Cult Classic(34)

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Something soft absorbed the impact of our front door. The culprit: Boots’s overnight bag, gaping open in horror, a dopp kit tucked inside. He was sunk into the sofa, his face illuminated by a laptop screen.

“What’s this?” I asked, shutting the door behind me.

“Jess and Adam’s wedding.”

“I meant like what’s it doing in the hall.”

I figured it was better to come off as someone suddenly irate about objects on the floor rather than expose myself as having completely forgotten about the wedding of his closest friends. Jess and Adam, the purveyors of every bite of farro salad I’d ever eaten. Judging by his fixation on the flashes of light coming from the screen, Boots was unbothered.

“How’s this for a laptop?” I asked, sitting on his lap, my face in front of his.

“Grounds for divorce, that joke.”

“We’re not married. You don’t need grounds. Is this annoying?”

He pressed his lips against mine, popping them off with a smacking sound.

“Yes,” he said. “Give me five minutes.”

I looked with him, assuming he was watching a show, but he was fulfilling another order, this one for a piece I was sad to see go: a glass hand that was modeled on my hand, if not an actual model (easy with clay, a felony with glass). The fingertips had turned what Boots explained was “sun purple.” Certain kinds of glass contain manganese dioxide meant to brighten it, but it turns violet when left out in the sun. Boots was not especially attached to the hand, not when he had two of my real ones around, so he’d kept the inanimate version on the kitchen windowsill of his last apartment until it looked as if it had been dusted for prints.

“Someone bought the hand,” I stated the obvious.

“How’s Vadis?”

“She’s fine.”

“I thought she was having a crisis.”

Until this moment, I never understood how people in the movies kept their magical powers a secret. But it was because secrets that strain credulity are tricky to jam into conversation. I entertained a partial truth: Clive was starting a new age SoHo House for rich idiots. Simple. But Boots would have questions. He’d wonder who was supplying their glassware, for one thing.

“She just wanted to talk.”

“Of course,” he said, with an edge he thought I couldn’t hear.

I knew he felt as if Vadis were commandeering his future wife. Every hole in the fabric of our relationship was made wider as I aligned myself with someone he knew to be the diametric opposite of him, someone who probably never had the good sense to point out his better qualities. We rarely fought, but if I so much as touched my phone after an argument, I’d get an “Are you telling Vadis how big of an asshole I am?”

“What am I supposed to wear to this wedding?”

“It’s casual,” he said. “I’m wearing a jacket but that’s it.”

“Like Donald Duck?”

“Huh?”

I plucked the invitation from the fridge. The reception would be on a goat farm on Long Island, near where Jess grew up. The invitation was bordered with pressed flowers. I liked Jess and Adam in that they were impossible not to like. Our double dates were civilized affairs, planned weeks in advance and just the right amount of drunken. Adam became animated about international affairs and carbon emissions; Jess was tactilely inclined, demanding to know where I got my shirt. The men paid the bill, which I found at once irritating and justified. The four of us had once spent a weekend in the Catskills together. Wanting to be homey, and perhaps accrue some leeway for the occasional cigarette, I made banana bread each morning. At night, as we listened to them have sex, I thought, not incorrectly: I have fueled this noise. Of all Boots’s college friends, Jess and Adam were the easiest to be around. But their steady sweetness meant they never said anything outside the range of pleasant. Thus, impossible as I found them not to like, I found them equally as impossible to love.

I slid plastic hangers back and forth in our overstuffed closet. There were dresses I’d bought at sample sales, hovering at the end of the bar, long dresses I thought might make me feel taller but only made me feel sloppy, or structurally complicated dresses I thought might make me feel like the kind of person who owned mid-century furniture. I let my fingers linger on the fabric, on the now-unoccupied places where I’d once been touched. I looked over at Boots and had the same feeling I’d had while watching the man with the backpack reading at the bar the other night. Sometimes choosing the right partner seemed like everything. Sometimes it seemed as deeply irrelevant as deciding what to wear to a wedding.

I made sure to sleep with Boots that night, getting a head start while listening to the sound of his electric toothbrush groaning. Even in the moments I wanted to kill him for being too passive, I could see the headline: “Woman Murders 40-Year-Old Disease-Free Man with 401k: Waste.” I thought if I could just feel his hands running down my back, feel him bury his nose in my neck, he could beat back the swell of information in my head. Sex, be it formulaic or exhilarating, could be reductive like that. It tended to complicate relationships when you weren’t in them, when you were getting in or getting out, but it simplified things in the middle. Look at us, letting the eagerness of our bodies override the discomfort of our minds. Look at us, in this human bed, doing animal things, blinking from position to position like holograms.