Cult Classic(17)

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.