Cult Classic(43)
Jonathan had done his senior thesis on the cult of personality surrounding the Beat generation. He interviewed people who made pilgrimages to North Beach, who found the rusted car under the bridge in Big Sur. He tracked them down, recorded their pride and their sadness. He got a tattoo on his shoulder, a line from Naked Lunch: “A freight train separates the Prof from the juveniles … When the train passes they have fat stomachs and responsible jobs.” It was my hand he squeezed when he got the tattoo. How strange, I thought, that I was the first woman to touch it and Adella would probably be the last.
And yet Jonathan had clearly never mentioned any of this to her.
Under normal circumstances, not qualifying for disclosure would’ve been an insult. But I knew something neither of them did: I mattered enough to him to land him here. And the prophecy of Jonathan’s tattoo had come to pass. He did have a fat stomach now, an emo gut bloated with years of feelings. And he did have a responsible job. Still, the more he spoke, the more I saw how this was the Jonathan I knew. He told Adella that it might be fun, in case the burglars returned, to tape a thousand different keys to the front door. She looked at him blankly and excused herself to answer a work call.
Branded content? Was it maybe branded content?
Jonathan and I occupied ourselves, wordlessly measuring our current faces against our former ones. I may not have been able to recall how we ended but I could recall how we began—the nights in the basement of our dorm as we waited for a washing machine to free up, searching for each other at parties, writing long emails that continued over summer break. I had an internship in the city and I wrote to him of my adoration for “the vacillating scents of city trash.” There were descriptions of New York at the turn of the millennium, during its gimmicky theme bar phase: Korova Milk Bar, Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Beauty Bar, Idlewild (which featured real seats from a DC-10). Jonathan was spending the sweltering months volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. He set up an email account for a splinter and sent me a series of missives from the splinter’s point of view. The splinter felt stuck. The splinter longed to be removed with my lips.
We were stymied by cuteness, by an inability to speak plainly about our feelings. We’d send each other origami and Polaroids and drugstore birthday cards that said things like “Guess who’s 5 today?” Our relationship died for the same reason Jonathan’s senior thesis got ripped to shreds: It smothered itself in its own conceptions. Turns out it’s a lot harder to write something original about William Burroughs than it is to skewer the people who idolize William Burroughs.
While Adella paced in front of us, fiddling with her earpiece, Jonathan explained how his father had died. Prostate cancer. Stage Four because he hid it, because he wouldn’t go to the doctor. Horrific but quick. I felt an unreasonable possession over Jonathan’s father, over the apartment I had not seen in years. Never mind the fact that Adella received mail there, kept her toiletries in the bathroom.
“I thought it might be weird to reach out. I should have. He always liked you.”
“Really?” I said, my voice going up an uncontrollable octave. “He didn’t know me.”
“Lola. To not know you is to love you.”
“That sounds like an insult.”
“I think you know it’s not,” he said, turning scarlet.
Now I remembered. We were at Zen Palate in Union Square, eating our soy protein balls before they got too cold to consume, and Jonathan got up to go to the bathroom. While he was gone, I held my glass of lukewarm organic wine, contemplating what I knew had to be done. Jonathan had his Polaroid camera on him and on his way back to the table, he took a photo, shaking the picture.
“Look at this composition,” he said.
I knew that would be the last picture he would ever take of me, that by this time tomorrow we would not be dating. I wondered if he still had it.
Adella returned to us with a perky “What’d I miss?”
Unlike Willis, Jonathan had not minimized the story of us. He remembered, all right. But like Willis, he also remembered to move on and live his life.
“What’s your story these days, Lola?” Adella asked.
“My partner and I are getting married.”
I’d never once answered this question like this and considered any unbidden relationship status offensive. Nor had I ever referred to Boots as “my partner.” But I enjoyed the ambiguity of it, the pilfered implication of growth, the potential expansion of sexual preference. I didn’t need to compete with Adella’s completionism, but I wanted to put myself in the ballpark of it. To establish my own ballpark. I’m self-aware, too. I’ve evolved into a partnership, too. I don’t need to be the boss of someone, nor am I anyone’s puppet.
Even though we were, all three of us, Clive’s puppets.
“Congratulations,” they said, generously but not too generously.
Our goodbye was an awkward baton pass of hugs. I tried to listen to their conversation as they walked away but their words were unintelligible.
That night, I pulled out the box of old letters that I kept in the back of our closet, wedged between vacuum-sealed sweaters and folded boxes that Boots used for shipping his pieces. I’d probably need to move my secret stash under the bed soon. He’d been selling enough pieces of late, one of my protective walls was thinning.
I had judged Willis for shoving all his experiences into a tidy box, but I had done it literally. I dug until I found one of Jonathan’s old cards. It was dated with a number that made my heart seize. So much time had passed. For a while, any year that began with a “20” felt comfortably contemporary. But now people born in the new millennium were whole people with opinions and degrees, babies even. As such, they were in flagrant violation of this comfort. They were having their own debates, making their own memories, sending their own cards, discovering music with the zeal of the converted. They were walking into parties, hoping their own Jonathans would be there.