There was a 24-hour diner across the street from our apartment called the North Star Canteen. Instead of being spelled out, the star was an electronic star shape, an asterisk, which sent the eye searching for a correction that wasn’t there. No matter how late it got, our apartment had a dawn-like glow. It would not have occurred to either of us to ask a broker to come see it at midnight. Though when your apartment is filled with hundreds of glass pieces, there are advantages to being able to see where you’re going.
In addition to the industrial-size rolls of bubble wrap leaning like thugs against the wall, there was a narrow hallway that led from the living room to the bedroom, covered with shelves of glassware. They were stuck to the wall like mushrooms on a tree trunk. We told ourselves it was all so high and undustable to keep the cat from knocking everything over. Really it was to keep ourselves from knocking everything over. Hand-blown candlesticks, mouth-blown bowls, sake cups, cake stands. The longest shelf was home to Boots’s bespoke creations, most of which were excluded from his website because they included flaws. These were little sculptures twisted like Medusa’s hair or melted to resemble gobs of candle wax, afflicted with seed bubbles and fractures. They had bumps like outie bellybuttons from where they’d been cut from the rod or straw marks from where the glass had cooled in a disappointing way. There was a set of Russian nesting dolls, cleverly colored with the darkest in the middle. But apparently the gradation wasn’t quite right. So much of glass blowing was in the home stretch of it, in how it settled.
I loved how discerning he was in this department.
I kissed the cat on the head, my little spite tabby, all grown up. I’d named her Rocket. It didn’t suit her, even as a kitten. She sunbathed all day long, like a suicidal slug. She was unflaggingly lazy, her greatest physical feat being the skyward extension of her back paw for easier access to her own anus.
Boots was allergic to cats, which meant spending his life in a constant state of near-tears, but he’d gotten used to it. He’d gotten used to being outnumbered by finicky females who functioned on their own terms, who couldn’t help but capitalize on his stoicism. But he did install heavy blackout shades in the bedroom. Even he, for whom discomfort was a foreign concept, agreed that something must be done about the light.
“All we need is death metal in our ears,” he’d said.
Boots was already in bed by the time I creaked over the floorboards.
“How was dinner?” he asked, groggily.
He was curled up, facing the wall. This man belonged in a California king, not a sagging queen abutting a heating pipe. There was something ridiculous about it, like a bear riding a tricycle. I was suddenly very drunk and needed to touch something solid. I pulled back the duvet and felt for his back in the dark, my fingertips pausing at birthmarks. I often found myself in conversation with the terrain of his skin. I had a whole relationship with the freckles on his shoulder, these mute witnesses to a childhood I’d never see. I told him Vadis said hello even though she had not.
“Hi, Vadis. What time is it?”
“It’s almost one.”
“Oh, really? I went down hard. Can you do that forever?”
I brushed my fingers along his arm, fondling his shoulder, stroking the occasional burn scar. Hairless strips that were pink in the light.
“I gotta go to San Francisco for a couple weeks,” he announced, “starting Monday.”
“What’s in San Francisco?”
“Weed. Facebook.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Massive amounts of homeless people due to a broken mental health system?”
“Less ha-ha?”
“There’s a restaurant group that wants me to do their stemware. And their salad plates, which are also glass, which is stupid for about a hundred reasons, but it’s a significant contract if I get it. They own a couple of spots in Vegas.”
“San Francisco,” I said, making a noise like I did not believe San Francisco existed.
I stared at his head, submerged in what little light had edged in around the shades, moving my fingers up his skull and feeling his hair fall back into place. He emitted a little moan of pleasure but was too tired to do anything about it. For this, I was grateful. On the one hand, seeing Amos was an aphrodisiac. On the other hand, I’d begun stockpiling the times Boots didn’t want to have sex to make myself feel better about the times I didn’t want to have sex. A respectful order of things had been established in a way that felt closer to baking a cake (add wet ingredients to dry, heat and cover) than sex. Our days of throwing ingredients into a pan had passed too quickly. As for fucking? Can we not embarrass ourselves by drawing attention to this recital of desire? Not when “that feels good” passes for dirty talk. We mostly used the word when we weren’t doing it. The other night, I caught myself calling him “hard” in a tone that would not have been out of place in a conversation about mineral water.
“Why so late?” he asked.
“We got drinks after.”
“Was it fun?”
“The funnest,” I whispered, “and now nothing in this world will ever be so fun again.”
“Okay,” he said. “Night, baby.”
It was never bad with Boots was the thing, but I wondered what kind of bar this was for a marriage: a low one or an elevated one? Sometimes, when I pictured our lives together, it felt like settling in the very best way, like a picnic blanket that falls into a manageable shape on the first try. Other times, I imagined we were siblings who’d been assigned to the same bed on a family trip. No snoring, no kicking. That’s all that was required. This allowed me to remold him in my mind as some combination of every man I’d ever known. A testosterone hydra. If he knew about this heavy lifting or, worse, those times I had to pretend to be a prostitute, and not in a fun way, in order to have sex, it would devastate him.
I knew Boots had his concerns too, but he would not take the crucial step of realizing it was I who was making him concerned. He chalked up our moments of disconnect to a mutual fear of the same gods. His hesitation manifested itself logistically, in the discomforts of compromise: How will we intertwine our families? What will potential babies do to our potential sleep? What will we do if one of us develops a gambling addiction and we have to move into an RV and live off fried crickets and malt liquor?
My worries were more abstract yet more pernicious. I worried about the betrayal of memory. I worried my former love life was a bomb waiting to go off or, worse, that it would never go off. That I would wake one day, having buried the past so well I’d find myself unrecognizable, having moved to a city I hated, slowly losing touch with my friends, then with the culture at large, until the only books I read were the ones I read about in nail salons, the only art I knew was presented to me through my phone, and the only plays I saw were the ones that had been adapted for the screen. And I’d have to pretend there was nothing wrong with this because there was nothing wrong with this. Not for that version of me. But is this what all my romantic dramas and career had been for, their natural conclusion? A life of palliative television? If I ever felt relentless, Boots would have to be enough. And if he wasn’t? I’d punish him with resentment. I would’ve preferred not to worry so much. But I had no choice: I was worrying for two.
I closed my eyes and let my mind go fuzzy at the edges. Soon I was in an Olympic-size swimming pool, doing laps. Men filled the bleachers. I knew them all but I couldn’t make out their faces. Some were cheering, some were jeering, some were ignoring me entirely. I wanted to get out of the pool but I had to dive down to retrieve some treasure and was not allowed to come up until I found it. Finally, I spotted it, flopping around by one of the filters. It was my mother’s diaphragm from the ’70s, which I have never seen in real life but knew on sight in the dream. Translucent bits of tissue clung to it, floating by their bloody threads. I laughed so hard, I woke up coughing.
The cat had developed this habit of pacing around my desk chair, waiting for me to pick her up. She was perfectly capable of jumping up herself, but all it took was a couple instances of elevator service and this was what she demanded henceforth. Boots had indulged this behavior, which was fine for him (if not his eyeballs—he’d once tried to pet her with oven mitts and she wasn’t having it). He wasn’t the one who worked from home half the week, editing quotes for redundancy. Sometimes I found it to be a rewarding game, trying to trick our audience into thinking Radio New York had a fresh take on the world. But a science website we were not.
Every hour, the cat meowed and pretended to walk away, stopping close enough for me to grab her. Then she’d squeak as if this whole process weren’t her idea.
We were engaged in this dance the next morning when my phone lit up. I was in the midst of reading a first draft of an article on ad-hoc “rage rooms.” Several commercial loft spaces had figured out a way to make money between corporate inhabitants. The rooms charged people $75 each to smash up television sets and mirrors but offered no face shields or gloves. It was a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or a trend piece. Whichever came first. Rage rooms were more expensive than escape rooms because, as one proprietor told our reporter, “you can’t unsmash stuff.”
The text I received was from a college friend, Eliza Baxter, asking if I wanted to have dinner. Eliza and I had not been close during college, but after graduation we decided that if only we’d been mature enough to look beyond our surface differences, we would’ve been great friends. She moved to Cincinnati shortly after this realization and so now our friendship was composed of supportive social media behavior and the rare dinner occasioned by her law firm sending her here.
Yes, I texted her back, IN. Where are you staying/restaurant requests?
I scanned our refrigerator door, knowing that behind it lay a week-old container of garlic sauce and a carton of brown rice (a healthy idea whose time had never come). Boots would not mind making a meal out of this.
Bronxville!!! Long story don’t ask—she went on to tell the story anyway—Jordan’s mom is having a “breakdown” so staying up here for two nights one of which I’ve bargained to have to myself yr so lucky
FUN, I wrote.
know where I want to go please hold …
When I clicked on the link, I brought my face close to the phone and then took it away again, playing an invisible trombone. I felt like I was being interrogated. Yes, officer, this is the spot. This is the mirrored bar and fancy cocktails. This is the Szechuan bisque, the sweet-and-sour leeks, the General Tso soufflé.
Can we go anywhere else I was just there
She sent back a frowning emoji. Forlorn. Round. Yellow. The woman was never in town. She was stuck comforting a mother-in-law who despised Eliza for idiosyncrasies like not being Jewish.
Jordan’s friend is the sous chef!!
Being forced to return to the same restaurant two nights in a row was a first world problem if there ever was one. Too often New Yorkers treated experiences as vaccinations. They went to the Whitney every two years, Coney Island every five, the ballet every twenty. I did not want to be one of those people. Besides, nobody said I was required to order the General Tso soufflé, to post videos of its salty plateau folding in on itself.
Boots had never even heard of Eliza, which was part of a developing problem. It used to be that the introduction of new people was a thread that led to tales of summer adventures or first jobs—anecdotes of import, the kind that emerge in green card interviews and lend subsidiary definition to any relationship. But after a while, a Rubicon had been crossed. We were on symbolic ground. Recently, one of his friends mentioned a desire to go fishing in the Grand Canyon. I said it was as beautiful as advertised, but there were surprisingly few fish there. Boots shot me a distrustful look, as if I’d intentionally duped him into believing I was someone who’d never been to the Grand Canyon. He was older than me by several years. Even Johnny Two-Chicks over here, with his few relationships, should appreciate the difficulty of intravenousing a lifetime of formative experiences into someone else’s bloodstream. Vadis and Clive had come the closest to fluency in my life, but only because I’d spent nine hours a day with them for as many years.
Perhaps if, like Boots, I’d been gifted with a dormitory full of bright, uncomplicated people, I wouldn’t have needed to look farther afield. But as it was, the temperamental discrepancy between our friends was the size of the aforementioned canyon. We would be at some civilized picnic in Prospect Park with these tucked-in citizens who traded in good-natured ribbing and I’d receive a series of texts from Vadis about how the DJ she’d stopped fucking had broken into her apartment and defecated on her (open) laptop. Eventually, my guilt over not adoring his friends burned off like a fog. No more farro salad, please. No more mass emails that began with “gang.” No more quantifiable drug use and convenient politics. No more yapping about the past as replacement therapy for the present.
I treaded carefully while contextualizing Eliza’s existence. I drew her connection to people Boots had met while minimizing her personal significance, swallowing the niggling resentment I felt over doing this. I was not ashamed of Boots—if anything, I took pride in my proximity to such a likable human being—but I could not talk about him in front of him, which should’ve been the kind of Girls Night Out logic he was accustomed to from his friends.
“It’s not that I don’t want you to meet her,” I explained, “it’s just that I never see her. Next time she comes, we’ll have her over.”
Our kitchen table was covered by a broken burner and cardboard boxes. Boots was in the midst of repairing the burner and the boxes were for his pieces, some of which had actually been selling these days. Four in the last month after zero in the last six. This was a healthy turn of events for us both.
“It’s fine,” he said, remaining upbeat. “I’ll just be here, watching all the shows without you.”
“So low.”
“When do you think you’re coming back?”
He looked like he might cry but this was a function of the cat.
“Just curious,” he added, “it’s not like I’m waiting by the phone.”
He picked up his phone and tossed it onto a chair across the room.
The hostess decided against my familiarity as she removed a menu from her stand. Who goes to the same restaurant two nights in a row? No one, I telegraphed, let’s stick with that. In a different place, in a different neighborhood, repeat patronage would be perceived as a positive. But this place was too trendy. She probably ate this food for free after hours and was sick of it. She escorted me to Eliza, who was already in a booth in the corner, shielded from the din of the room. Spindly orchids hung from the ceiling, reaching down with their crooked joints.
“Do you think those are real?” Eliza asked.
Her manicure was the same shade as the petals.
“I know they’re real.”
“Fancytown,” she said, whistling.
Within minutes, Eliza was describing a distant universe. In this universe, her husband was putting pressure on her to have a second kid. I already knew this because of her tweets. New mothers were required to post all debates pertaining to the plights of motherhood as well as all articles about the conditions in places like Bhutan, stories that unsubtly boomeranged to the fact that they too had done something frightening and painful. Granted, they had done it on clean sheets and with lots of drugs, but they had entered into a universal sisterhood. Though I somehow doubted the mothers they pitied devoted any time searching for ways to hitch their virtue to the Elizas of the world.
Eliza’s offline universe was filled with local library drama, choking hazards, high fevers, faulty pelvic floors, gasoline-splattered shoes, and property disputes. The closest I’d ever come to a property dispute was the time we caught our neighbor kicking our wayward welcome mat away from her door.
“Are you guys thinking of getting pregnant?”
“I don’t know. We’ll have to flip for it.”
“Be serious, you’re thirty-eight.”
“I know. I can count.”
“Don’t take it out on me,” she said, squeezing the words through her hyperaligned teeth.
“Take what out on who?”
Maybe I’d never connected with Eliza. Maybe we simply reminded each other of being young and any bond we felt was rooted in our respective narcissism and that’s why our odd-couple bit was collapsing like a soufflé.
Halfway through the meal, her sous chef friend appeared with an order of chèvre fritters. He had to get back into the kitchen, he explained, but first he wanted to hug Eliza. He was younger than I expected, for a friend of her husband’s. He wore a puka shell necklace and had ringlet hair and enormous vacant eyes, the kind that looked as if they were staring into the middle distance. Modern Psychology once printed that staring into the middle distance meant you were having a minor stroke, our copy editor having taken it upon himself to drop the words “urban legend has it that.” That was a bad week.
“How’s your food tasting?” he asked, hiding an anxious grin.
This question has always made me feel as if I’m being poisoned but Eliza had nothing but reassuring smiles for him. He seemed desperate for her approval.
“Brody’s like Jordan’s little brother,” she explained, after he disappeared. “He had a really hard time just existing before he went to culinary school.”
“Drugs?”
“No, that’s Brody. The hammock kid.”
She waited for me to be blown back in my seat.
“You know this story,” she insisted. “It’s a cautionary tale.”
“Against what?” I asked, amused. “Nap marks?”
Convinced of my ignorance, Eliza recounted the story. When Brody was a kid, his mother married a wealthy man. They flew up to the guy’s lake house on his plane, and Brody was left to bond with his toddler while their respective parents had sex and boiled lobsters. One morning, the toddler shook Brody awake because he wanted to go play on the hammock.
“Oh … no.”
Eliza continued: So Brody walked the toddler outside and they played a game where Brody spun the kid around like a cocoon and let go. The kid insisted on going faster and spinning more. Eventually, Brody wound the netting too tight. The boy couldn’t hang on. He hit his head on the corner of a rock and “that was that.”
“It’s the worst story of all time,” Eliza said. “You probably knew it somewhere in the back of your head.”
“No pun intended.”
“You’re evil.”
“Tragedy makes me nervous.”
“It’s become one of those things like how people remove the doors from old refrigerators before putting them out on the sidewalk. Except now there are safety warnings on hammocks. Because of Brody. That Brody.”
“Do you get sent to jail when something like that happens?”
“Lola, he was a child. He got sent to therapy. God, you’re so punishing.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Eliza shrugged, as if she’d picked the word out of a hat and was now fishing around for another one.
“Judgmental? Not all the time. Unforgiving, maybe. Always searching for fault.”
“It feels like I’m always searching for a lack of fault.”
“Yeah, that’s judgment.”
“Well, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like something I should get credit for.”
Our waiter passed by and asked if we were “still picking.” We shook our heads. Suddenly everyone in the restaurant seemed lucky to me. They’d seemed lucky before, to be laughing and gesticulating over thirty-dollar entrees, but now they seemed lucky to have never committed involuntary manslaughter. The defenselessness of our species was all out of proportion with the amount of ways we manufactured harm.
“I have to pee,” Eliza announced, shimmying out of the booth.
I checked my phone while she was gone. I wanted to see if the story was famous enough to be procured using only the words Brody and hammock. But before I could, I saw two text boxes. One was from Boots (a photo of Rocket sprawled out on her back, accompanied by his commentary: “slut”). The second was an automated box, offering me nearby Wi-Fi networks. Most were gibberish or strings of numbers, but one jumped out: “Willis Klee’s Phone.”
It was possible, I supposed, that there were multiple Willis Klees in the world, in the country, even in the city. But how many, I wondered, had left a stick of incense on the windowsill of a bed-and-breakfast in Carmel, California, during the summer of 2011 and nearly burned it down? How many had then accompanied me to an abortion clinic a month later, shaking his knee in the waiting room, a cup of ice chips in his hand?
Not that many.
My eyes darted around the room. I saw nothing. Then, atop the staircase that led to the restrooms, arose Willis. He looked like a mirage. Not in the way Amos had looked like a mirage, like he could disappear, but in the way Willis Klee had never looked real. There was no getting around it: Willis was the most physically attractive man I’d ever been with, a real boon in the “keep the baby” column. But I was too young to have a baby (at the “where would I put a baby?” age) and Willis was too cartoonish to be a dad, at least in my estimation. If asked about fatherhood, he would talk about how exciting it would be to teach his son to throw a football and ride a bike. I resented how reality-free this fantasy was. If I were to express excitement about having a little girl because then I could have someone to dress up, I would be deemed unfit to breed.
The decade gap from when I last saw Willis to now had not eroded his beauty. It had only made him more passable as a human man as I watched him weave between tables, tucking his hair behind his ears, a familiar tic. He did it when he was preparing to be falsely modest about something.
Ours was more of an experiment than a relationship. We met at a crowded bar on Vadis’s birthday, both of us angling to order a drink. Willis, consummate gentleman, tried to make room for me. He was not doing so to hit on me, but only because I had the correct anatomy to trigger chivalry. In the congestion, the only feature I could properly examine was his hands. There, on his pointer finger, was a clunky gold ring. It looked too unscathed to be a family crest. I assumed it was a collegiate ring. Back then, Vadis was still selecting bars with twenty beers on tap, populated by men who would be wearing their collegiate rings, who had already stretched their emotional bandwidth as far as it would go by listening to Wilco.
I thanked Willis for carving out space. That’s when he actually looked at me. I felt startled to the point of embarrassed by his face. That Superman-goes-into-the-phone-booth face. That nose at which all the marble sculptures of Greece and Italy were aiming.
“Hi!” he chirped, extending his hand over the short distance, “I’m Willis.”
“Lola,” I said, keeping my hand to myself.
How certifiable does a person have to be to lead with his name?
“It’s like a Dial commercial in here,” he said. “You know, aren’t you glad you use Dial?”
“Don’t you wish everybody did?”
Ah, so we were roughly the same age. Same commercials, same cartoons, same hazy memory of historical events. Oh, what nature had done with two specimens of the same species! It was as if a stopwatch had been clicked in our respective delivery rooms and Willis went one way, very fast, and I went the other, very slowly.
Willis beamed, a goofy smile that caught the bartender’s attention even though it was not aimed at the bartender. It was not aimed at anyone, for Willis, mindbogglingly, seemed to have no conception of his own appeal. I couldn’t understand this. Surely he had empirical evidence of the world treating him differently. Only later did I realize that it was not a lack of evidence but a glut of it that created a bubble around Willis. Any breaks in the universe’s abject affection were deemed glitches and dismissed. The effect was the same as in a confident person, but the math was wonky. It’s a form of mental illness to assume everyone who stabs you meant to hug you.
I ordered a Corona and Willis followed suit, shoving the lime down the neck of his bottle with farm-like precision. He looked shocked when I asked him where he was from. I looked shocked that he looked shocked.
“Iowa,” he gave in, drawing a box with his finger.
“Ah.”
It crossed my mind that I was dealing with a missionary and would need to extricate myself from the conversation.
“Actually,” he corrected himself, “more this.”
He drew another box, creating a squiggle down the side.
“And is that your college ring?”
I gestured at his hand with my bottle.
“Oh, no,” he said, tucking his hair behind his ears. “This is my Olympic ring.”
“For what?”
“For the Olympics?”
“You’re shitting me.”
I yanked his hand toward me. Sure enough, there were the five circles stamped on top and flames etched on the side. I held it until the circles left an indentation in my skin, until it occurred to me that I was holding a stranger’s hand. Having had no record of athlete infatuation and marginal athletic ability myself, I was surprised by how much I wanted Willis’s glory to rub off on me. Perhaps because it was indelible, the kind of achievement that no one could ever malign as overrated. New York was a field of tall poppies, awaiting a beheading. But here, pushing up through the concrete, was an undebunkable success. Not only was Willis a long jumper—a niche profession, even by Olympic standards—but he was the best long jumper in the world. It all made sense now: He talked like Captain America because he was Captain America.
Willis was in town to present an award at the New York Athletic Club. He told me the name of the award as if it were very obvious but referred to the Hilton Garden Inn, where he was staying, by its Christian name. He also referred to subway lines by their colors instead of their letters. At his request, I detailed the characteristics of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn and attempted to define a burrata as “a turducken but cheese.” I would like to say that it was Willis’s curiosity that kept me by his side long after Vadis had moved on to the next bar. But I had no deeper connection to this person. For once, I wanted nothing from a man but to see him naked. If I wanted a second thing, it was the novelty of him seeing an average woman naked.
There were segments of Willis’s body that I had noticed only in passing on other men. The thighs, for example. I had always considered them to be a transient area, a highway connecting the ass to the knees. And the back, peppered with extra muscles that visibly shifted when he did. I had no extra muscles. But I did fit through the door of his hotel room. Willis seemed taken with this fact, gawking at me in a way that began to feel vaguely insulting. In order to medal in an Olympic sport, you have to think of your body as special, that all your hard work will pay off because it’s being poured into a genetically superior container. When you operate in an echelon of minor physical differences, trafficking in seconds and millimeters, you assume that civilians who play no sports at all are lucky to stand upright. Hence Willis’s delight upon finding that my knees didn’t crack, that my hip bones protruded when I lay on my back.
“I thought you’d have a librarian’s body,” he said, stroking my side.
“I guess you’re not one of those guys who has hot librarian fantasies.”
“Are there guys who fantasize about librarians?”
The next morning, I woke to the groaning of the electronic keypad in the door. Willis had gone down to the lobby and returned with two coffees in cups with bold graphics on the side.
“This is me, bringing you coffee,” he said, shaking his head.
Despite having traveled the world thrice over, leaping over sand pits from Seoul to Salzburg, Willis had negligible dating experience. No prom, no drama, no bad decisions. Now he was in a race to catch up with the rest of the world. There was something newborn about the way he moved through it. Bringing a girl coffee in a hotel room was a scene out of the movies.
I thanked Willis and sipped. He also sipped, looking around the room, smiling at the walls. Then his face grew slack as he told me he had a confession to make. It was true, he said, that he was in town for the awards ceremony but it was also true that he would be moving here. Permanently. He’d always wanted to live in New York and he had always wanted to go to college. So he decided to kill two birds with one NYU course catalog.
“I just want to be the best possible version of myself,” he said, the admission of a professional athlete.
“Of course you do. Your body is your temple, mine is my garbage disposal.”
“But your mind is your temple and, without an education, mine is going to be my garbage disposal.”
“Fair point.”
He asked me if I was busy that night. I probably should have said yes and let this be the easiest one-night stand of my life. Willis was a person, not a safari animal. But I thought: Men date women far more beautiful than they all the time, women with whom they see no future. They don’t avoid it. They brag about it.
“Sure,” I said, “I’d love to go.”
“Awesome! The invitation says ‘cocktail attire.’ Your guess is as good as mine about what that means.”
And so we went to the ceremony, where I felt like human margarine as I washed my hands next to champion volleyball players in the ladies’ room. The towel dispenser responded to the wave of their hands like it feared them. We complimented one another on our earrings.
During the cocktail hour, I jumped whenever Willis put his hand on my shoulder. I was unused to the angle of it.
“How are you telling people we met?” I asked.
Somehow I considered him in training for perpetuity, which would mean no alcohol, no bars.
“I’m telling them we just started dating,” he said, kissing my forehead.
To my credit, Willis was on safari too. The idea of an editor-as-sex-object was a new challenge for him. We tried to meld into each other’s life, curious to see if we could be one of those theoretically incongruous couples that makes sense in practice. As if we could prescribe ourselves to each other. He wrote an op-ed about gender inequality in athletic brand sponsorships. I took up running. But no one was interested in publishing the op-ed and I got winded after two miles. All told, our safari lasted five months. The only reason it lasted that long was because Willis was accustomed to contorting himself to make things work physically and I was used to doing the same mentally. This is the lesson we taught each other: Sometimes practice only makes more practice.
Then came the abortion and that put real a damper on things.
Eventually, Willis moved back to Iowa, where he married a health coach. One shudders to imagine the collection of statement mugs in that house. Last I’d checked, he’d become the father of twin girls. And this I barely knew. Willis, oblivious to the wants and needs of ex-girlfriends, used social media for taking pictures of the family dog. In ten years, I’d seen only one photo of the wife and it was taken from behind, her biceps curled, wearing a T-shirt that read: “Don’t need a permit for these guns!” I imagined him telling her about me. Because they probably didn’t make some nonsense pact. And because, unlike Amos’s cousin Kit, who’d probably never given me another thought, Willis would almost have to tell his wife about me. I imagined him talking about the day he found out I was pregnant, about the strained conversation. But I never imagined him telling the story wistfully or even morally—only as a hurdle he had to overcome. Those words exactly.
Willis sat at a table occupied by two older men in identical neckties. One of them had half a name tag stuck to his blazer. It made me happy to think of Willis as having a career outside the centimeter of sand that had made him a champion. He used to keep a framed picture of himself from his winning moment on a shelf beside a velvet case containing his medal. This shelf struck me as morbid, putting me in mind of plastic trophies being picked over by detectives in the bedroom of a teenage girl. In the picture, Willis’s muscles are flexed and an ambitious vein protrudes from his neck. He looks like a giant ligament. In the foreground is a tsunami of sand. Looking at that picture, I knew, as deeply as you can know something about yourself, that I would never feel that level of dedication to anything. But when Willis looked at it, he saw his last definitive moment. Every moment after would be colored by a conflicting desperation to move forward and a petrifaction of being forgotten.
“What are you staring at?”
Eliza was back from the bathroom, lips glossier than when she left.
I gestured at her to sit before Willis spotted her, but then I remembered they’d never met. Only Vadis had met Willis. Even Clive had only ever heard of him. (“You slept with a child,” he joked, with casual cruelty. “You should be arrested for statutory rape.”) But of course everyone but Boots knew about him. Whereas I somehow doubted Willis was running around Iowa, bragging about that time he dated an associate editor with hip bones. Boots was aware of the abortion, but only the age at which I’d had it. No further detail. Our nondisclosure pact was practically built for Willis. No man enjoys hearing the words ex-boyfriend and Olympian in the same sentence.
“That’s the javelin thrower?” Eliza asked.
“Long jumper.”
“Go say hello.”
“I can’t,” I said, shaking my head.
“What? Why?”
When I lost my taste for Willis’s cocktail of guilelessness and naïveté, I lost it quickly. This is how it is with most relationships. So many of the things that attracted you come to repel you and sooner or later you find yourself going out the same door you came in. But I did not go gentle. I began trashing Willis’s career plans under the guise of saving him from harsher criticism from the outside world. As if I, personally, had dug him up and thawed him out. I became resentful of his prettiness, of the ease it afforded him. I leaped on him if he’d never heard of a historical figure or film director with whom I myself had only a passing familiarity. At one point, he bought me a notepad with “You Got This!” printed across each page.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll write my suicide note on it.”
Then, the final frontier: sex. My period came earlier and stayed later. I ate large quantities of takeout, passed out before 11 p.m., left for the office at 8 a.m., had arid conversations in between. My attempts to push through were halfhearted and cruel—I’d slide my hand beneath his boxers, get one gander at his goofy grin, and take the hand back out. And, because I was apparently committed to behaving like a garbage person, I decided my lack of sex drive was an honorable thing, a testament to my depth.
I did not want to say hello to someone who’d seen me behave like that.
And then, just like that, it was out of my hands.
Brody came bursting out of the kitchen, falling over himself to thank Eliza for coming. As if one of us had kicked him in the shins, he collapsed into her arms and started weeping. Shoulder-bobbing, jaw-stretching, face-crumpling, throat-closing weeping. He insisted that it was nothing, just a thing that happened when he got triggered. What in this restaurant had triggered him to think about the time he’d spun a boy to death was anyone’s guess. The orchids?
“It’s the guilt,” Brody said between gulps of breath, “exiting my body.”
Eliza folded him up in her arms. She was great at this. A natural. She should have that second kid. Half the restaurant turned to look, including Willis, who spotted me in the process. I waved, he pointed at the bar.
“Holy cow!” he exclaimed, shaking his hands above his head. “Lola!”
“Hi!” I squealed.
In small doses, Willis’s enthusiasm was contagious. How many boyfriends had I had who weren’t over our relationship before it began, who weren’t consumed with how it would end? He hugged me, crushing my nose against his torso.
“What’s going on with that?” He nodded over my shoulder.
“Oh,” I said, grateful for the mutual focal point. “It’s my friend’s husband’s friend. He works here.”
There was nowhere for us to go with that information.
“He’s the hammock kid.”
“What’s a hammock kid?”
“No, the hammock kid. You know, the kid who spun his stepbrother to death in a hammock and now that’s why there are all these warnings on hammocks.”
I knew Willis to be in possession of a hammock. Multiple pictures of the stupid dog in the stupid hammock when all the people want is the goddamn wife.
“Yikes!”
“Yeah. What are you doing here?”
“Here in this restaurant? I read about it somewhere.”
“No, in New York.”
“I’m here for a conference. We just moved to Fort Worth.”
“Got it,” I said, even though I could detect no connection between the two facts.
“I’m in sports marketing now. They only send three people from the company each year. I’m here to prove that the accounts guy knows what it means to be an athlete.”
He patted his stomach through his shirt.
“It’s kind of stupid that they trot me out for these things,” he mused, tucking his hair behind his ears. “But duty calls!”
“And how are the twins?”
“Oh, well,” he said, not flinching at the idea I possessed information he hadn’t shared. “Since you asked, I’m obligated to do this.”
He scrolled through pictures of baby girls. They were formal portraits, the girls wearing pink bows tied around their bald heads. Or else they were asleep in their cribs and the photos were of the nursery itself—a girlish explosion of matching mobiles, rose-patterned wallpaper, and monogrammed piggy banks. The last photo was of one of the girls, naked, propped up on Willis’s old sofa with his gold medal around her neck. There was a time when I had sat on that same sofa, wearing the same outfit. I gave Willis his phone back.
“New York always reminds me of you,” he said.
“I’m not sure I’m prepared to represent a whole city.”
“We came in to see the tree last Christmas and it was butt cold. And I thought of how cold you must be in your apartment because you refused to take out your air-conditioning unit between seasons.”
“It’s not worth it.”
“It is.”
“Agree to disagree.”
“Agree to freeze your ass off!”
Behind me, Brody had spread himself out in the booth, head down as if he were searching for something in the folds of the leather. Eliza was stroking his arm with a mixture of vibrancy and pity.
I told Willis about my new job, about the magazine folding. He only registered it as an updated LinkedIn profile, not the death of a way of life. He always said that everyone in New York identified too much with their careers. This was a stunning piece of hypocrisy, coming from an Olympian, the kind of blanket statement that made for a champion athlete but a strangely unfeeling civilian. Willis never saw “what the big deal was” in any given scenario, no matter how significant. A swastika on an advertisement, rendered in sharpie, was “just one idiot.” Global warming was “something the Earth was gonna do eventually.” I suspected that if Rocket died, he’d be the first to tell me it was an opportunity to get a kitten.
There were perks to this worldview. Willis knew the answers to his own questions before he asked them. Like Boots, he was not tortured. Unlike Boots, he used words like goals. Though I will give him this: Willis had a healthier grip on the confines of his own mortality than most of my peers, even if I didn’t agree with his rationale. Marriage, children, home ownership? Real. Jobs, boyfriends, landlords? Fake. This is why some people got engaged in the first place, to step off the fake list and onto the real one. And I had joined their ranks. I had turned another human being into a talisman against social grief. So I lifted my left hand and fanned my fingers in a way I had never done before, not even to the mirror.
“Ahh!” Willis said, lifting me up off the ground.
I squirmed to get back down. I had a full stomach and I also did not like how thrilled he was. I was only aiming for placation, to wipe that anthropological look off his face. When this first started happening with men, I was flattered. Clearly, my siren song was so loud, having a wife of their own was not enough of a deterrent. They needed me to be off-limits as well. It did not take me long to realize their relief had nothing to do with some long-suppressed desire to sleep with me. As a single woman, I made them uncomfortable. How hard it must have been for them to place me in their firmament of friends prior to me being part of a couple. Occasionally, they’d pump me for dating stories in the name of vicarious living, but they only missed their old lives, not my current one. On some level, I must have sensed this difficulty because I made constant efforts to demonstrate my wholeness, my effervescence. Feel the breeze, boys. As it turned out, all my efforts were for naught. Their current relief belied old pity. I mourned for all the time I’d wasted, concealing bouts of bitterness or depression, minimizing the impact of disappointments. I may as well have been smashing stemware against the fireplace.
Eliza was trying to catch my eye. Brody was still in the booth. The last train to Bronxville left in an hour.
“Tell me everything,” said Willis.
“What? Oh. He’s an architect,” I lied.
After all this time, I still wanted to seem otherworldly to Willis. Superior somehow. I immediately regretted it.
“He must be really smart.”
“Oh, I don’t … I don’t care about that as much as I used to.”
“Why wouldn’t you care about being smart?”
“Well, I probably care about it even more in one sense. You get older, you want the people you’re with to know just as much about the world as you do so that you can make your jokes and send your links. Or women do. We don’t, you know, get off on teaching other grown-ups. But being smart isn’t the only quality.”
“You’ve always been such a thoughtful person.”
I stared into his Captain America eyes, which were obscured by his cheeks because he was smiling. His assessment of me as thoughtful filled me with sadness. I didn’t deserve it, not when I didn’t care about his opinion when it mattered.
“Listen,” I said, “this may be weird, but now that you’re in front of me, I just wanted to say sorry I was so shitty to you.”
Willis screwed up his eyes.
“You weren’t shitty to me, not ever.”
“Willis. I was. Constantly.”
“Aww,” he said, ruffling my hair, as I stood there, stock-still, letting him. “You were just being yourself.”
I studied his face. Was it possible he’d dismissed my egregious behavior as the customs of a different world? In New York, we browbeat our men, mock their gifts, and tell them their ideas are sophomoric. Willis had applied the platitudes of hero videos to his personal life. He had rewritten history so that all his struggles were necessary in order to get him to the finish line—to his wife, to his girls, to his dog. I was a human sandpit.
“But, well,” I said, studying the ceiling, “I’m sorry about the abortion. Not, like, sorry for you. Not for the act. Just, you know, in general.”
“If you’re determined to apologize for something, apologize for never taking your air-conditioning unit out.”
“I’m serious.”
“It was a long time ago,” he said, shutting the conversation down. “Another life.”
It was not another life for me, it was still my life. All mine. I sometimes thought about what our child would have looked like and if it would have hated me by now. What if it had gotten Mommy’s muscle mass and Daddy’s brains? But after Willis and I split, he had not thought about any of those things. He had pulled up the anchor. All this time, I thought I had turned him into cocktail fodder when I was the cocktail fodder. There was no life experience too big to fit into Willis’s tidy box, including that one time we semi-killed a semi-baby. His wife probably had her own box. Maybe a sorority hazing gone wrong. Maybe a whole rape that she thought of as a “date rape” if she thought of it at all. Just one idiot.
One of the tie-wearing men at Willis’s table waved in his direction.
“Duty calls,” he said again. “The call of duty. So cool to see you, Lola.”
Willis smiled broadly, skipping back to his life. Then he turned around and practically shouted across the restaurant:
“What are the chances?!”
People looked up from their meals.
“I don’t know!” I shouted back.
What were the chances? Or the odds?
Modern Psychology had once devoted the back page to “luck language.” The same event could happen to four different people and one would deem it a coup, another kismet, another ironic, another auspicious. A coup signified chaos, kismet signified fate, irony signified order, auspicious signified faith. Meanwhile, odds were quantifiable but chances were not. Chances were abstract and “for” whereas odds were concrete and “against.” Hopeful people, of which Willis was one, used “chances” in the same spots where skeptical people used “odds.” I was an odds person.
Eliza approached with my bag in hand. She had the look of a mother who’d been forced to change diapers while her husband played solitaire on the toilet. But I was not the one who insisted we come to the restaurant with the unhinged kid in the kitchen.
“Why did you pick this place?”
“I told you.”
She seemed exasperated with me as she pulled her hair back, an elastic in her teeth.
“I mean, how long has Brody been working here? Was he working here the last time you came to visit?”
“Yeah, I think so. Hopefully, he’ll still be working here after that spectacle tonight.”
That spectacle. Crying in public. I looked at our now vacant table.
“Is he okay?”
“I mean, no. I don’t think he’s ever meant to be okay.”
“It’s late, I’m sorry. Are you ready?”
“You’re the one who’s been glued to the floor of this place.”