and lock him out on the porch with the raccoons? No, I have not.”
“Glad it’s just me.”
“I never said it was just you.”
“Clever girl,” Amos said, taking a sip of his drink.
“That’s what they call the dinosaurs in the movies right before they shoot them.”
“You’re still quick.”
“Fuck you. We’re the same age. Don’t talk to me like I have dementia.”
Amos sighed into his lap, exposing the flesh beneath his collar. I played out a reality in which we had never broken up, in which he had only ever wanted to see me, only wanted to put his penis inside me. Would he kiss me right now or would we be annoyed at the sight of each other? Just because something ends prematurely doesn’t mean it won’t end eventually. Usually that’s exactly what it means.
A wiry gentleman in a short-sleeved button-down emerged from the bathroom, removed a book from his backpack, and began reading and drinking Fernet. He looked like a grad student. Amos and I watched him do these things, taken by the mutual distraction. He wanted to know what the man was reading. I wanted to know why some grown men wear backpacks. At their best, they suggest an insolent outdoorsiness; at their worst, a lifetime of student loans.
“I know what you think of me,” Amos said, twisting back around.
“This should be good.”
“But we wanted the same things, Lola. I wanted a real relationship with both of us sitting in the same room, eating takeout, not fucking.”
“You wanted to sleep with half of North America.”
I knocked the outside of my knee against the inside of his.
“Yeah, but that wasn’t the only reason we broke up.”
“Amos. I’m not sure ‘extra reasons’ is kind at this juncture.”
“I’m of the belief that our kind of love, the six-hour-phone-call kind, melds into the other kind of love. And the second kind is more important. Agreed. But for whatever reason, we only had the intense kind. I couldn’t reach the second kind on your timeline.”
“We dated for years. Literally. Years.”
“It’s no one’s fault.”
“Is it not mostly your fault, though?”
The man at the end of the bar read with his elbows spread out in front of him, as if we were in a library with a liquor license. Perhaps my generation made not enough of selecting jewelry but too much of selecting a partner. Perhaps the internet had spoiled us more than we suspected and we already suspected quite a bit. Why couldn’t I just mate with this guy at the end of the bar? Why couldn’t we be happy? What difference would it make?
“I’m saying every relationship needs both kinds of love to go the distance,” Amos said, trying to catch my eye. “A galvanizing agent.”
“Like acid to the face.”
“What will you remember when you and this dude are seventy?”
“And by ‘this dude,’ you mean my fiancé?”
“You have to remember the passion. You’ll have decades to go back and forth and swim all the laps you want, but everyone needs to start by pushing off the side of the pool. Really shoving off.”
I slugged the rest of my beer.
“Love is not a race, Amos. Or a competition. This is your problem. It’s why you refuse to ‘swim laps’ with one woman.”
“I’m not talking about racing, I’m talking about not drowning.”
“And you know all this because of your vast experience with monogamy?”
“I take offense to the accusation that I’m unevolved, especially coming from you. The idea that you have to have had a long relationship to know what makes a good relationship is a lie propagated by society to make men settle down and women settle. It’s also a capitalist boondoggle to get the masses to pay higher insurance premiums. What kind of failure of imagination does the world think I have? Why assume I have no idea what it might be like? I’ve never drunk my own piss, for example, but I’m pretty sure I know what it tastes like.”
“Because you’ve drunk other people’s piss?”
“Don’t be clever.”
“Five seconds ago, you liked that I was clever.”
“My point is I couldn’t see into the future. You wanted someone to have an archetypical life with you and it wasn’t gonna be me, and great, maybe now you have it.”
“Fuck off.”
“It wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t true.”
“Oh, so we’ve never heard of slander, I guess.”
The man at the end of the bar looked up from his book. The bartender turned on the music, the kind of droopy tune that makes you want to cry on trains. I had not noticed the silence before. What would have been a welcome part of the atmosphere when we arrived now made me feel estranged from the moment, as if I’d been enjoying the wrong thing. Like when you’re already halfway done with your pasta and the waiter comes over and offers to grate cheese over it.
Amos saw his opening.
“Just tell me about him, then.”
I knew it was wrong to talk about Boots with Amos, like feeding a beloved cat to a lion. So I decided to tell Amos a safe story.
“We met at a surprise party, actually. My friend who I was meeting there was adamant that I arrive early so when I thought I saw the birthday boy crossing the street with me, I darted out of the crosswalk and nearly got hit by a bus. Like I felt the wind of the bus. I could even see a couple of the passengers, all shaken by a potential suicide. And out of nowhere, the guy rushes over, yanks me toward him, and escorts me out of the street.”
“The birthday boy?”
“No, different guy. You all start to look the same after a while, you know that? Anyway, we were both so high on adrenaline, we couldn’t stop laughing the whole night. Then he asked me out. Now one of our jokes is about that time I flung myself into traffic to avoid him.”
“You were in shock.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Why isn’t the joke that he saved your life?”
“I don’t know, Amos,” I said, folding my fingers together. “Maybe we’re both waiting for the day I turn around and say, ‘That’s right, asshole, I did fling myself into traffic to avoid you.’ I’m joking.”
“Are you?”
“Am I?” I mimicked him. “Should the day come when you manage to face-plant yourself into a relationship, you’ll find there are certain fragile truths every couple has. Sometimes I’m uncomfortable with the power, knowing I could break us up if I wanted. Other times, I want to blow it up just because it’s there. But then the feeling passes.”
“That’s bleak.”
“To you, it is. But I’m not like you. I don’t need to escape every room I’m in.”
“But you are like me. You think you want monogamy, but you probably don’t if you dated me.”
“You’re faulting me for liking you now?”
“All I’m saying is you can’t just will yourself into being satisfied with this guy.”
“Watch me,” I said, trying to burn a hole in his face.
“If it were me, the party would have been our first date and it never would have ended.”
“Oh, yes it would have,” I said, laughing. “The date would have lasted one week, but the whole relationship would have lasted one month.”
“Yeah,” he said, “you’re right.”
“I know I’m right.”
“It wouldn’t have lasted.”
“This is what I’m saying.”
“Because if I were this dude, I would have left you by now.”
Before I could say anything, Amos excused himself to pee. On the bathroom door was a black and gold sticker in the shape of a man. I felt a rage rise up all the way to my eyeballs, thinking of how naturally Amos associated himself with that sticker, thinking of him aligning himself with every powerful, brilliant, thoughtful man who has gone through that door as well as every stupid, entitled, and cruel one, effortlessly merging with a class of people for whom the world was built.
I took my phone out, opening the virtual cuckoo clocks, trying to be somewhere else. I was confronted with a slideshow of a female friend’s dead houseplants, meant to symbolize inadequacy within reason. Amos didn’t have a clue what it was like to be a woman in New York, unsure if she’s with the right person. Even if I did want to up and leave Boots, dating was not a taste I’d acquired. The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a decision. They knew they were on trial too, but our courtrooms had more lenient judges. These men quizzed you about every hurt and humiliation until you were so flattered by the inquiry, you forgot that quizzes are made to be failed. This process was made worse by the garb of flirtation.
Vadis called it the “millennial music rider.”
“Just tell them the worst thing that’s ever happened to you and get it over with.”
“What is this, the McCarthy hearings? I’m not naming names.”
“It’s your own name, dummy. Your own trauma.”
“What if the answer is ‘this conversation’?”
“Well, maybe don’t say that.”
Whereas with every last man I knew, even Zach, the full trajectory of their lives became more appealing with age. Every gash added up to something intricate and alluring. Heartache was something that happened to them, not something they made happen. Feminism failed us on this point. Women are meant to emerge into each chapter as if from cocoons, divine creatures with a smattering of flaws. Just look at what drivel comes out in the wash: slideshows of dead houseplants.
By the time Amos returned, the man with the book had left. More people had arrived, seeming to have come here with the express purpose of discussing an absentee friend’s social infractions. Amos had a hangdog look on his face, the look of someone who’d recently confronted a bar bathroom mirror. He was wearing a button-down shirt that gaped at his stomach, exposing a keyhole of belly.
“We can stop talking about this if it upsets you,” he offered.
“Good,” I said, “but not because it upsets me. Because it will cannibalize everything and I’ll wake up tomorrow feeling like I don’t know anything about you. Tell me about your life.”
“I have no life.”
“Tell me about the new book, then.”
“I’m sick of hearing myself talk about the book. All I do is summarize my own opinions as if I read them somewhere. It’s hard to talk about the thing you’re supposed to love when you don’t feel connected to it anymore. Maybe you can advise me.”
“My advice would be to trust the process.”
“Tell me what’s good about him.”
“Amos.”
“Tell me his name.”
“No.”
“I’m going to find out eventually.”
“So you can find out eventually.”
“Do I know him?”
“No.”
“Then tell me his name.”
“Amos.”
“Come on.”
“I don’t want to hear you say his name!”
The bartender looked at us, waiting to see if there was more where that came from. It was at once the most protective thing I’d said about Boots and the most revealing thing I’d said about my leftover feelings for Amos. I pulled at the edge of my cocktail napkin until it broke apart.
“He’s considerate. People love him. He’s weirdly tall. You’d hate him.”
“What’s weird?”
“Like six-three.”
“That’s not weird.”
“He’s a good listener. With some people you can see the little kid inside them, raising their hands in the air while the teacher is talking. He’s not like that. He’s smart without being esoteric. I’ve never looked at him and had to ask what he’s thinking.”
“Is that maybe because he isn’t thinking anything?”
“He went to Brown.”
“Gross.”
“He’s from Illinois. He blows glass.”
“He must be great at going down on you.”
“He makes sculptures, if you must know. But he also runs his own business, selling glassware to restaurants.”
“An Ivy League educated Willy Loman.”
“I don’t know why I’m defending him to you. He does Per Se.”
“He does what per se?”
“The restaurant.”
“Oh. Thomas Keller ‘does’ Per Se. You should be engaged to him.”
Amos sincerely expected to wake one day to the news that I’d married a famous person. Or a diplomat. To him, the definition of a compliment was “to set apart.” When we were falling in love, he’d enumerate the ways in which I was not like other women, listing traits such as intelligence and sanity—leaving me with the choice of rejecting the compliment or betraying my entire gender.
He fished a tissue out of his bag, a canvas satchel with leather trim. I must have been ogling the bag.
“My cousin gave this to me,” he said. “She got it in a ‘gifting suite.’”
Kit. I desperately wanted to ask about her. For years, I’d fantasized about her doing the same. What ever happened to Lola, Amos? She’s the only one I ever liked. But before I could nudge him down this conversational rabbit hole, he announced that it was getting late. We should go. An hour ago, I’d harbored fantasies of Amos pushing me against a wall. Now my head pounded, my eyes burned, and a squeal that did not belong inside a human body came from Amos’s stomach.
“Hospital?” I asked, furrowing my brows.
“Roger convinced me to split the General Tso soufflé,” he lamented, touching his stomach. “It’s grumbling chaos in there.”
“You should give restaurant blurbs.”
I got up from the stool and grabbed my coat.
“It’s a self-inflicted punishment,” he said. “I chose that place.”
I froze, arms partially sleeved.
“You picked an actual location?”
“Sort of. Roger is in Baby Land so I asked Jeannine. Do you ever get paralyzed whenever anyone asks you to pick a restaurant, like you’ve never left the house?”
Amos had a way of presenting quotidian problems as karmic ailments. A MetroCard with insufficient fare was just his luck. Spam was an act of personal oppression.
“This is going to sound nuts,” he said, “but I had crazy déjà vu right when you walked up. Did you know they figured it out, déjà vu? It’s your brain temporarily processing present tense as past tense, like swallowing something down the wrong pipe. You should write about it for Modern Psychology.”
“I don’t work there, I’m not a writer, and it doesn’t exist.”
“Oh. Right. Well, it wasn’t déjà vu déjà vu. It was more like clairvoyance. Like my lizard brain knew I should keep standing there. I think I was waiting for you.”
“Amos, that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
There were few cars when we got out on the street. The air was thick, as if someone had put a lid on the city. I heard the beep of a garbage truck and panicked, thinking it must be 3 a.m. But this was a regular truck backing up and it was only midnight. There was nothing wrong with staying out, drinking with another man, even one I used to date. I lost track of time. This was an emotional one-night stand, not an emotional affair. Still, I felt guilty for not checking in with Boots.
Amos reached into my jacket pocket and removed one of my cigarettes. It was intimate, having him fish around in there.
“Lola, can I offer you another piece of advice?” he asked, lighting the cigarette.
I could hear the crackle of the paper, like water being poured over thirsty dirt.
“Was there a first piece of advice I missed?”
“It’s more of an observation.”
“Ah, the gentleman has more of a comment.”
“What I loved most about you was your decisiveness.”
“One of us had to look up movie times.”
“I don’t mean with me. I mean you decide things and go do them. You decide to live on this shithole island, you live on this shithole island. You decide to skip work and go to a museum, you don’t hem and haw until it’s too inconvenient to go. You’re not afraid to move. You decide to quit your job, you quit your job.”
“I was laid off when the magazine folded.”
“Oh,” he said, blowing smoke upward. “Really?”
I nodded.
“Well, my point still stands. You of all people, I mean, get married or don’t get married but indecision doesn’t suit you. Opinionated and indecisive is lethal.”
“What indecision? Why do you keep poking at this?”
“Because I’ve met you. And even if we both live to a hundred and even if I never speak to you again, that means we will have known each other for like ten percent of our lives. That’s a lot. But it’s none of my business.”
“Oh, now it’s none of your business?”
He looked around, momentarily confused about where he was.
“Once more to the subway!” he yelled. “God, isn’t Shakespeare great? You don’t even need a verb to get anywhere.”
“Amos, your charms are wasted on this city’s interns.”
“Spoken like someone who’s never banged an intern.”
I hugged him tightly. His body felt foreign in my arms.
“I have the weirdest feeling I won’t ever see you again,” I said.
“I was kidding. We know hundreds of people in common.”
“That’s true, but I didn’t see you for years.”
“Well,” he said, pulling away, “now the seal has been broken.”
I nodded but felt an unexpected sense of loss. Amos used to have a quote from an obscure philosopher taped above his desk: “Every goodbye is a little mourning just as every orgasm is a little death.” He gave me his new phone number, typing it into my phone, as if I were too drunk to do it (was I too drunk to do it?). I was happy to have the number, not so I could contact Amos but so I would not be caught off guard if he contacted me. But by the time I got home, I realized I’d deleted it when I meant to save it.