Cult Classic(56)

I watched Phillip through the window of a men’s clothing store, examining strips of houndstooth, and was tempted to march in there and ask him about the dream. I wondered if he remembered that night as well as I did. Phillip had sent back a sweater of mine a few weeks after the breakup, accompanied by a note, which I kept. It was my only evidence of him. The note, written on a piece of scrap paper, hoped I was well, which I found to be a grievous glossing-over of events. But seeing Phillip again inspired me to think of the note in a softer light. They were just words, written by someone who didn’t know what to say. Prior to the note, I’d never seen Phillip’s handwriting. How badly can you be hurt by someone whose handwriting you’ve never seen?

I followed Phillip as he exited the store, trying not to be seen. He arrived at a bus stop just as a bus pulled up. Then my phone started ringing. It was Boots. We hadn’t spoken in a couple of days, kept just missing each other. I sent it to voice mail but it was too late. I was too close to Phillip, who turned and spotted me. I had a flash of worry that he wouldn’t be able to place me. I was out of context, a time traveler. And I felt so haggard, part of me felt recognition would be an insult. But as he boarded the bus, he pointed into the open door, and yelled “Bus!” Phillip had places to go, people to see, plants to graft. And it was as if all the feelings I’d ever had about our relationship drove off on the M22 with him.



* * *



Aaron was wheeling a baby carriage down Mott Street. He wheeled right past me but I could tell it was him. All these men had lost or gained weight, changed their style, become estranged from their hairline, but their mannerisms were as indelible as fingerprints. I followed him to a bakery famous for its bear claws. There was still a line out the door at 6 p.m. He greeted a petite woman with bluntly cropped hair who handed him a beverage from a cup holder in a second stroller. They looked like they had come downtown for the express purpose of obtaining bear claws. One or both of them had been issued images of pastry by the Golconda.

Aaron was a relic. The summer before high school began, I was hopelessly infatuated with him. He was a lifeguard at our local summer camp, where he was a senior counselor and I was a junior counselor. He used to twirl a lanyard with keys to the equipment shack around his fingers, moving in controlled circles. I spent all summer thinking of ways to get those fingers inside me. I hiked up my shorts, pulled down my V-neck. I had a well-fabricated nightlife. I casually dropped Jerky Boys references in front of him and rented the action movies he liked from Blockbuster. I paid a king’s ransom for a vintage Bruce Lee Fist of Fury T-shirt. When he complimented it, I pretended to have fished it out of a secondhand bin.

As the summer wore on and Aaron made no overtures of affection, I didn’t give up on my forced metamorphosis into cool. I wanted to seem like I had good taste and so I accidentally became someone with good taste. I wanted to seem elusive and so I accidentally became elusive. Aaron took notice on the last day of camp. Men, even boys, are very good at knowing when a woman’s heart has left the building. By the time Aaron asked me to help him collect the kickboards, I was inconvenienced.

The walls inside the equipment shack were covered in cheap panels with the manufacturer’s logo on them: Beaver Lumber. Aaron had me up against one of the panels, his tongue exploring my ear. This guy wanted to eat my brains. He dug his hand over the waistband of my shorts and under the spandex of my bathing suit, his forearm cut off by two types of elastic. I’ll never forget the look of concern on Aaron’s face, that I might be unimpressed with his putting his fingers in me. I wanted to tell him there was no need to question if it felt good because of course it didn’t feel good. I had not expected it to. But I was suddenly responsible for this creature who noticed I wasn’t reacting how women reacted in the movies. Neither of us knew how to fix this so Aaron freed his hand and kissed me. He left the shed first.

“See you next summer,” he said, even though I’d already told him this was my last summer at the camp.

I watched him through a crack in the door, moving up the slope of a path. Another counselor came up behind him, a girl his age, and punched him affectionately in the arm. I reached my hand down to smell myself. As suspected: chlorine.



* * *



Out of everyone, I least wanted to see Knox. I was hoping that Clive had overlooked him, but if the Golconda’s net had caught the likes of Howard and Dave, there was no way it was letting Knox slide.

Knox was an emotionally distant librettist and latent sadist from Detroit who looked like a young Daniel Day Lewis. I interviewed him for a Modern Psychology feature on prodigies and we had drinks after the story ran. Knox seemed cultured, confident, and unassuming about both, the kind of man who extended himself as much as he retreated, a function of being an in-demand artist who must answer email eventually. The kind of man I thought I should be dating. In this way, I was perpetrating the same crime against Knox as Dave had perpetrated against me. Whenever Dave assumed I’d like to go cliff diving with him, I thought: Do I even need to be here for this relationship?

I blamed Knox for why I’d later fall for Amos, because I was hoping to date an artist who was also an intellectual. Boots didn’t count because Boots was too practical about his art to risk insufferability. I’d never managed to strike the right balance with creative types. Either I tiptoed around these men, letting them stop me mid-sentence to point out a cloud, letting them expect to be rewarded for banal observations, or I felt self-conscious about my own creative limitations and transformed myself into whatever they wanted me to be.