Cult Classic(18)
“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.