Cult Classic(48)

9




Because it couldn’t hurt, I dressed up before leaving the house. Or, if I was working from the office, before leaving for work. I wore shoes with heels and applied makeup using tips I’d acquired from shame-watching Chantal’s YouTube tutorials, her pupils eclipsed by the reflection of a ring light. The trick was to curl your eyelashes firmly and close to the base, right where the robot spiders get in. I tweezed, I scrubbed, I dusted, I blended. I did interesting things with belts. My younger coworkers, with whom I’d never really bonded enough to categorize our small talk as negative or positive, took notice. “You look nice today” expanded to “You look nice this week” which expanded to “What are you eating?” Potato chips and hard liquor, mostly. A surprisingly fast-acting diet if you really put your back into it.

After work, I’d zigzag through the streets of Chinatown, admiring the intersections of lettering I’d never understand, buying beverages significant enough to merit dome tops, then having to sweet-talk my way into salon bathrooms. I’d sit on the benches on concrete islands or on the biscotti-shaped stoops painted municipal red. I’d watch my reflection warp in the stainless steel doors. Or else I’d suggest drinks meetings be held in the area, dragging publicists to me under false pretenses, ostensibly to discuss Radio New York’s coverage of their productions and publications. I went in the evenings because I assumed it would increase my chances. Most of my exes were grown-ups now. They had responsibilities from which no amount of subliminal battering could distract them. They were no longer waking up at noon, still drunk, for instance.

I avoided Boots within reason or else I called him before I went (went hunting, went to be hunted), but only after a relatively normal day had passed. It was in this window that I could convince myself nothing out of the ordinary was happening and thus convince him, too. This is how people must conduct affairs, I thought, by hitting the “refresh” button each morning, lying to themselves before they lied to anyone else. That was the secret, to put your denial mask on first before helping others. Most of the time, I got voice mail. Sometimes I got sent there on purpose. The time difference put him in afternoon meetings. When Boots and I did speak, I dodged the topic of myself with the kind of balletic skill that gets confused for curiosity, asking such detailed questions about glassware, it prompted him to offer me a job. Or else I interviewed him about the weather.

“You know what Mark Twain said about San Francisco?” I asked.

“‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.’”

“Yup, that’s it. That’s what he said.”

“Did we get something for Jess and Adam?”

“I keep forgetting. I’m sure the only thing left on the registry is a sleigh bed.”

“Seriously?” he said, annoyed at this symbol of my warped priorities. “What else have you been doing?”

“Taking a shit? I don’t know. Can’t you just send them a vase?”

“I’m not The Giving Tree, Lola.”

“They’re your friends,” I said, eyeing the glassware shelves. “I thought you’d prefer to send them something you made.”

“You just told me you forgot.”

“That’s true. But there’s really no way I could have predicted this reaction.”

“I feel like I’m talking to Vadis.”

“Well, you’re not.”



* * *



One night, I got a twofer. At first, I thought there would be no sighting. I tried to conceal my stakeout by luxuriating in the reflections of people in the windows of lighting stores and rubber emporiums, pretending to inspect the merchandise (If it’s in rubber, we have it!) or else looking out the corner of my eye while examining the panes of glass circles in the pavement. The glass was centuries old, predating the lightbulb. These were vault lights for the downtown factory workers toiling away in the basement. It would only take a few people to stop, their shoes covering the glass, and it would be a blackout below.

Every face I picked out from the crowd looked normal in that it looked unfamiliar. Perhaps Amos, Willis, and Dave had been coincidences and Jonathan had been a fluke, manifesting only because he came as a matched set. Two consciousnesses are better to manipulate than one?

But then I saw Howard, crossing Mott. At first, I couldn’t be sure it was Howard. It was dark out by then. Plus the Howard I knew had a full head of hair and a pear-shape bottom that one rarely sees on a man. This guy had neither of those things. But I could tell by the gait. Howard sashayed, which was unfortunate because Howard very much wished not to sashay. When we met, he was a pudgy adjunct professor of linguistics on Long Island, cloaking his bulges, dreaming of tenure. If Howard were a woman, he would’ve been categorized as “basic,” but as a man, the expectation of surface individuality was lower while the pressure for conformity was higher. Howard’s curiosity was limited to whatever happened to physically cross his path. He stopped for every street canvasser, tried every cookie sample and squirt of lotion. If he saw a billboard for a movie, he’d go see that movie. His sister was the most creative person he knew. She was an artist who painted woodland scenes on plaster casts of her own face. He owned a dozen of the masks, hung proudly across one wall, staring down at us with hollow sisterly eyes.