Cult Classic(5)
This was not a place I would’ve expected Amos to have heard of, forget patronize. When we were together, he was dismissive of the “fetishized expense” of Manhattan. Manhattan was soulless, gentrified, once for the very young and the very rich, now only for the very rich and the very soulless. Reduced to a high-end strip mall, all the city’s personality was in the past, all its pride delusional. I was too tired to mount a defense—tired, probably, from having to schlep to Bed-Stuy to see my boyfriend. Dropping our near-identical rents or the pilates studios of his neighborhood into conversational evidence bags didn’t seem worth it. Besides, what Amos never understood was that with each pronouncement of my home as a dead zone, he made me feel better about living here. The eye of a hurricane may be inaccessible, but it’s still the eye.
Toward the end of our relationship, I felt a reactionary love for all the things Amos hated. Not just Manhattan, but streaming services, nature videos, expensive toiletries, pop music, smartphones, beaches, throw pillows, bottled water, alternative milks, kitchen gadgets (a strawberry destemmer—who knew!), and cats. So completely did I commit to these things (was this the first time anyone adopted a kitten out of spite?), I convinced myself they were more indicative of who I was than the deeper things Amos and I had in common. I became resentful of the books and politics and niche references that had brought us together, as if they had betrayed me by leading me into the arms of a man who diagnosed Clive as a charlatan and my friends as “morally impoverished.”
Our relationship never would have lasted for the two years it did were it not for Kit. Amos had a twenty-something cousin named Kit, a Hollywood starlet with a penchant for filters and quotations. But she was a blood relation, which made her tolerable to Amos, which, in turn, made him tolerable to me. When Kit was filming in New York, the three of us went out to dinner. She ordered food as if she and the waiter were working on a project together. She recounted stories from Amos’s childhood and demanded our conversion from tequila to mezcal.
“You’re such a good proselytizer,” Amos told her, “too bad you’re Jewish.”
Kit flicked the straw wrapper she’d been balling into Amos’s face and he cackled. She unlocked a less captious Amos. He refrained from deriding the Hollywood industrial complex in front of her. When the bill came, Kit grabbed it like it was nothing. I’d never seen someone take a check like that, without momentarily losing track of what they were saying. Amos didn’t flinch. Whereas whenever I grabbed the bill, we had weird sex afterward.
After we broke up, I found myself watching the multi-cam sitcom on which Kit appeared, searching for his jawline in hers. I wasn’t trying to torture myself, though I did manage to do that, only to search for evidence that Amos had been real, that I had kept this person’s contact lens solution in my medicine cabinet. I often felt like this after breakups, no matter who had cut the cord—that fresh shock that life does not end from a single blow. A comforting concept in the long term, a jarring one in the short term. Resiliency is overrated. To get hit by a truck and ride the subway the next morning is not commendable, it’s insane. But thanks to Kit, I could postpone this mourning process indefinitely. I watched her show so religiously, my interest in it took on a life independent of Amos. At the magazine, Zach and I shared a cubicle wall, so I foisted plot summations on him, despite his having zero interest in hearing about a sitcom meant for teenagers. I read the recaps, scrolling for Kit’s name to see if any of them had isolated her performance. I closed out of these articles if I sensed Clive or Vadis behind me.
When the show was canceled, I felt a second wave of remorse about Amos that felt a lot like the first wave. Details that should’ve cycled through my memory long ago came rushing back in—the holes in his clothing, the scratches in his records, the disability that prevented him from wringing out a kitchen sponge. I remembered the layout of his apartment too well. This included the musty sofa on which he explained that monogamy was a vestigial construct gifted to us by the Puritans. It wasn’t me, I had to understand. Except that it was me because there was only one of me.
We sat there, like guests of the furniture. I told him that I did not like the way he was talking about this, as if he had some kind of affliction that required him to put his penis in multiple people. I said that I could forgive someone, even him, for cheating, but I could not forgive someone, even him, for plotting to cheat.
“Why do you have to call it ‘cheating’?” he asked in that redoubtable tone of his.
“Call it whatever you want,” I said. “Pancake. I am not going to sit here while you pancake every woman you meet.”
“Every woman is unlikely,” he said, scoffing.
* * *
The breakup was about six years ago. Kit’s show was canceled two years ago. As I approached, I worried this discrepancy in mourning would be palpable. I also happened to have on the same shirt I’d worn the night we broke up, as if I’d been walking around in a mausoleum the shape of Amos Adler, breathing stale Amos Adler air. I reminded myself of the full life I had now. I had a steady job that I didn’t completely hate. Old, good friends. Ten fingers, ten toes. I had wiped all the sleep from my eyes before noon. Also, I’d been having sex. More important, the sex I’d been having was with my fiancé. My fiancé to whom I was engaged to be married, a person I’d swindled into a lifetime of mutual tolerance.