Cult Classic(23)

“People keep matchbooks, it’s a decorative choice.”

“Everything gets stuck in the craw of the consciousness with you.”

“Did you knock yourself on the head on the way here?”

“It’s like the Cranberries said: Do you have to let it linger? Do you have to, do you have to, do you have to—?”

“No?”

“No. Let’s go out. It’ll help.”

“I don’t need help.”

“It’s nice out.”

I checked my bare wrist. I wanted to be here when Boots got back. I was practicing equilibrium, maintaining a balance between putting him first and putting my own whims first. Most couples seemed more self-regulating than we were. They knew when it was okay to be absent the day their other half returned from a trip and when it wasn’t, they referred to each other as “halves” without vomiting into their hands. They knew when it was okay to stay out all night with an ex-boyfriend and when it wasn’t. We never knew. So I erred on the side of obligation. Which was doing no one in our relationship any favors.



* * *



Vadis’s pussy willows drew stares on the subway platform. She put her arms through the straps that held them together. Strangers assigned cultural meaning to the bundle of twigs and their transporter and were uncharacteristically understanding when the pussy willows got caught in the subway doors. Uncharacteristically understanding when they got popped in the eye. One woman offered to give Vadis a seat but we stood, our bodies swaying. It took me a minute to notice how quiet she was being.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Just because you’ve never just dropped by the apartment before.”

“I believe in spontaneity.”

“Got it,” I said. “Yes to spontaneity, no to coincidences.”

I stared at the heads of strangers, the silver hairs at the part lines of women entering middle age, the things they could not see in the mirror. On the other side of the window was gradating darkness, the occasional graffiti tag.

“Are we on the express?”

I hated the feeling of being whisked at high speeds to the wrong place. Then I remembered I didn’t know where we were going.

“Don’t take me somewhere cool,” I chided her. “I’m not dressed for it.”

We emerged onto Canal Street, determined to get off it. Or at least I was. The view from Varick, looking east, was like approaching a town in the Old West. The humble parks and 99-cent pizza places ended abruptly when the lofts and factories sprang up, giving the skyline the air of a Potemkin village. My tolerance for this strip of town had weakened with age. The billboards that blocked the sky, the way the sidewalk seemed to offer you up to traffic like an animal sacrifice, the souvenir shops guarded by mechanical frogs treading in their troughs. Boots and I had once spent an ill-advised weekend looking at apartments around here, despite not being ready to move in, mentally, emotionally, or certainly financially. We wanted to see what was out there. For “fun.” So we toured a place on Canal and Mott. The trick with this part of Canal, the broker explained, was that it was “secretly SoHo.”

“If I was SoHo,” Boots mused, “I wouldn’t keep it a secret.”

The apartment had a skylight, floors segmented with area rugs, and a little bedroom in the back that fit a queen-size bed if one forwent nightstands. There was also a dining table that looked like it belonged in a barn. It would not be there for new residents, but it would leave the suggestion of dinner parties in its wake. We could never afford a place like this, but I wasn’t desperate to make it work anyway. I’d feel trapped. Just the thought of double-parking a moving van on Canal made my chest seize.

“If you don’t like something, you don’t like it,” said Boots, walking ahead of me down the endless stairs. “But for the record, I could live anywhere with you.”



* * *



In addition to the pussy willows, Vadis was in the market for snow globes. The bedding scion for whom she did her bidding was throwing an intimate dinner for sixty, and Vadis had been sent to procure snow globes for each table setting.

“This is the surprise? An errand? It’s very weird to me that this is your job now.”

“I hated journalism,” she said, as if the opposite of journalism was buying party favors.

“But what do snow globes have to do with bedding?”

“They remind people of sleep.”

“You know what else reminds people of sleep? Klonopin.”

We entered a narrow shop where a saleswoman followed us around as if we were picking out our wedding china. A middle-aged man in clear-framed glasses leaned on the glass behind the register, filling out a crossword in pen. I flipped a globe and watched the city turn upside down. Chunky snow settled into the well. When I flipped it over again, the snow collapsed onto the buildings. The globes with the glitter were more flurry-like. Their reflective flecks swirled around a Statue of Liberty sporting sunglasses and a bikini, an outfit that defied the logic of the globe’s own making.

“Do you have any of these ones but bigger?” asked Vadis.

The man behind the counter didn’t look up from his crossword. The saleswoman was at Vadis’s side, answering for him.