Cult Classic(47)

“No,” I lied, but quickly surrendered to the needle. “Okay, yes. But I would like to address the shame. I didn’t throw Jonathan away because he was nice to me. You know, when you’re younger, you worry that maybe no one will ever love you and that fear makes you do some dumb shit. What you don’t know is that fear has nothing on the fear of not being capable of loving someone in return.”

“Final question,” said Jin, more entranced with her data than with me.

“Great!”

I clapped my hands together. Jin winced at the sound reverberating in her ears.

“At any moment during your interaction with Jonathan this evening, did you sense that you should’ve tried even harder to make that relationship work?”

“Everyone feels like if only they had been more or less tolerant, if they could commit to a version of themselves, they could be with anyone they’d ever dated.”

“Umm,” Vadis said, “no one thinks that.”

“Then they’re not thinking about it hard enough. Romance without practicality is a fling. Love is agreeing to live in someone else’s narrative.”

“Dark,” Vadis decided.

“Are you supposed to pipe in this much?”

She raised her palms in the air, unhanding the conversation.

“This is insane. Not this. Though yes, this. Just this whole line of questioning. We’re supposed to think we break up with people because we know who we are and the other person wasn’t going to fit. It’s why you get all this postmortem feedback after you’ve been dumped, about how the dumper is incapable of having a relationship. Like literally incapable. As if any of us are in a position to assess someone else’s capacity to love. Meanwhile, somewhere across town, that person’s therapist and friends and family and whoever are confirming the many ways in which you were wrong for him. A medical doctor is telling some bozo that he took the only choice he had. So not only is he not broken or stunted or missing the gene, noooo, he is to be commended for his self-knowledge. How else would he have made the excellent decision to get rid of you? But what happens next, when time passes and he’s in a new relationship and he thinks it’s going great but then boom: he’s the one getting dumped? Is it because he’s flawed and the other person made an excellent decision?”

“No?” guessed Jin.

“No!” I shouted. “It’s because the person who dumped him was incapable. Someone always has to be the broken or immoral one. Maybe we get less terrible about assigning blame as we get older, I don’t know. Maybe we learn to retain who we are better instead of giving it all away to a stranger. People do cut their losses, shake hands on it. But no breakup, even an okay one, is complete until you dig like a pair of truffle-sniffing pigs to find out what happened. This is how romantic love keeps itself from going extinct, right? How it swindles itself into sentience. Romance may be the world’s oldest cult. It hooks you when you’re vulnerable, holds your deepest fears as collateral, renames you something like ‘baby,’ brainwashes you, then makes you think that your soul will wither and die if you let go of a person who loved you. So you better have a good goddamn reason for saying ‘nah, not enough.’ The love lobby is worse than the gun lobby. More misery, more addiction, more heads on spikes. And for what?”

“Fucking hell, Lola.”

“I’m serious. For what?”

Jin cleaned her glasses on her pajama sleeve. Vadis bulged her eyes. She was trying to signal that my point had nowhere to land, not in this building, not with this audience. But my point was hers. She had eschewed romance the entire time I’d known her, but I was obliged to believe simply because I’d already put in the effort?

“All love is, is the process of deciding on familiarity.”

“Oh, yeah?” she huffed, whirling her finger around the map. “Then why is this working?”

“Because I’m not concussed! I remember these guys and they remember me. I didn’t make the rules. Maybe Clive should’ve put me on a plane to Tokyo.”

I took a deep breath. I could hear the sound of the needle’s tireless scratching. Jin twisted several knobs, clicking them off, and the whirring of the machines came to a halt.

“I don’t know,” I gave in, “maybe a perfect relationship is just on the tip of my tongue. That’s a clinical phenomenon, you know. It’s metacognition. You become momentarily conscious of your synapses firing.”

“I wrote the metacognition piece,” said Vadis.

“You did? That was a good piece.”

“Thanks.”

“So this is it?” I asked, rubbing my temples. “I come here every night and bludgeon these gentlemen with analysis until I am cured of indecision?”

“That’s closure,” said Vadis.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. Someone had done a poor job of repainting it. I could see where the roller of fresh paint had bumped against the wall.

“Men,” I said, plunking my chair to the floor. “I can never decide if I forgive them too easily or punish them too easily. My whole life, I’ve never known.”

I flicked the monitors from my fingers and tugged off the suction cup.

“Where do I put these?”

“Anywhere you want,” said Jin.