Cult Classic(14)

“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.