Cult Classic(20)

“New York always reminds me of you,” he said.

“I’m not sure I’m prepared to represent a whole city.”

“We came in to see the tree last Christmas and it was butt cold. And I thought of how cold you must be in your apartment because you refused to take out your air-conditioning unit between seasons.”

“It’s not worth it.”

“It is.”

“Agree to disagree.”

“Agree to freeze your ass off!”

Behind me, Brody had spread himself out in the booth, head down as if he were searching for something in the folds of the leather. Eliza was stroking his arm with a mixture of vibrancy and pity.

I told Willis about my new job, about the magazine folding. He only registered it as an updated LinkedIn profile, not the death of a way of life. He always said that everyone in New York identified too much with their careers. This was a stunning piece of hypocrisy, coming from an Olympian, the kind of blanket statement that made for a champion athlete but a strangely unfeeling civilian. Willis never saw “what the big deal was” in any given scenario, no matter how significant. A swastika on an advertisement, rendered in sharpie, was “just one idiot.” Global warming was “something the Earth was gonna do eventually.” I suspected that if Rocket died, he’d be the first to tell me it was an opportunity to get a kitten.

There were perks to this worldview. Willis knew the answers to his own questions before he asked them. Like Boots, he was not tortured. Unlike Boots, he used words like goals. Though I will give him this: Willis had a healthier grip on the confines of his own mortality than most of my peers, even if I didn’t agree with his rationale. Marriage, children, home ownership? Real. Jobs, boyfriends, landlords? Fake. This is why some people got engaged in the first place, to step off the fake list and onto the real one. And I had joined their ranks. I had turned another human being into a talisman against social grief. So I lifted my left hand and fanned my fingers in a way I had never done before, not even to the mirror.

“Ahh!” Willis said, lifting me up off the ground.

I squirmed to get back down. I had a full stomach and I also did not like how thrilled he was. I was only aiming for placation, to wipe that anthropological look off his face. When this first started happening with men, I was flattered. Clearly, my siren song was so loud, having a wife of their own was not enough of a deterrent. They needed me to be off-limits as well. It did not take me long to realize their relief had nothing to do with some long-suppressed desire to sleep with me. As a single woman, I made them uncomfortable. How hard it must have been for them to place me in their firmament of friends prior to me being part of a couple. Occasionally, they’d pump me for dating stories in the name of vicarious living, but they only missed their old lives, not my current one. On some level, I must have sensed this difficulty because I made constant efforts to demonstrate my wholeness, my effervescence. Feel the breeze, boys. As it turned out, all my efforts were for naught. Their current relief belied old pity. I mourned for all the time I’d wasted, concealing bouts of bitterness or depression, minimizing the impact of disappointments. I may as well have been smashing stemware against the fireplace.

Eliza was trying to catch my eye. Brody was still in the booth. The last train to Bronxville left in an hour.

“Tell me everything,” said Willis.

“What? Oh. He’s an architect,” I lied.

After all this time, I still wanted to seem otherworldly to Willis. Superior somehow. I immediately regretted it.

“He must be really smart.”

“Oh, I don’t … I don’t care about that as much as I used to.”

“Why wouldn’t you care about being smart?”

“Well, I probably care about it even more in one sense. You get older, you want the people you’re with to know just as much about the world as you do so that you can make your jokes and send your links. Or women do. We don’t, you know, get off on teaching other grown-ups. But being smart isn’t the only quality.”

“You’ve always been such a thoughtful person.”

I stared into his Captain America eyes, which were obscured by his cheeks because he was smiling. His assessment of me as thoughtful filled me with sadness. I didn’t deserve it, not when I didn’t care about his opinion when it mattered.

“Listen,” I said, “this may be weird, but now that you’re in front of me, I just wanted to say sorry I was so shitty to you.”

Willis screwed up his eyes.

“You weren’t shitty to me, not ever.”

“Willis. I was. Constantly.”

“Aww,” he said, ruffling my hair, as I stood there, stock-still, letting him. “You were just being yourself.”

I studied his face. Was it possible he’d dismissed my egregious behavior as the customs of a different world? In New York, we browbeat our men, mock their gifts, and tell them their ideas are sophomoric. Willis had applied the platitudes of hero videos to his personal life. He had rewritten history so that all his struggles were necessary in order to get him to the finish line—to his wife, to his girls, to his dog. I was a human sandpit.

“But, well,” I said, studying the ceiling, “I’m sorry about the abortion. Not, like, sorry for you. Not for the act. Just, you know, in general.”

“If you’re determined to apologize for something, apologize for never taking your air-conditioning unit out.”