Cult Classic(13)

“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.





2




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.