Cult Classic(42)

I struggled to remember the last time I’d seen Jonathan. Was it possible the answer was: Not since the night we broke up? My mental Rolodex began spinning once more. Our breakup would’ve been about six months after we graduated, and almost twenty years ago. I knew things had not ended well but I could not remember how, which suggested I was the inflictor of pain. One thing I did remember: the apartment. Jonathan’s father, an architect, was still living there when we were dating. Jonathan grew up in the neighborhood and was thus doomed to describe the crumbling streets and needle-strewn parks of his youth to a world that refused to absorb the severity of the past. One winter night, his father lent us his Porsche, which made us feel a little like we were in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off until the taillight got smashed on First Avenue. Then we felt a lot like we were in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

We came back, panting up the stairs, sulking like the teenagers we so recently were. Jonathan’s father was hunched over a drafting table, snow settling on the window panes behind him.

Jonathan told him about the car while I hovered around the kitchen area. It was obvious I could hear every word, so eventually I joined them.

“If you can’t afford to destroy something,” his father said, without raising his face, “you can’t afford it.”

“But,” Jonathan pressed his luck, “I didn’t afford it, you did.”

“I have insurance.”

“It wasn’t an accident. The car was too far out into the street.”

Jonathan wanted to be punished. This was a stunning realization, one I was too young to transfer to the bedroom. In the early aughts, most of the women I knew still had more business with the twentieth century than the twenty-first, and so much of mainstream sex was defined as “to go along with.” It was hard enough, climbing out of this hole of internalized people-pleasing. The idea of then jumping straight into another uneven hole, one in which I strung Jonathan up from the ceiling and beat him with a paddle, was too daunting.

“Son,” his father said, uninterested in debate, “this world will be hard enough on you without my help.”

Would it, though? A well-off white boy with zero college debt?

Life would be hard because everyone’s life is hard, but so long as Jonathan remained unmaimed, his challenges would be glaringly internal. What made Jonathan stand out was that he knew this and he would not accept a free pass, even if it were foisted on him, even if he were unsuccessful at giving it away. He took pride in trying to step out from his father’s shadow. We should’ve swapped fathers, his nonconformist boomer for my suburban boomer, a man who would happily oblige in chastising Jonathan for minor offenses.

“I like this one’s teeth.”

It took us both a second for us to realize his father was talking about me. He’d barely looked at me but now he did, setting down his pencil. I grinned nervously.

“See?” he asked Jonathan. “Good teeth.”

Later that night, sleeping on a foldout couch more supportive than my own bed, I told Jonathan that I aspired to be like his father.

“Rich?” he asked, on the verge of annoyance.

“Chill,” I answered. “Able to let things go.”



* * *



As Jonathan trotted across the street, holding up his hand to thank a car for not running him over, Adella explained their presence here. They had to have the locks changed after a break-in. Jonathan decided to make keys that could be reproduced only by specific locksmiths. There were three of these locksmiths in Brooklyn, one in Queens, one in Harlem, and one in lower Manhattan, on Forsyth. Which, in Adella’s estimation, was why they were here. Not because Clive had conjured her boyfriend using playlists, targeted ads, and modern sorcery. Not because a combination of private investigators and app programmers had put the idea of new house keys into the locked box that was Jonathan’s brain.

As I watched him from a distance, I wondered: Had this man been designing my monthly missives about Mexican folk art?

He slowed as he approached. He still had a boy’s face. I had difficulty imagining Jonathan paying for goods with cash he earned from a job he held. How would he do these things without using a drawing of a fox as currency?

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

They looked at me in unison. Had we not just been over this?

“I mean now. On Earth. In general.”

“Oh,” Jonathan said. “I work for the Department of Environmental Protection.”

“He’s going to save the planet.”

I tried to imagine them having sex. Adella was theatrical and confident, the kind of woman who glommed on to her gender as if it would steer her whole personality. And who had done pretty well with this theory. But the Jonathan I knew was uncomfortable in his own skin, rarely thinking of himself as human, forget masculine. He blushed at his own erections. I never saw him crave anything. But we were older now and perhaps Jonathan had learned to funnel his desire for punishment into something satisfying.

“Only mass sterility will save the planet,” he deadpanned.

“I love that you guys know each other.” Adella changed the topic. “This world is too tiny. I swear, there’s just ten people in all of America and the rest is funhouse mirrors.”

“Here I was at the end of America,” Jonathan recited, “no more land—and now there was nowhere to go but back.”