I couldn’t stop saying goodbye. When Boots got out of the shower, I wrapped my arms around his waist, clinging to his damp skin. It was barely light out but the neon star made it seem later. I watched, hypnotized, as he coiled his phone charger. I followed him into the living room, padding after him, bleating, “How long, again?” Two weeks. Fifteen days, to be exact. And, as he reminded me, San Francisco is not the moon. His enjoyment of this role reversal was apparent. Though not starved for bursts of affection, he was unaccustomed to them for no reason. He welcomed my clinginess without question and did not see it for what it was—an alcoholic’s fear of an unlocked liquor cabinet.
“I’ll miss you, too,” he assured me. “You’re my favorite thing.”
I didn’t cringe at his referring to me as a “thing.” I was happy to be put on a shelf like a cake platter and think of nothing. Watching him arrange piles of shirts in his beaten bag, I thought of the last time I’d seen this particular bag. He’d returned from a camping trip and I was in the bedroom, reading. I greeted him without getting up, which was its own kind of performative romance (he with the “Honey, I’m home,” me with the “How was your trip?”). Then he asked, with strained calm, if Rocket was in the bedroom with me.
“Yes?” I said, making eye contact with the cat.
“Can you please get up and shut the door but stay in there?”
“Umm, okay.”
I remember feeling that it was too early to propose, that we had not discussed this and, superficially, that whatever ring he’d picked up at a truck stop gift shop might not engender unbridled enthusiasm for the idea. The cat and I sat on the bed, our eyes wide, as Boots rustled around in the living room. I heard the sound of a box being unfolded, followed by a “motherfucker!” Then he whipped open the door.
“I had a stowaway. There was a brown recluse spider in my bag. It was not small and I trapped it. I’m getting rid of it and everything is fine.”
“Can one of those kill a cat?”
“Better not find out, right? Be right back!”
Then he blew me a kiss and dove back into the living room with a hunter’s spring in his step.
Had I ever made him as happy as that venomous spider? I wanted to. I knew how precious it was to have a person love you as Boots loved me. I did not take it for granted that such a person was living in my house. But my efforts to turn stability into desire and familiarity into respect were coming unglued.
“You, too, are also the thing that is my favorite,” I told him, “as well.”
“I know that,” he said.
I kept the door open as I watched him disappear down our steps. The moment he was gone, I issued a correction to the cat.
“Second favorite. Obviously.”
She was resting with her chin between her paws. Aware of being addressed but unsure of how she might benefit from this conversation, she looked at me without moving her head. Then my phone vibrated, a skirmish with my desk. It was Vadis, asking me how the wedding was. I did not answer since I knew that’s not what she was asking.
I had to go into the office for a day of weekly and annual meetings that had a disturbing amount of thematic crossover. Our directives for two weeks out and six months out had the same tenor, balancing ideas with branding. Our editorial director, a hyper pigeon of a woman in her early thirties, dubbed these “ideas sessions,” words my calendar liked to weaponize in bold. Even the robots knew ideas was a big word for it. It could be disheartening, working at a glorified content aggregator, covering the culture instead of creating it. Our jaws clamped down on prey with clickbaity headlines, only to find we’d caught nothing in our teeth except for the occasional lawsuit. At real media outlets, arts coverage was an art unto itself. But focusing on trends that we had no part in creating or even spotting had a bottom-feeder effect. The younger staffers took it more seriously. Radio New York was the only world they’d ever known. Their earnestness made me feel simultaneously jaded and indignant.
At least, at Modern Psychology, the publication and the field it covered were locked in a regency dance. Maybe it wasn’t Radio New York’s fault. Maybe it was New York’s fault and Amos has been right all along: There was simply nothing new or unexpected happening on this island. Except for the Golconda.
It was impossible to maintain focus. During lulls in conversation, I piped in with regurgitated ideas that gave the illusion of attention being paid. After the meetings disbanded, I wandered back and forth between my desk and the pantry, getting coffee, forgetting milk, going back to get the milk, forgetting sugar, going back to get the sugar. Stirring it with my finger. I silenced the occasional wail of the phone.
Boots texted to say he’d landed. He got a thumbs-up in return, followed by a Yay, the plane didn’t crash, yay! This elicited a befuddled: lol?
I skipped lunch to sleuth, opting for vending machine pretzels, pushing grains of salt into my mouse pad as I scoured my brain for anyone with whom I’d been on a date ever. A Rolodex of faded faces creaked in my head. Men are the sitting ducks of the internet because none of their names have changed. Every stroke of the return key brought more professional headshots, more neckties, more grinning into the camera like children trying to recall the state capitals. Or else these men were engaged in an industry that required them to lean against a brick wall, arms crossed. Their “about” pages made me feel an almost parental pride, forgetting these were the same people who’d once made me pay for more of the bill because I’d ordered goat cheese on my half of the pizza, the same people who’d exfoliated my face raw with stubble when surely not one of them would appreciate a sandpaper hand job.
My whole life, I’d been telling myself the story of every breakup so that I had more agency in it. Men do not like to entertain the idea that they have destroyed someone and so they behave as if they haven’t. I granted them the delusion, forking it over without a fuss. Everyone wins. It’s difficult to comfort oneself by shrinking one’s emotions without conceding that one has allowed those emotions to expand, unchecked, in the first place. I found it easier to skip this process. In truth, I’d been the victim of a metric ton of rejection. Already I could sense years of psychological work coming unglued as I searched for name after name, subjecting myself to condensed humiliation. I experienced these men as no one is supposed to experience them, as if being propelled from a T-shirt gun. It was like seeing every cigarette I’d ever smoked in One Great Big Pile.
There were men whose dating profiles had read like rules at a public pool: No tattoos. No couch potatoes. No heavy drinkers. No picky eaters. No taking oneself too seriously. NO DRAMA! Men who demanded a woman have a sense of humor but showed no signs of being funny. Men who posted photos alongside striking female acquaintances, as if to say, “just so you have a sense.” Men whose insecurities ran so deep, they came out as accusations: “How do you not have a boyfriend? What’s wrong with you?” I went out with them anyway, these bouquets of red flags, curious as to how repulsively I’d have to behave in order to trigger a new decree, knowing in advance the answer would be: not very. So many bloodless creatures who wanted all my blood, who offered nothing of themselves in return, who accused me of not “opening up” during the once every two weeks I was permitted to see them. The needle of curiosity goes in, the traits are sent off to the lab, the results never to be shared. There were men who told me they wouldn’t sleep with their ex-girlfriends for all the tea in China but who turned out to own an import/export business to Beijing. Men who broke up with me because I was too good for them. Ah, but when do we send our food back to the kitchen because it’s too delicious? These were the same men who were always off to the gym. To the studio. The party was lame. The party was boring. You wouldn’t have had any fun. Men who didn’t think they were misogynists because they defended the actions of famous women. Or famous minority women. Or famous trans women. Men who said I reminded them of the girl who broke their heart in college or the one that cheated on them in grad school, Tuesday afternoon kinda wounds for every woman I knew. Men who told me they would have to be dragged kicking and screaming out of this town but now lived in Idaho. Another woman had dragged them. But how? A blow to the head? Ether and a hand towel? Did she take the back roads? These were the same men who said they’d gone celibate for fear of hurting women, who thought they’d invented sadness, who told me I had no clue how dark things got in their heads, how dank the basements of their sorrow. Unrequited narcissists, these were men with a delicate sense of injustice when it came to their fellow man. Yes, life’s a witch hunt. It will magnify your sins until they are grotesque, canceling you from a program you didn’t know you were on. But is that a broomstick between your thighs or are you happy to see me? These men were like tropical fish, easily stressed by too much communication or too little. Some stared into my eyes, attempting tantric meditation over martinis, telling me I was their soul mate after minute ten, some called me their girlfriend after date two, some refused to call me their girlfriend after year one. Some called me someone else’s name. There were younger men who were the same age now as I was when they broke up with me—did they feel the burn of shame at having made me feel old, now that they were all caught up? Men who cut lines of powder with a jeweler’s precision. A one-time thing. A two-time thing. It’s hard to pass off any activity as a sixty-five-time thing. Men who’d hurt me more than once. That was my fault. I wanted to touch the stove, to see if it was still hot: It was still hot. Men who made paper airplanes out of the customer copy while I signed the merchant one. Check’s in the mail, hand’s on the thigh. Men whose texts I’d shown Vadis, who gamely looked at the time stamps. Blue, I’m blue, we are all of us blue. Sometimes we are green with inexperience or envy. Men who preferred missing me to being with me. Men who told me they were falling for me. It felt so good to say it, they’d figure out if they meant it later. But when later came, they were not falling. By God, they had tried. They detailed their efforts to the court. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client has made reasonable attempts. He has gone to great pains. He has texted when he did not feel like it. He has listened when he was bored. He has written down the birthday. Those were the worst of all, worse than the cheaters and the sociopaths. Because, as they stated their cases, they shook loose from the context in which I knew them. They were only people, mired in downy confusion, born a little broken and trying to fix it. In all of history, we had landed in the same city at the same time and, to ladle miracle upon miracle, we had met. What were the odds? What were the chances? How could I not love them all just a little? In that moment, they became unanchored from being men at all. They became genderless droplets that floated away before my eyes, drifting into the sea of human fallibility, particles rising toward the surface.
By the time I looked up, I could see the reflection of the fluorescent lights in the windows. I could hear cars honking their way into the Holland Tunnel, followed by the sound of the cleaning cart being rolled off the elevator in consecutive thuds. A vacuum cleaner switched on. The cleaning woman jumped when she saw me, holding her hand to her heart.
Near the Second Avenue subway station, children were playing an intense game of soccer under bright lights. They were running back and forth over the yin-yang printed on the Astroturf, intermittently stopping to accuse one another of cheating. The air had grown sharper. I leaned on an iron fence, picking leaves from an azalea bush and folding them between my fingers. They made a satisfying crack. As Clive had explained, I was the magnet (preferable to “hole”) within a liminal space and that magnetism was concentric. The Golconda worked mostly through the power of suggestion, but Clive also had the members put energy out with the goal of “reeling it back in.” Like a tide rising and then receding from the shore, who knew what debris would be dragged my way? I’d spotted Dave Egan, stuck in the sand over on Canal, farther west. I figured I had about the same chance of running into an ex here as I did outside the Golconda’s front door, where I would be on camera.
So I stayed put, watching commuters return home, watching tourists get turned around, watching a hunched man carrying a cloud of cans so expansive, it made a mockery of the population’s wastefulness. It seemed to me that Clive could accomplish his goal easily enough with a few illusionists on the payroll. Formalizing it all with cult-like rhetoric was preying on people’s need for meaning, ethics notwithstanding. Amos had not called Clive a charlatan for nothing. Still, I concentrated on emitting my own vibrations. My own pheromones.
I only managed to make myself sweat.
Clive had said that there might not be a chronology to the next couple of weeks. I’d dated Amos after Willis, and Dave before either of them. What he did know was that this would work via emotional impact. That’s what the social media monitoring and the meditation had in common. Love leaves a neurological footprint. A search history of the soul. It was therefore unlikely that I’d run into any one-night stands, as neither party could be triggered to revisit the other. No amount of planted advertisements for the boysenberry body wash I’d used in 2012 would be effective on such a man. Beyond that? Everyone was fair game.
My pupils stayed vigilant, both fearful of and desperate for recognition. This awareness was draining, reminiscent of spending too long in a museum. Every second of our lives is pressed from two sides—the present and the past—like coal. Mostly we don’t notice it. We don’t notice we’re in a continuum. Other times the pressure gets so intense, it turns all existence into a diamond.
And then I heard a voice call my name.
My shoulders went stiff. I often heard my name in public, or a piece of it, in slow or hola, words exchanged between people on the street. I’d trained myself not to react. But then I heard it again. This was a woman’s voice.
Narrowing the gap between us on the sidewalk was Adella, a friend of a friend. I was never quite sure what Adella did for a living. What I did know was that she was on the board of a women’s folk art museum in Mexico City because I was on the email list despite repeated attempts to unsubscribe. I resigned myself to the fact that Adella would pass through my mind, monthly, for the rest of my life, harmless as a shooting star.
“Lola, I thought that was you,” she said, as if my ruse had failed.
I’d never gotten to know Adella because there was no need for me to get to know Adella—I could count our interactions on one hand. We were peripheral people for each other. But even if I’d been desperate to crack her code, she maintained too upbeat a demeanor. Everything was always fabulous. Work? Great. Family? Great. Friends? Manifold. Apartment? Redecorated. Shattered tibia? Healing at record speeds. Only once did she mention the time she’d been held at knifepoint in Buena Vista, blindfolded and forced to make withdrawals from several banks. Then she started talking about an app for haircuts.
But right now, Adella was a gift. I kept losing focus on her, keeping a lookout. Adella soldiered on, releasing information like she was blowing bubbles. She’d had outpatient surgery for endometriosis. She’d hired an assistant she loved. She’d moved back to the city from Chicago, with her boyfriend whom she also loved. (I had not realized she’d left for Chicago in the first place.) Her inquiries about our mutual friends required my participation, but I hadn’t seen these people in years. I didn’t have much in the way of answers. So she resumed the bubble-blowing: Her boyfriend had inherited “part of a floor” of a building in the East Village. The twinge of real estate jealousy snapped me to attention.
“His great-grandparents ran a canning business out of it,” she explained. “Dumb luck, right?”
“Completely stupid.”
“His dad lived there but he died. We live on the fourth floor, which is actually—”
“Wait, what did they can?”
“Sorry?”
“The grandparents. What did they can?”
“Oh … some kinda fish, I think.”
“Herring?”
“Yes! How’d you know?”
There was a clanging of bells in the distance as Adella’s boyfriend exited a hardware store across the street. She waved at him with violent cheer as he darted across the street to meet his current girlfriend, her—and his college girlfriend, me.
I struggled to remember the last time I’d seen Jonathan. Was it possible the answer was: Not since the night we broke up? My mental Rolodex began spinning once more. Our breakup would’ve been about six months after we graduated, and almost twenty years ago. I knew things had not ended well but I could not remember how, which suggested I was the inflictor of pain. One thing I did remember: the apartment. Jonathan’s father, an architect, was still living there when we were dating. Jonathan grew up in the neighborhood and was thus doomed to describe the crumbling streets and needle-strewn parks of his youth to a world that refused to absorb the severity of the past. One winter night, his father lent us his Porsche, which made us feel a little like we were in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off until the taillight got smashed on First Avenue. Then we felt a lot like we were in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
We came back, panting up the stairs, sulking like the teenagers we so recently were. Jonathan’s father was hunched over a drafting table, snow settling on the window panes behind him.
Jonathan told him about the car while I hovered around the kitchen area. It was obvious I could hear every word, so eventually I joined them.
“If you can’t afford to destroy something,” his father said, without raising his face, “you can’t afford it.”
“But,” Jonathan pressed his luck, “I didn’t afford it, you did.”
“I have insurance.”
“It wasn’t an accident. The car was too far out into the street.”
Jonathan wanted to be punished. This was a stunning realization, one I was too young to transfer to the bedroom. In the early aughts, most of the women I knew still had more business with the twentieth century than the twenty-first, and so much of mainstream sex was defined as “to go along with.” It was hard enough, climbing out of this hole of internalized people-pleasing. The idea of then jumping straight into another uneven hole, one in which I strung Jonathan up from the ceiling and beat him with a paddle, was too daunting.
“Son,” his father said, uninterested in debate, “this world will be hard enough on you without my help.”
Would it, though? A well-off white boy with zero college debt?
Life would be hard because everyone’s life is hard, but so long as Jonathan remained unmaimed, his challenges would be glaringly internal. What made Jonathan stand out was that he knew this and he would not accept a free pass, even if it were foisted on him, even if he were unsuccessful at giving it away. He took pride in trying to step out from his father’s shadow. We should’ve swapped fathers, his nonconformist boomer for my suburban boomer, a man who would happily oblige in chastising Jonathan for minor offenses.
“I like this one’s teeth.”
It took us both a second for us to realize his father was talking about me. He’d barely looked at me but now he did, setting down his pencil. I grinned nervously.
“See?” he asked Jonathan. “Good teeth.”
Later that night, sleeping on a foldout couch more supportive than my own bed, I told Jonathan that I aspired to be like his father.
“Rich?” he asked, on the verge of annoyance.
“Chill,” I answered. “Able to let things go.”
As Jonathan trotted across the street, holding up his hand to thank a car for not running him over, Adella explained their presence here. They had to have the locks changed after a break-in. Jonathan decided to make keys that could be reproduced only by specific locksmiths. There were three of these locksmiths in Brooklyn, one in Queens, one in Harlem, and one in lower Manhattan, on Forsyth. Which, in Adella’s estimation, was why they were here. Not because Clive had conjured her boyfriend using playlists, targeted ads, and modern sorcery. Not because a combination of private investigators and app programmers had put the idea of new house keys into the locked box that was Jonathan’s brain.
As I watched him from a distance, I wondered: Had this man been designing my monthly missives about Mexican folk art?
He slowed as he approached. He still had a boy’s face. I had difficulty imagining Jonathan paying for goods with cash he earned from a job he held. How would he do these things without using a drawing of a fox as currency?
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
They looked at me in unison. Had we not just been over this?
“I mean now. On Earth. In general.”
“Oh,” Jonathan said. “I work for the Department of Environmental Protection.”
“He’s going to save the planet.”
I tried to imagine them having sex. Adella was theatrical and confident, the kind of woman who glommed on to her gender as if it would steer her whole personality. And who had done pretty well with this theory. But the Jonathan I knew was uncomfortable in his own skin, rarely thinking of himself as human, forget masculine. He blushed at his own erections. I never saw him crave anything. But we were older now and perhaps Jonathan had learned to funnel his desire for punishment into something satisfying.
“Only mass sterility will save the planet,” he deadpanned.
“I love that you guys know each other.” Adella changed the topic. “This world is too tiny. I swear, there’s just ten people in all of America and the rest is funhouse mirrors.”
“Here I was at the end of America,” Jonathan recited, “no more land—and now there was nowhere to go but back.”
Jonathan had done his senior thesis on the cult of personality surrounding the Beat generation. He interviewed people who made pilgrimages to North Beach, who found the rusted car under the bridge in Big Sur. He tracked them down, recorded their pride and their sadness. He got a tattoo on his shoulder, a line from Naked Lunch: “A freight train separates the Prof from the juveniles … When the train passes they have fat stomachs and responsible jobs.” It was my hand he squeezed when he got the tattoo. How strange, I thought, that I was the first woman to touch it and Adella would probably be the last.
And yet Jonathan had clearly never mentioned any of this to her.
Under normal circumstances, not qualifying for disclosure would’ve been an insult. But I knew something neither of them did: I mattered enough to him to land him here. And the prophecy of Jonathan’s tattoo had come to pass. He did have a fat stomach now, an emo gut bloated with years of feelings. And he did have a responsible job. Still, the more he spoke, the more I saw how this was the Jonathan I knew. He told Adella that it might be fun, in case the burglars returned, to tape a thousand different keys to the front door. She looked at him blankly and excused herself to answer a work call.
Branded content? Was it maybe branded content?
Jonathan and I occupied ourselves, wordlessly measuring our current faces against our former ones. I may not have been able to recall how we ended but I could recall how we began—the nights in the basement of our dorm as we waited for a washing machine to free up, searching for each other at parties, writing long emails that continued over summer break. I had an internship in the city and I wrote to him of my adoration for “the vacillating scents of city trash.” There were descriptions of New York at the turn of the millennium, during its gimmicky theme bar phase: Korova Milk Bar, Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Beauty Bar, Idlewild (which featured real seats from a DC-10). Jonathan was spending the sweltering months volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. He set up an email account for a splinter and sent me a series of missives from the splinter’s point of view. The splinter felt stuck. The splinter longed to be removed with my lips.
We were stymied by cuteness, by an inability to speak plainly about our feelings. We’d send each other origami and Polaroids and drugstore birthday cards that said things like “Guess who’s 5 today?” Our relationship died for the same reason Jonathan’s senior thesis got ripped to shreds: It smothered itself in its own conceptions. Turns out it’s a lot harder to write something original about William Burroughs than it is to skewer the people who idolize William Burroughs.
While Adella paced in front of us, fiddling with her earpiece, Jonathan explained how his father had died. Prostate cancer. Stage Four because he hid it, because he wouldn’t go to the doctor. Horrific but quick. I felt an unreasonable possession over Jonathan’s father, over the apartment I had not seen in years. Never mind the fact that Adella received mail there, kept her toiletries in the bathroom.
“I thought it might be weird to reach out. I should have. He always liked you.”
“Really?” I said, my voice going up an uncontrollable octave. “He didn’t know me.”
“Lola. To not know you is to love you.”
“That sounds like an insult.”
“I think you know it’s not,” he said, turning scarlet.
Now I remembered. We were at Zen Palate in Union Square, eating our soy protein balls before they got too cold to consume, and Jonathan got up to go to the bathroom. While he was gone, I held my glass of lukewarm organic wine, contemplating what I knew had to be done. Jonathan had his Polaroid camera on him and on his way back to the table, he took a photo, shaking the picture.
“Look at this composition,” he said.
I knew that would be the last picture he would ever take of me, that by this time tomorrow we would not be dating. I wondered if he still had it.
Adella returned to us with a perky “What’d I miss?”
Unlike Willis, Jonathan had not minimized the story of us. He remembered, all right. But like Willis, he also remembered to move on and live his life.
“What’s your story these days, Lola?” Adella asked.
“My partner and I are getting married.”
I’d never once answered this question like this and considered any unbidden relationship status offensive. Nor had I ever referred to Boots as “my partner.” But I enjoyed the ambiguity of it, the pilfered implication of growth, the potential expansion of sexual preference. I didn’t need to compete with Adella’s completionism, but I wanted to put myself in the ballpark of it. To establish my own ballpark. I’m self-aware, too. I’ve evolved into a partnership, too. I don’t need to be the boss of someone, nor am I anyone’s puppet.
Even though we were, all three of us, Clive’s puppets.
“Congratulations,” they said, generously but not too generously.
Our goodbye was an awkward baton pass of hugs. I tried to listen to their conversation as they walked away but their words were unintelligible.
That night, I pulled out the box of old letters that I kept in the back of our closet, wedged between vacuum-sealed sweaters and folded boxes that Boots used for shipping his pieces. I’d probably need to move my secret stash under the bed soon. He’d been selling enough pieces of late, one of my protective walls was thinning.
I had judged Willis for shoving all his experiences into a tidy box, but I had done it literally. I dug until I found one of Jonathan’s old cards. It was dated with a number that made my heart seize. So much time had passed. For a while, any year that began with a “20” felt comfortably contemporary. But now people born in the new millennium were whole people with opinions and degrees, babies even. As such, they were in flagrant violation of this comfort. They were having their own debates, making their own memories, sending their own cards, discovering music with the zeal of the converted. They were walking into parties, hoping their own Jonathans would be there.
The card featured a cartoon of a go-go dancer in white boots, music notes against a rainbow background. It read: Someone’s in the birthday groove! It still played a tune, a melody like a tiny ambulance.