Cult Classic(19)

I gestured at her to sit before Willis spotted her, but then I remembered they’d never met. Only Vadis had met Willis. Even Clive had only ever heard of him. (“You slept with a child,” he joked, with casual cruelty. “You should be arrested for statutory rape.”) But of course everyone but Boots knew about him. Whereas I somehow doubted Willis was running around Iowa, bragging about that time he dated an associate editor with hip bones. Boots was aware of the abortion, but only the age at which I’d had it. No further detail. Our nondisclosure pact was practically built for Willis. No man enjoys hearing the words ex-boyfriend and Olympian in the same sentence.

“That’s the javelin thrower?” Eliza asked.

“Long jumper.”

“Go say hello.”

“I can’t,” I said, shaking my head.

“What? Why?”

When I lost my taste for Willis’s cocktail of guilelessness and na?veté, I lost it quickly. This is how it is with most relationships. So many of the things that attracted you come to repel you and sooner or later you find yourself going out the same door you came in. But I did not go gentle. I began trashing Willis’s career plans under the guise of saving him from harsher criticism from the outside world. As if I, personally, had dug him up and thawed him out. I became resentful of his prettiness, of the ease it afforded him. I leaped on him if he’d never heard of a historical figure or film director with whom I myself had only a passing familiarity. At one point, he bought me a notepad with “You Got This!” printed across each page.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll write my suicide note on it.”

Then, the final frontier: sex. My period came earlier and stayed later. I ate large quantities of takeout, passed out before 11 p.m., left for the office at 8 a.m., had arid conversations in between. My attempts to push through were halfhearted and cruel—I’d slide my hand beneath his boxers, get one gander at his goofy grin, and take the hand back out. And, because I was apparently committed to behaving like a garbage person, I decided my lack of sex drive was an honorable thing, a testament to my depth.

I did not want to say hello to someone who’d seen me behave like that.

And then, just like that, it was out of my hands.

Brody came bursting out of the kitchen, falling over himself to thank Eliza for coming. As if one of us had kicked him in the shins, he collapsed into her arms and started weeping. Shoulder-bobbing, jaw-stretching, face-crumpling, throat-closing weeping. He insisted that it was nothing, just a thing that happened when he got triggered. What in this restaurant had triggered him to think about the time he’d spun a boy to death was anyone’s guess. The orchids?

“It’s the guilt,” Brody said between gulps of breath, “exiting my body.”

Eliza folded him up in her arms. She was great at this. A natural. She should have that second kid. Half the restaurant turned to look, including Willis, who spotted me in the process. I waved, he pointed at the bar.

“Holy cow!” he exclaimed, shaking his hands above his head. “Lola!”

“Hi!” I squealed.

In small doses, Willis’s enthusiasm was contagious. How many boyfriends had I had who weren’t over our relationship before it began, who weren’t consumed with how it would end? He hugged me, crushing my nose against his torso.

“What’s going on with that?” He nodded over my shoulder.

“Oh,” I said, grateful for the mutual focal point. “It’s my friend’s husband’s friend. He works here.”

There was nowhere for us to go with that information.

“He’s the hammock kid.”

“What’s a hammock kid?”

“No, the hammock kid. You know, the kid who spun his stepbrother to death in a hammock and now that’s why there are all these warnings on hammocks.”

I knew Willis to be in possession of a hammock. Multiple pictures of the stupid dog in the stupid hammock when all the people want is the goddamn wife.

“Yikes!”

“Yeah. What are you doing here?”

“Here in this restaurant? I read about it somewhere.”

“No, in New York.”

“I’m here for a conference. We just moved to Fort Worth.”

“Got it,” I said, even though I could detect no connection between the two facts.

“I’m in sports marketing now. They only send three people from the company each year. I’m here to prove that the accounts guy knows what it means to be an athlete.”

He patted his stomach through his shirt.

“It’s kind of stupid that they trot me out for these things,” he mused, tucking his hair behind his ears. “But duty calls!”

“And how are the twins?”

“Oh, well,” he said, not flinching at the idea I possessed information he hadn’t shared. “Since you asked, I’m obligated to do this.”

He scrolled through pictures of baby girls. They were formal portraits, the girls wearing pink bows tied around their bald heads. Or else they were asleep in their cribs and the photos were of the nursery itself—a girlish explosion of matching mobiles, rose-patterned wallpaper, and monogrammed piggy banks. The last photo was of one of the girls, naked, propped up on Willis’s old sofa with his gold medal around her neck. There was a time when I had sat on that same sofa, wearing the same outfit. I gave Willis his phone back.