Cult Classic(35)

After Boots fell asleep, air whistling through his nostrils, questions raced around my mind. How had Clive managed to renovate a synagogue without anyone noticing? How badly had he brainwashed Vadis in order for her to keep this from me? Were the members also maybe Scientologists? Did Clive really think he was actually doing good? And who was responsible for keeping the atrium smelling like lemons? All minor curiosities compared with the biggest one of them all: Did I have it in me to confront the past without getting stuck in it?

If I agreed to this, it would be an advent calendar from hell.

I kicked off the sheets and got up to pour myself a glass of water, leaning forward on our bathroom sink until my nose touched the mirror. I’d always chalked up my devotion to the past as an extension of curiosity. If I found out someone who’d hurt me had gotten married or purchased property, I would google that person. Assumed behavior, but I went beyond the confines of assumption. If they had private social media accounts, I’d send “hang soon?” texts to our mutual friends with some vague fantasy that I’d be able to snatch up their phones while they were in the bathroom. I never did this. But I recognized the impulse as a bad one. I visited the Facebook accounts of the family, the Twitter accounts of the colleagues, the hashtags of the events to which I was not invited. It would’ve been more efficient to set up alerts for these men, but I never did it for the same reason I never bought a carton of cigarettes—too much of a commitment to bad habits.

If, on top of showing these men just the right advertisments and articles, the Golconda was using my search history (the retrieval of which would take negative effort for an NSA specialist), it was a real cheat sheet. Because sometimes, in an effort to repair hours of damaging activity, I’d google people who had wounded me slightly less and therefore elicited less of an emotional response. It was a form of croquet, knocking one hurt out for another and another. Sometimes, after I’d knocked all the croquet balls out of sight, there was one left standing—and it had Clive’s face painted on it.

Tonight I was filled with rage at Clive for not dating me when he could have. We thought we were so smart, fighting off an inconvenient attraction. It wasn’t all his fault. But he was older and, as the one closer to the future, I felt it was his responsibility to see into it. If we had acted back then, maybe we could be together now, be different people now. But the timing was bad. So Clive set me adrift into the dating world, turning me into the perfect candidate for the Golconda. And now he was with Chantal, a woman who posted sexy photos of herself with incongruous captions like “God is in the detours” and “You don’t have to act like a man to be a strong woman.” As if wearing a bodysuit by a pool were the solution to a problem. She also took a dizzying amount of pictures looking down at her shoes, showcasing the thinness of her ankles. You have to be a certain brand of attractive to take tip-of-the-iceberg photographs of your extremities, safe in the knowledge that anyone will go: “Oh, icebergs—obviously.”

Clive never needed a peer, he needed a Chantal.

As I crawled back into bed, Boots was still on his side. Here was a man so at peace with commitment, he became the physical manifestation of it. Each morning, he woke in the first position he’d settled in the night before.

“What am I going to do?” I whispered to the back of his head.

“Whatever you want,” he mumbled, half-dreaming. “You always look pretty.”

He reached his hand behind him and patted my hip, a gesture that meant both “good night” and “making sure you’re there.”





6




The next morning, we stood beneath one of the screens at Penn Station, straddling our bags. My eyes were glued to the track assignments. Boots was less competitive in these situations. He reasoned that we had tickets, which meant we had seats, and that was as much thought as boarding a train required. I informed him that this was the approach of a tall white man with no hindrances in his history and no oppression in his genes.

“Does Penn Station have to be about the patriarchy?”

“It was torn down by men and put back up by men,” I said. “You tell me.”

I primed my muscles to lean in one direction or the other, willing my synapses to transfer the numbers to my brain faster. On cue, I grabbed his hand and made him bolt with me.

“Peconic, first two cars,” instructed a conductor. “Only the first two cars will open for Peconic.”

He sounded exasperated that we were not born knowing this.

Boots and I sat in a center row, our fingers interlaced in a jigsaw puzzle of bones. I watched as the landscape shifted from apartment complexes to shallow bodies of water, birds bobbing in concert with the telephone wires. Maybe, after we got married, we could live somewhere out here. Find a town the real estate boom hadn’t touched. Somewhere safe from memory or coincidence. A place so tiny, none of the train cars open, there’s just a little chute that spits you out onto the town cushion. I thought of Clive’s mother’s story, of the lottery and the towns filled with ghosts who would do anything to go back in time. Anything.

I shook the thought out of my head.

“Are you okay?” asked Boots, squeezing my hand.

Adam’s brother picked us up at the train station, where we were trailed by a woman who’d been on the train with us, only in a different car. She swallowed her name when introduced so I didn’t catch it. She also kept a close watch on her garment bag as it was being loaded into the trunk, showing no compunction about treating the brother like a butler. Boots, in the front seat, turned and widened his eyes at me.