Cult Classic(21)

“I’m serious.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said, shutting the conversation down. “Another life.”

It was not another life for me, it was still my life. All mine. I sometimes thought about what our child would have looked like and if it would have hated me by now. What if it had gotten Mommy’s muscle mass and Daddy’s brains? But after Willis and I split, he had not thought about any of those things. He had pulled up the anchor. All this time, I thought I had turned him into cocktail fodder when I was the cocktail fodder. There was no life experience too big to fit into Willis’s tidy box, including that one time we semi-killed a semi-baby. His wife probably had her own box. Maybe a sorority hazing gone wrong. Maybe a whole rape that she thought of as a “date rape” if she thought of it at all. Just one idiot.

One of the tie-wearing men at Willis’s table waved in his direction.

“Duty calls,” he said again. “The call of duty. So cool to see you, Lola.”

Willis smiled broadly, skipping back to his life. Then he turned around and practically shouted across the restaurant: “What are the chances?!”

People looked up from their meals.

“I don’t know!” I shouted back.

What were the chances? Or the odds?

Modern Psychology had once devoted the back page to “luck language.” The same event could happen to four different people and one would deem it a coup, another kismet, another ironic, another auspicious. A coup signified chaos, kismet signified fate, irony signified order, auspicious signified faith. Meanwhile, odds were quantifiable but chances were not. Chances were abstract and “for” whereas odds were concrete and “against.” Hopeful people, of which Willis was one, used “chances” in the same spots where skeptical people used “odds.” I was an odds person.

Eliza approached with my bag in hand. She had the look of a mother who’d been forced to change diapers while her husband played solitaire on the toilet. But I was not the one who insisted we come to the restaurant with the unhinged kid in the kitchen.

“Why did you pick this place?”

“I told you.”

She seemed exasperated with me as she pulled her hair back, an elastic in her teeth.

“I mean, how long has Brody been working here? Was he working here the last time you came to visit?”

“Yeah, I think so. Hopefully, he’ll still be working here after that spectacle tonight.”

That spectacle. Crying in public. I looked at our now vacant table.

“Is he okay?”

“I mean, no. I don’t think he’s ever meant to be okay.”

“It’s late, I’m sorry. Are you ready?”

“You’re the one who’s been glued to the floor of this place.”





3




In order to explain the coincidence to Boots, I would have to reveal that I had not told him about Amos. Which would be making a big deal out of a medium deal. This is why the pact was in place. The bones of the concept were solid. No one has the power to control how an ex blooms in one’s partner’s imagination. Every breakup becomes the wrong size in the retelling. You can keep your food from touching all you want, it all winds up in the same place. Besides, there were maybe five people in the world who had met both Amos and Willis, who would understand the peculiarity of the past forty-eight hours. And then one of them invited herself over.

Vadis was in the neighborhood because she had a Victorian lampshade in need of repair and, unbeknownst to me, our apartment is in the lampshade district.

“Row,” she corrected herself, panting into the phone as she cut through street traffic. “It’s more of a row.”

“I feel like I would have noticed.”

“They’re not storefronts,” she said, disgusted at my ignorance. “They’re ateliers that specialize in refurbishing lampshades.”

“Only you.”

“Well, no, not only me or they wouldn’t be in business. Anyway, I’m here.”

The buzzer rang. Boots poked his head out of the bathroom, letting a front of steam into the apartment. His hair was plastered to his head, a streak of shaving cream on his cheek.

“Vadis,” I said, leaning on the buzzer.

“Who drops by unannounced? Is she Mr. Rogers?”

“Was that the premise of Mr. Rogers?”

“You know what I mean.”

I leaned on the buzzer once more, letting her through the second door. Boots scrambled for a shirt. He and Vadis got along so long as I was there to translate. I’d let them gang up on me, tease me about inconsequential things like how long it took me to leave the house or my low alcohol tolerance or how attached I was to little things, like matchbooks and birthday cards. These were easy sacrifices for the sight of my best friend and my fiancé enjoying each other’s company. But whenever I walked in on just the two of them talking, it was like watching a daisy and a stapler trying to hold down a conversation.

Vadis came flying through the apartment with a bushel of pussy willows. The ailing lampshade had already been dropped off at the lampshade hospital and she’d gone on a pussy-willow-buying rampage.

“I live in the flower district, too?”

“You need to leave the house more,” she chided.